… and that’s the name of my art film.

It’s been an epic battle against time here… three days to learn how to use Maya, then use it to create a ~1 minute art film. I did it, but it sucks… although you might say ‘good’ cause I -did- finish it in 3 minutes.

I watched FF7:AC last night. Holy shit. Hoooollyyyyy Shiiiit. (etc etc)

Even though I have never played any of the FFs all the way through (yes, I know, kill me now), but the movie itself had action scenes that completely owned the crap out of stuff like the Matrix. Plus, the CG is -awesome-. And I mean Awesome. The detail is unbelieveable, wind affects hair (which is still clumped in a metaphysical sense to ease the computational needs, but you still see indivudual strands), cloth effects, skin, textures… you really gotta see it for yourself. And considering I’ve actually worked with some 3D animation tools… I can tell you this would’ve taken forever to make and render.

I suggest you all see it.

With the holidays coming up, I’ll have free time to complete the inserter GUI, and try to get the beta-test going ASAP. I make no promises though ;p

So, I made it to Florida.

What a trip. I eventually decided to bring down my S12, and my friend opm made a good argument to do it: “I know a guy who can fix up your front end really cheap…” With this in mind, I was all set to come down by myself and probably have a two day trip, when low and behold my mother decides she wants to come down and look for a job. While I agree, it’s a great idea for her to look for work elsewhere then in crappy PA, she drove me nuts on the way down. I swear my mother was born with the sheer purpose in life but to only moan and groan and complain about every god damn little thing you can imagine: “Michael, I’m cold. Michael, I’m to hot. Michael, I gotta pee.”

So now I gotta play taxi for her for the next week or so she may be down here. If she gets a job, great, she can get another car and go to work and stay wherever. After all the god damn complaining she’s done, none of my new roommates want her around, and I don’t blame them. My mom can’t be made happy, it’s not a possible task. And the worst part is, I cannot get her to shut up, even when we are out in public. She’ll say the most god damn irritating comments, and then giggle at them as if they were witty. She honestly enjoys making a fool out of herself, then wonders why in the hell she can’t keep any friends. I can’t stand her.

So now that I’m down here, I’m just guna chill for a few days and get the feel for my new environment. Today opm and I went with his buddy and played football. I didn’t play though, cause the last tragic time I tried throwing a football in 2002 (oddly enough right after I first brought my current computer online and was installing Windows 2000) was a complete disaster, and I vowed never to repeat such a retarded looking toss ever again. After the football game in 90+ degree weather, we went to the pool at the same place, and swam for about an hour, then just shot the shit with opm’s buddy for another two hours afterwards. I didn’t mind it one bit, and I got to get to learn a bit more about opm’s High School days, and have some good laughs.

The last thing we did was go to the 7-11 that opm works at and talk to his friend about my 200’s front end work. He gave me an estimate of $850 (and he called that on the pricey end just to be safe). This would include not only straightening the sub-frame of the front end out (yay, the main frame isn’t bent), but also doing the body work on the rest of the car and then matching the paint color (who knows, maybe I’ll just get the entire thing painted?). While it’s currently not something I can afford now, I’ve now got a nice goal for the next few months to strive toward. Get a job, fix the body of my car, then look to fixing up the exhaust system. Things are looking up for the first time since the school pulled the money out from under me.

So, I’m tired, I’m going to bed, then waking up and then playing taxi for my mother tomorrow. God I’m guna go crazy listening to her shit…

Just completely owned the Maths B exam today. All the study I did was three problems from the test last year, and then I went to bed.

After coming home from 12 rounds of DDR (8x double standard and 6x versus heavy, good fun) I sat down and tried up whipping up some effects in After Effects to use in my art film. Got bored of that, so I started working on the graphical Tsukihime Inserter Program, which I have unimaginatively called “Sashikomi” (‘to insert’ in Japanese).

I really need a better name.

Either way, I’m learning PyGTK on the fly and simultaneously cursing Glade as it is a worthless POS that needs an undo function DESPERATELY!

Either way, The basic interface for the program is done and I’m working on integrating the inserting function into the program (to see where the problems occur in the scripts without having to open a AppLocaled notepad, ugh). I’m also thinking of rewriting the inserter completely as the current version is a direct port of the C++ version, which is extremely dodgy and I admit I could’ve done it better.

