Pet peeve of the day: How long will it take for people to realise that optical mice do NOT require mousepads? In fact, with brightly coloured mousepads, the colours will in fact mess with the detector at the bottom of the mouse.

My concert is tomorrow... I have been practising the pieces for the concert almost exclusively for the past 4-5 months, and guess what? I'm not ready.

Part of the reason is that I often give myself excuses not to practise. Even in the past couple of weeks, I doubt I managed to put in 12-13 hours per week, which considering that I haven't even finished memorising the pieces until 3 weeks ago, isn't a very wise idea.

This laziness contradicts squarely with my perfectionism, which means that when I do practise, it's extremely frustrating. To be fair, it is only 3 or 4 awkward bars in the entire programme which have been giving me problems, but passing through those bars brings a huge amount of tension into my fingers, which is detrimental to the rest of the music. A large portion of my practise time has been devoted to trying to iron out those few kinks, but it just hasn't worked.

After this morning's practise, I'm just decided to give up any hopes of playing perfectly, or even expressing the music the way I want it to. It's going to be every musician's nightmare: to play a half-baked concert.