I borrowed the concept of connecting the dots from Steve Jobs' speech at the end of Standford University's academic year. Steve used the concept to refer to decisions he made in his life, decisions that were dictated more by instinct than by Common-Sense, decisions that in retrospect can be connected. And these connected dots show the path he took and what a wonderful whole it turned out to be for him. I won't recount this speech, because my story will be colored by me. And it is better to color it yourself with emotions or interpretations.
Today I know that I like programming and realize that such a skill costs me -10 to charisma, at least in the opinion of the so-called majority. However, decades ago I did not know this. When I was still very young and I was in the so-called monkey age, that is, I preferred to spend time climbing trees in the backyard (such times), my parents bought us a computer. But what a computer it was!!, it was the indestructible Commodore C64, an eight-bit-machine that had 40kB of RAM of which 38 was available to the user. Connected to the a TV, with the Joystick-:) as a control device and the tape recorder as an immortal interface for loading games. And while the C64 itself deserves an entry or at least a paragraph, this time I'll limit myself to that: It was, this my (our) C64, wonderful. I say mine, because, although my siblings (I always had plenty of them) and I owned it, I was probably the main user of it. It delighted me, I loved it. I think Commodore loved me back!
Well, but let's talk about The Dot-Programming.
The Dot-Programming.
Back then, that is, in the years of my elementary school, when there were Ataris, Amigas and Commodores on our market, or at least among my friends, and no PeCet, I wrote my first programs. "I wrote" is a bit of an abuse, in fact, I mostly rewrote programs from magazines such as Bartek or C&A. These programs were written in Basic or Simon's Basic. Such rewriting of programs from the newspaper to my friends seemed pointless such a frivolity. I was transcribing them. Sometimes there was an error in the code published in magazine and even more rarely I was able to correct it. I remember that my brother, 5 years older, helped me back then. And he understood more than I did (but it annoyed me, back then). Even after these years, I remember that frustration of mine, the fact that I did not understand the difference between goto and gosub, bleeah. Rewriting programs and analyzing them line by line allowed me to grasp the language as much as possible, and consequently my first program was created. It was this kind of Game. The game of drops falling from above (the most top of the screen) and the player's task was to catch them at the bottom of the screen with a glass. Such a simplified version of the Soviet Egg Game. The drops fell from the top and not from the hens, because programming the diagonal movement was beyond my skills. When I created the algorithm (now I can use this word) for handling the glass movement, I made a mistake, somewhere. And damn it, the glass was agitating terribly. I.e. when you pressed the arrow sideways e.g. to the right it started to move, but if you held longer the key the glass accelerated, well, and cool. Only, as the drop appeared from the left side of the screen then before the shitty glass deigned to move its glassy leg to the left some time have passed. Oh man, I spent hours trying understand what I had done wrong. Where I made a mistake. I succeeded and corrected that bug, but I left this faulty code just for memory's sake it was really cool behavior. Still today I can recall that inertial-algorithm with a tear in my eye. A perfect, beautiful algorithm. The game was seen by me, my brother and I doubt if it was seen by my parents or the rest of my siblings. All that remains from that time is the memory of the success of finding the bug and probably a dormant love of programming.Dot-Graphics.
My adventure with computer's graphics, as I want to describe this dot, began with 3DStudio Max a 3D modeling application from 1996 :-). I used to spend nights making models, rendering pictures and things nobody needed. Those were still the days where I spent most of my time outside hanging upside down, or playing basketball. The themes of the pictures were: Star Trek, chess, hourglasses, and similar little no-needed-things. In those days I didn't have a website, and besides, the Internet was so slow (The picture of the undressed lady was downloading for several minutes and still usually the connection broke at the height of the navel), so my pictures were not seen by anyone. Well, maybe Kondzio and my brother. However, something drew me to it and I devoted my nights to this passion. It's hard for me to judge whether my works from that period are "pretty". For me, they have considerable value. Then came the time of Linux and free applications legal and, unfortunately, often unstable, and so we came to the Moonlight.I mention it because, in addition to the brilliant, in my opinion, renderer (that is, that mechanism that counts how those lights are rambling around the scene) and the downright divine modeler, it had a flaw. Very often with saving scenes was like with BackUps now. I.e. everyone saves, no one checks if it can be read, and even the reading itself was sometimes troublesome. This is what happened with Moonlight. Very often it was impossible to load saved works. At that time there was also an episode with Povray. Everyone makes balls in Povray. I mean spheres!
