Uni exams approaching

With my very first uni exams approaching I have decided to take 2 weeks off from work to help prepare me for my exams. I have a week and a half to study and relax before the exams, which should provide me with the best possible result. I’ve read a few suggestions on how-to effectively study and work on a task, which I will try.

Splitting time into blocks helps stay focused on tasks. The idea is to split your day into blocks of time, such as 15 minute intervals, and switching tasks each block. This helps keep your mind fresh, and stops the task from becoming boring or repetitive. Let every 3rd or 4th time block be fun, such as a computer game or a video.

Write, don’t read.. Rather than reading a text book, and continue on the next task, write notes as you go. This helps you remember what you just read, and also helps you get your ideas onto paper. Great for exams.

Answer questions where possible. Most text books or uni courses have questions per chapter of text books, fill these out. Most of the time they only take a few seconds, but make sure you write the answers down and check them. If they don’t have questions, make them.

Noise environment. I can’t work in a dead silent room, nor a noisy room. I like to find a nice quite place and listen to some nice classical or ambient music, usually fairly loud. This helps to stimulate my brain.

Remove your self from distractions. It’s that simple.

I hope to be employing all these techniques next week to ensure I get the best score possible.

Also thanks to Sprocket Web Design for providing me a new kickass logo for my blog.

Hard Drive Down

Just getting a quick post in before the end of the month. As you may notice by the picture, a hard drive in my server failed. Luckily this was a backup drive in a LVM which actually wasn’t being used, so there was no data loss. As you can see the damage to the drive is quite large (the most I’ve ever seen in pulling a drive apart). LVM wasn’t too nice to me though. I was quite disappointed that LVM failed to notify me of the drive failure, and/or recognise that there was a problem and mount things in read only, instead LVM continued on it’s merry way, until I found the source of the “clicking” noise in the computer room. Once I worked out which drive it was I had to remove the inode and get LVM to remove it and carry on.

From this, I think there needs to be some improvements for LVM. LVM should have some sort of error detection on drives and send out alert emails. LVM should also do data redundancy. I know LVM isn’t designed to do either, but it seems logical. I want something like a Drobo, but for free running on Linux or FreeBSD. Something where the hard drives can be what ever size they want with redundancy with error reporting. This is just a dream….

I’m also getting into my Uni work, starting two courses, Foundations of Business Computing and Data Communications. Both seem fairly boring so far but I’ll see how it goes.

Life

I couldn’t let January be wasted with one useless post, so I may aswell make it two. A bit of a slow start but I’ve been busy. A few things have happened in the last 3 weeks, including me getting a new chair, finishing season 2 of Dexter, getting a second server, and accepting UNI. (Yeah I know that paragraph sucked balls in the grammar department, anyway, moving on)

I’ve accepted an offer to CQU – Rockhampton UNI for Information Systems, but I’m doing is externally, so I can work at the same time. Although I’ve accepted I haven’t selected my course yet, because I can’t seem to work out this damn site. I’m going to give them a call tomorrow.

A friend of mine from work has gotten me to watch Dexter season one and season two, and boy it’s good. I started to feel sorry for Dexter, and really like the story line. It gets so intense at parts and it’s a great show. I really enjoyed it.

The other two lesser points is that I have a second server http://treee.internaluse.net/ and I have a new chair for my desk (which I have put the arm rests on backwards, and CBA fixing it).

Basically that’s all that’s exciting in my life this month, and the rest has been work.