I've been without a bike for a while, since my bike went missing when I got back from LA. This last Sunday I tried borrowed a roommates bike and went all around trying to find mine. I figured someone grabbed it in order to use it, and that they'd be somewhere around these parts, so I tried to scope out all the bikes on campus and in IV. IV isn't so bad near DP for going back and forth and methodically searching each patch of bicycles you see, but then it gets more tricky as you weave your way north, I found. I didn't end up finding it, unfortunately, although I feel I looked at thousands and thousands of bikes. No random drop of "my bike" when I inspected each one happened, which is kinda what I was going for.

Anyway, I've been getting a lot on my plate. Writing it all down in a to do list really helped out. My skeletal figure recognizer hasn't progressed much, besides doing some of the actual texture mapping of the image to the drawing pane when you draw something. There are some bugs with it I'd really like to fix, but I don't know where they're coming from. Tracking them down is a huge, huge pain.

I've started on the Person Paster application which is my masters project. It will use the skeletal figure recognizer as one of it's major components. I'm making it in C# so that I can take advantage of any C libraries for doing any of the video camera motion tracking I might want to use, and so that I'll have access to a GUI library, namely WPF. WPF is pretty straightforward to learn how to use. It's a lot like the Android XML based GUI stuff, since it's also using XML. I like that a lot.

I've gotten some job/interview offers that I've followed up on and am now waiting to hear more about. I'll see what comes of them.

Also, like... in order to do the C# stuff I needed Visual C#. But when I tried to install it that terrible problem with .NET 2.0 being broken on my laptop reared it's ugly head again. So I got Visual Studio Professional and Windows 7 Professional off of MSDNAA and installed them ( which in the case of Windows, was more troublesome than it should have been ). I'm liking both, somewhat, but as predicted I'm having issues with certain things, namely the touch/pen input. The pen's fine but currently the touch screen doesn't do anything. I tried fiddling with that last night but it ended up breaking the pen. Super. Had to remove and reinstall drives to get it working again.

Anyway, Tim Rogers has his next Kotaku article up here. I really like everything he does. His writing style, the depth to which he explores topics, the personal anecdotes he adds in order to illustrate his point, they're all great. He also sounds like an interesting dude. Also he did a FFXIII review which is also entertaining.

What did I say I was playing last, Assassin's Creed? That was really awesome. Makes me want to play Assassin's Creed 2 but dangit, I have my backlog. No more buying games until it's done! I played Mirror's Edge after that and now I'm playing Prince of Persia. All sorts of free running games. Mirror's Edge and Assassin's Creed does it better than Prince of Persia though ( so far, I'm only at the beginning ) - while PoP ( so far ) has brilliant art and visuals and characters and setting, all the acrobatics that you need to execute are all very scripted. For Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge, if you miscalculate a jump you're probably going to go off the edge. In PoP the game is "smart" and auto-corrects you. IE no matter how you exactly run, jump, and angle yourself off a given ledge, as long as you're pointing towards a wall-run labeled piece of cliff face, your character will correct you and jump towards the same location on the cliff. It's user-friendly I guess, but takes away a lot of the agency - you're pushing buttons and not actually moving through the world.

To contrast the runnin' games and match my lack of bike, I also played Yume Nikki, finally, which is a game involving walking around. Or biking, I guess, which messes up the connection. That was some intense stuff though. Wouldn't know where to start talking about it.

Now what? I guess I'll just keep working on stuff. Oh yeah, our paper was accepted to the CHI workshop! Woo hoo! Now to figure out about traveling to Atlanta in April, which the school should cover.

So I've been keeping rather busy. This will be no lax quarter. It's my second to last quarter here at UCSB. Next quarter I'll start looking into game development companies, preferably in the Bay Area. Some people here and there are talking about looking into finding work after they graduate even this quarter. But that's so long! I don't really get how that's viable. Are there companies that want you to apply to them and then wait 4-5 months for you to finish with school? I don't see how that works, but I guess that's probably because I haven't really been following the norms that other people have been subscribing to regarding this sort of thing. Been busy working on stuff.

