Tash got home and came to talk to me immediately. She said the letter was nice but she just wanted to stay friends. It was a little dissapointing but not totally unexpected. Seeing her smiling face as she stood there and finally talking to me openly about this topic just made it all worth it. While it's not the answer I wanted, at least I know and can stop torturing myself. She added that "they" have to get me out of the house and seeing girls. Interesting that she said "we", I guess she's already pretty serious about her new guy. They're going out for dinner tonight. One odd thing was that she said she was "too old" for me. She's 31 and I'm 26. Is 5 years that big a difference?

Now I have to try to get some rest. I've been on an adrenaline rush for about 12 hours now. I didn't sleep well after I put the letter on her car.

Ok, it's done. I wrote a letter, printed it out, folded it up, and delivered to the wind-screen wiper of Natasha's car. Some obsatcles though. Firstly, a spider had decided it was a good time to spin a large web in the derilict car-port, right in front of her car. Fairly big too. I hate spiders, I'm sure you do too. Web destroyed and spider squashed, I found the second obstacle. An object. A red square. A red envelope already pinned under a wiper. Damn! I'd been outdone, and right under my nose! Thoughts initially turned to tearing up the letter or even just opening it to see who it was from. It was sealed. And it was soaked! The sudden down-pour around midnight had left it soggy. I wonder if the ink inside ran. So there is an advantage of living with your target and being able to jump out your window at 5:30am. So, jumping back in through my bedroom window (thankfully that hadn't turned out to be the obstacle I had feared) I wrote a post-it note. Just a quick note to lighten the mood. Back out the window and the letter was delivered, note attached.

I was surpised at my reaction to the "competition". Firstly one of curiosity. When did he do it? Does he live close?
Some rather animalistic instincts came up too. Sort of like ruining a rival birds nest or something. But in the end I actually felt relieved. It was like "I'm in the club now". I felt like I belonged to something. And it will maybe take some of the focus off of me, although that might not be a good thing.

Well, here's to the future. I've turned a page. I've told Natasha that I want to be with her and maybe even be more than just friends. This is a big step in my life. It might sound stupid or pathetic, but I've never done anything as brash as this, telling a girl how I feel about them romantically. Lets hope it goes well.

I'll write another journal entry with the results. Natasha should be home in around an hour.

Sorry if I sounded a little harsh in my last journal entry. I guess I was angry at myself for expecting everyones' advice to magically fix my problems without me putting any effort in. So as a small update for the last two weeks- I haven't done anything and I think Natasha is getting semi-serious with a new guy. He's been over a number of times and Natasha has been going out a lot more. This breaks my heart, but I think I have a small solution to my communications problem.

As we all know Friday is valentines day, just two sleeps away for me here. Since I have so much trouble telling Natasha how I feel about her I thought I could break the ice with a valentines card. I could even make it myself instead of just buying one.

So, since I've neither given nor received a valentines day card/letter/note/whatever, I wondered if you guys could give me a little help with these mysterious tokens of affection. Here are my thoughts and questions:

• v-day stuff is usually fairly light hearted and playful, right? So I shouldn't come out with the heavy stuff about how I've wanted her for years and how I suffered watching her with the last guy.
• I'd like to sign/close it with "The guy trapped inside Ians' head" and add "please help me escape!". That is how I often feel - trapped in a goofs' body, unable to do the things I want. It could also take some of the directness out of what I have to say.
• Write some text or (non-rhyming) poetry. Further to the last point, something like "I have a mouth yet I can not speak".
• I was thinking I could attach it to her car at the train station while she's at work, or maybe slip it in an open window. Or should I put it on her car for her to find first thing in the morning? What sort of timing should I use? Should she get it in the morning and have it all day, or when she's just getting home? Knowing my luck, she'd find some way to stuff me up unintentionally, like going out with her new guy straight after work. So maybe first thing in the morning would be a safer delivery. But it feels "riskier".

I don't know what else to add. I hope I have the guts to go through with this. Comments?

Update: First draft before I go to bed. I do all my best thinking in the shower :)

I have watched you all these years
and held my toungue.
Now that you are free
I still can not speak.
I am trapped
in this form.
Won't you set me free?

The guy trapped in Ians head.

Thoughts?

