Yesterday the snow began to fall and as of today, there will be upwards of 16″ of snow on the ground. This has caused a lot of problems on the roads and a lot of delays around the area. Today is definitely a “sit-at-home-and-relax” day.

Besides the snow, a lot else has happened in the last few months. I finished my co-oping period with ABB in December. It was an enjoyable and valuable experience. It does feel good to be back in school though, I was really starting to miss the academic environment that has become so familiar to me over the last few years. Christmas break was pleasant, we spent some time with family, saw some friends, and burned up a lot of time playing Rock Band and other video games.

Now I’m back in school, and back to the grind. This semester I only have four classes, but they’re all engineering courses, so it’s a very difficult semester. I am taking VLSI, Operating System Concepts, Electromagnetic Compatibility, and Communications & Signal Processing. Over the summer I’ll have to take a few more courses to make sure I can graduate next spring.

Other than that, the last few months have kind of buzzed by. Tim is looking at colleges to attend in the fall and head to France after he graduates in June. Mike is not currently attending school, and is trying to find a job (which he is finding out is very difficult in today’s job market) . I spent some time with Nick Koehler over his winter quarter break a couple of weeks ago. Nick will graduate this spring and start working at AEP in Gahanna, OH this summer. Also, Tom Downerd will get married to Ashli Litten this April. Exciting times for all, that’s for sure!

Anyways, that’s pretty much all for right now. Hopefully I will be able find some time to blog a little bit more often than once every 3 months!

Just saw a cute cartoon over at xkcd and wanted to share it. Engineers/Mathematics majors will get a kick out if it.

I’ve been pretty busy with programming projects for school lately, and I thought I would share them. They are nothing to fancy, just something to play with and look at. The first program is a CAD style program, it allows you to draw different specified objects, move them, change colors, etc… It was to practice GUI and Inheritance in Java. The second program is a simple OpenGL program that displays a textured rectangle on the screen and moves it around using a sine function. It will grow if you right-click it, and shrink if you left-click it.

The source is included with the OpenGL program, but if you are interested in the source for the CAD program, contact me. Both programs are pictured below, CAD program on the left, and OpenGL on the right. By the way, the quote in the title is from my professor that teaches both my programming classes. He’s an awesome teacher.

Last week I had a project to do for my Computer Graphics class. This project required me to generate an image using ray tracing with POV-Ray, and provide animation for it. It wasn’t very hard, and it is a really neat way do render some 3D graphics quite quickly, with fairly little code required. Some of the images generated by POV-Ray are really amazing.

More POV-Ray Renders: