Taniith’s Relto

Yay blatant rip-off ;D.

So first off, since I haven’t heard anything else from my service provider about the hacked/spam thing, I have temporarilly (hopefully) moved all emails from the blog over to my buisness domain. Its a pain, but oh well.

Next, so I found out something that kinda annoys me. Now, don’t take this to mean that I regret defering because I still think it was the best plan, but still: Last year (at the end of the year), not only did OkGo play at WPI, but they also got the Mythbusters to come here! I mean, WTH?! How could I miss BOTH of those awesome things?! The only thing that could fix this situation would be…. uhhh…. IDK, maybe if Stargate shot on-site here or something. Or of Jonathan Coulton and John Hodgeman did a sing-off with Weird Al or something. Anyway, you get the picture… I’m annoyed that I missed it.

And to make matters worse, people in LnL (Lens and Lights… thats the last time I spell it out) got t-shirts that said “OkGo Security”.

Gah!
-K

So, I have a Calc 3 class from 4-4:50 today (don’t even get me started about just that statement). So fittingly, lets do some math. The class ends at 4:50 (suppossedly). The bus I want to take picks up just outside the same building as the class. The bus is supposed to pick up at 4:55. The Bus is supposed to get to City Hall around 5:10. My train is at Union Station 9 (a few blocks away) at 5:38. The next train doesn’t even go anywhere usefull, and is at 7:30.

Who thinks I can make it?

*damnit… stupid bus system… and crappy commuter rail system!*
-K

Well, if working on getting the damned truss down for 3 hours and getting locked out of my dorm doesn’t get me brownie points in the LnL (Lenses and Lighting), I don’t know what will. The RAs said, when we early arrivers met as a group on Saturday, that as of this year they were going to be locking the dorms at night, but that our keys would get us in (”and we’ll be installing key-swipes soon, but we wanted to start”). Yeah, so my key fit one door, but didn’t so much turn. Thankfully, two of us found a side door that was open onto his dorm (same building, two names… go figure). So he was able to swipe in to a basement door, and I eventually made it back to my room.

*sigh* its been a long night. At least there aren’t any important sessions tomorrow morning, so I can get some sleep.

Speaking of sleep,
-K

It official, my web-server account got hacked. I just got an email from my hosting provider saying something along the lines of: “Hello, we have been getting a large number of spam reports on you account. Please reply with an explaination within 24 hours or we will suspend your account.” They also sent me a sample spam letter about some UK lottery. Fun. I hope this all gets straightend out (and I hope my new password is stronger than my old one).

Oh, and I have now learned, the hard way, that steel toed shoes are not right for *everything*. I was on the quad for a party hosted by the greek life people (read, watching people riding a mechanical bull… not so much with the partying of course ;p), and of course this was after shoving myself in the midst of the Lights and Lenses club and doing some grunt work to get on their good sides before signing up Wednesday, and I saw these people off in another part of grass next to the quad that were fighting semi-fencing style with foam swords. So of course I went on over there and ended up getting a nice lengthy explaination of the club (some sort of medieval reenactment club). Well needless to say, I ended up “fighting” with someone (very fun to be able to move around unlike fencing, BTW), and I flunged (run, jump, lunge and hit the guys head), and when I landed my toe got slammed into the sleel of my shoe. Nice big bruise there under the nail now (and I just realized that I did not bring a toe-nail clipper), so I think I am going to have to get a second pair of shoes that are soft toed.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I see out my window that Lights and Lenses are striking, so I think I am gonna go carry more stuff ;p

-K

Not to be confused with day zero, which was when I moved in early yesterday (but didn’t stay the night). Just wanted to write a quick something, because they are only letting us eat early tomorrow so I have to get some sleep. Of course, that endevor will be dificult since my room has a window on the quad, and the party that should have ended 20 minutes ago is still going… and I’m findign that OkGo and Pacabel’s Cannon don’t so much mix ;p

Oh yeah, and apparently my web server got hacked… I have a backup of the blog database sent to my gmail acount nightly, and the past week it has ended up in the spam folder (no matter what I do). So I finally decided to try forwarding from a diferent address, and when I logged in I saw that there were suddenly 10-15 new email addresses that had been added. So obviously someone got in and was sending spam from Taniith.com…. so now my domain is blacklisted! *sigh* I guess I will have to take care of it later.

good night
-K

Well that was a new experience. Come to think of it, it was also the first time I got carded… and I didn’t even try to order alcohol! I decided to go for a walk and find a nice restaurant for diner; the restaurant at the hotel is a tad (cough) expensive, and I didn’t want to go back to the “Kentucky BBQ” place again (though I would like another slice off that “walnut pie”… like pecan but walnut-ified). 
 

