Matthew Hughes

Hi guys,

I am writing this from the Boscastle (as seen on CNN) visitor centre. I have had a pretty eventful week. I had my birthday, I went to the Ripcurl Boardmasters Skate and Music Festival, where I got given 30 free samples of shampoo, 8 pot noodles, bought loads of random crap and developed my relationships with my family.

Right now I am exhausted. I have walked more than I usually would have done, although the lack of a pensioner in wheelchair is a definite plus.

I ate in Rick Stein’s restaurant, which was pretty much bog standard bar food, albeit with a pretentious twist.

In Boscastle, where I am staying, the only phone network available is Orange, thus rendering my phone, and the expensive five day mobile Internet pass I bought, redundant.

This week has gave me time to think about where I want to be in life, and what I want to do. I know I dicked about too much with my exams and schooling, and I expect to fail spectacularly when I get my results. This isn’t my natural pessimism. I just got fed up with my teachers and work, and just acted like a complete cockbag.

I have just had a bit too much difficulty adapting from GCSE to AS, and I got swamped with work, and I just decided to take the wise monkey approach to my schooling.

Either way, I will just resit it. Life is just like that. You either fail, or succeed, and if you fail, you work out how to get to where you want to be.

Anyway, I decided a few months ago that during my summer, I was going to learn C++. Now, I am aware that every previous attempt to learn to code ended up in epic fail. I have tried various languages, from Java to Python, and even modern variants of old-school BASIC, not to mention Ruby. I have spent so much money on books, and I feel this has been money wasted.

I don’t know what I want to do, or be. I feel pretty lost to be honest. Whenever I try to learn to code, which is my ambition, I just hit brick walls. I don’t know what to do.

I wonder, maybe I am a hardware guy. My uncle has promised to give me his old Powermac which I will use when I take my CISCO IT Essentials course next month, and I was tempted to actually build from scratch my own Gentoo based MP3 server for my house. I decided to forgo this to spend my cash on a ram upgrade for my macbook to bring it up to 4GB, and other social activities.

Anyway, my money for the computer is running out, so I better be off.

Regards,

Matt