42 Piscine Day 11 — (08)
Edit: This is part of a series that culminated here, Next post. Previous post.
Edit2: I consolidated all the posts of the piscine daily posts here
Edit3: You can read up about what it’s like as a cadet at 42 here
Today most of us are prepping for the next exam, I started to as well and I’m glad I did as it showed me which foundational knowledge I was lacking in. I ended up spending most of the day understanding pointers more thoroughly and also understanding argc/argv. With those a little more understood I’m a lot more prepared, I’ll keep studying for a few hours, and again in the morning. I don’t expect I’ll do as well on this test as the last one, this last week really kicked my butt I’ve felt behind the whole time. Everyone I talk to either is keeping up fine or is so far behind that to them I seem like I’m way ahead, there doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground where I’m at, or at least it feels that way.
I’ve barely looked at day07 due tonight, or day08 due tomorrow, day09 is also due tomorrow before the test. I’m not sure if they are going to get done or not. I just want to understand this crap, it’s almost pissing me off not understanding.
A warning about day09, you have to sign up for each assignment individually, each is released one an hour, to get decent credit for the assignment you have to do more than half, which is about 15 assignments. They are small assignments and you can pick and choose which to do, so in a way it’s easy points, but the timing is awful and I think that’s by design.
My friend who was thinking about leaving had seemed to pretty well decide to go, but then sat down at a computer and started working on figuring things out again, all I did was smile, nothing needed to be said, I was proud of her for trying. It reminded me of how sometimes I’m better with women after they have initially rejected me because now I’m no longer holding myself to a standard making me awkward, perhaps by allowing herself to have already failed she is now free to succeed by no longer living under the pressure and strain of needing to. Probably I’m reading too much into this.
We had another study session tonight, the girl that was kind of in charge arranged for one of our classmates that really knows his stuff to come down and explain some things to us (pointers mostly) and I was grateful, but it was interesting to see him have little patience with the people he was teaching. Which is fair, he is as stressed as we all are and taking time to help with something he already understands. Ironically one of the other girls who sort of rubs me the wrong way was actually a great teacher, but still bugged the hell out of me. I’m not sure what it is about her, I think it has to do with a sort of patronizing tone, but I can’t quite place it. The girl that put it together got doughnuts for everyone too, a really nice gesture. I’m not quite sure why she’s trying so hard to put these together as she was barely there and didn’t stay long at all. I’m curious as to the motivation is all, not ungrateful.
I felt more isolated today, everyone was sort of already talking to someone else and I didn’t really want to interrupt. I know most of these people are friends or at least know me by name acquaintances, but it still sort of felt like intruding today. I still did talk to people mind you, just not as many as I would have liked to or should have.
I’m still running into people I’ve not met before, and I’m not sure how that’s happening, I’ve been fairly social, I wander around, I talk to people and yet it sometimes feels like when a new character is introduced on a sitcom. Suddenly a new person who really was there the whole time but you had never noticed. My personal headcount tonight was 95. I saw two people leave this morning with luggage and a mom picking them up. I’m not sure how many others have left and how many are just nocturnal or only putting in smaller hours.
A lot of the people who did piscine’s before were complaining today about hoping they get in (apparently the acceptance letters from last month are only just coming out). I guess some student they didn’t feel were very bright or capable got in so their reasoning was along the lines of “if they let her in, surely they will let me in too”. But I was sort of turned off by the logic of it, it felt sort of asshole-ish in a way. Like I can see the logic sure, but it was the entitled tone I guess.
Today was productive, perhaps not in the most useful of ways, but I learned a ton so I’ll call it a success, even if I’m fairly sure I did last nights assignments right and the computer marked it wrong, all good here.
Assignments today were as follows:
- split whitespaces, split characters into words using spaces, line breaks, and tabs.
- create a library
- boolean to run the main in the photo properly
- macro ABS
- compile the main in photo
- store program arguments in an array and return the address of the arrays first box
- now display the content of the array created in last function
