MetaAnomie

That would be me.

Thanks and now get off my damn lawn.

It’s always ever so exciting around my house:

Not that I’m complaining.

Just got finished with the basics for the plotter grid rendering. My initial idea was to have the whole viewport covered in grid but I quickly changed my mind after I saw what it looked like (i.e. crap). So I’m trying a new approach: I’m going to have floor, ceiling, and four wall grid planes that are movable and that can be toggled on and off. My idea is to use the intersection of the active grid lines as picker points to draw polygons onto. We will see how it works I suppose.

Just got done implementing the basic movement controls and calculations for the plotter. I designed it after the old school 1st-person shooter game controls so you can steer around with one hand and keep your mouse hand free. I figure that’s going to be the best approach so you can plot points and whatnot with one hand while you move around with the other. Next on the agenda is to get the plotter grid up and working.

Just kidding; absolutely none of this is important:

• Just got back from a trip to Osaka with the wife and princess
• Maggie and Lorne looked after the princess for us today being as we had a class to take at the hospital
• Found out that I won’t even be able to hold Mr. yet-to-be-named baby for an entire week while he is in the hospital after he is born because of the pig flu
• Maggie needs to update her blog
• Got drunk off Grolsch while simultaneously bowling on Wii and playing Enemy Territory
• Freestyle rapped with Lorne on the walk home, primarily about my penis
• Thinking we should have at least one day of drunken freestyles a week from now on — just not about my penis
• Tired
• Going to sleep

Yeah, yeah, I know. Hong Kong was all of five months ago and I’m just finally getting around to putting up pictures. With that said though, I think they’re some of the best photos I have taken:

Man was the food good:

And the princess seemed to have no problem getting along with the local kids:

The full album is here.

We got a shipment of presents from my family in the states in for the princess:

I swear, this girl is too spoiled.

I’ve decided to break off the level editor portion of my Reflex project into its own beast namely because:

1. I changed the scope a bit and decided to make a full-blown game designer out of it instead
2. I can’t see any reason why it couldn’t be used for other game engines eventually
3. Hopefully it will help me keep my head in one place

So far so good: I’ve wrote the framework in C#, integrated the DockPanel Suite to setup a docking workspace, and got the OpenGL rendering context up and running for the plotter using CSGL12. I’ve noticed some bugs with the plotter window resizing but they aren’t terribly significant so I’ll write them up to look at later when I don’t have better things to do with my time. From here, I plan to get the plotting grid implemented and setup basic movement controls.

The princess turned two this weekend so we had some friends over to celebrate. We ended up drinking till about four in the morning and getting nice and plastered.

Us adults that is, not the princess.

The wifey and I picked up this toy oven for her because we thought it was super cute. That, and I was starting to feel bad for her watching her pretend to make soup in the bathtub all the time.

We spent the week before trying to explain to her what the whole birthday thing was about. For example, singing happy birthday, clapping, and showing her that you have to blow out your birthday candles. It kind of backfired on us though cause every time we would clap, she would look real serious and start blowing into the air — even if what we were clapping about was totally unrelated.

Background:

Smith talks of the benefits of banking practices and paper money exchange, specifically the created ability to employ what would otherwise be stationary capital into useful endeavors. He also brings up the risk this entails: in particular, the chance that during wartime, another country could seize the physical gold and silver assets of a nation, thus rendering the bank notes void in value and causing widespread chaos. He suggests that a proper balance would be to only offer bank notes in large denominations, thus ensuring that the large majority of note circulation would occur between dealers, rather than between the dealer and consumer. The following is his explanation of this proposal as it applies to his theory of natural liberty.

Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as of the most despotical.

“The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith
6th Edition, Copyright 1937, pg. 308

So ultimately, it appears as if he his arguing that “natural liberty” isn’t so much of a hard-fast rule as it is a guiding principle, which can and should be trumped if restrictions on a few are necessary to protect the security of society as a whole. In other words, the whole “leave the market completely alone” mantra that is usually associated with capitalism is more of an exaggeration of what Smith believed rather than what he actually put forth.

Hopefully someone in the U.S. will catch up on this next time someone decides to buy and sell shitty, doomed-to-fail housing loans.