This quarter I'm taking a class on Java based Cluster & Concurrent Computing. It's been a lot of work, and I probably haven't been working as efficiently as I could - some playing around with games and such, some being sleepy, some getting distracted by talking to people here and there. Everything gets done on time but I need to step it up. I'm currently implementing a system not unlike Cilk that allows a job to be decomposed into short non-blocking threads in a directed acyclical graph that get distributed over a compute cluster using work stealing. Neat stuff!

It is taking time away from working on my research though. This weekend I should be finding out if our position paper is accepted to the Sketch workshop at CHI, which I'm sure we'll then talk about at a meeting we're having next week. Whenever I get time to work on my research project I make a lot of progress. It's going well! I haven't, however, had any time at all to work on From Dusk into Twilight. I was designing ships here and there but that's about it.

Also on Tuesday I'm going down to LA to see Tenacious D in concert! It's also a Haiti relief concert, which is cool. But I mainly just want to see The D. Also the Lynette figure I ordered some time back was shipped the other day. Looking forward to having that!

I'm making better progress on things than I was projecting. Stuff is debugged! Stuff is implemented! It's kind of working! But I made a 1/2 cm scratch or so on my 24" Dell monitor last night. Was twirling my scissors and it hit the monitor. Balls! I'm not having much luck with monitors lately. Try VGA mode didn't fix the 19" monitor - I'm going to actually have it fixed.

I beat Katamari Damacy and Monkey Island Special Edition since I got back to school. Both of which didn't take too long. I only waited this long to play Katamari because I lent it to Cydney a while back and hadn't got a chance to play it... I got it back during winter break :D Fun game. I'm finally playing Assassin's Creed now and it's great. It really does setting well, the most important part of a game or movie to me. Lets see where the game goes.

Also I pre-ordered Nodocchi and Yuuki figures! They should be awesome! Nodocchi is even supposed to be like a foot wide! I still have those Yoshika and Lynette figures I preordered as well to wait on... so this makes 4 relatively expensive figures that I'm waiting on. Haven't pre-ordered anything like this before - lets hope it's not a painful process I'm going to need to do 4 times.

On friday I had the option of going with the Pep Band to a basketball game with the prospect of a free T-Shirt and tote bag, or goto Anime club. I chose the latter and it was the right choice :D We watched Summer Wars which was fantastic, one of the girls taught us to play Hanafuda afterwards ( namely the Koi-Koi varient that was played in the movie ). They showed the Legend of Koizumi short beforehand, which gives me an excuse to continue the Japanese board game learning next week for me to bring my Mahjong set :D Perhaps I could teach people to play who would want to play a full game! At least one girl knows how to play. Also I went to see The Princess and the Frog with some people from club the next day, which was great :D

I'm also going to be following this live blog of the Proposition 8 trial being held currently in San Francisco. From what I've seen so far, things are going amazingly.

Happy new year! I was watching a 3-Day/Single Cycle Majora's Mask live stream on Backloggery when midnight hit. I ran into the other room at 11:59 to see the ball drop, and then ran back to see the thrilling boss fight the guy was on - beating the last of the four dungeon bosses, finished with less than 20 in-game minutes left on the clock! It was make or break and he managed to pull it off at the last second. I certainly found it fun :D

Also the list of banned IP addresses is at 942. Beat the spammers! It would be nice to do a little more web development for Charhut, I guess. Oh, did I mention I reworked the design of my professional site? Check it out - click profile on the top bar or just click here.

I'm nearing the end of winter break... and there's still quite a bit to do! I'm not satisfied! I did even really get anything done yesterday. I'm not done with my project, I have several things I need to go out and do, I have people to see and need to somehow get myself to Santa Barbara and ready to go for Monday. I don't know! Also I'm not fully registered for all my classes because the seminars haven't been made register-able yet. The plan was to finish putting my schedule together when they were up. They did the same thing for Fall quarter - I had to wait until the first week. But now the seminars aren't even showing up on the CS website! What the deuce - that doesn't help me out any! I'll just have to hope they show up again both on the website and on the system used for registering for classes. Otherwise I'll need to figure out what to do.

