So, this week one of my alternate research plans fell through. I had been planning on making a wireless glove interface for the Wii that is around the cost of current Wii peripherals. I had looked into the kind of bending sensors I was going to use, had some ideas about 3D positioning using a Wii remote and some clever infra-red stuff (similar to some of Johnny Lee’s research) and investigated a lot of other current projects and so on that are commercially available. However, when I looked into the research community, there was something similar that was published about three years ago. I would be using different technology, different protocols and with a different end objective, but there wouldn’t be enough about my research that was novel enough for it to be research, so when I presented this at the meeting this week, my supervisor suggested I quit pursuing it. I still think it’s a cool idea and would love to make some games for it for the Wii, but it’ll have to be relegated to a personal project for now (which means that it’ll probably never get done unless I have some strong motivation or a collaborator, given that my backburner list is pretty long). I don’t know – what does the Void think? Would a wireless glove for the Wii be worth upping in my backburner priority list?

Classes are still hard, I’m still not following as much as I’d like. I started my UI assignment, which is writing some interface stuff for controlling robots. I wrote the simple version of a mouse interface pretty quickly, but that’s pretty boring. I’ll get the automatic algorithm out of the way, then look at some different ways of interacting with the software that would be more interesting. Heck, maybe I can write interaction with a Wii remote as practice… anyone have an opinion?

Worth mentioning I think is that at the start of this week, True Blood started up again. I quite enjoyed the previous season and have been looking forward to it starting back up again. I haven’t read the books that the series is based on, but I hear that apart from going a little slowly, the series is staying quite true to the books, which is always a good thing. I recently finished watching the first season of Legend of the Seeker, which is based on Wizard’s First Rule (by Terry Goodkind), which I did a re-read of after finishing the season. There are a number of things about that series that I just didn’t like. I mean, I get that you have to adapt a certain amount of the material so that it fits into a television format – most books aren’t exactly written episodically, after all. But there were a bunch of things that I found just fundamentally weird about the whole thing. Part of it, I think, is that Legend of the Seeker was licensed by Disney and wasn’t licensed by HBO or the likes, which means that most the adult elements and themes to the book (and there are plenty) are just completely glossed over, and that strips out a lot of the important elements of the story because they’re trying to target a different audience than the book. On the whole, if you can separate the series as being a different thing from the book then you’ll probably be fine… but for those of you that haven’t seen the series yet, I would suggest you read the book(s) first so you can get a better impression of how the story and characters are supposed to hang together. It’s been renewed for a second season and again I would make the same recommendation – read the books first, watch the series second.

While I’m on the topic of things to watch, this week Anastasia and I went to our local movie theatre and watched Star Trek and Terminator 4. I also joined the movie club… and racked up a few points for the both of us going to a couple of movies. I later tried to work out how to register for their online service (all in Japanese), but while I could slowly make progress, I eventually ran into an error that informed me I was outside the registration period. Ah well. As for my opinions on the movies, I enjoyed both of them! Star Trek was a lot of fun, with a lot of nods back to the old stuff… I was initially a little concerned with the casting of Karl Urban as Bones, but once I saw him in the film, I think it worked out really well. It certainly never would have occurred to me to cast him for that role, but he played it very well. I enjoyed how they adapted it for a new audience and I can certainly see them having a good run of these new movies for quite a while yet, assuming they have good scripts. Terminator I also really enjoyed… I think they took it in a new direction, which they needed to because they’d sort of used up the sending-back-in-time routine with the previous films (and the series for that matter, although I haven’t seen that yet). I thought that Sam Worthington did a fabulous job, and I’m looking forward to seeing him in other films in the future. Moon Bloodgood, who I know mostly from her role on the sadly not renewed Journeyman, was extremely talented and still very hot. Also in movie news, Transformers 2 came out in Japan yesterday. No, I haven’t seen it yet. Yes, I will see it soon, try not to spoil it for me!

On Monday this week I also visited the National Institute of Radiological Sciences with Anastasia. The Engineering school held a tour for the international students (for free), which was pretty cool. I got to go see particle accelerators and how they get used for medical purposes. The visit was more up Anastasia’s alley than mine in terms of specific research area, so I was usually gawking at the software they use and trying to work that out… that and the medical imaging stuff, which is fairly related to some of the stuff that I can do research on – computer vision. It’s not really the focus of my lab, but it’s something I could look into some more I suppose.

I had a random conversation with Ruby this week about Tlazoteotl, the Aztec goddess of filth. I suspect if I was going to have any kind of deity affinity, it would probably be one like her. Both the source of and absolution from lustful sin. Sounds like my kind of goddess!

Earlier in the week I looked over my list of anime and manga that I have on the go, or want to watch/read (and have watched/read, for that matter) and it highlighted for me once more that I really should write a little program to manage that stuff for me. I keep meaning to, and it keeps getting relegated to my aforementioned rather long backburner list. What does the Void think? If there was a site you could log into to keep track of what you’re watching/reading, what you want to watch/read (and what you have watched/read through the history if nothing else)… would you use it? For that matter, is there something out there that does this already that I just haven’t discovered yet? I mean, AniDB (which I use often) has something similar just for anime, but it isn’t quite what I want it to do. There are a bunch of other sites that have communities built around the individual things… for that matter, I’m a member of Flixster as well, which is a similar for movies, although I don’t really update it very often. None of them really keep tabs on what you’re doing in the way that I’d like, and certainly not in one unified place. Well, would other people use something like that if I made one?

While I’m talking about my personal projects, I decided today to scrap updating my financial spreadsheets, and just use the online system I built (LeithBank). Hopefully this will motivate me to work on it some more and get in some more of the functionality that I want/need to use it for proper analysis.

Ian told me he had his first professional commission for music this week! I’m really happy for him, although we both had a bit of a laugh about him really needing to have his portfolio updated and online. ^^

My medical checkup at the university was this week. I dropped more weight, although I knew that was going to happen. I blame my regular basketball. I think I’m going to need to start getting serious about putting some muscle back on… more muscle-building exercise, eating more foods to help with that kind of thing. Anyway, I apparently grew 4mm since last year, which puts me at a little over 182cm… but still shy of being six feet. By 6.8mm. Ah well, I’m six feet with shoes on I guess.

Yesterday Anastasia and I got some more stuff for the apartment for free… well, we had to pay for the transport, but that was waaaaay below the value. We got a TV (and stand), a new couch and a bunch of little things like power boards and so on. I’m not sure what we’re doing with my old (smaller, less comfortable) couch just yet – maybe put it up on Craigslist? We’re probably going to get some shelving for the kitchen as well, but I’m not sure yet.

It’s a bit irritating that I keep falling behind on my journal. I mean, I take notes about what I do everyday, I just need to put them into entries. I don’t think I’m really the micro-blogging type, so I don’t think I’ll be using Twitter, despite its massive rise in popularity and use as a communication medium. I don’t think writing everyday would work, because there’d be too much dross… I need to cut out some of the unimportant details or I’d bore myself to death writing them. Still, my once-a-week entries seem to be getting a bit more epic lately, so maybe I should try writing a couple of times a week to make it more manageable? Who knows. I had some weird dreams this weekend that I’m going to defer to writing about later.