I do. Because then, when I have it, and when I’m driving Silver Belle to uni each day, if something like what happened this morning happens again, I can drive home.

I am stuck here until 5:00 PM. I arrived at 9:30 this morning for a tutorial which is supposed to start at 10:00 AM. “Supposed to” are the operative terms, my friends. My tutor decided not to show up. Therefore, I am stuck here until 5:00 PM. Without a car, without a lift, without any conceivable, safe way of getting home.

My dad is right. I need my licence, stat.

So you’ll be glad to know I’m taking steps towards achieving this goal.

I passed my computerised Hazard Perception Test a few weeks ago now - which, if you want my opinion, is a pretty silly way of seeing how safe we are, given the pass mark is a measly 54 per cent (but it’s hard).

For instance, how am I supposed to tell the computer when I would slow down on a road? There are so many things to consider. For example, how fast is the rest of the traffic going? Is there anyone behind me who, if I “slow down”, might plough into the back of my sweet little vrrrooomthing? What exactly do you mean by “slow down”? Do you mean start slowing down? Or, perhaps you mean coming to a near-complete stop?

What the hell does “click when you would slow down” essentially mean?

I was so prepared to stay home from uni today. I was. I fought tooth and nail to stay home, even though my mum fought tooth and nail back to get me to go.

So I went.  Only my going had no purpose after all.

Mondays are only an hour’s worth. Now, some of you might question why the hell I go to uni on Mondays this semester at all, but I figure it’s X-amount of weeks, it could be worse, et cetera, et cetera.

My lecturer didn’t show up.

So all in all, attending uni today was an exercise in complete pointlessness.

This freakin’ sucks.

I got out of bed way too early this morning to get to uni by 9 AM (because Mum starts work at 9 AM, and I go to the university where she works - yeah, I need to start driving). My Business Law tutorial class started at 10 AM.

Only it didn’t.

My tutor apparently still has jet lag, or is ill, or something. He couldn’t even be bothered to inform us that he wasn’t going to be there. My only other class today is Knowing and Knowledge, which is a one-hour lecture at 3 PM.

So I could have come in at 3-freaking-PM. *punches something* I got out of bed way too early for no reason whatsoever.

Oh, and we had homework to hand in as well, and apparently there’s an assignment due next week that my tutor hasn’t even discussed with the group.

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Today is so not my day.

Okay, so it was kind of good, with only one hour-long lecture, and in most weeks my dad’ll be able to pick me up soon afterwards. And my lecturer for the next month in Psych 1B is practically a comedian, so at least the excruciating 9 AM-10 AM Timeslot of Death and Sonya Not Being Totally, Completely Awake Yet will be an entertaining prospect.

But the big problem is with the Faculty of Business and Law’s online education system, WebCT. I dropped a subject (Accounting for Decision Making) that I enrolled into at the start of the year because I realised it wouldn’t fit in to this semester’s schedule.

However, I kept the other business subject I enrolled into (Human Resource Management). I can’t access either subject’s home page on the system because it alleges (and IT, useless as they are) presume I am not enrolled correctly. Rule one of the blackboard jungle of academia: it is your fault, even when it is decidedly not your fault. So, I have to deal with this pronto. There’s online assessment I have to do for Business Law which, ironically enough, is accessible only through WebCT! And I can’t access it!

EDIT: I can access it now. How amazement.

To top it off, I can’t access the home page for the University altogether. Oh wait, now I can.

And according to TNT Logistics’ package tracking service, they tried to deliver my iPod, but we aren’t home, home, home. A free cookie for anyone who can guess what song that sentence could be sung to the tune of. You all know when my birthday is. If not, it’s on that sidebar o’yonder. *points pointedly*

I treated myself to a fantastic box set of ten Doctor Who novels featuring the Ninth and Tenth Doctors. They’ll keep me going for a while. It was only $54.95, can’t say fairer than that. I estimate that that’s about $5 AUD a book, but my maths is rubbish, so don’t quote me.

Oh yes. I was going to post about the seventh and final Harry Potter book. But do you know what? I don’t think I will. I have so much to say about it that I’m just going to cop out and say nothing. Much.

It was one of the best books I’ve ever read, I couldn’t read it fast enough, and I read it in four hours without a break to eat, drink or go to the loo, so that should tell you something of how enthralled I was by the spell of “Deathly Hallows”.

Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off, is premiering on Channel 10 tonight. I’m sure it will last five minutes in its prime-time slot of 9:30 PM. Channel 10 never gives anything a chance to find an audience, so it will be relegated to the Friday night death slot of 10:30 PM (this is changeable, especially when Big bloody Brother is on - see Veronica Mars and how it is not on Australian television!).