Assesment left: Maths C test to go and art film to hand in.

Then all that’s left is one small term, then it’s a week of partying at Schoolies, and then into university I go (thinking of a Film/IT double degree with a Japanese minor).

And also, I’m thinking the Tsukihime community is quiet or full of leechers or something… I swear we aren’t getting enough comments considering the supposed popularity of Tsukihime. But that’s just me.

[img_assist|fid=4|thumb=1|alt=Inserter GUI|caption=A days work on the GUI with no prior experience. As you can see, it stalled on the script (unable to match correctly due to a number of factors). But otherwise, it automatically matches string with a Leviwhatever distance being less than 2, due to possible string corruption, blah blah.]

EDIT: The PSU somehow works now. Except I fried the wires for the lights in front of the box. Not critical, and thankfully I didn’t have to fork out more money :/

My day started at 4:45am this morning. That was around 4 hours of sleep, although I managed to catch some on the flight down to Sydney.

Today was the date of the UNSW ProgComp 2k5 (don’t click if you don’t wanna know what happened :), an Australia-wide high school programming competition, designed to attract the most elite programmers from around Australia.

Previously, our team has won the competition back in 2003 (a fluke, I’d say) but we only solved two questions out of six (excluding the tie-breaker question) as the questions back then were more algorithmic-based then they are now. Due to that, we couldn’t take advantage of the algorithmic questions as my friend pretty much rips through those questions as he recently obtained a bronze medal at the IOI2005, one of the four(?) people representing Australia. Also, we somehow managed to win with VB6.0 in 2003, ousting C++, Perl, Python and Haskell (the tiebreaker was with C++).

Before we even got to the airport, however, we already hit a snag.

There was no box for my computer.

Due to the problems they had with making sure each team had the right software and whatnot on their computer, they made it so that we had to bring our own. So, a large bag and two blankets later, we checked the luggage in, and prayed that it wouldn’t break.

Location: Sydney, UNSW Campus.

We made our way to the venue, which was the Beagle(?) lab in the Engineering building (they had a funky chocolate mountain at the entrance, we went there after the competition and dipped some marshmellows in that, great stuff) and dropped our stuff in the storage room as the setting up period doesn’t actually start for another 45 minutes. Some food and a can of V later, we were back and unpacking our stuff.

Snag number two: Box doesn’t power up.

I pretty much shat myself when this happened. The computer only gets power for half a second before dying, and it only works again if you unplug the power supply, and replug it back in. I assumed it was the power supply at fault, so we searched for a power supply, as I thought there had to be one in their computer science building.

Fifteen minutes later of pants-shitting, they returned with a power supply and threw it in for us.

Didn’t work.

Until I found out it had a hard switch at the back.

I bounced off a couple of walls as the box powered up. That’s another hurdle passed.

Was a few minor snags with trying to find printer drivers for the printer they supplied us (we were the only ones running Linux there), before I just forgot to start the CUPS daemon.

The competition started.

Five problems: Mattress, Stencils, Manuscript, Censor, Sudoku.

Mattress: Simple problem involving a depth-first search (I think, anyway) to find the most effecient way of rotating a mattress to even out wear and tear. We didn’t bother attempting this question.

Stencils: My friend had that one. It was a fill problem, probably the most algorithmic one there. We got this after two tries.

I should explain the team that we had at this point. There was my friend (Year 12), another guy we know (Year 11) and me (Year 12). Us Year 12’s had the programming knowledge and I had the non-algorithmic based ones whereas he had the algorithmic ones. The Year 11 guy was there to solve the problems by hand 😀

Manuscript: Letter substitution cipher on a 30kb file. We didn’t actually have to use a program to solve the cipher, but it had to have a programming element. Year 11 guy solved this manually, then we coded the decryption function (which took a lot longer than it should’ve :/)

Censor: My problem. Involves a ‘bad word’ list and the text to censor. Censored text must be bound by non-alphanumeric characters. Screwed up so bad… spent maybe an hour or so working in C++ before I realised it would’ve been a no-brainer in Python. I switched languages and converted 2 pages of code into 10 lines (2 lines actually contained the logic). Hit a snag with escaping characters, though. Thank God for regex. And thank God I learnt Python like a week ago, just for kicks.