Update 2: Ooh boy, T-4 hours. I've printed out the letter and folded it. I decided to go with a more direct text. Here's what I finally wrote:

Natasha, you're a wonderful person.
You have been my friend for many years
and nothing could be more precious to me.
Now I want to spend more time with you
and get to know you better.
Maybe even become more than just friends.

What do you say?

It's printed out and I've folded it up. The only problem is the weather. It rained around midnight but it didn't last too long. Now I could either wait around another few hours to see how the weather goes and place the letter at the last moment if it's still good. Or I could perhaps wrap it up in cling(sarin)-wrap to keep it dry. Somehow that doesn't seem as classy. I wouldn't think she left any of the windows open, even a little, certainly not overnight. Although, can't you force electric windows down a bit? All I need is a few millimetres to push the letter through. And I still haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to get out of my bedroom window and back in.
Wish me luck!

I thought I should put a note here about recent events. Yes, I saw your little request Flamesplash. Nothing has happened, and I don't want my difficulties to be a little soap-opera for your entertainment (no, I'm not picking on you specifically Flamesplash). I want to handle this on my own, so I've disabled comments on this post. I'm a procrastinator and as I've already noted, all the talk of "cheap places to take her out to" is only getting me ahead of myself. My real problem is in communicating my feelings. This is something I have to work through myself.

Tschus

Thanks to everyone that replied to my last journal. I'll write an update when/if anything happens, that's only fair. But for now I'm taking it slowly. One problem is that with Natshas parents here, we're not alone to talk like we often were last year. Patience...

I don't put much faith in astrology, but it's interesting to look at every now and then. Just for a laugh, you know. I found a nice long page about the scorpio sign. While I agree with a lot of it (ever notice that these sort of things are put in a flatering way?), there's some I don't. Both me and Natasha are scorpios. Is that a bad sign? This and this don't seem to think it's so good. Oh well. We'll see.

I also found a page of Chinese zodiac readings. Oh, did I mention that Tash is chinese? Oops, I just broke one of Interrobangs rules. Oh, and she's a non-geek. Dang, that's two.

Anyway, I was born in 1976 which makes me the year of the dragon. Hmm, a scorpion and a dragon. Does that make me a tough bastard or something?

Dragon
Make a special effort and you will see a noticeable improvement in your social status.

Well duh, but thanks for the tip. I am in a rut at the moment.

<snip>
Your love affairs will run the risk of becoming entangled and will not give you all the satisfactions you expect from them.

Oh bugger. But it did say "love affairs" - plural. All right!

The base on which your physical equilibrium rests may become shaky.

And just what is my physical equilibrium? My sense of balance? I dunno, these astrology people have some weird language sometimes.

And now since I'm an obsessive scorpio, here's Natashas. She was born in 1971, which was the year of the pig. oink!

Pig
Your love life may feel burdened by monotony and routine, so appeal to your imagination for help.

Does that apply to me? or the ex? Perhaps I'm the one to break her monotonic love life?

<snip>
You'll have stormy relationships with your entourage, at work and in your home.

Oh double bugger.

However, you'll be well disposed to make concessions and to recognize your errors.

Erm, yay, no wait... um. I'm confused.

yeah, big surprise. Star charts are mostly fluff anyway.

Quick update: Check out full descriptions of chinese zodiac signs and compatibility comparisons in the chinese zodiac. Gung hai fat choi!

The Dragon and the Pig make wonderful couples. Each is warm-hearted and will provide the other with the tenderness they need. As long as they respect one another's differences they will flourish in a loving relationship. Their overall compatibility rating is 80%.

And now for something completely different...

I have a problem. It's been growing for many years and now I feel like I'm going to burst.
My problem is my housemate of 4.5 years running, Natsha. She's an attractive young (actually older than me) woman. And she has got to be the nicest person I have ever met. I don't think I'd ever be able to repay everything she has done for me. Because of this, I have very strong feelings for her. I adore her, I am utterly infatuated with her.

