overt.org

Let’s see… what’s new? I’m still a grad student. Still loving it. Pinch me. Et cetera.

Friday, Stefani came over for dinner and drinking. We had steak and shrimp, yum. Introduced Stef to the Daily Show, tasted wine (in quantity), and generally had a great time. I headed to bed just as a screening of The Princess Bride was starting. My loss.

On Saturday I went to Ironworks (the Berkeley climbing gym) with another graphics grad student, Ryan, and an EE grad student named Dan. We’d gone a couple of times before, and I decided this time to restart my membership. It’s $60/mo, but they now seem to be offering ashtanga as part of their free yoga classes, and that plus climbing a couple of days a week is worth it, I think. I wasn’t quite at the top of my game, but Ryan and I took the lead climbing test and passed where we’d failed the time before. That alone made the trip worth it.

Today I worked for five or six hours trying to…well. I’ll just say it. I was trying to display gradient vectors in a discrete vector field on a cow. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. It kind of looks like he has a beard.

The second half of today was spent in a much-needed and very satisfying cleaning of our apartment. I just don’t have the spare time for it that I did when I worked at Apple. Man, this being a grad student in a paid program thing sure is rough.

---

Comments

Ali — 2004-10-14 21:20:57

It must be more satisfying to have something cool looking at the end of the day; or at least more satisfying than the couple of pages of stats that I get.

It’s been a while since I’ve plugged a video game on overt, but I just had to mention something about Katamari Damacy. Here’s the premise: the King of the Universe got high and broke all the stars in the sky. You, the 1cm-tall young prince are charged with repairing the damage. How? You get a little sticky ball (“katamari”) which you roll around picking things up with. You start with little things, but as you grow bigger things stick. Thumbtacks, erasers, candies, buckets, welcome mats, sand castles, babies, alligators, cars, airports, thunder gods. When you’re ball is big enough, the king tosses it up into the heavens to replace a missing star or constellation. If it seems silly and trippy, it is. And I love it.

In other news, it looks like overt has fallen victim to its first comment spam. Four new comments were posted at 2:01 last night, and they all had the same indecipherable message to deliver:

Hardcore young viagra samples here (Tons of amateur movies and videos) Monika Livinsky Playing Strip Poker HERE

Maybe I should consider it flattery that a blog spamming bot took it upon itself to befoul overt. Let’s hope it’s an isolated visit.

---

Comments

cameron — 2004-10-19 21:19:34

it made gamespy’s list of top party games! not bad for a single-player game.

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/558/558338p4.html

bryan — 2004-10-19 23:38:27

ah, but! there is a two-player mode as well. you can roll your opponent up.

I was one stop from getting off BART yesterday, underground, between the Ashby and Berkeley stops when the train suddenly lurched to a halt. After a minute the conductor got on the PA and said, “the train is stopped because there was an earthquake.” Not the most reassuring thing to hear. But, since she used the past-tense, and I wasn’t dead, I figured it was probably safe to go back to reading my book. It turned out that the earthquake was actually 200 miles or so away, and they just stopped the trains as a precaution. Still an interesting experience.

On my way from Soda to a friend’s house in Berkeley, we passed by first a fire truck, then a person lying in the street on a stretcher being tended to by several paramedics, then a woman sobbing, then a car with a smashed windshield. It was surreal, because we were there before a crowd had gathered, so just right in the middle of our conversation, these things just surfaced my perception. Kind of messes with you.

I’m off school today, trying to cover more ground on my various projects and helping Leslie with a few errands she’s getting done while not teaching school. And I’ve just begun drinking beer.

---

Comments

amy — 2004-10-04 14:22:10

nothing like grad school to turn you into an alcoholic.

Relaxing weekend - Star Wars: a New Hope on Friday night, Saturday night some great steaks, and Sunday I went golfing–yes golfing with Phil and a few of his friends. It was an interesting experience. I alternated hitting the ball with inexplicable accuracy and total incompetence. Still, it was fun–not a sport I’m going to take up any time soon, I don’t think. Too slow.

I spent most of the day on Saturday coding my first programming assignment for my splines class. It’s not very exciting, but it’s a start. I’ll probably post the code on overt once the due date is passed. The rest of Saturday I wrestled with Makefiles and dependencies trying to get SLIDE to build correctly on Mac OS X. Made quite a bit of progress, but I still have a ways to go.

I’m now reading Claude Shannon’s really old and really important paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” for my classic papers class. The man may have been a brilliant information theorist, but I can’t say much for his prose.

What a week.

On Wednesday I finally got to talk to James O’Brien, the last of the graphics profs at Berkeley who piqued my interest. It’s always a little weird going into these situations. I try to get out of the way quickly that I have an EE background, an EE degree, and that I was admitted as an EE student specializing in networks. Then I get to tell them about how now what I really want to do is graphics. You’d be surprised how well this usually turns out. I love Berkeley!

Anyway, James seemed leery but was willing to give me a shot. He set me up with a project that he described as “straight-forward.” Basically, I’m supposed to take this paper from this year’s SIGGRAPH and merge it with this paper. Clearly a piece of cake! Just extend Poisson-based triangular mesh editing to tetrahedral meshes, then project the tetrahedral mesh back onto a polygon soup to model deformations! What could be simpler?

I’m a little terrified, but also very excited. This is really a chance to sink my teeth into a project and impress someone. I’m not sure how it’ll go, but I’m definitely going to do my best to succeed. To restate what I’m actually doing in terms that mean something: Any random thing is hard to smoosh. But nice round things are easy to smoosh. So, take a random thing, cover it in goo so it’s round, smoosh the goo, then take it away to reveal the smooshed random thing. Simple. See?

