If I died tomorrow, I'd be all right...

...because I wouldn't have to worry about the results of this OS exam, that's why. In truth I think that this one won't be too bad, it just depends on how many two-level paging bit-addressing calculations that we're given.

This is the first of three pre-exam status reports that I'm going to write in the next three days, and believe it or not, it will also turn out to be the most optimistic. I think I was awake from 4am to 5am today, but I'm really not sure.

Also, this song is still amazing. Get on to my shared folders and have a listen. It sounds such a strange lyric when it's written as the title of this post, and almost the complete opposite of what it actually means in the song.

OS: The Aftermath

History has been made today - I left an exam early, but not for a good reason, as I'll describe later. It wasn't that it was difficult - in fact, I'd like to declare that CS3104 was the easiest exam that I've ever taken in St Andrews. I'm going to get a vast ribbing from Whitney when I get back, because it turns out that she was right in that the amount I worry about an exam is inversely proportional to its actual difficulty. By that rule, Databases is going to be impossible.

Anyway, I had gone through all the OS questions easily by an hour and twenty minutes in to the exam, and read through my answers again to check they were coherent (legible being largely an optional extra in my case). At 3:22 I began filling in the form at the front of the exam paper to finish it off.

At 3:23 the fire alarm went off. After sitting wondering what to do for a while, the invigilator led us out of the building under instructions not to mention the exam. I had a word with him about it and he said that there was no danger of the paper being invalidated because of the break, purely because he didn't feel like writing another one. That's a decision that will be left to higher authority, though, and if we have to do it again it will be infuriating. The fire team that arrived were as efficient as they've ever been in Andrew Melville Hall, and we were let back in about twenty minutes later with fifteen extra minutes on top of the half an hour we had left to make up for the disruption.

I just grabbed my coat and left, though - I had finished and I didn't want any doubt about advantages that I would have had because of discussing the exam with people outside. I'm especially paranoid about this because I think I've got a very good mark legitimately that could now easily be overturned.

Walking out of the quad, I had a brief moment of panic when I realised after leaving that I hadn't read the front of the question paper and had just assumed that the paper would follow the same rule as all the other courses and only ask for answers to three questions out of four, but I came here to the Irvine Building to check the past CS3104 papers and they all follow the same rule as well. In fact, I'd better get back there and see who else has come out.