Now I fear I may lose her. Firstly is my hope of going back to university to finish my degree. Although it's very late, I may still be able to get in as a part-time student. But that's back in Bathurst. Natsha's parents own this house and I rent one room. A few times we've had someone in the third bedroom, but me and Tash are the only two long-term tennants. Tash has said that if I move out, then she will too. Her parents want to do-up the place and rent the whole house to a family. She'd have trouble finding somewhere that would let her keep her pet dog. So I feel like I'd be both losing Tash and inconveniencing her terribly if I left.

The second problem is my feelings for Natasha. She has just broken up with a long-term (5/6 years?) boyfriend. Just tonight she got all done up and went out "for coffee". So now I'm afraid that she's going to be seeing guys again and I'm left thinking "hey what about me?". How should I let her know how I feel about her, without blurting out "I love you!" and scaring her? I don't know how she feels about me. For all I know, I might not be much past "that weird guy who hardly ever comes out of his room" in her view. I'm not even sure exactly how I feel about her. Should I simply try to become a closer friend?

I really need help here folks.

Update: Thanks for the advice people. I think I'll take it subtley like flamesplash suggests. I had originally thought that I would "have a talk" to her and tell her how I feel, but on second thoughts that would be a little too confrontational. I'll try to work something into conversation. Work up to it and test the waters, I suppose.

This has been rather cathartic. I guess I needed to let out some of my pent-up feelings about Tash, and this quasi-public arena was a good start. Now I just have to go about actually letting her know how I feel, and finding out how she feels about me. There's always a first time for everything. Wish me luck!

With my recent wealth of christmas/birthday presents (I really only get money anymore) I went out and bought a USBdrive. $AUS68 for 32MiB from Dick Smith Electronics in case there are any other aussies looking around.

Here are my adventures with the USBdrive:

• I first compiled a new Linux kernel with the usb-storage module. I could have just compiled the module, but I wanted to update as well.
• With usb-storage it shows up as a SCSI disk.
• It came with a VFAT fs on the whole device (/dev/sda).
• With fdisk I put a DOS partition on it, then made a 4MiB partition (/dev/sda1) and put a VFAT fs on it. This will be for things like my resume. I hope Winders will recognize the partition table.
• A second partition (/dev/sda2) holds an enrypted ext2 fs. I use the (seemingly outdated) international kernel patch. 256-bit Twofish sounds pretty un-crackable, I hope. So far I only use this area to store a backup of my ~/.gnupg directory. Who knows what else I will store here, you certainly won't! :)
• The big lid/cover thingy was a bit loose which made it rather impractical. Two small pieces of Magic Tape(TM) on the main body added enough thickness to make a firmer fit. No doubt the texture of the tape helped as well. Now I don't have a problem with carrying it in my pocket attached to my keyring.

I spent some time debugging the hotplug subsystem because I had this crazy idea of auto-mounting the device upon insertion. I made a script in /etc/hotplug/usb/usb-storage to mount it and stuff. I found that hotplug only ran the script if the specific module (e.g usb-storage) wasn't already loaded (i.e the first time). So I fixed that but then realized that I didn't really want to do things that way. In the end I just added an entry to the Mtools config file. I now have a u: drive that I can use with mdir/mcopy/mmkdir/etc...

In other news, I got a Harry Potter poster book and have been busy scanning in the posters. This is made difficult by the fact that the posters are just a little too big for my A4/letter-sized scanner. So I have to do two side-by-side scans and join them together. And I have to cope with the half-toning patterns as well. I'm getting better at that although it's still not perfect. But I still get nice big images in the range of 2.5K x 3.5K. Good for scaling/cropping down to 1600x1200 for wallpaper. Certainly much better than scaling up crappy 800x600 or 1024x768 jpeg's from some losers' web site.

So now I have a few good Hermione wallpaper pictures. The way i see it, a lot of guys have cute girls as their wallpaper. Only, Hermione really is a girl :P

Update: Actually, the Hermione pictures/posters aren't that good. I must try to get the poster book for the first movie. Hermione was absolutely adorable in that one. For now the Quidditch poster is my wallpaper. It has Harry reaching out for the little winged gizmo, looking front-on at him. It's landscape so it's easy to adapt to a wallpaper, plus it's bright and colourful with good detail and action.

I just made a little post on the Mt. Stromlo fire story and I thought I'd post the link here too. You see I have a digital temperature sensor in the garden outside the house as well as two inside. On Saturday it hit 42 degrees (107-108 farenheit) outside. It was incredibly hot. And I have the graph to show it. That huge peak is Saturday, with Sunday after it on the right. I'm glad it was a one-off.

