Three weeks of blah

So, I just realized that it has been a very long time since I've posted. It feels like the last three weeks have been days and days of the same stuff. At least in the school department. My wife's been wearing a foot brace for a week now, and so that involved setting up a doctors appointment and some other out of the ordinary events.

But, school has been time consuming and not very exciting. I have a final demo day for a group project in my graphics class. It's been very time consuming and pretty frustrating, but it is looking kind of cool. It's a program that loads 3D models and renders them like they were drawn with different styles of artistic strokes. I'll try to post the program itself or at least some screen shots at some point... maybe I'll do that now. Ok, I just made a couple screen shots. These just demonstrate a couple of the possibilities with our program. I moved the camera to show that these are real 3D models. The other cool thing is it does this all in real time, so you can move around the 3D world and have everything rendered like pencil art, or whatever. Once we have this presentation on Thursday, all I have left is to finish my other final project which is way too complicated to try and describe here. Have a great week.

Publish via e-mail, Pixar, Links

This is the first time I've tried publishing a blog post via e-mail. Hopefully it will work just fine.

A few things today. First, my wonderful wife has finally started a blog. It is located here if you are interested. Also, to go along with that, I've added a post to it in the sidebar section entitled "Friends". Which brings me to my next point which is to let you know that I also added a feed reader that is being populated by my shared items in Google Reader. So, this will contain the last 5 things I've shared. Which will hopefully remain a selective list and won't change too often. But, today I wanted to point out the link to the story about Pixar. My dad e-mailed me the story this morning and I was very pleased at the detail CNN gave about the future releases of Disney and Pixar. Here is a full list of the upcoming Pixar releases and there respective release dates:

Wall-E
(the following are being released in 3D)
Up
Toy Story 1
Toy Story 2
Toy Story 3
Newt
The Bear and the Bow
Cars 2May 2008

May 2009
October 2009
February 2010
June 2010
Summer 2011
Christmas 2011
Summer 2012

So, this summer I will be working on one of these movies (or possibly one of the shorts that will go with one of these movies). Which still makes me VERY excited.

Also, I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, but I have a list of interesting/fun links on the side bar as well in the section titled "Cool Sites" Feel free to check them out.

Mom, california, and school

Another quick update. First, I picked up my mom from the airport (Providence airport) last night and she will be staying with us until Monday which is fun and exciting since we hadn't seen either of my parents since graduation last May. It's hard though because I have school all week still which I will discuss in more detail in just a minute. My mom went to work with Jess today which should make the day more enjoyable for both of them.

To answer a question...the Pixar internship is paid, and it in itself is a huge answer to prayer. Before I was offered the position I knew it was paid, but I had no idea how much or any of the other details. Well, it turns out it pays better than any other internship that I know of! And since Jessica's 36 hour a week nanny job has been supporting us all year, it will be very good to have some more income that will help us survive the next year until graduation next May. So, that's a huge praise...oh and the position has a "standard" work week of 50 hours. Which could be interesting if I get a job there after school (they expect at least 50 hours from their employees). But, for now it is a blessing as well since anytime over 40 hours is time and a half. Also, since 50 is standard for them, you get paid for 50 even if you don't put in quite 50. So, that is good for me too. And, housing for interns is provided by Pixar in furnished intern apartments. So, I will have a roommate or two, but I don't have to worry about the cost.

Also of note. My school year ends the second week of May. Between then and when I leave for Pixar, Jessica and I will be moving into a new apartment. It is just about .5 a mile from where we currently live, but I think it fits us better than our current one. Mainly, I think the cost of utilities will be a lot more manageable. And there is A/C for the hot/muggy parts of summer. I'll try to remember to post pictures once we move.

Finally, I wanted to update a little about the current status of school. I've had a lot of programming projects this semester and that won't change until the semester is finished. I'm trying to finish the last regular assignment that I have. And then I will be working very hard on two final group projects. One for each of my classes. If you are at all interested in the work that I've done in my graphics class this semester, they are listed on the assignments page for the course. It can be found here. Also, since each of these assignments were based on one or more research papers form the last few year, the papers themselves can be found here. Image Analogies was the hardest, followed closely by Photon Mapping (my output at right). I won't go into details about these unless one of you want to know. But, they make some cool pictures. Both of my final projects are going to be a TON of work, but hopefully I will do the best I can and get it all done in the month that is left of school.