Back on the quintet today. I’ve deleted a chunk off the end of the piece and put it to one side for use later on – I was just feeling that it was coming in too soon and I needed to stretch out what I had a bit more before this particular bit recurred. Haven’t quite found what I want to do in the space now, but I feel it’s edging its way, crab-like, towards a new jumping off point. Just wish it would get a move on – I’m off to Portugal for a week on Tuesday!

Also finally got back to the new website and I’m very excited to report that I’ve now fixed it up for IE7 and 8. Firefox 2 is looking pretty broken, but FF2 makes up only 0.3% of the site’s visitors so for the moment (as in “launching by Friday”) I’m going to ignore it. I’ll come back to it later – apparently there’s a hack you can do to make FF2 recognise HTML5, but it sounds a little fiddly, so low priority it is. Opera likewise makes up a mere 1.2% of the minim-media.com populace and Opera 10 is certainly pretty much in need of no tweaks at all, so again I’m going to ignore that for the launch and focus on the one remaining browser that is both significant in usage and crap at rendering. And I don’t think anyone who works at all on websites will be in any doubt as to which one that is – yup, our old friend IE6. It’s pretty gebrochen – indeed unusable at present – so it unfortunately has to be a pretty high priority, but hopefully a touch of zoom: 1 here, a little position: relative there and a few numerical adjustments and it’ll come back into the fold.

I think I’ve basically decided to not apply for the London Sinfonietta’s fabulous-sounding Writing the Future programme – everything’s getting too squashed, I need to provide a live recording, and don’t have one for anything I’ve written in the past decade and there have been some issues with getting a reference (mostly because there’s really only one person who could write it, and she’s snowed under [although very generously willing to do her best]) so it’s feeling like really it would be best to just set it to one side, ask the London Sinfonietta to put me on their mailing list and hope they’ll do another one I can apply for next year. Disappointing, but I think there are enough opportunities coming up through the Composers Forum to keep me well and truly occupied – including a four-session workshop on writing for percussion in January! Can’t wait!

And I discovered a fabulous recording of chamber music by the Russian composer Taneyev. It’s on Spotify or check out the details on Amazon. The piano quintet’s scherzo is particularly awesome – very cheeky!