I didn't really finish any of the games on my backlog here during break. I did manage to complete nearly 3 costumes in 3 weeks though - not half bad at all. Three pleated skirts, two sailor blouses, a big giant cape and an amulet are what I constructed. The rest I got together or bought or planned - although there's still a few needing doing. That I didn't get my checklist 100%ed is another element of stress. Get it done!

I also forgot to do stuff with my smaller monitor which is now not working. I got the 24" Dell monitor replaced but as soon as it came back my 19" ViewSonic monitor stopped working! Maybe tomorrow/today I can run out and buy a small VGA cable and test if the problem is only with the DVI connection. It's a possibility. If so I can just use VGA and it should be fine! I have a little DVI->VGA adapter ( the kind that comes with video cards ) handy.

What else... it's late/early because I was laying in bed not tired at all just being frustrated at having stuff to do. So I figured I should try to fix my sleep schedule and get stuff done by just working on things more. Make up for not getting anything done yesterday.

Also Christmas was good and Riverdance was super good :) I like being home and having a tree and the decorations and stuff. It's very warm. I got a good haircut and I got a jacket which I think should be pretty stylish in a good casual way. I hope! I'm not good with fashion but I think it will work! It's not unlike an M65 jacket which is recommended in the SA men's fashion thread. So yeah.

So funnily enough, because of this blog and how the Facebook updates stack on top of each other like the way they do, if I were to update my status more often than I post on this blog, they all stack up and make it look like I'm ignoring this blog more than I should in favor of Facebook. The result is that I avoid updating my status in order to make this blog look nicer! The alternative is to just make blog posts more often.

I just finished Guitar Hero 5. Finally! There's just so many songs, I would keep sitting down and say to myself that I'm just going to plow through them all and get the game off my to do list. But I would always burn out after playing a lot and realizing there was still a long ways to go. The defining was Do You Feel Like We Do? by Peter Frampton. Long, long classic rock song. Just great and awesome. A lot of the other songs are forgettable, but there are memorable ones like this one. World Tour still has a much more memorable collection of songs for me.

I made Louise's cape. It's very big and long and kind of heavy because it's no slouch - this is one hell of an awesome cape. I guess I need to try and make the blouses now, but I'm not 100% confident I know what I'm doing. Lets do it anyway!

I'm back home from UCSB for winter break, for 3 weeks or so. Well, I guess 2 more weeks now. So did I do it? Did I finish everything? Not quite I guess. I didn't finish implementing the subgraph matching, as it's pretty complicated. Lots of stupid little special cases. I finished everything else though. So I guess it's okay if I just finish that by the end of break. Hopefully I can manage that! I've worked on it a little bit this last week, fixing/implementing a few bits and pieces. Did a big refactoring of this one complicated function that does quite a few things, for instance.

My biggest problem is finishing things I've started. When it comes to schoolwork and such it's no problem - if it involves other people I rarely disappoint. No, it's the stuff like maintaining a big stack of unfinished games, unwatched movies and shows, and projects I want to do stuff on. Maybe it's just because I pick so many things to do that take a long time.

Speaking of big undertakings that take a long time to complete, I'm making three costumes for Fanime, which I might have mentioned - Louise from Zero no Tsukaima, Someya Mako from Saki, and Fukuji Mihoko from Saki. Should be great! I have Louise's pendant and Mako's skirt done. The skirt took like two days. They both look great! I need to wait another two days before I can take measurements to make more progress. Aces! We're on schedule.

Also, the current count of banned IPs is 736. That's a lot of spambots!

I heard that Throwback is coming back on the 28th. Awesome! I'm seeing Riverdance on the 29th, which is also good! At some point I need a haircut really badly! I got Dell to replace my 2407WPF-HC with one with working power button! They didn't replace it with a refurbished 2408 like I requested though. That would have let me do 1080p with my 360 and PS3. Oh well - at least the refurbished 2407 I got is in prime condition.