Thursday, November 8, 2007

Novembruary the Arth, 20X7

It's been much too long since I've written, and therefore I write. This semester has been a ton of hard work, but also very rewarding. I've been doing school work from the time I get home until the time I go to bed every day of the week including Saturdays for the whole semester. That's what I get for taking 4 computer science classes. It is, however, paying off. As it stands I have A's in all of my classes, so this could be the first time in my life I've had a 4.0. The closest I've ever come was in high school when I had a semester with one A-.

It's also paying off in other ways. This semester I've written a fully functional web server from the ground up, a 3D renderer that does lighting and shading, and a ray tracer (that's what Pixar uses to render 3D scenes) that does lighting, shadows, and reflections. By the end of the semester I will have also finished two computer games as group projects. One of them is an RC Racing game (which is starting to look really awesome), and the other is a 3D version of Tower Defense. I will also have written a database query language and a website similar to IMDB for video games. At work I just finished a tool for searching e-mail gateway log files, and I wrote a website for one of Tara's co-workers.

So no, I'm not exaggerating when I say I've been working non-stop, but it really has paid off.

This week I had an interview for an internship with Pixar that Dr. Egbert arranged for me. I think it went really well, but I won't hear back for a few weeks. It would be really awesome to get the internship, but at the same time I don't have my heart set on it because video games are what I really intend to do. Don't get me wrong, if Pixar takes me for the internship, I would love to stay and work there as long as they'll keep me, but video games are what really interest me, so I wouldn't be heartbroken. Anyway, I think they were somewhat impressed by all of the graphics experience I've been getting this semester, so hopefully I'll make it to the next round.

Time for another round of awesome things!:

Ray tracing
Pixar
Mario Galaxy
TES4:Oblivion
TES4 mods
Supreme Commander
Spiderman 3
Dashboard Confessional
Sufjan Stevens
Ratatouille
Smash Bros. Melee
Gray Fox
Quad core
In Rainbows (Radiohead's new album)
In Rainbows' distribution method
Live
Airwalk
Slashdot
Harry Potter 7 (again)
Signal Fire video
Ubuntu 7.10
Compiz Fusion
Amarok
C++
OpenGL
Amazon MP3 downloads
Cycling
1062 TMCB