The Krishna Transform

Now that I have finished all those midterms it is time to get back to regular assignments. Currently I am just working on a ray tracer for graphics.

For those that are curious, a ray tracer is basically a method of drawing images. With a ray tracer all a user needs to do is describe a photo. So by describe a photo I mean just say where simple objects are placed in a photo.

Ray tracing is a pretty big area of research right now. The pixar movie cars was the first movie to rely heavily on ray tracing.

Currently my ray tracer can draw cubes, spheres and polygonal meshes. Next step is getting it to draw rectangular prisms and ellipsoids. After that I will need to make a scene using all those primitives. Anyone have any ideas on some basic scene I could try to draw?

Besides ray tracing nothing else of interest has been happening here. I recently bought Avatar Volume 3 from Amazon. I can’t wait to rewatch parts of it. I have also been watching Darkwing duck again. The show is awesome. I was only just informed though that the episode order on the DVDs aren’t the same order the episodes were created. This is good to know because a lot of the villains and characters in the show are just dropped in and it really makes no sense.

Yesterday after working on some Calculus I met up with Marc and a few of his friends and went bowling. I safely secured last place overall. For a good chunk of time I would only hit the left corner pin. Towards the end I was doing a little better but not by enough.

After bowling we drove by Roxxanne’s. Since my license was expired I couldn’t go in so Marc and I just wandered about outside for a bit. It was freakishly cold. I really need to get some sort of valid photo ID.

Now today will be another long day of lectures then more ray tracing. I have been operating on very little sleep these last few days. This ray tracer will be the end of me. After that I will have to start working on my final project. My current idea is to make a PaRappa the Rapper model and animate him doing actions like Kick, punch, block. I am very excited but not sure how complicated this will all be.

So I am currently on reading week however this will be the most intense reading week ever. Before getting into what I have to do next week I will give a brief recap of Friday – Today.

So on Friday I woke up at 8:30 since I was expecting a bell technician to come by between 9-11. I think I had about 4 or 5 hours of sleep, but anyways I am up just checking stuff on the internet and relaxing until the bell technician comes. He never makes an appearance. At 12:00 I leave for class. On my way there I pick up a donut from timmy’s. After class I had an hour to kill before my greyhound bus arrived so I went to the local convenient store and bought a bag of chips. I thought to myself, “I might as well get some nice food when I get back to Toronto”. Oh how wrong I was.

I line up for my 4:30 bus at 4:00. I am basically at the front of the line (probably 6 or 7 people ahead of me). By the time 4:30 rolls around there is a pretty long line. So 4:30 rolls by and no bus. 5:00 comes and still no bus. 5:30 and still no bus. At this point I am freezing, so I ask the person behind me to save my spot in line and I speed walk back into the library. I find a vent and just sit and warm myself up. For a period of time I was truly scared I was going to get frost bite on my toes. It was freakishly cold. After I see a bit of rustling in the line I head back outside but still see no bus. At around 6:20 I run back inside to warm up again and roughly at 6:30 a bus finally shows up.

It turns out there was some crazy accident on the 401 holding up all their busses. Also greyhound decided to start picking up students from the greyhound terminal first instead of the university. Usually greyhound will make the university its first time. So after 2.5 hours of waiting in the cold I finally boarded a bus.

I got into Toronto at around 9:00. The first thing I did was walk to the apple store to confirm the address of the Karaoke bar I was going to. Next I went and got some mcnuggets since I was starving. It was very cool to learn about the new sauces. I tried the spicy szechuan sauce, it wasn’t that crazy.

When I got to christie station I eventually met up with Moiya, Michelle, Sam and a few of their friends for some karaoke. Karaoke is so fun. Michelle suggested that everyone dress up as a popstar. You can see the set here. Can you guess who is who?

After karaoke justin came by and we talked about randomness for a few hours.

Saturday was a pretty laid back. I played some white knight during the day. Eventually Adrian came by my house and we went to Woodside square. I had to pick up some valentines day chocolate, a photo album, and trade in a few games for Star Ocean. We ended up having to go to Scarborough Town Centre to get Star ocean though. Even though everyone I know has told me the game sucked I still am excited to play it. The one on PS2 had a crap story towards the end but I still enjoyed it for the most part.

After picking up Star ocean we headed back to my place to get ready to watch the dunk contest. This year’s dunk contest sucked. Once we finished watching the dunk contest it was just a lot of talking and a lot of laughing. Redford seemed to have some sort of violent reaction to the wings we were eating and ended up falling quite ill.

