Exam Week, Semester 3 (2)

9 December 2014

This is it. The end of exams. I’m no longer bounded by constant routine of waking up at 7, going to exam, relaxing and procrastinating after that, studying and revising, and most importantly, sleeping.

The first day of exam was greeted with a blow from CZ2003 Computer Graphics and Visualization, in which I did not do well enough, and hence around 20 marks are filled with nonsense answer since I did not know how to solve the question. Well, I think that these are hard questions and others will not do that well too. Hope the almighty Bell Curve God can help me :P Great depression must be relieved by great entertainment. Hence I only started revising next subject after watching loads of HIMYM and taking naps.

The second day of exam was CZ2005 Operating Systems. Although it was not as tough as CZ2003, the materials tested was very broad and hence the difficulty. After the exam, I learned one very great lesson that 16 is 2^4 and not 2^3. Well, hence my calculations were off by one (normally it was a minor problem, but this off by one error is done exponentially). After this exam, the rest of the week seems pretty good.

The third day was CZ2001 Algorithms, which greeted by a heavy rain. Inside, there was this one question that I know the solution, but don’t know how to derive it from the codes provided (the complexity of naive string matching algorithm, which was O(n*m) ). And, there a lot of proving question, which was good since the correct answer is already there: Proven. :)

The fourth day was CZ2002 Object Oriented Design and Programming. The questions were time-consuming, although in my first run, I finished all in one and a half hour, but later when I rechecked my answers, I found some critical errors that require me to erase lots of parts and I also found that I have not completely done some questions. It was quite tense, and I used up all of my time (until the very end of exam) but I successfully completed it.

The final day was CZ2004 Human Computer Interaction, which were blah blah blah. Some questions were just never been expected to be there, and with the high density of text in the lecture notes, I can’t be expected to remember everything from the notes. Hence, when stuck, the creativity process went on and lots of writing was done, although some of them were complete nonsense.

After exam, I went to hall 11, having lunch together with Jeff and other hall 11 current residents. It was so nostalgic to eat mixed rice from the Canteen 11’s stall. After that I went back to my hall, take rest, and went back to school, meeting my URECA professor, Prof Sun Chengzheng, with Edwin, reporting to him on what we’ve done and asked for advise on what should be done next. Going back, I watched How to Train Your Dragon 2 in my laptop. The story was nice, although I kind of expect the presence of the mother may turn against her son’s will. But it did not and the story went normal, very normal: some fighting, some magic, and *boom* the villains died.

The next day, I woke up early in the morning again. This time is not for exam, but for NTUBS Dharma Camp 2015 video trailer shooting which took the whole morning and a bit of afternoon, led by the director cum cameraman, Xiao Hui. After that, I took some rest, and went off to SCE Outing at JEM. We had dinner at Ichiban Boshi, which the meal was quite large in terms of portion. And then we watched Mockingjay Part 1, which was the sequel of Catching Fire. It also coincide with the sequel of our last year’s outing around this time (in which we watched Catching Fire last year). The movie was not as hype as Catching Fire, and I can’t catch the climax part of it, everything was gone up and down and up and down, and then “to be continued”. Well, this is one of the reason I do not like a story to be split in 2 parts. After this, we went to take photos with Christmas decorations around the mall, chit-chatted, and went back to NTU. After stopped by Fairprice, we continued the fun at Hall 17 TV Lounge, where we chit-chatted, played little game, ate snacks, cooked Indomie. We dismissed ourselves around 2.30am.

I woke up around 8am, slacking off the whole day, watching HIMYM, watching The Legend of Korra, packing up my room, and having rest. Well, I packed up my room since the official owner of the room withdrew the room and I had to move back to my official room. At evening, I attended the BAW dinner + meeting and when I went back, I moved room, helped by Filbert, Zillion, and Handoko. :) I’m exhausted now.

The week has been a constantly tiring and intense. After it has ended, this week I attended Web Science and Data Analysis Summer School 2014 at NUS, which require me to wake up at 6.30 am every day and commute to NUS. It was a heavy learning experience, as the attendees were mostly professors and postgraduates. I’ll share more later at the end of the week.