10/15/08

More Posting on College Life...

People, I hve officially trumped my previous unintentional short-sleep record! As of two nights ago, I had only 1.5 hours of sleep. Yes, thats right, 1.5 hours. Hint of the day: "Dont put off a 7 hour long binary math assignment til the night before its due." lol
Anyway....haha so lets see....oh!! last weekend was basically like the best weekend EVER!! So im sitting in my room friday afternoon and Brandon (one of my friends) walks up and asks me if i want to go to a Milwaukee Bucks game that night! So of course i said yes and left in a half an hour for lacrosse. I love no-plan trips lol anyway, the game was awesome, cept the Bucks lost :( but whatever. Then we basically spent the rest of the night driving around this town called greenwood which is about 2 hours from lacrosse, doing crazy stuff like climbing a pavillion and starting a bonfire on brandon's driveway! :D Yea if u want to see pics u should be able to see them under pictures of my from others on facebook....let me know if u dont see any pictures of a playground! lol So yea i got back that day at 5am and slept about three hours before mom came and picked me up to go fishing with grandpa. I only caught one little 4in crappie, but it was still fun! then...well lets see...the packers won, the dodgers won, and the rays won!!!  all in all it was a good weekend lol. Then the week hit. :O Monday was ok...but monday night 2 other guys and i starte that binary math assignment at 9pm. We got done at 4:15AM! And of course in order to stay up that late we all had tons of caffiene. I dont know about the other guys, but i know i didnt fal asleep til about 5-530ish, and of course had to be up by 630. That sucked. THEN! i went to chemistry, and realized that in all of the hype about the binary math assignment, i had forgotton to study for a quiz in chem. Then OF COURSE he had to pick THAT quiz to be the hardest quiz iv ever seen. sooo that didnt help my chemistry grade at all. Well, that brings us up to today, and so far nothing has happened today, so lets hope it stays that way!!! Soo...i think that about does it for current events here, so ill talk to u all later!!!
Hang loose!!!

10/4/08

*Sigh* Sooo neglectful

Hello again everyone!! I apologize for being so neglectful of this whole blogging thing...in case you couldnbt guess, my life has become incredibly crazy in the last month. I mean INCREDIBLY crazy! Like, this week was homecoming, so all day every day there is stuff going on besides classes, so it gets pretty intense sometimes lol. But yea, we won the homecoming game today against oshkosh! WOOO!!!! 34-0! And it was really funny cuz after the game 6 of us went to Old Country Buffet for supper, and ran into the Oshkosh team....awkward!!! I have to say it was the most depressed looking group of guys i have ever seen lol cuz we OWNED them!! hahaha. anyway...OH!!! i forgot the Brewers game is on!!! *gets up and turns on the tv...literally :P*-----*returns 6 hours later after the brewers/phillies and Cubs/Dodgers games * YES!!!!! GO BREWERS!!!!! wooo!! lol sorry i have all of the sudden gotten very much into baseball. Sorry Raihala's, im not a twins fan. :P ANYWAY where the heck was i?? Well....i guess ill talk about classes. I seriously miss classical education. i mean SERIOUSLY. these classes seem so...cheap? i mean, im learning, but not NEARLY to the depth that i did at dokime or home. I really miss all of you a lot. :( Its hard having friends that run on a fraction of the thought depth that you do, if you know what i mean. :p So yea, we need to have a dokime reunion ok??? Oh and i discovered another truth. Your teacher can have a HUGE impact on how much you like a class AND how well you do in it :P. Yea, so sophmore year, i had chemistry and LOVED it! Like, it was my favorite subject in all of hs. NOW i havee almost the exact same class here, buuuuut...wow. I absolutly HATE it. It is the worst class i have. It doesnt matter how hard or how long i study, I just cant figure out my prof's quizzes. Hes a great guy, but he doesnt know how to teach. savvy? So even thought i understand everyhitng he is talking about, somehting is OBVIOUSLY not clicking when u look at my grades in his class. Yea, it sucks....but thankfully its the only one im having trouble with. everyhitng else is going great class wise. Wow...i just read over everyhting i have written so far, and i have used a LOT of all capital words!! ummm......i just did it again. im so dumb. maybe its cuz im really tired?? i stayed up till 330 last night and right now its 11:30 pm...so im kinda tired right now. What the heck kinda blog post is this anyway??? im basically writing what im thinking as i think it, which is really weird for me cuz i alwas think everyhting out b4 i say it. So yea..idk if i have anyhting else to say tonight so i hope u all are having a great time at school (as if :P) and i hope i can talk to u all soon!!! 
hang loose!!!
Andrew

6/14/08

Back to Science: The Dynamically Reassignable Instruction Execution Register (DRIER)

Ok, well i have strayed from scientific posts for quite a while now, so i decided to start back up with this!! Now the subject matter of this post may go waaaay over your heads, but i will try to make it understandable. Also understand that im beginning writing this at 1:10AM so...bear with me lol.

