Damn stupid email system at UWA has taken it upon itself to randomly delay 75% of all my email for 1-2 days. Stuii is now linked at the bottom of my blog in place of Woodsta. The links were random anyway (just the ones I could remember).

Yesterday I bought my car insurance and I am now thoroughly expecting the bankruptcy proceedings. I really can not afford the £1400 insurance. I'm still hoping to be able to convince the parents to pay it for me instead of buying me Christmas / Birthday presents. It was their suggestion, not mine, but I like it. I hate the way I am instantly put into the "dangerous" group for insurance, just because I'm a young male who has only just passed his test. Yes, there are a lot of young males who have just passed their tests who bomb around like twats, but that doesn't mean I will. It's very discriminative. And don't even get me started on the "Girls, get a 20% discount on your car insurance" adverts.

Went to the video shop last night to get a video and decided I'd get two. Unfortunately "Full Metal Jacket" had gone missing so I couldn't get that out. Good job really, because she then called up my details on the computer and found I had a fine. I'd been expecting that and so asked how much it was. £7! OUCH. She was so apologetic too. I kept saying it wasn't her fault, it was mine for not returning them on time.

Tom Jones quite unexpectedly turned up when I got back. Went for a quick pint in the Scholars shit-hole before he buggered off back up the hill. After he had gone I sat down to watch Johnny English. It was OK, but nothing special. It certainly wasn't as funny as the critics made out. Personally I thought that Rowan Atkinson was far funnier in Rat Race.

For the first time in days I got uninterrupted sleep. Liz has apologised to me in her blog :-o It's all to do with distances :-P

Now that I've passed I am desparately trying to get my car on the road and insured so that I can drive it back from Nottingham this weekend. The weekend after I want to be in Newbury (and I'm not cancelling that under any circumstances) and so the next chance I would have to collect my car would not be until the weekend of the 21st. I suspect when I ring for insurance there will be cries of "HOW much?!" but we shall see.

Walking to work is becoming a bit of a nightmare with the road I normally walk along being torn up. Pedestrian access has been reinstated, but they expect you to not be bothered by the dangerously torn up pavement and overgrown hedge. Plus they are taking the top surface off the road which produces the most foul smell which clings in the nostrils. Yeuch.

No sign of the froggy this morning, s/he must have hopped away to freedom and safety having learnt a valuable lesson: always look before you leap ololololololol. I'll get my coat.

Am thoroughly soaked after walking to work. On the way I saw a frog lying upside in the road, the poor bugger. I hate seeing dead frogs, and I was quite surprised when it moved so I picked it up and put it on the verge where it was less likely to be killed. And yes it was a frog, I am aware of the differences between frogs and toads. It was a fat blighter too! Annoyingly the workmen have closed pedestrian access on Primrose Hill now, so I had to walk up a mud track in the rain.

All this, of course, was after my driving test which was this morning. I've never been so nervous in my life about anything, I'm not a fan of one-on-one tests as they make me really nervous. Last night was worse when everything culminated. I had a beer to try and settle my nerves and played with some more OpenGL to try and forget about it.

This morning I was surprisingly calm. My reasoning for this was the fact that I knew that I could now face the fear head on and get it out of the way rather than dreading it for days on end. Somehow the realisation that I could now just get on with it made it a little more bearable.

When Andy Bowker arrived at 9:44 I was starting to feel the nerves again, and I made a number of really stupid little mistakes during the hour before the test. I soon started to calm down again and things picked up, but then we had to go to the DSA and park up ready for the test. I could see the last person who had taken their test as they left but was unsure if they'd passed or not.

We parked up and Andy took me through all the controls one last time to make sure I knew where everything was for the maintenance questions that they now ask you to answer then we locked the car and he gave me the key. Somehow that was a bit of a confidence boost as it reminded me that all this was so that I could have my own car with my own key - it was almost like a symbol of the point of this exercise, and so that helped a lot.

There was a short wait inside the test centre and when the examiner appeared he had someone with him who I soon after found out was also coming on the test with me. I'd been dreading this, as if one person isn't bad enough. We went through the paper-work and then walked to the car. There were the usual simple maintenance questions and the practical test began. My heart was running at triple speed by this point but he piped up a conversation which helped; telling people mundane facts about your life is surprisingly good for the nerves.

All seemed ok at the start following an intricate route through the town which tests for various things, from observation to control to speed and ability to read the road. In fact everything seemed fine until we got to Penglais hill and I put the car into third, which was fine for cruising but not for getting my speed to 30 Mph. I had to shift back to 2nd, which I don't think he liked, and then back to 3rd once we had a little more speed. That wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been carrying two passengers, but never mind. No point crying over spilt milk.

