Hump Day

Wednesday is often refered to as hump day as it is the middle of the week and it is all downhill from there. I had a mentor/mentee meeting for an hour today. That is when I get to warp the minds of a new generation of students. I talk about goal setting, getting into the university of your choice, etc. It's all good and some interesting conversations flow. They will believe just about anything :-)

I had my second class on computer animation and games today and we talked about collison detection. I softened it up a bit for the ladies in the class and instead of shooting down a paratrooper we where bursting ballons as they came closer. However, you look at it, a collision is a collision and you have to write code to detect them. There are some wonderful software libraries out there you can use and lo and behold one of the Ministry expectations is the use of software libraries, Sound like a plan as I have a great one I have been exploring over the past few days. It can track hundreds of objects. Let me see, 10 paratroopers and a hundred bullets on the screen at a time. Sounds like one of those combinational factorial math thingies that Larry like to talk about. All I know is the library makes small work of it and the paratroopers are toast.

I thought a good simulation would be the WKRP show where they went up in a helicopter and chucked out turkeys on Thanksgiving to reward the good folks in Cincinatti for listening to their show. Turns out that it was an advertising nightmare as the turkeys plummetted to their deaths. Apparently turkeys can't fly. Who would have thought it. Back to my game, chuck them out and try to catch them with 2 guys and a net. If you miss, make it go splat and if you catch one, you get points and a free turkey. Just the right theme for Thanksgiving coming up. Wonder if they celebrate it here.

TTYL,

Jim