17 December, 2004

Resting

I finally am in Toronto. I've been really lazy to update this place. Really lazy! I slept for 8 hours in 72 over the last weekend, played World of Warcraft at day and studied at night! An awful mix :) Right before my last exam i crammed until 5 am and got some sleep, wrote the management exam and was finished with it. Then I went to the airport and came to Toronto, and here I am not, relaxing and trying to catch up on things I've missed.

07 December, 2004

Information Systems

After doing tossing and turning in bed, waking up at 3 am, 3:30 am, 4, 4:30 am and so on until 8AM I proceeded to the Wembley Exhibition Centre Hall 1.

Three hours passed and I was out, finished, with my first exam on Paper 2.1, Information Systems.

There were a total of six questions, in part A there was a CASE study and three manditory questions regarding some aspect of IS/IT. In part B you had to choose two out of three questions. I completed most of part A before moving on to part B. In question 4 I had come to a little dead end in the first part where it asked me about the disadvantages of decentralisation, so I left it out until the end and came up with something later in the end of the exam.

Now, I started doing question 6, a "Decision Table" had to be constructed for 12 marks, wow I thought, so damn easy! But I've encountered these innocent easy questions before, you get the 12 marks and the other 8 marks were a red herring, you literally had no clue what to say. I started doing it and doubted myself, and scrapped it. Turns out I did it correctly in the first place, but they won't mark it

I did question 5, which had one 10 mark question regarding Data Flow Diagrams, an aspect I knew quite well, so I drew my illustrations, examples, more examples and explanations. The other 10 marks of the question were regarding some sort of interview and questionnaire junk, I mostly had to use common sense and logic in that one.

The first three parts, are too scary to describe but I would just like to say that I managed it.

Thirteen pages of writing in three hours, not too shabby! Roll on Law...

05 December, 2004

Hi

Hi, my name is Dima (pronounced slightly differently that you may think), I'm 19 years old and I'm from Canada. I decided to get this blog thing, since I've been too lazy to set up my own Nucleus on my personal website I wanted something that would already be set up for me. And this ain't bad at all. Only problem is, I would probably want my blog to be more customizable, I want more themes!

I am here in London studying for the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) www.accaglobal.com exams, which actually start tomorrow. So I am going to stop wasting my time and go revise one last time before my skills are put to the test.

The ACCA is the worlds largest and most professional accounting organization. After I completed high school in Toronto, Canada I didn't have any clue what to do and decided to go on a little tour, so I visited London. And I found out about the ACCA and a little College that would tutor me their stuff called Barnet College in North London. I however didn't do extremely well on my first year of exams so I have to retake some this second time around.

The ACCA has a set of fourteen (14) total exam papers that are pretty much spread over three parts, or three years, if one managed to pass every single one then they're in luck. Part one only has three papers, part two has six and part three..well, I don't want to think about it yet because it freaks me out. ACCA hosts two exam sessions per year, one in June and one in December, you can take four papers only per session. So here I am, taking four.

First, on Monday I have the Information Systems (paper 2.1) exam, 10 am and three hours.

On Tuesday I have the Corporate and Business Law (paper 2.2) exam.

On Friday I have the Financial Information for Management (paper 1.2) exam.

And on Monday the 13th I have Managing People (paper 1.3) exam.

I am ready for all except for the Law exam, that is a tricky one. The syllabus (contents of the paper) deal with British Legal System, Contract law, Partnerships and Company Law. The latter being the most highly examinable topic. I won't go into detail, but company law deals with the Companies Act 1985, it is the very corporate essence of the paper and includes some interesting information about Public Limited Companies, Unlimited Companies, Private Companies, formation of a corporation, Directors and Secretaries Duties and last but most definately not least, the Cessation of a company.

Now I am going to go eat breakfast and do a few things around the house, today I want to figure out how to customize this Web Log page a little bit more and possibly add some links to weblogs of other people who I have come to known (most particularly from Internet Relay Chat, channel #3dfx on EFNET where I have been sporadically visiting since 2000).