Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Originally Rebecca was supposed to be gone from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday night. She is interviewing with a company called TellMe and they offered to fly her out to San Jose. Tuesday afternoon, she was interviewing over the phone with Stanford's NLP group and they wanted to see her in person as well, so we worked it out so that she could stay an extra day in order to make it to both interviews [with Stanford reimbursing the cost to extend the trip]. This was the first time we've been apart since we got married, so it was stressful and emotionally difficult [for both of us!]. I just have gotten so used to having Rebecca around that it isn't easy to be away from her.

This is interesting because so many people I know see their spouse so little. I find it a great blessing to be able to spend so much time with my best friend. Although I know this won't necessarily last, it is definitely a wonderful thing for now.  read more »

That's what this week felt like. I've worked pretty much all day all week on my thesis, trying desparately to get better results than what I'm getting. But it looks in the end like I just need more data (examples of paraphrases) to train my models better. I guess 4000 pairs of sentences just aren't enough examples!  read more »

Note to self: artificial turf is nothing like real grass.

My injuries this week started on Wednesday when I went for a goal in my soccer class. I slid for the ball, realizing afterwards that artificial turf acts more like sandpaper than real grass. My leg was shredded. It didn't hurt so much at the time, but it continued to hurt worse throughout the day, making the worst pain right when I was trying to sleep. Now one side of my leg is a large wound, but fortunately it is healing well.  read more »

I'm not exactly sure what we did this week...I'll be honest. But stuff, definitely stuff. :)

I know somewhere in there I checked out a couple of bags full of library books, and made progress on my thesis. I'm getting so close to being able to just run all my experiments and conduct the survey. I'm shooting for the end of this week to finish the experiments; hopefully it won't be much longer than that because I have hard deadlines approaching sooner than I would like!  read more »

This was the first week of our last term here at BYU. Rebecca is still plugging away at her thesis and her advisor is making her set some good goals so she can get this done in time. Hopefully there will be a light at the end of the tunnel soon. But all my classes this week were brief. One bad thing about spring term is that some teachers feel the need to cram twice as much in because the term is shorter. So my Biology GE class will be a drag, but the rest of my classes will be a nice breeze through spring term, then I'm done.  read more »

To Phoenix and back again. We left Wednesday morning for the greater Phoenix area to work on a group art project that Wayne's professor invited him to participate in. 240 pictures and over 1200 seconds of sound clips later, we came home. That's the essence of our week.  read more »

Going backwards. On Saturday, we spent half the day doing some heavy cleaning. One of the worst things about being in school full time and working the other part of the time is that our only available time for cleaning our apartment is on Saturdays. I'm sure this isn't something most people care to read about, but I grew up doing cleaning and so I clean with Rebecca. We actually have our set rooms: Rebecca does the kitchen, the bedroom and folds the clean laundry, while I do the bathroom, living room and the washing part of the laundry.  read more »

We do know that we aren't going to Ohio though. And that Wayne is on "hold" at Mass Art. Whatever that means. The sooner we can find out yay or nay, the better.  read more »

The week started out at 70 degree weather. Then, it jumped to 30 degree weather with snow, slush and rain. Then the next day it was back to 60 degrees.

Monday evening, we flew our kite at Rock Canyon park. The wind was just right as the evening wore on and we got in lots of stunts. We even had a a group of kids that just wanted to watch us fly a kite. So we put on a show for them.  read more »

Whew. Lots to tell, lots to tell. Let's try starting with New York.

We got an early flight out of SLC, carpooling with the other girl, LaReina, who was attending the conference with me. It was hard to sleep on the plane, and hard to concentrate on the papers I brought along to grade, but I had a good book with me that helped pass the time. Wayne thought the flight took forever though (he didn't bring a book!).  read more »