Exam Experience

I have been wanting to blog about this during my exams, but first I want to yell "I AM DONE!!!"

<PWednesday, April 26. The first exam I had was "Real Analysis". I was a little worried, but not that much. Although it is a tough courseit’s not as bad as some people say it is. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. The thing I was worried about was that the term tests we had were too long: 50 mins for 3 questions. Fortunately, there were 7 questions on the exam, and it was 3 hours. Also, the questions weren’t terribly difficult. So that was nice.

Friday, April 28. I had two exams that day, two economics exams. "Economics of Organizations" was in the morning, followed by "Financial Economics II: Corporate Finance". Both are 2 hour exams, and the relieve I had from Wednesday’s exam boosted my confidence. The morning exam was what I expected; it was just like the term tests, and I thought I studied well. The afternoon exam, Corporate Finance, was brutal. Really brutal. I’m serious. The 2 hour exam was 36 pages…36!!! I couldn’t finish it. Most other people couldn’t, so I hope the professor boosts everyone’s marks.

Monday, May 1. This was the day I feared most. The exam was "Mathematical Theory of Finance", a 3 hour, open book exam. We could bring anything. I brought my notes, some had laptops. The good thing was that it is only worth 25%. I was prepared to die. However, it turned out alright. The notes didn’t help much (as expected), but the qeustions were pretty straight forward.

Tuesday, May 2. The last exam was "Complex Variables". The course was never hard. It is like adding i to ordinary calculus. The exam went smoothly, although I was quite sleep since it was from 7:00 to 10:00 pm.

So there it is. My exam experience. What’s up next? Job search. If you know of a good job, let me know.

Update

It has been a while since I updated my MSN space. The thing is, I don’t know what to put in it. I mean, I pretty much got my computer working the way I want now.

What I want next is a monitor, so I can have a dual monitor setup. That would be sweet. I always have to hide my windows to look at other stuff. I know I have a wide screen now and get 256 x 768 = 196608 more pixels over my previous XGA screen, but still, not enough. A 17" screen would be nice, but what’s nicer is a 19" wide-screen. But then that’s too expensive. Oh well, I guess I’ll wait a little longer.

Recently, I have starting rebuilding the website at work. Learned a lot of stuff about HTML and CSS. If you have time, check it out here. Looks nicer (I think).

(New) Computer 4

I have noticed that the P-State Transition settings on New Computer 3 is not updated. The ones I use now are:

Undervolted* | CLOCK =
FID   VID    | FIDx200
4x    0.975V | 800MHz
5x    1.025V | 1000MHz
6x    1.075V | 1200MHz
7x    1.150V | 1400MHz
8x    1.200V | 1600MHz
9x    1.250V | 1800MHz

I have been using these for over two months now. Not a single problem that I recall.

By the way, these settings are on a AMD Mobile Sempron 3000+ (1.8GHz). Now, if you had been to my homepage you would’ve noticed that I describe myself as a computer geek. You may then wonder why did I get a Sempron instead of Intel’s Celeron M, or even a Turion64 or Pentium M? I did have a Pentium 4 -M before, and that was at 2.2GHz. Strange…I think so too. I got it over Celeron M because it is definitely faster, on clock speed definitely and possbile equal on cache usage. The Sempron has up to a 1600MHz duplex bus speed too, much faster then Celeron M or Pentium M. As for Turion64 or Pentium M, well, I didn’t think I need all the power and would just be a waste of money. So far, I am happy about the performance of my computer.

Helping Others

I love helping other people, but at the same time, I hate it.

I really like helping others because it gives them joy. When someone helps me out, I feel grateful, and it’s a really great feeling. Why not give others the same feeling?

I hate helping others because I am always afraid I can’t help them. For example, if I promised someone to help them out at a specific time, I am always scared that I can’t keep my promise. It’s not that I can’t, it’s external factors that cause me to fail. For instance, my family, especially my parents. They seem to excercise absolute power.

A recent event has led me to think: "I shouldn’t promise to help anyone anymore." That would definitely solve the problem of breaking promises. But then that leads to another problem: I won’t have any friends. I would be the worst person to know. Moreover, no one would help me when I ask them to.

So I guess the answer is to strike a balance, not to go to either extremes. This is almost always the case for a typical indifference theory problem in Economics. But then the question now becomes: what is the balance point? Should it be exactly in the middle, or a little biased?

Now, maybe the next question would be: is this balance stable? Or would it change over time? If it does, is just a function of time/age, or a function of other things (eg. people, the event, etc.). Then one would have to go further and ask: what are the properties of this function?…

I think I am thinking too much. I think I should stop now…

New Computer 3

Undervolted2 doesn’t seem to be stable at the higher FIDs/VIDs. So I changed it to Undervolted3. So far so good.

Undervolted3 | CLOCK =
FID   VID    | FIDx200
4x    0.950V | 800MHz
5x    1.000V | 1000MHz
6x    1.075V | 1200MHz
7x    1.125V | 1400MHz
8x    1.200V | 1600MHz
9x    1.250V | 1800MHz

Hope this works out ok.

