I had asked my wife (then girlfriend) as we were driving all my possessions across the country en route to Washington D.C.: What would it look like if an asteroid slammed into the Earth? My idea was to write a visual simulation of this. From there I started diving into Direct3D, writing a generic simulation engine that would bounce notional particles off of one another and model gravitational attraction. But since it was just a side project I had going I didn't take it too far.
A month or two later, Chris Sells asked me if I'd be interested in writing an article for the Intel website, as part of a series he was editing. The idea was to demonstrate how big-ass CPUs were still important in a web service world. I thought, "Here's a great chance to get paid to finish working on that idea." Because if there are two things that can suck CPU, they are simulations and 3D graphics.
Chris had given me until December to finish the article, which I did. It was fairly challenging, as I had to learn a lot about Direct3D in the process. I turned in the article, submitted my invoice, and waited for it to show up on their site.
And waited. And waited.
Five months later, after emailing Intel roughly every other week, we were finally able to cut through all the red tape. A check is supposedly in the mail. And today I went to see if the article is there. It is! Here.The code is here.
And I will not be writing for Intel again any time soon.
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