YAY! The exams are finally over! Both of them … the Monash maths exam and the VCE physics exam. All that is left is the VCE General Achievement Test, but that’s more of an IQ test than an exam.

Some general comments on each exam:

Monash - It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Though you definitely needed the three hours for the five questions. Had to do it at the local TAFE college in the Hair And Beauty classroom, which I thought was rather comical. The Monash exam rules say you can’t look around the room at other people’s papers, but the whole right side of the room was a giant mirror. Heh.

Physics - It could have been worse. The exam wasn’t as testing as I thought it would be: probably because of the complete absence of transistor amplifier questions. They had questions about amplification but no questions about resistors/capacitors etc. in a transistor amplifier. That disappointed me, as it was one thing that I was feeling rather nervous about before the exam.

Also, VCAA, the people who make the exam, are dumbasses. Period. There were two corrections for the exam, one at the start and the other part-way through. Looks like the so-called experts can’t even draw a graph properly. They screwed up the positioning of a number in the horizontal axis of this graph by putting a number one division to the right of where it should be, resulting in a graph that made no sense. They didn’t realise this until half-way through the exam. You would think these jokers could possibly write an exam properly. Obviously not.

I know the previous paragraph sounded a little heated, but that’s probably because I’m annoyed at two other things right now, both that happened post-exams. After the Physics exam I needed some McDonalds, because the experience of exams is a very draining one. So, I travel to the McDriveThru, order a crispy chicken fillet burger meal, and then get handed my meal and drinks. However, the cardboard holder for the drinks broke, so quite a bit of my large Coca-Cola was spilt … all over my Domo-Kun Hoodie from ThinkGeek! Oh no! I was very annoyed.

The second thing that’s annoying me right now, is Apple’s WWDC conference. During Steve Job’s keynote (they call them, Stevenotes!) he announced a few random things, of course showing off the iPhone that will be released pretty soon in the US (I’ll rant about it later), but a big surprise was that Apple have ported their Safari web browser to Windows. I’m still not quite sure why. I mean, we already have Firefox, Opera, and even Internet Explorer, so is there really room for yet another browser? Plus, unlike the other browsers, Safari appears to look completely out of place with Windows because Apple insists its UI is better. Therefore it looks nothing like your other apps, except if you have iTunes open. It’s completely against Microsoft’s UI guidelines, but do you really think Apple, of all companies, would listen to Microsoft tell them how to make a UI?

I just installed it, and it’s not bad. Here’s the first thing that came up:

Yup, it doesn’t like my Vista install. Whether it’s because I’ve got UAC turned off, or whether it’s just their bad coding, who knows. It’s still a beta so not everything is expected to work. I’ll give it a try on Windows XP later.

Anyway, it’s great not having any exams or work for the next few days. I think I’ll use the time to try and catch up on my life.

–Ben

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 4:51 pm and is filed under School. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.