overt.org

The semester has worked it’s way up to a gallop. One of my classes, “computational geometry,” has been computationally kicking my ass. My current plan is to stop taking it for a grade for my sanity’s sake. Otherwise things are peachy, I need to restart my research engine after the long burn of SIGGRAPH. Cool things of note:

• I moved into an office with some other graphics folks. This is significantly better even than my already serendipitous office down the hall from the graphics people. I’m also right next to the communal Xbox, which seemed a reason for concern but hasn’t been a problem yet.
• Speaking of Xboxes, I have one now, though I’ve yet to play any Xbox games on it. What I have done is disassembled it, solder a chip in its innards, and put it back together. Why? Because now the Xbox will, at my whim, run any NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, Gameboy, and Arcade game ever. I’m not saying that I have copies of all these games–what blatant piracy that would be! Ok actually I do.
• Going to New York the day after tomorrow. No doubt much posting of pictures and events will be done
• Awesome Valentine’s dinner

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Comments

cameron — 2005-02-18 08:45:13

I hope it is one of the newer Xboxes, not one whose power cord will burn down your apartment!

I can send Halo back with Leslie in March if you haven’t acquired it by then.

bryan — 2005-02-19 23:12:00

i tried halo on my mac, and was unimpressed, but i’ve heard it’s better on the xbox. i also have halo 2 (a friend gave it to me), but i don’t want to play it until after i play the original, so it would indeed kick ass if you sent her back with it. you may just have to sneak it into her bag.

So, our year with Servepath (SUCK!) is almost over, and Ali found a great place to colo in Michigan, so we’re going to set ourselves up with a little server there and hopefully things will work out better. It’s actually not all that little–the new box is a 2.8GHz P4 with a gig of RAM and 240GB of space… quite a step up from our current 20GB. I imagine the switch over to the new server will be sometime in the next couple of weeks. Nothing should change for anyone using overt, but there might be a few problems here or there. Just let me know if there is any trouble.

My typical day for the last week before the SIGGRAPH deadline went something like this:

Wake up at 8, shower, dress, eat. get on my bike about 9:30 and ride to the BART station. Spend the next hour in bliss reading a book or a magazine that has nothing to do with smoke. Get out at Berkeley, walk up the hill to Soda (since the campus buses mostly weren’t running). Arrive at Soda about 11am, an hour or so before almost anyone else will show up. At noon, join the author of the paper I was helping with (also named Bryan). Work on getting smoke to look right until the last train home (usually 11-11:30pm). Repeat.

Now, to be honest, not every day was like that. I took a few nights off to spend with Les or to hang out with friends and exercise, but mostly that’s the way it went. It was gruelling, but mostly fun. The atmosphere in the lab of all the people working day and and out on the papers was electric. I was usually one of the earliest to leave. Bryan stayed many nights until 3 or 4, and he had company.

At the end I got to help out with more than just rendering. I put together figures, and also helped on the text. In the end our product was a 5-page paper and a 2-and-a-half-minute video. I think, in sum, the work I did for those two weeks exceeded that which I did in any three months at Apple. But what motivation. Looking into the future, I hope that writing the paper can be done another way. It’s just not my style to pack it all into a month of frenzied work at the end. Hopefully I can exert enough control on the process to work mostly during the day the next time around–when I’ll hopefully be working on my own paper.

Anyway… quite an experience. It has triggered some serious slacking this weekend, so I’ll probably only start thinking about my classes tomorrow when I have to go back to school again.

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Comments

Ali — 2005-02-03 23:28:23

I hope it can be done to…. However, all my group has ever managed is all-nighters the last couple of days before a paper deadline. Yuk.

I’ll probably write more about the whole process when I get to the end, but for now I give you this and this. Let it be Thursday soon.

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Comments

em — 2005-01-27 00:11:34

Magic!

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.