the corner office

Braai down at M and B's this evening. G and S were there as well. Ribs ribs and more ribs. Awesome. Interesting talk with G about wireless/satellite data in South Africa. Veeery, veeery interesting stuff.

On the studies front I'm still banging my head against this damned graphics programming assignment. It's taken me a depressingly long time to come to terms with lighting and the various subtleties of how OpenGL handles it. It would have taken less time if I'd actually done some meaningful RTFMing instead of rushing in and starting to tweak a huge, complicated chunk of lighting-less code without really knowing what I was doing. As it stands, I think I've ironed out most of the issues, except that the super-fancy object-oriented infrastructure I built to handle the rendering I wanted to do, is causing the lights to go out - literally. I can't figure out why and I've just about run out of time, so I'm probably going to have to rely on a less elegant system and just crank out as much code as I can with next to no reusability. Then again, that's what the model solutions from the lecturers always do, so fuggit.

I'm not superstitious but if I was I'd be thinking that kick-starting the Olympics on Friday the 13th was quite a brave thing to do.