The house is thankfully double-brick which kept it merely warm (31C/88F) inside. But the lounge room out the back is an obvious add-on, with thin walls and a simple tin roof. It was like an oven out there. And where did my housemate and her visiting parents spend most of the day? uh huh, in the lounge room. By the way, this is in Roseville, in the northern suburbs of Sydney. The Sydney CBD (just south of the harbour) is a half-hour train ride away. Several posters said that Paramatta (out west) got up to 45C (113F). I'll have to ask my brother and his wife what it was like out that way :)

Yay, I'm back home. I got back Tuesday (14th) evening. After the amount of travelling I'd done during the previous few weeks, the 3 hour train trip was nothing. Lets see: 14 hour on a train to Brisbane, then a 2 hour drive to Kingaroy. Driving around with the family was perhaps 5-6 hours over the first week. Then to move to Bathurst, we drove over two days - 4 hours on the first and 8 the next.

So, it's back to my Linux boxen and my 19" flat Hitachi monitor. No more little 1024x768 displays on 14-15" monitors. No more single desktop. No more SSH'ing over to the familys Linux server just to get to a proper godamn command line. No more seeking permission just to get on the net. No more click-to-focus or hitting ctrl-c/ctrl-v just to copy and paste. No more going without porn :P

It's also back to my recently-single housemate. Her (unfaithful) boyfriend moved all his shit out over the holidays and boy does the place look empty. I should perhaps write something about that drama, but I'm still not sure how much to go into it. I'm asking again for guidelines/suggestions.

Anyway, I'm trying to get in extra-late into a Uni course. Hopefully I can get in part-time at CSU Mitchell where I started my course back in 1995. Mum would love that and has been pushing me to come home for ages, but I don't think I'd like to go back to living with my family. Mum has a habit of, well, mothering me too much. And any amount of responsibility or self-discipline I have goes out the window when my parents take over. I'd much rather find a flat or apartment in town and live there. My 19-year-old brother might also want to move out, so there's the possibility of sharing a place with him. But it's hard to get anything out of him lately, so who knows if he would go along with it.

Better go soon. My brother and his wife are coming over so we can see 8 Mile on its opening night.

Update: 8 Mile was good. Eminem is my hero. But we (26, 24, and 23) must have been the oldest there. The cinema was full of rich, white, australian, gangsta-wannabe teenagers and their teeny-slut girlfriends. They started clapping with the music at the start, and they made general noise (chatting and laughing) during the slower parts. Chatswood (north sydney) is a pretty up-market kinda place, so god knows how these spoiled brats identify with Eminem. Still, a great movie for fans of Eminem, rap and hip-hop.

Hope you all had a merry christmas and will have a happy new year. It's coming up to midnight as I start this, so this entry will span two years :)

I'm still up here in little Kingeroy with my parents and youngest brother. The two grandparents each left a few days ago. It's been decided that I stay and help move back down to Bathurst. Oh joy of joys. That's next week. I'll only stay a little and then it's back to my lonely housemate in Sydney. I might relate her recent dramas in another journal entry. What's the consensus about how much I should write? I've been involved with both her and her ex for the last several years, but the split and stuff doesn't really involve me. Or maybe I'm just downplaying my part.

A slight correction since my last entry. The weather is actually quite nice this year. Apprently 'locals' have told mum and/or dad that last years summer was exceptionally hot. It's barely got above 30 degrees this year. The only problem remains that this house does not seem to be well ventilated. The partially-underground bottom floor is bad. The spare room that Scott and I have been sleeping in only has one small window. This computer room only has a small window into the garage. With three computers and at least two people in it, it can get kinda warm.

So what have I been doing? We travelled around a bit with the grandparents, but that always involves multi-hour car trips. Still, lots of scenery and photos taken. Here's a photo of me in front of Kingeroy, Peanut centre of Australia. You can kind of see the peanut silos behind me. So, am I as much of a mug as Interrobang?

