Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Saturday, January 24, 2004
Friday, January 23, 2004
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Sunday, January 18, 2004
QuArK 6.4.0 alpha 3 is out! Get it here.
I've been busy this weekend. On Friday, the Central Music School (CMS) Sinfonia (of which I am principal horn) played two concerts at the Sheldonian Theatre for primary school children, so I got to miss school.
On Friday night, Lizzie and I went into Oxford with some friends of ours: L. (a rower friend of Lizzie's) and A. (her boyfriend). I was amused to discover that L. had recently got an offer (of 3 As) to study History of Art at Pembroke College (Cambridge), and that A. was on a gap year before going to read Bio. Sci. at Selwyn College (also Cambridge). That made Lizzie the only non-Cambridge-associated person there... talk about putting the pressure on. Teehee.
I was annoyed to discover that the cocktail bar we were hanging out in did not have any cinnamon.
I stayed over at Lizzie's on Friday night, and on Saturday we went to CMS together. Now that the Sheldonian concerts are out of the way, we're starting some new repertoire with the Sinfonia, including Liszt's 2nd Piano Concerto, for which our friend M. is the soloist. Unfortunately, the orchestra parts are very difficult, not aided by the fact that the piano he's playing it on is very quiet.
I had my weekly horn lesson this morning, and the ridiculous amount of practise I've been doing this week had paid off: I managed to convince my teacher that I could hack the Schumann, and so he's set my large amounts of exceptionally strenuous exercises and studies, which I'm unlikely to be able to do in the near future. Ah well, lots more lip-torturing practise, here I come. But it'll help my horn playing in general, I hope, so it'll probably be a good thing if I persevere...
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Monday, January 12, 2004
Sunday, January 11, 2004
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Deep in the throes of revision for Mechanics 3. Here's an example of the sort of fun question I'm having to deal with:
"Using integration, show that the centre of mass of a uniform thin hemispherical bowl of radius a is at a distance a/2 from the centre C of the circular rim of the bowl.
"A lid is attached to the bowl to form a closed composite body B. The lid is a thin circular disc of radius a and centre C. The lid is made of the same uniform material as the bowl. Show that the centre of mass of B is at a distance a/3 from C.
"The body B has mass M. A particle P, also of mass M, is attached at a point on the circumference of the plane circular face of B. The body is placed with a point of its curved surface in contact with a horizontal plane and rests in equilibrium. Find, to the nearest half degree, the angle made by the line PC with the horizontal."
Fun, huh?
Friday, January 09, 2004
Thursday, January 08, 2004
Gosh, it's a long time since I last got round to updating this, isn't it? I hope you had a good Christmas and New Year.
My New Year's Resolutions were as follows:
- Work Harder
- Play Harder
- Blog more often
I had an interview at Cambridge just before Christmas, and on the 2nd of January I got a letter from them saying that I've got an offer! I'll need to get A grades in Maths, Physics and Further Maths (!) to get in, so I suppose I'll really need to pull all the stops out this term to learn all the stuff I need to.
Speaking of learning all the stuff I need to, I had my Pure Mathematics 3 modular exam today. Even though I'd been working almost non-stop since Monday morning at my revision, I still messed it up - I got hopelessly tangled up on question 5, which was a question on the integration of parametric equations. The next exam I've got is Mechanics 3 on Monday. When that one's done, I'll stick a couple of choice questions from both papers on to here so you have some idea of what I was up against...