bored
destroyerj gave us many seasons of Battlestar Galactica as a present, and we sat down kinda late Saturday night to watch the miniseries. (i.e. Disc 1 of Season 1) I had heard from a few people that the miniseries was kinda slow since it had to introduce all the characters and such. To the contrary, I enjoyed it a lot, and we stayed up until 1:30 or so to finish it. Good stuff, although I liked the first "real" episode less than the miniseries. My mom's coming this week (she has a conference in Columbia...what are the odds?) but I guess we'll pick it up next week...As one obsession waxes, so does another wane. My licensing problem with the Google n-grams led me to try to find my own. I found a corpus based on Wikipedia that I'm currently using, but the parser I wrote to extract words isn't very good, and I'm not sure that it can be improved due to inconsistent data. So my data is not particularly clean. (sometimes two words are strung together, sometimes a single word is broken into two) I wrote a quick little thingy to just do a simple lookup on the popularity of a word, and I'll probably make a web interface for that, but I'm highly doubtful that a cryptogram solver would actually work. (and I've basically given up with trying to extract 2-grams, 3-grams, etc. that would generate English-looking text)
So I'm really losing motivation to work on it, and not having an exciting project to work on leaves me in a weird and unstable condition. I like having a drive to do things like this, but sometimes it's kinda irritating. Maybe a little time off from the n-grams will give me some more inspiration...or maybe I'll give up completely and move on to something else. In a very real way it shouldn't matter (it's just something I'm doing for fun, not for anyone in particular), but I still feel bad starting a project, then giving up and moving on to another one a week later.