I ended up playing lots of games on the familys' windoze computers. Little Linux geek me, I don't often play games. It's either StarCraft or TotalAnnihilation under Wine, or maybe even Loki's native Linux port of Civ:CTP. Anyway, lots of network TA playing with my 13 year-old brother (Scott). Then he introduced me to DiabloII on Christmas eve. By Christmas evening, my amazon was up to level 18 or something and kicking some ass. Maybe I shouldn't try to brag since I've never played it before and have nothing to compare my performance with, but it was a lot of fun. The only distraction was the almost constant crashing of windoze and/or DiabloII.

As the administrator of the familys' Linux network server, I've had a lot to sort out. Actually, not that much. But me being me, I end up breaking a lot of stuff before fixing it. LDAP, Samba, Cyrus, you name it. Samba has been a problem. For the life of me I cannot get the 3.0 alpha in Debian sid to work properly, even with an existing working config file. I would really like to use it because it has native LDAP support, instead of depending on the PAM-LDAP module for authentication.

Debian seems to have upgraded to version 2.0 of Postfix already, and that seems to have installed without a hitch. Email's still running fine.

I got to see LOTR:TTT the other day with Mum and Scott. I'd forgotten how long FOTR had seemed. Bloody good, but bloody long. The big battle was pretty awesome, but I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I had heard that it was big and everything. I kept watching it thinking "is this the big bit now?". Like many have said, the Gimli jokes started to wear thin after a while. He seemed to be more for comic relief than anything.

In preparation for seeing the second Harry Potter movie, I had to see the first one. My dad has managed to borrow a video projector from work for this christmas holiday. In the same "spare room" that Scott and I sleep in, they've set up a mini theatre. The picture is projected on a double bed sheet that is hung from a long (5m?) piece of wood and suspended from a drain pipe by a c-clamp. Unfortunately, this morning it decided to fall and hit me on the head as I was just getting up out of bed. We've also got a decent little stereo-with-sub-woofer speaker system. So it's not surround, but it's still pretty good.

Anyway, I got to watch the Harry Potter:The philosophers' stone DVD on this setup. It's interesting to see the contrast between the "hardcore" magical world of J.R.R.T in LOTR, and the "kiddy" magic in Harry Potter. Of course, Harry Potter doesn't even compare with LOTR, but that's not the point. It was very entertaining and a lot of fun to watch. And it's nice to hear some british/scottish accents on the big screen. Nothing personal, but the American accent gets a little annoying after a while. Don't tell anyone, but I think Hermione/Emma Watson is kinda cute, even if she does over-act some parts :P

Wow, this has been a long entry. I guess it shows how boring my life is the rest of the year. I might write more later, but this is the bulk for now.

Happy new year everyone!

Yes even though I am down here in Oz, I am dreaming of snow this christmas. But only because I'm heading up to Queensland to face 35C (~94F) heat. My family isn't from Queensland. My Dad got a contract job up there this past year and so that's where they've been. Although "they" is just Mum, Dad, and the youngest - Scott. I'm the eldest of four boys. Us eldest two have moved out, and the next one has been "minding" the family home in Bathurst while they're gone. They moved last year at the beginning of December, so this will be the second and (hopefully) last christmas spent in Queensland.

I know my Mum and Dad have about a million and one things for me to fix on the Linux server I've administered for them for over 5-6 years now. Being able to do things over a SSH link is great, but still not as good as being there. Especially when things go REALLY wrong. Recently the ancient 10G WD hard disk started failing and giving weird errors. Thankfully they got a brand-spanking-new 40G IBM disk in time. I was on the phone to my mum walking her through moving enough stuff over to get it to boot and get online, then I took over from there. The funny thing is that my Mum seems to be picking up the Linux CLI better than my Dad, as well as well as lots of hardware knowledge with upgrading memory and disks and things. The reason it's funny is that my Dad is an Electrical Engineer and from what he's told me, I gather he's had experience with computers since the 70's. And Mum is just an ordinary "house wife". way to go ma!

