One of the busiest week ever: 1 assessment on Monday; 2 assignment due and 1 presentation on Wednesday. More free towards the end of week but yet still need to prepare for quiz and assignments due on the following week. There was also Google Code Jam 2015 Qualification Round in which I passed. One more thing: I passed the Phase 2 of Wikimania 2015 “scholarship” application! :)
Monday, I skipped the CZ3001 lecture as I woke up late (I actually woke up at 8am and then sleep again, expecting to wake up at 9, but then it was 10! And my lab started at 1030). I rushed myself to CZ2007 lab which was the final lab that has a group per group evaluation. Our group had the last turn (and hence spent quite lot time doing nothing there). The evaluation was okay as the TA asked us to do some stuffs and it worked well (except when it didn’t work, we disabled the trigger and he still marked the query as successful :P ). After lunch, I went to CZ2007 lecture, then spent 2-hour for Green Computing meeting and then 1-hour at library watching lecture recording (CZ2006), and then went back after CZ3005. I watched YouTube videos (this time “John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight” on Government Surveillance and it was hilarious: informative, educational, non-technical, and funny!) I also started the CZ3005 lab 1 logbook, finished MDT assignment, and revised the sequence diagram of Software Engineering.
Tuesday, as usual, I skipped CZ2006 lecture and I continued doing the CZ3005 logbook. Near lunch, I went to NYH taking my matric card (as I needed it for taking goodie bags on Wednesday and later at exams). After lunch at canteen 2, I went to CZ2007 tutorial and after that I went to CZ2006 group meeting (mostly for doing the demo video) and then went back, finished the CZ3005 logbook and practised the Green Computing presentation for a while.
Wednesday, I started the day receiving news that my phase 2 application of Wikimania 2015 Scholarship* was successful! (*not educational scholarship, more like travel grant to Wikimania 2015). Wikimania is annual conference of user of Wikipedia (and its sister projects) across the globe. This year it was held in Mexico City, Mexico, at 15-19 July 2015. The previous years they held it around end-July and early August of which I can’t join as there were other commitments. This year tough I will have internship, before my acceptance of the internship, the one that offers me the internship (the CFO) said it was okay (although later when I told this matter to the CEO, he said “he will discuss with the others”). Well, it was just this day that I told my parents about this. Although at first they were reluctant, since there was option to cover all cost of travelling including the cost of visa application, ground transport, and meals there, they said it was okay. I also informed the admin communities of Wikipedia Indonesia :) But I found out that one of them who was accepted on Phase 1 wasn’t selected for Phase 2 :( That means I’ll go alone. . . Well, I knew this Wikimania program since 2009 where there are lots of banners around the site promoting the conference. But isn’t applying for the scholarship till this year because it always clashes with my classes (that time I was still high school student).
After this, I went to Software project lab to submit my CZ3005 logbook, Hardware project lab to register our group demo time (Monday, 1020-1040), and then to Hardware Lab 4 for CZ3001 lab free-access but then no one turned up -_- and I realized that there were numerous bugs in our codes and yet to be fixed. I then went to collect CEC goodie bag before going for lunch and then meet up for CZ0002 presentation final practice. We went to the LT and then ours was third to present. Well, I can say that I haven’t practised enough for the presentation as I not really fluent during that time so much that I can see the prof put a mark beside my name at the evaluation sheet. And I was also having a stage fright as it was facing a lecture theatre-wide audience. But then he did some other mark during the end of presentation after I answered his question. My part has been completed and I was really relieved. Overall our presentation was just so-so. Around 3pm, I walked out from the LT to collect NTUSU’s goodie bag of which I was one of the last ones to get it as they were already closing and cutting the queue. After the Green Computing session, I went straight to Canteen B having a really early dinner and then realized that there were something wrong at my printed MDT assignment 2 and I manually crossed out the errors and corrected it :P At the MDT class, it was nice as always. After the class, I went back and revised quickly (watched the lecture recordings and reading the lecture slides) for CZ2006 clicker quiz on the next day.
Thursday started with me going to CZ2006 lecture for the clicker quiz. Well for this 2nd half of the course, I only went to the lecture only for the clicker quiz. After lunch, I attended CZ2007 final lecture (which ended with motivations from lecture 1 and tips for exams). Then I attended CZ3005 lecture and then went back, started to learn how to use Adobe Premiere Pro and then did a draft demo video. Well initially without any cutting and fast-forwarding, the video was 12 minutes long and after making the inputting part three times as fast, it was reduced to 8:44. Besides this, at night I went to CITS part-time which I also did my work on LILY. Also I read some of the problems for the ICPC training.
Friday started with revision on the CZ2006 demo video (cutting some seconds suggested by Gaby, hence reducing the video length to 7:49; this video length fits very well with the background music used), and debugging on CZ3001 codes. After that I had meeting with people from LILY telling more work to be done although I said that I can’t commit that much since it was near exam period already. Then I continued the CZ3001 code debugging, later turned out that we did not put enough NO-OP to the instructions that it just went to infinite loop. I attended the CZ3001 lecture which was so boring but I was lucky since the lecturer said that the mic was broken and hence he didn’t use the mic (and hence lecture recording is without audio). Next I attended CZ3005 tutorial which was nice. I like this style of tutoring which encourages participation and not only based on the model answer. Well, mostly he only write down whatever we said and then state “I don’t know the answer” and then later check with the model answer and corrected us if we had done mistakes. After the tutorial, I went to library to continue debugging and finally found the bug.
After this, I went for dinner with NTUBS friends and then to CNS Meeting (in which the main committees that is non-managers were discriminated -_-) After this I went back and attempted to solve the ICPC training problems. There is “RACING” problem which was a MST problem. I tried to recode instead of copy-pasting from my old codebase (by the way the codebase was also corrupted and hence inaccessible anymore :( ). After some attempts, it was accepted (I had off by one errors). I also revised again the video, pushing it to the extremes (keyboard inputs increased to 500% speed from original speed) and Gaby parts were sped up 1.1x (hence the voice was not really natural but was still acceptable). This was, the video is now 7:15. At first I sped it up 1.1x but then the tempo sound unnatural. Hence I reverted it to original speed and cut some of the background music to make the ending transition nice.
Saturday started with me reading Google Code Jam qualification round problems (problem A and B). Then I went to ICPC training which the turnout rate was very low by now. After the training session I had lunch and then went back, switching between attempting the GCJ problems and CZ2007 revision for the rest of the day. In the end, I completed revision on lectures and solved A-small, A-large, and D-small. I also did laundry and room cleaning that night. It was also on this day that I started using the website blocker application again to block distracting websites such as Facebook, and I accidentally clicked to block them till Sunday midnight. Ouch.
Sunday, I skipped BF as there will be CZ2006 meeting in the afternoon. I started the day trying again to solve the GCJ problems (apparently haven’t ended yet) but failed, and was delighted when my A-large was accepted. Whew, I just barely pass the lower bar. I went to the CZ2006 meeting after that, which was a very long meeting on practising the presentation. After the meeting, I went back, rested for a while and then started revising for CZ2007 again, this time by redoing the tutorial questions including the critical thinking questions. Later at night, the group of CZ3001 has gotten serious and many more bugs were discovered and fixed while doing the report at the same time. This process gone till 2 am.