Happy Holidays

Exams are done, my new iMac was finally delivered, and Christmas is almost here.

Exams went pretty smoothly, except for Cisco. The written part took less than an hour, but the hands-on part could only be done 2 people at a time, and I was lucky enough to go last. It sure can be fun waiting around the school for 8 hours to do an exam. It didn't take too long, maybe 2 hours.

Once I finally started, I noticed the guy before me had left all his configurations on the switches, so I had to wait another 15 minutes while the teacher went through them all and made sure there were no traces of it left. I stayed a little longer after I was finished, too, 'cause I didn't want the guy who started an hour before me to feel like too much of an idiot with me finishing before him. And, of course, being the last ones in the room, we had to help clean up and re-wire the room the way it usually is.

By the time everything was done and over with it was almost 9 PM. Not bad for an exam that started at 9 AM.

The last exam was a bit… weird. As a bit of a preface: We didn't do anything in the class all year. He gave about 5 lectures that were mostly review of what we did last year, then gave us assignments without teaching us how to complete them. It turned out the exam was pretty much all the assignments bundled into one.

Except, people were having problems. I mean, sure, we also had tons of problems while doing the assignments, too, but he never actually showed us how to do them "properly". Not only that, but the virtual machines he had given us were also having some problems. Some of them wouldn't recognize the disc drive, so we couldn't install some of the required components. Some of us didn't even have our discs so we had to wait until we could borrow someone else's, which took a good half-hour. Then some of the components within the VMs wouldn't work.

It was a mess.

Finally, when everyone was done, he announced "oh yeah, and your unit tests for the semester should be online later this week". Wow, thanks for that. I'm sure those would've been more helpful before the exam. That was on the 14th. It's now the 22nd and he only just turned on the last two tests. Oh, and our transcripts were finalized today, so any marks we get on the unit tests won't reflect retrospectively in our final mark. I'm just left wondering if I should even do them.

But enough about the bad news. Onto the good news!

My iMac came in! (Finally!) It only took about a month. Ordered on the 27th of November, delivered on the 17th of December. But it's okay, Apple, I forgive you. It was worth the wait. If anything, the wait made it more worthwhile.

27" iMac, 2560x1440 resolution, 178 degree viewing angle (yes, I've even tested it out, it's awesome), 2.8 GHz i7-860, 6 GB of RAM (upgraded Steve's 13" MacBook Pro from 2 GB to 4 GB and put the extra chips in the iMac), 1 TB hard drive, ATI 4850 with 512 MB VRAM. It's amazing.

It also came with a wireless keyboard (which I already had before, but this one is ever-so-slightly different) and Magic Mouse. While not exactly "magic", it's a pretty cool mouse. It brings the cool multi-touch gestures of the MacBooks to the desktop.

Speaking of multi-touch gestures, if you happen to own a Mac with a multi-touch capable mouse, check out this site. It increases the number of things your mouse can do by an order of magnitude. It can even do some multi-touch stuff on some of the older MacBooks that only support two fingers.

I never managed to get that Christmas shopping done. Mostly because nobody told me what they wanted, or anything they needed. I'm thinking of getting the parents some seat warmers for their vehicles, but I'm not sure about my sisters. Money is always nice. As for my brother, I was thinking of getting him some hot sauce, since he's a big fan of spicy food. But not just any hot sauce, I'm talking about hot sauce that has a Scoville rating of over 1 million. The kind that you only use one drop of in an entire batch of chilli. You know, the kind that makes you think you're going to die if you get a drop on your tongue.

I already upgraded Steve's RAM, but I think I might do his hard drive, too. He's got the stock 160 GB, 5400 RPM drive in there right now. I'm thinking of upgrading him to a 500 GB, 7200 RPM drive since it's on sale at newegg right now. Besides, he could use the extra space and speed. He downloads a lot, and speed is always a good thing to have. I'd go SSD, but that's prohibitively expensive, and doesn't have as much space. I kind of wish they would come out with metal foil drives already.

I'll use Time Machine to back up his drive, replace it, then restore his machine from backup. It should be pretty painless.

I might get him his own Magic Mouse, too, since he said he wouldn't mind having one. FutureShop has it for 90$, Apple has it for 70$, so I might get them to price match it.

Megan's back for the holidays. One semester down… I have no idea how many to go.

Oh, and Amanda's moving back in. The parents are gone down to Toronto right now to pick up her and her stuff. They should be back tomorrow.

That's all I've got for now. Check back later for updates on which expected Christmas gifts I got and which ones they forgot to order (like the USB-rechargeable AA batteries).

Oh, and I may start another blog soon. An 18 and over, gratuitously filthy blog, that is. We'll see how that goes.

Homework, among other things

So I managed to finish my web programming assignment. A big leap, in my eyes, to go from a bit of HTML and CSS on my own time to all-out PHP, MySQL and Javascript, but unimaginably easier and more convenient. Having the ability to use loops to generate a page and only generate the parts you need is pretty nice. So is not having to rewrite every single page. Kind of a pain, however, is getting all the HTML code to still line up in the source code. While not at all necessary, it's still something I like to do as a matter of professionalism.

This weekend I have the task of making a 15 minute presentation about my website (oh boy, and with Steve's MacBook Pro at hand I can finally use Keynote in class!), a short presentation for Systems Analysis about some company offering Software As A Service, filling out an entire lab book with answers, and figuring out how to set up a DHCP server, a VSFTPD server, a backup routine, NIS, LDAP, and a mail server. On SUSE 9.

Yeah, that's gonna be fun, getting to set up obscure software on old software without being given any documentation on how to do any of it. Oh, but it's to "prepare us for the real world, where we might not be told how to do our job". Except in the "real world" (which one are we in now? we're definitely not in Second Life) there's a minimum requirement as to how much you have to know before you can do something. Even The Sims managed to cover that.

All the other stuff isn't so bad. I kind of like giving presentations, especially if I like what I'm talking about. Talking about one of my own projects? That's loads of fun. I love doing that. It's my chance to show off. I'll give it 110%, and hopefully get a similar grade since I managed to put in that much more effort than everyone else.

Making a presentation about something boring? Not bad, but still tolerable if I get to use Keynote.

Filling out a lab book with notes? Boring, but at least it'll boost my mark by 10% (seriously? yeah).

Oh yeah, I'm also expected to do a bit of Christmas shopping and socializing, too. And it's a weekend, so I'm not waking up before noon. This is going to be fun. Assuming Saturday has a 1 PM wake-up time, a 9 PM to 2 AM socializing time, then Sunday has a noon wake-up time, 1 hour finish-up on socializing, then a 11 PM bed time, with about 25% procrastination rate, I've got about 12 hours. The website presentation should take all day Saturday on its own, then the more boring presentation taking up an hour or two on Sunday if I'm lucky, the lab book another hour or two, then the rest of the day can be spent wrestling with SUSE 9. Lovely.

Oh, right, then I have to go on Blackboard and fill out all the course surveys, finish up a few rogue assignments, do a few quizzes, and make sure I'm not missing anything. Awesome.

Not that they could've started giving out this work in any of the 3 months of school we just went through, that would've been too balanced. No, they have to dump it all on us the week before exams. You know, because it's just so terribly easy to do a semester's worth of work in a week. So easy.

Anyway, I think that's enough for one day. I'll be sure to post a status report sometime next week.