Nearly There…

Just waiting on some final computational results for Chapter 5, and then it’ll be done.

My best photos at Max Hammond Photos.
More of my photography on Flickr.

West Pier

Nobody wants to help me procrastinate. Except my youngest brother, and since he’s upstairs that’s not so helpful :-)

(Incidentally, this is MSN 8 beta – I like.)

My best photos at Max Hammond Photos.
More of my photography on Flickr.

Brighton Beach

My best photos at Max Hammond Photos.
More of my photography on Flickr.

Went down to Brighton today to collect my little brother. I’ve previously only really spent a few days down there, and it rained continually. Today was sunny and nice.

This is a tourist shop by the beach. I guess somebody must like this stuff.

Writing about: BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Campaign to cure EU labour woes

Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker is reported as saying: “We know exactly what to do, but we do not know how to win the next elections after we have done it.”

_{Thesis Status:}

... Use a Data Table

I used to know how to do this, but then forgot i) how to do it, and ii) what it was called.

You can fill a range of cells in Excel to the output from whatever arbitrary formula you would like, by making a list of input values, and the output formula at the top. This is useful because you can have the output being the result of some worksheet which is too complicated to manage in a single formula. The inputs can be applied to any cell you want.

So. 20 minutes of joy trying to navigate MS help and Google before I found what I needed.

Writing about: http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay51.htm

There isn’t a single great work in the history of civilization, no novel, symphony, film, or song that was completed as a 1/5th time-slice between e-mail, IM, cellphones and television.

(_via_ John Dale)

Well put, and so true. I know that when I want to really get on with the thesis, I quit the browsers, Set my messengers to Busy and actually really don’t talk to anyone who ignores that. Some things can be multitasked, most can’t. Or rather, can with a timeslice of > 1 h :-)

So. There’s a proposal to put “traffic lights” on food so the buyer knows how bad things are for them. The supermarkets don’t want it, they’d rather give the numbers rather than any kind of relative rating. (do both?) So here’s a similar thing for my thesis.

Again, if you’re looking at this other than on my blog, it’s not going to make sense :-)

Estimated Submission Date: 31 March

This depends somewhat on getting some final data from an industrial collaborator, which is really the only thing causing Ch 5 to be orange rather than yellow.

I love those moments when suddenly something becomes completely clear. Last night I suddenly, for the first time, really understood how to play oboe.

I played for years when I was at school, but I never really put in the time to practice, and so progress was slow. I passed grade 5 and was working on grade 7 pieces, but then just totally stopped when I got to uni, really.

My big problem was always stamina. Oboe has a reputation of requiring very strong lip muscles to hold the embouchure (the shape of your lips around the reed), and I was always collapsing after 45 minutes. Now, since about christmas I’ve been playing almost every day, and could play for an hour, but then I was totally exhausted.

My oboe teachers always used to tell me not to “bite the reed”, and I didn’t think that I was. But after reading a description of how to make sure that a reed is playable I realized that I was. I was using my lips to force the reed to make a noise, whereas I should really just blow the thing and let it play itself.

The change was immediate. Suddenly, my tone improved drastically (I’d been blaming my v. basic oboe), and I can play for hours. It means that I have to learn a new type of control, but this is coming easily. I suddenly have a completely new level of sensitivity to tone and dynamics that I have never experienced before.

My technical skills are returning (slowly), my sightreading and theory are recovering, and now I’ve got a nice dark tone rather than a rather raspy effort.

I love it when things come together like this.