Anyway, I'm off on a train this thursday. It's a little earlier than I had wanted, but I left the booking a little late it's the only thing I could get. I get to spend 3 weeks with my family and my lonesome youngest brother. He's missed his big brothers since he's become a virtual only child. And I'm his favourite because I'm the nicest to him :)

How the hell do you kill 14 hours on a train? For a start, I'm taking my Discman and a good selection of CD's. (My personal stereo technology isn't up to MP3's yet. Hopefully by the time I can afford a new player they'll be some good Ogg Vorbis players). I'll probably put a dent in Cryptonomicron. Boy, I used to chew through books when I was working and had to commute on trains and/or buses every day. I've had Cryptonomicron a couple years now I think, and I'm only half way through it. Previously, I would have finished a book like that in a few weeks.

Tschuss!

Update: Damn, it looks like my Discman doesn't like 80min CDR's. It's only a few years old! I don't think I have any 74min CDR's any more. Oh well, I've got a good CD collection anyway.

LinuxToday is reporting that MS is going to be back "exhibiting" at Linux World Expo next year. Last year they were in the rookery since they were a first-timer, but this year they of course get to be out in the regular area. Let me join the chorus of people saying "kick them out".

Does MS make make a Linux distribution? NO.
Does MS make any product for Linux or the other Open Source operating systems? NO.
Does MS make a product based on Linux? NO.
Does MS support any Open Source projects? NO.
Has MS done anything for Linux or the Open Source world? You mean apart from opposing it at every possibility, and spreading FUD? NO.

MS has made it abundantly clear on many occassions over many years that it fears and opposes Linux and GPL licensed software in general. As many in the LT talkbacks opined, MS is just there to grab fence-sitting or opportunistic people over to their "side", and to try to improve their image. Don Brock's comment suggests they could even be trying to kill off the exhibition in the long-term by driving people away.

I remember a case earlier this year where the roles were almost reversed. A vendor was exhibiting at an MS-sponsored expo. IIRC, this vendor provided a mixed bunch of solutions, some of which were based on Linux. One of the employees attending the expo had stuck on the wall of their booth a bunch of pro-linux newspaper clippings. It was all set up the night before the expo, but the following day the clippings had been removed by one of the representatives of the expo. Does anyone else remember this incident? I can't seem to find it on LT.

Kick 'em out.

It was nice to see the response to my last journal entry in EnlightenmentFan's journal entry and the responses. It's nice to at least know that someone is listening and may be in a similar position. But now I'd like to do something different. I'd like to take a moment to write about the code I'm working on at the moment.

Early this year I started on a rendering system I called "PR" for Photo Realistic.... or Photo Render... or something. I can't remember exactly. It's a ray-tracer and I worked on it on-and-off for most of the year. It produced some good images and even a simple animation. But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. So about a month ago I decided to abandon PR and start on a new system using the lessons I've learnt from PR.

This new system, that I'm calling "Oktopus", will have some important changes. Whereas I originally tried to make PR as general as I possible, Oktopus will be more focused and purposeful. Among the changes:

1. Update to using GCC 3.2.
   PR was developed using the GCC 3.0 C++ compiler (g++-3.0 under Debian), so this isn't a very big change. Mostly just changing <iostream.h>'s to <iostream>'s, and adding using namespace std to a few places.
2. Use STL types instead of my own templates.
   So, use string instead of char *. Instead of PrList<type>, use vector<type>. And instead of PrHash<type>, use map<string,type>. It at least allows me to throw out a lot of shakey code :P
3. Remove some of the more "creative" elements from the renderer.
   In particular, the more powerful curves and animation functionality will be moved to a seperate animator. The renderer will do just as the name suggests, render individual frames. An animator program (possibly written in Perl) will pull in individual objects and evaluate animation curves. In the renderer objects will still have a transformation stack, but only linear interpolation will be used. Objects will now be in a tree structure, so transformations are inherited. And lastly a frame's timescale will be normalized to 0<=t<1 by the animator.
4. Forget about the REYES algorithm.
   For a while I was looking at implementing REYES alongside ray-tracing. But I've since changed my mind about REYES. I thought that it would be an easy way to render (true) displacement-mapping, but then I remembered reflections, refractions, and global illumination. Simply put, scan-line alogrithms are centred too much around the frame buffer. They have to render temporary images to even approximate reflections or refractions, or even shadows! For me, this is too much of a hack. I'd rather make a pure all-ray-tracer and focus on methods to accelerate the ray-object intersection search. Which brings me to the next point-
5. Use oct-tree datastructure to organize the scene - hence the name Oktopus.
   Borrowing from Radiance, hopfully the oct-tree datastructure will give me the speed and efficiency to throw around a lot of rays. However, borrowing from REYES I plan to slice objects into smaller pieces before putting them into the oct-tree. I hope that this will give the added efficiency to do expensive displacement mapping. I'm still not sure how to do DM with ray-tracing apart from doing a whole bunch of searching/scanning. I wonder if there are any little tricks to speading it up. Anyway, hopefully (I'm very hopeful aren't I?) the oct-tree and slicing will reduce the number of times that these expensive tests have to be performed on displacement-mapped objects.