Sunday I met up with Justin and Cheryl and the three of us celebrated valentines day by going to see Avatar. After watching Avatar we went to a crepe place on queen street west. As we ate our crepe’s moiya joined us. Once we finished eating the four of us went down king west towards Craft burger since Cheryl wanted to eat a fancy burger. After finding parking and reaching the restaurant it turns out we were like 5 minutes late and the restaurant had closed. So instead of craft burger we went to this bar nearby and got dinner there. Once we finished dinner Justin dropped moiya and cheryl off at home and we went back to my place to watch some tv and talk for a few more hours.

Monday I went to Ram and Shima’s place to play board games. We ended up playing a lot of bananagrams and a bit of battlestar galactica the board game. We did however order a pizza hut pizza which was very pleasant.

At around 8:30 I left their place and made my way back to loo. Now I am about to get a bit of sleep and start doing crazy amounts of work tomorrow. I have 2 assignments, 2 midterms, and an essay all due between monday and wednesday of next week. I can’t wait to finish next week.

Last Thursday/Friday was a busy day.

The day started off with a children’s lit lecture. I still don’t like the course that much but it is getting a little better now. The highlight of the class though is the hot chocolate I buy on my way to class.

After children’s lit I went to the library and did some math. I had an advanced calc assignment due the next day so I was pretty busy. Jo and I worked away at DC till around 5:45, at which point Amy and Ian picked us up to go to their place to eat dinner.

We got takeout from China Garden and had a pleasant meal. Joanna seems to love Amy’s dog. As soon as we got in she went straight to it and started playing with him.

When we finished dinner Amy and Jo went to the guest room to talk about who knows what. Ian challenged me to a foosball game. He totally demolished me. It wasn’t a sweep though but still something like 10-2. Eventually Amy and Joanna come back from the guest room and I think Amy was holding something behind her back. It was the complete battlestar galactica series in blu-ray. I was actually about to buy the series but Joanna told Adrian to talk me out of it. It worked quite well. Adrian is deal central. If he tells me something is a bad deal I steer clear of it.

After I received my gift we made our way out to check out Final Fasscity. Final Fasscity is a performance put on by FASS, the amateur waterloo theatre group. The play was about the land of video games where all video game characters live. So basically what happens is “continues” are running out so video game characters can actually die now. So the entire play is about the good guys trying to restore continues and the bad guys are trying to kill all the good guys. The play as a whole was okay. I feel you need to be a hard core gamer though to catch a lot of the subtle references though. One reference which I thought was REALLY obscure was one of the characters says “You spoony bard.” That line is taken from this fight in FF IV. It was a poor translation that they never fixed in reincarnations of the game (I think).

When I got back from the show Chris was getting ready to head out to K-Zone. Seeing as how it was one of the things on my to-do list I joined him. When we got to K-Zone we met up with Athena, Ben, Carson, Jenn, Julie, Sean, Wayne, and Wendy. We all sat in the lounge and played random drinking games. Chris was stuck taking all my shots.

Since we were in the lounge we didn’t get to sing too many songs but I did manage to do a duet with Sean singing “As long as you love me”, and then another duet with carson singing Tornado.

We headed to Mel’s after karaoke. By the time I got home it was like 3ish. I talked to Nelson for a while before heading to bed at 4:30. I woke up at 8:30 the next day so that I could get some photos of Simon dressed up as a sailor scout. I will explain this in another blog post.

Joanna was making a list of things she wanted to do before she graduated, I thought I would do the same. As of right now though the list is quite small.

Things I want to do:
Go to K-zone, the local karaoke bar
Sleep in The Comfy – the student lounge inside the math building
Go to the observatory – the campus has an observatory where you can look at stars
Go to waterloo park
Walk around uptown waterloo

Things I should do but probably won’t do before graduating:
Go to Caesars – a small lounge/bar/club. I am not sure what it qualifies as
Go to Revolution – a giant club
Go to Fed hall – a club on campus (assuming it is still open).
Join and become an active member of a club
Go to a warrior weekend event – I am not even exactly sure what happens at these events

I will probably add to this list periodically.

In September our neighbours were holding a small party which I happened to attend. While there one of the guys had this thing called an orgasmatron. It was actually just a crazy name for a head massager. This thing was totally crazy.

Anyways last friday while going grocery shopping with Jo we decided to swing by this small store and inside I happened to find another orgasmatron. I instantly bought one. This thing is totally awesome.

