Uni grades for the first half of the year are out now with three high distinctions for the music subjects and a plain lil’ ol’ distinction for Management.

Doing some statistical analysis on previous grades, this last semester saw me score the the most total grades between all subjects at 342 out of 400, thus 85.5%. My lowest was 318 out of 400, or 79.5%, for this same semester last year.

I also think this semester was one of the best in terms of balance between music and commerce, with a difference of only 4.6% between the aggregate percentages of commerce versus music (can you tell this is getting a little crazy). The second semester of last year had a difference of only 3%, but the total of marks is higher this semester.

Of course, none of this really matters. I’m certainly not looking at these figures because I’m convinced they’ll help me at all; it’s mere curiosity. Marks are the last thing I think of mid-session when I am just struggling to get all the essays and other work done.

At least I can rest easy knowing they are getting their money’s worth for my scholarship.

In an ingenius plan to direct more hits to his website conceived by fellow blogger Bevis, I have entered the Big Blogger house, where I, together with 11 of my blogging peers (including the entirely sufficient Steph), will take part in weekly BB activities, of course with regular, soul-crushing evictions.

The best part of being in the Big Blogger house (as opposed to the Big Brother house), is that I don’t have to take my clothes off on camera. That’s not to say I won’t. We’ll see how the voting goes. Why am I in the house? No, it’s not for the “journey”, to meet new people, nor the two million dollar prize money, but because I am really looking forward to doing those radio (podcast?) interviews when I’m finally evicted (which will undoubtedly be early because Steph gets more hits than me).

You can check out my first night in the house over at Big Blogger: Night One.

This past weekend consisted of the following elements for me:

Going clockwise from the top left, we have:

1) Singing: I accompanied a friend for two sections of the Eisteddford this weekend. Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. I had forgotten how nasty and horrible everyone can be backstage at these events, but how kind they are to each other’s faces. Believe it or not, the dressing room of a dozen manicly-nervous competitors is not a wonderful place to be.

2) Crying: As I said on Friday night, it isn’t an Eisteddford unless there are some tears. Boy was I not disappointed. Not only were the performers regularly returning to the dressing room with tears rolling down their faces, but we actually got an on-stage break down. One poor competitor ran off-stage, wailing, mid-way through her song and didn’t attempt her second song. This is what eisteddfords are about. At least, for me.

3) Sleeping: (well, that’s what came back when I google-imaged “sleeping”) Often not getting to bed until the early hours of the morning, I slept in quite late (never past 11am!). I did manage 11 hours of sleep on the Saturday night, going to bed at an oddly-early 10:30. I managed to disgust quite a few people with this fact on Sunday.

4) Aliens: I finally sat down to watch a classic which I had never had the chance to see before - Aliens! I hadn’t seen any in the series, and probably should have started with the first, but I enjoyed it anyhow. It sure is a stressful movie though. It should have had an intermission or something (that’s something I often do when I’m watching something on DVD), because as much as an hour before the end of the movie I was exhausted and wanted to scream “Just give up Ripley! It can’t be that bad a way to die!”.

I’m also taking part in ‘Big Blogger’, another blogger’s initiative to get some real hate flowing amongst the blogging community. I don’t want to link to the site until he posts the first entry in case he writes something horrible and I want to denounce him and his whole organisation, ala Michael.

The reason I haven’t posted is that I’ve been spending every waking hour (those which I haven’t been at rehearsals), working on a website for a new project. This website is becoming more and more involved, but I haven’t accepted any compromises. It takes twice as long to do the last 10% or so they say. I’ll be announcing it officially very soon, but until then, here’s a teaser:

In other news, I have long been an advocate that the best chocolate-chip biscuits you could buy (legally, at least), are the K-Mart brand Decadent Chocolate Chip cookies. They are thick, crumbly, delicious with large chocolate chunks in them which taste great. While they were temporarily ursurped by the Mrs. Fields’ cookies, the K-Mart cookies don’t require your heart to be beaten back into operation due to a large stream of butter travelling straight through the heart.

The Decadent Chocolate Chip cookies have a lot going for them, not to mention the fact that you get quite a few in a box (rather than Mrs. Fields singularly-packed offering of eight. However, you have to be near a K-Mart to grab them, not just any old supermarket.

That is, until NOW.

As those who tend to inform themselves about these issues will already know, Coles and K-Mart are both part of the Coles-Myer conglomerate, and Coles have recently taken to repackaging the Decadent Chocolate Chip biscuits in their own packaging. You still get the great taste, the huge chocolate chunks, and a whole pile in a box, and now they are available at your local Coles under the title “You’ll Love Coles Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies”. Ignore someone randomly named Sandra or Barbara spouting something inane like “Why bake when I can go to Coles!”. They really are worth the $4.23 every now and then.

I just ended a battle between my finger and a splinter that lodged itself in there last night during rehearsals.

I had grabbed the door to enter the ’store room’ during the Skid Row/Downtown number and scored myself a giant rod of timber hanging out of my finger for the effort. I pulled it out and kept going, and it wasn’t until this morning that I realised there was still a bit left in my finger, by which time the skin had buried it deep below, faded like a penguin in an ice coffin. I made several efforts during the day to find this tiny medical tool we have to dig splinters out of your skin (not without pain), and only just found it tonight. Then, armed with a pair of tweezers and both the “Grip and Rip” and “Sculptor’s Scalpel”* ends of the found tool, I got to work, eventually ripping the skin around the splinter away until it had nothing to keep it there. What a sense of achievement when I finally got it out! Sure, it feels worse now, but that will eventually pass.

In other news, I have just officially given up on my PC (… for tonight). Firstly, it decides it’s too good for my files, so it randomly starts throwing them away. I check for bad sectors because the drive is still under warranty, but it returns none. Then Windows XP decides to randomly reboot a few minutes after each boot, even after two entirely fresh reboots (installing on both FAT32 and NTFS drives).

A Mac would never do that to me. I’m going to buy another external case so I can use the perfectly fine, windows-rejected hard drive on my beautiful mac.

And I got a haircut.