Grading from the trace project came back and Mario managed to get refraction totally wrong… and since I didn’t want to obsessively have to correct everything he did because it was horrible, I didn’t catch it. Annoying.

Anyway, other than that I actually managed to get up (relatively) early after a reasonable 7 or so hours of sleep. This meant I actually had time to exercise, check my email and agonise over my homework some more before I went in, printed it off and went to class.

Today’s graphics class was so intense my head hurt. It was a lot of linear algebra to do with eigenvectors and eigenvalues… while I had heard of these from Josh when he took the linear algebra course at Canterbury, I had never actually known what they were or learnt anything about them. So, much in the same way that they assume I have a college-level understanding of physics (or even high school for that matter, I have no idea), they assume college-level linear algebra, none of which I’ve done. Graphics is extremely hardcore about theoretical models then coming up with complex mathematical approximations.

You know, after doing all this graphics stuff, I really want to do my research in it for the next couple of quarters but I don’t know if I’m good enough. My assignments so far have been around the 98% mark (could’ve been a lot higher, but hey, I’ve already ranted about that), but my written homework on the theory aspects was 52% for the first one (well below average), and I’m not expecting something much better for this homework I’ve just handed in considering the amount I left blank (much the same as the first one). What does this tell me? Well, it appears that the theory I do know, I know how to communicate. Other things I’m totally useless at expressing. Practically speaking though, I’m pretty damn good. My issue now is that I’m still stuck in academia, where there’s a really strong correlation between getting the theory right and having something cool working in the practical.

Anyway, back at the office I did some email… actually a lot of email. Churned out an invoice then managed to screw up my virtual drive system… again. Stupid backup system does it almost every time. After that I went down to another Microsoft event on how to get an internship (not necessarily just one at Microsoft as it turns out), but got there three minutes after the food started, so naturally there was none left. Yeesh. No free stuff for me this time, but it was a really cool presentation and some useful tips. I say that because I’ve never had to interview for a job before. The interviews I’ve had have all been academically oriented and those I’ve been able to handle extremely well. The actual jobs that I’ve had before I started this owning my own business gig were recommendation-based – my ‘interview’ consisted of me showing up to talk to them and ‘getting the job’ on the spot. So the idea of a technical interview for an internship is totally foreign. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, really. I guess at some point I’ll have to interview other people to find out whether or not they’d make good LeithCorp minions, but that’s a wee way off. So what do I do in the mean time? I guess I figure out how to interview technically.

Ok, so I ended up doing emails and business stuff for ages. I also started my application for the BNZ Undergraduate Scholarship, which has been knocking around my hard drive after an exchange with the officials asking if I could still apply as an overseas student. Apparently yes (and I was encouraged to apply) as long as my grades are good. Which they are.

I hoofed it up the Ave and managed to snake in and get burritos for dinner (and get a free drink upgrade to the massive size… on a free drink! Wohoo!) then is was back to the apartment to chill and watch television while I ate before digging into more email, more business organisational bollocks and readings for tomorrow’s class.

As a side note, I also finally got the photos from Kat’s camera from my 21st last year, which means I think I have copies of everyone’s. I’m not sure though. I don’t even vaguely imagine that all of the people who came to my 21st actually read this, far from it. But I’ve now got 346 photos of the event I think… so next up on my list is to go through and label them all and compile my ‘Best Of’ CD, which I’ll be putting together when I have time (which will be on one of my longer breaks, sorry for those who were expecting this any time soon).