Escaped Thoughts

Now In 3-D!

I've now reached (through the time-honored method of skipping ahead) 3-D scene rendering in OpenGL. The coolest think I've discovered so far is that by simultaneously showing 2 slightly different views of the same scene side-by-side, and allowing the camera to pan and zoom, I can make my own, fully interactive, stereo-grams. How cool is that?

Note: if you do this too much, or aren't careful with the camera locations, this also doubles as a good way to give yourself a headache.

Category: Geek

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Look At All The Pretty Colors

I picked up a book on OpenGL, just for kicks, and it's incredibly cool. The basics (all I've learned so far) are unbelievably easy, and still a lot of fun to play around with. It's a real shame that Case doesn't have a decent (ok, any) undergraduate graphics course: not only would it be quite interesting, since it would move us out of the text-only realm, but it would have been really useful any number of times in my undergraduate career.

Category: Geek

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When The Lights Go Down In The City

So I'm sitting at work yesterday at about 4:15 when the power suddenly goes out. Clearly, a sign that it's time to go home early--only there's no power there either. I figured it was a large transformer somewhere, and decided to go run some errands a good distance away, where surely they wouldn't be affected. Luckily, I turned on the radio before going far, and heard them say something about a cop directing traffic at 12th and something. "Wow, all the way downtown! This must be a really big blackout," I think, and look for a good spot to turn around and head home. Then I hear, "And that's so-and-so reporting to us live from Detroit." Oh.

Happily, things are more or less getting back to normal here. Some industrious workers get a huge thanks from me, as we got out power back at about 7 this morning. Power in the Cleveland area is still spotty, so we are very fortunate (at least for now; there's word that some areas may lose power again while repairs are made). The only lingering issue for us is that our water is probably bad, but that's nothing that some boiling can't fix.

Things I'm thankful for:

  • Gas stoves: allowing us to cook our perishable food even without power.
  • Oil lamps: we were given one as a wedding present, but didn't know what we were going to do with it. Luckily, Laura remembered it, and we enjoyed bright, trouble-free light.
  • Traffic cops: the general level of driving-impaired-ness in Cleveland extends to a total lack of comprehension that a dead traffic light means stop. Apparently, most people here think that if they don't see a red light, they can just keep going. Of course, this shouldn't surprise me, since there are quite a few people who think that even if they do see a red light, they can keep going.
  • Simple, non-cordless, non-cellular, phone-line-powered, phones: the guy at Radio Shack looked at me like I was from another planet when I asked (after fruitless searching) if they had any non-cordless phones. I explained that I wanted it for power outages, at which point he tried to sell me a cell-phone. Since many cell phones didn't have signals during this whole mess, I felt quite vindicated when we were able to talk to our families.
  • Good freezer insulation: after putting perishables in the freezer overnight, they were all still nice and cool in the morning even after almost 15 hours of blackout.

All in all, considering how power-dependent we all are, things went very smoothly for us.

Category: Life

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Email Me Quick

This could be your last chance to email me: my email address will be expiring. The notice came this morning from admin@po.cwru.edu, so I know it must be valid, especially since I got it five times in a half hour. Repeat sendings and garbage text at the end of the subject (to make sure the vital message isn't inadvertently marked as spam) are how I identify all my legitimate messages. And if there were, somehow, any doubt remaining, all I would have to do is look at the location of the important information: in an attached zip file. I know I always send my text messages in attached zip files. Who doesn't?

Seriously, how hard is it to learn not to open an attachment unless it is very obviously from someone you know (translation: not someone who you've known for years suddenly emailing you in weird, broken English)? And if you can't understand that, then chances are very high that you didn't set up your own computer, in which case the person who did should be beaten about the head for not setting some basic security settings in your email client.

So to my computer-configuring techie bretheren, I say: what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you condemning your less-knowledgable friends and relatives to suffer the agonies of email worms? If nothing else, protect them to save yourself from having to clean up their hosed computers!

Category: Geek

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It's A Small World After All

I've been reading Linked, a book about the advances in modeling and understanding the nature and behavior of networks since, the beginnings of graph theory. While it's non-technical, and therefore slightly superficial, it covers some fascinating material. Although some of his conclusions seem at first trivially obvious (like, people link preferrentially to good websites), he goes on to explore the ramifications, the methods of remarkably simple modeling, and (by far the most interesting) the parallels with systems where it's far less obvious. Who knew that cells behave like food chains behave like the internet? That Microsoft is a Bose-Einstein condensate? That there's a mathematical proof that, the internet being structured as it is, stupid people will continue to send me year-old viruses? Not me, but it's amazing how simple it all sounds when you hear it. Just another example of how cool the world is.

Category: Geek

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The Revolution Has Failed

The good news is, my DDR pad and adapter have arrived. So in theory I should be a happy, healthier, dancing machine. The bad news is, it doesn't work. So now I'm in limbo waiting to see if they fix it with drivers (which is worthless to me, as I have no drivers) or ship new ones. In the meantime, all I can do is stare forlornly at the dance mat sitting, totally useless, next to me.

It's a cruel world.

Category: Geek

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