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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?