A Week Past.

Well, not quite. Its actually been six days since my Wednesday from hell. I had two exams in a row last Wednesday and had no idea what to expect on them. With a list of over 25 topics for each one, I was trying to figure out how the instructor could narrow them all down to a 50 minute exam.

The first exam ended up being nothing as expected, earning me a low mark on it. However, since everyone seemed to have the same outcome, a curve is looking good. Every question on the exam seemed to be something completely off topic compared to what we were required to do for the homework and the labs. I guess the instructor didn't understand the meaning of their own syllabus when they said that the exams will be based on homework.

The second exam was a killer for anyone. This exam was beyond reason. It started off by asking to convert this 32bit binary number into decimal.

1010 1101 1110 1110 1111 1111 1111 1111

Now, I have to admit that I do not know what the 31st power of 2 is. Nor do I know what anything above the 16th power of 2 is. To think that we were to do this conversion without the use of a calculator was completely dumbfound. The question did ask us to also convert the binary number assuming it was a 2's compliment, a IEEE 754 Decimal Number, and the machine code for a MIPS process.

The second exam also required us to memorize the Single Cycle Data Path and be able to modify it for a new process never covered in the class discussion (ISZ - Increment, Skip if Zero). Now, I do not have the time of day to memorize a complete data path, nor do I have the ambition to. I am expecting low marks here as well, which isn't good.

Caution: Potentially Contagious Post

I have come to believe that computer problems are spread from person to person, by either telling them about it or posting it on a blog. The communication of a computer issue is the interconnection that spreads the disease. So, lets dive into this theory of mine.

While a friend (will remain Nameless) came to visit me while he was here for manors of work mentioned to me that he had a hard drive crashed oh him and he was forced to install Windows 2000. Now, during his visit for some reason, we had gone over the BestBuy and looked at hard drives (odd). During the browsing of the many selections, the mention of the Maxtor hard drive company came up, where the warranty topic came up.

About an hour ago, I started to read the blogs of the week. During this hour, I could hear my computer try to read from one of my hard drives (spin up, spin down, stahl). Peranoid that I am, I restarted the computer only to find on boot that there are now two drives, instead of the three that I had. After closer studies, it turns out that the hard drive isn't recognized on any of the settings or by the DOS program I got from Maxtor.

Thus, there is my theory. This isn't the first time that this has happened to me; however the circumstances were different, the results were still the same. A friend had a hard drive fail, mentioned it, and well... look what happened.

So, Yeah.

I thought last weekend was the worst weekend I had ever had. Well, I was wrong. Sometime on Saturday, I ended up in the hospital with no recollection of what happened. All I remember is waking up staring into the eyes of a nurse with pains all over my body. Turns out, while working in the EE Lab, I just passed out (based on what people have said).

Anyway. Its time to relax and do some homework.