Posted by martin on
Sunday, 16 March 2008 at 13:55
Term has finished now, and I am going home to Belfast tomorrow. I took fewer courses this term than last term, in order to have more time. Together with stepping down as TCMS President, this seems to have worked, although in the past few weeks the maths we have been doing has got much harder.
In the past week (plus a few days), I have been to three very different musicals: _Kiss Me Kate_ by Clare College Music Society (with Mary-Ellen in the leading role), _Me and My Girl_ in Magdalene (directed by Maria, a maths friend) and _Into the Woods_ at the ADC. They were all pretty good. Last night there was a TCMS concert in Chapel, featuring the chapel choir singing English choral music, and then the chapel choir joined with the Trinity Singers (TCMS' big non-audition chorus) to sing Stanfords' _Te Deum_ and Parry's _I was Glad_, all directed by Stephen Layton. It was a great success, and the Singers enjoyed working with Stephen and the chapel choir.
I have also been to three formal dinners: last Sunday in Trinity for someone's birthday, on Monday in Pembroke with a group of people who bought Trinity Ball tickets for Pembroke mathmos, and on Friday it was the commemoration dinner in Trinity (a grand dinner to which Scholars are invited, at which all the people who have given money to the college are remembered, starting with Edward II in 1317).
Tags musicals, tcms
Posted by martin on
Tuesday, 04 March 2008 at 20:50
The world is full of unfinished websites (in particular, the world of Cambridge societies, but I am sure it applies elsewhere too). The "Archimedeans":http://www.archim.org.uk/ have had a "new design":http://www.archim.org.uk/?test (for the same content) for about three years, but it has never been officially adopted. The person who made it left the Society a couple of years ago, but intended to finish it off (although I don't know what still needs to be done); since he has now left Cambridge, presumably it will be forgotten.
For TCMS, our IT officer, who developed the "current website":http://www.tcms.org.uk/, graduated a few years ago, but continued as the society's IT officer. He runs a small software consulting business, and the website is hosted on their server. This has worked OK, but has always meant inconvenience every time a change has to be made, and noone has ever completed some of the missing features of the site. Jon resigned last year, and I have now taken over responsibility for the website. I have been working on a new site, as the current arrangement remains inconvenient for both Jon and us.
I chose not to remain on the TCMS committee because after two years, I have done my bit of feeling responsible when the society fails and of practical help at concerts, and so that I don't either become frustrated or step on people's toes if things are done differently from what I would do. I fear that this puts me into the position that I regard as the problem in the cases above: developing a new website for the society, without otherwise being involved. Nevertheless, as the person who knows what is going on now, I think it is the best arrangement.
Tags archimedeans, tcms, website
Posted by martin on
Tuesday, 19 February 2008 at 17:09
Well it seems I have let it go for ages without posting anything. It is now week 5, which means we are just over half way through down. This term I am just doing four courses, because I didn't want to work as hard as I had to for last year's six courses.
The courses are: Algebraic Topology (using algebraic techniques to show that different types of object cannot be deformed into each other), Set Theory and Logic (formalising logic and the foundations of mathematics), Geometry and Groups (symmetries in normal 2 and 3 dimensional space, and the more exotic world of hyperbolic space - lots of this appears in Escher's pictures) and Number Fields (how concepts like prime numbers generalise to bigger sets of numbers than the usual integers). It becomes increasingly difficult to give one sentence descriptions of the courses as they build up on top of earlier concepts (e.g. topological spaces).
Last week I just stepped down as President of the Music Society. It was fun and I learnt a lot from it, but it was also hard work and I am quite relieved to give it up. I am confident that Vicky and the new committee will do a very good job. I have also recently become Treasurer of the Cambridge Lindy Hoppers.
Tags lindy, tcms, tripos
Posted by martin on
Tuesday, 17 October 2006 at 20:29
Two weeks into term, here's a bit of what I'm doing. The courses I'm doing this term are: Analysis II, Linear Algebra, Methods, Quantum Mechanics and Markov Chains. Of these, Methods is probably the most interesting as it is techniques I know nothing about. Linear Algebra is particularly boring; this is not really a good term for pure courses. I am also going to the lectures for one course on General Linguistics, and this week I will be starting classes in Mandarin Chinese as well as continuing my German classes.
