The Grasshopper who told the Rhino what to do

I dropped Saori off for her early class this morning and went grocery shopping, cleaned the house a bit, and rearranged some rooms. My old roommate is gone, but I kept refering to that room as "James' room", but now that I moved my desk and all my printers in there, it feels more territorialized, and I now think of it as "the study."

Picked Saori up from school and made a run by the transit office to pick up our metro transit passes, followed by a quick run to Goodwill to drop off some old stuff. I've wondered why the quality of stuff I see at Goodwills around here is so low. First, there's not much of it, and secondly, its not nearly of the same quality or quantity of what was in the Phoenix stores. This Goodwill is on the fringe of the most affluent areas of St.Louis. Are people generally poorer here than in Phoenix or do people tend to hold on to their stuff more here?

Anyway, stopped for a quick bite of Pho for lunch, and then went back home. We took a long walk around the neighborhood to get some exercise and talk about St.Louis, and then I headed back to school for my night class. I'm enrolled in this class entitled: Optimization for Parametric Design, which is... exactly what it sounds like. There's a lot of classes with names like "Territorializing Context: The Subliminal and Interstitial," "Decoupled Spatialization in the Semiotic Landscape," "Biomimetic Aphasia," or "Pattern Recognition" where who really knows what the class is about.

Anyway, the class is very technical and practical- essentially a software class which teaches students how to use the Grasshopper plug-in for Rhinoceros, and practical applications thereof. Rhinoceros, a.k.a. Rhino, is a 3D modeling program like a very very advanced version of SketchUp, and far superior in every way. It is actually the computer modeling software of choice for most of my classmates, and its pretty powerful for making forms. Grasshopper is a plug-in which runs in Rhino, and by manipulating variables and creating an algorithm in Grasshopper, that sequence actually generates the form in Rhino.

For a very basic example, instead of drawing a rectangle in Rhino by clicking two corner points, I could, in Grasshopper, simply give length and width dimensions, and Grasshopper tells Rhino how to construct the rectangle.

Anyway. Should be practical. And even thought the final product is about the pointlessly formalistic swoopy object, its still a type of class I havn't taken, and to be honest, sharpening Rhino and Grasshopper skills is a good thing to have on the old resume. At the very least, its good to know what potential there is.

The last bit of fun news is that I finally broke down and got a new computer. My current laptop has a graphics card that is crapping out on me- I can't take out the card since its welded to the processor, and I can't rely on a machine that totally crashes several times a day from graphic glitches. I picked up a new Dell xps 8300, which has a 3.4GHz intel i7 core and an AMD graphics card. This means I have a very fast, very powerful computer. Also comes with a 24" monitor, so I am a very happy boy. Going to get it in the mail hopefully before the end of the month.

It's a tower, so it's not portable like a laptop, but then I'm working at studio all the time anyhow, and its also upgradeable, so I can swap out components instead of having to ditch a $1300 laptop because the graphics card is screwed up.