Right, so finally the second half of the stupid busy month of April. After getting back from NZ I had to get straight down to studying for my professional practice exam. The week after I got back I went to site which was actually a good thing as there was nothing to do except study in the evening. I was a little worried about it as I talked to a few people who studied for months. I heard two things about the exam 1) just about everyone passes and 2) just about everyone over-studies. I was concerned as I definitely didn't fall into category 2 so I was dubious if I would fall into category 1.
In the end I don't think it was too bad. It was all multi choice but some of it was pretty hard. Some questions I had to guess outright but not many of them. I swear some of them had two or more right answers! The essay question was about the worst part! I wrote about "self regulation" and it made me feel like a 5 year old retard. "I think self regulation is good because people get to self regulate" god dammit. I'm hoping that it was mainly to weed out people with poor english so I tried my best to form complete sentences, the content was pretty weak though. Hopefully I never have to sit that again, fingers crossed.
Then the rest of the week was dedicated to getting our bloody rube goldberg machine built. Some people at work (Katty, Elyse and Chris) and I had signed up to build a machine to connect to a bunch of other consultants machines in a mall and run them all together in a mall. If you don't know what a rube goldberg machine a little googling will fix that. We decided that we would build a machine to illustrate the rock cycle. We had tectonic plate subduction, a volcano, sedimentation and then a wee truck taking dirt away. It was a pretty massive task and I was pretty sure we had bitten off more than we could chew. However, some late nights after my exam were pulled and we had it working on the Thursday, with the show on Saturday. We decided to take Friday off, which may have been a bad idea....
With my night off I now had time to go and celebrate Jans birthday with her. I had a few drinks at a bar and then we headed to this new thing in Vancouver called E-Exit. It is kinda like a real life video game. They stick you in a room for 45 minutes and you have to solve problems and find clues to unlock things to get out. I was on a team with Jonas, Kai, Dessi, Ruby and Arif. We allegedly had the hardest room called "The Lab". It was incredibly well made. In one suit case we unlocked was a box with a joystick and a button on it and when you pressed the button a laser shone across the room, you could then control the laser pointer with the joystick and had to line it up with a thing to unlock the next part. Then there was a stupid whiteboard with a matrix of numbers that we never solved and a secret passageway to closet thing. We all worked pretty well together and we thought we were doing pretty well but when our 45 min was up we discovered we had only unlocked 55% of the room! It was disappointing we didn't do any better, but it was pretty awesome nonetheless. After that we went and had a few drinks at a bar until it was waaaaay past my bedtime. I stumbled home to bed and set two alarms to try and get up at 7 the next morning to go and organise getting our rube goldberg machine to the mall....
I woke up at about 7:50 and I was supposed to pick Elyse up at 7:30! I felt awful and I rolled over to let everyone know I would be running a little late. I had slept through two alarms and two calls! Ugh! I finally picked Elyse up and got out to help load the machine. When we got the machine to the mall we found out it wouldn't fit through many of the doors or elevators so we had a hell of a time getting it to where all the other machines were. We were pretty confused because we were told that we had a 4ft by 4ft by 8ft space which we used most of. We finally walked it through the mall with some angry security guards watching us. Everyone was freaking about public liability. It was a terrible example how the sueing culture here has made everything so much harder.
We got our machine into position and started running it. Over the course of the day we ran the machines close to 20 times. It was pretty awesome except I was hungover as hell. Even some filthy KFC didn't help much. It turned out our machine was the most reliable with most of the machines stopping a lot of the time. I think one machine didn't make it the whole way through once without stopping which was a little pathetic. So Saturday night was very subdued which worked well into my favour for the last hurdle of April.
Bloody Sun Run!!! I signed up with the work team (so it didn't cost me anything) to do this 10km race in downtown Vancouver. It is one of the largest 10km races in the world with close to 50000 runners and walkers. It was a pretty crappy morning weather wise but it didn't piss down which was lucky. They do this wave start where you pick a group based on your 10km time so it roughly puts slower people towards the back and faster toward the front. Unfortunately there are a few idiots that get it very wrong, or just stand in the wrong group. I had selected the fasted group that wasn't seeded but I still had about a 20min walk to the start line after they had started the race. The race felt pretty awful. I was hoping to do a bit of training for it but because the month was pretty busy I hadn't run much at all. It was pretty crazy to be part of such a big event. When I was nearing the end I put a bit of a sprint on. After about 100m I caught up to this other guy that was sprinting a bit too, but he was having none of it. We ended up boosting the last 200m together and it was pretty awesome. Then I found out my time as was pretty stoked as it was 44:52. Without my sprint finish against that random guy I probably wouldn't have made it under 45min and I would have been pretty guted. Before the race I had talked to another person from work who was keen for a drink afterwards. I told them I would just run home and text from there because I didn't want to take my cell phone running. So I ran home and had a show before they text me. I was expecting they had just finished but they weren't even at the start line yet! I had run the whole race and had a shower and they were still waiting to start! Ridiculous. So it was kinda hilarious but I definitely wouldn't go out of my way to run it again.
