Well, two years ago today (31st) I met Laura for the very first time, as well as her mom, dad, and grandparents. I made my very first purchase with American currency: a 50c newspaper from 7/11.

Blah, I still remember it so well. First time I ever kissed Laura was two years ago today.

Anyways, onto more recent events…

Laura and I went to San Francisco today. We walked along the Embarcadero to Pier 39 and had lunch at In-n-Out which was as fantastic as usual. We got ice cream afterwards on our way back towards the aquarium.

We looked at all the fish and other various sea creatures. I touched a sting ray (I did that years ago) and a leopard shark too.

We walked back to Market Street and walked up to the Apple store to see how much an iPod mini is… $199 or $249 depending on if you want 4GB or 6GB.

We got back on BART and headed back to my house for a few minutes.

It was a really good day.

Two years ago today (30th) I first arrived in America and met Shaun, Heather, and Link for the first time each. After about 2 quick games of Dead Or Alive on the Xbox I fell asleep on the sofa.

Not exactly the most eventful arrival ever, but man it was good. I woke up at about 5AM the next day and I was just so amazingly happy. Ah that was so nice.

So yeah, the two year anniversary of a whole bunch of stuff is coming up in the next few days/months… Should be nice to celebrate them before things all change again :\

Anyways, code…

Someone wanted me to rewrite my i2x script to work with the new plugin written by localhost and I couldn’t get the fricking plugin to work with my version of iTunes, so I decided I was going to just write my own plugin. Well, I changed my mind soon enough when localhost suggested that I just try using the COM.

I read a bunch of stuff about needing some silly ActiveState development kit for Perl that costs like $40 or something, so I decided to forget that too. I read some stuff about Python and apparently it has good COM support, so I used that.

It took me pretty much all fricking day to get the bloody thing working. Stupid XChat was being a total bitch. The official Windows version isn’t free, so I don’t use it. Unfortunately the free unofficial build is having major problems loading Python scripts with the latest version of Python. I ended up installing the trial ersion of the official XChat. After a trillion cryptic errors I discovered that Python scripts seem to SUCK in XChat because they don’t unload correctly.

After about 20 restarts of XChat I finally had a working Python version.

A few minutes ago I remembered something I’d read about for Perl that is free, so I decided to give that a shot too… In less than 5 minutes I had a completely working version. I wrote the entire script from beginning to end without saving or testing, and it worked first try.

You might not think that’s particularly amazing, but any programmer reading this will know how absolutely excellent it feels when this thing happens. The following quote by slyfx pretty much sums it up.

“I love it when my code works first time, it’s like christmas, except not as often.”

Last night I went to l8nite’s parents’ house to play poker for his brother Nick’s 19th birthday. I got Shaun out first, he went all in and I challenged him on it. I won pretty much the first 4 or 5 hands which was awesome. I then got Shaun’s dad out a few minutes later, excellent.

A while later the cards were dealt to me, Heather (Shaun’s girlfriend), and Maggie (Nick’s girlfriend) and I was like “Sweet, ace, king,” but nothing really good came up, so I kept checking, as did Heather and Maggie. We went through the whole hand checking the whole time, and then it came time to throw our cards down and I was fairly confident I’d win with an ace high, and then Heather threw down her ace, king… Then Maggie threw down her ace, king, and I put mine down last to the absolute amazement of everyone at the table. The chances of that happening have got to be incredibly miniscule. The top 6 cards were all aces and kings o_O

Anyways, Heather went out after one hell of a battle and then the two tables merged for the last 4 people. I went out pretty damn quickly because I called this guy Ste who was blatantly bluffing 80% of the hands, but unfortunately I got owned and lost out big time.

This other guy Chad looked like he was out for sure, but he managed to hold on for quite a long time and made a come-back for a while. All this time Maggie is folding 99% of her hands and holding onto most of her chips. The blinds are getting to like $3.20 small and $6.40 big, which is insane in a $10 buy-in :\

Chad went out after forcing his way back for a while, and then it was down to Maggie and Ste. Ste was pushing Maggie around because she kept being dealt bad hands I suppose, and he was incredibly cocky. After about 10 hands of Ste just bragging and Maggie folding Ste went all-in (as he did on pretty much all of his other hands too), and Maggie called him on it. Turns out he had a pair of 2s, and Maggie had aces 😀 Game over and Maggie owned us all. $120 in the pot or something, quite a tidy win to say Nick paid for her buy-in 🙂

We sat around a bit (bop-it, twist it, pull it) and then went back to Shaun’s house. We played a couple of darts games, and I suck at darts now. Then I watched Shaun on WoW for a little while and then we went through to watch Conan O’Brien for a bit. Then to sleep because we’d agreed to help Shaun’s mom the next morning (actually that morning, 6 hours later) at 7:30.