I see it. I see it all.

And with really freaking long commercial breaks!

Why couldn’t they stick Torchwood on the ABC along with the Doctor Who mother ship, or even on SBS, which would have been a perfect fit along with its existing cult programming such as Queer as Folk and Big Love, and, I believe, possibly, Red Dwarf? Oh yeah, and its selection of ‘art-house’ T&A exploitation?

Why does it have to be murdered by Channel bloody 10, with its damned aversion to intellectual programming?

Lately, it seems, my computer speakers have decided that they no longer want to function properly. Or it could be my sound card that does not want to function properly. At random times, the sound through my speakers messes up like the song is skipping. Is this the sound card acting up? It shouldn’t be: we just bought a damned new motherboard. I need some new speakers. I’ll admit that these are old, but that’s easily remedied.

Fact: The songs themselves are not skipping; they would have skipped prior to this. I’ve given up, and am simply listening to the dulcet tones of Amy Winehouse, demented speakers or no.

The stupid, messed-up sound, however, cannot explain the slowness of my computer. End of story, thank you for coming.
Actually, since November 2006 it has seemed that my entire computer is on a permanent PMS cycle. We threw five-freaking-hundred dollars worth of new parts into this computer at that time - nope, said the computer. It ain’t good enough, no matter what ‘it’ is.

I hate this computer now. It used to be so reliable. Now Mozilla Firefox insists on crashing; The Sims 2 insists on crashing; and the stupid computer itself insists on randomly rebooting. The thing itself is incredibly slow. We have 1 GB of RAM.
This should NOT be happening. End of story.

To top it off, now the computer has decided that sometimes it doesn’t want to boot up, or else boots up very slowly.

I am ready to defenestrate this bloody thing.

I’m at university. I’ve been here since 9 AM today. It’s 11 AM now, and I have to stay here until 5 PM. Oh, life is so cruel. But seriously, you’ve never been in my Introduction to Marketing lectures, have you?

No, you have not.

Count yourselves lucky.

My lecturer, who shall remain nameless, is a twit. No, she’s not a pregnant goldfish, but she is utterly self-impressed, and insists on blathering on with pointless random information about herself:

• Exhibit A: babbling about the trendy salon where she gets her hair done;
• Exhibit B: Whingeing about the overpriced local supermarket she shops at;
• Exhibit C: Perhaps most memorably, moaning about purchasing French perfume duty-free and being dismayed to find it at a much lower price in a discount department store close to the university.

I had to fight the impulse to shout, “You should have bought the Chanel! That’ll never be cheap!”

And it won’t. Did you know that Chanel does not discount its merchandise? Any stock that is unsold at the end of a season is burned, ostensibly to protect the prestige of its brand name.

Edited to add: Everything seems to be okay now. She hasn’t killed me.

I deleted my online acquaintance’s site by accident.

Clearly, you shouldn’t let me near your Web space. This is why I am going to be buying my own domain name and paying for hosting through a company instead of asking other people for hosting. I’ve been a year without a Web site and, at last, I realise that I miss it. I miss having a domain name and a Web site of my own.

I only hope I don’t delete my own Web site, although, theoretically, I wouldn’t lose much, as I keep copies of everything I upload to my Web site. I don’t edit anything through my FTP program or an interface like WordPress’. I edit through Notepad.

So, there are lessons to be learned here, for everyone. I won’t mention what happened exactly, as I (a) have no idea how I managed to delete her public_html folder, and (b) it’s nobody’s fault, and yet, everyone’s fault, at the same time.

She has blogged about this incident on her Web site, and I would like to reiterate here that I am not a hacker. She has not said anything of the sort, but some of her comment-leavers have insinuated it. I do not have the desire to attempt anything like that. In addition to that, I do not steal passwords or user names. You may draw your own inferences from that.

My faithful, old pink iPod mini, who was christened Minneh three years ago, has died.

My evidence for this dreadful pronouncement is that it’s not responding to being plugged into:

• The AC adapter charger, nor
• My speaker and charger dock, nor
• The USB port in my computer.

The last chance to resurrect the gadget comes in the form of yet another replacement battery. My birthday is in about two months’ time - I just need the thing to last until then, because I am getting an 80GB iPod video for my birthday.

I petition the thing: Please don’t die… we’ve had such a good run together. I just need you to carry on for another two months. That’s eight weeks! Please!