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:
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. :)
