Starting from the 15th of November, secondary students from across the country have been sitting NCEA exams. The majority of these exams span over two weeks, which covers most of the students subjects. I myself only had 3 exams this time round, the final time round. I had none on the first week but I had 3 exams the next week on consecutive days. As with my Level 1 and 2 exams, I did no study at all. I know, that is bad and I should have, but everything will work out in the end.

My first exam on that second Monday was Statistics and Modelling. This was the exam I was looking forward to the most. This was also probably my most important exam of the 3 because I put a lot of weight onto getting at least 2 of the papers which will make this my 3rd University Entrance subject. Generally I found the papers in this exams pretty alright. Once of them I found so alright that when I got to the end of the paper, I was wondering where the excellence questions were. It was either an easy paper or I am really good at that topic. I could have done a bit better in the other papers if I had prepared for them better, which I kinda wish I did have now.

My second exams on the Tuesday was Physics. This was the exam I was dreading the most. It is the subject I am worst at out of all the ones I take. I decided at the start of the exam, that I was only going to do the 2 big papers worth 6 credits in the exam. My reasoning behind this was that I already have credits from the waves topic and I don’t really need to sit it again for a better (*cough*) mark. I also didn’t do the atoms paper because it wasn’t worth many credits. Getting either one of the Mechanics or Electricity papers would give me enough subjects to use it as a UE subject. Anyway, I did as much of the papers as I could and I would be lucky to pass one of them, even luckier to pass both.

My last exam was Geography on Wednesday. I didn’t really want to do all the papers here because I hate writing essay type responses. I did the skills paper which was pretty alright. The skills is definitely the thing I most enjoy about Geography (other than the field trips, but we don’t get credits for that. ) I did do one of the written papers which was on natural processes. I answered the questions to the best of my ability with my limited knowledge at the time. Hopefully it was enough to get me a pass at least.

Now I am free from all the testing at this level. I am also unofficially free from secondary school forever. For everyone else who sat exams, or is still sitting exams, I hope you get the grades you deserve. Good luck to you. Now that this is all over, its off to University next year! (I hope.)

Tuesday this week was my last day of high school. It was only a half day, but no worked happened, at least not for me anyway. Just before lunch started, someone had set off a fire alarm and the fire department came. Anyway, in the afternoon we had prizegiving practice which was alright. I knew I was getting a prize at that stage, I just didn’t know what for. After that we got to go home. We would have to return later that night for the real thing.

I went out to dinner with my parents before prizegiving. We went to a small steakhouse. I had Beef Teriyaki which was really good. I would be willing to go back there for a meal. After that we made our way to school for the prizegiving. When I got there, I had a look at the booklet they give to the parents to see what I was getting a prize for. My certificate was for Excellence with Diligence in Statistics and Modelling, Merit with Diligence in Electronics and Diligence in ICT. That wasn’t bad I guess. Another part of the prizegiving was the farewell of the year 13′s. For this, the dean read out our names and what we planned on doing next year and we walked across the stage to get our leavers t-shirts. This was this years school t shirt with all the names of the leavers on the back. That was pretty much the night.

The next day, we returned to school for the leavers mass. This was a mass for the year 13′s as well as the year 12′s. On this day, all the year 13′s wore their leavers tshirts to the mass. As well as the mass, there were also pictures and later on some videos of us year 13′s. That was really interesting to see and watch. That would be the last time we all meet together like that. The next time would be when we return our gear and sign out, which will be the last time most of us will see each other.

So now I am done with school. All I have left to do is the 3 exams I have in a weeks time. After that, it’s off to University next year. Goodbye Kavanagh College, it was nice having you for the past 7 years.

Our last unit in Electronics at school was Robotics. For this, we got to use the Lego NXT robots and program them to do different things. This was the unit most people were looking forward to because it means we can play with robots, Lego, not learn any theory and it was a very easy standard to achieve. There were many different robots, all built differently, that all did different tasks. Most of these robots did obvious things like Line Following, Object Avoidance, Light Sensing and such.

The one me and my robot partner, Martin decided to do was the Line Following Robot. it seemed like a simple enough one to do and shouldn’t be too much of a problem. After doing the starting paperwork, we then got given one of the Robot Kits. Lucky for us it was already pre-built so we didn’t have to make it from scratch. This allowed us to quickly getting into the adding of sensors and the programming. The annoying thing about the robots was the software used for programming them. It was a flowchart based language which was really annoying, and even painful due to the really slow lab machines. But it wasn’t too long till we hard a nearly working robot. After some minor tweaks in the power levels, we have a fully functioning line following robot.

