Tearing Down...

Okay, the computer is being torn down now. Most of it is going in an attic to stay here for the summer, but little bits and pieces are coming home with me. Here's hoping all the little bits and pieces play nicely with the new bits and pieces they'll be integrated with when I get home!

I'll be back online...well...I'll have access to the internet again on Friday night (10 or 11 Pacific). I'll actually *be* back online.......sometime later. (-: I think I still need to buy myself a compy case.

The forecast today:

*sigh* You see that icon there on the left? Yeah - I despise it when that icon applies to a region that I'm currently living in. As you may imagine - I am currently living in a region which is covered by a forecast containing that icon. Today's weather has managed to successfully live up to the forecast and I'm currently soaked from a quick run from Heath-Hardwick Hall to Thomas Hall (my dorm). That's about a 30 second run.

*sigh* I despise water falling from sky. Under all circumstances. Water should exist in lakes, rivers, and oceans. It is not proper to have it fall from the sky. If it is necessary for some sort of ecological process or stability, then the rain should fall at a time when I won't be outside. That's only like...95% of my lifetime, how hard is that?

Yeah...I'm still not a fan of East Texas. Everything's bigger in this state - including the weather's mood swings.

Anybody curious about my bandwidth?

Here's the latest statistics which count almost everything to date but this post here. That day with the gargantuan spike up to nearly 3 gigs? That's right after I told the school to raise my limit to 10 gigs. Bye-bye, $50.

If I could only have one accomplishment this semester....

Then it may as well be the construction of this monument.

My First Turing Machine™

So yesterday I got to design my first Turing machine. It was a lot of fun. The machine would start with a string of 1s and 0s such as █111111101111█. It is some number of 1s followed by a single 0 followed by another series of 1s. Then it would exit in one of two final states depending on which of the two sets of 1s is larger. On the ends are markers indicating the edge of meaningful data.

In case you're curious how such a machine would work, I'll be happy to list the states and transitions for you. The first value is the value read from the tape. The second is the value that is written back to the same place on the tape. The third value is the state that the machine transitions to, and the fourth value tells whether the read/write head should move right or left. The machine begins and ends with the r/w head on the first non-█ character in the tape, and final state f₁ means that the first set of 1s is greater than or equal to the second set. Conversely, final state f₂ means that the second set is greater. Why am I putting this up? Because I'm procrastinating from sleep and this makes me look like I'm doing important work or something. I'm really not. (-:

Good night, all!

• State a
• 1, X, b, R
• 0, 0, g, R
• X, X, a, R
• State b
• 1, 1, b, R
• 0, 0, c, R
• State c
• 1, X, d, R
• X, X, c, R
• State d
• 1, 1, f, L
• 0, 0, f, L
• █, █, e, L
• X, X, f, L
• State e
• 1, 1, e, L
• 0, 0, e, L
• X, 1, e, L
• █, █, f₁, R
• State f
• 1, 1, f, L
• 0, 0, f, L
• X, X, f, L
• █, █, a, R
• State g
• 1, 1, g, R
• 0, 0, g, R
• X, X, g, R
• █, █, h, L
• State h
• 1, 1, h, L
• 0, 0, h, L
• X, 1, h, L
• █, █, f₂, R
  

*Grumble grumble irritated sigh*

You'd think that I'd know by now how to set my alarm so that it goes off at 7:40am instead of 7:40pm, eh?

Just got an e-mail...

Just wanted to let you know that there is a severe thunderstorm watch in effect today until 4pm. We will likely be having bad thunderstorms even if we don't have tornadoes. If the Longview sirens go off, remember that everyone should go to the 1st floor. Thanks!

Yay. I hate this sort of thing. I'd take the possibility of earthquakes over tornadoes any day.

On the woes of one day's indiscretions...

My school, in an attempt to curb the problems that our network has had in the past (namely, slow access to the internet) has instituted a policy wherein users are allowed 3 gibibytes of transfer (combined up- and down-stream). After you reach your limit, you are placed in what has popularly been referred to as "The Dungeon." In the dungeon, you share a low-speed connection with everybody else in the dungeon, so the more people there are, the slower it goes. I spent the last week of January in the dungeon and was blessed with 0.5 kibibyte/sec transfers when I stayed up until an insane hour when nobody else in their right mind was awake. Most of the time my transfers would time out before completing, causing me to refresh webpages 10 times before they would actually come up. Downloading a page such as this one with Flash and images disabled would probably have taken something on the order of two minutes.

Well, thanks to some decisions I made a few days ago about downloading some software, I may find myself in the dungeon again. If that happens, I'll probably not post more than a single blog entry since it's so bleeding painful to do so. As it stands, I have 4 days in which I must stretch out 100 mebibytes. I think I can do it.