GoneWacko’s Blog

My First Grade™

Yay!

I received my first grade for College. It’s not a very serious grade and at the same time it is, but let me start at the beginning:

Since this year (I think) my school works with a new way of determining if a student is to pass a subject. Instead of having exams, we have assessments, which are conversations with your teacher where you prove that you master the subject through competency tests and indications. The competencies you do during the lessons, the indicators should come forward from the conversation. I think.

Anyhow, because there are like 300 new students this year it’s a bit insane to have them all go on assessment so they held a test-exam for the subject Embedded Applications. If your portfolio assignment (a program) was good enough (which was the case for me, I’m quite certain) and the test result was satisfactionary (not sure what the ‘limit’ is) then you could pass the subject without an assessment.

I apparently got 84/100 on the test (31 multiple choice questions. I’m ashamed that I didn’t get 100/100) which most probably means I get to skip the assessment. Hurrah.

“Blog update is the plz”

Indeed I haven’t blogged in some time.

I mainly blame the fact that me going to college has already become routine after 4 weeks.
Still, some things did happen that are mentionable.

Firstly, I FINALLY received my 2×512 MBs of extra RAM and installed it, which brings my total RAM to 1.5 GBs. I can’t say I’ve noticed too much of a difference yet. (still have to try World of Warcraft in Orgrimmar, but I’ve not played WoW in some time) I did find out that I can now shut down my PC within 2-4 seconds time. But if that’s all then it has not been worth the investment

Also, school’s been fun. I always take a (pretty long) network cable to school, even though there’s a wireless network, so we can connect laptops to each other with a 1 gbps connection, to share music and play games. Great fun.
And one of my classmates even has a router in his locker at school, but we’ve not used that yet.
Very amusing if you have nothing to do for 4 hours.

Also, I’ll probably be broadcasting on Zernebok Radio which is an Icecast server that Owen has recently started and is the early stages of possibly becoming something.

Only

Yes I’m alone but then again I always was
As far back as I can tell
I think maybe it’s because you never were really real to begin with
I just made you up to hurt myself
I just made you up to hurt myself
I just made you up to hurt myself
I just made you up to hurt myself
I just made you up to hurt myself
I just made you up to hurt myself
And it worked.
Yes it did!

The above is a small bit of the lyrics of the song ‘Only’ by Nine Inch Nails.
It’s not a new song. At all. It’s been on TV for about half a year now I guess. And of course NIN has been around for ages. But I only recently started listening to NIN and I must say, it’s nice music.

The lyrics of ‘Only’ are pretty sweet. And the fact that Trent Reznor can get away with pretty much just talking half the time without screwing the song up is impressive, I guess.

A Boring Sound of Thunder

Yesterday I went to see “A Sound of Thunder”, not knowing it was such a crappy movie.

The special effects are hilarious. The characters just do not blend in with the CG background at all. The actors walk in a very unrealistic way, and the background moves twice as fast as they are.
The cars look like they’re inspired on the Power Rangers.

Next time, I choose the movie we go to. (I went to see A Sound of NoobSFX with a friend)

Born to code

Well, today was fun.

Not to seem arrogant or egoïstic, but … well… I rule.

Firstly, I had no experience with Java, at all until last week.
Today, I already wrote a somewhat sophisticated function which other classmates had tried to make but had not managed to. Which meant that I got plenty of attention from people wanting know my secret.

After that, the guy next to me (who happens to live close to my home town so we tend to travel home together) had a strange problem with his code. I couldn’t see why it was resulting in exception errors so we asked the teacher. He couldn’t figure it out either. His code was nearly the same as mine (well, not the sophisticated part, but the easy copy-from-book part :p) and my code worked fine.

Then I just tried the one thing that I noticed was different, even though the book didn’t say it was necessary (it didn’t mention it at all). That fixed it

Still, I consider it to be luck and the fact that I have experience in other programming languages, because, overall, Java still seems a bit unlogical to me at times. Also, it sucks that the “(expression) ? true : false;” thing doesn’t seem to work in Java.

Binary

Today’s Embedded Applications theory lessons were about how a computer calculates.

Nothing too new but still quite interesting. For example, I didn’t know that you could convert a decimal number to binary by just doing <decimal> modulo 2, then dividing <decimal> by 2, and then loop that, prefixing the new answer before the old one(s), until <decimal> is 0

Interesting.

HTML!

Woohoo!

Today’s lesson is about the wonderful technology called HTML. Something I already mastered 6 years ago…

Boooooooring.
I’m actually blogging this during said lesson!

I love my laptop.

Weekend

Well the first week of college is over.
It was quite relaxed this week although that will change with the next one, unfortunately. Today we just have 2 hours of Web Design and then we’re done.

No idea why I’m even blogging about this because it’s hardly fascinating, but I have to do something while waiting for class to start.

So.