I woke up at like 6:55 or something, washed quickly and brushed my teeth and we left. Doritos for breakfast 🙂

We went through the McDonalds drive-through (yes I spelled it “through”) and got some drinks and food, I just had a coke to wake me up a bit. Then we headed off to Lockheed Martin to set up for a party type thing or something. I’d had my name added to the list the night before and I needed to present ID at the gate or something. We found our way there and the guards at the gate had no stickers for us with our names on, so we waited a few minutes while they made them. When we got them it said “US Citizen” at the top of them, which everyone found pretty damn funny on mine 😀 Especially considering Shaun’s mom put England as my birthplace, oh well.

We got two bouncy castles set up, a bungee run, a velcro wall, and an inflatable obstacle course.

Nick and I had a little competition on the bungee run. He shoulder barged me over on one of the runs, which was nice of him… So a few minutes later while he was trying to get over the end to stick the velcro to Shaun I waited for him to start running and then when he was level with me I kicked the dividing inflatable wall really hard and he went straight down, much to my, and everyone elses amusement. 😀

Then we went over to the obstacle course to have a race. He totally kicked my ass on that. Then at the other end Shaun suggested that we try and get up the wall backwards, so Nick gave it a bunch of tries, and this girl who turned up gave it a few tries too, but neither of them got far. I had a few tries, but failed, and there’s only really room for two to try, so once people had kinda given up I ran the thing and managed to grab onto the top. As I was starting to pull myself up Nick grabbed hold of my ankles and started trying to pull me down. I managed to stay up, then put my feet over to the side wall and got a tiny bit of extra grip and managed to get my feet to the top first and made it 😀 I knelt at the top with my arms raised. That’s when I noticed the vinyl burns on my elbows and knees :'(

Nick made it up a minute or two later, after a big struggle, and I was bloody tired. I had adrenaline pumping for probably the first time in months and I felt kinda sick from it. Arms and legs a bit shaky, how sad is that?

Anyways, I got my shit together and then Shaun drove me home, and then I wrote this 🙂

1. What kind of toothpaste do you use?
Colgate.

2. Do you take vitamins?
No.

3. Which over-the-counter drug can’t you live without?
None.

4. What kind of soap do you have in your shower?
I dunno… Soap.

5. What is the most unusual item in your medicine cabinet?
I don’t have a medicine cabinet, the only medicine I have is a little tub of pain killers. Ear buds then… I dunno, nothing in there is unusual. What a crap Friday Five.

And the second one…

1. What is your favorite movie of all time?
Office Space.

2. How often do you watch this movie?
Once in a while, every few months maybe.

3. What’s your favorite line out of the whole movie?
“I’ll tell you what I’d do. Two chicks at the same time,” or “I’m gonna show her my “O” face, oooh oooh ooooooh,” or “What am I going to do with 40 subscriptions to Vibe?”

4. Who’s your favourite character from this movie?
Milton. Cracks me up.

5. What scene do you love the most?
You’d imagine most people would say it’s the one where their favourite character says their favourite line… but no. Umm, probably the opening scene.

So yeah, that post was rescued by the second Friday Five, that’s for sure.

And here’s a picture I made for David.

I’m out to play poker for the night, so I’ll be offline for the first time in a while. 🙂

I recently had the pleasure of seeing the upcoming episode of Doctor Who, and it’s fricking brilliant. Should be a great series and I’m really looking forward to watching it.

I personally find Billie Piper quite annoying, and her boyfriend in the show even more so… But I don’t think he’s going to be in it very much between now and the end. Thanks to the Time And Relative Dimension In Space machine 😉

The Doctor is the main army guy from 28 Days Later, although it took me a while to remember where I knew him from. He’s a good choice for the role, in my opinion.

Anyways, it’s a good show, 27th season too, so plenty of stuff to watch.

Knock knock.

Doctor. 😉

I’ve been playing GT4 with JonP some more. I’m now at 31.2%. Done a bunch of the endurance races and stuff. It’s nice having proper racing cars. I can just go around and slam the other people into walls and stuff 😀

I made that myself 🙂

Took this cool picture of my Nike car flying through the air 😀

I’ve been spending some time downloading the albums I was too silly to bring with me from England. A bunch of Offspring albums, an Oasis album and stuff like that. Finding sources for this stuff is a pain sometimes though, even on Soulseek.

Anyways, just saying what’s up and stuff.

Well, David just pasted me the URL of the other Friday Five, so I’m going to add that one now. From now on I’ll try and have them both in the same post though.

