Older blog entries for nymia (starting at number 1922)

I received the latest copy of Condé Nast Portfolio yesterday and read about the article Stiglitz wrote. In there he advocated for the homeowner’s version of Chapter 11, though I did not see any term relating to writedowns. He’s saying he wants to eliminate the asset by Chapter 11, not writing it down based on percentage.

As a homeowner myself, I see this as definitely the cure, especially tailored for the ones who are in the grinder at the moment. Those who walked-away will probably never get their homes back, but those who are still hanging in there waiting for a savior, a solution based on Stiglitz could possibly work.

How? The next president should enact a law targetting those numbers.

Then, there’s another angle into it that needs to be considered. According to a Stiglitz book I read a few years back, rule of law and trust are some of the main ingredients needed to have a sound and vibrant market. Take one away and the market will probably tailspin. Fixing the mess by revamping the law could restore trust in the market. Something to the effect of a New New Deal FDR-style could be taken.

And then there’s the issue of spending. Have you seen the NASA MMO RFP? It came to me as some sort of a message that budgets are being slashed, held tight by some unknown fear. Again, why would a government agency tighten its belt as if things are going to the great depression? We’ve been there before and we know the solution: SPEND, SPEND, SPEND.

Well, finally, after several years of spending time tutoring this student he is now as-they-say passed all the Computer Science requirements last term and has been approved to attend the graduation ceremonies. The last subject he took was really fun, he did manage to ace most of them and got an A minus, not bad for a subject that had a lot of C and C++ programming, along with tons of OpenGL and Matrix concepts.

I’m happy for him after all that painstaking sessions he had to go through. He’ll probably never forget those moments when he felt like he was about to give, yet he still went on trying his best to pass the subject. I would humiliate him for getting a passing mark and he would always get pissed and not return any calls after that, yet we somehow he managed to get-along and continue the sessions.

He’s definitely happy that he’s preparing for a vacation soon.

 

It has been several days and stuff has happened, let me write them down in no particular order

Marketing Stuff

It’s really hard pulling a stunt with basically no money involved. Ask anyone you meet on the street about buzzing with no money backing and you’ll definitely get lol’ed out of the street. Anyway, my partner-in-crime seems to be playing the role of a heckler in the peanut gallery. I just wished he would see the situation in a different angle. But then, I re-iterated I will not part with my hard-earned dinero with the suggestion he was trying to make. No way, Jose. Not with that kind of idea.

I made a bet with him that if things worked-out pretty good for this no-money-involved marketing plan, the money generated from that campaign will all funnel into my account. He gave another laugh but this time he agreed to join-in and pledged his support creating more content. I told him I’ll have to buy a monk’s habit to prove my point.

A New Model for 태 권 도 

I was chatting with this guy while playing in the gym and told him about the status quo of TKD (태권도)  and how it should flow in a different direction. He started getting serious about it and found out he wanted to explore that area. We’ve been talking lightly about it for several months now and word spread around to several people with a few verbalizing their interest. Yesterday night, he gave me his email and mentioned some concrete plans on how he would like to move the concept forward. Again, I re-iterated the commitment he was about to make and said “This stuff is cool, let’s make it happen sooner.”

Someone (can’t mention his name) overheard the conversation and said “I do MMA, let’s do it now.” And I replied “Whoa, not too fast there my friend, there is a place and time for this. Let’s act like gentlemen here.” He winked at me and gave a grin, “come on, let’s get this thing going, here’s my email.”

“Everyone will sign a waiver.” Exactly the point, why would one get in and not sign a waiver. And secondly, once this thing gets in motion “there will be no more talk about this.”

The symbol is a syllable having the English pronunciation ‘DO’ meaning ‘The Way Of’ more commonly found in the Hanggul script. Practitioners are basically taught by guides or teachers who by years of learning have mastered the art. Success or enlightenement is said to be achieved when the mind and body join into one, where form are no longer form but part of the spirit that move body. One mind and body is Zen.

But, what does that symbol have to do with this blog? Am I supposed to reveal the mastery of a certain art? Certainly not…for I am no master.

Western thought, originally were pretty much Aristotelian. So obvious that, the Greek civilization made a huge impression in the formation of western thought and it still considered a major influence as of today. Grammar and empiricism played a crucial part of the western thought. Intelligence bounded not by Zen but by connection of symbols with other symbols, forming a vast network of collections supported by empiricism.

Along the line, Baconianism crept-in to supplant the old structure paving the way to a new kind of thinking. Baconianism is now the major driving force of everything I see here, now.

Where will it go next? And what kind of new thinking will this generation rally up to?

Maybe this is it?

 

A conversation with the kid:

• Didn’t you know I placed second in spelling.
• That’s good, that means you’re getting better in the classroom.
• No, not in my class.
• What do you mean class, I don’t get it.
• I got second place in the school trials for spelling.
• Hmmm, now that’s different. You’re supposed to be happy with that, second is good.
• Well, I could’ve gotten that simple word spelled correctly.
• Don’t worry about it, do you want to do some spelling exercises?
• No
• Why not?
• It’s boring.
• Well, you could pretend you’re eighteen years old in Half-life and spell every word correctly.
• I’ve done it already, but I could do more, plus it’s boring trying to be adult.
• Ooooo-keeeyyyy, how ’bout this…[scratches head]
• what…
• I’ll go get the dictionary and I’ll put you through some interesting spelling test.
• No!