Should be fun. In other news, I’m trying to teach myself MATLAB so that I can do a little project for my splines class, and I’m also still working on SLIDE for Carlo. I’m busy. It feels like my mind is really expanding again, for the first time since I left UT. I love it.

---

Comments

leslie — 2004-09-24 09:28:16

I wanted him to squish peeps, but he said they were too easy. To really impress someone, you’ve got to squish tractors.

em — 2004-09-24 21:00:02

How Berkeley can you be? Did you find out today?

On Sunday. It was beautiful. If only it were possible to time my visits back to Texas such that I could be sure to catch a thunderstorm. I miss them most of all.

I dropped a class–too much time spent on problem sets. I really have grown lazy in my old age. Still, I’m hoping to pick up another independent research project before too long to fill in the gap. For now, I’ve got plenty to keep me entertained with my one real class, my one real research project, and my seminar. I found the main library stacks today. They’re amazing. The bookshelves are on tracks, and you have to slide them around to squeeze into the actual shelf you’re interested in. So many books. Still need to investigate DVDs.

---

Comments

em — 2004-09-21 22:34:08

OK, I’m really having a hard time picturing how these sliding bookshelves work. Help!

bryan — 2004-09-23 19:07:57

hmm… i couldn’t find a picture. So I’ll try to describe. Think of the stacks like at the PCL. Two-sided shelves for books interspersed with walkways. The shelves are really long, and form hallways. Now imagine pushing all the rows of shelves together so that the walkways went away. All the books are still there, you just can’t get to them because you can’t fit between the shelves. So you leave enough room for one walkway, and put all the shelves on rails. at the end of the shelf, there’s a wheel you can turn to slide it one way or another. To get between two shelves, you slide over shelf after shelf until the one you want is accessible. Make sense?

em — 2004-09-24 20:56:47

I can picture it now, thanks to your comment. So, if two people want books that are on distant shelves, they have to take turns, since there can only be one walkway at once! Saves space, at the price of convenient access. I could see it working… for rarely used books, anyway.

bryan — 2004-09-29 18:20:05

When you’ve got the 2nd biggest university library in the country (second only to harvard), you have to imagine that most of the books will almost never get checked out. how crowded did you ever see it in the stacks at UT?

yes.

1515 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94709 510.883.0222

Monday was a triple feature, and the finale was César, a tapas bar on Shattuck next to Chez Panisse. Very nice atmosphere for a bar; the music was not too loud and as always in cali, no smokers! We went with the intent of getting some strawberries and cream, but I guess they are already out of season, so we had to settle for some chocolate pudding which was so think and rich it was almost like fudge. But somehow, it managed not to be heavy. It was covered on top with fresh whipped cream. I had a sour cherry soda to drink which was absolutely delicious. Definitely a nice place to chill out after some other activity. I’m not a big fan of tapas for meals because it would cost me about $100 to get full. But in this case, it was the perfect fit.

1984 Shattuck St. Berkeley, CA 94704 (510) 540-9997

Another winner here. I had dinner there on Monday with Stefani–it wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time that I rememered in time to write a fair impression. The interior of the place is pretty plain, with maybe 20 tables and a few booths. It does have an open kitchen, which I always find encouraging. It was pretty empty when we went in around 9, so the service was fast. The staff is very helpful and attentive (I’m no expert at this kind of food). We started with some “arabic tea with mint” that was delicious. I’m not sure what kind of tea it was but it came with several fresh mint leaves floating in it that I let infuse until I was done drinking it–very soothing. I had sabanekh (lamb and spinach stew) with saffroned rice on the side, and Stef had roasted chicken. Previously I’ve had roasted lamb, falafels, dolmas, hummus, baba, tabouleh, cucumber salad, and kanafeh for dessert, which is sort of a spin on baklavah.

It’s all been very tasty. Fresh, hot, and convincing enough to fool a neophyte like me into believing it’s “truly” mediterranean. I’ve already been back to this place twice, and I can see the pattern continuing. Cheap, fast, filling, friendly.

1700 Shattuck Ave Berkeley, CA 94709 (510) 849-4983

Jackpot! Monday lunch was had with Jen, a third-year Berkeley undergrad who knows plenty of good places. We were going to go to Cheesboard Pizza, which she claims is her favorite place in town, but they’re closed on Mondays, so we decided on Kurry Klub instead on the way back to campus. It’s a little Indian place, as you’ve guessed, and it has very nice interior of carved wood with all-wood tables and carved chairs. The have a $7 lunch buffet, and it is incredible! I spent most of my time putting korma over basmati rice, but I also tried some chicken curry and paneer. It was all wonderful, served with naan and accompanied by a very attentive staff who kept our glasses full of water. The korma was my favorite–creamy but not too heavy. The curry was also great: spicy but manageable (I mellowed it out with some yogurt). For those of you from Austin, I would compare the quality of this buffet to the Clay Pit–it’s that good. I’ll definitely be frequenting this place.

---

Comments

Justin Robertson — 2004-12-05 23:54:28

Ya !! I think the same as u do. It is just incredible….. ya….

Ram Shiva Katwal — 2004-12-05 23:56:25

Ya !! I have tried their recipe. I wonder why they cook so well. I was so suprised by their new dish so called “MOMO”

U guys should try it.

Regards

Ram K :D