At home

For the second morning in a row I didn't have Internet access, so I called Charter at about 8:45 and spent about an hour on the phone--first with their automated system and then with a person in the call center.  The automated system had me unplug power to the modem, wait a few minutes, shut down my computer, plug in the modem, identify which lights were blinking, which lights were on and which lights were off before transferring me to a live technician.  The technician had me unplug all of the cords coming into the modem, wait a few minutes and plug them all back in.  Again, I reported the status of all of the lights.  He could not "ping" the modem and finally, since the "online" light was not on, he agreed that I had a problem and scheduled a repair visit for this afternoon between 1:00 and 3:00.   At about 12:30, the "online" light came on and when I started my computer, I had Internet access.  I cancelled the appointment, but I'm not convinced that I won't continue to experience intermittent problems.  A situation I can deal with for three more months.

I didn't have any classes today and since I thought I had to be here at 1:00 I spent the day at home--first time in awhile that I didn't go to campus at all.  I vacuumed and cleaned all of the surfaces of the little house then spent the rest of the day studying Queueing Theory and Markov Chains.  I have a meeting on 9/30 with one of my professors for him to judge whether my current understanding of these subjects is sufficient to allow the courses I took in them in 1975 to count toward my degree.  It's my last hurdle (assuming I pass the warehousing course) to graduation.  In a nutshell, queueing theory is the study of lines and Markov chains are discrete processes where future behavior, given the past and the present, only depends on the present--not the past.  They are related since a common model for queueing systems is M/M/1.  A Markov arrival process...a Markov service process...1 Server.  I'll continue to study the articles and reference books each morning before I go to campus, but I think I'm ready for my meeting!