I was at Berkeley yesterday, helping another graphics student on some renderings for his paper. We went in to talk with James in the afternoon, at which point I was invited to take a bit more responsibility for doing the renderings and, in return, maybe be an author on the paper. This was very flattering–that James thought enough of me to give me the assignment, and thought the work merited authorship on the paper. It also means a lot of work, and expectations of accomplishment. Well… it was about time for this vacation to officially end. Things should be kind of hellish until the 26th–the SIGGRAPH submission deadline–but also a lot of fun, I hope. Graphics is weird in that there’s really just one conference, and so everyone in the graphics hallway is there, with a mug of coffee, hunched and typing. I am, too, but in the first-year office where there is currently no one else. I pulled an old, crappy pair of speakers off the shelf and hooked them up so I could code to some Phish and Orbital (the more mindless, the better). Once I make sure that it’s kosher, I’ll post some pictures of what I’m working on, but basically, it’s smoke.

I’ve been back in town a week now, but I’ve decided to ease back into real life instead of going for the stark change that Leslie went through on Monday. You get the luxury of these choices when all your vacation is unpaid.

It’s been almost a year since we stopped freeloading off of UT and moved overt to a professional hosting service. Over the last few months, we discovered that the hosting service we picked also likes to host spammers. Because of this, we’ve had a few emails blocked from our servers because the host in general is being blocked. We called and bitched at Servepath (the host), who calmly told us that they have a zero-tolerance policy toward spam and that the offenders’ accounts would be cancelled. All lies, actually–they seem to have a policy of lying to customers and taking spam money, so we’ll be leaving them shortly for a new host–I’m not sure yet which, but I’ll try to make the swap as trouble free as possible. If you have any ideas, let me know.

Most absurd xmas present award goes to Doug, who bought me a 27" HDTV. Damn. I’m still reeling from that one. My favorite thing about the HDTVs is that they don’t make the whine normal TVs do when turned on. The whine is caused by the refresh rate, which is 15KHz, outside of some peoples hearing range, but not mine. HDTVs refresh at twice that rate, so only dogs are in trouble, I guess. In any case, I love it.

Leslie has entered into her last 100 teaching days. Praise jebus. I have been officially classified as a California resident for tuition purposes, which means I’m free to travel where every I want this summer… finally. Whether I’ll actually go anywhere… that remains to be seen. We do have this wedding to attend and yet another move to yet another Bay area town.

It’s been raining here all week. I feel justified in extending my quasi-vacation to prevent myself from being soaked on the way to the train station.

I’m not sure how we got to this point in the semester, but here we are.

Let’s see… I won’t try to recap the minutiae of my life. It’s worth mentioning that I finally finished the hellish task of porting SLIDE to Mac OS X. Just for “fun” I also ported it to Linux. So hopefully that’ll stop being a draw on my time now if I can help it.

Last night I saw a really good movie from Hong Kong–no kung-fu involved. It was called Infernal Affairs. Well, actually it’s called “Wu jian do” in a roman transliteration. It was just a standard-issue action-thriller-crime drama, but it was done really well. Like Hollywood might make if they didn’t have to follow the same damned formula every time they make one of those movies.

I’ve also been playing the open beta test of World of Warcraft, an online RPG set in the Warcraft world. Now, you have to understand that I played Diablo and Diablo II a lot. These are some of the most pointless games ever made, from an absolute perspective. You literally spend hour after hour clicking repeatedly on randomly created little monsters in randomly created little dungeons, hoping to obtain the Truculent Mace of the Cursed Cow or something. Somehow, I found this entertaining. WoW is like Diablo, except instead of there being 15 or so people playing in your world at any given time, there might 15,000. They’ve also replaced the 2D sprites with chunky, lowest-common-denominator 3D stuff. Not compelling to a normal person, just to me. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to cough up the $50 + $10/mo to play it once the beta is over in a week.

I finished my NSF application for the third and last year yesterday. At this point, it’s just obstinance. But the fact that I’m now at Berkeley is sort of proof that obstinance can work. So off went the application.

I’m looking forward to the next few months. Doug shows up to take my old job at Apple in a couple of weeks, and it will be great to have him in town (not that Houston wasn’t great, I’m sure). Sometime in mid Dec we’ll be heading down to Texas for some holiday fun with the Halls–should be a blast. Then, the day after Christmas, we’re heading out to Breckenridge via Denver for some snowplay with my family. We land back in Cali on 1 Jan. There’s also talk of a potential trip to Hueco Tanks in early Jan with some old friends from Texas. I wonder how much tickets would run…

It seems weird for this to be the sum total of my research for the semester, but I give you squishified rotating bowls and cows.

It seems I’ve settled comfortably back into student-mode. What that effectively means is that there is now always something I should be doing, and frequently that thing is different from what I’d like to be doing. But it’s good–this is in contrast to when I was working, where 8 hours of the day, 5 days a week I had something I should be doing, and all the rest of the hours were mine to do with whatever I wanted. I’ve expounded before on the ups and downs of this, but I think, essentially, busy is the way that I like to be, and apparenty I have a penchant for these merit badges handed out by universities, so I’ll keep racking them up. My time these days is basically divided between three things: independent research with Carlo, indepedent research with James, and splines.

For Carlo, I’m mostly working on porting SLIDE to Mac OS X and other unixes, and although I’m more or less done with the port, I’m being held up at the end because I don’t know Tcl and also because, like everyone, I hate maintaining code I didn’t write. Honestly, if there were an easy way to let this project slide, I would, but I’m so close at this point I might as well tough it out.

My splines class is going well, and I’ve gotten a couple of weeks ahead by finishing the last programming assignment early. Now I just need to pick a final project to implement sometime between now and the beginning of November. There’s no final in the class, so I think things should be smooth sailing the rest of the way.

The most interesting thing going on right now is probably my project with James. I’ve talked about it before; like I suspected, it’s been tough. Still, there’s something about the way it’s been forcing me to learn that I’m really enjoying. I’m not sure yet whether James would have me as a student, or whether he’s the right choice as an advisor, but I’d say at this point he’s probably at the top of my list.

I’ve also been climbing more, and even getting a chance to do ashtanga once a week. I’m slowly filling in all the empty spots in my schedule with activities, just like when I was an undergrad. I do love it.

Oh… and I beat GTA:SA. Only with 50% completion, though, so I’ll be playing it through again, I think :)

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Comments

Johanna — 2004-11-15 21:26:15

Your independent research partners aren’t hot - very disappointing . . .

bryan — 2004-11-16 02:01:20

yeah… i’ve entered a field not exactly known for it’s beauty (or hygiene). Luckily in graphics you’ll find a better female/male ratio than practically anywhere else in the field (and even a pretty good showering rate overall).