freshly squeezed orange juice

08 Dec 2005 There's nothing like some freshly squeezed orange juice when you get up in the morning.
Whoever invented this should get a medal.

So whats been going on ?

I decided to buy a car to finally get my drivers license. A Peugeot 205 from 1995-1996, it costs 1000 euro. Then there's insurance (400 euro), roadtax (107 euro) and maintenance (37 euro). I still need to get license plates too. Taking the driving lessons again is going to cost a lot. In order to be able to drive around on my own, I need to follow 20 hours of lessons. Which is about 1000 euro all in itself. So this whole thing will cost me about 2500 euro. Finally something to save up for ;)

To make sure I don't screw up again, I'm going to write a driving simulator which I will probably call Steven's driving school. It will use Open Dynamics Engine (ODE), Open Audio Library (OpenAL), Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) etc.
I've been studying the physics of cars and have good hopes of being able to create a decent simulation. The first tests with ODE revealed that my graphics card (Intel915GM) sucks at 3D, or maybe I screwed up hardware acceleration if such a thing exists on this card.

In any case, the simulator should allow me to drive around in a virtual world, without endangering other people. I can learn to do the maneuvers, replay what I did,look at it from different angles and develop "tricks" for people like me who don't have depth perception. (No thank you mister Driving School Instructor, I really can't see how far away the right side of my car is from the other cars, so shut up)

I will obviously post all my advancements on here :)

I can't wait to get a drivers license and a car to drive around the globe and do fun stuff. I'm already planning a couple roadtrips.

In other news, the washing machine nixe brought with him from home is hooked up and working nicely as far as we can see. Now we only need something to dry the clothes ;) Since the air in the basement (where the machine is) is too cold to dry clothes in, we had to find something else... The bag of (what we thought was) charcoal we bought for our Annual 1st Of November BBQ was useful in lighting the odd heater we have in the basement. I'm not sure what the results will be, but I'm not worried (mostly since they're not _my_ clothes ;)

I'm up early today and may well be doing so again for a longer time. I noticed my evenings are quite filled up in my current schedule. I did a short cycling session in the gym and burned 332 KCal (Level 5, Setting 9, 30 minutes). Maybe I'll write a drupal block to monitor my improvement.
It used to be a nice feeling when I was in topcondition, doing 1hour sessions every day for 2months.
I'm not sure why I ever stopped... Speaking of cycling, the steering axis on my real bike seems to have broken (God knows how this happened) and its not safe to drive around with it.
But since I have no other bike, and getting the bike fixed is not done fast I presume, I have to drive around on this on. Applying pressure to the right side seems to keep my wheel from turning in odd ways :)

Time to get a haircut!