Posts from — April 2004

Sooo… long story short I overslept my last day of classes by 4 hours (I turned off two alarms in my sleep). I missed two classes, the last midweek middays of the year, and now I’m going to be late to work. Had some good chats with a couple of people last night, but they did keep me up until 5am. Worth it, though, I didn’t really miss anything critical in the classes, I think.

A few things from Steve Garrity (guy who works on mozilla firefox, among other things):

http://www.theembassyvfx.com/qt/tetra.mov

A very cool short movie demonstration from a visual effects company.

http://actsofvolition.com/archives/2004/april/theriseof

An article he wrote about improvements in open source user interfaces. Very well written and insightful.

Yesterday was an incredible day for procrastination. I don’t think I got anything significant done… I’m not sure what I actually did. I went to Dunkin Donuts with Pete, Rachel and Karen at 11 or so. I had two donuts and a bagel (poppyseed, untoasted, with plain cream cheese). They sorta skimped on the cream cheese, I’ll have to remember that for next time. It was a good break from not getting things done, as I did really need to get out of my room.
After sitting down for a while longer after we got back (after midnight), Tim and I went to Waffle House at 3 or so. Another good trip, I was so full after eating most of the waffle (considering I had pretty much just eaten a meal). I got back and had a good sleep at 4:15 or so.

Made it to all my classes and work today, so that’s good. Now that deadlines are looming, I’m ready to actually get work done today.

Apparently I got nominated for some sort of music dept award (along with 47 or so other people who got nominated for things). Must be my INCREDIBLE performance at the concert on Sunday. That calls for a wink:

Tim asked about the sounds that I liked to make back in middle school. I found a couple on my computer (I save almost everything).
The first one
The second one

I think Jeff Stauch and I made both of those, I’m not quite sure. I can’t remember the name of the program we used to mix the sounds, I think it came with my sound blaster. Goldwave, perhaps?

I found the first web page I ever made… it was stored on my computer. For a good time/laugh, visit Cheese Log Online. I made it in 8th grade.

Quick-hitting headlines from the last few days…

Saw Kill Bill Vol 2 with Tyler, Doug, Emily and Aleks on Friday. It did not disappoint, I was very satisfied by the ending. My mom mentioned that she had heard someone refer to it as “the epitome of a guy movie” or something like that. The more I think about that, the more I disagree. It’s not a movie about fighting, it’s about archetype and style. I think I read someone refer to it as a “meta-movie” before, since it’s more like an expression of genres.

Loft cleanup was Saturday. We got a lot done, but I feel like we wasted some people’s time. We had too many people for what we were doing (given the amount of space we had). It was difficult to keep people busy. Other than that, it went well.

Mom, Dad and Brian came were in town. I went on a long run with Brian after loft cleanup. I was tired after moving and cleaning stuff all day, but we had a good run (such a nice day). We all went out to eat with Andrew, Dan, Greg, Emily, and Tyler at Ruby Tuesday’s. Good times, good food.

While we were in the mall, they got me some new running shoes (that I’ve yet to use) and socks. I also got a bunch of other goodies including a light stand that I can put by my bed (now I can read before I sleep!).

The Symphonic Band concert was at 3pm today (er, yesterday). It went pretty well. We played a ton of music, some of which was pretty good. My parents and brother had to leave after the concert. It was good to see them, especially since I hadn’t seen them since spring break. Not sure when I’ll be back home, everything’s pretty up in the air for the next month.

I had dinner with KKY alumni and friends after they left, it was really good and I got to visit with some people I rarely see.

One more week of classes. That’s insane. I’m going to be a senior (for real, this time). Time flies…

If anyone has ideas for where I can get a good algorithm for removing red eye from a picture, please let me know. I can’t find good stuff online. The method will be “directed” meaning the user will click on each eye, but can’t depend on anything more than the manipulation of RGB values in the image.

More info on this project once it matures a bit more…

This week has been exceedingly OK, nothing horrible has happened, but I haven’t been particularly happy with anything.

The bane of my existence for the last couple of weeks has been the software engineering project. It’s been very hard because I’m working on one portion through class and I’ve been responsible for getting the camera code through work. Since most people in the class are incompetent (I’m not trying to be mean or elitist here, it’s just true), I’ve ended up being the only one getting a much larger portion working. I say they’re incompetent because they #include cpp files, have variable declarations in their header files, and have no concept of how different parts of a program can be linked. That and the code on CVS often just doesn’t compile.

So today, Humberto (one of the competent students in the class) worked with all the code, fixed everyone’s modules so they’d compile correctly, emailed some groups whose code we had to change, and finally got the whole thing working end to end. My camera class worked fine after we got it all working. I didn’t think we’d get to this point today or even in a week. There were so many bizzare linking errors that only yielded moderate information on the net. But somehow we dug our way out of it. The pressure is now off me for that project, so I think I can just finish it only playing the role of student.

Very exciting.

I’m looking forward to work this summer. The first thing I’m going to be working on is an Image class that can perform advanced operations and abstract away some performance-oriented libraries. We’re also looking to use some of the ideas of extreme programming, notable pair programming, so I’ll probably be working with Humberto more.

Some stream of consciousness for the kids…

Things I like:
A newly opened container of cream cheese
Warm summer nights outdoors
Thunderstorms
Organization in certain forms (you wouldn’t believe it if you saw my room…)
Getting lost and finding something new
Doing a project in a new programming language
Simple systems that solve complex problems
Teaching anyone who legitimately wants to learn
Discovering a new style of music
Spice cake
Going for a long, slow run
Integrated spell cheque
KDE
Good french fries
Scripting and automation
Law & Order
Showering after a day at the beach
Short, relaxing naps

Things I don’t like:
Wasted potential
Any activity related to networking in the business sense
Almost anything “IT” related
Any music that sounds like whining
People being mean to each other (outside of humor, I hate listening to people slander other people)
Talking to drunks (usually)
Basic web site design (sometimes)
Ice cream cake
Caffeine
Cleaning viruses off Windows computers
Microsoft Excel (for a very specific, picky interface reason)
Most things dealing with computer hardware
SCO
Listening to most radio stations
Watching TV (usually)
ASP
Visual studio 6 (and previous)
Sites that depend on Flash
Web comics
Anime

Ok, so this was random, but the idea popped into my head when I was walking home from work.

I’ve determined that I have “Senior-standing-itis”, the milder yet longer term form of senioritis.

Bring on summer.