Because we did that so fast, our Electronics teacher made us an “extension course.” The original course was a curvy lined course, which was pretty simple to achieve, but the advanced course had sharp angles in it, which required different programming techniques and such to get around it. After a bit of fiddling around with code, we couldn’t get anywhere near getting it to work on the new course. In theory, our ideas would work, but in practice, weird things happened. It just never seemed to work. It required some more thinking and different approaches.

After looking at some other robots on YouTube, I came up with the idea of adding a 3rd sensor onto the robot. This still didn’t work, but we did once get it to go around over half of the extension track, but it struggle on some of the angles over 90 degrees. This is when we admitted defeat. Unfortunately when messing around with the new course, we seemed to have lost out curvy lined program that we needed for the assessment. We managed to modify one of the 3 sensor codes to work with the curvy line.

Some of the other cool robots was another pair that made a line following robot. It also went around the curvy line but it hopped around instead of going around more smoothly. My friend Aaron made a light sensing robot which found the darkest place in the room and went there. This worked alright, but it was pretty average. My other friend Morgan made a Collision Avoidance Robot (again,) but this time with the Lego Kit. His seemed to have trouble at times which it strangling itself and hitting into things. Another pair did this same robot except took a different approach. It worked pretty well and looked cool. There was also a completely original robot that another pair made, and it was put on a table and avoided falling off the edge.

Making the robots and programming them was really awesome, and it was really great to see other peoples ideas and robots doing the same, and other tasks. This was definitely the best part of the year because robots a the best! Now all that I have to do is finish the paperwork for the standard so I can get my credits for this unit. I wish I had some spare money lying around so I could get some robots, I love playing with these things!

Over the past few days, I seem to have been struck with a bit of bad luck. I seem to have the worst luck with computers at times, but it is not normally a group of things going bad in the space of a couple of days. This time it has been overwritten files, disappearing files, corrupt files, and closing unsaved files. Where to start..?

First off, in Electronics we are programming our Lego robots. We had been trying many different approaches at trying to tackle a second problem after easily accomplishing the first task. During all this mess, we had left all our programs unsorted in the default directory that the programming software saved to. We were shuffling around with so many versions of code we hadn’t organized this well by keeping the default untiltled-1 filename. Anyway, for some reason our original program for the assessment of the first task went missing, and the closest thing that would work needed a bit of modification. When we went to the computer to get it, it wasn’t right. Somehow, someone else got access to the computer and managed to overwrite our working program. After a lot of hunting for it, I did manage to find a similar, modified version which I has to remodify to get it to work again. This was a huge hassle.

The next morning when I booted up my comptuer and launched Firefox, it didn’t do what it usually does. I was expecting it to launch and load up my 15 or so tabs from last session. But for some reason it just loaded with an empty tab, empty bookmarks toolbar, empty bookmarks and history in fact. All this had gone and all I had was a 6kb bookmarks html file and those bookmark backups Firefox does automatically. I first tried to restore them, but all I got was an error. It seemed like I had lost around 3 years worth of bookmarks. I needed to get them back but i didn’t have time to try then and there. Later on in the afternoon, I tried to see if there was anything that Recuva could find. I had no luck there. I decided to go to Google with my problem but it didn’t help me much. I tried to restore from backup one more time without luck. I decided to Google the error I got and this time I got lucky. It turns out my backups couldn’t restore because the sqlite database was corrupt. After deleting these files from my profile, the restore worked and I was once again left with my huge collection of bookmarks. I didn’t have any of my history, which is disappointing, especially since the Awesome Bar ain’t so awesome without history, but at least I have my bookmarks, which is a huge relief.

But wait, there’s more! I was doing an assessment in ICT at school in spreadsheets, worth 5 credit (ones that will come in handy I my add.) This is the last one of the course and I was zooming through it. I had one more task to do which was a write up with instructions on how to use the spreadsheet I created. After copying a similar task from another assessment and spending a good amount of time changing it to match what I was doing, I acidentally printed the wrong instruction list and closing without saving the new one that I had done. All I was left with was the wrong thing printed and a blank document where the correct copy should have been. Now I had to redo it again, which I did very sloppy because I could’t be bothered spending all that time repeating it again.

All these problems could have been easily prevented, or files resored ithout hassle if I was better organised and had good backups of my work. This would mean I’d have the original code for my robot, I’d have a backup html copy of my Firefox bookmarks, and I’d still have that good instruction document for my assessment. Anyway, everything turned out fine but it was a bit of an inconvenience and a huge shock. There is nothing worse that the feeling of when you lose important data on your computer.

