you tell me

Today I wrote my first self-motivated FlexUnit tests to test my as3 quaternion utilities. At my laptop in our rented condo in Kauai. While my wife is out snorkeling on the beach 100 yards away.

...

but the baby physics engine* is looking pretty good, I've got angular joints working now (though they don't handle torsion? I think that's a separate joint?) and stick joints look pretty good too, and I built a little inspector panel with tabs so that I can easily tweak stuff. And the math is all in 3D, which is a bit of a leap for me (much more thinking... such a pain.)

Unit testing is still a little unfamiliar to me I must admit, but I'm enjoying the added confidence it gives me about the math I'm using. Now it might be time to work on plant biology and rendering, which is after all what I sat down to do in the first place before I got distracted by all this 3d math.

Or, it might be time to head over to the beach I guess.


*Annie likes to call it a "baby-physics engine" instead of a "baby physics-engine." I like the mental image. :-)

in kauai*

Some places are a letdown. They don't live up to the hype and the advertising, you get there and you think, oh, that's nice I guess. I was sorta expecting more.

Kauai is not one of those places though. Neither is the the Grand Canyon (actually grand). But yeah Hawaii in general is a little mind-blowing.

We were walking through the grounds of a hotel down the coast from where we're staying (in a condo cause it's cheaper and way better) and I got to thinking about how posh hotels terrify me.

Not as a guest. They terrify me from business perspective. It's such an amazing risk, to take, what, tens of millions of dollars and sink it into building a resort on some piece of coast near a natural wonder, with the confidence that you can earn it all back and change, in what, 5 years, 10 years, what? And all of the tens of thousands of details that go into it.

Anyway the magnitude of the business venture staggers me a little, and it makes me a little queasy to be a place like that, because it puts me in mind of the kind of people that could pull that off. I know I guess that they're just people on some level, but on another more childish level I suspect them of being well basically, cold calculating psychopaths, to be able to risk that much.

Which goes to show that I am still a small town boy, fresh off the farm, etc.. I have relatively small ambitions on that scale. Build a castle. Doesn't sound so hard.

Also I'm having a good time working on a grass growing sim in my down time. :-) I'll post the results if there are any.

*we got married!!! it was great. pictures may show up at some point.