I've just started on moving some of the code over from PR. I've got the Base and BaseMath parent classes moved over and cleaned up and I've almost finished doing the same for the math classes - Scalar, Vector, Quaternion, and Matrix. Come to think of it, I think I only needed the Scalar wrapper class for my template code that has now been replaced by the STL types, so I can probably remove that. I've also moved over the xml module and clean some of it up, but haven't tested it. *shudder* Now there's some messy code I need to clean up.

This is getting pretty long so I should leave it at that for now. I have a Centrelink form to fill out.
bye

That first entry was a little down, dontcha think? I was pretty down recently, but I'm not sure how much I should write here because it invloves my housemates. For this entry I think I'll try to be a little proactive.

Like a lot of geeks here on slashdot, I have pretty bad social skills. I'm so bad that my Mum is starting to ask the occassional question and my 7-year-younger brother has gotten himself a girlfriend before I have.

So I've identified three areas that I think I should focus on:

1. Improve my self-esteem and confidence.
   I'm not sure how to go about this, and will probably be somewhat of a catch-22. Perhaps I should try to think more positively about the things that I'm doing and have done. This could also be good for job hunting.
2. Improve my conversation skills.
   Try to listen to how other people handle conversations. Would TV interviewers be a good place to start? I'm a hacker, so learn to hack verbal communications. A little bit of social engineering, in a way.
3. Improve my body language.
   This could be the hardest to change. I had what I thought was an epiphany about this the other day. I realised that all the years of bullying and harassment at high-school had made me good at hiding and avoiding confrontations. Or, if not good at it, then I at least subconsciously try to achieve it. My eye-contact is bad. I've known that for a while but I think I'm getting better at holding eye contact when talking to people. If I'm to meet people, especially girls, I need to look aproachable.

Addendum: EnlightenmentFan followed this topic up with some good tips for geeks, and Interrobang had something to say about seducing geeks. Some good links in that last one.

Here goes my first entry here. I'm not sure how much I should include here, since I already have a quasi-news/journal bit on my own little homepage, plus my own private journal.

Perhaps i should introduce myself for the few people who consider me a friend.

My real name is Ian. I'll leave you to figure out my nick, apart from giving the hint "Vulcans". I chose my nick quite a few years ago and it has served me well. I use it in a number of places online, and it seems to be pretty unique.

Now, to myself. Imagine a bright, outgoing, successful person full of life and surrounded by friends. Unfortunately that is not me. For the last two years I have been unemployed. For the last 4.5 years I have rented a single bedroom in a house with an attractive but attached girl, and her charming but dim and unappreciative boyfriend.

Even at 26, I still don't have a drivers license or a car. However, walking is a helluva lot cheaper and I certainly need the excercise. In the time since I moved out of home (4.5 years), I have lost at least 20Kgs. Most of that has been due to getting away from my mothers' well-stocked fridge and pantry. Plus, having gall stones last year helped a lot. Nothing makes you cut fat out of your diet like the threat of incredibly painful attacks lasting 5-7 hours each. Pretty soon I might be described as simply being "pudgy" rather than "a fat bastard".

Like most geeks, I don't have a lot of friends. In fact, I have very few. I haven't talked to any of my highschool friends since I left. Apart from my brother and his wife, the only person in the Sydney region that I've kept in touch with is an ex-workmate. And I haven't physically seen him in over three years, it's all by email.

This has been pretty negative, hasn't it? Maybe that's because it's now 11am here and I've just pulled an "all-nighter" for no particular reason. I'll try to get some sleep now, and write more later when I'm not such a sad-sack.

bye for now.