Tuesday, May 20, 2003

I've been working hard this morning - I did an S1 practice paper. Then I went and bought £45 worth of DVDs, computer games and music from Amazon, but that's beside the point. I've ordered 2001: A Space Odyssey, Enemy at the Gates (only £8!), Homeworld: Cataclysm and Trance Nation Deeper (a Ministry of Sound compilation). Retail therapy. I'm playing the horn a lot at the moment. Speaking of which, I must now go and practise, once I've finished updating my bank records...

Monday, May 19, 2003

So shooting over the weekend - on Saturday we had the Sawyer Cup (shot at 300m) and the Sussex Schools' Trophy (3-500 aggregate). Despite a good shoot in practise last Wednesday, we underperformed in the actual match - the pouring rain may have had something to do with that. I personally did reasonably well, achieving an aggregate of 60.2 over the two distances. In the end our pairs did very well, especially our reserve pair, but our eight only managed to get runners up position in the cup for small schools. Sunday (the 4th Divisional Cadet Target Rifle Competition) didn't go much better. We had more rain, and this time we were shooting the Cadet GP, which we haven't trained on at all this year. I myself had serious problems holding my elevation, mainly because of the different sighting system, and only managed an aggregate of 54 - pretty poor. Sutton Valence beat us. And then laughed at us. They'll be laughing on the other side of their faces at Bisley... On a non-shooting note, I'm now on study leave. Which has meant large amounts of horn practise and sleeping, interspersed with bits of work. Actually, I have done both Chemistry and P2 papers today, so I haven't really been wasting my time - besides which, I am overtired and I do need to practise the horn. I'm certainly looking forward to Friday - not only do I get to see Lizzie but I get to watch The Matrix Reloaded as well...

Saturday, May 17, 2003

Mmmm... digital radio... I want one. But it seems there are no receivers that connect to a computer by USB other than the Psion Wavefinder - and that's expensive. One lesson and then I'm on study leave! We're shooting two shooting matches today, and I have a kind of horrible feeling that I'm not going to do very well. I didn't shoot particularly well in the LMRA match, so I have to hope I'll do better this time. It turns out I'm not going to be on the Cyborg Project but working the MADLAB. Whoopee.

Thursday, May 15, 2003

I'm listening to Ministry of Sound radio... not bad actually. I just wish I had enough money to upgrade to the high quality stream. I've got to get around to e-mailing my administrative contact at Reading University sometime I suppose... I'll do it tomorrow. 'Peter by name, procrastinator by nature.' Probably not a good thing, I guess.
Haven't had time to blog, I've been to busy playing Freelancer... Hmmm... work experience looks like it's going to be interesting. My original placement at Culham Laboratory fell through (something to do with government bureaucracy), but I was snatched up by the Cybernetics department at Reading University (I'll be working with Kevin Warwick). He's the guy with the computer chip in his arm... We've got three (!) shooting matches this weekend: the Sussex Schools and the Sawyer Cup on Saturday (at Bisley) and the 4th Divisional Target Rifle Match on Sunday. And then study leave starts... which means I have to pull my finger out and do some work. Ouch.

Friday, May 09, 2003

Argh... AS science practicals next week. Yes, I'm worrying. And generally my studies aren't going very well at the moment... but I get to see Lizzie tomorrow, so things aren't all that bad. The first couple of weeks of July are currently looking exceptionally busy. In fact I'm triple-booked on at least one day. I suppose I ought to sort it out sometime. Interesting thing: SpaceShipOne, Burt Rutan's latest idea.

Wednesday, May 07, 2003

I've been going out with Lizzie for five months now... yay! I just can't be bothered to work on my website at the moment... I should have uploaded my new design months ago, but I just can't be bothered. Oh well. My friend Lisa's put a really nice new design up on her website (obliviated.net). I wish I was that good at design... Windows is really annoying me at the moment. It's slow, it keeps on crashing, and most of the applications I currently use don't run under Linux. That said, Linux isn't being that great either... it refuses to detect that my sound card has a bass channel, for a start. Grrr. Speaking of Linux, I need to download the latest OpenOffice. Personally, I reckon that OpenOffice has a much better feature set than MS Office... even if it is open source and unsupported, which don't count for much in my view.

Monday, May 05, 2003

Oh yes, and I got hit by a car when I was out cycling yesterday. Oh well.
Gosh, I haven't posted to my blog for ages... Shooting's going pretty well at the moment - new rifles (the L81A2 target rifle, courtesy of MoD) which are much nicer than the cadet GP - but we didn't manage to retain the LMRA Schools' trophies. Epsom beat us. Yes, I'm meant to be revising for my AS levels, and practising for Grade 8 horn... but I'm not...