As you may have known already from my previous blog posts, the past one month has been a very very busy month for me, loads of projects, events, etc. that have virtually taken most of my time everyday. I haven’t got much time to relax, rest, or even play any games… But things have changed since last Wednesday. It was the deadline for all of my projects (except Computer Graphics which have been submitted a week before). Since two or three days before that, I have slept as little as only five to six hours a night. I basically do the projects until late night, and wake up early in the next morning to attend classes. As I am someone who normally sleep seven to eight hours a day, these days had been really exhausting for me. Some classmates have even skipped the night sleep altogether for the last day, rushing the projects into completion. But all of us really feels relieved, at least everything was over and we now have at least a bit more time to rest and relax…
In terms of result, I must say that I am quite satisfied. Although the projects did not complete as good as what I am capable of making, at least the deliverable and scores fulfilled my expectation based on the amount of work I put on them. It is just right at the level where extra efforts or features does not add up to the score anymore. Congratulations for all friends who have already finished their projects as well, I know some of you worked real hard to achieve that ^_^
There are many works coming though, as exams are coming this very next week, and the ACM ICPC Indonesia National Contest (ACM INC) is going to start with an online preliminary round tomorrow. Somehow I feel that for this time, the exams are going to be much more difficult than the mid exam or any of the previous exams. There are just so much thing as theories, syntax, etc. to memorize, and I am not sure whether I can memorize all of them. Anyway, I’ll try my best and we’ll see what will happen. Regarding the ACM INC programming contest, I guess this time I have to work real hard during the competition days. I expect this time it’ll be much more challenging than the previous BNPC-CS. I still have to complete parts of my skill that haven’t been practiced much such as network flow and A*. I guess a week should be enough to at least try some of those algorithms, no need to memorize since I can just add them to the team notebook. There are also the e.COM System project coming, and to be honest I haven’t got any idea on how to distribute the work to my team members… This time I really need some advices from expert Java programmer on how to split the work of Java web application projects…
Besides work, I guess other things have also got better than before. I think I should just let go those things that does not really deserve to be chased for, and focus on getting more important things done. I guess I have to reorganize my financial matters, as I haven’t done much of it for several months. Another things that deserve more attention is my room. I bought a lot of books and items that mostly haven’t been organized well in my room, taking up spaces that they shouldn’t. The same thing goes to the computer file storage. Pictures, documents, musics, have been scattered unorganized in the system. If these files are not organized soon, I sense some disaster coming when some hard drives fail.
Speaking about digital storage, I guess many of us don’t really think about the security and reliability of our storage media. Some people just store their files in whatever harddisk they have and can’t do anything when the disk is broken. For avoiding this kind of things, I have used RAID-mirroring for the disks in my file server for some years already, and although there hasn’t been any failing disks yet, I feel a little bit less worried simply by doing that kind of mirroring. I guess for computer science students, especially those using laptops, data backup should have better priority. It’s certainly a disaster to lose the nearly-completed projects, if it happens.
I guess there are still much to say, but before this blog got too long, I should stop here and continue next time. Please feel free to leave any comments you may have, I’ll really appreciate those…
-Andrian Kurniady
