A good 7 miles around nottingham, with a sting in the tail. Start off at the corner of hucknall road and mansfield road (by the Grosvenor). Head up Hucknall road and take the 3rd left (Hamilton Road). At the end cross Sherwood rise and head down Alberta Terrace, follow it all the way along as it turns into Gladstone Street, and keep going till it finishes on Radford road. Turn right and head along till you hit the ring road by McDonalds, turn right and follow Valley Road. When you hit Mansfield Road cross over and turn left. Just after the parade of shops turn right up Thackeray’s Lane. At the roundabout head up Wensley Road. This is where the hills start. Follow Wensley Road up and round the corner. You’ll start to drop down towards the end of the road just before you turn right up Somersby Road. This is the steepest part, and it’s pretty steep. When you get to the top and Plains Road turn right and head through Mapperly Top. Just before St Judes church turn right down Lucknow Drive. Follow this along till you get to Magdala Road, then turn right and head downhill till you get back to where you started.

Well, I submitted MST121 CMA42 last night. So technically I’m all done with mst121 except waiting for the marks to come back. Shouldn’t be too bad as I’ve be averaging >75% on TMAs, and even though CMA42 was a bit of a last minute thought as I’d been concentrating on MS221′s TMA04 I think I’ve probably not done too badly. But as all I really wanted was a pass, that should be plenty.

The TMA covered the entire course and I tried (as revsion for the MS221 exam) to answer it all just using the Handbook, which mostly succeeded apart from some of the stats questions.

Overall I’ve really enjoyed the course. There’s been a good range of material covered, and everything seems to be really well presented and written. Having done a Maths A-Level a lot of the course was revision, then some new bits on top, which was good for me as I was doing MS221 at the same time. But I reckon anyone with a decent GCSE could probably work through this course quite happily if they put the hours in.

But no time for slacking off, as I’ve now got 3 weeks to revise for the ms221 exam.

Next up on the Infest bill were Danish band Memmaker. Good electro sounds and good high key lighting as well :). Keep an eye out for a reappearance by one of the members during the Ayria set (photos to come).

Myspace – http://www.myspace.com/memmaker

My Infest 2010 photo archive – http://napalmgram.co.uk/wordpress/index.php/category/infest-2010/

Seen a few search queries landing in the last couple of days looking for “mst121 exam”. Just to stop anyone worrying, there is no exam for mst121 whatsoever. Just the 4 tma’s and the 2 cma’s (the first tma and cma are just for revision, so don’t count towards the mark, but are worth doing for tutor feedback alone).

Now MS221 is different, and that does have an exam. And I have about 3 weeks panicing about that to get through now once I’ve posted TMA04

And moving into day 2 of Infest the opening band were Northern Kind. A nice laid back start to the day, which had been a bit of a bizarre start thanks to all the police horses that’d been drafted in to keep the EDL ****s in order.

Website – http://www.northernkind.net/
Myspace – http://www.myspace.com/northernkinduk

My Infest 2010 photo archive – http://napalmgram.co.uk/wordpress/index.php/category/infest-2010/

And moving onto the first headliner for 2010, De/Vision. Not a band I’d heard much by, but the crowd certainly seemed to be enjoying their synthpop stylings. Good upbeat way to finish off the first night.

Nice lighting on stage, but I wish I’d had something wider on the 30D as the band we pretty spaced out around the stage so was hard to get them all in from the stage edge.

In other news, I’ve just been asked to submit some of my photos from Infest for publication. So here’s hoping they like what I’ve sent them. No names yet, just in case they don’t ;).

Myspace  – http://www.myspace.com/devisionmusic

Website – http://www.devision-music.com

Infest 2010 archive – http://napalmgram.co.uk/wordpress/index.php/category/infest-2010/

And on to the next band of Infest, Heimstatt Yipotash, the first of the Hands bands. Great noise coming off stage, but unfortunately as is a hazard for all these type of bands there’s not a huge amount going on stage.

Website – heimstatt yipotash
Myspace -http://www.myspace.com/heimstattyipotash

Infest 2010 archive – http://napalmgram.co.uk/wordpress/index.php/category/infest-2010/

nottingham half marathon route 2010

Just in case it disappears from the official site again, here’s the route for the 2010 Nottingham Experian Robin Hood half marathon. Splits on the map may be slightly off due to my inaccurate clicking, but it’s the route I ran/trudged around :).

So a bit of a recovery week, but also trying to get some good training in for the Leicester half  in 4 weeks.

15/09 – ~3.5 miles – 35 minutes – Did about 3 laps of the forest rec, very hard as my muscles were still hurting from the Nottingham Half.