Anyway, where was I? Oh right, getting carded. So I was walking along and I found this Irish pub type place. So I attempt to walk in, and this guy just puts out his arm and stops me, though he didn’t look at me till he finished his conversation with some other guy. Eventually he managed to convey the fact that he wanted to see ID… just to go into the place and order fracking food! In the end, he shoved (literally) me into the place and told one of the waitresses, “take care of him, he’s under 21.” I really wanted to slap the guy and say “look, all I want is some food! Is that such a big deal that we needed to go through this?!” Sufficed to say, I’ve never had that happen back home… and the food kinda sucked. 
 

As a side note, there’s music being played outside my window by the pool (29 stories down…) the guy’s in the middle of that song about things being “unpredictable, but in the end that’s right”…. that one always reminds me of a certain person’s dance performance from senior year. I should watch that again soon… awe, the song’s done!
 

So, on to today at the Conference. In the morning, (after a very nice cinnamon bun french toast breakfast!), I saw the second half (a few hours) of a lecture dealing with “Augmented reality.” That’s basically the next step in virtual reality, dealing with everything from the traditional idea of wearing a headset, to working with all 5 (or 6) senses and adding fake things over the real world while you are walking around. I was particularly interested in a segment about projecting onto non-projector friendly surfaces (Aka, any surface). The presenter spoke about how the projector could be calibrated, even on the fly, to automatically adjust the images being projected in real time so as to make the surface essentially become invisible. He showed examples he has worked on in theatre where the set becomes invisible, and all you see is the projection! That’s the sort of thing I would love to do (remember when I had planned to use 3D projected backgrounds in Holes? ;P).
 

Then in the afternoon, after my second pretzel-dog of the week (what a great idea… hot dog wrapped in a pretzel), I went to see a lecture on quaternions. Now, I have heard of this sort of thing before and it said it wasn’t too mathematically advanced. But it lied. The basic idea is that it is another way of doing rotational mathematics, instead of using Euclidian (xyz), it uses XYZ and another variable that helps with something called “gimbal lock” (and I did learn today that gimbal lock is not just a 3D thing… it was an issue with the gyroscopes on the Apollo missions). Sufficed to say, I got a tiny bit more understanding on that variable, but I was so lost in the crazy math (imaginary’ numbers and matrices flying to and fro) that I walked out after an hour fifteen or so. I really need to start going to things that aren’t so over my head… or at least things that may be over my head, but that are close enough to at least see when I look up!
 

Well, I would talk about “FJORG!” (pronounced “forge”) but this is getting to be way too long. So I think it’s about time to end it and try calling my dad again (stupid 10 hour time difference from the west coast to Israel!).
 

TTFN!
 

-K

So I finally got the wifi inside the convention center to work. It’s not the fastest in the world, but then it beats paying $10 a day at the hotel (for either wired or wireless). So you know what? I’ll take it :P.

I’m not sure when this will actually get pasted to the blog (though since you are reading it, I assume it got poasted at some point). I’m using Window’s Journal to write this, and I have to wait for a suitable opportunity to convert my handwriting to text. So you may notice that several poasts are put up at once.

I saw part of an interesting, though way over my head, presentation about bottlenecks relating to rendering speed. I learned a little bit about the usual rendering engines, but I think I missed most of what they said.

Right now I am just trying to kill time until 1:45 when there’s an interesting sounding course on Shrek 3. I have to say though… I kinda wish I had watched it on the plane yesterday. I did watch the last half or third or so, but still….

Oh, and have I mentioned how sweet this tablet is? It is much nicer to be able to pull out a tiny laptop and jusr write what I want to say, than to deal with the normal method. Maybe this will ring in another golden age of my blog, like the old days when I updated once or twice a day. Or at least maybe it will until The novelty wears off :).

That’s all for now!
-K