Evidentiary Burden

On Monday, I had the penultimate of my law exams --- Evidence. I remember my father telling me that he, somewhat surprisingly, received a very good grade in evidence given the difficulty of the course. The exam and the course were not difficult in the sense that they were confusing, in fact, I found both quite reasonable. The trick with the exam was that there were 11 questions which meant that you could only skim through them and there wasn't enough time to go into any depth. You sort of had to trust your first instincts and go with them. There was no way you could cover all the issues other than superficially. I think I covered everything and my confidence is due in large part to my study partners. We spent considerable time going over previous exams and quizzing each other, not to mention that our collective summary was very good. I think I went rather well.

The only other bit of news to report is that I found out what caused the system crash just before the Melbourne Cup. ACTTAB is not an independent betting agency in that we are tied in with Supertab, the Victorian betting agency, and we pool with them. According to one of ACTTAB's tech support guys, what happened was something like a 1-in-trillion event. The results, pools and dividends are sent from Supertab in Victoria in data packets of various descriptions. Just before the Melbourne Cup jumped, for some reason the data packet that was sent was encoded in binary. Now, binary code is recognized by the computer system only as a command, not as information, meaning our host computer thought it was being told to do something. The computer then decided that it had to deal first with this "order" and then it would deal with other things. This resulted in the computer system sort of sequestering itself while it tried to figure out what to do. This resulted in the betting system going down for the period it did. I was also informed that South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania were similarly affected as they also run on Supertab. So all in all, I imagine there were a great many unhappy people throughout Australia. As well, I learned that ACTTAB's estimated earnings loss figure caused by that system crash is $1-1.5 million!

Also, my parents are coming in a few days. Yay!