Well, reading break is sadly over for academia, and I feel like I need a break after this break. Most people took this opportunity to go travel or relax. For me, I spent the majority of time locked inside my room working on an assignment. Good times.
The assignment involved creating a wireframe cube model in a 3D space and being able to manipulate the cube and the 3D space with mouse gestures. This is for my computer graphics course. If your eyes have just glazed over from what I just said.... well, I feel the same way. I spent many days banging my head on the desk trying to figure out the math behind this stuff. Furthermore, the slides and hints that were provided for this assignment were fairly useless because some fairly important details were omitted. Long story short, I have ample respect for people who do 3D graphics for video games these days. It is definitely not a walk in the park at first.
There were a few other reasons why this assignment was fairly tricky. First, the specifications were fairly vague, and the TA said just to look at the sample solution programs which demonstrated what the 3D cube and space should look like. This is all good and well, but those sample solutions were done by students. There were four different programs that we could look at, but each one implemented things differently, and two of them were implemented improperly. To compound this problem, it's fairly difficult to debug a graphics scene because it's really in the eye of the beholder. This makes it hard to check if your program is correct or not.
Nevertheless, I bring this upon myself because I'm a sucker for taking some of the hardest courses in my program. These courses are known for their heavy workload, yet I still walk right into it. I guess it keeps me sharp though since I go through the term with guns blazing the whole way through. In the end, it'll also be more useful for the end game: the workplace.
In either case, I was frantically trying to finish this assignment, and today was the due date, and I finished about 90% of it. I felt kind of stupid because usually I get programming assignments done completely. Luckily in class, the prof asked how many people were still not done, and about 95% of the class indicated they hadn't finished. The prof did confess that this was by far the hardest assignment that we'll get, so he gave us a one week extension. I breathed a sigh of relief because it wasn't just me having troubles with the assignment. Even my fellow grad students weren't finished. Most of the undergrads had about 66% of the assignment completed.
In conclusion, I didn't really have a reading break at all since I spent most of the time working on that assignment. I've probably spent over 40 hours on this thing so far. Nevertheless, I had a fairly productive reading break. Let's recount the stuff I did last week.
Last Tuesday I did a lot of work on my car. I fixed the leak in the trunk, dried out the trunk, killed the mold that was growing on one of the seats, and replaced the headlights. (45 straight days of rain + leak = mold). I also got the last of my RRSP contributions in before the cutoff date, and my portfolio is officially diversified. I also put away some cash away in a GIC. Last Saturday, I also finished a multimedia presentation for my church's kid's ministry which was used for fundraising purposes.
Its been a busy week, but hopefully I'll be slightly ahead of the game when classes resume.
