I had a haircut today. I was looking forward to it because my hair was too long. It got cut and I came home. Later, I was sitting at the computer and my neck felt chilly. I reached up to touch it and felt smooth skin and realised with horror that my too long hair had been keeping my neck warm all this time.
Best day of the month by far.

Since finishing exams all my plans, mainly composed of tasks that seemed desperately more interesting than studying during exam revision, have taken a back seat to pure laziness. So, in the last week (and this time frame keeps extending) I haven’t accomplished many of the goals I set for myself during SWOTVAC. Instead what I’ve mainly done is occasionally drink at places, work out and/or sleep a lot.
I was once told, by my hairdresser no less, that she understands why university students sleep so much because all that learning is so very, very hard. She dropped out of uni (and is a skinny chick) so I can understand where she’s coming from, but I think she may be right about needing to sleep so much when you finally can sleep freely, you do with reckless napping abandon. Those days of arduous, break free study (aka June) must have taken out of me more than I knew or was willing to admit (most likely the former, I’m pretty upfront with myself mentally). I know this because I keep sleeping so much. For the first few days of break I accepted this. But as it keeps going, and my aims for these holidays continue to be avoided, I realise that maybe I was overambitious when deciding what I wanted to get done before July 26, and in the same regard how many hours I wanted to stay awake.
As you can imagine based on this 200 word exposé on my 10 hours a day voluntary bed-riddenness, I haven’t done much over the last week. I did go to Port Elliot on the weekend, and there was an embarrassing adventure in the field of keyboard washing (with associated valuable lessons learned). As of today I realised I should stop putting pressure on myself to achieve so much during the holidays and, in fact, just chill out and relax. After all, that’s what holidays are supposed to be about. Either way, it’s the lazy alternative and how could that not work for me at the moment. I mean seriously. Now to sleep for another 10 hours.

Steve went off to Army today. I'm not great with being emotional, but I realise this is probably something I should care about. Whenever people leave, to me, I never really think they've left. It's like "Should we invite Steve?" "Nah, he's busy tonight". Except multiplied indefinitely.
So to try and convey the emotional sadness of this day I would appreciate it if all readers could imagine a slow montage set to a sad, Scrubsesque track. In it Steve's packing his bags, putting his uniform on, swearing an oath to the Queen and then catching a bus that drives out into the horizon.
While all this is happening here's my day.
I woke up and had a shower and then went into town with Alex and Mother. We found the Army Building and Alex and I play I-Spy in the waiting room. I still claim I won because Alex lied when I asked him if it was inside or outside the car. Eventually the waiting was over and we went to the affirmation ceremony. Apart from Steve there were four other dudes going that day too. First there was a 30 minute presentation about some army organisation that you can talk to if you're in the army and people harass you. Mum said that made her feel better and I said "why? Now Steve can get in trouble when he harasses people" because that's the type of guy Steve is.
Then four of them swore and oath to God and the Queen and one just to the Queen. Apparently you get the choice. I don't know why you'd choose not to swear to God too. Even if you're a hardcore atheist, you're about to go off to be trained to get shot at. Why would you want to risk pissing God off?
After the ceremony we had afternoon tea and then Steve left. I saluted him before he left. Throughout the day I kept thinking about Buster in Arrested Development which I think helped everything go much smoother.

It's 4:07am and I have spent the last six hours writing my announcements code. I have plans to use this once. And it's, ironically, going to ask for requests for features for Bradism for me to code seeing that I can think of a few things but they don't seem very challenging.
Along the way my vision of a simple Announcement function got mutated into the hulking, awesome, javascript laden function it is now. It's powerful. I don't know why, but it wasn't until I wrote this announcement feature that I realised the novelty of the fact that I'm writing stuff, and it appears on the internet. I made my first website in 2001 (It's still hosted somewhere) and It's only now that I've come to understand the power I have. I write announcements... and people on the internet can read them! I think it's the little exclamation mark in a yellow triangle that makes them seem so important.

