Marrying Lingyan has been the most wonderful, exciting experience of my life.

Here are some wedding photos.

My fiancée and I registered at Target a few days ago, and after spending more than a little time wandering the store with the special scanner gun they give you, we handed it back to them and they said “Thank you very much! Your items will be viewable online within 1-2 hours.” We said great, went home, and went to bed.

The next day I tried to look it up online, and low and behold we have an empty registry. I call up the local store, and they explain the syncing happens automatically, wirelessly through the unit. They assured me it wasn’t sitting around unsynced somewhere, forgotten. They then transfer me to some regional office, they transfer me to general customer support, who transfers me to the bridal registry, who assures me (quite curtly) it’s in the system, just that it takes up to two days to display on the website. She said there was nothing to do but to wait another day, and call back if it didn’t appear.

Well, today, it’s still an empty registry. I go through the same series of phone calls again, and I’m told there are no items registered in either system, and that we need to return to the store to select the items again. Or, “we have convenient registry access online! You can pick out what you want there without having to go back again!” Gee, thanks lady. I’m astonished by the ease and convenience of the options you have presented me, and and eternally thankful for the care and level of professional support Target has provided me so far. Would you please delete my registry from your system?

Grrr. Argh.

Google’s LDC2006T13 corpus is organized in an understandable but slightly annoying way; as a tar of split gzipped files. To avoid having to untar it repeatedly, (in fact, at all, as it’s >100GB extracted), I wrote a small Python generator that let’s you iterate over them in their compressed state. Usage is something like this:

corpus = LDC2006T13()
for ngram, count in corpus.ngrams(3):
  print ngram, count


Code is here: LDC2006T13.py