Today was an interesting day at work. Matt and I spent some time talking to Rob in the morning – bringing him up to date on our progress, etc. Apparently, he had a meeting at 1:00 to discuss the possible requirements for the Q1 news program. After our talk, though, Rob decided that it would probably be best just to have Matt and me there.
The meeting turned out to be a conference call with a guy in Eagan, which is really strange. I don’t particularly like conference calls, since I like being able to draw diagrams and see the people with whom I am talking. I actually left feeling like the meeting went very poorly, especially for me, since I didn’t know what to say; everyone had completely different ideas about the project and I didn’t know what everyone was trying to get out of the conference. Matt seemed to do ok, though, and afterward he typed up a document clearly explaining our position and opinions and sent it to everyone who was at the discussion. I think that I could learn from his example in this case, because taking the initiative to write this document has really cemented our ideas as the company’s vision for the project.
That was about it for the exciting part of work. The rest of the day, Matt and I worked on implementing adding tf-idf to our vector space catagorizer. Sadly, after we spent all that effort on it, tf-idf actually ended up hurting our performance, so we’ve decided not to use it. At least we’ve learned that much.
Finally, after work, I was really excited to visit with Nicola again. She is back in town visiting her family this week because her uncle is also here from the Phillipines. She and I met down at Santana Row at about 6:20. There was a live Salsa/Meringue band playing from 6-9, which is why we thought it would be fun to meet there. She and I ate dinner at Pasta Pomodoro – not too expensive and really good food, so it was a great deal. After dinner (about 8:00), we met up with a friend of hers from high school back by the band.
I enjoyed meeting Nicola’s friend; I feel that I understand better where Nicola comes from, plus I just like hanging out with new, fun people in general. We listened and talked for an hour, when the band was done for the night, then we went to a French pastry shop and ate dessert outside while talking for another hour and a half. Our conversation covered everything from religion (Nicola and her friend went to a Roman Catholic, all-girl high school) to bananas (apparently there’s a guy at UC San Diego that has never eaten one in his life). This was a great change of pace from constantly thinking about work.
Moreover, the weather was absolutely perfect at about 10:00; The air had cooled down to 75 or so, and the sky was very clear. I really enjoy that type of atmosphere; it just makes me feel happy and relaxed. All in all, I had a great night, and I hope Nicola and her friend did, too.
