Up until recently I have had absolutely nothing to do with this thing they call stress. Life has simply washed over me in many ways - my course has been clear. Now I'm living not in Nottingham but somewhere else entirely, I'm starting to feel the burn.

Moving house is a stressful experience, I'm sure many of my readers know. As for me, I have less stuff than the majority of people in the world, so this was not so much of a problem. As long as everything I owned was boxed up and ready to be shifted by my parents on Saturday, I was fine. Driving was the parents' problem.

The three main issues have been lack of mobile phone signal at my new house, which cripples me, and lack of reliable internet at my new house, which cripples me even further, and finally the lack of a regular bus service between the house and anywhere. It's a fifteen-minute walk - some of which is across a field - to reach the nearest bus stop. There is only one bus which services that stop, and it runs hourly during the day and only fractionally more frequently at peak periods. I have neither a bicycle nor an automobile. Besides which, the nearby roads are entirely without street lighting, making cycling treacherous at the times I would need to cycle to and from work, and I only passed my test three weeks ago and haven't driven since, which makes driving an equally intimidating prospect. I would walk, if there was pavement. Why did I think moving here was a good idea, again?

I visited Halford's today, looking for cycling gear. Halford's is a joke. I went in, having guessed approximately £100 for the bike and maybe £50 for your pump/helmet/lights/lock/mudguards/high visibility vest. It transpires that men's road/trail bikes start at £110 and go up seemingly without limit, and you can easily pay £50 for any one of the quoted accessories. How can a cycle helmet be worth sixty pounds sterling? They all fit the same safety criteria! They all have the same concrete block dropped on them for testing purposes. Why do mudguards need to be aerodynamically shaped and cost £30? What? Is Sainsbury's version, which is one-fifth the cost, really one-fifth as good at the simple task of simply guarding the rider from mud? And it's all so shiny lined up on the wall. Cycling is a shiny, bright, slick endeavour, these grey and silver and black tools all seem to be saying. Meanwhile, it's raining outside. Lies...

This seems to happen everywhere I go. Now I've moved out I'm getting around to buying a lot of things which I simply never owned before, and every time I go to the catalogue or the website or the shop and look, I find myself having to revise my expectations of price upwards by a factor of two or more. I was researching beds. I need a bed. But they cost hundreds! Thousands! I don't even want to buy one because all I can think about is how much hassle they are to move. I haven't even begun looking into the vague possibility of buying a car.

Housemate/flatmate R has ten times as much stuff as me, and that's not even an exaggeration. I thought the living room/dining room area was pretty full and then I found the entire third bedroom stacked high with boxes of stuff. All of which has been shipped to and from France at various points. The box the television arrived in is preposterous. The TV itself could be described as "too big". She's casual about money in a way which I will probably never be able to be, no matter how much money I eventually find myself with. I've met some of her friends and I really don't know what to talk to them about. I don't know about property, tax, finance and investment. I think this is culture shock. The culture which is shocking me is "the rich".

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Several people have asked what my actual job at Business Machines (Int.) is. I do performance testing for Websphere MQ.

In more detail: the company has a family of products called "Websphere" and one of these product is an industrial-strength message queuing application called, imaginatively, "MQ". MQ is middleware which is designed to make it easy for one application to communicate with another, under the condition that under no circumstances will a single message ever be lost (or delivered twice). A great example is an ATM. It would be catastrophic is the ATM dispensed money to somebody, but the message "subtract £50 from this man's account" did not reach the server where his account is tracked. This is achieved by having a queue, a software object which is essentially a list of messages. Each ATM doesn't communicate directly with the server, but instead puts messages into the queue. All the ATMs can theoretically feed into the same queue. Meanwhile, the server gets messages from the queue and acts on them. The advantage of this is that it is a fault-tolerant system. The ATMs can switch off and the queue stays there. The banking server can switch off and still the queue stays there. The queue can even switch off, but all the messages are safely logged for later restoration. (Meanwhile, the ATMs simply stop accepting requests for cash and the server has nothing to process - but, most importantly, no harm is done. No messages are lost, no money is dispensed.)

By adding features for prioritisation, logging, caching, multiple queues, local and remote queues, transmission queues and response queues, it is possible to build large, complex and very reliable systems. Websphere MQ is not the only product on the market that does this, however. So we need to make sure it shapes up to its competitors. That means two things. One is new features. The other is providing favourable results in standard benchmark tests.

Each day a little development work is done, changes are committed to the codebase and a new build of MQ is created. Most of these builds never see the light of day. My job is to test the various builds in various ways to see how they compare to one another - yesterday's build, last week's build, the most recent publically available ("gold") build, and so on. I take the output from the test runs and create quantitative comparisons. Other people in my department do fairly sophisticated analysis to find out exactly what line of code is causing various performance hits - this is a very quantum kind of occupation, since the more carefully you analyse live running code, the more your analysis distorts the code's regular performance. Others still are actually making code changes.

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What I don't have much time for, these days, is writing...