by ·Comments Off on Being Professional About Writing

Ah, David Hing, I see you are writing another article about something with which you have had no experience with and are no good at. Well done. In an age of Web 2.0, general comments and having your say, you reckon stuff with the best of them.

I love writing. I love the process of writing things down. When I was growing up, I would oscillate between playing computer games for hours on end, to writing fiction for hours on end. I just loved the way that it felt like watching television or films, but with me deciding what to do. It should be noted that this was the start of my particular brand of attention-span deficiency in that I started a lot of things and finished precisely none of them. It was also the first indication that maybe a plan wasn’t such a harmful thing after all. I’m actually very thankful that I wasn’t born ten years later, because had I been, I would imagine that most of this would have leaked its way on to the internet and become public domain, lurking around in the background ready to pounce out and scuttle any sort of professional career in anything that I might want to launch…but maybe that’s just paranoia. I’m…also now wondering if carrying on this blog post is a terribly good idea.

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by ·Comments Off on The Tortoise and ActionScript 3.0

HU-logoA while ago, I mentioned that I had written up a syllabus for my own course in programming which centred largely around C++ and then later on elements of ActionScript 2.0.  Needless to say this was a dismal failure and never quite got off the ground.

Whenever I’m studying something or have something quasi-professional that needs doing, pretty much anything else in the world becomes more interesting and appealing to me.  I understand this is not a phenomenon unique to me and it was an ongoing joke in a previous house that I lived in that you could tell when a lot of us had essay or project deadlines because the place was spotlessly clean.  This instinct to do something other than what my brain things it SHOULD be doing triggered around about the time I had something in my hands that looked vaguely like a course syllabus.

Of course, in this case, I had the last laugh over my bloody minded brain, as the poor thing jumped on to something different but that is in the same field and has instead for the last few days been trapped in a prison made of Flash and ActionScript 3.0, one of the programming languages that powers flash.

When I have something worthy of publication I will of course share, but for now I shall just have to state how much I’m enjoying finally getting some programming knowledge under my belt.  Up until now, it’s been like my dutch:  I understand more than I can speak, but I don’t understand much.  Now, my programming is at the level whereby I could probably reliably ask for directions to the railway station, even if I won’t necessarily understand the answer given to me.

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There’s a saying that everyone has a novel inside them. I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be a novel, but the sentiment is probably true and that even the most unlikely people have a lot of creativity inside them that they can’t get out. Everyone has something. A lot of people secretly work on little personal projects or just daydream about working on little projects but everyone has these little ideas that they want to get out.

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by ·Comments Off on Time Travel the Wrong Way

That last choose your own adventure style post was a little self deprecating, slightly exaggerated and probably made me come off like a pathetic alcoholic, which just isn’t true.  I’m not an alcoholic.

However, the point that’s there is that time very quickly slips away without you noticing it.  I suppose my only real comparison that I can make is school life contrasting with working life  (University doesn’t count.  I had very few contact hours which meant the time could be divided between time spent awake and time spent asleep, but the hours with which each were happening were not consistent).  Whereas I get home from work most days around 5:30, during my time at school, I could have been home for an hour and a half by that point.  With this in mind, it’s clear that I already have less time in the evenings.

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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.