Well, I guess this is as good a time as any to open up a new chapter in Pie2k. It really is a new chapter in my life... though I've been out of school for about 5 months now and I've been living without my parents' support for quite a while. I guess the thing that makes this different is that a lot really does rest on my shoulders right now... from rent to impending car insurance to the phone bill... there's a lot of loose ends for me to take care of.
     Sadly enough, though, it's not entirely the cost of things that's been getting at me. I know that things are expensive, that's nothing really new. The shocking part is just how complicated things are when they should be pretty simple. Take car insurance, for example. It took me 2 weeks of inquiries to finally get a quote. When I did, I was told it would take at least 2 weeks (but most likely a month) to start the application process. Well, I said nuts to that and went with another company, and I should be able to start the application process tomorrow, but it'll take "5 to 10" days (that's business days, so it's actually 1 - 2 weeks) to complete the process.
     The only thing that actually worries me financially right now (other than my penchant for spending) is my student loans. I expect the monthly payment to be around $250 (since that's what the consolidation companies think my pre-consolidation monthly bill will be). If that's the case, I should be okay. I just hope I don't get royally shafted with the payments like Billy did (around $500 a month). Then I'll have to get a second job just for the student loan bill.
     On the good side, though, I've made progress with my raytracer. I've got rendering with natural light working and it took just over 5 minutes to render a 1300 polygon model at 320x240 (though the quality on the diffuse shading is set really low to get that time). For anyone who's interested (none of you I'm sure), I'm not using a radiosity method to calculate the lighting, I'm using a hemisphere occlusion method. And, although my speed sounds really really low, the method is giving me similar results to rendering a model with HDR in Lightwave, so I'm pleased. I have a bunch of renders to upload to my raytracer page, so I'll post a link when they're ready.
     I'm gonna try to get back to updating more frequently, but that probably won't happen until I have some things: a desk, a free socket for my tablet, and an internet connection. There are plenty of other things that prevent me from updating so much, but they're pretty easily solved (i.e. starting earlier so I can get some sleep). I'm gonna cut this short here so I can still have time to transfer to the USB drive for upload tomorrow and get to sleep at a reasonable time.