This is some very weird stuff indeed. The 3n+1 problem is essentially this.

Step 1: if n=1 then stop

Step 2: if n is odd then n=3n+1

Step 3: else n=n/2

Step 4: goto Step 1

The problem is to find out whether or not all of the 3n+1 sequences converge which appears to be unknown right now.

Maxtor announced that they had a 320 GB drive in the hopper in November 2002. It’s now almost April, and it’s still no where to be found. Except now it’s going to be a 300 GB drive. I’ve been waiting to get some new drives for a loooong time now (3 years almost), and have been putting it off because I wanted to have a couple of 300s.

The InqWell ran a story today about setting the IBM T221 monitor up with Windows XP. Allegedly, the high-end ATI Radeon cards will support this monitor under XFree86 with linux. I’d seriously like to see a Gnome 2.2.2 screenshot at 3840×2400.

Here’s the overview for the Asus P4C800. This is the new Canterwood-based P4 board that is supposed to rock.

Decibel posts like five garfield comics every day to #alg on distributed.net. Nugget suggested that someone ought to do a little shell scripting to determine which were good years for garfield comics. So, in a flash, I produced a little graph that showed the best years for garfield comics according to the authority.

egrep “gaview.cfm” irclogs/distributed/#alg.log | sed “s/.*date=([0-9]{4}).*/1/” | sort | uniq -c | awk ‘ { print $2″ “$1 } ‘ > db_garfield_stats.dat

I took a 175 mile Sunday drive out on some country roads outside of Austin. My digital pictures from the event are here, dbaker’s are here, and Nugget’s Quicktime Movie is here.

I was watching Bela Fleck and the Flecktone’s
“Live at the Quick” DVD yesterday, and at the
end of the show I perhaps witnessed the most
amusing musical composition ever.
Bela brought out, Kangar-ol Ondar, a Tuvan throat singer, and played “Ah Shuh Deckio”, a Tuvan folk song, along with the Flecktones, Sandip Burman on Tabla, Andy Narell on Steel Pan, McCandless on picollo, and Hanson on Basoon. It’s truly one of the most strange and unique things I’ve seen done musically probably ever.

I managed to make it through 8 days without consuming soft drinks (Coke, Mountain Dew, etc) in an effort to reduce my daily Calorie intake.

Apparently, Microsoft thought it was a good idea to delete my Passport account for no reason. Now I can’t use their lame Instant Messenger service. Thanks Bill.