So, it's been a long time since my last post and as a result I've forgotten most of what has happened. The quick rundown of what's happened is: more rock climbing with Alias folk, the Alias Christmas party (awesome!), Kim visited for a while in my last week of work, four holiday dinners (goose, turkey, ham, salmon), got to see Mike (and start him out on Perl) and KJ, hung out a bunch with Kim, saw a bunch of movies (including King Kong and Harry Potter), lots of fun Christmas presents (5 seasons of Simpsons!!!), moved from Toronto to Waterloo and probably a ton more stuff that I'm forgetting. I should post some pictures from the break, but I don't feel like formatting them and stuff so it probably won't happen. Oh well.

This term is gonna be nuts, I've already put in maybe 15 hours on Compilers (the result being a mostly functional scanner for Ada, the language we have to compile). Also I have other courses (I think, haven't really looked at them yet). Plus, I have to get a job so that I can um...you know, become a real person or something.

The apartment in Waterloo is good as always, of course. I got my roommates to watch Grey's Anatomy, which means that we've been into the 4 or 5 episode marathon sessions already.

Last night Matt and I watched The Big Lebowski for no particular reason. Such a good movie. Interestingly enough I think Mike watched it yesterday too. Probably because it rocks.

Here are some pictures from the climbing gym we went to on Sunday.

Me on a wall

The outside of the chimney

Me in the chimney climb

Me in the chimney climb

So instead of just saying I should fix my site, I went and did it right after writing the last post. You can see that my site now displays the last five posts at any time. Also, the bottom link on the default page will show you all the posts for the current month, which conveniently activates the code to cycle backwards by month.

Long time since the last update, I really gotta change my backend code to show a set number of previous posts rather than the posts for the current month. Then I won't feel bad about long spans of time with no updates.

Last weekend Kim came up to visit and we had a pretty damn good time. Her bus was late on Friday (something about a gigantic multi-car accident on the 401) so we didn't do anything then other than get supper at McDonald's. On Saturday we went to the ROM and looked at a bunch of stuff. Kim really likes it there, and I had a good time too. The museum combined with Kristjan's website made me really want to go to Europe (ie. Rome) or anywhere that isn't North America. Hopefully once I finish school and get settled I'll have a chance to do a bunch of travelling.

After the ROM we got some Pizza Hut (sooo good, it's been too long) and then headed up to the airport (via TTC) to meet my friend KJ, who was coming in from a year long stint teaching in Asia (specifically China and Taiwan). While waiting we shared a $7 fruit smoothy that was really good (even though quite expensive). KJ was really surprised to see us and even though we only got to chat for 20 minutes I'm so glad we took the time to get up there. I really don't see her enough and it made me realize that I miss her quite a bit. I'll be seeing her again at least once before she heads back to the other side of the world.

On Sunday my mom (who was also in Toronto) came over and took Kim and I out to IKEA for $1 breakfasts. It was pretty good food for the price and afterwards we wandered the store for at least 2 hours. I was pretty tired afterward so I went home and relaxed for the rest of the weekend.

So, onto this weekend that is just finishing up. Mike came to Toronto to visit this weekend, and spent some time hanging out at Alias on Friday. I didn't get much work done as a result, but I did get to play some Xbox 360 for an hour, so I think it all balances out somehow. Friday was also the end of term lunch for the co-op students which means that I now have another Alias t-shirt. Sweet!!! Gotta love the swag!

After work on Friday Mike took me to the house of his friend Ya'el for a Shabbat dinner. It as pretty cool, lots of good food, about a dozen friendly people and multiple bottles of nice wine. I really enjoyed it.

On Saturday Mike and I headed off to Yorkdale mall for some Chirstmas/Chanukah shopping and just general mall stuff. I'd never been to Yorkdale before so it was pretty cool. In addition to several Christmas gifts I also picked up a new plain white button-up shirt for $19 (regular $70) at Club Monaco. Good times.

