Elen Sila Lumenn' Omentielvo

"A Star Shines on the Hour of our Meeting"

I am a long time fan of The Lord of the Rings. In fact, it was twenty years ago today that I received The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring for Christmas. Not knowing anything about them at the time, I decided to tackle Fellowship first, simply because it was longer - I had never read anything that long before - not realizing that Fellowship was actually the sequel to The Hobbit.

To quote that oft overused phrase "and the rest, as they say, is history."

I read through Fellowship fairly ravenously, and I remember, among other things, being gripped by the tension of the journey through the Mines of Moria. I also remember that, upon reaching the end of the first book, that I didn't want to wait to have to read the other two. It seemed like it would be forever until I was able to get them. My parents had to tell me that they'd already gotten the other two books or I'd have gone out and gotten them by myself. So I tided myself over by reading The Silmarillion (which, while slow to get into, I nevertheless ended up adoring as well) and, I think, pretty much every other Tolkien book I could get from the local library.

Of course, when I finally did get The Two Towers and The Return of the King (after what seemed like an eternity as a child) I enjoyed them as well, including the appendices. I even taught myself to write using Tolkien's Tengwar letters (his Elvish script), though slightly adapted for the english alphabet.

I have continued to read and enjoy The Lord of the Rings from time to time throughout the years and started another read through of it today to commemorate the 20th anniversary of my first journey to Middle-Earth. I still have my original paperbacks, though Fellowship is in rough shape, having some loose pages, so I'm reading a newer edition. I might go back to my originals for the 2nd and 3rd books if they seem like they're in good enough condition.

There are relatively few things that have had as large or as lasting an impact on me as The Lord of the Rings. The fact that I enjoy it and still return to it 20 years later speaks to that. Among the things that I enjoy in The Lord of the Rings is the sense of history, the languages and the sense of hope against all odds - and many other things, besides.

Anyway, I could no doubt was on in much more detail than I have here, but I think it suffices to say that The Lord of the Rings is something which has had, and will likely continue to have, a profound impact on me.

Namarie,
-TFitC

NSERC Update

I got an e-mail this afternoon from the associate provost for graduate studies here at the university (don't ask me what a provost is, I haven't looked into the details) regarding my NSERC application.

My initial reaction was "uh oh" since the first two paragraphs read like what I would expect from a standard form rejection letter. Then the third paragraph was "I am pleased to inform you..." and I sighed a bit in relief. The e-mail itself is really nothing exciting. It's just informing me that the application made it beyond the university level and was sent on to NSERC itself. While this is what I was expecting, it's nice to get confirmation of that, even if it's coming later than I was expecting. The actual scholarship results don't come out until March so there's still a few months to go for that.

So, fingers are crossed (metaphorically speaking).

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Graphical Interlude

So, I've spent the better part of the past three days doing marking and marking-related activities for the graphics course I've been TAing this term. Monday and Tuesday were marking projects (which included demos by the students) and Wednesday was proctoring and marking the final.

First, the projects. There were some very good projects, but also some, shall we say, not so good projects. Kinda felt sorry for some of the students who, for whatever reason, weren't able to finish their projects and obviously felt bad about it - then, of course, there were some students who didn't seem to care much as long as they passed the course. Ah well.

For the final - well, I've mentioned proctoring before and this was just as boring as all my previous proctoring experiences. Marking the exams went significantly faster since the prof who's teaching the course this term seems fond of making exams that are easy to mark.

In related news, here is the final version of the image for the course t-shirt:

All of the interesting puppets from assignment three are positioned on an 8x8 grid of tetris pieces (the background colours are, supposedly, the official tetris colours according to wikipedia). Since sixteen pieces fit in an 8x8 grid and there were only fifteen puppets, I snuck in my evil snowman from my raytracer scene in the last piece. The four leftmost images along the bottom are raytracer scenes (the middle two being from students who didn't make a fancy puppet) and the images along the right side are project screen shots. The top, middle and bottom projects were raytracers with the other two being openGL projects.

There is a full-size version of the image (4500x4500 pixels) available here.

Freak Out,
-TFitC