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I wasn’t expecting to see snow for a few more days, but tonight Corvallis is being gently blanketed by soft, picturesque flakes.  I ran out to the store as soon as I realized yes, we really were going to get snow tonight, and stocked up on firewood and spiced apple cider.  I should be all set for the next few nights, and then it’s back to Michigan, where I’ll get snow plus blustery winds… while colder than normal here, it still feels pretty calm outside.  I even went out for a bit with my camera and tripod to snap a couple of photos.  Tragically, I discovered that long exposure times don’t lend themselves to rendering the snowflakes softly drifting down from the sky.

The view from my porch

Looking back at my apartment

After another day of coaxing OpenGL to play nice, I’ve managed to make some progress on my final project.  The goal is to create a 3D version of the 2D visualization my research group designed for the logic underlying a Bayesian classifier.  So far I’ve got it displaying blocks representing the importance of each word to the classifier (only using three words at the moment, but I’d like to scale it up so that you can just zoom down a list of hundreds), and translucent regions denoting whether a word is required, forbidden, or unimportant to the classifier’s decision.  The blending isn’t quite right for that last part, but good enough to move on.  Now I need to make it interactive, so that the user can adjust the importance of each word.

Also, Ted and Judy dropped off an electric oil heater when they passed through town today.  My apartment’s furnace does a great job of heating the family room, but that’s about it.  Now maybe my bedroom won’t be freezing each morning!  Sadly they were just passing through while I was on campus; I want to take them out to dinner sometime before heading back to Detroit for the holidays.