Today I put up a small sign saying “Anyone want to be orgasmatronned?” while in the library. Sadly there were no takers. Tomorrow I think I will just try “Does anyone want a head massage?”. If that gathers a few people I will switch it up to, “Does anyone want to be orgasmatronned for free chocolate?”. I am curious to see if I can offer anything reasonable to get someone to say “Sure I don’t mind being orgasmatronned.”

Apologies for this very broken post. I am quite tired. I have spent a bulk of the day working on algebraic number theory and it has crippled my spirit. After about 10 hours working on the assignment I still need to finish up 2 out of 6 questions.

After talking to shawn I thought I would try and revive my old blog. You can check it out here

The difference with this attempt was a lot of the old photos on the blog are actually alive again. It took a fair bit of work but I am slowly getting them all back online. I am still angry that the blogger export didn’t keep a hold of all the comments. I have no idea why I bothered to delete the blog.

One problem with wordpress though is it failed to import all the posts. I am missing maybe 20 or so from when I started blogging.

Anyways if you want to skim through old posts go right ahead. I won’t be updating it so comments will be off. Posts after like 2006 or 2007 have broken photo links. I still need to fix those.

God I am starving. Time to go to sleep.

In an effort to raise a bit of money for Haiti I am going to take the same approach I did for raising money for Breast Cancer research.

If anyone donates money to Haiti I will match their donation up to $100. According to Joanna the canadian government will also match donations up to some amount of money, so basically every dollar you donate is like giving $4!

You can make your donations by going here

Also there are new photos on my flickr account. It is so nice taking photos again. Its hard to find the time to sit down and process photos though. I think I may stop taking photos in raw for a while. I will make a post about the small party tomorrow maybe.

While walking home after class one day I was stopped by two random christian missionaries. I was very hungry this particular day and was going to keep walking when I noticed one of the missionaries was this very pretty student. I decided I could spare a few minutes of my time.

The other, middle aged women was telling me who they were and asked me if I believed in god. At this point I realized that the super pretty girl probably wasn’t going to be talking and I was very hungry so I said I don’t believe in god and walked away.

Man that girl was pretty.

Last term while in a galois theory lecture my professor mentioned she was looking for undergraduate students to do some research. At the time I was very interested but it was still early in the term so I didn’t want to ask to sign up, bomb galois theory and then have to face my prof. So instead I waited until I got my mark in Galois theory before asking her about it.

So after getting my galois theory mark and seeing how poorly I did compared to the rest of the class I decided not to bug my professor about this. However a few days ago I thought to myself, “I really need something in my graduate studies application to distract people from my less than impressive marks”, so with that thought in mind I begged asked my professor to consider me for her research project. She replied and asked me to come in today.

So after my lectures I went in and spoke with her. She said since I asked too late I wouldn’t be able to apply for an NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council) undergraduate research study awards program. The NSERC URSA is basically a way for me to do research and get paid for it.

Getting paid would have been nice but I was more interested in just being able to say I have done some actual research. So my professor said it should be fine as long as I don’t mind working for free. So starting next term I will be doing some research. No idea what kind of research yet but I am still very excited.

The way the research will work is students will individually (or maybe in groups?) will do research on their topic and every few weeks present what they have found to the coordinators and other students involved. My professor said it has been a pretty successful program so far. Students have gone to M.I.T and Stanford.

I am so excited, hopefully I will be able to juggle this in with normal school work.

Well enough about spring term, today I need to do some calc, watch pinocchio, read pinocchio, then talk about it. I also need to start my next graphics assignment. Graphics is too intense.

Everyone I know seem to be leaving the country and travelling the world. Simon went on his eurotrip not too long ago, Jess and Louise are in HK, Redford is going to HK AND Korea, Jo is going to HK and China, and Cheryl is going to Japan!!! So as it currently stands I plan to go to Sydney sometime during Fall.

Almost all of my mom’s brothers and sisters live in Sydney so I have a fair amount of family there. One of my cousins is getting married so I thought it would be a good reason to go. Right now I won’t have school between September to December so my idea is to go in September and try and find a job in Sydney.

There are currently two problems with this plan.
1. I have no money to pay for a ticket
2. I have no job prospects in Sydney

#1 is a bigger hurdle to get over than #2. I really enjoyed Sydney the last time I went. Mind you I didn’t really do that much except just wander aimlessly around the city and relax with family, but it was still fun. A lot of my cousins now own their own places so it will also be nice to be able to go out and come back home after the sun has set.

To help fun this trip I am going to be creating a, “Help send Krishna to Sydney” fund. I think the ticket costs like $1800 when I checked a few days ago. This promo offered by an australian airline looks promising but I have to do a bit more research into it.

Also my tetris program looks to be coming along quite well.