On Thursdays I am singing with the Trinity Singers, the non-audition chorus run by Trinity Singers who are doing Handel's _Messiah_ this term, and doing some of the organisation for that. We appointed a Singers Secretary last week, relieving me of much of that. And on Wednesdays I am going to swing dancing classes. This is nice because it is not just a university organisation although there are quite a lot of students who go. This is also one reason why I like Emmanuel United Reform Church (besides being Protestant and non-Established): there are few students there but well-integrated with the rest of the congregation - hard given the temporary nature of students and the ease for a church of catering to them as a distinct group.
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Martin
Tags emmanuel, languages, lindy, tcms, tripos
Posted by martin on
Sunday, 08 October 2006 at 16:43
I have finally got some time to rest after a very busy week. First we had two events to recruit new members for TCMS: the Chaplains' Squash on Sunday night (a small, fast event within the college) and the Societies Fair on Tuesday and Wednesday (a huge university-wide event). Finding people to run the stalls was hard; our new Director of Music also decided to hold a party to meet college musicians at the same time, and our committee had to put in a good appearance at that.
Said Director, "Stephen Layton":http://www.stephenlayton.com/, is a fairly significant international conductor, so why he chose to come to Trinity I don't really know. But while his primary responsibility is for the College choir, he seems very enthusiastic about getting all sorts of students involved in playing music. This looks like an exciting future for TCMS, although this term things don't look so good: we don't have a huge number of concerts lined up, and the termcard still isn't finalised (but that is always late). We did manage to appoint directors for the Trinity Singers and Players this week (our non-audition chorus and orchestra), and the Singers have already begun rehearsing Handel's Messiah.
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Martin
Tags tcms, trinity
Posted by martin on
Thursday, 18 May 2006 at 09:26
Two weeks today until exams; the past papers seem to be reasonably doable - at least when you are used to olympiad problems that take hours each. We are still getting some lectures as well, of which the most interesting and hardest are on topology; I have been spending quite a bit of time thinking about this and learning it by discovery. (Very briefly, topology is the study of continuous maps: you start off with some space or surface, then map each point from that space to a point in some other space; the map is continuous if points that started off close together end up close together.)
There have been three TCMS concerts in the past couple of weeks, including a special one in the Wren Library instead of our normal venue of the chapel. That meant lots of moving of chairs from the chapel store to the library. It's a nice building but a slightly odd concert venue; actually both the Wren Library and the chapel are very long and thin, which seems to me a strange shape for a chapel.
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Martin
Tags tcms, trinity, tripos
Posted by martin on
Monday, 24 April 2006 at 17:02
Last term I got out of the habit of posting; sorry about that. You will consequently have missed that I have become Membership Secretary for the Trinity College Music Society and Bookshop Manager for the Archimedeans (University maths society). The first is not a terribly difficult task, which means maintaining the members database and making membership cards for new members, and also stewarding at a few concerts per term. We had a committee meeting this afternoon, held on the Fellows' Bowling Green thanks to the sunny weather (although it is not yet very warm).
A major event this term will be exams. I have four exams at the start of June. We are expected to work pretty hard before that, doing a year's worth of past papers each week, with two supervisions a week to go through them. There are also four weeks of lectures, but these are not examined until next year and you can choose not to go to some of them until next year. In any case, we will get no supervisions on them this term.
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Martin
Tags archimedeans, tcms, tripos
Posted by martin on
Wednesday, 09 November 2005 at 08:30
I'm pretty busy at the moment, largely due to the fact that I am going to Stockholm at the weekend for the ACM programming contest. This is a competition in which universities send teams of three, broadly similar to the IOI except that you work as a team and the trip is much shorter (only three days). Trinity is sending two teams; the one I'm on also has Paul Jeffreys, UK/GB IMO and IOI medallist, and Mark Thompson, GB IOI medallist and member of the UK IMO squad.
As well as training for the competition itself, it has also meant I have had to reschedule a supervision from Friday to this afternoon. With two supervisions yesterday as well that has meant a lot of work the past few days, but fortunately it is all done now.
What else have I been doing? My parents came to visit Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, which was great. On Sunday there was the Freshers' Concert in the Master's Lodge: anyone in the first year could audition to perform in this, and we had a range of stunning performances on piano, violin, viola, bassoon and voice. The first year choral scholars also did a couple of pieces - Cole Porter and something similar, very different from their usual chapel repertoire!
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Martin
Tags ioi, music, tcms