D'Izzy Words

I now have Internet on my laptop! I've had it for three days.

Silly as it may sound , I didn't think of Googling the answer to "How to find a password for the router" because I assumed that if it wasn't found in the Network and Sharing Center on my parents' computer and my parents' didn't know, it was lost forever and we needed a tech dude from the Internet service company to find it somehow. Ironically Matt found the answer in Yahoo! Answers.

( Finding the passcode my parents told me didn't exist )

Now that I've all my bookmarks and all back, it's kind of addictive. I obviously can't use Hulu or Netflix here but I can still download the e-books and audio books from CPL and WPLC. *knocks on wood* And that's what I did Wednesday. It's nice to have both Matt's and my CPL cards to download books from. :P CPL only allows 6 downloads and 3 holds per card from their Downloadable Media Library. WPLC is a little cooler - 10 downloads and 10 holds.

I tried Eoin Colfer's Airman but lost interest pretty quickly. I love his Artemis Fowl series and The Wish List but this one just felt too...prosaic, I guess. There's no fantasy and I'm not interested in historical fiction, usually. Also, planes and flying mechanisms don't much interest me. Guess that's another reason some steampunk books completely lose me...

Then I reread Carolyn Mackler's The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things which I definitely recommend. It's very honest. I bought my own copy years ago while in high school. It was originally published in 2003 and yep, after 9 years, I still find it a compelling book. Of course it's not perfect but I found it very relatable.

But with two days of these books, I think I'm able to stop getting sucked into the Internet. Again, there's no websites I can stream TV shows from (that I know of) and with the time difference, I really don't have anybody to chat online with GMail or anything now. It's study time!

Here's some good GRE studying news:
I'm done with the Arithmetic section in the GRE Quantitative book! I'm going to start the Algebra Section! I love algebra! ♥

Amy has a bucket which contains 4 2/3 gallons of water. She pours out 1/4 of the water. After several hours pass, 3/7 of the water remaining in the bucket evaporates. How many gallons of water remain?

Give your answer as a fraction. ____ gallons

Here's How to Crack It

Your impulse may be to convert all those fractions into decimals. Don't. First off, they're fairly messy as decimals (3.7 ~ 0.42857 ... ), and secondly, there are some nice simplifications we can do with the fractions.

Start with that 4 2/3 gallons. Convert it into an improper fraction, which means it is 12/3 + 2/3 = 14/3. Now we want to find 1/4 of 14/3, and then 3/7 of that. So we want to find 14/3 x 1/4 x 3/7.

Notice that we can simplify the 3 in the denominator of the first fraction with the 3 in the numerator of the last fraction, leaving us 14/1 x 1/4 x 1/7.

Simplify a 7 from the top of the first fraction and the bottom of the last, leaving 2/1 x 1/4 x 1/1.

Now simplify out a 2 from the first and middle fractions, leaving 1/1 x 1/2 x 1/1. Enter in 1 on the top of the fraction box, and 2 on the bottom.