Outstanding achievement in the field of excellence

 Woohoo! I admit I was worried about my chances of qualifying for the Microsoft Excel World Championship this year, with not having done all that great in the monthly competitions. That left me needing to get through the big qualification round to select the remaining 68 competitors to join the 60 who'd already qualified. And since it's divided into regions, I had to be in the top 22 Europeans (out of 194 entrants), excluding the lucky people who'd already secured their place and could just take part in this final challenge for the fun of it.

And maybe 'fun' isn't the word. After the hour's time limit was finished, I was a LOT more worried about my chances of qualifying! But I needn't have been - it turns out the tasks really were unspeakably difficult, and nobody (not even the REALLY great guy on the livestream who always shows us all how it's done) got close to the maximum 10,000 points. My measly 4,400 was enough to put me in European 6th place, provisionally.

It might still be corrected before the final results are announced, but that should be enough to guarantee me a third consecutive prestigious place in the grand final round of 128!

Now, can I get beyond that first round for the first time? I just have to hope for a lucky draw, avoiding the top seeds...

I also wish I could win a Nobel Prize

I'm sort of almost acquainted with Demis Hassabis, after all. I know who he is, and he might if prompted recollect meeting me and even having at least one conversation. So I'm kind of envious that he's going around winning Nobel Prizes and I haven't won anything for absolutely ages. Except an online chess match earlier this evening, but that's not quite the same.

Although to be fair, he only won a quarter of a Nobel Prize: "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 was awarded with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction”."

And what does predicting protein structure actually help with? My lack of understanding of the basic fundamentals of this area of knowledge is another thing that annoys me. Someone give me some kind of award, quickly, or I'm just going to feel terribly inferior!

I wish I was musical

 You know how Paul McCartney says he dreamed the tune to Yesterday? I mean, obviously he's just making that up so we'll think he's cool, and it's a pretty dull tune anyway, but the point is that I can dream cool music too, and sometimes wake up with a tune in my head that isn't totally stolen from whatever most recent song I've heard on the radio.

But not knowing anything about music, I can't exactly write it down or preserve it for posterity when I do dream something beautifully melodic. I suppose I could record myself, if I figured out a good way to do that on my phone, but I don't think it'd sound so good. I'd like to transcribe these things and give them to someone musically talented to reconstruct and tell me where I plagiarized it from.

This morning, for example, I tried to preserve the song in my head by writing down that it was basically the All Saints song Never Ever, but in a higher key, and had the really catchy line "You've been the beating of my heart for so long" or something similar. But after humming it all morning, I can't recapture what it sounded like now, so the world has been deprived of another masterpiece.

Further updates

 I haven't written enough in this blog recently, and can quantify how much I haven't written by following up the last-but-two post to say I've now watched the first 24 episodes of The Owl House (one a day), and it's even better than I thought after having watched the first nine! I really admire the clever writing that makes it feel like each episode is a one-off story disconnected from any other, but still never just resettles into the status quo, instead subtly changing and developing as the saga continues. I wish I could write like that. Or at all.

In other news, I seem to have become the head of a puppet theatre troupe, my qualifications being that I "seem to know what I'm doing". This is a bit worrying, really, because I genuinely don't. It's all going to be a horrible disaster, but never mind.