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Fall Review

All the cool kids are doing reviews of the past year, so I figured that I should do some kind of a review too. Of course, lots of un-cool people are also doing reviews, but we all know that I'm one of the cool ones.

At the beginning of Nov, I started accompanying a musical on the cello. I wouldn't normally play a musical -- there's too many performances, so I'm generally bored with the music by opening night, let alone by the end! -- but it had been two years since I'd done any semi-serious music, so I thought it would be a good exercise. I'm happy to report that I've still "got it going on". Yes, the first two weeks hurt a bit -- playing the cello takes a lot more muscle than violin -- but I was still able to keep track of everybody in the ensemble, and could often pinpoint mistakes before the music director could.

I wanted to get all my old compositions in a publishable state, but that didn't happen. This wasn't entirely my fault -- I was waiting for lilypond 2.12 to be released -- but I could have done more prep work so that it would have been faster to finalize them. Oh well; at least that will give me something relaxing to work on in Singapore.

In other news, I've been accepted to the University of Glasgow for the PhD. I still need to work out the funding; the tuition is over 12,000 pounds per year. But apparently in the UK one has to get accepted by the university before one applies for scholarships, so this means I'm one step closer.

I'm not really certain what to do about MEWER now. I'm hesitant to start advertizing it, because if there's any problems I can't fix them while I'm in Singapore. On the other hand, it's probably good enough to help some people, so it'd be a shame not to mention it to them.

Finally, I'm becoming the next release manager of lilypond, and starting up a Grand Organization Project for lilypond. The Grand Documentation Project was a great success, so I'm hoping to do the same thing on a larger scale.