Week Seven, Accomplishments

Thesis

After the last few weeks with moderate to huge progress with respect to my thesis, this week was the reverse. Based on last weeks progress I decided to (re)write some toy apps. One of them consisted of an interactively modifiable polygon ring consisting of the 12 vertices constituting the boundary of a 3x3 mesh. Using the very same algorithm used in the subdivision approach I had to find that under certain circumstances the faces constructed by the solution are–contrary to my expectation–not necessarily planar. The rest of week was spent trying to figure out what actually went wrong; the result so far is that the subdivision algorithm fails to complete two full iterations on a simple cube. In the course, the renderer has gained the capability of rendering colored edges. More results to come, though so far it looks quite bleak.

Life

As I reported, we were looking for a flat; as of Saturday, we received the signed agreement from our new landlords and have signed it on our behalf as well. Preparations for the new flat slowly start to take shape now.

Language learning

I regret that in the last weeks the thesis has taken over literally all daytime. I had little to no time left to actually practice any speed reading. I have as well had to accept that time is just too limited to study any Japanese further. I’m on track with Vietnamese though. After stopping with new vocabulary for a few days, reviews in Anki have dropped dramatically and recall went up to nearly 100% most of the time; I am now confident to start to add new vocabulary to my study deck.

Even though I cannot complain about the progress I’m making, especially with regard to the current extremely high work load, I’m still disappointed at the little use I get from the learned vocabulary so far. I can read and understand the dialogs in the textbook with covered vocabulary satisfactory, but it is far from sufficient enough to understand real world Vietnamese; news, short stories or novels and just incomprehensible for now without looking up many words using a dictionary.