Ketchup

That was what my friend and I used to call "catch-up" mode on Need For Speed II. The person who was behind in 2-player mode would get a small increase in the top-end speed of their car to help them catch up, but "catch-up" soon became "CATCHUP!" which sounded like "KETCHUP!" which we then simply adopted and used in normal everday conversation... Anyway this is a ketchup blog.

When the window was jammed shut, the temperature in my bedroom promptly rose from a reasonably comfortable temperature of somewhere around 20 degrees, straight up to about 40 odd. (Numbers may not be accurate as I just made them up) As a result I hardly slept at all before my exam on Wednesday and was rudely woken up by my alarm clock at about 8am, very bleary eyed and barely able to balance.

Still I don't think I did too badly in my exam, I wrote loads -- I was actually still writing when they said "llychwyn agoch pynau dwn, pens down please" (the more astute readers may notice that this is not real Welsh. The rest of you, please ignore this bracketed section) but I'm not sure how good what I wrote was. I'm sure Chris Loftus will be quite proud to see his lecture slides regurgitated in the form of an exam but I doubt he'll see fit to give me a first.

After the exam we headed to the union. At one point I thought the hill was going to defeat me, and I was almost at the point of telling the others to bury me wherever I should fall when I saw the top of the hill was within sight and I got a new lease of life. There we bumped Crompton, an ex-CompSci who I once got very drunk with after handing in an assignment in the first year. He was struggling to remember his pin-number for the cash machine after a heavy night of revision and eventually the machine told him to piss off and locked his account for the day. I didn't even bother trying to remember the pin number for my credit card, I knew I had no hope.

We went inside where Saad kindly obliged in buying me a beer (damn, I owe too many people too many pints) and then we all played a little bit of pool. We had some excellent doubles games which took ages as they got rather tactical. My mad pool skills have sadly vanished over time. It seems you have to keep using them or you lose them. Ah well. I improved a little as time went on.

So having consumed the worst pint of supposed Caffrey's and played some pool, we headed back to my place to get the details of the B&B that I am designing a website for. The person who runs it is an ex-colleague and I offered to build her a website in exchange for one night of accommodation when I come back to Aber for my graduation. Splendid! Problem is, the picture she sent me was on paper and I don't have a (working) scanner so Saad had agreed to let me use his, but I'd left the details at my place.

On the bridge to PJM we found a starling lying on the floor. Odd. I rolled it over to see if it was still alive, which it wasn't, but was surprised to find it was still warm. It must have only just dropped out of the sky. It hadn't been mauled, the only sign of damage was that the poor bugger had cracked its head open on the pavement. We decided it was best not to leave it in the path, so we put it under a tree to let nature take its course.

When we got the paper with the picture of the B&B we decided it'd be better to just go down to town and take pictures ourselves as the quality of the picture wasn't too great after printing. We headed down there and took some pictures, including one where I stood in the middle of the road to get a picture of Aberystwyth Castle and probably confused the driver of the car who was driving straight at me...

Today I went down into town to get my cards from my parents/sister/brother/grandma/aunty. Aberystwyth is like one big construction site at the moment. They're tearing up Penglais hill, the main road from the retail park all the way to the roundabout near the train station, and the footpaths are closed on parts of Chalybeate street as two different buildings have got scaffolding over them and have intensive works. Walking through Aberystwyth earlier was exactly how I could imagine hell being: Busy, crowded, noisy. No matter where you stand you're always in someone's way, and no matter which way you move someone or something will always be in your way.

Now I really must revise for my robotics exam. I've looked at the past papers and can't answer a single question on any of them...