Saturday, April 09, 2005

Just to let you know, I'm calling security!

Escorted out of the hospital last night for sitting beside my girlfriend after visiting hours.

-Not as exciting as TV makes it out to be. Bo-ring!

Friday, April 08, 2005

More Hospitality

That's a good word, isn't it? Hospitality, being hospitable. Welcoming and catering to another and their needs. We've had a good run of nice nurses and volunteers at the hospital, which helps to make the stay more pleasant. At least tonight nobody was pressing me to get out of there before I was ready, I left when my girlfriend was ready to fall asleep for the night. I'll be back there early tomorrow morning, just as I was this morning.

-I watched her sleep for almost an hour

Transitioning... Conglomerating... Consuming

The school I attend is being consumed by a larger, better known school. I figure it's just as well, seeing how I'm paying big-school prices, I may as well get the big-school degree. To help ease students into the transition of one school consuming another, the new institution has printed up brochures to help inform the new and transitioning students. It just happens that I'm 'featured', as one friend called it. Here's the quote:

rak ~ (8) take the skin and peel it back... doesn't it make you feel better? (8):
hey, dude... you're featured prominently in that [big all absorbing conglomerate] transition booklet they were handing out.

I haven't had a chance to look at the page in detail, but from what I've glanced at, it's me striking a pose (because I was posed) talking to some girl. That's how those brochures are thrown together. They aren't reallystudents doing real student stuff, it's a photographer gathering a bunch of ... well, ok, students ... and posing them doing student stuff. I'm also smattered around the website of the new (and as of yet still non-existing, but soon to be new and existing) school. I'll give you a hint, I'm in the middle wearing the grey sweater bearing the school initials. 'rakslice' is the guy doing the 'hey ho, kool-aide' in the white shirt behind me.

-Sleep time, gotta visit and take care of my girl some more tomorrow

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Hospitals and their ilk

I've spent the majority of the last 29 hours at the hospital; my girlfriend went under emergency surgery. So I spent the night at the hospital last night (seeing how she was out of surgery at 12:30 midnight) and skipped school and work today to be with her. I made up an hour and a half of work today, seeing how I'm on salary for researching. I ate hospital food... that I paid for. $4 for 2 sausages, 2 eggs (scrambled), 1 english muffin (crumpet?) and 2 scoops of shaved hashbrowns (because nobody likes hairy hashbrowns).

I'm going to sleep now, though. Now that I'm back home, and I'm going to work and school tomorrow.

-Checking up on her early in the morning and after school

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Guru of sorts

I've been playing with mazes as of late. Attempting to solve the secrets to creating one, actually. And there's a method to my madness, it's for level generation in my game. So, I'm learning to program mazes.

Anything I'm learning, I'm learning from this site, Think Labyrinth which truly is a great source for anything maze related. This guy really knows what he's talking about, and was even blurbed about on Ripley's Believe It or Not section of a newspaper .

I'm trying to code my own 'Hunt and Kill' agorithm, which basically, when no more rooms can be carved in a certain segment, scans the array of rooms and searches for the first available room that is not too crowded, which means there's room to start another segment of room creation.

Start at one location and carve a room. Next, choose an adjacent room at random. Test to see if that room is not too crowded. If it's not too crowded, place the room and choose another adjacent room at random. Test and repeat. If a room is too crowded, 'Hunt and Kill' to find the next available uncrowded room and continue from there.

A room is concidered too crowded if there are two rooms adjacent to that room. What you want to ensure is that every room you add is a continuation of only the preceding room. This ensures that there are no loops in the maze, which guarantees there is only one path to the exit. This is called a 'perfect' maze.

Admittedly, I've been having trouble with my program. But only because I did not understand these simple concepts. It took me the last two hours laying in bed for my brain to really dumb it down to something I could understand. And here I have crawled out of bed to make a note of it so I don't forget my brilliance in the morning.

-Because that's something I would do

Followers