Ravings of an Undead Cheese Minion

Beautiful land of dreams... Above the horizon, in the early morning, when everything is still.  I grab you but you're gone The ending of a dream Back to reality... It's not true, I see it, but it's not there. It's not there, I see it! But it's not there... I call you. I want you. Are you there?  Can you hear me? ~ Theatres des Vampires full lyrics

Well, not quite. There are a lot of things I need to improve with it, and lots of features to add, because I'd love for it to be close to a full-blown renderer at some point. But, for the requirements of CS 655, it is finally completed.  This one is decent, you know?  Wasn't as big of a fan of this one, but I'm kinda out of time -- got to get to the final project...

There are a few aspects of this that do not  apply to me.  I am not a quitter, unless I had no passion for something to begin with (i.e. Boy Scouts) in which case I am absolutely going to quit.  hate drugs, not necessarily opposed to legalization, but I just really don't like them hate the rain wouldn't describe myself as irresponsible, though I have my moments Otherwise, it's super accurate for me.  link  

Clarinet TBA, I can't play right now anyway because I'm congested and coughing up a storm lmao and also I have way too much homework  Owl City: The Real World Owl City: On the Wing Owl City: Vanilla Twilight Evanescence: Give Unto Me Adastra theme  Lucky by Jason Mraz / Colbie Callait A Whole New World from Aladdin  a few church/primary hymns, why not I feel like I should do some classical stuff too, like where I left off on actual formal piano lessons, but...I'll have to look more into that later. 

While I found the guide on  1000 Forms of Bunnies  to be pretty helpful, I actually found that the UV computations Victor used simply didn't work for me. I had to mess around with the math myself, and ended up using the Wikipedia formulas .  However, there is an important caveat with those formulas. Specifically, you can't just use your hit point as your vector d. You have to do || sphere.center - hitPoint || -- yes, that's a norm . If you don't, everything will be all screwed up. I also found that for the particular way in which my coordinate system is oriented, I had to manually add 0.5 to my U coordinates, because it was rendering the globe backwards. It's possible that I should've done || hitPoint - sphere.center || instead; I'll have to look into that later.  It's all very weird but you can get it working if you keep drilling deeper into the fundamental aspects of what's going on.  This is how I used STBImage.  I had to do a deep copy of the buf

Gosh, I forgot about this YouTube channel. I remember watching her differential equations videos and busting up laughing in the middle of the HBLL. "And why do we do it this way? Because we are sad and lonely mathematicians!" :D  I really need to get back into this stuff. And I will, once I get a handle on everything.  link

You just select the entry and then click "Text". Then, expand the window as you see fit. I'm not sure why I always forget how to do this, so I'm just putting it here. 

I love their art. These pieces are definitely not mine; I just love them. So, I decided to put them here. ( fb ) You deserve the world. But the world is cruel, so I brought you the moon. 

I will meet her in her shadowland Embrace her pain and make it mine Maybe...I can save her...from the darkness within... And she can walk away from here. ~ When Nothing Remains 

This evening I was driving on the I-15 on a Sunday afternoon after a peaceful walk in the park. The radio was blasting X96 and the autumn sun bathed the world in a soft golden light. There wasn’t much traffic and as I drove it felt like I was flying. My mind flew between imagination and reality, lost in a thousand adventures all at once. For once, peace. For once, bliss. 

Still working through Big O.  This one is super simple.  If you notice, there are no loops, no recursion, etc. Just a conditional. Regardless of what the values for a and b are, the function is going to take what is  mathematically  the same amount of time. Thus, this function is doing a constant amount of work, so the runtime is simply O(1) . 

It was an okay week, not great, but not terrible either.  CS 655: I'm still catching up, urgh. I finally got the entire median split lab working. I thought I had textures working on Friday but it looks like there's something wrong with my math. I've got to push to finish that by today, or I guess tomorrow, and then REALLY push to finish the path tracer. Because I NEED to start on that final project.  CS 601: It's going well, though things in that class always take me longer than they probably should (i.e. I overengineer things). But hey, the A doesn't lie.  CS 650: I am extremely grateful for the group that I have for my project. I'm trying to contribute as much as I can, but I hope to do even better next week. Still trying to master deep learning and make sure I understand as much as possible about the paper we're basing things on.  Senior Film: This fell by the wayside...Again, due to CS 655 mostly. However, the more I work with fluids now, the easier

I'll believe  All your lies Just pretend you love me.  Make believe  Close your eyes I'll be anything for you.  ~ Evanescence, "Anything for You" 

Phase 1: Just a few weeks Monday - Friday: 3-4 miles per day.  Saturday: 10-12 miles.  Lift weights for 30 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Do an ab workout on Tuesday and Thursday.  Phase 2: Once I'm consistent with the above.  Monday-Friday: 5-6 miles per day.  Saturday: 10-12 miles until the spring (then ramp up).  Continue previous lifting schedule, but go up to 45 minutes per day.  Time trials in early or mid spring (April?) Mile 2-Mile 5K Potential running workouts: tempo, recovery, hill training, fartlek, negative split, normal run, long run, strides, hard run, time trials, races. 

What I really need -- -- a few free years. No work, no school, or anything like that. Just money flowing in somehow (this is a hypothetical, obviously).  I'm not going to get that though, not unless one of my creative projects takes off like crazy (hence my First Day of June core competency project).  I would spend my mornings exercising, lifting weights and then driving to a park or bike path to run. I would do speed work, recovery runs, hill training, tempo...pretty much anything to push my fitness and speed to the next level. I'm tired of being slow.  Then, I would transition into art. I would draw, do digital painting, animate, and do 3D art. I would have art projects, commissions, maybe some webcomics/visual novels/video games in progress.  After spending a few hours on art, I would do coding, maybe some app development, or websites for people who would pay me. I would also self-study physics, mathematics, engineering, and astronomy. Of course, a few walks in some beautifu

I'm trying to get a LOT better at weight lifting this fall and winter, in addition to running. I've let fitness slip a little bit while trying to succeed at coding, art, and writing, and unfortunately the consequences of such are highly visible. So, no more. I lifted for 30 minutes today which is a pretty good start I suppose, upper body, plus a 4-mile run. I will up both of these, but not until I've been consistent for a few weeks first.  Here were the songs I listened to (at least the ones that I can remember). It was a pretty good workout even despite the elders and half their district showing up at 7 AM again (so annoying because of how small the gym is). I kept the songs fairly intense, and occasionally repeated them.  Insane Clown Posse: Mr. Happy Moonspell: Lustmord Motionless in White: Abigail  Chelsea Grin: Crewcabanger  Children of Bodom: Kissing the Shadows  Cradle of Filth: Forgive Me, Father  Lifting is one of those things that I've remained pretty stagnant

Cracking the Coding Interview: VI.2 Oh look, recursion, lmao.  One mistake I used to make was assuming that recursion automatically means a super complicated runtime. That's just not always going to be the case, and I understand this much better now.  If I pick a few arbitrary values of b and trace through the execution... ...we see that the value of b decreases each time. If b is 5, the recursion will iterate with 4, 3, 2, and 1 before unwinding. So it just iterates b times. Thus, the Big O runtime of this power function is O(b) . Not bad, eh? Not bad at all. 

The 3 most important pursuits to me right now are my writing, art, and code. All of these are multifaceted and complex, with many different pieces and moving parts, but those are my three main focuses. Fitness is important but it’s a given — it has to be done, like sleeping or eating. Music is the final priority on the list. In addition, I am trying to imagine a lot, and consume various media forms that I like so that way I can get more ideas, but that’s a subset of art and writing. Stuff like math/physics is included as part of code. Theme park design is part of art.  So, 3 primary areas of focus (writing, art, code), with 2 secondaries (fitness, music).  I’m glad I found this a while back (not my artwork). It can be done. 

This is how I run jupyter notebooks from my D drive, which the anaconda prompt doesn't like me navigating to for some reason.  source "C:\Users\alexc\Anaconda3\Scripts\activate" Just replace alexc with your username. Unfortunately, this only lasts for the duration of the terminal session. I'd probably have to edit the bashrc or something in order to make it permanent -- will look into that later.