Depressingly, Tiscali have now started advertising their products in my e-mails. I've sent off a complaint to their customer service department, but I'm not sure if they're going to do anything about it. I find it quite annoying that it seems almost impossible to find an ISP that doesn't put its own advertisement signature on your e-mails. It's my 18th birthday tomorrow! But I'm not really looking forward to it, because the rest of my year have sworn to give me a wedgie, the b@$t@rds! I think I'm going to have to make myself scarce tomorrow: I've got some tactics prepared though. The school choir has kicked off for the year - and the new Director of Music here is really putting the boot in. He's not messing around at all, which bodes well for the rest of the year. Hopefully Greg, who has a very poor opinion of the school choir, should be placated if we get to a reasonable standard this year.

I got my comeupance for "borrowing" a CD player from the Music Dept: it was a broken CD player, and it scratched my copy of "Night Works" (Layo & Bushwacka). I am now somewhat disgruntled. Fortunately, however, I'd made an MP3 backup. Isn't it a good thing the CD wasn't pirate-proof? I've spent most of the day shooting at Pirbright, training for the CADet Skill-at-Arms Match (CADSAM). My brother's being really annoyingly good at the moment: it's not that he's good, it's that he's ridiculously good without even seeming to try, whereas I try really hard and am still only fairly competent. It's infuriating. Concert plug: OCYO are playing their annual Gala Concert in Oxford Town Hall on September 13th. Programme: Rimsky Korsakov Russian Easter Festival Overture, Debussy L'Aprés Midi d'Une Faune, Hindermitt Symphonic Metamorphoses, and Rachmaninov's Second Symphony. It should be good, so come along if you have time! I'm playing first horn in the Hindermitt, so I'd better do some practice this week. The Adams Family is an incredibly amusing film.

Despite my initial plans to play badminton this term rather than rugby, Mr. Hennessy has persuaded me otherwise. Fortunately they're going to give me a pair of boots so I'm spared that expense, and I've already got the majority of the kit I need. I started of the term doing as much exercise as I intended: yesterday I went for a run in the morning and an ergo in the evening, but didn't do as much as I intended. I even did some horn practise, but unfortunately it's really not going well at the moment. Ming has gone! And I didn't even notice! Terrible. Anyway, it's about time I started paying more attention to h2g2 again.

This seems worth a read...

So, I'm finally back at school and bored enough to start blogging again. No, I haven't updated my website for ages (too busy) and probably won't be able to for just as long (my laptop's battery has died, and we haven't even got the supplier to collect it for servicing yet). I'm going to be eighteen in a few days, and I'm finally going to be getting a Visa card! I'm looking forward to the end of not knowing whether the shop I'm in will or won't accept my piece of plastic...

Oops, haven't been updating again... I got a distinction in my Grade 8 horn exam!!! The Schools' Meet and the Imperial Meeting went quite well. I'm now the Captain of Shooting (yay!) but unfortunately we didn't actually do that well - we came second in the Marling and in the Team Snapshooting, and our 'B' team won the Falling Plates (our 'A' team came third). The next week some of our team went back to Bisley to shoot the Imperial because we want to apply to the GB youth teams for next year. I don't rate my chances though - I shot poorly, and that's what matters... Since then I've been doing lots of cycling - I'm cycling to Wales next week - and reading, and I've been doing some work on QuArK - latest snapshots are at SourceForge. In other news, I'm heading up the RAF section of our school Cadet Force next year, and I'm Deputy House Captain. And leader of the orchestra, but that doesn't count for much, unfortunately. I've made some updates to my website, but they won't be visible until I get my new hosting working.

Fortunately, my brother seems to have recovered from his anaphylactic attack, and AFAIK he's out of hospital now. So that's good. In other news, I spent the entire afternoon reading J. K. Rowling's new Harry Potter book, The Order of the Phoenix. Pretty good actually: suprisingly, in fact. Bristol Open Day tomorrow, and I still don't know how I'm going to get there... My Grade 8 horn exam this morning went... reasonably... hopefully I scraped a merit: it would be great if I have. I don't get to find out my mark for ages, unfortunately...

Hmmm... once again, I haven't been doing much bloggage recently. I've been pretty busy: last week I was on work experience placement at Reading University Cybernetics Department, which was pretty cool. In fact it was amazing.

I'm finally an official developer for QuArK, which means I get lots of exciting things, like a remote shell account at SourceForge, access to the SourceForge compile farm, the ability to make releases and stuff... I still haven't quite got my head around it!

Greg was taken ill with a severe allergic attack this evening - we don't know what caused it - and he's in hospital at the moment, under observation. Not very nice really...

Grade 8 horn tomorrow morning! Aaargh! No!

Well, over this week I've been doing a lot of work on QuArK, and I've produced a new installer for it: you can download it from Yahoo Groups if you want to try out the latest 6.4.0 alpha version.

Yes, Chemistry was tricky, and long: three one-hour papers. Some of those questions were on really obscure parts of the syllabus! I don't think I did as well as I should have, so I'm going to make pretty sure that I am properly prepared for my other exams of this session.