A pirate walked into a bar. The barman said “why have you got that ship’s wheel in your trousers?” and the pirate said “Arr, it’s drivin’ me nuts!”
I’ve been pretty busy recently, working on a bunch of blog things of very specific interest, all about how I am learning / teaching myself unit testing and test-driven development. I’ll get around to tidying them and putting them online at some point, but I keep hitting snags with it. It’s one of those things that I believe I understand, but having never seen any real examples I keep getting a nagging voice at the back of my mind that says “are you sure you’re not doing it wrong?”
It’s time to update with normal-people stuff though. One of my resolutions for 2010 is to get a driving licence, and I had another crack at that last week. I can’t help but think that if it had been a different instructor, I may have gotten away with it… but I don’t know that for sure. As usual, I had two serious faults. I failed to check my mirror when changing lanes coming off of a roundabout till I was almost halfway where I was going. The other was failing to stop at a stop sign. I believe that I did stop, but maybe it wasn’t for long enough. My instructor was understanding about it and said that a lot of people do stop, then creep forward as they would at any other junction. But that’s a failure, so no licence this month. It’s doubly infuriating because there’s a stop sign on the way out of where I work, and no-one stops or even slows down for it. There’s good enough visibility to see what’s coming and there almost never is.
On the other hand, we were so confident about this test that we bought a car. We got it on eBay, never went to see it, and somehow everything turned out alright and it’s a decent car, we weren’t ripped off or robbed or attacked. So that went alright! Since the wife can drive, she’s going to be using that to get us about and all the things that I would have had to do instead. So finally, I’ll be (sort of) mobile! The only real downside is that since I have just spent out on a car and insurance, I’m a lot shakier on financial terms than I am used to being. That’s the reason I’ve not booked my next driving test yet… I just want to see how healthy the bank is this week first.
In the case of other resolutions, I have officially completely shelved Wargame Tools in favour of my new learning project for test-driven development. As I mentioned before, I’m doing that in the blog completely (eventually). I’ve managed to get almost an hour of painting done in the past few months, I’ve not even thought about trying German yet (I’m still enjoying the free time that I get after finishing some of the other bits) and we’ve not booked to see anyone about finishing off this first (easy) stage of the family tree. But with the car now sorted (mobile! whee!) we can probably get onto that one… it would be a good idea, as there’s only ten weeks left to squeeze in two more family visits!