Dot-Writing
Writing is a rather difficult subject, because the beginning was also difficult. The beginning was the Verse, the Poem. And discussion groups. And the criticism that fell on me. I will write more about writing. I'll just say that writing gave me two basic things. I realized that what I do and what makes me happy is not always well received, it was a hard lesson I picked up when I was young. And another thing is while I was writing I spent about two weeks learning to type on the keyboard. Such, let's say, pseudo non-peeking typing. It's amazing how few people who work everyday at a computer can't do non-visual typing.If I would be tempted to connect the dots and even describe the connections themselves, the Dash-Programming-Graphics connection would have the caption: PovRay. For those who don't know Povray is a RayTracing program, but unlike applications like Maya or 3DStudio in POVRay graphics are created by writing code. Yes, yes, In 3DS the sphere is selected from the menu and dragged to the scene and in Povray you write
sphere { <0,0,0>,10 color { <1,0,0,0> }. POVRay is such a combination of good with better, a combination of writing-programming-graphics. However, I will not describe the connections I will only tell what these dots gave me and list the strangest episodes that came to my mind. Programming: (1) My thesis in technical school. A total failure in the execution area. It was the Technical School-Electrical-Electronic and it was a great period in my life. Learning about a subject that totally did not interest me :-). Thus, my work and its execution were not perfect, so to speak. For this, the documentation and presentation of the work was written in HTML, and it delighted the teaching body and only because of this, this presentation written in HTML, we managed to defend it. (2) I am in that social group and, as far as I know, this is a very small group, that works in a profession that they enjoy and love. The group where the work is enjoyable. As I wrote I am a hero who, because of my profession, gets -10 to charisma already at the start but +100 to happiness of doing what he loves, what I love doing!.
Graphics: (1) the ability to create objects and general knowledge of working in 3DStudio allowed me to shine in front of my first Wife. I was young. Those were the days, she was in the art school and had to design a perfume bottle for her for Design (such a subject). And I made a model of it in 3DStudio. Well I know it doesn't sound impressive now, but those were the days when we were just a couple and every plus in my favor was at a premium one. (2) In college we had a subject 3D graphics and there we worked on Cinema4D, in addition to the fact that it was easy for me to learn this program, in addition Cinema4d had the ability to script scenes. (hmm maybe this should be in plus concerning programming? Well let it be on the dash) (3) Working with the Moonlight program taught me two things. First, it taught me to save jobs under multiple names. Second, it taught me to do one thing entirely at a time. Although I don't know if this is a good thing.
Writing: (1) Engineering Thesis, Master's Thesis - my unappreciated attempts at writing stories and poems gave me the ease of writing the previously mentioned works. (2) Letters: During my high school period and later when I was hanging around my Ex-Wife, I wrote more letters than all my colleagues in high school. In high school, writing gave me the status of a good friend (which had its good and bad sides), while later, well, that's what it was.
I mentioned Steve Jobs' speech and his connecting the dots because it perfectly reflects the character I will try to give to this Blog. And just like Steve did at that speech I like to look back sometimes and connect the dots. To look at a dot that, although it seemed irrelevant and frivolity at the time, now shows the way and gives me such confidence that it is worth doing something that seems unhelpful but rewarding, something that my intuition tells me, because although I can't see it now it may be another dot to connect. And that is what I wish for each of you.
I promise the next entry will be shorter. And now just about PovRay and the first critique something ala the one from There Was a Life. My first major work in Povray, that is, containing more than one ball, had two balls placed next to each other. Delighted with the result of my work, I showed it to the only person among my friends Kondzio. He took a look, tilted his head and said. "Balls - everyone in Povray makes balls." He put me out like Hades' Pegasus. So I got giddy, and my next work was to depict a human conglomerated from balls with a Blob function, sort of a combination of the Terminator and the Foam Man from Ghostbusters. I set up the balls, set up the camera, the light, fired up the calculating, rendering. PovRay wrote politely that the rendering would finish at 6:30 a.m. that is, in about 9 hours. Approximately, I went to bed. In the morning happy with myself I got up and went to see the result. I was already figuring out what I was going to tell Kondzio. I looked at the picture. Hmm let's say that the effect was a little different from my expectations. It turned out that I placed the camera a little too low and 3/4 of the picture was black, below the horizon level. I didn't show this work to Kondzio. And I put PovRay away for a few years. :-)