My school is fortunate enough to offer Electronics as a subject in year 12 and 13. I did it last year and continued it this year. It is a really cool subject, especially this year because we get to play with Picaxe microcontrollers and Lego robots. The last standard I completed in Electronics was the programming unit. For the Picaxe, we programmed them in basic.

For this project, we get a Picaxe and we make a circuit that we program with the microcontroller. For the standard, you need at least 2 inputs and 2 outputs of any kind. For this, I decided to do a Pedestrian Light simulation. For this, you push a button and it starts the pedestrian lights and then it simulates the traffic lights to stop the cars and shows the light for the person. All the timings are accurate for this simulation and it worked. You can see a video of this here. (Mute video/speakers before playing.) This is my friend Martin’s version of it, which works exactly the same as mine, the only difference being the code and the type of Picaxe used.

Another interesting Picaxe project that I must talk about is that of my friend Morgan’s. He built a Collision Avoidance Robot which is controlled by the Picaxe microcontroller. His program looks far more complex than the Pedestian Light simulation ones and it probably was. The base of the robot was pre-built from some other kit but he added the breadboard with wiring onto it as well as some bumpers to it. When the bumpers get pressed, it gets the robot to turn away. Although it looks simple enough, I can tell you, the construction of the bumpers was quite hard, for some more than others. (Aaron *cough*) A video of the Collision Avoidance Robot he made can be seen here.

Playing with the Picaxe was really awesome and it was really cool to have done a project like this. It was also really cool to see the robot Morgan had made, it was amazing. For a lot of people, this is going to look like child’s play but how many people can actually do this, not many. For me the programming was the best part, I guess I just enjoy trying to solve problems and make little things like this. Next up, its Robotic Lego time

Last week was mock end of year exams. This is a chance for us to sit the papers we are going to be doing at the end of the year in exam conditions. These run for the whole week and you only have to be there when you have an exam. I only had 3 subjects with exams and two were on the same day, so I only had to show up for 2 days, one being Monday and the other Wednesday. I was lucky enough to get a nice long 4 day weekend.

My first exam was on Monday afternoon and it was for Geography. We only had to do 2 papers, one for skills and the other for cultural processes. I spend most of the 2 hours allocated doing the skills paper thoroughly but didn’t even write my name on the second paper because I couldn’t be bothered writing lots, and I couldn’t remember anything because I didn’t do any study.

And on Wednesday I had one exam in the morning, which was Statistics, and another one in the afternoon, which was Physics. I hadn’t studied for either of them so I knew I wouldn’t do that well. The Stats papers were relatively straight forward, with the Probability paper being the most difficult of the three. In Physics, I was completely lost. I had no idea what I was doing and knew as soon as I looked through the papers I was screwed. I still tried to answer as many questions as I could in case I could fluke a grade.

Well today i got my results back from all my exams. For the Geography paper I did do, I got an Excellence for it, which was well above the expected Achieved/Merit I would have expected. In Stats, I managed to get once of each, an Achieved, Merit and Excellence for each of the papers. In Physics, I flat out failed! This is what you get when you do absolutely no study. Although I justify the lack of study for having other priorities, my reading log assignment which is due in a few days. I will try and study for the real exams and hopefully get good grades in those ones!

Last week, the small group of us doing the Polytech computing course finished our second unit, which was on Operating Systems. For this we looked at two different operating systems, the first one being DOS (where we actually used Command Prompt because most of the commands are the same) and Linux (Kubuntu if you need to know the distro.) The reason we looked at these two is because for the standard, we are required to look at a single user and multi user operating system.

The first section involved a bit of research and learning the terminology of how Operating Systems work. We weren’t tested on any of this stuff. Then we were messing around with basic commands in cmd. Then we were trying out some basic commands in the Linux console. For this we used a Kubuntu Live CD. We didn’t get into anything that technical, basically only file manipulation stuff, and this was mainly due to the time limits. For example, we only had 5 hours on Linux, 4 if you exclude the test week, 3 if you exclude the week everyone was away/sick. It’s very difficult to learn anything advanced in that short amount of time.

The unit seemed shorter than the first one but I think it was because it was broken up into sections, so it seemed like we weren’t working on it for long. Anyway, now we move onto our final unit, System Programming. For this we were given Atmel AVR Butterfly’s, which we get to keep, for programming. I’m not really sure what we are going to be making the things do but they seem like pretty sweet gizmos. Can’t wait to get into it!