What I've noticed most about this semester so far is the illusion of a relatively free timetable. I say "illusion" because even though I never have more than 3 hours of classes a day compared to getting up to 6 on some days last year, my afternoons seem to be always spent in the Honours lab trying to make sense of one or more of our practical tasks. The James battle is still continuing, with half of another question being struggled through today - this is after a meeting with the man himself who seemed very reluctant to help, but eventually made me go through the whole thing on the board and awarded me a Bassett's fruit allsort.

Finally, after a two-year search, there are some UT players on the network - I had a few games with Johnny (who as I've faithfully forgotten to mention previously, is now my academic son) this evening, but the latency of the game varied immensely. Sometimes it was fine with a bit of unusual choppiness, but at other times it was rather terrible, reaching over 1000 ping at some points. Optimistically I'll decide that it was due to varying network traffic and the way that we were using the slower computer as the server.

The day-late celebration of Paul's birthday was not spent in Drouthy's, as has become traditional in the two years I've been here, but instead at the Union playing several games of DDR - ranging from the taxing (Test My Best, Expert) through the difficult (Hard 1, Nonstop) to the just plain stupid (Max 300, Expert). After beating my own top score, slightly increasing the probability that Rich will kill me next time he sees me, I decided I'd award myself a Tesco sandwich.

However, they'd run out of all the ones which are decent without being too expensive, and I had a look at the bakery instead. I was going to get some hideously chocolatey doughnuts, but as I took them to the checkout I remembered the result that I recently got from the BBC Body Mass Index test (which basically told me "You're fat"), so I decided against it and bought two gigantic packs of cheap biscuits instead, which are naturally much healthier.

My biscuit tin, unprepared for such gluttony, only comes close to fitting one of the packets inside, because the close-packing fraction of digestive biscuits isn't as good as you might think at first. So it looks like I've got a stack of about fifteen biscuits to eat tonight. Such is the hardship of my life. Actually, I've got some honey left, maybe I could dip them in that... Mmm. Revolting. Forget that idea.

At least there's some good news in amongst all the practicals - I got back from the Union at 11:57 and found to my surprise that Douglas had uploaded the progress log for the project this week, saving me the less than enjoyable task of writing an update in three minutes flat.