Things progressed quite nicely until I was asked to take a parking position and brushed the curb. D'OH! I wasn't sure if that was a failable offence: It is certainly a failing offence on the turn in the road. We carried on and did some other stuff including a turn in the road, an Emergency stop (which wasn't good as the brakes were wet and I was carrying extra weight). At one point I think I scored brownie points by asking the bloke in the back seat to take his arm off the seat as it was obscuring my vision out of the rear window. Hehheh.

After what seemed like ten minutes or so of driving we were obviously heading back to the test centre. Not a good sign, it suggests you've mounted up the minors and they've accumulated to become a major - ie a fail. We got back and he didn't ask me to do a reverse bay park, which is his usual finishing touch. Damn. I drove into the parking bay, switched the engine off. He took a moment to organise his paper work. I awaited the final blow; the "I'm very sorry, but on this occasion you have not passed your test..." spiel.

When he spoke and said "Well I'm very pleased to tell you that you've passed your test" I mentally heard what I was expecting to hear, and there was a strange sort of verbal double-take going on inside my head. My facial expression almost certainly remained grave as I threw my head back and said "Thank God I don't have to do that again!".

I'd passed with 8 minors, most of which were down to nerves. Silly things like brushing the curb, failing to check something on the turn in the road, gear selection etc. After signing what seemed like a mountain of paperwork he explained how to go about getting my license updated. We got out and went to meet Andy who didn't seem at all surprised. I'm not sure if that's because he was confident in me or because he's just been doing it so long that it means nothing to him.

He drove me back and we had a chat about PassPlus and driving in general before I got out. I'm really thankful that I chose to take my test in Aberystwyth, Andy really helped my driving improve a lot. If it hadn't been for him I'd still be dipping the clutch on corners. Strange how nobody else picked up on that. Thanks to Andy I can now go back to Nottingham and collect my Peugeot 106 and start living a life of freedom.

Suffice to say I'm in a good mood right now... Wow, this is one hell of a long Blog! You are now free to go and do something more interesting.

The amazing "Eat More" diet began today. Having recently established that I was in fact, as Liz had said a long time ago, eating far too little I decided it was time to start a refeeding programme. The general idea is the exact opposite of the amazing Eat Less diet plan.

Where as I should have been eating about 2300 calories a day, I've been eating between 1500 and 2000 calories each day and some days even as little as 1000. Not healthy. Things it never seemed like a problem, I thought I was eating enough and it's only recently that I stopped and worked out how many calories I'd eaten and saw the huge gap. And yes, Liz did point this out a long time ago and I told her she was worrying over nothing. :-(

Anyway the plan seems to have gone ok so far. So far today I have eaten:

- A huge breakfast this morning

- A snack of one peanut butter sandwich at 10:30

- Two peanut butter sandwiches with a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar for lunch

- Another peanut butter sanwich at 15:00.

I feel like I'm bursting at the seams! All well, I should soon get used to it. I've yet to have my dinner. :(

Last night was fun, trying to sleep while two guys yelled at each other from opposite ends of the road because they derived some bizarre pleasure from waking up an entire street. I confess to having some very dangerous violent thoughts. They're probably very lucky I gritted my teeth and stayed where I was.

When I chose Aberystwyth one of its plus points was that it was described as "a quiet seaside town". I wanted to get away from it all for a while and have guaranteed full nights of sleep. Turns out Aberystwyth is worse than inner city Nottingham - and I'm not exaggerating. I have slept in a flat in inner city Notts in the Summer on a Saturday night with the window open and it was quieter than Aberystwyth in the Winter on a Monday night with the window shut.

Went driving again last night. It was a really good drive with only a few minor errors. My driving is far more controlled now, which is a good thing, so now it's just a case of making a point of putting it all into practise tomorrow in the test. *gibber*

I told the instructor that I wasn't feeling confident about the test and he immediately said "Why?" and seemed genuinely surprised. Personally I didn't think my driving was good enough, swinging from excellent standards to "absolutely pants" standard.

Not too happy with my life at the moment. Starting to feel trapped somewhere I don't want to be, which is never a nice feeling.

Accidentally hit Ctrl+Q again, but luckily hadn't written anything this time. I'm going to have to start hacking Mozilla if this keeps happening! (Note that's HACK and not CRACK - I hate the way the media always uses the wrong word)

Last night after I got back from work I went and played Snooker. I was really on form winning 3 frames to 1! For some reason it was all just pulling together and I was potting everything without even thinking about it.