 Conclusion: Raising kids in America is hard.

The kid is progressing slowly, he started two nights ago with a subset of the alphabet and is now almost done memorizing two-thirds of the symbols. I placed the kid in an actual test to see if he can see the difference. It went like this:

• Do you see the English text above?
• Yes, of course I can read it.
• Now, try reading the symbols below.
• Well, the letters are mixed up.
• That’s right, the text go circular as you read a syllable.
• OK, now I get it.
• Try reading it the way it was written.
• The first symbol is T.
• Yup…
• Followed by ae?
• Go on…
• k….u…o…n
• Keep going
• d….o….
• Ya got it.
• Hey!

It’s been a week since he left us to set up his new startup. The air in the room has never been the same. The long laughter filling the air is now silent, it’s now echoing in a new place.

I know he will browse this page, his techie instinct will take him here and perhaps read this line. Only to find this journal that speaks of the good times we had while developing the concept into a neat commercially graded standard product.

It won’t be the same without this tech-business-savvy guy manning the post, because it takes both skills to have this wonderful combination of personality. The ability to see the future and play around with crazy ideas.

Never before I’ve never never met this bunch of people who worked like family. A startup company that would have lasted forever. I mean the team that worked tirelessly around a concept, treating each other as equals to achieve a common goal.

I shall remain here to keep the good times going, but it will never be the same.

Perhaps we shall meet again, on a crossroad path, only to find out we are going to work on a different concept.

Heaven.

It was a dark cold night. No stars were piercing through the clouds as I gazed up the sky for a few seconds and sighed as the cold spell continues on in the cold February air. People around were wearing thick, some wearing thin, as I walked past them going to the bookstore.

The store was about 15 minutes before closing. So I had to rush the ritual before they cut me off. So I raced through the aisles and went straight to the shelf where I was hoping to find the right book. Grabbed it and then headed off to another section.

 Then, it was time to go. The voice coming from the speaker warned about the impending doom, err I mean the few minutes left before they start kicking people out. The ritual was on its last few steps when another lady greeted with a smile. I smiled back at him in some form of cheerful counter-attack.

Lining up at the counter, my eye wandered afar, zooming in on some books that piled-up for collection. Then the book came into view. I knew that book from sometime back. Picked it up and held it face distance, saw the price: $9.95. “Hmmm, that’s a pretty good deal.”

That was several weeks ago. The book is now placed near the computer table for easy reach and quick reading. The book kept me entertained, though. I learned a lot about this country and how the supreme court and its justices agreed, concurred and dissented on various cases.

One thing I’d like to comment was how the book presented the padilla v. rumsfeld case. It sounded like this case was unprecented. All the technical jargon surrounding this case was deliberate and singular, as if to point-out its uniqueness.

I’ve been doing a lot of 3D programming in my spare time. Though parts of it were spent doing mostly in research and study.  Take for example the time I spent going through bits and pieces of information figuring out the details of Matrix Transformations, you probably know and can probably count the number of nights spent on it.

Anyway, with the help of a friend who badly needed a Matrix Transform lib written entirely in C, he’s trying not to borrow code from the Web so as not to get a lower grade, we finally sat down and wrote probably the shortest quick-n-dirty version of the Matrix Transform ever coded.

With most of the basic Transform functions squared-away, I finally got it added on top the OpenGL engine wrapper.  The first test was basically loading a 3DS mesh file into the world before rotating, scaling and translating it to a location. That test went very well, the Matrix Transform worked right away with no hiccups. I thought the model will come out mangled in knots, but somehow, the model got rotated, scaled and translated as planned.

The next test will start soon, though the elements needed to get the test going aren’t there yet. The B3D loader is still 50% complete and the slerp() function is yet to to coded. For some unknown reason, I somehow got hooked into B3D format mainly because of its completeness and simplicity.

 The B3D loader is LGLP’d and is available on SF.net.

Been reading tons of stuff about hair, mainly papers from Kajiya and the much later presentation from Thorsten Scheuermann (ATI Research).

From goofing around with the equations to finally buckling-down to implement the attempt using simple tools like Blender to create the geometry and then export the vertices to a render tool like RenderMonkey, I thought I had all the materials ready. Unfortunately, the geometry I generated did not have the tangent data which was required in the fragment shader. To state it simply, I was royally screwed.

What I basically had was the position, normal and some texcoord data. Plus two textures for skinning and masking. With that on the table, the only option was to re-think the phenomena and re-state the formula according to what was available.

The first try failed, it came out just like an ordinary texture splatted on a polygon.

The second was even worse, the specular made it like plastic.

I’ll try again this weekend.

 

ref: Martin Koster, J¨org Haber, Hans-Peter Seidel