Funny The Way It Is

Oh, how time seems to pass me by. I'm already halfway done with my junior year and I have no idea where it went. Or rather, I do, but it all is already a blur. My last post was, what, three months ago? What an adventure those three months were. But, oh, where to start...

I have no idea how many people follow my blog anymore, seeing as I haven't really been publicly productive (with machinima, AMVs, code, etc.). In reality, yes, there was a lot of downtime during the past few months in which I could have produced something, but for the most part the drive wasn't there. I had other obligations. I bonded with a lot of friends that I had only just barely known at the beginning of the semester, I wasted time on women, I caught up on many games that I had been wanting to play, and I re-read my favorite book series. After all the work I did over the summer I wanted to reward myself with some downtime. So first, let's break up the downtime activities.

On the video games front. After playing the first Deus Ex and being massively disappointed in Invisible War, I was quite hesitant about Human Revolution. However, the live-action trailer changed my mind entirely. I knew that if a company spent that much time and energy just on an advertisement for a game I could not imagine how much effort they put into the product itself. That trailer still gives me goosebumps. When the game finally came out, I was not disappointed. Back was the old feeling of the original game: the amount of choice given to the player, the impressive amount of backstory and extra content not even associated with the main storyline, amazing music, great weapons, items, and balance. Eidos and Square had pulled it off: a prequel/sequel worthy of the original. I played through as fast as I could and loved every second of it. The only thing that I have to complain about is the length of the game. It seemed so much shorter compared to the original. Oh, and some of the boss fights were ridiculously hard. But whatever, I still kicked their asses.

After Human Revolution I believe it was Dead Island. I have become increasingly irritated by the Left 4 Dead franchise. I played the first one for maybe a week before it utterly bored me and I was really excited for Dead Island. Non-linear gameplay, an RPG-style leveling system, unique items, sidequests... AND zombies? Sounded like a recipe for success! It was. I thoroughly enjoyed it and, although I only play occasionally now, it was definitely worth the money. I blazed through the game, completing all of the side quests, farming experience and spending as much time in the world as possible. It was definitely a great game!

I actually think Dead Island was the only other game worth noting until I played Need For Speed: The Run last month. I've always had a soft spot for Need For Speed games, although I've been disappointed in most since Underground 2. After seeing the trailer for The Run I had a feeling this one would finally not let me down. From the look if it, EA wanted to profit off of how damn awesome Split/Second was and took a leaf out of Disney's book. I must tell you, I was not disappointed. If a racing game can get my heart pumping, make me shout loud explitives at my screen and keep my face glued to it throughout the entire duration it's a good racing game. I really enjoyed the story (which was very contrastive from other Need For Speed games), even the quick-time event sequences were fun.

Then the next leisure activity that took place this semester was rereading the first three books in The Inheritance Cycle before the fourth, Inheritance, came out. I have been a fan of the series since 7th grade and was really pumped to finally read the conclusion. I remember reading Brisingr in my junior year of high school thinking "Wow, I'm going to be in college when the next book comes out.". And woah, I was in my junior year of college reading it. It was kind of surreal: the book series that I had loved for almost 8 years finally coming to an end. I wanted to re-read the first three so that the story could be fresh in my mind when the fourth one came out, and I was glad I did. I love being drawn into the world of Alagaesia and its wonderful characters and story. I don't even care about all of the Star Wars parallels that can be drawn from the series, it's just overall awesome. The final book didn't let me down. Okay, it let the hopeless romantic in me down a little bit, but not a huge deal. It was a worthy conclusion to the series and I was locked into the book the entire time. I got extremely emotionally involved in it. I probably looked like an idiot reading some of the scenes. I was cheering, voicing my internal theories about the story out loud, etc. I really hope Paolini picks up the story again eventually. I can't wait to hear what happens after!

Oh, and somewhere in there I accomplished to rewatch the first two seasons of Shakugan no Shana. The third and final season is airing now and I wanted to freshen up on the story before seeing the conclusion. So far the final series has been completely, mind-blowingly epic in all ways! Sadly, it's really the only anime that I've watched since going back to school. I have an ever-decreasing amount of free time that has forced anime to the back-burner, again.

Now, what absorbed most of my time after the first half of the semester was the project for my software engineering class. It was a daunting shadow hanging over most of the semester as the presentation for it slowly arrived (this was my final project, determining whether or not I graduate). It stressed me out to the max and I even gave up on it and one point (and exchanged some pretty harsh words with my professor, I will admit). It was definitely a humbling experience. But looking back at it I am really glad that I went through with it.

A short overview of the project: dubbed PastFinder, our software engineering project involved mapping a real-life cemetery in virtual space, complete with images of each grave (all perfectly geotagged), an updated reading of the cemetery, biographies on as many of the deceased as possible, geolinks to the places that they lived, audio clips that were managed to be recorded before they passed away, etc. All with a desktop and Android viewing application to browse these assets. Each student was given complete control over a section of the cemetery (mine was South of West: all the way at the southwest corner of the cemetery, obviously). Due to various reasons I had to take each picture about 3-4 times, which meant hours alone with dead people. We all collaborated on the PostGIS-enabled PostgreSQL database schema to hold all of the assets and then each person was given two projects: a personal project and one that directly related to the final product.