After Snooker I began messing with C, SDL and OpenGL/Glut. I'm learning from some tutorials written entirely in C++ and so was quite chuffed to be able to rewrite all the tutorial code in C with no difficulty at all, it's a far cry from CS23710 (C and UNIX Systems Programming) where my project compiled and ran and displayed a pretty "Segmentation Fault" error. Not only does this one compile and run cleanly...but it even displays a fullscreen black window with two coloured triangles in it! Wow! I'll bet you're all impressed by immense graphics programming skills.

There was yet more drunken arseholery last night including one stupid bitch standing in the road repeatedly shouting in an intensely annoying whiny voice what sounded like "Kaz". Then every 5 minutes or so I would hear a window being opened and a female voice would yell "FUCK OFF". There would be some shouted discussion between them, and then the window would be shut and the whining begin again. I could have slapped her. Words can not describe how much people like that piss me off.

GAH, which idiot came up with the great idea of putting the "Quit" shortcut in Mozilla right next to the "Close Tab" shortcut? It could at least pop up a prompt or something, or better still provide the option of turning the shortcut off. I just lost an entire unsubmitted blog because of that.

To summarise what I can't be bothered to rewrite: I am sick of the drunken arseholery around Aber at the moment. Last night I hardly got any sleep because of the noise and this morning there was fast food all over the place, including chips and curry sauce smeared all over a white car. I had to step over two huge piles of festering vomit to get to work. <end of stuiiBlog©>

I wanted to listen to some music while I work today, but then I went and forgot my headphones. :-( Luckily I remembered there are some old ones in a box in my office \o/ Most of them were broken :-( But then I found a pair that worked! \o/ Then I realised i'd forgotten my music too. D'OH.

Just worked out how many hours I've taken off and how many I have made up by working late. Only 9 hours to make up for... I've worked 5 so that's 4 more hours to do, but I would also like to make up for the 3 hours I am going to take off on Wednesday so that is 7 hours left :( Either way I will have to come into work again tomorrow.

Will probably make up the 9 hours to bring myself back in line with everyone else in the office and then work an hour late each night to make up the 3 hours I am going to take off on Wednesday. *sigh*

It's Saturday and I'm in work. Woo. Because I've had to take lots of time off work recently (waiting for BT engineers, meeting Liz off the train, seeing Liz off on the train) I am now many hours behind. Of course I could take this time off as holiday but I want to put my holiday to better use at some point and do something nice. Current plans are to do an uber long walk with Liz :)

Last night I looked over some OpenGL examples and was shocked to find that it is all surprisingly simple stuff. They had an example piece of code that rendered what looked like a little bit like a level from Half Life or similar with some terrain, a lush looking sky and volumetric fog. I looked the code over, and it was all so simple! I'm not claiming to understand OpenGL now, but I know it's not outside of my reach. loweyProject #LP300104001 may yet happen! :-D

Talkie Walkie arrived this morning for much grooving, but still no sign of my 56k modem.

I've just got back from a driving lesson. My god I was crap :( On the plus side several things came to light in my driving that would have otherwise caused me to fail... Seems that my previous instructor had taught me a load of crap. For example, on an emergency stop the brake must be applied before the clutch. I was taught by my last instructor that the clutch and brake should be applied at the same time...an instant fail. Also I'm still making some silly mistakes, so I've booked another lesson before the big day.

Had a driving lesson last night. My driving wasn't bad, but I still make the occasional daft mistake like not checking my blindspots before moving off. It's silly little things like that which can ruin your test.

Spent most of last night geeking trying to install a mass of software that I've not been able to install previously. Actually got one to install after an hour or so of struggling, and was really chuffed. I ran it, and it ran fine. Only problem was the author had neglected to mention that it didn't do half the things required in order to use it. Even selecting "New" from the File menu resulted in a pretty little dialogue box that read "Not implemented yet!". *sigh* Got Fluidsynth to run too and found it is actually a really good piece of software although not what I require at the moment.

Had another nightmare last night. I won't describe it because it's a bit gruesome and quite silly really. I had one a few nights ago where I was being attacked by "Sharky the friendly shark (who's not so friendly)" - a creation of Eddie Izzard's imagination. That one wasn't very scary though because I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it.

Work is much better now that I'm not doing the secretary's job and can get on with documentation and writing tutorials. Tonight I shall play with some openGL in the vague hopes that I can write something roughly game-like. I want to write a basic space-shooter game - who knows, I may yet achieve this dream! (loweyProject #LP300104001)