Can you believe we’re nudging December already? Here’s a recap for those who just tuned in.

• The young guy I tutor in maths came first in his exam.

• I went for my first drive yesterday in many months. I drove for about an hour and a half. It wasn’t too bad, and I’m going to make an effort to get more experience up this summer.
• We start rehearsals for the concert tonight. There is a huge amount of material for everyone to learn and we don’t have a very long rehearsal period so it’s going to be pretty intensive.
• I was awoken by a gaggle of complimentary real estate agents this morning as they walked through our house. I’ll explain more about this later.
• Christmas soon. When did that happen?
• My Mighty Mouse is broken. The side buttons keep activating like crazy. Strangely, it only acts like that on my Mac, not on the PC.

I have not long returned from a great evening with the girls. In belated celebration of mine and Becky’s birthdays, Becky and Rebecca journeyed down from BrisVegas and held us a special ‘Do’ full of laugher and frivolty.

It was so wonderful to see the ladies again and spend time to catch up with everyone. We played games, from pool through to Taboo, and ate lots of naughty foods. One possible highlight of the evening was me trying to express “Cottage Cheese” in a round of Taboo. My team (Carla and Rebecca) had the Cheese bit down pat, but when I tried to describe the first word as “A little house in the country with lots of flower gardens” Carla screamed out “Parmesan!”. Another great moment was Sophie trying to protray “Breed” by saying “Tyson is the only one in the room allowed to do this”. I’m not sure Sophie’s up to date with the latest legislation.

Speaking of Carla, it was so wonderful to see her again as I only ever get to catch up with her at the latest birthday party. There are still severe remnants of our high school years, during which we spent all day, every day together due to our timetables being the same. Check out this wonderful gift she bought me.

Special thanks also to Zoe who put her love and tears (and maybe a little arsenic) into a batch of cupcakes baked for me. You know how much I loved the “Cupped Cakes”! Shame everyone else ate them! My other great present was a sheet of name tag stickers from the ’70s Ursula picked up from a closing down time-capsule of a shop. It’s even better that the name on the stickers is Darren!

What a great night! Thanks to Becky and Rebecca for organising and hosting the evening. Photos are a bit on the scant side, but Rebecca took a number of photos (as did I on her camera), so I’ll post some of those when I get them.

It’s uni results time again! I’m going to give you a Kit-esque breakdown, because I know you need it so.

SCMP322 – 88 (High Distinction)
Consisted of mostly the planning and execution of our final grad concert. However, that only accounted for 20% of the mark (which was assessed through a journal). The other 80% came through 20% for reflective reports, one a week, on guest speaker presentations, and 60% for a research essay, abstract and literature review. I must have done fairly well in the essay because my marks were sitting around the late 80s mark before the essay. I’d actually like to get it back at some point and see the comments and mark.

SCMP312 – 87 (High Distinction)
Having only 12 (or so) weeks to come to terms with writing music in cSound (click for description), with a class of a huge range of computer literacy levels, there was certainly a serious challenge to overcome. My experience with basic code languages like HTML and CSS was a big help, but it was still a bit of a weekly struggle to get the thing to do what you want. Not entirely a bad struggle though, as it appeased my love of puzzles and problem-solving, and I’m certainly happy with my mark.

SCMP302 – 77 (Plain ‘Ol Distinction)
The first half was a free-for-all, the second half we created Audio/Visual works. My first composition was a seriously rushed job, something I would have liked to have spent weeks on but didn’t have the time, and my mark suffered a little from it. Due to the assessment criteria, I only really had one chance to redeem myself. I got 80% for the second composition, even though the entire comment from the lecturer was “Excellent. This is a very tight piece on a conceptual and technical level.” I enjoyed this class the most, but got my lowest grade for it. Oh well…

BUSS110 – 88(High Distinction)
This was my commerce subject, Introduction to Business Information Systems (or some variance on those words). The assessment criteria was extremely forgiving. If you turned up to the tute every week, listened to the notes, and did the simple exercises, you were score 5 whole marks per week. They were very cheap marks and I squeezed out every mark I could. I ended up doing a major load of the group work. For three of my group members, english was their second language, including one who never once contributed. In the end it was worth it as I went into the exam sitting on 94.5%. Even if I scored the lowest pass mark in the exam (40% in this case), I would have walked away with a credit. Doing the maths now, as long as they didn’t do any scaling, I got just over 78% in the exam. Pretty nice considering I didn’t turn up to a single lecture!

Like Kit, I calculated my Music average for the three years. Unweighted, it sits at 84.72%, which is shamefully close to a HD. Now using Kit’s patented Hundred-Level Weighting system (in which 300 level, third year subjects are worth 3 times first years, second years 2 times), it works out to be 84.69%, which basically means I’ve been pretty consistent grade-wise over all the years. Finally, adding in my commerce electives, my average drops to 83.95%.

It’s a nice feeling to know that I don’t have any more classes of music to take. I think it’s also safe to say they got their moneys-worth out of me scholarship wise (and they can’t take that money away from me now!). Now for another six months (at least) of commerce! I’m going to take just three subjects to lighten my load next semester. It’s all I need to graduate from music, and I’ll be really busy with theatre stuff.