Depending on the way the wind may blow

Hard drive update: yes, the power supply was covered under warranty. Yes, Ascent will replace the power supply. No, I don't have to send in the whole drive to achieve this. If the end result of the process is an actual working power supply (and it's looking increasingly as if it will be), I will have to start sacrificing a Flash drive to Ascent every Friday, as clearly their powers must extend beyond those of your average retailer into the realm of the gods.

Today was a lot of fail centred around my attempts to get the power supply mailed to Auckland, but it doesn't really matter, because I don't have much to do anyway. I want to start on my coursework but cannot do so until various dates next week (a different date for each course). Until then there's nothing to do but read.

Will tomorrow be the same?

Being that I'm in a state of mild anguish about the end of my math degree (just two months until I have to stop doing math FOR EVER AND EVER), and that my worldview has relaxed to the extent that what I cook for dinner now seems at least as interesting as my studies, I'm going to ease the filtering on this filtered blog and write about stuff that interests me even when that isn't necessarily related to the topic of the blog.

There were 82 words in that sentence.

Yesterday in the 314 lecture we laboured endlessly and fruitlessly to apply rationalisability, a normal-form concept, to extensive-form games. The motivation for a lot of this stuff seems to be that we like to find formal justifications for our instinctive solutions. Unfortunately a lot of it is being taught by example, which, I must say, is not very formal.

So far this week I haven't studied for the test because I have a math assignment to do. My justification is that doing the math assignment counts as de facto preparation for the math test (also next week), so after it's done I'll be able to spend that much more time revising 314 instead of math. The assignment is interesting; it puts polynomials to an actual use. I had heard there were such things, but hadn't really seen any until now.

As for dinner, this morning I prepared a pork casserole and set it to start cooking at 4pm, so when I get home tonight the house will smell all yummy :)

A new day but it all feels old

This morning, when I nonchalantly strolled into the campus computer shop and asked for a MacBook, the woman in the shop trumped me most excellently by nonchalantly producing one from under the counter. I paid for it and took it away immediately, and now it's all up and running under the name of neoMac. babyMac is consigned to a bottom drawer until I can afford to waste money fixing it, but thanks to the wonder of Time Machine backups, its spirit lives on inside neoMac.

Today I finally got a textbook from the library. It's mine until Thursday. Already parts of the assignment are starting to make more sense.

The lecture today made a start on Nash equilibrium, which is about all there was to game theory in first and second year courses. I remain puzzling about just what we've been doing in class up till now, and what it was good for.