Sunday, March 05, 2006
Rejected
Important news first: Nian's notice of action arrived from the INS on Tuesday -- REJECTED. What??? OK calm down, upon reading further it seems my check of $185 was five dollars short, so they spent two dollars mailing everything back to me to tell me so. The "K3 Kit" instructions we paid for had said to send $185, but I guess they were written sometime ago well before the new fee went into effect, which as stated in the rejection notice, October 15, 2005. Nian has a friend that got a notice of action reply in 11 days. I'm hoping to get something back by the end of next week. The rejection did say to include the rejection notice upon resubmission to expedite processing. I'm hoping all the work is already don and the extra $5 dollars is just a formality. Today marks 3 weeks 3 days since we first mailed in the K3 application.
OK, more than a week has passed since I started to write this. Nian finally got her Valentine's day gift; it arrived in Guangzhou on time, but took another four or five days to make it to her door. Still it was well received -- a heart shaped locket that we plan to put a family picture in on my next visit to China, which will be at the end of April. I had hoped Nian would be here with me by then, but it seems unlikely now. Still maybe she will accompany me back in April. In the mean time Nian has finally come around to the idea that perhaps we should contact a lawyer about how to proceed with the immigration process, so tomorrow I'll burn up the phone lines to find one that specializes in immigration law.
Nian was upset with me Saturday morning because I wasn't being attentive enough. I didn't quite realize it at the time, but I was becoming sick and after I got off the phone with Nian I got sicker. Trouble is I don't know whether we argued because I was sick, or whether I got sick because we argued. At first I thought it might just be in my head, but by Saturday night I was really feeling bad. I slept most of Saturday away, and by this Sunday morning I felt pretty good. A strange sickness that came on quickly and disappeared quickly and one I can't help but wonder if I made myself sick in someway. Nian and I talked again Saturday night, and with me being sick she took to being overly apologetic and sorry for not being patient and understanding enough. I wonder if somehow I unconsciously made myself sick in order to make Nian feel guilty for being upset with me. I guess I will never really know. I really did have a low-grade fever, sweats, and a heightened sensitivity to cold, mild diarrhea, and a painful sinus headache. I'm inclined to think it wasn't just "all in my head", but my guilt and stress could have led to a lowered immune system response to something that shouldn't have even gotten a toehold.
I've had Monkey Typewriter working for a week or two, at least in a crude rudimentary fashion. It has turned into a self teach project in learning JavaScript. I won't spend a lot of time explaining what it is doing this time around. It isn't in its final form yet which would be in pure JavaScript and runs on the client machine. What I have now is a hybrid program that runs on the server creating the evolutionary set of sentences, then a JavaScript viewer that displays them. The point is the program takes too much time and CPU power to risk having it run by visitors. For now I am just show the results of a Monkey Typewriter run on some sample sentences I have chosen, which in today's cases are the headlines from CNN.com.It may seem like an obvious insight, but one thing Monkey Typewriter has taught me is that the more evolutionary constraints you have operating in parallel the faster the program will home in a an optimal solution. I suspect this holds true in the real world with real organisms as well. From what I've observed from past genetic algorithmic experiments there is a certain threshold of complexity and viability that must be crossed at which point evolution finds optimal solutions easily.
For awhile Monkey Typewriter was quite an obsession, I'm not quite sure why I put so much effort into it. To be honest what it does seems quite unimpressive if you knew the complexity and machinations it goes through to arrive at what it does, but sometimes you get an idea to do something and finding a solution is more important than putting the solution to any practical use. Next up, convert Monkey Typewriter into a pure JavaScript program.