Sudoku: Friend also had this one. You can read all about Sudokus here. We got the basic part out, didn’t get the advanced part though (would’ve gotten 15 marks… that’s a fair bit).

Overall Score: 76 out of 100.
Score Table.

The team that came first completed all problems in 1:54 (total allocated was 2:30), which, I have to admit, is an insane effort. gg to them. Our excuse was cause they were a year older and had programming courses at their school. We only get taught VB. Well, that’s our excuse anyway :p

So, we walked away with $400 each (which leaves maybe $150 after airfares and new PSU :/), and a $2000 scholarship to their CSE division (which we can’t use cause we already have a $3000 one from 2003 and we live in Brisbane…).

Not tooooo bad for a day’s work.

My main computer is lying in my room with no PSU, so I’m on the family one. Exam block starts on Monday (English and Japanese, argh) and I have an art film due soon, so don’t expect me to make any progress with inserting.

End of transmission.

Okay, so all I want to do is move to Florida, right? The job market in my area stinks and I’m sick of only working jobs that will pay no more then $6.50, with tons of forced overtime and hard labor. It’s time for me to get the hell out of here and it looks like a friend will put me up in Florida for awhile.

First this hurricane comes threw and devastates Louisiana and all of the surrounding areas. This has raised the gas prices in my area from $2.50 to $2.70 in a little less then two days time. I waited in a long line for $2.55 gas at a new Circle K (they just bought out Dairy Mart apparently) while the other stations in that town were priced at $2.65. We’ve got it pretty good in this area of Pennsylvania though, while there are parts of the country with gas at $3.00, or even $5.00 in area’s of Florida.

So, after putting up with getting my car fixed up enough so it will survive the trip to Florida, it has become very unrealistic to even think about bringing my car down there. My insurance rates haven’t been all that bad, but putting gas into it is such a costly expenditure now. I get the feeling if I do bring the car with me to Florida, that I’d end up putting all my money into gas, instead of saving money into improving the car to do some off-the-street racing with it (this is a 85’ Nissan 200SX Turbo S12 for anyone who might actually care).

On top of all of this, I am a bit worried about being able to participate at Revolve and MirrorMoon over the coming months. With Tsukihime entering the insertion stage, and Melty Blood just about ready to get a surge in the translation department because of all the free translators, I feel like I’ll hold the Melty Blood project back from where it otherwise could be and I’ll miss out on the Tsukihime project I seem to have become a less and less part of as MirrorMoon gained more and more support. I already feel pretty lousy for my lack of participation with the Tsukihime project since chendo took over, so I really want to spend a lot of time on the insertion process. However there is the little issue of this move to FL.

So, the question is this: How do I move myself to FL without my car, and still be able to take my computer and bed down? It seems like a damned if I do, damned if I don’t scenario. If I take the car down, I’ll be paying outrageous gas prices and will have to make a stop or two on the way down? Even though my car is equipped with a factory alarm, that’s the problem, it’s the factory alarm. I just don’t want my stuff stolen out of it while I make an overnight stop (or two) somewhere. Also, once I get to FL, will I really be able to find a place to store the car for awhile and actually be able to afford the cost of this storage?

Now for the flip side of this scenario, I leave the car here and come back for it later. When I eventually do want to bring it down to FL I’d most likely have to tow it down somehow, because the cost of putting enough money into it so it would pass PA inspection, plus PA plate registration would just be outrageous. Also, how would I get my bed and computer down there if I took the bus or train down? Damn this dilemma I’m having.

I suppose the best way to go down would be to have someone else drive with me, so I could sleep in the car part way down, and we could do a not stop trip. Then I don’t have to worry about staying somewhere where the stuff in my car might magically disappear. So that leaves my mom as the only real candidate, and she has already told me she doesn’t like the idea of trying to sleep in the car. Even then, once she’s down there, she will probably want me to take her down to my parent’s old friends place (and even farther trip) and drop her off there so she can look at a job.

Such a pain in the ass… this week is.