And thats the end of April, well it was about the 23rd, but it was over as far as I was concerned.
In the end I don't think it was too bad. It was all multi choice but some of it was pretty hard. Some questions I had to guess outright but not many of them. I swear some of them had two or more right answers! The essay question was about the worst part! I wrote about "self regulation" and it made me feel like a 5 year old retard. "I think self regulation is good because people get to self regulate" god dammit. I'm hoping that it was mainly to weed out people with poor english so I tried my best to form complete sentences, the content was pretty weak though. Hopefully I never have to sit that again, fingers crossed.
Then the rest of the week was dedicated to getting our bloody rube goldberg machine built. Some people at work (Katty, Elyse and Chris) and I had signed up to build a machine to connect to a bunch of other consultants machines in a mall and run them all together in a mall. If you don't know what a rube goldberg machine a little googling will fix that. We decided that we would build a machine to illustrate the rock cycle. We had tectonic plate subduction, a volcano, sedimentation and then a wee truck taking dirt away. It was a pretty massive task and I was pretty sure we had bitten off more than we could chew. However, some late nights after my exam were pulled and we had it working on the Thursday, with the show on Saturday. We decided to take Friday off, which may have been a bad idea....
With my night off I now had time to go and celebrate Jans birthday with her. I had a few drinks at a bar and then we headed to this new thing in Vancouver called E-Exit. It is kinda like a real life video game. They stick you in a room for 45 minutes and you have to solve problems and find clues to unlock things to get out. I was on a team with Jonas, Kai, Dessi, Ruby and Arif. We allegedly had the hardest room called "The Lab". It was incredibly well made. In one suit case we unlocked was a box with a joystick and a button on it and when you pressed the button a laser shone across the room, you could then control the laser pointer with the joystick and had to line it up with a thing to unlock the next part. Then there was a stupid whiteboard with a matrix of numbers that we never solved and a secret passageway to closet thing. We all worked pretty well together and we thought we were doing pretty well but when our 45 min was up we discovered we had only unlocked 55% of the room! It was disappointing we didn't do any better, but it was pretty awesome nonetheless. After that we went and had a few drinks at a bar until it was waaaaay past my bedtime. I stumbled home to bed and set two alarms to try and get up at 7 the next morning to go and organise getting our rube goldberg machine to the mall....
I woke up at about 7:50 and I was supposed to pick Elyse up at 7:30! I felt awful and I rolled over to let everyone know I would be running a little late. I had slept through two alarms and two calls! Ugh! I finally picked Elyse up and got out to help load the machine. When we got the machine to the mall we found out it wouldn't fit through many of the doors or elevators so we had a hell of a time getting it to where all the other machines were. We were pretty confused because we were told that we had a 4ft by 4ft by 8ft space which we used most of. We finally walked it through the mall with some angry security guards watching us. Everyone was freaking about public liability. It was a terrible example how the sueing culture here has made everything so much harder.
We got our machine into position and started running it. Over the course of the day we ran the machines close to 20 times. It was pretty awesome except I was hungover as hell. Even some filthy KFC didn't help much. It turned out our machine was the most reliable with most of the machines stopping a lot of the time. I think one machine didn't make it the whole way through once without stopping which was a little pathetic. So Saturday night was very subdued which worked well into my favour for the last hurdle of April.
Bloody Sun Run!!! I signed up with the work team (so it didn't cost me anything) to do this 10km race in downtown Vancouver. It is one of the largest 10km races in the world with close to 50000 runners and walkers. It was a pretty crappy morning weather wise but it didn't piss down which was lucky. They do this wave start where you pick a group based on your 10km time so it roughly puts slower people towards the back and faster toward the front. Unfortunately there are a few idiots that get it very wrong, or just stand in the wrong group. I had selected the fasted group that wasn't seeded but I still had about a 20min walk to the start line after they had started the race. The race felt pretty awful. I was hoping to do a bit of training for it but because the month was pretty busy I hadn't run much at all. It was pretty crazy to be part of such a big event. When I was nearing the end I put a bit of a sprint on. After about 100m I caught up to this other guy that was sprinting a bit too, but he was having none of it. We ended up boosting the last 200m together and it was pretty awesome. Then I found out my time as was pretty stoked as it was 44:52. Without my sprint finish against that random guy I probably wouldn't have made it under 45min and I would have been pretty guted. Before the race I had talked to another person from work who was keen for a drink afterwards. I told them I would just run home and text from there because I didn't want to take my cell phone running. So I ran home and had a show before they text me. I was expecting they had just finished but they weren't even at the start line yet! I had run the whole race and had a shower and they were still waiting to start! Ridiculous. So it was kinda hilarious but I definitely wouldn't go out of my way to run it again.
And thats the end of April, well it was about the 23rd, but it was over as far as I was concerned.
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