Today started pretty well. I woke up and drove to Uni and played basketball for three hours or so. First against Asians, then with Asians. I stopped when I got hungry and went to drive home. Along the way I was amused by three non personalised numberplates, the first was "WTF", the second "WEE" and the third was "VAG". I'm pretty easily amused and this eye candy helped me enjoy the drive home.
APPARENTLY my car doesn't like me looking at other cars; it's very insecure and wants to punish me. Later tonight, whilst driving, the battery light came on and would not turn off. I was a little worried but I figured the battery is in its third year now and was probably due to die soon.
However as I got closer to home things started to get worse. My petrol gauge went to empty. This worried me but I figured it might be the car shutting down non-primary systems to conserve power for the shield.
At this point I mentally chided myself for watching too much Stargate Atlantis this week in preparation for the new season starting tonight and diverted my attention back to my car. By this stage I was losing dash lights, headlights and my CD player kept saying "HELLO" to me. Only a few kilometres had passed since the light came on and I yelled at car for providing such little warning. However things got worse and after getting my car into the driveway at half-lights and turning off the engine I heard a noise. Trickling, to be exact. So I opened the bonnet and my coolant container was making cracky noises and stuff was leaking out from it and a pool formed on the ground.
I murmured 'I hate you car' and walked inside. I will fix it tomorrow, maybe with my Dad! I am having lunch with him tomorrow. I write a good announcements feature so I figure I can fix a Commodore.

Today's entry will be mainly about Angus. He's the third highest commenter on this site and his main complaint about my internet life is that it doesn't involve him enough.
I woke up this morning after about four hours sleep and sent Angus a message asking if he could drive me to Tim's, who was having a BBQ at 1 while the Bulldogs game was on. I thought offering to make a journal entry about him would be good motivation, but he was unable to do it. So I got mum to drop me off at my friends house and she asked what time I wanted her to pick me up at. I flashbacked to primary school.
The Bulldogs game was so great that I was very glad that I didn't make it to AAMI Stadium this time. After the game, during which I was manipulated by ads for Farmers Union Ice Coffee, I decided I wanted to get an Ice Coffee.
So Bene and I stole a car. Angus' car. It was really fun driving a new car and I don't know why. Maybe it was the lack of power steering.
Arriving at the servo and reverse parking Angus' car, I went in and bought an Ice Coffee, and I got a 1 litre one for some reason. Possibly because I was high on adrenaline due to my grand theft auto. Bene and I then drove back to Tim’s.
I drank my Ice Coffee reasonably fast and then Angus and I, along with James and Tim, played Air Hockey for a while. That was pretty fun, even though my knuckle is completely bruised now mainly because Angus sucks at air hockey and I laid so much beat down on him that I started sweating.
Eventually the air hockey came to an end and I went home. Basketball was forfeited so I spent the rest of my night programming which has been a major pastime for me in the last few days. It's actually the reason I only got four hours of sleep last night.
And that was my boring day today, which is mainly about Angus. The point obviously being that the reason I never mention Angus in my journal is because he lives a boring, boring life.

I don't know what was the best part of today. It might have been this:

COMP3001 Programming Language Concepts DN
COMP3004 Computer Networks DN
COMP3006 Database Systems 2 HD
COMP3020 Internet Computing DN
COMP3200 Enterprise Mgmt for Info Tech DN

Or it may have been winning hearts, twice, on a moon both times.
I have to say, it's got to be the hearts.

I ate too much chocolate mousse today.
For weeks the others talked about going to a buffet and I marked every occasion with references to how I like mousse, how I once read on the internet that your stomach can stretch to twenty times the size of your fist, and how I thought I could eat 20 fists worth of mousse.
I don't like mousse anymore. I ate 11 bowls of mousse tonight. I think I hopefully cancelled it out ish by playing basketball for 3 hours in the afternoon and evening but still. Fortunately the girl at Charlies liked me enough to only charge me half-price as a children's meal when I explained to her what I was planning to try.
I didn't even look at the food, just ate mousse. The first five bowls went down pretty easily. But, as not much time passed and I began to attract the attention of nearby diner’s things got harder.
By the end of the ninth bowl I was full. By the end of the tenth bowl, to ensure that I at least made it into double figures, I was sick.
There was then five minutes as my body furiously debated with my hand that, no, it didn't want any more mousse. It reminded me of the time I tried to drink 22 litres of water in 12 hours. Your body just stops you. I eventually overcame common sense and finished the 11th. This was followed by an hour plus of queasiness.
A lot of these uni breaks over the last few years I've felt I've wasted my holidays. These, I'm less certain I have!

