I am so pissed off.

I didn't get any writing done for most of the week partly due to it being the busy season at work, leaving me stressed and tired, and partly because that muscle relaxer I took last week left me feeling tired all week long.

I went to the write-in on Saturday but only got about 600 words in because everything going on at once there left me a little overstimulated. That's okay, though, because I mainly go to those things for the social aspects. :)

Spent most of Sunday trying to get the wifi on my netbook working. Long story. Fedora sucks. I'm back to Ubuntu. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't sweat it. Essentially, I had to reformat my hard drive a couple of times. Mind you, it would have been smart to back up my files first. *blush*

So, today, I started out at the very same word count I was at last week. A whole week behind. :( I worked my butt off for most of the day, agonizing over what should happen next, and finally had a good 3,000 words in there. Good stuff, too. I thought up another juicy little twist for the story to follow, and all that. I was exhausted and brain-fried, and my netbook needed a rest, too, so I saved it, backed it up, and shut the machine down.

An hour later, I turned it back on to partake in a "word war" with a friend and lo and behold! THOSE 3,000 WORDS WERE GONE! I checked the backup and it was the same! Just gone. No earthly idea what the fuck happened. None. Whatever happened must have happened before I backed it up and I just didn't notice, or something, but I just lost another damned day.

I checked the word count and it turns out I only lost 2,000 words, but STILL! I can't figure out what the hell happened to my work! I'm so pissed off.

*sits and fumes*

Some of you may remember my friend Krista donating some of her artwork for the helpvera auction last year. She's currently putting the final touches on a business plan she's been working on for several years: taking portraits of people in Ren Faire-style garb. But she needs a little help, so I'm spreading the word.

( The details! )

I just got a phone call from my goddaughter's husband. Her bp is 198/97. She's in the ER at General/Meharry hospital in Nashville, TN. Her name is Amber. She's not due until after Christmas. Energy, prayers, dancing, what have you... Amber and her son-to-be could use it. Thanks.

Poll #1486447 Holiday gift question
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

What should I get for giftmas?

I've got a friend who will shortly (as in later today) be undergoing eye surgery.

She's got vision but is legally blind (she can read large type on the computer if her face is up against a *big* monitor)

Also some of her vision problems are *because* of previous eye surgeries. So this is rather stressful.

Good thoughts please.

http://sperari.tumblr.com/post/245726204

“An old saw in science fiction is that a sci-fi writer can take the automobile and the movie theater and predict the drive-in. But the drive-in is dead, and the echoes of its social consequences are fading to negligibility; on the other hand, the fact that the automobile was responsible for the first form of widely carried photo ID and is thus the progenitor of the entire surveillance state went unremarked-upon by “predictive” sci-fi.”

- CORY DOCTOROW: RADICAL PRESENTISM – Tin House Books Blog (via Instapaper)

I am now only 1500 or so words behind. I can easily catch up tomorrow. Almost halfway done!

This has been such an interesting experience, and I would love to write more on my thoughts regarding the matter but alas, it is already 11:18.

But yay almost halfway there!

23452 / 50000 words. 47% done!

**Me**

Singapore was not a "sleepy British colonial backwater" when it was a British Colony. It was, and has always been a trading hub in Southeast Asia. A simple check of Wikipedia would have told you that.

Another issue of Yoga Journal came for Alanna. And once again, they have some skinny girl in an impossible pose on the cover - this month, she's got her leg pulled up along her back and above her head.

Why has there never been an issue with some normal dude on the cover struggling to touch midway down his shins, let alone his feet?

So Thursday night, I went to the Indianapolis Fencing Club practice. Good times, one guy taught me some stuff with foil, then I got to play around with epee for a while. Actually got a decent amount of touches in considering it was my first time...now only if I was working and had money...

Oops... I have been forgetting to post these updates, largely because I write right up until the wire when it is No Really, Time to Go To Bed. I have also gotten into the habit of thinking that sending my latest draft to rustycoon (in part because he has helpful comments but largely to ensure a draft exists somewhere other than on my hard drive :) is the last thing to do before bedtime. Last night, I didn't quite make it that far before I fell into bed. But today I am posting a number! Go me.

I am almost, but not quite, caught up--only about a day behind. I am confident that if I sit down and write like I did last night, I will be caught up by the end of the weekend.

19154 / 50000 words. 38% done!

**Me**

Okay, this isn't going to be the most interesting post, but last time I said I'd aim for 20″ by this time this week, and…

The blanket is actually quite wide — wide enough to cover a queen-sized bed. The real question is… how long is it going to be?

I made it to 24″, and I've still got a TON of yarn left. Maybe next week I'll be up to 36″ of blanket!

I'm also seriously considering moving my destashing criteria from weight to yardage. That's going to be a little harder to count, but I think it'd be worth it in order to make me stop avoiding socks and shawls (which I love, but which don't weigh much).

I have a fingering-weight scarf on the needles, but no pictures of that just yet! I've ripped it out and restarted it several times, but I think I'm finally happy with the (tubular) cast-on…

Originally published at Sheep On My Stuff. You can comment here or there.

Hello must sew faster,

I tried to reply to your message, but you have your privacy filter up. ;o)

According to the sources I've read, Gibbs sampling doesn't really tell you how to sample... it's just divide-and-conquer: you still need to sample each variable from its full conditional.

In my problem, that would be more trouble than it's worth, since no denominators are canceling. So I'm doing good old Metropolis-Hastings, with a proposal that makes its trajectory resemble Gibbs: it randomly chooses one variable to modify, and then randomly chooses a value for that variable. In other words, the proposal is uniform over the neighbors in the "generalized hypercube"^*.

I can easily compute the posterior. In traditional MCMC, I think you would weight the samples by how often they appear. But doesn't it make more sense to directly compute the posterior in all sampled models?

Should I be using MCMC at all?
How else am I going to find the set of high-probability models? (Maybe what I want is a mode-oriented stochastic search, as my EA project did.

Believe it or not, it's my first time actually implementing MCMC.

Also, I'd like to know what proportion of the posterior mass my sampled models account for... but this is probably VeryHard to do if I can't enumerate the models (otherwise we could know whether the chain has mixed).

---

^{* - what do you call a non-binary hypercube? I mean: let each node be a string in {0,...,k-1}^n, and neighborhood relation is defined by set of strings that differ in exactly 1 character. When k=2, we get the n-dim hypercube. What's the word when n>2?}.