This is what I'm going to have for my self-summary for now:

My incessant self-editing and drive to perfection is preventing me from writing a self-summary. Maybe this fact will be more revealing than anything I could have actually written as a self-summary.

Note to all: It does say that I am looking for 'new friends' somewhere in this silly system. In case you are not scrolling down far enough to see this, or think that this is code for something else, I assure you, I am actually looking for new friends. And not (at the moment | for the foreseeable future) a relationship or hookup.

Addendum: If you can't spell or follow the basic rules of syntax, I will judge you. I don't care about proper capitalization, but appropriate punctuation and the ability to string a sentence together is kind of important.

I'm working from home for my former major advisor (I just graduated from college in May 2008). What exactly does this entail? I'm helping her develop the American National Corpus (ANC). If anyone out there is familiar with corpus linguistics this will have meaning; otherwise I am probably getting some blank stares right now. Luckily, there's this thing called Google... Also, if you want to learn more about our specific project, there's the ANC website, where you can even contribute your own texts!

Anyway, what this entails is using the magic of Perl ("Everybody stand back! I know regular expressions!") and XSLT and sometimes shell scripting to convert texts in various formats to all be in the same format, XCES, which then get fed into a program called GATE and emerge with all sorts of meaningful tags like sentence boundary tags, part of speech tags, and so forth. This description makes it sound like I am way more code-savvy than I really am. Or perhaps that's just the impostor syndrome talking.

I'm interested in linguistics, particularly computational linguistics, though I'm also very interested in semantics. (Quick tangent: I love λ-calculus because it represents the intersection of two great loves: functional programming and formal semantics. Glee!) It only took me a summer to realize that I didn't want to leave academia forever. But I didn't apply to grad schools in the fall. Yet: I got into a motherfucking grad program and am starting this fall. FUCK YES. I applied about 4-5 months later than you're supposed to but because I'm made of magic this didn't matter.

Procrastinating!

I'm rather short.

Just a small sampling of the things I like. I will probably gradually add to this list.

Books/Authors: L. Frank Baum, Daniel Clowes, Neil Gaiman, Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Le Petit Prince, Still Life With Woodpecker

Television: Arrested Development, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Home Movies, Mr. Show, Square Pegs

Movies: À bout de souffle, Back to the Future (ALL THREE), Blue Velvet, Fifth Element, House of Yes, The Point, Punch-Drunk Love, Reefer Madness (the original AND the musical), Shaun of the Dead, Tron, True Romance

Music: Amanda Fucking Palmer, April March, Ben Folds Five, Bishop Allen, Cat Power, Freezepop, Harry Nilsson, Jeff Buckley, Julie Doiron, Ladyhawke, Leonard Cohen, OK Go, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Suzanne Vega

Video Games: Katamari, LEGO Star Wars, Paper Mario, Psychonauts, Zelda, Zoop (also Guitar Hero is fun)

Things on the internet (not an exhaustive list): achewood, Cake Wrecks, engadget, dinosaur comics, etsy, Questionable Content, remember the milk, xkcd