It was Cowan's birthday party tonight. I love that little guy. Through coincidence today I also stumbled upon this chain mail I filled in with my thoughts about Cowan back in Summer 2002. Apart from making me laugh, it's a little wordy and won't make much sense if you don't know Cowan. But for those who do it certainly is an entertaining window into the life of Cowan three and a half years ago.
Happy Birthday Cowan. I'm suprised you lasted 21 years, here's to 21 more buddy.

Today marked the otherwise unremarkable return to uni. Despite being unemployed and sleeping way too much, it was probably my most productive uni break ever! I got so much done in the last two weeks!
Now, as is the norm, I'm in the grip of tutorial sign up fever. This time during the first week of every semester is spent devoting all uni energy into getting the best possible permutation of pracs and tutorials so that your timetable can be as compact as possible. Why this is done is kind of a mystery, seeing as by the end of the first month half your timetable has gone MIA and you don't even go to half the tutes anyway. But what else are you suppose for the first week? In other news, I also got offered a casual teaching position for Computer Programming 1 tonight so that was sweet because it gives me even more tutorials to try and build a timetable around.
I'll bring you more tales of uni later, after today's lecture slides go online and I can use them to illustrate the more entertaining moments of my day.
Wait, what? The break was four weeks. Oh crap!

If you read this entry please leave a comment telling whether or not you can place your ships diagonally in Battleships.

I have a few problems with one of my topic choices at uni this semester. It's not that it's a particularly bad topic or, worse, inconveniently scheduled. I think I can best illustrate my problem with a bit of background information followed by some quotes from the first lecture.
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery is a third year database topic offered in odd years only. It is taught by Roddick, who may be remembered as the DB1 lecturer from last year. Whilst learning about Databases from him I felt that, although he at first appeared to be a nice guy he was, in fact, actually a real life version of Bowser, the evil overlord of the Mario universe. But he taught databases and they are important so I learnt from him and eventually jumped over him and landed on the hammer behind him to pass DB1.
So what is Data Mining? Roddick explained it like this. Initially there was Data Queries, where you had a question to ask and a general idea of what answer you would find. Then came Data Analysis, where you knew what your question was but had no way of determining what the answer could be. Then there is Data Mining, in which you don't have a question and you don't know what the answer will be like.
I'm sorry, but that's not "Data Mining", Roddick, that is "You making up random shit about databases". If you don't have a question or an answer you're not "mining", you're "not doing anything". Of course, not doing anything is much easier to get paid 30 grand a semester for compared to mining.
Roddick was particularly proud of his efforts in establishing this fraud so sturdily. He talked about how if anyone thought of Data Mining, they thought of Flinders. He then compared this to how if anyone wanted Biochemistry they thought of Adelaide University. The only real difference being that Biochemistry is non-fictional.
I like Roddick; I enjoy the way in which he surrounds himself with an air of authority as a Data Mining expert. He seemss like the Dungeon Master in Dungeons and Dragons. He creates an intricate reality in which everything he says seems crucial and important when, in actuality, he is just a big nerd making up random crap.
He finished the lecture by informing us that there was "large scope" to undertake Honours as a Data Mining PHD student. Seems there's not much demand to specialise in such a cutting edge field. I wonder why.

Everything has been coming up Brad recently it's almost a disturbig trend.
I won't go into too much detail, but today for example we won basketball and the Bulldogs beat Brisbane so that was pretty sweet.
I walked home from Tim's tonight after Bene's farewell. I'll miss Bene, but damn is it about time I walked home from somewhere again. I haven't walked home for ages, not since I left Woolworths I think. All the timed to the second runs and weight sessions don't hold a candle to the sheer amount of thinking and left-right-left-righting that a drunken stroll to your house does. I got home around 4:40am and cooked myself some tinned spaghetti. As far as important life decisions go, I rate that one pretty highly because damn that spaghetti was fantastic.