This is a report on what I've been doing since I talked to you on my last 
visit to Syracuse.

I've had to spend a few days setting up my new PC, installing software, 
Linux, etc. 

Got the second referee's report for the NHSE Review paper. Both of them were
very helpful, and pointed out a few typos and minor errors that I've fixed, 
and also made some suggestions for improvement that I'm following up on. One 
of them pointed me at a very good paper that I hadn't seen, which I need to 
add some information from. I'm almost done with the fixes, then I have to 
redo some HTML hacking to prettify it, add hyperlinks, etc. I hope to have it
done by the end of next week.

Wrote the review of the Physics Today random numbers paper and emailed it to
you last Friday night - I assume you got it OK (I think my email is working
OK again). 

Gave Heather some info about work with Community School Networks, Askari,
and Empire Web/Student Center for the Infomall report she is working on.

Started looking through Miloje's documentation, reports, papers, code, etc.
I hope to have understood it enough to come up with a plan of action for the
Askari project by next week. Been talking with Chou-Wei via email, will meet
with him when I come up next, in about a week.

Still working on code improvements for Webboard for Gary, but haven't been
able to do much on this for the past couple of weeks. Gary visited me today
and we discussed a few things. He says he has been negotiating a deal with
WinStar that is much better than the one he was negotiating with MCI (Winstar
is a telecommunications company started by founders of MCI, which just got
given $600M in venture capital). Gary also claims to be closer than ever to 
getting venture capital, and hopes to get $2.5M within a few weeks.

Finished editing Saleh's journal paper. Added a lot more information about 
how his expert system works - I finally understand most of what's going 
on in his code, after many long discussions with him (his initial draft of
the paper didn't explain this very well). 
I thought we were finally finished with the paper, but I found some 
inconsistencies in some of his results, and on closer examination it turned 
out that he was computing the variance and specific heat incorrectly. Since 
he uses an adaptive cooling schedule which uses these values to figure out 
temperature changes and number of sweeps at each temperature, that means all 
the runs need to be done again. He is doing this at the moment, I'm hoping
it won't take too long, and it may even improve the results a little. Once
the new runs are done and the figures are regenerated using the new data,
the paper will finally be ready for submission. This version will probably
go to the Journal of Operational Research. Then I will write a version for 
Int J Mod Phys C.

Edited a couple more chapters of Alvin's thesis.