Uni results have taken me by surprise and come out early. Further surprise came when I saw I got a 2:1. I don’t remember sleeping with the markers or anything! Weird…
I’m very much on the final stretch of my Uni course now. I’m just coming out of the other side of a quite alarming panic after I realised this final assignment I’m working on is going to be handed in unfinished, with it’s passablity severely in question. I feel better now as I’ve heard word that other people have had problems, too, and even the tutor has admitted the difficulty of the assignment is out of proportion to how much teaching we got on the various subjects. So, what will be will be. Hopefully I’ll scrape a pass on this one and my other modules will prop me up for a 2:2 or a 2:1 and all will be well. In the meantime, I just want to get the fucker handed in on Thursday and process to totally forget about Uni until my results come in.
What I’m really keen to get going on is various portfolio building activities. The likely course of action will be to get an easy job here in Northallerton for a bit and then move to London as soon as a good job/housing opportunity lands in my considerable lap. For those of you even remotely interested, these the are things I will be pursuing in the coming months:
Writing for Ganymede & Titan and Noise to Signal
Despite my fairly obvious limitations as a writer, I’ve had a great deal of fun writing for the above sites and some my proudest moments have come from achievements centred around what we do at G&T. Uni work and a quite alarming amount of laziness has put paid to any substantial writing recently, but after this week it is one of my top goals to write much more for these sites and try to drag my sorry ass into a state that’s approaching a half decent amateur writer.
“Paul McGrath, my Lord, Paul McGrath… oh Lord, Paul McGrath”
Priority one after finishing Uni has to be to build up my web portfolio. Basically, start building sites as fast as my little legs will allow. This is one of them. Myself and m’colleague Ian ‘Ian’ Symes will be starting a blog based around the comedy stylings of Aston Villa Football Club, with me providing all that pesky HTML/PHP stuff needed. I plan to keep the work load light on this site, so I’ll be building it around an existing Content Management System (probably Wordpress, which powers this here bag of shite) and concentrating initially on design a nice clean and simple layout. I’ll be dead in a fucking ditch before I even consider using a pre-built template. Dead in a ditch, I tell you. As this place attests to, I tend to be a little poor on creating properly good site layouts and designs, so I’m taking this as a challenge. If I make it look not shit then I will be happy, so wish me luck on that one. Finally, I plan to have quite a bit of custom PHP in there, too. It’s going to be a site based around two gob shites gob shiteing about Villa, but including Villa feeds based feeds in all the right places (latest scores, position in the table, current status in various competitions) would be pretty sweet and help the site develop a status approaching essential for any self respecting Villa fan. We’ve set a launch date of 26th May, so I better get cracking!
Lazy Capitalist Whores
Speaking of collaborations, here’s another one. Not nearly as definite as the Villa Blog, but more of a kind of vague idea that might possibly make enough money for a double cheese burger at some point, maybe. I wont reveal the exact details, because I’m a prick, but it should hopefully provide myself and Gavin (he’s laughably the ‘ideas man’ in this twisted union of idiots) the opportunity to include well placed and targeted ad banners, depending on what page is currently being viewed. The site itself will be entirely data driven so I’ll be using it as my reason to dive headlong into PHP 5 and it’s fancy new OOP type abilities. Even if the site doesn’t even get launched, the development of the framework should be invaluable.
“Science Friction that burns my fingurrrrrs”
And to cap off my four point plan I’ll start as I began, with ambitions of writing that are sure to land me flat on my stupid face. A good while ago myself and Seb created an idea for a sit-com and since then we’ve co-written what I consider to be a good pilot, Seb’s written what I consider to be an excellent episode 3 and I’ve written what I consider to be a collection of disparate scenes suffering either from containing NO funny to generally appalling funny designed to make precisely 3 people laugh. It’s safe to say the blood of a natural writer does not course through my disgusting veins but never-the-less I plan to finish my assigned episode and begin a through peer review process that should at least teach me something, even if what I end up with is basically unsellable to anyone outside my group of friends.
I’m happy with that pan, I think. Those are four substantial things that I’m really going to enjoy. Let’s see how I’ve done by the end of the Summer, shall we?
So, I was taking a stroll in Orwellian knightmare-town Middlesbrough the other day. I was enjoying a tray of chips as I was walking down one of the main pedestrainised streets just off Linthorpe road, which is one of the areas included in the pilot scheme for those cameras with speakers that tell you off when you’re being naughty. A chip fell from my tray and I swear I heard a crackly “pick that up please” come from behind me. I was too intimidated to look behind so I just strode off, holding my chips securely in place.
