It’s the end of the week, and my voice is shot from taking tutorials and labs for the last three days. I’ve been living a life of a quiet research student for years, so my vocal chords aren’t up to the extra stress of hours of explaining things to students. I’m looking forward to a somewhat quiet weekend of typing.

I’ve been somewhat neglecting this site as of late (way too busy, sorry), and I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting traffic from some Inkscape sites for the tutorial I wrote for Order of the Stick avatars. I mainly wrote that for the Order of the Stick forums - I noticed they had a lot of people using Inkscape but were in need of a good tutorial, and the style of that art works really well as a tutorial. But I didn’t expect it to get any attention from elsewhere. It’s good to know that it’s of extended benefit to the community at large. I’m hoping to write more tutorials once I get enough time to do so (it takes far longer than you think to write one of those things!). If you’ve stumbled on my blog from one of those sites, welcome! And I hope you enjoy the tutorial!

I’m also hoping to clean this site up a bit some day soon - it needs a new face lift and a new poll. Unfortunately I’ve got a huge amount of stuff to do right now, so I can never guarantee I’ll actually get to do something until after I submit. I’m looking forward to having less deadline pressure and more time to devote to projects like these - I’m sure I’m due a week or four off after I submit.

Geez, I’ve been meaning to put many more posts in this journal this year, but I keep forgetting to get round to it. I guess it’s partly because I haven’t been up to anything that interesting, with the exception of some of the Python work I’ve chronicling over at my GameDev.net journal (under Trapper Zoid, if you aren’t from there originally).

Today I’ve started teaching tutorials and labs again, after a several year break. It’s a way to refresh the ol’ teaching skills - and the extra cash will be handy too. Today went a bit badly by my view - nothing disasterous by any means, and I’d probably view it as okay back when I was younger, but given I’ve got experience at tutoring I should’ve been a bit peppier and more prepared. Unfortunately though the content of the tutorials isn’t very fixed until right up before I teach them and I’ve been up early in the morning most nights the last month so I’m pretty fatigued (up to three last night preparing for this weeks classes, an hour later than usual).

Hopefully the rest of the week’s teaching will go better now I’ve had one to learn from, but I’m too exhausted tonight to do any extra replanning.

Incidentally, if any of you need to know tips on computer vision, as a tutor I should be up to speed in a month or two