Acer Aspire Timeline 1810tz

My old laptop, a Zepto Znote, broke during the christmas holiday. The graphics card was suddenly totally fucked up, causing the screen to viewed twice on the monitor, on top of each other, and the colors totally fucked up. At first I thought it was the memory as it was also giving some BSOD screens with memery error and taking out one of the ram blocks fixed it. But it turned out it was just random when it happened and eventually it happened again and more and more frequently, untill it was like 95% of the times I turned it on.
It had still waranty but Zepto has recently went bankrupt so not much help in that. Eventhough it's not an onboard graphics card I found out it's integreted in the motherboard, which means it will be quite expensive to get fixed. And seeing as the motherboard had just been replaced a couple of months earlier, for different issue though (that time on warranty as it was before they went bankrupt) I didn't want to spend a lot of money fixing it, if it would just brake again. So I decided to get a new one. Also because I wanted a bit smaller one, and was tired of the old ones noise.

After some research I pretty quickly find the Acer Timeline 1810tz/3810tz to fit my needs perfectly, and at a nice price. This time I went for a much cheaper one, as I don't really need to good hardware I had in the old one, as I mostly use it for uni and when I'm at my parents place. There is an 11.7'' and a 13,3'' version of it, after seeing both of them in local stores I decided on the smaller one, and bought it at wupti.com for 510€.

After recieving it I was immediately reassured I had choosen the right size, it just felt really nice to work with. Today I could debut it at the semester's first lecture.

3. semester exams

Right now I'm in the middle of writing my last exam of this fall semester. Had 3 courses, one of them (Work, Media and Interaction) was just be present and pass, the two others had written exams, the first one (Visual Analysis) 12-15 pages and the last (Studium Generale, which is some philosophy thing) which I'm writing now 8-12 pages.

In the first I wrote about the visuel presentation of animals in The Lion King, in this one I write about the philosophers Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, comparing them and comparing them to positivism. And yes it's boring as hell. 1 page down and due monday.

Update: Since Eurotrip

Didn't want to do any other posts before I was finished with the posts about my eurotrip, so here's a little update on what's been going on since.

A week or so after I got home I started looking for a job. Planned on getting a job for three months so I could have a good long summer holiday before maybe starting on university or something. After searching some I found a temp agency which I figured might be the best solution since I didn't need a job for so long. It turned out to be a good solution, not that the things I got to do was especially exciting, just simple factory stuff. However the temp agency had a lot of work, so there were only like three or four days during those three months where I didn't work, of those days I wanted to work. Quitted at the end of june.

During those three months it was also a very big priority to figure out what I wanted to do after the summer. I was pretty certain I wanted to go to university as I really liked the time in high school I thought it could be cool. However I was, and still am for that matter, really not sure what I wanna do/be eventually. However a field that I've been somewhat interested in for a long time has been architecture. Back in tenth grade when we did projects about what we wanna be I made mine about that. Then for a long time I didn't think that much of becoming that, but in senior year in high school we were at this education messe where I where at a lecture about architecture and that kind of got me thinking of that again. Also a couple of series and movies has had influence, such as Ted Mosby who's an architect in How I Met Your Mother. Anyway this were the different educations that I considered:

• Architect School (Århus)
• Engineer in Architecture and Design (Ålborg)
• Landscape architecture
• Movie- and Media Science (Copenhagen)
• Media Science (Århus/Odense)
• Digital Design - IT esthetics and Interaction (Århus)

However with most of these there were some problems. For Architect school I would need a much highter grade or go to some entrance examination which I didn't get around to. For Engineer in Architecture and Design aswell as Landscape architecture I needed two subjects (chemistry and physics) which I didn't have time to take before september when I found that out. As for Movie- and Media Science aswell as Media Science I also needed a higher grade unless I wanted to go to Odense, and on second thought I figured out that it wasn't really what I wanted to do. Digital Design however was the only one I could get directly into.

So eventually the decision I made was to choose Architect school as first priority and Digital Design as second, well knowing that I would be very lucky to get into Architect School. Digital Design is starting it's only second year this year, so it hard to say what it really is, so I thought I could just try it, and if after half a year I hated it, I would still have time to take the nessecary courses to get into Engineer in Architecture and Design.

Some time during this period I discovered the band Paramore. They played in Copenhagen in June so I took a quick decision to go see them. On the day of the concert I took the train to copenhagen where I'd booked a room in a hotel and took the train back the next day. As previously mentioned Avril Lavigne also played in Copenhagen in June, which I'd bought ticket for already in January. For that concert I borrowed my mothers car and drove there at the day at the concert and took home the same night. Both concerts were pretty awesome, especially Avril Lavigne =)

In July I was on vacation with my family and my fathers sister and her family to Corsica for two weeks. Hot weather, bathing, watching the nature, eating were some of the highlights.

July 31st I got accepted on Digital Design. So August went with finding an apartment and moving. Pictures here. On August 25th I started on the university but more about that in another post.

Graduation parties

At the day of my last exam we had a small gathering for family and some friends from the neighborhood. What happened was basically me getting some presents, eating and talking. I got an alphabeat CD, dynamo label thing (exhanged in the shop for money), office chair, money and some stuff for when I'm moving to own place.

