Mock CAT

• No I’m not talking about the 18 useless tests I took in Time.
  
  
  I too have decided to jump onto the blogging bandwagon, problem was I dint have a clue on what to write about so I started thinking about something that was eventful and in the recent past. ……Hmmmmm….I started writing about CAT then I thought the better of it ,its depressing enough just thinking about it.
  
  So after lots of head scratching,hair pulling and hitting the backspace key I got an idea , it struck me that I wrote a very similar exam not so long ago in fact only a couple of days ago, similar in the sense that anything under the sun(around 10 programming languages!!!) was the syllabus for the exam ,we don’t have books for it and they can ask anything as they damn pleased.
  
  We were forced to study from a “local” author book(Anna univ dint even bother to mention the prescribed books!but to their credit they did mention the book for 1 unit and that dint appear in the exam as you will find out). I don’t know whether it can get any more “local” than this.... My God!! If you can read this book end to end without laughing or getting angry (note: I dint even mention confused.) you must be a man with few emotions or you don’t know the English language. Here are a few excerpts from the book
  
  And I’m not bluffing
  
  · “the message may have to pass thru a gaggle of computers and networks” – why does the message have to pass thru a group of geese?? Beats me!!
  
  · “as you are a strong computer fundamentalist, let me not go………” – I’m not a fundamentalist of any kind
  
  
  · “Excuse me for not telling what a variable is” –Let me assure you if I am a strong computer fundamentalist(sic) I‘ll know what a variable is.
  
  · “Yes!!! Its time for us to get eyesight to get into our traditional way…..” beginning to think I might go blind if I read this book any longer.
  
  
  · “I promise you that learning applets is going to be funnier than reading a novel” – Yeah,quite possible if the novel was about concentration camps during WWII.
  
  · “…readers might have got certain amount of anger on me since I gave them Ice-cream and not spoon for eating” – Don’t even get me started on this.
  
  · “……it satisfies varied level of users from kids to old age”
  “people use it to fool around”
  “let me jerk on the cd”
  “lets take it off”
  
  -Sort of gives you other ideas don’t it?
  
  
  
  “ CGI Server side applets-The ideology is the just the controversy to CGI client side applets”
  Don’t look at me I ve no idea on what he is trying to say and somehow I don’t think he is talking about political parties.
  
  · “”For persons with strong mathematical knowledge(?) a prime number is a number divisible only by that number and 1 and I choose very large prime numbers 7 and 11”
  
  -Do I detect a hint of sarcasm or is he really that stupid.
  
  
  · “I did not take time in dropping the code in the book,Instead…” we should take the damn book and drop it on your bloody head.
  
  · “Are you a lazy mathematician or good programmer” – Neither I’m just a bemused reader.
  
  
  
  
  And the one that probably takes the cake is
  
  
  “….but my view point may be wrong. Still I could not get any alternate viewpoints for this justification and discussing it with experts(who I sure are strong computer fundamentalists!!!!) and friends. Even the search of HTML Tag emulation in Google returned 0 results. Hence, let me accept my hypothesis correct and start working on this section”
  
  You are writing a text book for heavens sake!!
  
  
  And the actual exam was a disaster much like CAT (for me at least) there were three letters “xml” which I had chosen to omit from the syllabus and the gods decided they were going to have a good laugh at my expense .I open the question paper and what do I see, horrors of horrors the compulsory question is on xml. Anna University had very conveniently forgotten the 5th unit and decided to omit the portions of the 3rd unit from the actual “foreign author” book which I had pain stakingly studied (all 250 pages of it!) so there I was in the exam hall completely bereft of ideas on how to attempt these 20 marks on xml ,then I resigned myself to the fact that I might have to write this exam the next time it comes around, again like CAT. So there you have it I went through entire spectrum of emotions that I went through while preparing for CAT ,that too in a space of a couple of days. Sigh!! Oh well…there is always next time.