1. What are your five favorite all time TV shows?
Bloody hell… Ummm.
In no particular order: The X-Files, Stargate (counting Atlantis and SG-1 as one show), Live and Kicking, TFI Friday, The Simpsons.

2. What five things you want to do before the year is out?
Does that even make sense? Ummm, go to another country, learn to drive manual cars, get a good job, hang out with David and JonP playing games listening to good music and eating pizza, and find some way of seeing Laura often.

3. Who are five people (alive, dead, or otherwise) you would want to have dinner with?
Otherwise?
Einstein, of course… Homer Simpson (that answers my otherwise question I suppose), William Shakespear so I could find out for definite that he didn’t put as much meaning into his plays as English teachers manage to extract from them. Linus Torvalds, although I don’t know what I’d say. Bill Gates, although I don’t know what I’d steal.

4. Where are five places (cities, states, countries, etc.) you would like to visit?
Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Alice Springs, etc.). New York City, USA. Rome, Italy. Tokyo, Japan. Moscow, USSR.

5. What are your five favorite desserts?
Cornflake tart, caramel tart (I think that’s the name), egg custard, bananas and custard, apple crumble.

Dammit, now I want all of those…

Anyways, Laura’s first day seemed to go well. She says it’s pretty good there. She also gets a 30% discount, which is quite astounding. I don’t know how much she’s being paid, but I doubt she’s being ripped off or anything.

So yeah, stuff is good.

I finally made it past 25% 😀

Last night I finished a couple of races and got a car for getting over 25% and then went straight ahead and did one of the 9 hour endurance races (in B-Spec mode at 3 speed), so I’m happy 🙂

I also watched the Grand Prix while chatting on MSN with JonP. I set up my screen so it was magnified and set the text to large on MSN and sat on my bed with my replacement wireless keyboard and it was all good.

I can’t say I like the new F1 rules very much… They do make the race more eventful I suppose… In some ways anyway, they also make it less eventful. Pit stops are totally boring as hell now with about 8 guys looking at the tyres, presumably making sure they’re still there. It also means people are less likely to pass other people in the actual race because they usually get forced onto a bad part of the track which causes more tyre damage and harder braking, which screws the tyres completely.

The rule is basically that you have to use one set of tyres for qualifying and the race itself, and can only change if one of them blows out or something. Soon enough they’ll be removing the steering wheels and drivers and they’ll just let the cars free-roll down hills and see which goes farthest 😉

My site’s going fairly well, except for l8nite messing with it a bit. I have a couple of things to fix up and stuff, but nothing particularly urgent I suppose.

So, I got a replacement keyboard since I spilled Dr. Pepper on my last one. It’s all nice and wireless again. I bought a refurbished one saving myself about $50 or something, which is always nice.

I’ve been playing GT4 with JonP a bunch still, I’m almost at 25% at last, which will enable me to participate in the endurance races, which will enable me to win a really fast car so I can finally beat Professional mode without taking days to save up about 4 million credits or something.

JonP’s off for Easter for a couple of weeks so we should get in some quality endurance races while chatting on Skype :skype: which will be a bunch of fun. I just need that last 0.9% to get to the magical 25 though. It’s tough finding races I don’t need to buy a new car for.

Big news

Laura has been accepted to about 5 million different colleges, including one in London. They want to give her a $38 000 thingybob… Scholarship (thanks to leo for remembering that word for me) and a T-Shirt, which she gave to me because it’s a large.

More big news

Laura got a job at Pac Sun! Woohoo. It’s one of the coolest stores that I’ve seen out here. Her first day is tomorrow. She’s going in for some training and to sign a contract etc. I’m sure she’ll enjoy it a lot. The store always has good music on and the people who work there always seem friendly enough.

Umm, so yeah, that’s about it for now I think. Oh yes, I need more coat hangers.

Holy monkeys, for the first time I’m actually going to answer the friday five on a friday!

1. What’s the first physical feature that attracts you to another person?
Ummm, their face I suppose, since that’s the most obviously visible feature on any person, except a burglar.

2. Do you read the tabloids (i.e. The National Enquirer, The Mirror)?
I don’t read any newspaper unless the headline is incredibly funny and/or stupid.

3. Have you ever snuck a peek at someone else’s paper while taking an exam?
Not that I can think of. Not a proper exam anyway, I never needed to.

4. How would you describe your vision?
Eyes of a hawk! like Brave Starr.

5. What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever seen?
Bloody hell, that’s a tough question. I don’t think I’ve seen many scary things. I saw my grandad having two heart attacks, one on Christmas Eve and the other while he was on holiday with us. They were pretty scary… Or I guess seeing my ex-girlfriend after she took an overdose and having to call 999 was pretty fricking bad too…