So my thesis deadline is today. This marks the end of the tons of simulations i’ve done over the past few months…. until poster presentation in March. And my holiday has officially began… until school reopens next Monday.
it’s been really long man. I still rmb just about one month ago, I was asked to re-do this whole set of simulations. I had like dozens of simulations, each one taking 30 minutes to run on a 16 GIG RAM computer. And there is no guarantee whether they could converge or not. To make things worse, there is only one 16 GIG RAM computer which i could access in school, and the lab was only opened on weeekdays, 0830 to 1730. Thing is, in many cases, by 1630 I would be asked to leave, and sometimes the people came late, so the lab wasn’t really open at 0830. Finally, that computer crashed VERY frequently. With all these mounting problems, I really thought I wouldn’t be able to finish on time…
So began my almost daily weekday routine in December, going to school at 0830, doing work until 1730 then go home. There seemed to be some significant progress actually, thankfully. Then a new problem arose: what to write in my thesis?! By three weeks ago, the discussion part in my thesis was something like this:
“The following shows a graph of X vs Y. As can be seen the relationship is fairly linear. The following shows a graph of A vs B. As can be seen the relationship is not so linear.”
I thought I wouldn’t be able to write anything substantial on time.
Then began my daily work from 8 am to 2 am every day. And somehow everything pieced together nicely come the last few days or so. I could actually cough out 61 pages of report, with 23 pages of discussions (though half of the pages consists mainly of graphs only)
The report is not considered as well written by many. There were many things my prof asked me to do that I couldn’t do. But it’s a vast improvement from where I was four and three weeks ago; I felt like I had been given a second chance and I told myself, hey it’s good enough, considering not too long ago I was actually considering asking for FYP extension.
So today we went to play left 4 dead 2, after having the heavy burden removed from us since July heh. Honestly I don’t think I enjoy the game anymore. It’s getting really repetitive. And those swamp maps like Swamp Fever and Hard Rain, it’s really a bore to play. Especially if everywhere looks the same. Waters and wooden houses, and you get lost all the time. I wanted to sleep while in the game, like seriously. Even when surrounded by hordes of zombies, I wanted to sleep. Oh, but versus gameplay is still fun. But we didn’t play that today due to lack of people.
And then, I think many would already know that the power supply unit of my desktop malfunctioned for a short while a few weeks back. Now my computer can still run, but that brief incident indicated that the power supply unit is dying, and I gotta buy a new one before it dies for good. So I went to sim lim square, got deceived into paying a high price for a low quality power supply unit, went back, and tried to install it into my desktop. And failed. Lol. I was so peeved. Firstly, the Dell computer casing is designed to discourage people from using any things that are un-Dell. You just can’t fit the PSU into that compartment nicely without scratching the PSU casing. so now there is a portion on the casing where the sticker is kind of gone, and the black paint is also scratched off. Secondly, no matter how I fixed the inputs and outputs, the computer just couldn’t switch on.
I was about to give up until I told my friend and he asked if I turned on the switch of the PSU already. Turns out, that was indeed the reason why it couldn’t switch on, and now i feel like a freaking idiot lol. In any case, I need a molex to SATA connector to get the PSU up and running properly, which I don’t have at the moment. So it’s back to the old power supply unit until it dies.
Now, I’m still relishing the fact that I need not do anything academic for the rest of the week!
