You know those days?
Saturday was for sure one of them for me..
I hadn't slept for one minute that day, I had been working on like three projects simultaneously with my team. Sitting there since Thursday all day and all night just trying to get everything done as fast as we can.

We were three in the team, the other two had slept a little that night, even if only for an hour or two, but I didn't, I wanted so much to be finished and I wished I could be going to Alexandria that day with no projects to think about, so I couldn't just go and sleep + I knew that if I will go and sleep, I may not be able to wake up that morning any way.

Of course all kinds of parts of my body were aching and everything but I tried my best to ignore how I felt.

O.K. so at 8 a.m we were almost finished with all projects el 7amdolellah along with their horrible reports. Now only one more thing was remaining: to prepare the presentation about one of those projects, which we should be doing at 9:20 at the university and it had to be a flash presentation!!!!!!!

Now what we had to do was to print out all the reports, prepare the flash presentation and what we would say of course, wake-up our sleeping team-mate, dress formally, go to the university, which was at least 35 minutes away, and start our presentation, all this in about one hour.

And by the way, my poor husband was sleeping inside, after he had tried to stay up with us but he couldn't!! And he was the one who was going to drive us there...

You are thinking it couldn't get worse, aren't you? So just wait to for the rest.

Of course we knew we couldn't make it. So we called the other group who was supposed to give the presentation after us, telling them to tell the professor (who was one of those really nice and understanding professors -u know what I mean- just to make things worse) that we will be "a little" late and that they should start before us.

We arrived at the university at about 11 (one and a half hours after our assigned presentation time.) We went to the place where the presentations should be held but we found no one. So we went to the professor in her office (on the third floor) but we couldn't find her.

So we went back downstairs and asked the security guys about her, they said they saw her just once early in the morning. Could it be that she just left? No, one of my team-mates remembered that for each slot there was another class reserved, so we had to look in the schedule, because the new slot has started.. We stood there in one of the corridors trying to get the laptop of my friend to connect to the wireless network of the university but it didn't,of course, so we searched for an empty lab, of course not the first computer that we tried worked but the second, we found the number of the class where the presentations should be running now and we went there.

When we opened the door, the professor was sitting there in front of us and gave us a very understanding look, of course. Another group was in the middle of the presentation, so we went in silently. Here one student from another group told us with a worried voice: "Take care, the doctor will not allow any note cards!" "hehe", I laughed, "don't worry we don't have any note cards!". Now we hadn't prepared what we would say in the presentation, so there was nothing to worry about, and nothing to revise.

We just waited there trying to get our sleep-deprived brain to focus on anything, so that we don't get mixed up and speak about Palestine or something instead of our project.
The other group was finished, so the professor said: "So now one of you will have to sacrifice and let the other group start first".. So the one who was revising his note cards said:"We can sacrifice..." "Oh really? I don't know how to thank you for your great sacrifice", I laughed..
Our project was a website with interactive gaming for children using SMIL and JavaScript. We had done a great work, so we were really proud of our project.

We started out talking about what children like to see in websites and so on, anything just to make the time elapse. Of course, we didn't have the flash presentation finished, just one part, so I started out saying that half of the presentation will be using flash and the other half will be practically on the website itself.

After describing how "simple" our interface is and so on, we opened the website to start our "show". Here, the nice professor chose the last link on the home page and told us: "start with this one", why? I don't know.. So we clicked on it, and to our surprise it gave an error and the computer went in an "infinite loop"!

Automatically I said: "Oh no! This must be the wrong version".. but then I realized it was not he wrong version but not all the links on the home page were linked correctly. So I tried correcting the mistake, while the professor was giving us really nice looks.

At last it worked, we started playing the game, but when we won, nothing happened! After we had just explained how joyful it was for a child to win in one of those games and that a cartoon will play and so on.., it was all really so embarrassing! After all the effort that we had put in that thing, it just did nothing... It was because I was linking all the pages in the morning, and of course I had missed out some things, and for our great luck, they were those links which our dear professor chose to start with. I was now sure it was the correct version, but my friends, who were sleeping while I was linking the pages, still insisted it was the wrong version and told the doctor they were sure that the correct version is on the CD that we submitted. So she said: "Try the cd, but if it doesn't work, you will be penalized ".

"Oh my dear God", I thought, "I want to run away before this happens". And it happened, so the prof was really mad and got out of the roon waiting for us to finish correcting the mistakes. We were all feeling miserable. So we asked her if the next group can start until we fix our "small" problems, and she agreed. So we tried to be calm, sat there and tried to fix all dead links hoping not to be caught again. We didn't believe how many mistakes we had to solve, it took us all the time of the presentation and we weren't finished yet. The prof said that she had a meeting now and that we can wait until the next slot to give our presentation. This was God's mercy.

So we stayed there the whole slot long working on our mistakes and correctly linking the pages.
We were also preparing for our next evaluation of the other project.
It was soooo cold and I wasn't wearing warm clothes because I had to be "formal", it was cold to the point that it was difficult to move my fingers on the keyboard. And when we went to pray, the water was icy when we were performing ablution.
When she came back, we connected the data show to our laptop again to continue our catastrophic presentation, just to find it not working. We called the security guy, and he, too, couldn't get it to work this time. The professor told us it's over and called the next group. But the other group couldn't get it to work either. So we tried again on our laptop, and Thank God this time it worked!

We started trying out all the links in front of her and playing all the games till we won, and all the links worked this time.
She didn't even look at us while we were leaving. We told her "We aresorry,Doctor" and she answered"It's OK". After all this effort, we still should apologize as if we committed a crime, it was our fault for sure, but what could we do more than not sleeping for a whole week?

No, it was not over. We still had another project to submit for evaluation, this time without presentation, just explaining what we did.
We went to the "Visualization and Animation" Teaching Assistant in his office and gave him the CD with our project on it so he could run it. At this point, I wasn't able to stand anymore, so I got a chair and sat down.

When he ran the project, we discovered a wrong output was given. This time it was actually the wrong version. And again we started apologizing. The right version was on my laptop, but I had just left my laptop for the other group to make their presentation on it (because the datashow only worked on it) in the other class in the other building and we were on the third floor.

Now we had to start apologizing again. We started the evaluation anyway. This project was a very hard project and we had made great effort in it to make it as good as possible. The output was amazing. But the TA didn't seem to realize it.
When my turn came and I started explaining my part of the code, which was really a hard part, while I was explaining, there was a flag set to true in the program, so he asked me what this flag is for, and I explained. So he told me: "but the name 'flag' is not descriptive at all!" At this point, I was about to kill him, but I just remembered that killing was not a good deed so I just ignored his comment.

At the end my friends asked him about our grade, so all he did was to criticize some aspects of our project and told us he will compare it with the other projects at the end.

No, it was not over yet. I still had to go home quickly to pack my bag and catch my train to Alexandria, It was really hard to walk to the car.

We went to the car, where my poor husband was waiting for us all this time and it was raining.
Just to make it worse, I got car sickness on our way home.

Now we drove my friends back home and went home running quickly to be able to catch the train. The elevator was not working at first, but we waited a little and it worked..
We went up and threw everything we saw inside my bag, I was afraid of forgetting any materials because I knew I should study for my exams in Alex, so I threw all books inside and the bag became very heavy.
Then we went to the train station and Thank God we caught the train. Once we sat in the train, I slept and I didn't feel anything until my poor husband woke me up saying:"We arrived in Alexandria".

Oh, what a great day!

read here: thoughtsandtips.blogspot.com/2008/01/one-of-those-...