Back to student life...

Well, not really! From the student life I will only get the studying part... partying, dating, drinking, etc. are out...

This week we have started all the classes at the Conservatoire. I'm not sure I will be able to follow all of them, but I'm certainly going to try. In total I have 6.5 "contact" hours per week:

Guitar: 1
Ensemble: 1
Harmony: 2
Choral: 1.5
Chamber music: 1

Except for Chamber music, I had already one lesson of each of these.

In the guitar class, we have started directly with the Leo Brouwer simple studies n. VI and VII (they don't look particularly difficult, though they will need some time).

In the ensemble class, we started with two pieces for guitar quartet by Andrew Forrest (Joropó and Barcarowl), which can be downloaded at: http://www.forrestguitarensembles.co.uk/quartets.html

In harmony class, we started with the basic theory on triads, cadences, etc. I was hoping I could follow the Walter Piston book, and skip the lessons, but it looks like the teacher is going to follow a slightly different method, so I guess I will better attend as many lessons as possible.

In choral music class, we started by singing two pieces: "Adoramus Te" by W.A. Mozart and "Hymne a la Nuit" de J.P. Rameau.

Overall I don't think is going to be as difficult as I was expecting, though my intonation skills could certainly be improved, so I will have to devote some time to ear-training stuff. I would gladly do without the choral music class, but I guess at least it will be a way of forcing myself to not forget these ear-training exercises...

Let's see how I can cope with all this extra work in my already quite-busy life...

(Update: 4-Nov-2010)

It was a bit too much, so I decided to drop one of the courses: Chamber Music, which I will to do next year. My current plan is to do the remaining four years to the professional degree in six years (perhaps it is also a bit ambitious, since the higher the year, the higher the number of courses to take), but it is a bit more realistic. Let's see how it goes...

Building A Virtual Cluster with Xen

Not new stuff, but today I was looking for some information on this, and I just realized that I didn't have a link to this article which I posted some years ago at the ClusterMonkey site. I'm not sure how many things would need updating, but the ideas still hold.

The article is in two parts:

Part_1

Part_2