Month: November 2002

Today was unholy, weather wise. It was already in the high twenties
when I stepped out at 9 am in the morning and it just grew warmer and
warmer and the heat has not even fully dissipated from my room as of
now. Good thing I was at the campus labs most of the day, trying to
finish up my Industrial Experience project. “But you’ve just finished your exams!” you say. Yup, no rest for the wicked.

Anyway, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to finish my IE project early
and get it signed off before the client leaves for the holidays in
December. It might be possible, I’m going to try anyway. I’ll have to
fully commit myself the whole of next week and see what happens then.
If it’s nearing completion, I’ll try and push for a client review the
week after and leave one week for modifications and hopefully a sign
off after that. We’ll see. *fingers crossed* This is my last real
holiday, so I was rather hoping I could have a long 4 month one. That
is out of the question, but perhaps a 2+ month one is still within
reach. I wouldn’t want to stay here in summer anyway. From the way
things are going, it looks like it’s going to be a scorcher. I stayed
back 2 years ago and it reached 45 C at times.

Well I’ll be damned. The questions that came out today were EXACTLY the same
as the Semester 2 2000 one and the Semester 2 2001 one. I had read the past year exam papers, which
were actually removed from the past exams database and yet, available under a different course
code. By inferring and extrapolating, I had expected this year’s questions to be the same, and I
wasn’t disappointed. I would have done better though if I’d gotten some sleep though. It was hard
trying to recall facts that I already know and I’m sure there were some “cross-contamination”.
Cross-contamination is the phenomenon that occurs where you mix up the answers of one question with
another. The borders start getting fuzzy after a lack of sleep, you know. I might get a Distinction
if I’m lucky, but I’m going to be conservative here and predict:

Expected Grade: Credit

It’s off to bed for me. I haven’t had any sleep last night.

My brain is absolutely saturated. I did not sleep last night to memorize the
prodigious lecture notes of this subject. It’s amazing how this subject has 80-120 (!) slide
lecture notes. Times that amount by 13 weeks. Plus, every slide has stuff to remember. I can’t even
type properly now coz I’ve archived the “language” portion of my brain to make space for the
“memorize and regurgitate” part. Quorum consensus method, Suzuki-Kasami’s broadcast algorithm,
Singhal’s heuristic algorithm, push push push, go into my brain dammit!

Segmentation fault…

Core dumped!

Well…I didn’t do too well in this exam. I was rather appalled when I first
read the exam paper. I found out that I’ve been concentrating on the wrong stuff. However, I did
manage to rally up a bit and wrote what I feel was right, so I should be able to pass. The past few
year’s exams all had Gantt charts, which is like a free 11 marks, but it didn’t come out this year.
Bummer. Oh well.

Expected Grade: Pass

Anyway, the Doom III Alpha 0.02 (the E3 demo) has been leaked. I downloaded it
last night, but didn’t manage to unzip it until today. It damn near took 8 minutes just to unzip
the RAR file. It took another 2 minutes just to start and get to the new id animation with the
hybrid metal/flesh heart fusion loop. I tried bringing down the console and typed map
e3/e3_3 and waited for 25 minutes while my aging Athlon 750 w/ 128 mb RAM and a GeForce 2 MX
tried to load the demo, but gave up after that. It was an exercise is patience, and patience is a
commodity that has eluded me thus far.

This is an er…a screenshot of the Doom III alpha. =D

Another exam in a couple of hours. Wish me luck.