Today wasn’t actually a bad day, per se… I mean, I went to my classes, I looked up a bunch of information for the Microsft Imagine Cup, registered to enter a few of the competitions, downloaded the algorithm software and had hours of mind-bending fun trying to come up with terse algorithms. Given that there are people that have been working on this for months, I’m at something of a disadvantage, but I’ll persevere. The algorithms I’ve made so far are well under the requirements, but there are quite a few hard problems in there.

My computer froze up on me earlier… well, when I say earlier I meant earlier. It’s 3.30am as I write this (still can’t get to sleep). For some reason the server at my Dad’s house (which has all of my business information) decided to not connect to me any more… so very, very not cool. Especially when I need to bill people cos I just had to shell out another ~NZ$840 for March’s rent. My wallet is crying forlornly in the corner, wondering why I’m so abusive.

But this is nothing new, on all counts. I’m a student, I have no money (perhaps less than I could have if I was sane about what I did with my life), my sleep is shot and my time is spent buried in something totally computer geeky.

All of that aside, I just feel like crap. No rhyme, no reason, just feel crap and alone and sick and tired of feeling like I’m biting off more than I can chew with this whole study-in-the-US thing. I know I’ll get over it, I’ll move on and do my best and get through it. Hell, I’ll probably do reasonably well when I look back on the year. Just feels crap now, and I thought I’d share the misery with my keyboard. Maybe I should rename this Depression 101. Far out… someone needs to give my life a kick up the pants into something resembling normality of emotions.

I was going to work today. I was going to work a lot. Mostly because I’m behind schedule on some things (big surprise there, I’m sure) and also cos I need money. My financial paperwork is a mess right now, I haven’t heard from my brother again and he’s frustrated over the paperwork as well. All in all, my business is in shambles and there’s bugger all I can do about it. Ah well, I’ll put it together.

I’ve got a kind of fatalistic opinion that everything I do will turn out alright in the end, huh? I have no idea where that comes from. I don’t have empirical evidence that everything in my life will work out, quite the contrary. Well, I’m sure that’ll bug me some other time, right now I just don’t care.

Ok, time to try and sleep again. I’m going to head to bed (I think I’ll take Angelina with me to watch movies if I can’t sleep) and give it another go. Because I’m interested in how many people actually bother to read through my ramblings (certainly ones as depressing and boring as this), I pose a question and would really like people to post comments. Since I wrote a (short) story the other day, would you like me to post it up online, or in my blog, or something? Let me know.

Despite going to bed around 3, I couldn’t get to sleep… I ended up writing a short story of all things, funnelling my mind and experience into something creative. When I did that it was about 7.30, I finished up around 9 then went to sleep for a few hours before getting up and heading off to Graphics.

After Graphics I came back to find that my blog had been overwhelmed with spam comments. I’ve deleted them now, and installed the comment-spam patch. It’s been about 15 minutes now with no more spam, so I’m hoping it’s worked. Even so, I might try and migrate to another package at some point.

I spent most of the rest of the day still working on my graphics assignment. I fixed up the surface normal calculations on my trapezoids (which was bugging the hell out of me), did some other UI tweaking and almost got wrapping working for all the curves. I did get it working for normal and higher order Bézier curves, but had some issues when I was implementing it for B-Splines and Catmull-Rom curves.

After that was all said and I done I did my reading for my lectures tomorrow, then did some email, watched some anime and went to bed. Proceeded to lie awake for hours wondering when I would get to sleep.

Well, I slept for most of the day, which is both good and bad. I expect that this will hamper my efforts to correct my sleep patterns. Geez, you’d think I’d learn, but no.

Anyway, today I did some more work on my graphics assignment, tried to get steel material properties and the correct normal calculations, added in some parameterization so that the interface is manipulated by the user somewhat. I remembered to check the requirements for the hierarchical model (and then fulfil them).

I also spent a portion of my time deleting spam comments on my blog from random sites… this has been happening more often lately, so I might try to switch to different blog software if I can’t install an effective patch.

Today I also took a trip downtown to Borders and grabbed some manga with the discount coupon from my Borders e-mail-out and the gift-card I got for Christmas from Chris. Cheers, Chris!

Well, today I woke up to one of my extra-nerd points: a nosebleed. I don’t know why I get them, I just do. One minute I’m asleep or half-asleep, next minute I feel a pressure shift in my nose and I need to stuff my nose with tissues or start drinking my own blood. Not a great way to wake up I assure you, but it does wake you up, that’s for sure.

Today I spent most of the day working on my Animator project. I implemented all of the required curves and started working on my hierarchical model. I thought of something quite cool (well, I think it’s cool) – I’m going to model the user’s space-ship from an old-school game, Descent. Especially in the absence of any suggestions from my adoring readers. Not that you had a lot of time to make suggestions mind you, but hey, life goes on.

I bussed around to Greg’s and had dinner with him, then went out for coffee at “Third Place Books”. Had an interesting discussion with Greg about the educational systems of New Zealand and the US and had a very surreal moment – right on the shelf next to me, at eye level to where I was sitting, was Waterland by Graham Swift, the novel I studied somewhat extensively in 7^th form English. I’m sure Robbie will commiserate with me about this book… in any case, it was something of a shock to have it right in front of my face again. There was even a copy in the same cover that I had back in school. Weird.

Far out… I worked on this project until 6am and didn’t even notice. That’s not a good thing, right? Well… I’ve got a working model though. ^^;;

Well, I ended up sleeping for a very long time… which means I need the sleep. I had a shower, all the usual getting up stuff, then got stuck into doing some emails, my perpetual activity. I do wonder sometimes if I’ll ever get to a point where I only deal with the emails that come in on that day. Unlikely.

After responding to my emails for a while, I finished watching an anime movie I started yesterday, then started looking into some work stuff. After doing that for a while I had dinner and watched some television (Sci-Fi Friday!), then did some more work. Actually, I did a lot more work, periodically getting food and drink. Did a very small bit on my graphics assignment, but today was mostly just a work day. A bit frustrating actually, because a bunch of features that I need to implement for one site can only actually work if I extend/change the framework underneath, which is a bit of a pain to say the least. If I have time tomorrow after my graphics work, that’s my next job.