Now, I realise he may have been addressing someone else, but I remain convinced that Middlesbrough is in fact being scrutinised form afar by pillocks who can’t cope with a chip being on the floor and I am soon to be arrested to bits.
So, yeah, not much exciting has happened recently.
So, handed in my final project at 9am and spent the rest of the day in Middlesbrough with Scott and Gav arsing about. We ended up watching Vantage Point, which is basically all about the different points of view of a presidential assassination. The acting was generally awful and it was VERY dumb, but the presentation was interesting enough and the twists were ok. I generally have a dislike for Matthew Fox so was unsurprised to see his stupid face completely fail to impress me in this as he fails to impress me in Lost. Out of the other films I’ve seen over the recent months (Cloverfield, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men) it was probably the most fun as we were the only ones in the cinema so were loudly mocking throughout. There Will be Blood is definitely still the best of those by MILES, though.
Film wise, it’s actually looking like it’ll be a very good summer. Iron Man, The Dark Knight, X-Files, Indiana Jones and no doubt others that I’ve forgotten about should make for one of my busiest movie summers, like, ever.
Does anyone else think that the Activia slogan “Activia. It’s actively good.” is just really, really rubbish? It sounds so ineffectual. Just see if *I* boost my natural defences with a product so half heartedly marketed.
Finished final project. Getting report bound tomorrow. Why did no one tell me about these bastard clocks going forward an hour before today? Must now sleep.
I watched this episode of Golden Balls with Gav just the other day and it… was… AWESOME.
Fuck YouTube and the <embed> tag for breaking my precious XHTML validity, though.
I am having trouble doing it.
Between today and some ungodly hour in the morn of Sunday I have to: finish waffling about how I’m awesome at PHP and XML and shit despite the fact I’m a ham fisted child who couldn’t write a good algorithm if my food supply depended on it, write an entire section on the visual design of my web site complete with diagrams I haven’t done yet, write a pretty comprehensive list of every single piece of functionality on the site along with how they’re relevant to the users, write about the various laws that my new site is subject to and blah blah fuck, write about how I tested and evaluated my site despite the fact I have neither tested nor evaluated it yet, write an abstract, write an introduction, write a conclusion, organise my references, add my appendices and just generally make the whole thing look like a final report.
Oh, yeah, and I’ve waffled on too much with the stuff I HAVE done, so now I have to watch my word limit and start trimming stuff down, which is just more time. I’m almost entirely convinced that I wont be doing much sleep tomorrow night.
Have a nice picture:
Bye!
So, I wanted to start a new Blog. I was bored of the old C64 style and I had a good think about what a redesign might look like so I could launch a nice new look that would nicely showcase some of my web design skills. I’ve decided, however, to be a massive prick and do this instead which some may say distinctly showcases my *lack* of web design skills, and I certainly wouldn’t correct you on that. I might add style as I go along and I find more time, but we’ll see how this works. It’s amused me sufficiently to stay for a while, anyway.
So, I’m hurtling towards the end of my degree, which is about as scary as you’d expect. In the next two days I have to write quite a sizeable chunk of my final report ready to be bound in Staples on Sunday and handed in before noon on Monday. After that I have one month to complete two regular assignments (one JSP/AJAX/MySQL website and one load of database bollocks which I’ve been hiding from all year) and revise for two exams. The hand in dates and exams all fall in the first week of May. Well done time-table people. I hate you.
Things all seem a bit blurry and scary at the moment as I’m predictably ill-prepared or this onslaught of work, but I reckon I’ll emerge unscathed. I’ll continue to look forward to early May when the world will be quite literally (no, really) be my oyster.
As you’ll know, any good but hectic work schedule has to have a set amount of distractions to help stop the Sanity Horse from bolting, and I’m currently becoming enthralled in The Wire season 1 after a few months dicking around watching an episode every couple of weeks, so that should do quite nicely. It’s got, like, a really good story, and shit. And swearing, so it’s automatically cool and I am cool for watching it.
In other work distraction news, the new Supergrass album is quite good. Certainly better than Road to Rouen but not as good as Life on Other Planets and all that preceded it. I am top of the Elite scoreboard on Audiosurf for all the new tracks, though, so that just compounds my previous coolness. I bet you’re so impressed right now.
Right. Sleep. Then work. See you later!