I feel much more energetic today without the consumption of energy drinks. It has more to do with getting rid of a heavy burden which limited my ability to do almost anything else in life. I spent the last four (maybe more) days reaching the uni at 9am, stuffing a croissant and gulping a large cup of coffee before beginning to work. The work, which was very interesting, turned out to be painstakingly frustrating near the end, but more on that in while.

On Monday, I had my FIRST written test at Imperial and I was not really worried about it because it was the same subject (real time DSP) of which I was busy doing the project. The test was conducted in a lecture theater where everyone was seated very close to each other. Some people took seats next to their trusted friends and everyone was amazed to see how relaxed the conditions were. As the test paper was given out, it turned out to be disastrous! It was a LONG test supposed to be completed in only 45 minutes. Since, this subject is lab/project based the test counts for only 15% in the end. But, because of the nature of the test, no single person had time for his/her neighbour and probably that was the reason for having that format of the test. I will not be commenting of how my test went!

In these past days, I have working on a project to eliminate unknown background noise from speech in real time using a Texas Instruments DSP (and coding in C). There were several audio files given to us with varying levels of noise, and randomly five of them would be used in the demonstration test. The day began by plugging in headphones and listening to the same files over and over again trying to sense even the slightest improvement in the outcome of sound or the removal of noise. There were times when the slightest error in the code resulted in the output being multiplied and the sound blasted in ear to unbearable levels. I went through three different research papers and implemented them trying to get better results. Finally when I ran out of ideas of further improvements I gave in and presented my project for the test today which turned out to be great. I scored 82 (on a scale of 100), which converted to A+.

So today I felt relieved and hence came home early and vowed not to study. Oh, and I also had a much-needed haircut, bought 10litres of energy drinks, and did the laundry.

Another momentous event of the day was my lecture today, which was probably my last at Imperial. You can read more about it here. Now that I have decided not to study tonight, I am goign to use this opportunity, without wasting any further time, to sleep without any disturbances of alarm. Unfortunately, I have fallen into a routine in which I wake up at about 8 or 9 everyday :S

And those who didn’t see this on my FB, check out this video, it will blow your senses!