The Lair

Completely unlike the TARDIS, for example.

Any problem or knotty little puzzle abandoned assumes monstrous proportions when I return to it after a few weeks. Consider that for the past 10 days or so, I’ve been wrestling with FrameNet, a very nifty but rather complex lexical resource. It’s important for any number of reasons that I complete this technical arm wrestle and making this glorified dictionary work for me - not the least being that I’m supposed to be in writeup mode now and I still have lots of loose ends to tie up.

Unfortunately, the Framenet stuff is inter-related with some other work that I did almost an year ago. Around March last year, I took an unofficial sabbatical of sorts from this whole research gig and did a bit of commercial work for ye olde filthy lucre. It worked out quite well, on the whole - but all of the experiments I carefully crafted last year look like Klingon crossed with Mumbo-Jumbo at this point.

Most emphatically not of the good, since it’s understood that the person who discovered some novel process is generally supposed to be capable of explaining it. I can’t for the life of me remember the details of my (supposedly) novel process any more, let alone explain it.

This whole “out of sight, out of mind makes problems grow larger” theory has another anecdote. I somewhat foolhardily undertook an ambitious job for Habari - the whole dbdelta business. I had it covered, almost - till I had to take a hasty rain check and dive into the FrameNet stuff. Now that stuff looks indecipherable too. Ugh.

And a final sporting note - I tuned in late to watch Bolton vs Arsenal last night. Adebayor had already scored the first goal. Watched the game inbetween channel surfing and then settled down to watch it to a finish just before Adebayor blew a chance at an open goal by hitting the side post. A couple of minutes later, Bolton scored an equalizer.

What did I do? What any true fan would do, of course. Clearly, Arsenal had been doing great without my viewership and I was jinxing them. So I promptly changed the channel and pretended the match didn’t exist.

It worked too. Although I only found out about it in the news later on that night.