New Computer 2

After 2 weeks of fiddling with the laptop, I finally arrived at a satisfied state. Here is what I did:

1. I reformatted the harddrive. The original installation was somewhat screwed-up. My taskbar would suddenly not display any open programs. Creating a new account would solve it, but it would reoccur in a while. After numerous account deletion and re-creation, I got fed-up. Also, there were lots of programs installed but I don’t use. After reformatting it, it works perfectly now. I also partitioned my harddrive into two partitions in the meanwhile, one for Windows and programs, the other for my documents, so I don’t have to backup everything all the time.
2. I undervolted my cpu. Before, it would hang/crash all the time whenever it switched between FIDs/VIDs. I tried undervolting less, but no help. After talking to a friend, who suggested that it might be a driver problem, I uninstalled the AMD driver for my cpu and just used the RightMark CPU Clock Utility to undervolt and manage my cpu. It works! Now it doesn’t crash, and I can undervolt quite a bit. Below are my current settings, both of which seem to be stable:

   Undervolted1 | Undervolted2 | CLOCK =
   FID   VID    | FID   VID    | FIDx200
   4x    0.975V | 4x    0.950V | 800MHz
   5x    1.025V | 5x    1.000V | 1000MHz
   6x    1.075V | 6x    1.050V | 1200MHz
   7x    1.150V | 7x    1.125V | 1400MHz
   8x    1.200V | 8x    1.175V | 1600MHz
   9x    1.250V | 9x    1.225V | 1800MHz
   

   CLOCK = | Original
   FIDx200 | FID   VID
   800MHz  | 4x    1.075V
   1000MHz | 5x    1.125V
   1200MHz | --    ----
   1400MHz | --    ----
   1600MHz | 8x    1.300V
   1800MHz | 9x    1.350V
   

   Compared to the original settings, the cpu uses 0.100V and 0.125V less respecitively. Nice. I have yet to test out the battery life increase.

By the way, the specs of the notebook:

• CPU: Mobile Sempron 3000+ @ 1.8GHz
• RAM: 512MB PC2700
• Chipset: ATi RADEON® XPRESS 200M IGP with 128MB DDR (shared)
• HDD: 60GB
• Display: 14.0" WXGA BrightView Widescreen

As mentioned before, not the fastest computer, but adaquet for my needs. The ATi graphics, although integrated, is decent.

Wow, lots of technical jargon. But see, I can write about these things a lot more then about others things.

New Computer

Updated blog! Finally! Yes…the blog is updated after all this time. A lot has happened, but yet it seems like nothing happened.

First of all, I got a casual job…two weeks at night. Dead tired after every day, but it’s cool in the sense that it doesn’t bother any daytime activities, and I could still go to my regular job.

Second of all, a new computer is sitting on my desk. It’s not the fastest or lightest or the prettiest computers out there, but it suffices. I’m pretty happy about it. Check out the pictures!

Other then these two things, I’m just thinking about the new school year…looking forward to it. My brain is turning into mush everyday…didn’t really use it for quite a while. Hope I can still think properly in September.

Renovations

When you start to renovate your house, there just seems to be endless number of things to do, and never-ending.

I like the look of my new room. Very nice.

Camp

Just came back from camp at Bark Lake. My arms are sooooo tired. My whole body is numb. But what fun it was!

Saturday morning. We gathered at church at 7:30 am and left at around 8:30 pm. The first thing that went "wrong" was Simon’s and Allan’s GPS’s disagreed, Simon’s said to take 407, but Allan’s said to take city roads. We followed Allan’s GPS, but Simon’s kept tell us to turn back to take 407; we just kept ignoring it.

Originally, we had two big cabins with public bathroom and were to sleep in sleeping bags. Then, since no one went to Bark Lake, we were "upgraded" to rooms with two beds and a private bathroom, so we were to share a room. First surprise. We each have our own rooms, with 3 extra rooms. Even better, we got a whole building to ourselves!

Saturday afteroon. After lunch (fish and chips), we did a few warm-up games and started feeding mosquitoes. The first major activity was high-ropes. It was scary! After the first step, however, it was getting fun. Despite the mosquitoes, it was enjoyable.

Saturday night. Dinner was…weird. They made "Chinese" food. There were chicken balls, pineapple chicken, "fried rice", and noodles. They did not taste Chinese. After dinner, we had some games and sharing time and chatting in front of a real fireplace. Pretty nice!

Sunday morning. Breakfast was good! Eggs, sausages, potatoe bits, fruits, coffee. Very good. We then had Sunday service on couches. Very comfortable. After some free time, there was lunch (grilled sandwiches and fries).

Sunday afternoon. This was the killer. Canoe-ing was soooo tiring. It not funny. We went off to some distant island and explored it. Yeah. Then we had to canoe back. There goes my arms.

After a nice refreshing shower, it was time to say goodbye. On the way back, AA cried all the way. We were really concerned since we didn’t know what was wrong. Upon arriving at church, we found that he was hungry. Phew!

Overall, a really enjoyable weekend.

Ooops

Yes, I have noticed the typos in my blog entries…if you didn’t notice, then nevermind. They are rediculous (this is NOT a typo…I just don’t know how to spell rediculous)! I could actually miss a whole word in a sentence!

Some people can write a whole page about typos (or in fact, anything). They can talk about a lot of non-related stuff in a way that seems related. I don’t know how they do that. I can’t.