17/09 – 6.5 miles – 54:28 minutes – Slightly modified Route 6 to extend it to 6.5. Went out in the evening rather than the morning. Did feel different, but think it’ll probably be more use to get used to running later in the day. Felt reasonably hard all the way round, but pretty happy with the pace

19/09 – 5 miles – 41:07 – Slightly shortened version of Route 11 by cutting up the path by Kings Wood nature reserve and down lenton lane to rejoin the canal. Slightly faster pace than Friday, but didn’t feel too bad, though I don’t think I’d have kept it up for too much longer.

Heels and Plantar problems seem to be gone (touch wood). Hopefully I can keep this up for the next 4 weeks. Though a weekend of helping a friend move to Edinburgh next week may interrupt that, unless I pack some running kit for the evening, though I expect it’ll help with upper body strength

Well, thats all done bar the typsetting in LaTeX.

Bit of a mixed bag this one. Questions 1 and 3 were pretty interesting. I still like the way that they’re using pipelines/populations/matrices, I find it quite logical and nice to work through. Question 3 was a good blast through some calculus, not too hard as long as you spotted the similarities between all the sections.

Question 4 was stats. But didn’t seem too bad, mainly tweaking things in OUStats until the right result popped out. But at least you had to know what you were doing and have some grasp of what the result should be

Question 2 though was a waste of time. hours spent swearing at Mathcad which imparted no further mathematical knowledge whatsoever. I really don’t see the point of this question. This is meant to be a ‘revision’ paper for the MST121 course, so why waste 25% of that paper on what is essentially a test that you can use a piece of obsolete software?

Other than that rant though, I think I’ve made a pretty good stab at it. So now just to latex it, and then to settle down to finish MS221′s TMA04.

Right, back from the States, Nottingham half marathon completed, and I’ve stopped panicing about colours as my work monitor is just crap so it’s time to get on with some more Infest photos.

Starting off just like the festival with Mandro1d

So we kicked off with a band I’d never heard of, and of course I hadn’t read my programme by this point either. So it took me slightly longer than most to catch on to the humour in the songs (never claimed to be quick on the uptake).  But soon saw the funny side of songs like “The summer of 6.9“, the one that rips off Headhunter and the free advertising for Jaeger and MusicNonStop meant there was plenty to laugh at

Mandro1d Myspace – http://www.myspace.com/mandro1d

Well it’s all still been a bit light on the running front. Did about 20 minutes on a treadmill, and managed 1 run of 3 miles and 1 of 4 miles while staying in Orlando. Running in Orlando was interesting, the humidity is a real killer.

Managed to go swimming a couple of times a week as well. But again in Orlando was restricted to a hotel pool which was a bit small for anything serious but it did keep the shoulders moving.

So the 12th September was the Nottingham half marathon. And as you can see from the above I’d not really trained enough for that. Add to that the fact that we’d only flown back from the states 48 hours beforehand, and I’d over indulged in the whisky  on Friday night, and not had a brilliant nights sleep beforehand it was never going to be a fun day out. Stressed getting to the start as I couldn’t find my good shorts and then got caught up in all the traffic, so ended up running a mile and a half to get there, then having to vault into the starting pen. Felt good as we set off and as the miles passed, but completely blew up at about 8 miles and then ended up slowly run/walking to the finish. Completed with a gun time of 2:30:20. Bit annoyed as I was going well at that point, got overtaken by a mate who did 2:10 and then the pacer for 2:15, though strangely I finished before the 2:30 pacer.

The good news was that with some taping the heel/plantar pain appears to be controlable.

Now I’ve got 4 weeks to try and get fit again so I can put in a decent time at the Leicester Half on 10th October.

Having just got back from a holiday in Orlando it’s really made me think about where I’ve studied for these 2 Open university courses.

So far I’ve studied on the sofa at home, at the library in the city centre, on flights to Germany, in a hotel room in Orlando, a cottage in Normandy and when a TMA deadline looms, at my work desk during lunch breaks.

So that’s a lot of freedom to study and really opens up the amount of time it frees up for study as well. I know the standard advice is to have a specific place to study and to always study at the same time. But that can be really restrictive, especially if you’ve got a hectic social life or lots of other commitments. So being able to use what would otherwise be dead time means that studying doesn’t cut into the fun things too much.

I’ve also found that travel can often help in that there’s time to sit and read a whole course section from start to finish, and then go back to do the exercises which really seems to help settle things into the brain.

Not saying this will work for everyone, but I’ve found it a really good thing for me, and I’m not planning on changing anything when I move onto M208. That said, there’s still 2 months to go before I get the final marks for these 2 courses…………