After 6 months of wrestling with the Italian bureaucratic machine, I've finally received a scholarship to go study in Italy for 6 months, starting in December.

I don't want to bite the hand that feeds (or worse, insult myself) but fucking hell they are unorganised! I don't even know how many emails to consulates, universities, student organisations I sent, most without a response and the rest with very late replies. The information for the scholarship was only released about 3 weeks before the deadline for applications (luckily I had prepared most of the things before hand), and my correspondent at the Italian Institute of Culture in Pretoria, although very helpful, disappeared 2 weeks before that deadline.

He had been helping me and told me to fax or scan copies of all my important certificates and documents with the application for so he could check if everything was fine. So I did so and waited. And waited. 2 weeks later (very close to the deadline) I phone them and find out that the guy is away on holiday... until AFTER the deadline, luckily someone else there was happy to help me.

Anyway, then yesterday, I get the confirmation that I have been accepted and will be rewarded the scholarship, but I also need to send them some more documents before the 21st of June. #^$^@! I ask myself why they only inform me of this on a Friday? Most of it wasn't too bad, and just requires that I go into the consulate and approve some stuff (which is only open mornings and not weekends.) But one of the things is that I need a medical check up to say that I am fine.... in Italian @$#^%! I'm just going to get it translated... but anyway, it's great that I am going to be heading back to Europe, and also maybe since I will be learning Italian and staying there I will feel more apart of the culture than I currently am even though I am a citizen.

To start off with the course I am doing just teaches Italian, which I hope will open up options to study at a university in Italy, or just an alternative career than what I am currently doing. I will be staying and studying in Siena, which is supposedly a very beautiful place, what is also nice is my long distance girlfriend is going to do her final year of studies in Italy too, albeit in a different town.

In other news I watched "Fist Full of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More" for the first time, spaghetti westerns fucking own!

Also does anyone have a demonoid torrent account and would like to invite me? There is a torrent I want to get on the site that isn't available anywhere else i.e. Chronological X-Men pack 13, I've been reading every single X-Men comic that has ever existed in the past year and have almost caught up to the comics coming out now, and it would be nice if I could start buying them again.

On updates on past journals, I have effectively quit playing Quake 3, it wasn't a conscious decision, I just got bored and have stopped playing, it's quite weird. I have been playing a little bit of Quakeworld though, seems there has been a bit of a revival in South Africa which is cool. And civilization 4 has destroyed my soul and I'm about to delete it because I can't stop playing.

On Linux and other operating systems, I still have a reasonably stable version of Ubuntu running, but since I can't run civilization 4 or Photoshop, or use my wacom pad (correctly, no pressure sensitivity), I haven't really been using it often. I installed Vista, and uninstalled it 3 days later. Mac OS works pretty nice, but the sound is screwed (running it on hardware it wasn't designed for) so that's killed that. So I put on a XP clean install, modded it a bit, and it's working like a charm.