A new semester begins

I spent the summer far away from computers and website development in various locales like the cloudy cliffs of Inishmore and the sunny coasts of Croatia. Of course, I also spent some time in between visiting my family in the Virginia countryside. During this time, I’ve also obtained a Kindle and began tracking my recent reads on StoryGraph. It’s a lot of thriller novels by Preston and Child for the most part recently, but I’ve already finished their Pendergast series so far, so I’ll have to branch out to different authors soon. My general reading habit is to read as many books by an author as I can and then find a new author’s bibliography to spelunk–for example, I read all of Scott Sigler’s sci-fi earlier this summer, but admittedly I did skip his YA work and sports-themed novels.

And like that, the summer slipped away and fall began. With that, the third semester of my graduate program began. I am re-taking my probability theory class, and on top of that am taking five other classes. It’s a large courseload! And on top of that, I still have my job, and the dreaded Reviewer 2 comment came back for me to re-do the analysis… I really hope that my hard work will pay off and the reviewer will accept my changes.

On the disease front, I’ve started taking a new, higher dose of colchicine and have been experiencing symptoms less frequently (every 6 weeks instead of every 3 weeks!) but sadly have been experiencing very severe side effects instead. It’s silly, but I keep putting off the blood draw to test to see if I have amyloidosis, maybe because I’m scared to know what might happen, since there isn’t really any higher dose that I can take that would treat my serum amyloid levels any more than what I’m taking… And I guess I’m also scared to know if my medication is secretly killing me because this is the only dose so far that’s been reducing my symptom burden. Ah!!!

But enough about this sort of despair-inducing stuff…

I’ve added a little splash screen for my homepage! I used Javascript to make the little Pikmin bounce around with inelastic collisions, and I think momentum should be conserved so they’ll bounce around forever. Unfortunately it seems like the collision check isn’t something I can optimize very well per tick right now, but if someone knows a good way to handle the number of particles in Javascript please let me know and I will be eternally grateful. Javascript is not really my first language (English also might not be, lol) so I’m probably making lots of mistakes. I feel like there are probably some sort of tree based methods or whatnot, or maybe I can run some sort of check before calculating distance, but what if that check is in of itself computationally expensive…? Argh, so many years since my CS classes!

Anyway, please let me know what your thoughts are through the guestbook and I hope to see you again soon 🙂