What I actually do all day

A fairly common question I get is what I do for a living. This is a rather difficult question to answer, because what I actually do is create a specialized set of plugins for applications used by the computer-animation and computer-aided manufacturing industries. Got that? To be specific, I write software for calculating curved surfaces, which surfaces are second-derivative continuous, allow for mid-surface termination of their isoparms, and form a superset of both subdivision surfaces and NURBS surfaces.

Basically, unless you have a fairly decent background in engineering or 3D modeling, it's very difficult to explain what I do. I was digging through some old pictures wondering what might be a good idea to post on my blog, and I ran across a photograph I took of a whiteboard. The whiteboard is on the wall of the company I visited in Seattle a few months ago, and I wrote myself a lot of notes on how something worked. Since I was leaving Seattle in a day or so, I just took a bunch of photos of the whiteboard so that I could hang onto the notes. Clear? Anyway, the stuff I work with looks pretty much like what you see on the whiteboard. If it makes sense to you, perhaps you should contact me so that we can offer you a job.

Someone else has made a more coherent attempt at explaining what I do. Feel free to flip through that if you actually care. Most people don't, really.

My dad's in Chicago right now. Peter, who writes a far more interesting blog, also lives in Chicago, so I got him to call my dad and help him find the tourist traps. Dad's at a conference and hasn't got very much to do, so tourist traps are a welcome distraction.

It's late and I'm supposed to be asleep, but I'm not tired. I will make a half-hearted attempt in a few minutes anyway, so wish me luck.

I'm not sure how to spell the puppy's name

This week, we have a picture that was taken about a month ago. The extremely cute dog that you see presented here is probably named Payton. I say "probably" because I have never seen the name written down before, so I'm merely stabbing erratically at the spelling, like a blind serial language murderer with a blunt orthographic knife.

Anyway, this dog is my sister Shana's new pet, and he's very cute. He's still a puppy, though he won't get very much bigger -- he's about the size of a basketball, but not so fat, and you're not allowed to throw him or bounce him.

I have, at last, acquired a Bluetooth adapter for my computer. This means that I am writing this post from my desktop, rather than my old and dying laptop, and I was able to copy the photo straight from my phone to the computer. This ought to bode good things for the future of my blog posting updatefulness.

While I was out shopping, I also picked up Brain Age, which is sort of like a math test pretending to be a video game. The basic idea is that if you exercise your brain by doing memory, reading, and math problems for a few minutes every day, that you will keep your mind nimble and keep away degenerative brain diseases. Whether or not that's true, the game is mildly amusing, and I like to keep my mental arithmetic sharp because I use it a lot.

Actually, the main reason I'm fascinated by Brain Age is because it's a very interesting piece of Nintendo's strategy to expand the video game market beyond the fortress of males aged 9-35. Brain age is an attempt to go straight for the elderly -- the instruction manual's examples were all for a 55 year old woman. Nintendo's president recently spoke about the gradual fading of the mainstream video game market in Japan, and he feels that expanding the market is critical for the future growth of the industry. Brain Age is a piece of his answer, and the Wii is another one.

That's all I have to babble about today. Have a good one. Maybe I'll post again soon.