Student Dying

Studying is Student and Dying put together.

- Some wise dude or dudette

11:28 this morning was the pinnacle of the past two weeks! I handed in my final midterm and suddenly I consider myself on holiday until the finals begin some time in December. It could have taken an ugly turn since just prior to handing in my exam I let out a sigh of relief, stretched my arms, yawned and in the process of stretching my arms out to the side I accidentally groped the female exam-supervisor on her ass, who was collecting somebody else's exam from their table.

Let's make a few things clear: 

1) Yes it was an accident. 

2) Thank god they use students as supervisors here during the exams and not 70+ retired females as in Sweden.

The actual exam was fairly interesting as well - it started with Q1 where you simply had to cross corresponding boxes to what are considered manufacturing operations within a plant and what wasn't - fine, if the entire exam was like this no problem. On to Q2 - Death! It comprised half a page of an extremely technical industrial manufacturing process of some kind of industrial bolt or something (which I actually ought to have understood somewhat due to my summer job at Sandvik) all text in French. We were supposed to make a schematic drawing of how it went from raw material to finalized product and I didn't recognize a single word regarding the equipment or material used - except tubes d'acier (steel tubes). So I guess I managed to draw down the starting material correctly at least!

Anyway, I was glad it was kinda over and at 11:30 I head over to the laboratory for Circuits Logiques in the Electrical department to prepare tomorrow's lab. There's a lot of things a student doesn't need after 1.5 weeks of exams - the last thing is on the list is to be faced with the most insanest lab ever.

Mission: Program a circuit that uses binary numbers as weights of the three primary colors to create a white/black checkerboard of 16*16 pixels on a VGA screen.

Follow-up: 11:30 - 14:30 Salma and I stare blankly at the topic-at-hand being given absolutely no clues or hints whatsoever on how VGA technology works and how the device board we're supposed to program it on operates with the VGA. 

14:30 - 14:45 A slow-motioned Eureka!

14:45 - 17:10 Salma runs off to her lecture and I set up the circuit and resolve all the problems that arise in the process. Here's what I ended up with:

... maybe not the prettiest thing but at least it did the trick. A black/white checkerboard of 16*16 pixels using the three primary colors is indeed what I ended up with.

And may I pinpoint that this problem was just 1/8th of the entire lab... 

Time to blow off some steam at the gym!