Seven Hours of TOC and a Very Tired Pair of Eyes

Today was supposed to be a 10-hour TOC day.

It ended up being a 7-hour TOC day.

So technically, I fell behind.

But considering how the day actually went, I'm not too disappointed.

Another Office + GATE Day

The plan for today was four TOC lectures totaling around 10 hours. On top of that, there was the usual 8–9 hour office schedule.

I managed to fit some of the lectures around work.

I completed one lecture while going to the office, another while coming back, and then did a three-hour study session after dinner.

That gave me around seven hours of lecture time.

The remaining three-hour lecture had to be pushed to tomorrow.

And honestly, there was a pretty good reason for that.

My Eyes Basically Gave Up

During the three-hour session after dinner, my eyes started burning and blinking constantly. I was also extremely sleepy.

At that point, continuing just for the sake of saying I had completed the lecture didn't seem particularly useful.

So I pushed that three-hour lecture to Friday.

It does mean tomorrow is going to be even heavier, but Friday gives me a little more flexibility because Saturday is a holiday from office.

My TOC completion deadline hasn't changed.

TOC has to be finished tomorrow.

So Friday is going to be a fairly rigid push.

What I Studied Today

Most of today's TOC preparation revolved around finite automata with output and the concepts that followed it.

I studied Moore and Mealy machines, including how to convert a Moore machine into a Mealy machine and vice versa.

Those concepts actually felt quite easy.

Then I moved into Context-Free Grammars and the basics of Pushdown Automata.

PDA was relatively manageable, but CFG was the part where I had to slow down mentally.

CFG Was Tricky, But Not Impossible

I want to make one distinction here.

CFG didn't feel like something I couldn't understand.

It felt like something I was being introduced to too quickly.

I'm studying the lectures at around 1.5x to 2x speed, and this is also my first proper exposure to these topics. I actually skipped TOC during my graduation, so I'm encountering a lot of this material from scratch now.

There were two lectures covering CFG. The first one was essentially focused on CFG, while the second eventually moved into PDA.

Some parts of CFG were moving faster than I could comfortably absorb.

But I don't think that's necessarily a problem.

The way I see it, CFG is probably one of those topics where the first exposure is just that: an introduction.

The second revision should make more sense.

The third should make even more sense.

And after several revision cycles, the concepts should hopefully become much more natural.

So I'm not treating today's confusion as some major warning sign.

It's just a topic that needs more passes.

Seven Hours Instead of Ten

So the final number for today is 7 hours of TOC lectures completed instead of the planned 10.

Not perfect.

But I still studied through an office day, used my commute properly, completed a long session after dinner, and kept the preparation moving.

The missing three-hour lecture isn't disappearing.

It's simply moving to tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Finish TOC

Tomorrow is Friday, and the plan is straightforward.

Finish the pending three-hour lecture, complete the remaining lectures, and wrap up TOC.

It's going to be another long day, and I'll probably have to stretch into midnight because Saturday is a holiday from office.

The October 30 syllabus-completion deadline is still intact.

So for now, Day 25 goes into the record as a slightly incomplete but still productive day.

Seven hours done.

One three-hour lecture postponed.

TOC still on schedule.

Tomorrow, I finish it.