the Acid House - Stories #3 & 4

As I read "the Acid House", the stories' quality is going down. Story #3 - "Stoke Newington Blues" and story #4 - "VAT 96" are very ordinary, and you can find better stuff on the literary columns of most magazines.

By "ordinary" I mean that they are written in such a style, and with such an ending, that they simply do not electrify you, as the previous pages did. In other words, and because I read this book last thing before sleeping through the [rest of the] night, these last adventures are great KO pills...

While "Eurotrash", commented on day 17 August 1999, managed to wake me up, "Stoke Newington Blues" is about Euan trying to "get a shot" @ Donovan and Angie's place... The highest point of the narrative is when Euan throws up vomit on a Paul Gascoine picture, but after that it all goes very racial & drugs, when the police grabs the three of them, takes them to the local station and tries to get a confession against Donovan, a black dealer. In that same station, Earl [black] Barrat didn't survive...

It all ends up with both Euan and Angie giving up on Donovan, for a shot... Very lame. It is hard not to sleep...

"VAT 96" certainly is not that déjà-vu on the argument, as it tells us about Fiona and Keith, inviting Valerie and Crawford for dinner. The thing is that Keith is now a head living on kind-of-fish-tank... after a severe accident... and Fiona forces him to watch stuff the head wouldn't normally like to. Irvine could more from this story, that only runs from pages 42 to 45...

I expect the book to improve.

Open GL Tutorial - Lesson #3

Lesson #2 of the OpenGL tutorial, showed how to use Visual C++ to code OGL in MS Windows. Of course that is not as immediate as in UNIX / X, but with the right methods in the view class, it is relatively fast to achieve the status of having an OGL "enabled" MFC project.

Despite leaping that far, Lesson #2 didn't really show you any 3D or even 2D drawing - it just prepared the project to handle OGL calls.

Lesson #3 finally steps to the point of having visible OpenGL stuff up & running. In fact, Lesson #3 is the shortest so far, because it does no more than adding three new methods to previous project. It shows you how to do a white rectangle on black background, defining the rectangle as a polygon.

As it always happens with my tutorials, you can download both the source code and the win32 executable. Enjoy!

Don't you forget that I am also running a Visual C++ 6 [VCPP6] tutorial. Check the available tutorials.