November 27, 1999: and now... now i'm busy... busy again

It's been a month since I updated! The shame!

Here's what I've been doing:

• The "pure" design phase of our project finally finished, and I started coding full-time around November 1st.
• I'm working on a really interesting aspect of the system, in which I unify light sources, volumetric fog, shadows, and other things which affect the appearance of objects. Light sources have always been a clumsy part of past systems, never integrating cleanly. Finally, in finding other technologies they share some aspects with, a, well, a light came on over my head. It should be pretty clean and extensible.
• I've been prepping a lecture for a seminar I'm going to be giving in early December, mostly writing the paper version of the talk for the "proceedings".
• I played through my friend dfan's text adventure that was entered in the Fifth Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, so then I ended up playing through all of the competition entries. And voting on all of them. And writing up reviews of all of them.
• I started working on my own text adventure that I had started last January but had almost immediately put off. It's going along pretty well, but it's going to take forever; maybe in time for next year's competition.

So, all in all, just busy-busy-busy.