Ben Crowder / Blog

Weeknotes #4

  • Achievement unlocked: thesis defense. Presenting via Zoom turned out to be less intimidating than doing it in person would have been, I think. So that was nice.
  • Class-wise, I’m almost done adding transmission ray support to my ray tracer, and I’ve read a handful of papers on the preprocessing parts of deep learning pipelines for handwriting recognition. Both classes are enjoyable.
  • Found a local Thai restaurant that has some of my favorite dishes that are never on the menus of any of the other Thai restaurants around here. I may have squealed with excitement. The food was good, too.
  • I’m experimenting with a stained glass style for reworking some of my religious art pieces. The plan right now is to try using a Voronoi diagram to automate some of it, along with erosion/dilation filters in SVG for a potential stylistic effect.
  • Lately I’ve been planning an HCI experiment/tool called Wire. The intention is twofold: to explore writing interfaces that use Bezier curves, and to play around with applying curves onto other curves. Once I get the core functionality working I’ll be able to show what I mean by that.
  • Still cultivating story ideas, slowly fleshing several out. This style of outlining (repeatedly revisiting a number of different story ideas) is new to me, but I like it so far.
  • The end date for my Sacred Shapes exhibit is now indefinite. I expect it will come down sometime during the semester, whenever the next exhibit goes up. (But hey, it’s been up for eight months now — maybe it’ll gain immortality soon and stay there forever.)
  • Our stake is starting in-person church again, with each ward getting one Sunday a month. My family is still high-risk, though, and sadly won’t be able to attend for a while yet. But someday.