Ok, so a while back i had this idea about computer processor architecture. See, the way they are currently built, The internal execution registers are set at a fixed size...say 32 or 64 bit, meaning that they are designed to execue eiher 32 or 64 bit instructions.
Now the problem comes in the fact that as far as i understand, when you have a 64 bit instruction register, if you have a 32 bit instruction going into that 64 bit register, the register must wait for a second 32 bit instruction to come along and fill that register the rest of the way up. This can be thought of like a 16 oz cup. if you try to fill that cup using an 8oz measuring cup, it will take twice as long to fill up. This delay in filling the register causes it to be virtually usless for several clock cycles. (a clock cycle is the time measurement in a computer processor. a 3ghz processor runs at 3 billion cycles per second.) While this may not seem like a long time to us as humans..think of it in the long term. If that 64 bit register had to be filled with two 32 bit instructions, it would take a minimum of four clock cycles to execute. This is because it would require two to fill the register, and then two to execute both instructions. Now compare this to one 64 bit instruction, which only takes a minimum of two clock cycles; one for loading, and one for execution. Thus, using purely 64 bit instructions THEORETICALLY would result in %100 more yeild, meaning, say, that you could encode an mp3 in half the time using purley 64 bit instructions. Now i say theoretically, because this is a HIGHLT idealized situation used to illustrate my point. But i think you get what i am saying. Having a fixed register size causes problems in the fact that it wastes perfectly good clock cycles if (and when) your instruction set size is mixed. Now comes my idea. DRIER. WHAT if one could make a processor in which there were multiple paralell execution registers that were all linked together? Meaning that you could have 16 32 bit registers, arrayed in a way so that they formed two lines each 256 bits long. This would allow for multiple possibilities. a) each register could execute a single 256 bit instruction, b) each could execute 8 32 bit instructions simultaniously, or c) each could execute a mixed combonation of differant instruction lengths. The differance between DRIER and standard execution is the way the register is loaded. In a standard system, the execution register is loaded from the "bottom up" meaning that you have to take two clock cycles to fill a 64 bit register with 32 bit instructions. With DRIER, the pipelines are composed not of one massive 256 bit pipeline, but of 8 32 bit pipelines, each able to load itself in one clock cycle. These regieters can also stach though, meaning that two 32 bit registers can merge to execute one 64 bit instruction. Make sense? i know this is getting VERY technical, but im almost done...and if you have any questions, please ask in the comments!! Anyway, this would allow for massive increases in productivity if such a processing architecture was adopted, because there would be very little waste in processing time. All right, well its now 1:30 and i have successfully exhausted myself...so i hope you at least somewhat enjoyed this..and please ask questions if you understood enough to ask!! lol

DrEw

5/8/08

Im here again...

So i removed that other post because it was really irritating me....lol it bugged me the most when id be listening to music and then that stupid thing would start...but anyway!!! Well what can i write about....well i COULD write about work and all the fun i had a hokies.....:D! So i guess i will! Lets see, work is..work? lol on saturday for the first time i did the 6AM-2:30 shift, and that was pretty fun, but waking up at 5 to go to work IS NOT fun! lol anyway, it went well...and this rant about work is getting reeaaaaallly boring! so on to the hokies!! after work i went to the hokie abode where john and i spent the afternoon online snowboard shopping and blacksmithing! and doing other random stuff.....but i cant remember what:P after that i saw nacho libre (finally!) and loved it!! lol then john and i went outside and *attempted* to play volleyball. :-D lol i can see that this post is VERY dry and boring, but im not in a terribly peppy mood tonight, and for no particular reason! im just boring tonight! lol ANYWAY i wont waste any more of ur precious time that u are so pointlesly spending reading this blog! :D later!!!

3/21/08

MENS VOLLEYBALL!!!!

K so this is totally insane...and what i hope to be doing next fall!!! :D

3/20/08

IM BAAAAAAAACK!!!!!

lol, hey erry body!!! wow....its been a LONG time since my last post....like since January. O well, im posting NOW and thats what counts, right? lol well, iv been incredibly busy lately with school and work and all other sorts of extraneous activities...but yeah, HOPEFULLY i can find the time to start keeping this up again. I do really miss doing this, especially since its the only real means of regular communication i have with some of u! Sooooooo.....well, i went snowboarding 3 times in the last two weeks.....and it was AMAZING!!! im just really sad that the season is over now. :( Buuuuut i am UBER excited for volleyball this summer!! ya, i know, most people think its a girly sport, but im gonna find a vid of mens volleyball and put it on here. Its Awesome!! so i cant wait to start playing again this summer!!! i have hopes of being on one of the intramural teams at eau claire this fall.....i guess we'll see......but, i have to go eat my lunch, so until next time...HANG LOOSE!! lol :-D