Long Sunday and more labs for the week

Working on Sunday was bad enough. Playing Risk till 3am the night before is worse. My friends and I went to Spencer Plaza (the super huge shopping complex in Chennai) for shopping on Saturday. We ended up buying Risk together to fill our free time (very hard to get any these days). It was very addictive that we didn't want to stop playing until we finally gave up because we know that the game would not end so soon and we have work the next day.

Good thing that this place we are staying provides morning calls. I am really pampered alot here in Chennai. The caretaker of the place would just give a ring to the phone in my room to wake me up. After I have finish preparing then I'll just give them a ring and ask them to bring breakfast up. Anyway, on Sunday morning, I had to drag myself out of bed. Well, my friends and I actually arrived at office late. Supposed to reach before 9am but we arrived at around 10. We had to 'drink tea' with the HR the next day and I expect our score card has some marks deducted liao.

Sunday was just a lab session very much like my first year in SoC. Really dejavu... Aaron Tan's (my CS1104 lecturer) words keep ringing in my head. At times I could suddenly recall facts that I don't even remember when doing my CS1104 exams :S ... This lab session was supposedly an easy lab because when I saw the question, I had the algorithm roughly planned out in my head. I thought that it would be simple and not as tough as how the rest of my classmates felt. (Actually when the question was given, they were all complaining on how it should be done. I felt like shutting them up for whinning so much at that time.)

....However, when I started work on the lab, I realised that it was not as easy as I first thought that it would be. The way to solve the problem would have been very easy if I was asked to write in Java. Unfortunately, it was assemble language... The horror of the tedious branchings and comparing of registers..... argh... the whole day I spent trying to solve the problem ended up in frustrations. I stared at the computer screen for hours on from 10am till lunch and from 2pm till about 5pm... It was only then I realised WTH!! ... I've forgotten the most fundamental rule of programming ->When you are stuck and tired, just leave the program and not think about it. That's what I did and went home to sleep. The next morning my mind was clearer and I realised the silly mistakes that I made in my code which made my program to run in an unexpected way.

In addition, the funny thing was that on Sunday I thought my friends had finished half the lab assignments. It wasn't the case.. I ended up being the first one (or maybe 2nd to that VIT gold medalist.. not very sure because she seemed to be coding furiously even after I finished mine...) to complete followed by the other 3 of us from Singapore. The others were so shocked and one was frustrated by us. He was frustrated because he started to work on the lab 1 day before my friends and I did. He said something like "What the heck am I working so hard for?"... yah.. poor thing... He stayed overnight on Saturday, Sunday and Monday as well trying to finish up the lab. This is one example that hardwork not necessarily equates to success....

Anyway, today they just gave us another lab assignment. My brain was in a deadlock again and I felt super sleepy that I actually took a nap. After that, my friends and I rushed back to our TQ so that we could take a good rest then work on the labs tomorrow. The labs are really tiring. I wonder how long will this 3rd lab take..... Not only that, my brain is becoming more and more like a computer. Java was already making my brain to think in a very systematic way... Assembly language is the ultimate so far... think in numbers... when I no longer look at "The Matrix" in the same way again because I have taken the red pill and understand how to read Hexadecimal operation codes for IBM ESA/390 like 1A 23 means add register 2 and register 3....... goodness... :S