I snoozed not so much from exhaustion but from boredom; last night I had the position updater loop about 80% done, but just didn't have the force of will to sit down and finalize it. So things are "movable" and get passed through the data pipelines, but no movement computations are actually done at this point.
Part of my quandary is that it's hard to do movement calculations when I don't have anything to move - specifically, there's no 3D or 2D "thing" yet that corresponds to the moving entity, it's just abstract. Of course, I figured out about 3 minutes after laying down that I don't need to have anything; I can still compute the effective coordinates that something should be at, and at least dump them to the debug log each frame. Naturally, though, at that point I wasn't about to get back up and work on it.
So basically at this point I'm down to two tasks: generate actual coordinates for things as they are moved along keyframed animation paths, and then attach some little colored blobs to them so the whole thing becomes visually meaningful.
I'm a hair behind where I'd like to be; when I first sketched up my task list for the week, I had planned on getting a working dummy render by yesterday. That kind of got flushed down the tubes due to a bunch of personal stuff that came up earlier this week; so all in all I could be farther along, but honestly I'm not disappointed in my progress so far. In fact, compared to my relatively slack progress overall in the past few weeks, I think this mini-crunch has gone extremely well.
Ever since the laptop and case arrived in South Carolina, they've been in the same batch of stuff moving down here to the Atlanta area. I can tell because the timestamp of each scan in the tracking report is identical for both items. At this very moment they've arrived in the local distribution center (at 1:55 AM) but haven't yet been put out for delivery. I'm curious if they'll be delivered separately (due to one being a 2-Day Air package) or if they still both count as "general" packages and will get put on the same truck.
In any case, I think I need to get some code written now, because once that stuff shows up I'm basically going to not care about work ever again [grin]
This week has been a really weird feeling. I'm not sure if sleep deprivation is just making me excessively emotional, or what. Last night, at a late hour, I had a twinge of that old feeling (which I've written about before) of "wow, it's really Late at Night." You know, the feeling you get when you're 8 years old and sneaking back downstairs to watch late-night cartoons when everyone else is asleep. I haven't felt that in a very long time.
This morning was another interesting one. I'm fairly accustomed to being up at 6AM/sunrise/buttcrack-of-dawn type hours, especially these days when I've been tending to work all night. This morning, though, was somehow different.
When I was a kid, the only time I ever really got up "early" (by which I mean any time more than an hour before my "normal" wakeup time) was when we were getting ready for a big trip. I have many memories of waking up groggy and confused, knowing only that I didn't want to get out of bed, and then suddenly realizing that it was Trip Day.
Trip Day always gave me a rush of feeling. I've travelled so much that I don't get nervous about it anymore, and haven't for years - but that first moment of realization on Trip Day always involves that sort of vague nagging sense like I forgot something. Oddly enough, I've usually forgotten something, but it rarely turns out to be important. (Except for the time I did a winter tour of Germany and Austria and forgot to pack any socks. Duh.)
The doubt doesn't last very long, though. In fact, it's usually only a split second later when the really potent feeling rushes in: the overwhelming sense of promise and possibility.
One time, just before a really major move, our family went out to the beach in Florida and watched the sunrise over the water. I still remember - vividly - the image of the sun just struggling over the horizon, dim and a little cold in the morning mist. We walked along the beach and watched literally hundreds of crabs go about their routines. We'd been to that beach dozens of times and I don't think I'd ever actually seen crabs there.
In a lot of ways, that experience has permanently crafted my impressions of sunrise. Lately, I've been seeing a fair number of sunrises, but they just don't have the same impact when you see them after hours of work and are passing-out exhausted. There isn't enough time or energy to experience a sunrise like that.
Waking up to one, though, is still a rush. Memories of waking up to other sunrises - or long before sunrise - unleash a flood of other memories. Places. Experiences. People I'll probably never see again. Funny stories. Sad stories.
All of life is waiting at sunrise. Nobody knows what may come in the day ahead, but for now, that doesn't matter. For now, everything is promise. Everything is hope.
It's time to seize the day, and, as Calvin would, to throttle it.
