Procrastination, that's the thing!

To catch the cash-flow of the King! No, wait. That's not right. Hmm.

Why is it the older one gets, the less inclined they are to apply their increased mental ability or lengthened stamina? I remember doing SATs and GCSEs, and the homework would take about an hour, now matter how much there was, and I'd happily dive at it with aplomb and have plenty of time left over to spend on more pressing matters, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Metal Gear Solid.

I realise that universities are supposed to be taxing experiences designed to push you forward but my internal motivation stopped years ago. If education was a train and I was a carriage, people would have noticed that for the last thirty miles of the educational track my wheels have been producing sparks and smoke because they've locked up and don't want to move. If this carries on I'll probably catch fire (I think I've confused metaphor with real life again).

I know how this will play out. It seems that the only thing that gets me motivated towards coursework is the challenge of an impending deadline. Like a gambler, I've become accustomed to laying everything on the line with "just one more go" - a deadline is announced, and six months later only a third of the project is done, I realise there's two weeks before hand-in and suddenly gain the incentive and enthusiasm to work like the clappers until it's done, often right up until a day before the deadline.

This has not failed me yet, mind you. I haven't missed a single deadline, I've never had to retake anything and my grades are relatively high (much to my surprise). But I'm the cautious sort, and this tactic is long overdue to blow up in my face. It's my last year of uni, too. I think it's ominously likely that something will go wrong.

Any advice? I've tried forcing myself to sit down at a screen and work, but it just doesn't get anything done and I end up despising myself for it. Reward systems don't work either, I do some work and decide to treat myself with a few hours on the PS3 and the next thing I know it's gone dark outside and it's time for bed (although that's not really a problem right now, aside from on Fridays I've banned myself from picking up a game controller).

The impending cavern of educational fail that awaits me aside, my week of polls was most informative. Detulux came perilously close to dramatic changes at least twice, and by the end of the week it was back full-circle to where I had began. Thank you for those who voted, it made me feel like I hadn't completely squandered my subscription. New font and page size the exception, not much is really going to change with the format. Progress on the new Detulux site has also halted, because when you catch yourself making a website on your day off from a web design course, you promptly slap yourself and get on with less important things of the relaxation variety.

Finally, I managed to kill my PS3 last week by getting the YLoD (Yellow Light of Death). The solution to this problem, it turns out, was to completely disassemble the blasted thing and take a heat gun to the internal circuit board in order to melt the solder and fix any broken connections. I ended up paying a fair sum of money to some nice people at a repair shop in Bristol to do this for me, and although the small windfall was unpleasant, it certainly beat having to send my console off to Sony (in which case they'd have reformatted the hard drive for safety, wiping all my hours of game-based effort) or buying a new one (in which case I'd still have to reformat my hard drive because new PS3s apparently don't like hard drives full of game saves). Still, it could have been worse - the woman in the shop said that they receive three PS3s with the YLoD a week, which is nothing compared to the ten Xboxs a week they get with the Red Light of Death.

I will probably be off DA for a while. Catch all you peeps at the end of March/beginning of April, where we'll find out whether I made all the deadlines or not.