The next weekend we did this thing which is tradition for graduates to do in Denmark. Driving around to everyone in the class and getting a little to eat each place ect. We started friday morning in horse wagon driving around to those living close to the city of the school. It rained much of the time but that didn't mattered too much as there were good mood and such. At some time in the afternoon we changed to a bus in order to get around to some of those living the furthest away. The party mood kinda dumped at this point, either because of the warm bus and no need to jump around to keep warm of because of tiredness. Maybe both I guess. Anyway we ended somewhere getting dinner and drinking, talking, partying ect. untill around midnight when some went into the city, I went home.

The next day we had to meet in school at 8:00 in order to get class pictures taken before the thing where we get our examination certificates. This whole ceremony was boring at some times, but there were also some interesting stuff, such as the speech by my IT teacher and by one of the students. Anyway, I got my certificate, said hello to my parents and brother and sister, and then it was time to continue where we left off last night. This time in a truck, driving around to those living medium far away from the school, including me. It rained at first but soon stopped and it was quite a sunny day. A great and funny day with a good mood all the way through. We ended at this guy from my class called Happy for lumpsters and partying. Including card drinking games, beer drinking games and such. At some time past midnight we went into the city. One of the better evenings of that kind. Besides those from my class there was a lot of other people I knew, and at this dicoteque called Buddy Holly there was a stripper.

All in all two extremely great days. <3

Last exams and results

After spanish exam I had the IT exam. The IT exam is a presentation of a large induvidual project we've made duing the school year. Should be about some kind of graphical user interface, and everyone made a website. You can see mine on kopaka.dk/joomla. Anyway, the presentation went pretty well and I got a 10 for presentation, and an 11 for the written project.

The results of the written exams are put up a dashboard on the school, I went there some day to check it out. Quite disapointing though. 8 in danish, which was fine. 8 in math in which I usually get around 10. ;( And 6 in spanish, quite disapointing aswell, eventhough I normally get around 7 I expected a lot more than 6.

The last exam was law. There were two different subject in my exam, the first one went pretty well, but in the second one I mixed some stuff up and got a 7.

Overall I got an average of 8.2. This also includes the grades you get for what you do during the lessons. I'm not quite satisfied with this. My goal was to get 9. Or atleast 8.7 so I get 9 including the bonus I get for having three subjects on A niveau. I don't know yet if this really matters for me though. Your grade doesn't really matter unless you wanna go to some popular education, which there has a high grade requirement.

Spanish exam

I had my spanish exam this friday. The exam consisted of 3 parts. First one a presentation of an optional subject, but related to Spain somehow. I had choosen War of the Pacific. Secondly un unknown text and thirdly two questions to a known text. The presentation went pretty well, I had went through it many times at home, so I could do it without looking much at my cue-cards. Which seems to be one of my strengths, at both this and the danish exam they said I was good at not looking too much at my notes. The two other parts didn't went so well I thought, was kinda hard to remember the words I wanted to use. Anyway it couldn't have gone totally bad, as I got a 9.

Saving the best for last

Had my oral danish exam this tuesday. I wasn't happy for getting this exam (you don't have exam in all subjects) as it's the subject where I get the lowest grade, for oral that is. I had before this been at four oral danish exams, from 9th grade till now, and in average I haven't passed.

Quick introduction to danish grade system:
Possible grades: 00 - 03 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 13
You need 6 to pass and 11 correspond to the english/american A, and 13 is zweq in internals.

In marks for the year's work I somehow got a 7 though. Anyway back to this exam. It's 1 hour preperation and 25 minutes exam. I draw two folksongs from the middle ages. The middle ages was propably my prefered catagory, though I on beforehand had prefered a fairytale. However it went pretty well and I got a 8. Went home with quite a relief.

So to say I saved the best for last, as this is my best grade in danish oral ever. And now I will never have that subject ever again. \o/

hot in here

I have over the last few days consumed maybe a hundred litres of water. It's so damn hot. I've since the last exam not been doing much apart from reading for the next exams. Not that I've done that 24/7, but I haven't done much serious stuff other than that. I've been watching a lot of Scrubs. It's still really good the second time around. After finishing that I'll catch up with some shows which I haven't seen yet.

On the fourth Alias season 5 was released in denmark (on that page where I bought it atleast). Have been waiting for that day for while. I ordered a few other DVDs aswell:
Office Space
Das leben der Anderen
Planet of the Apes Collection (5 movies)
and Alias The Video Game, which they luckily had.

When I got the DVDs I wanted to update my DVDprofiler but it turns out they had released a new version in which you can only use all the features if you have less than 50 DVDs or pay 30$. I have over 50 dvds, so that means I can add them, but the new ones won't be added to the online profile. So that sucks. Hopefully I can find some other good program like it, do you know any?

Oh ye, and if the rest of you elma bloggers read this, make some new posts dammit, I wan't to have something to read =).

First three exams

During last week and the week before I had my three first exams, they were all written exams. Danish, Math and Spanish. In the danish exams I wrote an argumentation analysis of an article about cycling and doping. For math there was pretty many exercises, but I managed to make them all in time except one which I didn't knew how to make. Spanish was some text about child labour, for which there were some questions, a translation and an exercise where I had to write a letter. All in all I think they all went fairly ok.

There's still some time till the next exam, which is the 12. The four exams left are all oral. Next one is danish, but I've been reading for the spanish the last few days, as the two next exams are coming quite close after (15. and 18.). The last exam though isn't untill the 27. Beside danish, it's IT, spanish and law.

But daaaame it's boring to read for exams ;(