Post with both length and identity crises

[kyrasantae]

Yesterday I woke up to find myself in extreme discomfort. This is quite normal, since it's always somewhat stuffy in my room because I keep the curtains closed in the morning to protect my posters, but I get up, eat breakfast, stumble on the stairs up to the main gym in Van Vliet (Note: Peoples, it's Dutch. Learn to say it properly. It's pronounced "fleet." Deal with it.), squeeze through the crowd to the front, only to merge right into the crowd flooding into the gym to write the ENCMP100 (programming) exam (yes, on a Saturday).

I walked into this exam pretty confident of how I would do, since it's not one that people can really "study" (in all technicality) for - but what it does require is a thorough understanding of how the code works as a language and how commands fit together to do stuff. Since it's multiple choice, we don't need to actually write any code for it; just answer questions about how some concepts work and interpret some code - it's like going into a French exam that consists of questions about grammar and then a few readings to comprehend. Shouldn't be too bad, right?

I finished the exam in an hour, and stuck around for another 15 minutes before I left. During this time the requisite 'someone in the room has their desk fall apart and crash to the floor' happens. I wasn't the victim. When I got home I called forgottenlord and told him I felt that I had some...issues...with the exam. More on this later.

Lea has visitors (her mom, and Shad, and a friend and her mom) so she makes waffles for us to share.

I meet forgottenlord on 4 Ed South for some piano-banging in the itty-bitty practice rooms. I only brought my scraps with "Dante's Prayer" on them and having not performed that song since grade 8, I seriously can't play and sing to it anymore. And the guy in the adjacent room was playing some Beethoven, which made me feel really inferior. But pounding on a crappy grubby upright piano in a small confined space really took me back to my Academy days at MRC.

After that we trotted over to Lister and forgottenlord did some number-crunching on his calculator with regards to my exam. Basically the issue is as follows:

One of the most important but also the most challenging things about C++ is pointers. In fact, they are apparently such a challenge that the professors effectively taught the entire course (this is an intro course) without mentioning them until the very last lecture-and-a-half or so. How? E.g.: "It's much easier to explain C-style strings as arrays using pointers, but since we haven't covered pointers, just pretend they... work."

Of the 222 points on the exam, 44 of them were on questions about pointers (IIRC, 5 one-point questions, 1 three-point question, and 6 six-point questions). That's a whole one-fifth of the exam! We spend 1.5/26 lectures on pointers and it shows up as a huge part of the exam. We didn't even have a homework assignment that required us to use them, only a few not-for-credit questions on an optional component of the course (it's optional because we have to pay for it and it's probably too easy for anyone with any experience with the language).

forgottenlord's floormate Lee returns from something at 1400h, and wow, was he pissed. I guess Scots are just as good at extended bouts of cussing as Finns are. forgottenlord and I decide to write up a formal complaint to Trevor, our first-year liaison guy. Lee says he'll be willing to sign the letter once it's done, that is, if I can have it written up before next Friday.

I took a nap in forgottenlord's room and was walked back to my apartment at around 1800h. premierecardinal goes to pick up Steph and then comes to get me, then drives to Lister to pick up Kim, and then we go downtown to get allimalia and to get Kim's boyfriend Chris from the Greyhound station. We all went out to Tau Bay, a Vietnamese restaurant, for dinner. The medium-size bowls of phở were only $4.95 each, but one just wasn't enough (should have ordered a large-size bowl), so I ordered another one and finished most of it too. I also had a French-style coffee with condensed milk, which is basically a caffeine and sugar high rolled into one.

After that, we enjoyed some bubble tea at Tea Cottage (where doctorgandalf dropped by to say hi), then dropped off Steph at home because she needed to study. I had to phone forgottenlord to get him to help get the rest of us non-Lister residents signed in (two guests per resident). Then he went back to his dinner (this was around 2100h!). We watched Office Space while eating popcorn, jackfruit chips, and drinking Sprite mixed with a reasonable volume (read: enough to line the bottom of the glass) of aromatic bitters, whatever that is.

Then premierecardinal and allimalia needed to go home so they did that, and the remaining few (test: how many now?) went up to 6 Mac to see what I've dubbed the "official tourist attraction of 6M," a.k.a. The Brick (you know what I mean).

Now only I remain and forgottenlord drafts up some stuff regarding that complaint I'm/we're writing. I get home at 0235h and laze around with the computer a bit, and the next thing I know is that my computer still likes to get hotter and hotter, I'm still depressed (forgottenlord calls this "Rajaton is wearing off, isn't it?"), and it's 0400h.

By the time I turn out the lights, it's 0525 and the horizon is just starting to appear orange. I cry for a little while and fall asleep.

I wake up this morning somewhere around 1000h. Someone is skateboarding outside. I hear snoring. It's Dana on the couch, she sounds a bit sick with a cold. Lea's dad is here moving some stuff in and stocking her up for the summer. I somehow don't do anything unil 1200h, when I cook up some 牛什麵 (random parts of beef guts with noodle) with the leftovers from Friday's lunch with thegirlinred.

Then my computer decided to depress me further by mysteriously heating up the HD to 53°C. This means that the HD bay was practically scorching hot.

...And so now I'm here, having just spent 2 hours writing up an LJ post in Knowledge Common. I want a coffee.