After the mall we went downtown and met up with Alex for supper at Spring Rolls. It wouldn't be a visit with Mike in Toronto without a stop at Spring Rolls. Fortunately their food is pretty good, so it's always a fun time. Later on we went and saw The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I thought it was really well done compared to the book and the graphics were more or less up to current standards. I have some minor internal conflicts with the whole Chronicles of Narnia stuff due to the intense Christian parables in the story (ie. the Lion, Aslan, is Jesus -- no, really, C.S. Lewis was intensely religous and did this on purpose). I don't have much use for organised religion and even less for Christianity. But despite all that I very much enjoyed the story in the movie. I think C.S. Lewis (and the creators of the movie) accomplished something very significant in their presentation of the whole Christian theme in a delightful and compelling way. This is not to say that I've hopped on the conversion train (next stop, self-righteousness and condescending attitudes), but it makes me wonder what the world would be like if the religious nuts throughout history were more open to creative manipulation and interpretation of the various sacred texts (despite the heavy Christian themes, there was much in the movie that could be seen as heretical). Hell, I wonder what the world would be like if the religious nuts were just more open in general. I also wonder if I would be more open to religion if religion was more open to anything else. Basically the movie just put me in a very thoughtful mood.

Please note that my use of the term "religious nut" in the preceding paragraph, is by no means a judgement on everyone who is spiritual...only those who proceed in religion with a closed mind. If I believe anything it is that we are meant to question everything and pursue truth in all aspects of life.

On a lighter note, today we went rock climbing! I love it! Mike and Alex and I met John and then got a ride up to a place in Newmarket. It was much better than the place in Scarborough that we went to a couple weeks ago, but not quite as good as the place we normally go to. It did have a really unique set of climbs though. They hand molded a huge wall of concrete to create a really realistic "chimney" section. A "chimney" is a section of wall that is closed in pretty tight on at least three sides. This one was cool because the molding made it like actual rock. They had some extra holds on the that part of the wall too, but it was also possible to do it without using the holds and just using the "natural" features of the wall. I managed to get to the top using only features and it was really amazing/fun. Totally unlike any climb I've done before. I would definitely be willing to go back there, just for the chimney section. I'll post some pictures later when I get them from Mike.

This has been a really text-heavy post, so I figured I'd end with a couple of fun photos. The first is an action shot of some pool balls being broke apart on the pool table at work. The other is just a macro shot of some of the random crap on my desk, featuring a Dreidel and a CD with some cool reflections. Enjoy.

Pool balls being broken apart

Dreidel with CD

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

I've got a bunch of stuff to update on today, since I haven't posted in a while (booo to me).

Thanksgiving was a good weekend, as long weekends always are. Only two turkey dinners this year though, but that is still OK I guess. One at my mom's house with my Grandpa, Aunt and cousin and one with Kim's family. The dinner at my mom's house was amusing because afterwards my brother wanted to go visit his friends' apartment so Kim, my cousin and I drove him over and hung out there for a bit. I felt a bit old and out of place, but it was very amusing to see my brother in his "natural habitat." The food was good all around of course. On Sunday Kim and I wandered around White Oaks mall in London, which I haven't done in a long time. It was amusing but I didn't buy anything. Next time maybe.

Work was pretty busy last week, I managed to do 37.5 hours even though I wasn't even in the office on Monday (because of Thanksgiving). But I got some good stuff done and I didn't mind staying later.

I stayed in Toronto this past weekend, and that was OK, except that none of my four roommates stayed. So the house was a little bit lonely. On Friday I stayed at work until 9:30pm, and on the way home the subway announcer was hilarious. He said all of the station names in strange voices, and when we got to Bloor he yelled out "OPEN SESAME!!!" just before opening the doors. The whole subway car laughed, it was hilarious.

On Saturday I went to Mountain Equipment Co-op to buy some rock climbing shoes and a harness. They were super helpful there and they even had a wall to test the equipment out on. I ended up spending about $160 for the two pieces, which is pretty good I think. Since they are going to be my birthday present from my parents I don't really mind what the price is anyway. I still might go get a chalk bag. Not sure yet. Here is a picture of my new stuff:

Rock climbing shoes and harness

The rest of Saturday I spent relaxing and watching episodes of Firefly. Such a good show.

On Sunday I finally did some work on my ray tracer again. I added support for vertex normals on triangular meshes. I do Phong shading now, meaning that I interpolate the vertex normals across each face of the mesh to produce a smooth shaded effect. It was pretty easy and produces really nice results. I also updated all of the documentation so feel free to have a look at the Ray Tracer section for more details. Below is a picture of a mesh rendered without my new feature and then the same mesh with my new feature. I think the second is a much nicer result. I'm going to look around for some more meshes and try to create some more neat images. I chose this mesh to start with because I didn't think this site has enough boobies on it. :)

Mesh without phong shading

Mesh with phong shading