Friday, September 10, 2004 at 4:46PM This is what I've been working on for the past few days: SourceForge.net: Project Info - Graphics3D (C++). I learned to use it a bit this weekend, then spent this week learning it more thoroughly... then I spent today converting a tutorial for a Brown Computer Science class into a more general form.
This marks my first-ever check-in to an open source project. It's about time!
Saturday, September 4, 2004 at 4:00PM FeedDemon by Bradbury Software is the best RSS reader I've found yet. They've put more energy into presentation than other readers I've tried -- yes, even shrook and NetNewsWire. For the last month I've been reading RSS with the sage extension for Firefox, which is fast but minimal. FeedDemon
is prettier. It also has nice support for RSS enclosures.
Saturday, September 4, 2004 at 1:18PM Four days after I turned thirty, a baby-boomer man I met at a friend's wedding said, "You're what, 22?" in the context of telling me he'd been married to his wife for 33 years. A few weeks earlier, I was carded in a bar -- I was ordering a virgin margarita -- and when I didn't have my ID, the bartender suggested that I go get it if I wanted to keep playing pool there -- not even because she didn't want to serve me alcohol, but just because she didn't think I was old enough to even be in the bar. On my reecnt trips to Microsoft, people I meet often ask if I'm a student, although at least they tend to think I'm a PhD student or post-doc, which would at least be age-appropriate. The last few days, I've been meeting new students, who assume I'm an undergrad. The moment when I say "I graduated in 1997" there's always a pause, and some disbelief, and then some embarassment; am I offended they thought I was ten years younger than I am?
I'm not offended, but I'm curious about it. I think there's a few factors that come together to make me come off as young. In everyday life around Providence, I dress very casually, and I prefer clothes so comfortable I could sleep in them. Not exactly a businesswoman's wardrobe, and in fact when I "dress up" -- or my equivalent thereof, which involves ironed button-down shirts, sometimes a blazer, and slacks -- I "pass" as more like mid-to-late-twenties. I'd like to think that my personal carriage is more of an adult than a college student, especially in the business sphere. The last factor, of course, is my face, and especially the skin on my face... which is as soft, lightly freckled, and pink as when I was eighteen. I also have dark circles under my eyes, just like my brother's. Odd, because I don't think either of our parents have that particular feature. (Do you?) I don't know how i got this skin; I certainly haven't worn sunscreen as much as I should, or moisturized as much as I should. The one thing I do that's theoretically good for skin is drink a lot of water. Relatives out there, do other Beckers look young? Did you look young when you were 30-ish?
I think this all brings me to an awareness that I will need to work extra-hard to come off as professional in professional settings.
Friday, September 3, 2004 at 1:22PM I've spent the afternoon getting G3D installed on my tablet. G3D is a platform-independent 3D graphics library written in C++ by several Brown grad students. I had fun keeping track of changes to the install process for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 -- the last documentation had been written for Visual C++ 6 and Visual Studio 98.
I must be better at all this than I was a year ago, or maybe this install process was easier than getting InSpace to run on my machine. I spent days and days on that, but I just couldn't get it to go. I gave up when it turned out that I had spent hours trying to compile some obscure package from UNC with Visual Studio .NET. The definitions of C++ had actually changed between when the code was written and when I was trying to compile it, so that effort was a bear. Unfortunately, I let my difficulties working with InSpace keep me out of doing 3D work. Now I just kind of want to do some 3D work, especially 3D work with the GPU: graphics programming unit: hardware dedicated to accelerating 3D graphics math. It's just all so HOT right now.
Enough writing -- it's time to code!