Aw yeah, two classes down, two to go. Finished up everything today for my software engineering class and my electrical engineering lab. Feeling pretty good about both of those, at least grade-wise. There were things in both of them that I would have like to have gotten done but didn’t, but they won’t really affect my grade. Now all that’s left is a final for materials science (which isn’t even comprehensive apparently), and a take home final and final project for my graphics class.
Monthly Archive for November, 2001
Thanksgiving in Chicago was excellent, well worth the massive amount of driving in a short period of time. Got to see my dear sweet grandmother in good health and good spirits, which was great since I haven’t seen her in the longest time. Also, there’s really nothing better than driving around Chicago at night. It was a pretty accelerated visit though, since we left Thursday morning and got back Friday night. So yeah, I’ve been back since Friday but I couldn’t be arsed to update the blog for these 3 reasons.
Time to get started on my final graphics project, which means I have to learn a lot about BSP trees in a little time. I’m going to be doing real time shadows using BSP trees, or at least thats the plan.
Hey look, its fun to play with BSP trees. (java applet)
I’m not quite sure why I think Dead Man’s Switch is such a cool idea. It’s actually pretty morbid. The deal is, its a program with a timer that you have to reset periodically. If you fail to reset the timer because, oh I don’t know let’s say you’re DEAD, then the program can post messages to websites, send out email messages, and encrypt files on your computer. My only problem is that in the event of my untimely demise, I doubt my computer would remain on long enough for the trigger to activate, especially if it was set for weeks or months. If only there were some way to host this remotely on a machine that wouldn’t ever go down. At any rate, let this serve as a warning that should I suddenly cease to be, I still have the means to release your most damaging secrets to the world. Yes, even that one. So don’t try anything funny.
Last night was the best night of live improv comedy that I’ve seen at OSU in, well, ever. Derek and the rest of the Monkeys rocked out for a full house, and hilarity ensued. Great skits, witty biting satire (even if they did take a few cheap shots, IMO), and far fewer awkward moments during the improv bits. Believe me, the last part is important if you’re a person like myself who feels painfully awkward seeing people being painfully awkward. I do have one problem with improv comedy in front of a college audience, and I will demonstrate it in a sample dialogue I like to call “College Improv: A Play in One Act with an Overwrought Obvious Moral and Little to No Character Development”.
Improv Troupe Member: Can someone in the audience give us a scene to act out?
College Student: Penis! Boobs!
While the above scene never exactly occurred, regretfully it is not an exaggeration.
It was also cool to see Brett there, even if it was just for a few minutes. The show went longer than I thought, and I had to jet right afterward to give someone a ride home, so I didn’t really get to stay around and “kick it” afterward.
A brief list of arbitrary and somewhat suspect judgements:
| The New Pornographers | regular pornographers |
| Phong shading | Gouraud shading |
| Metal Gear Solid 2 | MGS2 during the end of the quarter |
| LAN parties | cleaning up after LAN parties |
| texture mapping | implementing texture mapping |
| DJ Shadow | DJ Tanner |
I have a new theory, arrived at after many bleary-eyed hours in the (relatively) new giganto computer lab in Caldwell Hall: By forcing the intelligent über-geeks to do their coding alongside the attractive business students working in Excel in the combined computing environment, the CIS faculty hopes to encourage a little mating action that will result in breeding a master race of hyper-intelligent, super-attractive coding geeks, who can’t even figure out how to add a column in Excel!! I don’t know why that last part would be desirable, but it’s obviously what they’d end up with. If this seems a little improbable to you, I understand. But how else do you explain the dimmed lights and Barry White playing softly in the background?
Elsewhere