by ·Comments Off on A far wetter way to learn English (April Fools!)

UPDATE: This is of course a contribution to my favourite day of the year, April Fool’s Day. It was a huge amount of fun to work on!

By day, I currently work for Kaplan International and they’re doing something very exciting. They are launching a really brave product that is set to take the education industry by storm. The video below should explain things a little more.


They let me help out making the launch video too and we’re all very proud of how it has turned out.

More information can be found here: Kaplan Underwater English

by ·Comments Off on New Research and Gaming

I often pick up a copy of the Metro in the mornings these days and one jumped out at me this morning declaring “Gaming Children ‘unfit for school’”.  The article was a short piece about primary school children falling asleep in class, missing meals (although if they’re missing meals in school I’m not sure that’s entirely their fault) and being unable to concentrate.

The reason for this, as declared by one particular teacher, is that they are addicted to gaming.

This may well be shooting fish in a barrel but let’s dissect that a little.

Continue reading

by ·1 Comment

"David" in shorthand. It almost feels like I paid a PR firm lots of money to rebrand me or something. UPDATE: Aaaand I'm wrong. The dashes should probably be on the OTHER side. I think I might just take the "it's a personal language" defence...

I am now on my way to becoming a profeshnul riter and I have just finished my first day on my NCTJ (which is a series of letters I never seem to be able to get in the right order the first time) course.  I have already learnt some valuable lessons which are as follows:

1)  Despite being a swot and trying to learn a bit of Shorthand before the course, I know nothing and what I do know I now know I know wrong.

2)  In shorthand, my name looks a bit like the logo for some variation on Starfleet.

3)  When you interview someone, you need to ask for a contact number.  I already knew that you also had to ask for their age, but asking someone over the age of about 40 for their age is an exercise in diplomacy that I wasn’t quite ready for today.

4)  Work experience in a call centre is good because it trains you for people telling you to “go away” in much less polite terms than that.

5)  I have a lot of work ahead of me.

In reference to lesson number 5, I am actually remarkably excited about this.  I’ve often said that I like having lots of work, but this isn’t entirely accurate:  I like having lots of work that I’m going to enjoy.

This work in particular is looking highly enjoyable and to be perfectly honest, this might well have been the first day in about four years that I haven’t found myself constantly checking the clock on the run up to 1pm and 5pm, traditionally being feeding time and home time respectively.

by ·Comments Off on The Point of Fanfic

I have just seen the vapor trails of an argument concerning the value of fanfic that has flown around a corner of the internet quite recently.

Fan Fiction (Fanfic) is a curious beast. It is summed up nicely by wikipedia as “stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator.” Fanfic stories can be encouraged by the original creators or not but are very rarely accepted as canon.  You get different levels of quality in fanfic and different tones running from that which would be in keeping with the tone of the original piece  to comedic interpretations through to the exploration of… “romantic”…themes.

Continue reading

by ·Comments Off on Computer Programming at Hing University

HU-logoAs mentioned in a previous post a few days ago, I am not a student and I am not starting a course this academic year, but I do have several friends who are students and are starting courses this year and it appears to have triggered off some sort of jealousy and bitterness about the fact that I’m not starting anything new (not even an NVQ in going-to-work).  Although I’m sure that this longing, jealous, self pitying feeling will rapidly evaporate around December or at the latest around Easter once the exams and deadlines start to fall from the sky, I’ve decided to take a different approach and write my own course outline to try and finally get to grips with my programming that I talk so much about learning.

Starting tomorrow is my module in fundamental C++, using the made-available-online “Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days” which I hope will do roughly what it says on the tin, and in a few weeks time I will also be starting to grapple a little more with Action Script 2.0, although I haven’t found a decent course text for this yet.  I’m also taking some secondary modules in Photoshop, something that I’ve been neglecting for far too long, and Game Design Mechanics and Theory (which will be a nice excuse to play some old games whilst playing very close attention to how exactly they work).  Also, even though it has no real connection to programming, I might even throw in a little Dutch vocabulary, depending on how ambitious I feel.  I always feel guilty when I meet my girlfriend’s family and my Dutch has not improved since the last time I’ve seen them.

I intend to keep a running record on how well this works out for me.  I’m fascinated by how I will put time aside to learn something, such as the majority of my law course, but seemingly only if I’ve paid an inordinate amount of money and I have someone with some sort of vague authority suggesting that it might be a good idea to hand something in.  If I can manage to motivate myself to learn this under my own steam, then the world is my oyster, or study-appropriate-metaphor-that’s-not-an-oyster.

The first update on this venture should land at some point on Friday, so if you see nothing around about that time, feel free to assume that the experiment has failed or been otherwise postponed.

Additional Notes:

Sadly enough, I actually intended to start this course at “Hing University” last week, but the lecturer was indisposed because he had forgotten his keys, thus locking himself out of the lecture theatre.