My personal project was to create a multi-platform EXIF/IPTC metadata editor for our images (each image is also tagged with its position in the graveyard [section/row/etc.] and the names of those buried there). I went all out on the application, utilizing wxWidgets and exiv2 to make the app as multiplatform as possible. I had a dynamic thumbnail view of all of the images, a quick, easily-editable, tabulated version of editing the tags, advanced search options, etc. Sadly many of these features are still crippled at the moment (I planned to do way more than time could allow), but the basic functionality is there in the application and it runs quite well. It was really a fun experience. I now also have an application to tag and search all of the 25,000 anime images I have (that's going to take a long while).

My contribution to the actual product was that of a virtual reality viewer of the graveyard. We were originally going to do it all in the Google Maps API but it was too restrictive for optimal use, so I was charged with writing a multiplatform (and Android) version of a quick-and-dirty top-down viewer of the graveyard. This was one of the most intense applications I had ever written. Utilizing the desktop/Android OpenGL wrapper I wrote for Spaulding over the summer, I had a basis for the program. It used PHP scripts to dynamically pull down all of the grave images from the database and then some complex math to map the geotags to screen coordinates. I also wrote a thumbnail loader that streamed the thumbnails from the Picasa pages where we uploaded the images and texture-mapped them to the graves as they were downloaded. You can try out the Java Webstart desktop version here.

The two days before the presentation were what has been dubbed "crunch time". Crunch time is a glorious, masochistic event involving sleep deprivation, caffeine consumption and hours of programming. I put almost 50% of the work into the VR viewer in those last 2 days, barely slept, and was absorbed in it the whole time. Crunch time is always stressful as hell while you're in it, but the moment you get out you realize that you live for the crunch. The amount of focus, drive, energy, and passion needed to go through with it is what defines you as a programmer. Crunch proves that you have the skill and the absolute love of programming needed to get shit done when it needs to be done, and I would not trade crunch time for anything else in the world. I'm already craving the next time I will be able to do it!

Then came the day of the presentation. I can't tell you how nervous I was. The president of the college would be there, all of the computer science professors would be there, press would be there, my fellow students would be there, and I had to give a 15-minute presentation about my involvement in the project. The class practiced the presentation three times the day before and we still only barely had it down. I dressed to impress in my best suit and got ready for the longest oral presentation I have given in my college career. It went flawlessly. I was almost exactly on my time mark (I went like 15 minutes and 30 seconds), managed to say all I wanted to, and had a great presentation prepared (you can find the Google Docs version here). After the presentation the feeling was absolutely transcendent. It was over. The cause of most of my stress the entire semester was over. Looking back on it, I learned a lot, accomplished a lot, and loved every second of it. But that glorious feeling when a project is finally over cannot be matched.

And now onto the final part of this post, which is actually the one I've been most eager to talk about. If you remember the lovely depressed section of my last post this is a direct continuation of it. The girl I liked since freshman year who pretty much ignored me? I confessed everything to her and was still ignored. I eventually realized it was because her relationship with her previous boyfriend left her so jaded that she's pretty much become an entirely different person (and in a very bad way). She's no longer the same girl I liked in freshman year so I've stopped caring and just enjoy watching her trainwreck her life. The girl in a relationship who obviously liked me? We had a pretty long conversation about that in which we both admitted that we liked each other, but that she loved her boyfriend too much and that, he being my friend as well, I didn't want to come in between them. And so our relationship hasn't really much changed and I'm content with just being friends with her.

After the software engineering project was over I finally had time to sit back and reflect on the subject of my love-life. Since the aforementioned girls were obviously out of the question and I had pretty much given up on them I resigned myself to enjoying another lonely winter to myself. However, funny how things work out.

I had recently met a girl who, at the time I met her, was dating one of my friends. Although he's a really cool guy, he's also known for having relationships that last about two weeks, so I kind of knew in the back of my mind that it wasn't going to last long. After they broke up I started talking to her and she seemed really interested in me (I don't know if my friend talked me up while they were dating or what). She's a really cute girl, kind of quiet and small, and I was definitely interested as well. So, after talking for a few days, we arranged to meet up at The Hub (which is sort of an on-campus carry-out restaurant with much better food than the cafeteria). I wasn't really sure what to expect going in, it had been a long time since I had had a conversation, alone, with a girl that I was interested in. To my surprise it went extremely well. I had her laughing and we maintained eye-contact and conversation pretty much the whole time. We sat there talking for almost two hours before I had to go to a final. It went so well, in fact, that she asked for my number before I did.

We then hung out later that night. We watched a movie (she had never seen Inception, so I watched it for the 11th time [so worth it]), I introduced her to Steve and Amber and we all just had a really good time. Later on in the evening it was apparently really obvious to Steve and Amber that I liked this girl and she liked me back. I definitely enjoyed being with her and stayed up way into the night talking with her. We did that whole "take 30 minutes to say goodbye because we couldn't stop talking for long enough to say it" thing, and I walked back to my room smiling the entire time. It was great! Only bad thing is that this was the day before winter break started so we didn't spend as much time together as either of us would have liked.

Now I'm on winter break and we've been texting pretty much nonstop. I'm really curious as to how this will turn out. My last two relationships have left me quite weary of trying again, but I'm quite hopeful that if we continue that I will actually, truly enjoy this one. In the little time that I've known her, I already really like her and can tell that she really likes me (this mutual feeling really wasn't felt at all in my previous relationships). Ah, this enjoyable ambiguity! Where will the wind take me? Only time will tell :D