Last night for wing night we went to Allen's on the Danforth for supper and it was pretty good. What was amusing though was that we saw Jian Ghomeshi, the singer/percussionist for Moxy Fruvous! For those of you who don't know that band, they did the song "King of Spain." If you haven't heard of it then you should check it out. It is early 90s pop/acapella that mentions Pizza Pizza and the Skydome!

Not much else has been going on lately. Adrienne came to visit Matt again last weekend so we all went to the Santa Claus parade. It was alright, probably the best I'll ever see, but I'm not a huge fan of Christmas or standing in the cold for hours or whatever. Bah! I am a fan of digital cameras though, so I took a bunch of pictures. Here are a few:

Herd of clowns

Peek Frean Maiden

Gorillas with bananas

Upside-down clowns

The Kool-aid Man

Moose in a canoe

Chicken noodle guy

Lots of sousaphones

Some car with something in it

Santa Claus

The Toronto subway

I think my biggest question is: Other than the picture of Santa, what do any of these have to do with Christmas? And it's not like I only posted the weird photos. Nothing was very Christmas related.

Guess what! I'm the number one result for "pickle" on Google's image search! Check it out! The image is my earlier pickle shot...reproduced for you here:

pickle again!

I found out this amazing fact with Google Analytics which is a free website statistic compilation thinger from Google. Pretty sweet!

I went home this weekend, but I didn't do too much. Basically I just spent time reinstalling Windows on Kim's laptop. Boooo to Windows! Booooo! Oh I also got to go to some birthday party with Kim for her Great Uncle or something...lots of random relatives that even she didn't know. Good food though. :)

I went through Waterloo on my way home today so that I could finally see my brother's apartment. It wasn't too bad. In other brother-related news, he got a co-op job at Maple which is totally excellent for a first work term.

Tonight along with the rest of my supper, I ate my giant pickle! It was pretty tasty. Below is a picture, note that it is on a dinner plate...no wussy luncheon plate for this pickle!

Pickle...uncanned!

Not too much has been happening lately. Last weekend I stayed in Toronto and just sorta hung around. I saw Tim Burton's Corpse Bride on the Saturday with Matt. It was pretty good, although I saw it in the smallest theatre ever. I think I'm spoiled by Silvercity and the like, but this was really small. It sat about 90 people, the screen was tiny and the sound was horrible. I don't think I would have minded, except that the ticket was the same price as at a Silvercity!

After the movie we went to the College Street location of Canada Computers which has apparently moved slightly further west along the road. Matt had to get a new power supply for his family's computer (which is the same model as mine, a Dell Dimension 8100). But, when we got back to the house, we checked it against my power supply to see if it was compatible and it wasn't! It really should have been since a power supply is fairly standard, but Dell apparently used to use non-standard power supplies. I hope mine doesn't die...or else I'll have to get a new computer...and that would be, um, terrible. Yeah.

After Canada Computers (but before the discovery of the incompatibility), we met Adrienne at the bus station and went to Salad King for supper. So good, I love that place. Adrienne brought me a birthday present, and it was pretty cool...a single giant pickle imported from Germany and contained in it's own can!

Pickle in a can

So cool! The can of coke is to give a relative feel for the size of the thing. When I eat it I will take a picture of it without its protective covering so it can be displayed in all of its glory. Stay tuned!

On Friday night and on Sunday I worked on my ray tracer a bit more and added a little algorithm to generate vertex normals for meshes. This turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be, and after thinking about it for a while I realised that it is in fact a rather hard problem. A mesh is a lossy data format so the data I'm trying to recreate is not even really there. The best I can do is an approximation. And since I am not king of spline mountain, I can only do a rough approximation at that. Here is the cow mesh, rendered first without and then with phong shading using my generated vertex normals:

Cow with generated vertex normals

In other news, I got an email from my friend Mike with a picture of me in it at his house from a loooooooonng time ago. I figure that, given my haircut, I must have been in grade 8 or 9. Here it is:

Me in grade 8 or 9...scary hair

Rock climbing has been going well too. I'm really enjoying it and it is fun to go each week and see myself progressing. I've never really been a "sports" person...not at all. So it is fun to get into something like this. I've been able to do progressively more difficult climbs each week, and I find that I don't get tired as easily. This means I'm developing "technique" or something. But whatever, I'm totally happy that I got the equipment and I'm going to keep going at least once a week for the rest of the term. It is definitely good times.

I should try to update more often, so that when I do update they arn't gigantic posts like this one and the last one. Oh well.

Work has been great, nothing new to report there. Except...that I don't have to do a work report, again! Hahaha to everyone who has to do one. Also, rock climbing with Alias folk has been sweet all around. It's great having people to help/encourage you and I'm really enjoying the sport in general. My new chalk bag is fun too.

Last weekend Kim came to Toronto to visit and we saw the Wallace and Gromit movie (sweet!), went shopping and just hung around. It was nice and relaxing because we didn't want to accomplish anything in particular. On Sunday her mom was in Toronto to watch her sister's Field Hockey game so we met at the game and Kim got a ride home from her. We watched a bit of the game, and I must say, it is a strange sport. Very...um...special. Oh well.

Friday was my birthday (23), and the other co-op students at work did a bunch of really cool stuff for me. I was quite impressed! They decorated my work area (fairly well too given limited resources), and they got me a toy! The Airzooka! So cool! Also we went out to lunch at Betty's, the typical Alias lunch spot. Good times!

By a happy coincidence, some family friends from Ottawa happened to be able to visit my mom's house this weekend, and happened to be coming from Toronto. So, in addition to getting to see some really great people on my birthday weekend, I got a ride to and from Toronto! The weekend was pretty relaxing, we mostly just chatted and ate yummy food. But we did go for a walk on Saturday afternoon in Springbank park in London, which was really nice because of the Fall colours and such. I brought my camera and took a bunch of photos, and here are a few.

Thames river pumphouse

Dam on the Thames river

Kim next to the Thames

Glowing leaves in Springbank park

It was a perfect day for this sort of thing, so I'm glad I remembered to bring my camera. Also, I'm pretty happy with the results. I didn't spend much time setting up these shots or anything, and I think they turned out pretty well. I need to go out sometime and do some more careful shots. Such a good camera.

Finally, while I enjoyed my weekend, my computer chugged along at creating a new image using a mesh and phong shading. Here is Athena wearing her helmet. The mesh has like 15000 faces, so it took a little while to compute. I'm thinking about implementing a sphere tree to help speed up mesh rendering.

Marble athena head