EggXpert

Argh - sorry guys.  Reading what I wrote last time, that sounds condescending, and I didn't mean it to.

Since we are past the original week, though, I'll leave it at this.  If you have a puzzle idea, send it in to me - the more bells and whistles the better.  If I use it, I'll give you a space from the Prize Box.

Things are going to continue to be slow around here.  I have six weeks of school left, and our senior design project is significantly less further along than it should be.

A quick update...

School is keeping me nice and busy, as usual.  The Prize Box is still dormant, but not dead.

Also, one of my graphics cards decided it wanted to quit working last week, and in the process corrupted some of my system files (how or why beats me), forcing me to reformat my computer without backing anything up.  As a result, all the Prize Box files were lost...  The only huge repercussion of this is that I'm going to have to count what spaces are remaining and come up with a new guide.  That will take a fair amount of time...

Anyway, Happy Easter everyone.  Catch a rabbit and force it to give you candy.

*edit*

Scratch that - I just found a copy of the guide on my external hard drive.  I must have put that there last year...

wow.. that bites to say the least, I hope you didn't lose too many irreplaceable files like old pictures or video/audio ect. it always stinks to lose that sort of thing.

happy Easter to you as well.  hmm.. forcing a bunny to give me candy sounds like fun =) .. I could threaten to tan it's hide if it refuses and that should help me get the good stuff lol =)

hopefully school will let up on you a little sometime soon and you'll get a chance to make a puzzle for us to stump our brains on, do you have any good ones in the conception stage?

also I bet you have a bunch of files/programs that you want/need to reinstall to your hard drive first.

~YN~

For the most part, aren't much of the puzzle things hosted online? That should help a lot.

Who needs an external when you could just have two hdd? :P (I got a 250gb for cheap by pure luck a while back, a better deal than any of the newsletters hdds.)

All the hosted images are *.jpg's, but I use *.psd's for all the image editing.

Anyone want to help me design a 16 bit pipelined Kogge-Stone adder?

Okay guys...  School is into the final stretch - there's this week, then dead week, then finals - meaning I have absolutely no time for anything else.  I've got a two week break after finals before I start work, and I'll try my hardest to get something up during that time.

pipelined:  computational elements have registers between them, allowing for faster operation after an initial delay
Kogge-Stone adder:  an architecture of adder that incorporates "propagates" and "generates" instead of simply propagating the carry out as in a normal ripple adder

hey, me too, but instead of dead week, we get hell week.  No break, in fact, they cram the assignments in the week before finals.  Course my classes are easier than yours by more than a stones throw.

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Updated Utility thread without downloading*online!*

More info

Hey guys...

Well, first off, I apologize.  I haven't touched the Prize Box for almost three months now.  The brief up front is that I want to continue the Prize Box, or at least something like it, but I can't tell you when that'll happen.

Believe it or not, I'm a fully fledged electrical engineer.  My undergrad years are behind me, and I'm a "contributing" member of society.  Actually, since I work for the government, all you state-side citizens are contributing to me.  And yet Uncle Sam still takes taxes out of my paycheck...  I've been a full-time employee (again) for about six weeks now, and they converted me from a student trainee to a regular Joe just last week.  I'm planning on making a blog entry shortly after this (another area I've left neglected), so if you care to read about the last few months in my world, you may do so at your own discretion.

I still enjoy making the puzzles.  I have a rather epic one that's been stewing in the husk on my shoulders that I really hope gets made sometime.  Unfortunately, I just can't keep up on the regularity of them.  I've been toying with a few ideas of how I'd like things to go...  There's the "simple" possibility of doing ridiculously hard puzzles that last for months.  The thing here is that the difficult puzzles tend to lull in activity once they hit a dead spot.  A second option would be to implement a kind of mini-RPG, where it's possible to help or hurt the chances of others.  Here, the issue would be ease of incorporating new or infrequent players.  Then there's always the minigames...  I must admit, they had spaces being uncovered a bit quicker than I was comfortable with.  My end desire is to have something that will draw day to day activity, and still be fun for you guys to play and me to manage.

I'm always open to suggestions.  I had opened the floor to puzzle submissions near the end of the school year, and though I did get a reply, I regret I never got around to actually looking at the idea.  I've still got it saved in my Inbox, though...  If/when something does happen, I'll find a way of rewarding those who have earned letters from this Prize Box.

Again, sorry for the huge span of nothingness.  I do want to keep things going, but I've got to figure out how much time I can safely commit!

Hey,
glad to see you're still out there and doing well CG, and its nice to see a new post here on this thread =)

I have an idea to help keep people occupied on fun puzzles and at the same time not overwhelming you constantly..

see, I have a hunch that, while people do like to receive a prize for completing one of these puzzles, there are still those of us posters that don't really care as long as there's some sort of brain melting challenge to work our minds on (in some cases its more fun for an easygoing puzzle that can actually be solved in short(ish) notice) , or sharing the puzzles we come up with in hopes of improving our "tactics" of puzzle making can be even more fun, at least I think so..

perhaps what we need to do is create a new topic similar to the "where in the world a google earth project" where in, everyone and anyone can post a puzzle, but if they don't have one or don’t want to make one they can just solve them and let others who wish to make them put them up.
now I'm not saying that the prize box should be eliminated, but I think it would keep people visiting the page and warping all our minds around and into new challenges, while at the same time allowing you to take your time on prize box puzzles if you get the chance to continue them, also this would give you a chance to try out other people's puzzles for yourself =)

the biggest problem that I can see would be the possibility of puzzles that make absolutely no sense and that lasted forever keeping the same person putting up puzzle after puzzle.. perhaps the best way to avoid that would be to institute a 4 week time limit as you did here, or perhaps even less time for a puzzle that was considered more of a "basic" puzzle by the poster, or one that there where no clues for.
and to solve for the "repeat offender" problem, if there was someone besides the last puzzle master who had something to put up (and the previous solver didn't have something of there own to put right up ) they should alternate to keep the puzzle types fresh.
all of this would have to be refined a bit and I think a good deal of it could/should be handled by simple courtesy and discretion of the puzzle master/s with the best interest of the sprit of game being kept in mind.

anyway that's the jest of my thoughts, I don't know if it would start out slow and get faster after time or just kind of die off or what but maybe it's worth a shot.
I don't have anything ready other then the one I sent you a few months back (I think that‘s the one you referred to), but if anyone would be interested and you wouldn’t feel like we where trying to steal your fire I'd be willing to try to come up with at least a couple ideas if there is anyone else for the idea.

~YN~