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?