In which I vanquish the evil and mighty Algorithms Homework and cook a tasty meal.
I finished my CS 161 homework! This is, believe it or not, a significant achievement. I spent all Saturday working on it plus an hour or two just about every day since it was assigned last Tuesday. There were four problems, and the fourth was what took all the time. Paraphrased, here it is:
Take these 25 functions and order them from fastest to slowest asymptotic growth. For each function in the ordering (except the last) prove that it grows faster, or at the same rate, as the next.
As I am sure you can imagine, this is time-consuming. But now that I've done it, I feel much more like a real computer scientist, instead of just a programmer who owns the complete works of Knuth (well, almost).
I made beef burgundy tonight. It took a lot of work, but it is wonderful, even though I think I probably boiled it too long so that the burgundy flavor was muted. I had a big bowl of it over rice and lot of bread and butter dipped in it. I made enough to eat for lunch for the rest of the week.
Went out biking yesterday with Joel, Costa, and Ramesh. The research group paid for lunch and ice cream. We stopped at a used bookstore and I bought some real finds: a like-new Exceptional C++, a book I was going to buy anyway, at half off the cover price, a first-edition The C Programming Language, which I've always wanted for historical value, and a copy of the PostScript ``green book'' to fill out my collection of PostScript manuals.