Flat3D

One more

This Wednesday is my final exam! Then I am free! After almost 20 years of full time education and more than 10 years of 6-monthly examinations I will finally be free!

The last exam wasn’t too bad. I think I managed to answer 1.5 out of 3 questions close to completely right and I am sure I will have gleaned a few marks from the other 1.5, along with the coursework that should be a comfortable enough final mark.

The upcoming exam this Wednesday afternoon is Image Processing. It should be a relatively simple exam. The concepts are simple enough, the mathematics is pretty basic.

BUT (and this is a big but!)… The lecturer seems to set his exams based on us gaining his understanding of the subject rather than developing our own understanding. Now this might seem like a trivial difference. But the problem lies in my lack of confidence in my lecturer’s completeness of knowledge and understanding of his topic. When we were doing the coursework for the (half) module, we took some slightly different approaches to some of the aspects involved, these were mostly code-savers, for example we used black on white for one comparison and counted the bg pixels rather than the foreground, simply because we had an algorithm in a method to count the white pixels in an image. It took us a while to explain this to him and that it gave the same results.
So this means that in order to get the marks in the exam we are going to have to do things exactly the way he would do them, any deviations from this may result in him deducting marks from an answer that is perectly good, simply as he can’t get his head around it.
Now being an engineer this is difficult for me, as my years of learning have been based around devising solutions to problems based on my own understanding of the problem and available solutions. Now I have to learn to regurgitate, and to be honest this has never been a strong point of mine. My mind works best with concepts rather than with listed facts.

Any tips?

Ok, my exam is tomorrow and I’m not even remotely motivated to do work. I don’t know anything close to what I should, yet I just want to do other things. I went to the bank and lodged my tax rebate (almost took a photo titled “The time I got money BACK from the government!”), I got a helmet for kayaking, I went and did some grocery shopping, I watched some tv, been listening to radio 1 and all kinds of things that aren’t studying!

Does anyone have any tips to help me focus?

Until I get some I will go back to listening to Classic FM and desperately trying to resist the urges to go do something else… It might be easier if the topic wasn’t such a dull topic…

One down…

The exam yesterday morning was ok… I felt quite comfortable doing it…

Although the first question, generic points on AI was a kind of an educated bluffing session, I forgot how to concatenate lists in PROLOG and I skipped the third part of the last question (partly due to time limits and partly due to being entirely fed up and wanting to go home, I still had 15 minutes to do it if I’d had the will power). But the rest felt pretty good and I seemed to know what I was doing for large sections. So I reckon I have done ok, and along with my decent practical scores I think I should be looking at a percentage in the 60s. Which would be nice enough.

The next exam is the computer architecture one. It’s not the normal computer science computer architecture module, its the electronic engineering one. I don’t know if it makes much of a difference. It is probably much the same material, just approaching it from a lower level…
But yeah, it’s the one I am missing notes on, so I plan to try to fill out my knowledge with a thick slab of googling and research.

To be honest I have been totally preoccupied with kayaking this week! I keep finding myself wishing I was out on the water! Even sometimes I find myself wishing I wasn’t going away so much this summer so I could do more of it! I am feeling more and more annoyed at missing the last weekend… Back when I was booking for canada I hadn’t put the June weekend in my calender cos it was after my exams, so I thought it was finishing in May… Oh well, I’m still getting to go to Canada! :thumbup_tb:

I wonder if there will be any kayaking in Japan…

Urgh

This weekend was great, it was another of the kayaking course weekends. We did our canoe safety test and three star kayaking test (from BCU) and all of us passed them.

BUT due to me being in canada, I can’t make the next weekend. Which is a bit poo… Not that I’m complaining about getting to go to Toronto! If I was given the option again I would still go… But it sucks that I end up missing that one. It is the end leadership training weekend which is what the whole course was for really. It means that I will have to find a training course in my own time and do it to get the qualification.

But at the same time, I can now kayak relatively competently, and it will only improve!

The service tonight was a celebration of our minister’s (and his wife’s) 25 years serving the congregation of First Antrim Presby. There was a LOT of food for thought regarding what is important in life etc. I thought back to my dad’s retirement do last year and think how much great stuff he did which, sadly as he put so much into it, will all be forgotten in 50 years time, or at best will be remembered by people. Then I look at what JD and Claire have put into First Antrim and their own lives for God and I think that even though people will move on and forget and so on, it will be remembered for eternity by Christ…
Makes you think.

So now I am up in Belfast and tired. So tired. But tomorrow I have an exam on AI. And as I was away I want to get through all of the material for the exam (not in depth, just to summerise it again, get it fresh) before I go to bed. So I have maybe an hour or two ahead of me to do that…

Urgh…

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