Computers- gotta love 'em
I had to take an online test this past weekend at the so-so www.webassign.net. What this involves is typing your answers onto text boxes on the web page, and then it all gets sent to your professor. For my test, there was a one hour time limit.

This was for my European relations class, and seeing how its in my major, I studied pretty seriously all weekend for it, knowing that I'll end up having to take a test against the clock online, in a setting that I've never done before. I was a bit apprehensive about the whole thing, in addition to being nervous over a big test in general.

So Sunday, after all day studying, I decide to go ahead and take the damn thing. I figured the library's computers would probably work better than mine, so I took it there. It starts out fairly well, I'm familiar with all my terms and facts more or less so no problems there. What I did was, I typed it in Word and then copied and pasted to the web page. There's a large essay you have to write to finish the test, and I'm making good progress on it, about to wrap it up and finish the test with a couple of minutes to spare, when- maybe you can guess what happens here.

Yup. The computer completely crashed and reset on me. Apparently, it was caused by a "comminication error" the computer had. Before resetting the power, the computer tried to auto save the file, but no doubt thanks to UNCC's computer's tough security settings, it was denied permission to save. Had I happened to save the essay myself before the computer went down? No, of course not. My essay was lost and I was basically out of time. I was just a little pissed at this later development. My friend Akane tried to tell me just to type it again and email it, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I logged off and went home to drink a beer.

Fortunately, it seems to have ended well. When I told my professor, he seemed pretty understand and extended the deadline that I could take the test. So I typed it up again, and got everything sent in this time. So hopefully I shouldn't fail thanks to the schools computers, just my own academic incompetence. Wow, that ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would. But the bottom line is this- computers sure can be a pain in the ass sometimes.