Pug’s Place

I’ve got my towel and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in my backpack, so I’m ready for my killer final and my not-so-killer-final after that (where the professor is a big Douglas Adams fan).

At 3:00 I’ll be waiting for my destiny in my Analysis of Algorithms final… at 5:30 I’ll be blinking blearily thinking, “what happened?” as I take my Numerical Analysis final. But here’s hoping my towel and copy of H2G2 (which Elf gave me for Christmas, yay!) scores points with Prof. Anand.
Yep… now just waiting… My walls are bare, my stuff is strewn on the bed and hidden away in boxes… all that remains unpacked is my computer, phone, clothes and speaker system.

…Another one bites the dust! Yea yeah!

UPDATE: I survived, but I feel like I fell from 30,000 feet without a parachute and got hit by a truck. Fun!

Found on my wall… wonder what it is?

Looks cool, time to play with that switch…
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Give me hug.

If you want to give me something other than a hug, here are things for which I am looking:

• A go/pente board, preferrably one which packs small (please no giant wooden ones )
• A small hot air popcorn popper, used (self, or garage sale) would be great, if it works.
• A photon microlight (available from ThinkGeek, or even some hardware stores) — preferably white or blue
• Pizza
• Lunch
• Dinner
• Something that blinks
• A vacuum suitable for an apartment
• A newer linux-compatible webcam (If you’re really interested, ask Flynn for help)
• Sean Flynn’s soul

Not to be pushy, but people are already starting to ask anyway, so… yeah. Hugs are greatly appreciated.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster.

Awesome.

You know you want to. Go on. I’ve seen your dreams. I’ve analyzed them in high-order polynomial time, and you better believe we’re talking big-theta notation here. So do it, step into this dusty road between these ramshackle saloons and late-model riding Lampropeltis getuluses, look into my eyes, steady your nerves and reach for your quizzing sticks. I dare you, you cur. I double-dog dare you.

Before your blood runs into the sand I should tell you that I’m not the kid you saw out here earlier. I’ve done a lot of growing up since the last time we faced each other in this street. This is an NP-hard world and I’ve adapted. I have a clear mind and I know, I know that everything boils down to black or white, true or false. The world is NP-hard and I can reduce it all to a string of ya’s and no’s. In polynomial time, no more, no less. Cook? I know what he knows. Afraid yet? You should be. ∑_i=0…∞x_ip_i. That’s right, I’m looking for trouble.

Oh, ohh. A big man, making a P with your fingers. Yeah, I can’t prove P=NP, and nor can you, so shut yer mouth. And yer fingers. Give me a certificate and an NP problem and I’ll validate it for ya, fast. Try it. Or are you scared? Ha! Reducing the Hamiltonian Circuit problem to the Hamiltonian Path problem is easy. Can you do it? It’s possible in O(n²) time, and I can. You show me an NP-complete problem, I’ll show you it lies on the intersection of NP and NP-hard. You tell me an NP-hard problem and I’ll ask “to what other NP-hard problem should I reduce it?”

I’ll cover your vertices, I’ll find your subset sums, I’ll color your nodes, hell - I’ll even reduce those problems to the Windows Minesweeper Consistency Problem.

Not so confident anymore, are ya, boy?

I ain’t backing out, and I know you ain’t either. I’ll meet you out here Wednesday at teatime and we’ll finish this.

I’ve made some updates to my wp-mail.php hack for Sprint PCS phones (old story). The ChangeLog is below for the last few versions.

Download from Pug’s Random Bits of Code place, as normal.

* Version 0.3.3 (23 April 2005)
* - Stop using random numbers for the filenames — use datestamps
* (jcjones AT ufl DOT edu)
* - Add automatic image resizing (jcjones AT ufl DOT edu)
* - Yet another fix for Sprint Picture Share emails
* (patrick AT princephotography DOT com)
*
* Version 0.3.2
* - Allow multiple Sprint pictures at a time to work (jcjones AT ufl DOT edu)
*
* Version 0.3.14159265, Shoop Edition
* - Support the new (April 2005) Sprint Picture Share emails (jcjones AT ufl DOT edu)

I received a package yesterday from Canada. A 56.0 lb package. Within it was:

• 50 lbs 14-gauge galvanized steel
• 1 lb 14-gauge brass
• 1 lb 14-gauge bronze
• 1 lb 14-gauge aluminum
• 1 Knippex cobalt-blade hard wire cutter
• 2 Knippex flat-nosed pliers
• A book on European chain-mail

All of which were purchased from The Ring Lord. I delivered said box to Carmen’s today and she and I sat down and alternatively cut rings from 3/8″-diameter spools of wire and assembled some European 4-in-1 mail. Just a little, mind you, but we’re both trying to learn the weave still.

You see, Carmen is learning armor-smithing and going to make both herself and myself hauberks over the next… year (hehe!). She’s hoping to maybe have hers done by the end of the summer and then during the fall she can teach me the ways of chain-smithy while constructing mine.

While I was there we both constructed about 2 square inches of chain, but something tells me that Theresa has a good 10 square inches by the time I’m writing this. Some observations:

• Despite what your preconceptions, armor-grade steel rings cannot be bent in any way with your fingers. If you thought you could close the ring just a little bit with your fingers and you haven’t been doing fingertip push-ups for 10 years, you were wrong.
• Carmen has a very large amount of strength in her hands. She can cut two rings at a time while I can only cut one. It’s more time-wise efficient to cut one ring at a time, but still, Kung Fu and Tai Chi yield grip, obviously!
• Rings, until they are connected to a large “cloth” of chain-mail, never lay as flat and perfect as they do in pictures.

Otherwise, I’ve completed finals and everything for four of my six classes. Just two exams next week, and I’m all set to graduate the first time in December. More on that later, now I go to the last Programming Team meeting for the term, and then out for pizza on the department’s dime.

Oh, and you can see in the pictures above Carmen’s Hisshou headband. Cool, no?

Universities have started mailing me literature. Again. Though this time the literature is all about graduate programs in engineering.

I feel like I should start filling another box like the one which held all of my undergraduate advertisements…

In the April issue of IEEE Spectrum there is a feature article about all of the true effort, numerous simulations and general engineering which went into salvaging Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank explosion.

It’s a long article but very interesting, at least to those of us with a science inclination. An excellent read if you’re supposed to be studying.