Good Grief

My professor for my blogging class - yes I'm taking a blogging class - was in Pennsylvania today and will be for two weeks...which means that our Thursday periods are cancelled and our Tuesday periods are online. Do you know how incredibly unproductive a class is when it takes place in a chat room? Especially when all side conversations show up in the exact same thread as the class discussion? Actualyl, with this class it's about the same as in real life because there are a lot of goobers in the class that know each other, but my eyes did get really sore after starting at a blank white screen with black text for an hour.

Everyone started calling me Prince Charming, Prince, PC, or Mr. Charming for the whole period, too, following a joke I made. There's a guy named Drew in the class that prefers to be called Zack, and I immediately followed him by telling the class I prefer Prince Charming. Now I'm stuck with that for the semester. I guess there are worse names I could have chosen. :-P

After that I had my 3D class where we turned in the remotes assigned last time (see previous post) and got out new assignments. Guess what! It's another remote! This time it's different, though. To make sure it's just as difficult as the first one, all we got for the assignment were photos - no instructions or anything else to help us out.

We'll see in a few days how that turns out.

My First-Ever 3D Creation

Alright so school's been in session just over a week now, and my first assignment after just one class of 3D modeling and Texturing was to make a production-level prop from Jimmy Neutron. Like everyone else in the class this is the very first digital 3D class I've ever taken, and we were given one week to make the model after just a single lecture's instruction. WHAT?!

Then he told us to allow 15 hours to complete the model, or as many as 24 hours all-told. WHAT?!

Then he said that each assignment would be this intense every week. Excuse me...

WHAT?!

Well, anyway, I worked on it and got it done in an apparently-blazing 11 hours. I know it doesn't look like much without colors or anything, but just picture making something this in clay to the level of refinement and detail as this, and you've got a good measure for how painstaking it was and how long it took.

Complaints aside, I'm extremely proud of my first-ever model. It's ridiculously more impressive than it would have been at another school that would have let me take baby steps rather than throw me in the deep end like UTD did.

Freshman Convocation 2010

For anyone that didn't already know, I've finally started playing trombone again. There's been a dry spell since the end of my high school junior year (May of 2006) but now that I'm a senior and missing the band experience more and more I've joined UTD's Pep Band.

The band's only 1 year old this year, so I just missed being a charter member...but the whole group already feels like an extended family and I'm loving the feeling of being an active part of the production of music again.

After 3 classes (we scheduled a bonus period before school started for the semester) and a short rehearsal, we played at this year's freshman convocation to welcome all of the new incoming freshman to campus. It turns out they're an extremely smart group - UTD honestly believes this class to have the highest average SAT score in Texas public school history - and there are a ton of them...it's UTD's biggest-ever class weighing in at 17,500 students.

Anyway, the whole production went really well, and all of the band geeks were given free frisbies, shirts, and glow sticks! At the carnival after the indoor part, there was a ton of free food and games followed by a finale fireworks show LIGHTYEARS better than the one my city put on this last Independence Day.

My point of view during the convocation

About 1/4 of the carnival afterwards (most of the people look pretty small, too, because it's a panorama)