Author Archives: Alan V
Fwoomp
Why am I so tired? I need to get less sleep.
Today was rather amusing. Got up at 7:45 because I had a photo crit at 8:30. Went to photo and the crit took all of 15 minutes. Came home and slept for another 3 hours. Came home again after classes (at 4:30) and slept for another 3.5 hours.
Missed the TBA last night. Rather unfortunate. :-\
There was a bit of snow today, but nothing stuck. Rather unfortunate.
Ev got into an accident yesterday driving home. Rather unfortunate (but fortunate that he wasn’t hurt).
Got to play with Dom’s Wii this morning. Wheeee! (Not) rather unfortunate.
Had all you can eat pasta at Joe Mamas with 8 and Alisa (thank you!!!) tonight, but now I kinda feel sick. Rather unfortunate.
According to the purity test, I am now 72.0% sexually pure (28.0% sexually corrupt). Rather unfortunate…?

Random happy
Something I’ve noticed from randomly reading back in both this and my old journal is that entries have gotten increasingly serious.
Mayhaps this is because my life has become increasingly serious, but it still makes me sad, because I don’t like to think of myself as an incredibly serious person…
Thus, I present to you a completely random and pointless entry of great power…
Apple piecake is fuzzy bunny happy poop in your mealworm gunk covered salmon veiled with yellow curry xylophones laughing quickly over the lazy dogma foxen. With boxen and oxen wearing soxen eating loxen. Or lox. Soundless veloceraptors screech lazily by the flower-infested cultural poignancy of walruses and film canisters overflowing with an abundance of absence. Over the painbow like dentists enjoy grabbing white enamel laced muffins from teapot kittens in the ceiling watching you masticate your badger badger badgers and mushrooms, but snake shakes should be drunk quickly or plain planes will intersect you and cause much incontinence in bed where pretty pink pillows pile precariously preparing popular preinsurgencies for the purpose of power of porposes.
APRICOT POOP!
Wheeeee(an hall).

G

R

R

R

!
Treat your mother…’s right leg because it’s filled with ANGRY. And beer, a female beer drunk by Ray climbing a mountain. In bed.
Frainbart.
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| I AM HAPPY! SEE MY BIG SMILE? |
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WHEEEE!
It’s amazing how things can turn around so quickly and leave you feeling immensely relieved.
Last night, I got an email from Mark (my advisor) saying that he had added me to Web Apps. I was number 27 on a waitlist for the class, which has a class size of 30. Mark Stehlik is amazing and I want to have his babies.
I’m really glad I get to take this course before I graduate… this is my last spring semester, and the course is only offered in the spring, so it would have been really unfortunate if I hadn’t been able to get in. Meh.
So then this is my schedule as currently registered. I’ll need section B of networks instead of the currently registered section A, but there’s not much I can do about that right now (worst case, I’ll just go to the wrong section unofficially).
Also, today, I “finished” my ray tracer. The last two things that were making me incredibly sad were phong shading and recursive reflections. The former was almost immediately fixed once I realized that a) the provided vector class didn’t scale as expected, and so once I wrote my own code to generate and scale the desired vectors, the phong shading was almost completely correct and b) I forgot that I’d created soft shadows by duplicating lights with slight offsets, so I had to scale my light intensities by 9. Once I had that working, I realized that, since I’d planned for recursive reflections from the start (added variables into my method headers to account for the required behavior), reflections were an extra one line of code. I added it in, and it worked beautifully.
The only thing that’s still wrong is that the shading produces random artifacts in the scenes (the black lines you see in the scenes below). I don’t know why, and at this point I don’t care enough to go in, figure out why, and fix my code. I suspect it has to do with my reflection ray calculations and shading equation, but meh.
Behold, my ray tracer…
This demonstrates the sphere and triangle rendering, reflections, sphere texture mapping, triangle color interpolating, triangle texture mapping, triangle texture interpolation, and shadows.

This demonstrates colored light sources, object rendering, object texture mapping, soft shadows, and reflections.

More of the same.

I used an image of Cornell just because I wanted to try texture mapping, and it happened to be the first one I clicked on when looking through my photos page for a random image.
So yeah, I’m feeling quite a bit less stressed now. All I have left for this week is numerical methods homework (relatively easy) and studying for my analysis exam on Friday.
*breathes a huge sigh of relief*
…
Analysis exam this Friday, algo quiz next Tuesday, graphics homework looming over my head, analysis homework due tomorrow (which I’m stuck on), photo projects due soon…
And now waitlisted for web apps (the one CS course I really wanted), and unable to get into the proper section for networks… (schedule as registered)
This week just keeps getting better and better, and by “better and better,” I mean I want to die.