Academic prizes announced for this year. I won the Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry prizes - given that they're the only subjects I do, I think I've done pretty well... ...it's almost the end of term!

I just got my work experience place confirmed - I'm going to be spending a week working at Culham Laboratory! Yay! Unfortunately I have a Pure Maths exam in the middle of that week, but all that means is that I'll have part of a morning off work... All I need to do now is to write a CV.

Hmm... not too bad a day, really. Didn't get as much done as I should have though. Bad me. It's the last week of term, so I don't have very much prep to do - but I'm meant to be revising. I've got an extra exam in the summer now, because my Head of Maths said I should retake Pure Maths 1 (I only got 81/100 in my first try). And I've got a mock Statistics exam on Thursday, it turns out. Ho hum. Better start doing some work, really. But right now I'm off to bed...

Weekend was pretty good - went to see National Security with Lizzie on Saturday, had a great time (as always when we're together). CMS actually was pretty good as well - concert next week, so I need to do more horn practise! Matt said that my playing was sounding much better this week - probably thanks to doing all the exercises he set for me last week! I need to keep it up - OCYO's coming up, only a couple of weeks away now, so I need to get my endurance really, really up to scratch. At the moment it seems my dad will stop me going to Lizzie's birthday party. It's so unfair!

With parliament voting for war, and Saddam Hussain refusing to back down and go into exile, it seems that war is now inevitable - merely a matter of when the first cruise missile will be launched, the first bombs dropped, the first troops engaged. In a way I support the coalition's motives - Saddam is an man who should be removed from power as soon as possible - but the pretext that they're only going in to disarm him of his WMD is something I don't agree with. How can the US and UK be so openly hypocritical? If they think that WMD are that much of an evil, shouldn't they dispose of their WMD first as a gesture of good will?

I can't believe how much better my violin playing is sounding nowadays! I think I might actually be able to take my Grade 7 in the autumn... but right now the priority is to practise for my Grade 8 horn, which I'm hoping to take next year. My statistics teacher (Mr Mackay) is introducing something called the Model United Nations to the school. It sounds interesting... perhaps I could be on the security council. BTW, one thing I particularily find amusing about the UN is the fact that that the UN resolutions are all one sentence - extending to a page or more. It makes them very hard to read, IMHO. This weekend I'm going to get new hosting for my website, with 34 SP. And since I'll have both PHP and MySQL access, it seems that all my work on NEWTS was a bit pointless. Then again, it'll be useful to tide me over until I design a full CMS.

I found just about the best online t-shirt shop ever: Talking T's.

I got my templating engine working. Yay! I've decided to call it NEWTS - that's short for "Nice & Easy Website Templating System". I like acronyms. I've even got a newt as the logo. Anyway, as I was saying, I've got a beta version in CVS, and I'm using it to build my new website. It's much quicker than I expected - at the moment it manages to build my website, about twenty pages, in less than a second. Hopefully I should be able to get it uploaded at the weekend... by which time I should have made a new design. I performed the Poulenc Elegie again today, at the Teatime recital, but it didn't go as well as it did on Friday. Hey, that's just life I guess. I wonder if I can get some more horn practise in before I go to bed?

Just got my modular results - Decision Maths 1 93%, Mechanics 1 97% - which means that I've now got AS Applied Maths at grade A. Yay! I've got another rehearsal for Carmina Burana tonight. It'll be interesting what it'll sound like when you add two more choirs - then again, any change would have to be improvement!

Help. My AS Applied Maths results come tomorrow. And I'm panicking, because I have to get an A... and I don't think I did that well... Lisa's got a new domain - obliviated.net. Go check it out... you know, I really wish I was as good at design as her. I know all the languages, all the standards, but she knows how to make HTML look good.

Still no progress towards trying to write a templating engine... but I found a really interesting book - Orbital Mechanics. It's pretty complicated maths, but I'm getting to grips with it - I think. I've got halfway through the first chapter... Why, oh why, is our school choir so rubbish? We're meant to be performing Carmina Burana next week, and we still sound awful. And our school orchestra is worse, however that's possible...

After a day's worth of messing around with things, I'm still no closer to getting my templating engine working. I now think that I'm going to have to write it all in Java. Yay. The real problem is handling relative URLs... Mr. Banks pulled a really harsh trick on the 3rd Form this morning - woke them up an hour early and told them that the clocks had changed. Laugh? I nearly died.

I finally got QuArK to compile successfully! Hmmm... so, new project: automatically generating my website from reStructuredText files. This currently involves Docutils (written in Python) to convert rST to XHTML, an XSL transformation to get the actual bit of HTML I want, and then a PHP script to create the output HTML files, with Ant tying it all together. It's a bit of a mess ATM (and I did get my Physics in on time - just). My violin lesson today went quite well, considering how much (little) practise I did over the last week... I'm actually starting to sound convincing-ish. On the horn, the Poulenc is still being problematic, but I'm sure that I'll be able to play it by Friday. Well, hopeful at least. Since the rather... pointed... comments I made at my last Young Enterprise meeting yesterday evening, Patrick's stopped talking to me. Now I've resigned I can criticise in (relative) safety... Aargh... I wish someone would explain how the lifespan of a particle is connected to the way it decays.

Having played around with my website all day, I have finally worked out how to successfully move the menu from the left to the right. Yay. I've also found out that my website is not valid W3C XHTML, although my stylesheet is valid CSS-2. So I'm going to make it right. But I haven't done my Physics prep for tomorrow yet...

Okay, so a major reorganization of my website is taking place. But without my news (now I've got a blog) the home page of my website is now looking distressingly empty... I just can't think of anything worth putting there. Not to mention the fact that the nasty evil WinXP network at school is refusing to cache cookies, so I can't log in to Freeparking and modify my DNS records... IE must die.