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.

Half term was good. I got to spend quite a lot of time with Lizzie, and managed to relax quite successfully (inbetween bouts of revision). I didn't really do enough revision though, but I'm revising more now. God knows I need to.

I had my first exam of this session today: Pure Mathematics P1. It went pretty well, and I think I'm above the 90th percentile for definite. I'm looking forward to the results for that one! I've got Chemistry tomorrow though, and I'm not looking forward to that in any way whatsoever. It's going to be a tricky one.

I've got a date for my Grade 8 horn exam now. It's going to be on the 25th of June, which is good because it clashes with a compulsory school activity I'm not very keen on: our year's Day of Recollection. So I'll basically have the day off (well, sort of).

Exam-wise, this week's busy. After Chemistry tomorrow I've got a Statistics exam on Thursday followed by Physics on Friday, but then I've only got two exams, and they're pretty spaced out, so I'm going to have plenty of time to prepare for them.

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...

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...

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.

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.