I was out of it for a couple of days, because I hurt my back and couldn't sit for long. However, since getting better, I've been doing quite well. I tidied up the obj parser so that the vertices are stored as a dynamically allocated array. I still haven't done faces, but I'll get there. I think I have the 'save space' functionality working, I will test it more later. I've got to do some cleaning, and hit the grocery store, and pick up some port for Anna for tonight.
Well, it's been a while. I was distracted from this blog by NANOWRIMO, which was a success and a failure to me. I'm not sure what to do about that now. I think that it's a matter of whether or not I should be writing stuff that I enjoy -- like the stories I tell myself, or writing stories that I think would mean something to someone else. NANOWRIMO was a compromise, I think. It was a story that I loved, that evolved into something I thought would mean something to someone else.
But back to my thesis. I've been doing middling on it -- so now I'm going to go back to what I was doing before. Yesterday, I got the vertex stuff working, but I really need to attach my OBJ vertices and polygon information not to a particular agent, but to a tribe, because otherwise I am going to have way to many copies of that data in memory. That seems reasonable, and I did anticipate this, by giving tribes and spaces a property list. Hmmm.
Things have been not so good since the last post. I am getting very down about the complete stupidity of my work, but after talking to Joerg yesterday, I feel better about it again. I really need to get something done, so I'm going to set myself a goal of having that OBJ parser done by Monday. Then I'll at least be able to make some movement on something, which will make me feel better. I think when I'm theorising, or doing "light extemplorania" (Ben Franklin), I get more and more depressed about work.
Well, it's been an adventurous week. Monday I had that extended meeting with Joerg and Sheelagh. It went pretty well, but it was a little bit of what I was afraid if. They have some good ideas as to where I should go, but I'm still struggling with some more fundamental problems. I had dinner on monday with good Andrew. It was a lot of fun. I miss hanging out with him. I really enjoy his company. On Tuesday I went to West Edmonton Mall and spent three hours playing in the water park. It was a lot of fun, but I now have to send a letter to the management objecting to the captive Dolphin.
The way back was more of an adventure -- I'd gone up with Peter, 'cause he had a job interview, and I thought I'd keep him company on the trip. Only, neither of us was clever enough to check the weather, and it started snowing a lot. We were okay, but a semi jack-knifed on the road, and blocked it, and we had to wait for about 5 hours, and by that time the roads were nicely iced over, and we had to get dug out by a fireman. That cost me all of Wednesday to recover, because I didn't get any sleep. And Thursday they came to install my phone, and I spent the day cleaning my flat. I got everything dealt with except for three boxes, and I will keep working on dealing with those. Today, however, I'm really going to tackle that OBJ importer. That's my goal.
I also want to get some cardio, so I might go to the pool, or maybe I'll break down and finally go to the gym. We'll see.
Yesterday was quite productive. I got through quite a bit of reading, and formulated a plan knowledge representation in my agents. I got an outline done for the paper that I want to do with Joerg, and better, I got an outline done for my thesis, using the Official Thesis Template. The guidelines say I can use any font that I'd like. I'm being very tempted to buy Adobe Garamond, but I've asked Erick what he thinks about that. Maybe he can recommend a better font. We'll see what he says. I'm also very close to buying myself an iBook. Mmmm. iBook. Though I'm kinda wondering if I shouldn't use it as a reward of sorts. Like maybe, try to accomplish a few things first, and then if I manage that, I'll get it.
I'm going to try to work a bit on my thesis as much as I can now that I've got it set up. I'm going to set a goal to never let a week go by in which I don't add something substantial to it. I think that might help me a lot later on. Everyone I've talked to who has done this has said that -- start writing as soon as possible, so I plan to do that. I may have to rewrite everything, but at least I'll have an idea of what I need. Sheelagh made some good suggestions as to how I could alter it to make it a bit better from the start, so I'm going to do that today before I go home.
I need to learn to talk to Sheelagh a bit differently, I think. She's a very smart lady, but she uses language a lot differently than I do sometimes, which confuses me. She likes the $50 words that IFWA keeps trying to beat out of me (today's word was semiotic), and she also tends to use what I think of as the "lingo", and I'm not very good at that. Also, I think she just thinks faster than I do (entirely likely), because she often seems to be wanting to talk at a very abstract level, when I'm struggling to pull things together in a way that I can understand concretely. It's probably good for me, but it's frustrating, too! Ahhh, the joys of supervisors!
I'm going to be meeting with her and Joerg on Monday to talk about stuff some more. I worry a little that it's going to be me sitting in on a discussion between the two of them. I've got to try to keep it very much grounded in the practical if I'm going to get anything useful out of it -- I hope it goes okay that way.
Well, this is a miserable start. I haven't really done much in the last few days, apart from cleaning my flat. It's still not very well arranged after the move. I did go on a 90 minute hike with Jeff, Wendy and Uta (from Magdeburg). And I went to a 7 of 40 meeting last night, where two people critted one of my stories (Halved). They liked it, but were a bit confused in parts. I don't blame them -- I got a bit confused myself a couple of times on re-reading it. That's probably very bad. I'm not sure what I should fix, and what I should leave :(. I need to think about it some more. Definitely I want to make it more clear what the main character's role in the society is. It's way too cyberpunk for me right now, and I don't like that.
The power went out in my flat this morning, and I missed a dentist appointment at 0800h. I really can't blame it on the power though, I got the times mixed up in my head. I was going to get up and call before 8:00, to double check, but I didn't. I suck. I really really hate doing that. I feel really crappy about the whole thing. I need to get my appointments more together, and start logging them better. I think that's a big part of my goal for today.
I''ve put together an outline for the paper I want to write with Joerg, but it's pretty sparse. In all the reading I've been doing, I'm getting some really good ideas of how to apply this or that, but I know I"m going to forget them again, if I don't put them together in the right way. Sheelagh suggested I take over a wall somewhere, and start tacking bits and pieces to it, until they form together in my mind. This might be a good idea, but I'm not entiirely sold on it yet. I'd also like to get an outline of my thesis together. Maybe I'll go down and have a look at some of the theses on the second floor here, and see if I can't detect a pattern in the chapters. That would give me a place to start.
I'm starting this blog to keep me honest about working on my thesis and my writing. We'll see if it works. I don't promise to write this for anyone else -- so it may not make sense. Today I didn't do much more than reading. I think I've finally figured a way to formalise my rules. Really, in every time step, each agent has to figure out three things: (1) where it should be, (2) how it should orient (rotate) and (3) how it should draw itself. All of the rules that I might come up with are going to be methods of determining this.
In other news, I got a new fish today -- a second pleco to help with the algae in Moebius and Tesseract's tank. He's very cute. I think I'm going to call him George, to go with Fred, my other pleco. He's a bit smaller than Fred, and when he wandered into Fred's side of the tank, Fred got very excited and swam in circles. I guess this was threat behaviour, because George swam back to the other side, where he busied himself eating more algae. I turned the heater on in the tank for the first time yesterday, and Moebius and Tesseract didn't boil to death. I have the tank heated to 25 degrees now. Not too warm, but takes the edge off the cold. And I got them a timer, to turn the light out and the heater off at night. The tank stands at 23 degrees when the heater is off, so they should be fine.
Chester took me down to memory express, and I got a new CD drive. I think the motor on mine is none too happy, because it really doesn't like to recognise when I put a CD in. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect that my friend Susan had been around. CD drives always break when she goes anywhere near them. Very suspicious, indeed.
