the (un)real thoughts of realbt

On this, the busiest week of the year for Canada Post, I’ve decided to ponder the following question on my blog: how many pieces of mis-delivered mail do you receive (from CP) per day? per week? — or month?

In our humble basement suite, complete with it’s own address, we receive at least a couple pieces of mis-delivered mail per week. If not more. Sometimes we go without any mail for days, and then it comes in a big clump, obviously having been delivered to someone else and then redirected to us. I’m not talking about receiving mail from former residents at our address, neighbours one or two doors down, but blocks away. We might get mail with the same house number on a different street; same house number on a different block (off by 100); or just completely wrong altogether. In fact, I’ve started to recognise the names of some of the people we consistently incorrectly receive mail for.

Thankfully we don’t get mail from East 7th Avenue.

This has been going on for some years — certainly as long as I’ve lived at this address. I find it hard to believe that we have a reliably dyslexic delivery person. I have no idea what the problem is or who to complain to without having our mail “accidentally” lost entirely.

Term 1 has come to end. 5 courses: 2 computer science, 1 statistics, and 1 microeconomics. This term had one of the fewest number of computer science courses, yet had one of the heaviest work loads I’ve had. I’ve also had a lot other stuff going on which kept me busy — trips to see Harvey Danger, near weekly climbing, and yoga whenever I woke up early enough.

At UBC, this marked a number of changes. The first Shopper’s Drugmart opened on campus. Not just by campus, but officially on campus, in the new dentistry building. The workers are of course non-union. I wonder how CUPE is liking this.

Speaking of the village, it continues to grow. We now have a Vera’s burger place, among other things.

And unsurprisingly, the temporary bus loop has not changed and construction on the old one hasn’t even begun. It is still a parking lot for the Super Rich(tm).

My computer graphics project is done. Well, it was done last week. But I’ve only now gotten around to making a few screenshots and combining it into an animated gif.

The first project was to draw and animate a dinosaur using only ellipsoids (stretched spheres). In this last project, I worked with 2 people. We each included our dinosaur in the making of this project. Everything you see has been hand drawn using basic geometric shapes. Grass, water, sky/cloud and dirt textures were borrowed from the Internet. Each dinosaur may be moved independently. Each has a shadow that is geometrically correct, but does not match the light source (and it’s also slightly skewed…). Shadows are tough! The water is transparent and specular (reflective). And there are multiple light sources in the world. When a dinosaur is selected to be moved, a spotlight appears over it. As the t-rex moves closer to either of the other two, it shades to red; the other two dinosaurs also turn automatically such that they are always facing the t-rex. They animate at all times, either performing some arbitrary idle motion (tail wagging, neck bending, etc.), and their legs move when they walk. Very simple animation, but it works.

Here are some screenshots scaled down: