ross goes to canada

Lately I’ve been kept very busy with school.  There has been some time for other things, though:

• I walked down Robson Street at night with all of its amazing lights.
• I got lost in a very confusing grocery store that enjoyed placing mirrors and windows interchangeably– I was never sure whether I was looking behind me or just looking through to the next aisle.
• I got punched ( pretty lightly ) by a smiling homeless man.
• I bought and read the excellent Cul De Sac book.
• I saw a Vancouver tourist bus scrape a street sign.
• I helped a homeless man find a nearby liquor store– I’m not sure whether this makes me a good or a bad person.
• I searched for, and failed to find, any good apple cider in the surrounding area.
• I finished another sketchbook.
• I went to China Town with some friends and tried out some Chinese bakery ( quite different but still good ).

Here are a few pics from the research that I mentioned:

For the pictures with the arrow included– the image under the arrow is the action of the sentence.

Anybody want to try guessing at these?  I’ll give 50 points for each correct answer.

Something I worked on during biology class– unfinished, ambiguous, and inefficient… but I still think that it is an interesting problem.

Here are the notes:

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A few months after I wrote up my idea ( and completely unconnected ), I was invited to participate in a user-study testing out an AI system that tried to automatically create meaningful picture “sentences” out of text given to it.  That’s a very very difficult and interesting problem.  I have a few pictures from the study somewhere that I’ll try to post if/when I find them.

Anyways, busy busy busy and “busy busy busy”

Awhile ago I wrote a simple little program that simulates the evolution of a species ( or sequence of letters in this case ) through sexual or asexual reproduction and mutation governed by natural selection. I only have a basic understanding of evolution but I tried to make the simulation somewhat realistic ( yeah right ) while trying to make the computational time reasonably brief.

At one point the program was complete, but then I decided to make a few more changes.  Right now the program is in something of a ( not quite working ) transitional form.  

If you’re interested you can get the admittedly rather messy java code for the program here:

evolve

organism

This is a short animation that I did for a class in Madison.  It turned out ok, but in the process of making it I was disappointed to realize that stories should be written around characters/situations and not just as things to fit around a single gag.  eh, I’ll have to remember that for next time

Anyways, you can check it out here.

note: I’m going to be posting some projects over the next few days.  This is the first one.  Next up– the second one.

I’ve been subscribed to Dictionary.com’s word-of-the-day email service for awhile… not so that someday I can flex an over-sized vocabulary as a form of pathetic bragging, but so that I can understand someone if they are using those words and, plus, sometimes words can be kinda fun ( one of my favorite is defenestration ).

The problem is that I haven’t really learned any words from Dictionary.com’s word-of-the-day service. I log into my email account and glance through the word-of-the-day email. Within 5 minutes I forget the word’s definition.  Within 10 minutes I forget the word.  ( I guess this progression of forgetting is slightly better than forgetting the word first and then the definition. )

The cause of my forgetfulness, is, of course, my own personal laziness and lack of self-motivation to spend even a single minute trying to commit the word to memory.  However, Dictionary.com’s word-of-the-day (and all the other word-of-the-day services I’ve seen) makes this easy to “get away with.”

So over winter-break I spent some time trying to make a word-of-the-day service that forces the user into taking a bit more time and using a bit more mental effort… which I hope translates into remembering more words.

» Read the rest of the entry..

Yesterday I successfully gave directions to some tourists.  Here’s an exciting recap:

tourists: “Excuse me.  Which way is it to the beach?”

me: “I think it’s over there” (pointing)

tourists: “Thanks”

This isn’t the first time that I’ve pointed a direction to a tourist, but it is the first time that I’ve been correct.

I’m 1 for 5 so far in Vancouver.  You wouldn’t believe how proud I am of this.

In other news, my parents have some pictures from the Vancouver trip up on their photo website.

some notes added where appropriate

Here are a few games that I made with MMF ( a nice no-programming-needed application-creating tool ) in middleschool/early highschool and also one newer game.  They’re somewhat embarrassing for a number of reasons, but I thought I would post them anyways for posterity or something.

1. Dodgeball Extreme

It’s a single-player avoid-bouncing-balls game. If that doesn’t quite make sense, 14-year-old me decided to include an extensive Help section which can definitely be checked out.

To play the game you will need cncs232 ( put it in c:\WINDOWS\system\ )
click here download Dodgeball Extreme

2. Cool Tennis ( aka Smash Tennis )

Cool Tennis is pong with gravity ( the gravity is a bit less than a universal force, though, since it only affects the paddle ). There is a 1-player mode ( shown below ) and a 2-player mode ( not shown below ). I made an updated version at some point, but unfortunately I lost the file in a computer crash. I might as well also state that the updated version had 3d-graphics, an extensive online-play mode, and a rather impressive eye-tracking gestural control system. It’s a shame that I lost it.

To play the game you will need cncs232 ( put it in c:\WINDOWS\system\ )  — this is the same file as above so if you already have it, you don’t need it again.

click here to get Cool Tennis

3. Wizard Beta –the pinnacle of young me’s game-creating attempts.

Wizard Beta is a platforming game. Like the previous games, the title alone explains everything needed to know about it. Here’s the breakdown:

Wizard: You play as a wizard… who, naturally, can cast spells and such. As you can see in the screenshot below, you wear a nice wizarding hat and wizarding cloak. Painted on these are several magic symbols such as the moon, a star, and, apparently, the greater-than sign. You also have a long gray beard as all wizards must have.

Beta: There are a lot of bugs.

To play the game you will need cncs232 ( put it in c:\WINDOWS\system\ )  — this is the same file as above so if you already have it, you don’t need it again.

click here to get Wizard Beta

4. Avoid-a-ball

This game was made just a few months ago in a somewhat successful attempt to learn a bit of actionscript programming ( and was shortly followed by an even more successful forgetting of everything about actionscript ).  It’s a very basic 2-player game and you should grab a friend and check it out here.