Chan's Personal Blog

At exactly 10:00pm on August 4th, 2006, I finished writing my last final exam ever. For the record, the final exam was on embedded systems (think computers inside everyday objects like microwaves, remote controls, etc). For a course that's supposed to deal with hardware, there was an awful lot of programming required for the final exam. My hand hurts from writing so much stuff. I used up two entire exam booklets to answer all the problems. Furthermore, programming on paper is annoying because you end up erasing a lot of stuff because you forget to put something down earlier. Programming is much easier on a computer.

Anyway, I feel pretty good about the final exam. I definitely over-studied for that final; a good problem to have I guess. I spent most of this week locked in my room studying for this final. Since I didn't really see the light of day for the week, I grew an exam beard. I looked like a mad man. But I shaved it off before the final exam. We used to have this stupid ritual in high school where no one would shave during exam week. The tradition lives on!

After the exam, I drove by my church to see if anyone was still around for youth group; as I drove past the church, I didn't see any vehicles, but I decided to go in for a closer look. Turns out everyone was loitering in front of the church, and all the cars were parked in the back for some reason. So, I met up with everyone after my exam. It's definitely kind of strange interacting with people again after being locked away for a week. I felt kind of anti-social, and definitely tired especially since I've been sleeping at 2:30am on average this whole week.

So, this concludes this major round of combat. The difference this time is, when next term starts, there's no more courses to battle. Woot!

Anyway, time to do some gaming. I feel very deprived right now. Oh, and maybe some ice-cream. Yes, delicious ice-cream.

I feel kind of bad for those who still have exams. This summer's exam period is only 10 days long for some reason, usually it's at least 2 weeks long. In either case, the engineers have 6 exams spread over 10 days. That's pretty hardcore. Best of luck.

Some people, when they're stressed out in school, they break out with pimples and such because of a combination of caffeine, lack of sleep, poor food choices, etc. For me, when I'm stressed, I get white hairs. They just keep on coming which hints that the end of exam period is near. Normally I get a haircut after exams are over (because I don't have time to go during exam period), and my barber takes a look at my hair and goes.... just finished exam period eh? The post exam haircut is almost like a cleansing ritual if you will. But yeah, you can always tell how stressed out I am by the number of white hairs I have.

But anyway, we are entering the final stages of this war. Today I handed in my term project and gave a presentation on it. The professor was fairly impressed by it; he was pretty surprised that it worked as well as it did. Initially, the professor said that it would take about 3 weeks to complete this project, but due to time constraints, I was only able to allocate 5 days to it. Nevertheless, I was able to blitz through it and finish on time. The key was that I did my research ahead of time, so my mind was subconsciously tackling the programming problem. Funny enough, I was helping Adam move to his new place this weekend, and I managed to figure out a solution to something I was stuck on during the move.

For those who are computer geeks, the term project involved converting a UML state chart diagram to Java source code. It's essentially a compiler project, and now I'm glad that I took a course in compilers even though I didn't do so hot in it. I decided to use PHP 5 for this project since it's a nice language to use when you have to manipulate strings. Coding this project really showed me the power of PHP 5. Parsing XML output involves one line of code: $obj_xml = new SimpleXML(file_get_contents($your_file_name)); In Java, this would probably take 20 lines of code just to open a file, and another 40 or so for the XML parser. Developing in PHP was fast, short, and sweet. Anyway, very impressed with PHP 5.

So, one battle remains. I have a final exam on Friday evening, and that concludes this stretch of the war. It will be the last final exam EVER! This is week 3 of me blitzing through end of term work. It will be nice to have normalcy restored. I don't know what I'm going to do with all this free time afterwards.

It's kind of wierd thinking that it's almost all over. I've been at it for 6 years straight non-stop. It's kind of like fighting a war for so long that you don't really remember what it was like before it started. Furthermore, what are you going to do once it's all over? You get used to fighting a persistent enemy.

Anyway, I'll worry about the philosophical and metaphysical implications AFTER my exam is done.