Calm after the Storm

One of the first major HSC hurdles is over - I've submitted all my major works for it. Now is the time I sit back and wait... And wait... And wait and wait and wait... =]

Music composition (Mp3) - effectively a tribute to Nobuo Uematsu's One Winged Angel

The Ideal Enigma (PDF), my comedic metafictional absurdist short story for English Extension Two

With those two things over I have a feeling I'll be a tad more sane for the rest of the time.

And then, on a somewhat unrelated note, I had a short stint as Wolverine =]

The claws were much better in motion unfortunately - in time I shall Photoshop them to full glory but until then =]
(tidbit - first time I've ever worn leather lol)

And then, on a further unrelated note, I was newspaperised ...

We are all caught up in this narrative web for the mere fact that we cannot exist outside of it.

Smerity

Extend my telomeres damnit!

First, all my exams apart from music are finished - and I got pwned in Maths Extension :(

On to the title - in my typical MSN discussions Xachro and I broke onto an interesting topic - Obfuscating Python - and we were doing pretty well. It eventually lead to a small discussion on DNA - specifically on that thing with the really really cool name that had to do with gibberish at the end of DNA so as to act as a disposable buffer for the lossy replication of DNA (to say the least)...

After a bit of Googling I came up with it! Telomere ftw! So of course I revised myself on it, as any good nerd would, and came across -

However, it has been hypothesized that there is a trade-off between cancerous tumor suppression and tissue repair capacity, and that by lengthening telomeres we might slow aging and in exchange increase vulnerability to cancer (Weinstein and Ciszek, 2002).

So, it's ridiculously simple what must be done now!

1) Cure cancer
2) PROFIT
3) Extend telomere - end aging
4) PROFIT

As you see, my plan does not fail where others have tread. Unlike other worthy adversaries, such as the Underpants Gnomes, whose fatal flaw was not properly defining their steps.

That is all for now.
CEO Smerity

Divine intervention is... unlikely...

I've given up on shooting stars at the moment. I saw another one tonight and just couldn't fathom wishing on it, so I'm passing my wish off to someone else who wants it. As far as I know wishes passed on to third parties should still be valid, no?

Trial exams last week and this week. I'm finally getting into the heavy duty end of my high school life - quite worrying. Whatever way it ends up it shall be over soon at least, and I plan to do a lot of things once the HSC is finished. Of course, the operative word there is 'plan' - plans seem to fall through easily though. I'll outline them here so I shall at least have failure forced upon me should I miss them.

Post HSC
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Programming
Just as before with the NCSSF Weekend Challenge, I'm going to continue to explore the tangents of computer science. I'm going to become fully fluent in C/C++ and experiment in some other languages. Remind me to experiment in fluid dynamics - specifically water and smoke, image based modelling - even a simple version of this would be a realization beyond my wildest dreams. Maybe for the latter I can even do it as a Python script for Blender - that'd sure be interesting - allowing a fly through of the generated geometry.
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Write-Ups
Creating tutorials on my previous NCSSF Weekend Challenge projects so that I can help others in learning about topics. I want them to be fully inclusive, where if you're doing the tutorial on writing a raytracer and don't know what vectors are a small section will pop out and give you a fundamental grounding in vectors, until at least the level of understanding required by the article. This removes all barriers to entry and lets people regardless of level learn.
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Media/Multimedia
I want to see if a podcast or a videocast is possible. Producing content instead of just consuming it. It'd also be nice to find the niche of podcast which I would love to listen to but have never found and instead of leaving it empty fill it for others.
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Music
I want to be able to actually use that acoustic guitar I bought forever back!
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Art
Start to sketch again, even if it's just doodling. Maybe even do CG if I'm adventurous.

So there's my short rant. I was going to go onto something a tad more depressing, but having read a bunch of university papers I feel strangely contented almost - so no complaining today.

Link dump -
Soft Scissors : An Interactive Tool for Realtime High Quality Matting
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene
Parthenon Renderer (GPU accelerated global illumination renderer)