Job
Mobile Post. Woot.
So I’m on my way back to Toronto after my long easter weekend right now. It’s not been a bad weekend… But it has seemed short. At least I finished my layout for print class, and I’ll be submitting it via e-mail when I get home. I’ll also attach it to this post when I publish it. I had a lot of fun doing it, as it’s on Gorillaz… Which is just an all-around awesome subject. I’m slowly catching up on all my work, which is good. GRADUATION IMMINENT!
Unfortunately, graduating presents a slew of new problems. For instance, I’ll no longer be employed by the A/V department, and I’ll have to find a real job. Life is just beginning, which just as horrifying as it is exciting.
Speaking of Gorillaz, I’ve been enjoying a lot of Damon Albarn lately. The Good, The Bad, and The Queen is an excellent album. I’ve also been enjoying Beck’s Modern Guilt of late, which I got from Max in the summer. My favourite song from it is Youthless… I like it’s lyrics and beats a lot. I like music a lot… But I’m really bad at describing what I like about it. Go me.
I’ve also been getting stomach pain of late… My side to my stomach was hurting all day Thursday, and I’ve had a weird stitch in what I can describe as under my lowest rib on my right side all day today. I kinda felt sick earlier because of it. I hope it’s nothing bad… The last thing I need right now is medical problems… I’ve gotta finish school!
Anyways, that’ll be all for now. Bye, nobody who reads this!
Updatin’…
So, the last couple of weeks have been busy, not busy, semi-busy… I’m not really sure. I’ve been all over the place lately.
Let’s see… Reading Week / Study Break was last week for me and the rest of Seneca, so I had a week off to… read or study. I did read, though. Go me! It was for a class, though. Actually, A Dirty Job has renewed my love of books, which is saying something. I’ve always loved reading… I read tons of books as a kid… I read at a Grade 12 level when I was in Grade 4… Just somewhere between schoolwork, video games, girlfriend, and the rest of life, the time I used to take for books got phased out. I think I’ll try to phase it back in a bit… even if I won’t be ploughing through the pages like I used to… it’ll probably be good for me!
Also over reading week, I managed to go to the gym. If you actually know me, your reaction to reading that sentence would probably be something like “Gym WUT? CRAIG GYM!?” and then you’d fall backwards out of your chair from the sheer shock of it. Me and exercise are like… two things that don’t mix. I’d say oil and water but that’d be cliche. And they still kinda hang together. If gym was water and I were oil… Oil would have skipped town. But I went. And went on an exercise bike. Samina badgered me into going, but I’m glad she did. Tired legs kinda felt good, not gonna lie. I thought I looked like a bit of a tool in my I-don’t-own-many-pairs-of-shorts cargo shorts, and my regular old street shoes because I only own one pair, but nobody said anything. Or even looked at me funny, really. I statically travelled some six miles on the bike in 20 minutes, which was cool I suppose. Samina and I got out of there once King of Queens came on the TVs. I don’t like King of Queens. I’m not even sure anyone watches it.
So, the “stuff done during reading week” tally has me reading a book and going to the gym so far… it also has me working all day Tuesday. It was such a quiet morning, and it would’ve been great if I’d remembered my book… but I didn’t. I went home to pick it up at lunch, but then I had constant help requests all afternoon, so I was unable to get much reading done. That and the painters had shown up… they were speaking loudly at eachother in Italian so it was hard to concentrate. I say that they spoke at eachother because replies usually consisted of grunts or ‘hmm’s.
I also went to school on reading week. Yes, school. Tim Willison, our Flash teacher, ran a workshop on Wednesday all day. We learned about the Dictionary functions of AS3, and how handy they are. It was fairly fun, and I think I picked up a few things… it was worth going to, I’ll say that.
I managed to contract some spyware or adware or whatever somewhere between using my computer for 5 minutes on Thursday, and then it being off until Saturday night.Which was weird… because I didn’t go anywhere but GMail or Facebook, really… I think I may have dropped by The Escapist forums for a minute, but I trust them. I’m running AdBlock Plus and NoScript in my install of Firefox too, so I don’t even know how it made it by that. I didn’t download anything. I’ve never had ad or spy wares as long as I’ve owned my own computer, so I’m kind of embarassed by it. Spybot Search and Destroy seems to think it’s called Virtumonde, and there seems to be about 2 or 3 variations of it that keep coming up in the scan. I’ve removed it several times over now, even trying to kill it before my computer connects to the internet or even launches anything else when I start it. That seems to work for a while. At least the ads aren’t ads anymore, as they used to come up advertising some bogus anti-virus software and doing that thing that ads do to make stupid people think that they’re part of Windows… I think it’s called being designed to look like standard Windows XP! Doesn’t fool me. It can’t. My theme is different. Hah. I think I’ve nuked most of it… now it just seems to occasionally pop up a window with the title “Windows Internet Explorer”, yet I’m running Firefox so it has a Firefox logo in the top right corner… again, nice try. The window is completely blank, as I’ve scanned like 10 times in 2 days and killed most of the files. It’s terribly annoying. I seem to have gotten rid of it, at least temporarily, for now. I thought I’d got it before, but it just came back a day later. I will not trust it’s totally gone until I don’t see it for at least a week. In the meantime, I’ll just repeatedly scan.
On Saturday, I cleaned my room back home. Like REALLY cleaned it. It’s like, crazy clean now. Like it used to be before I moved out/got lazy. It’s not totally done yet… my “junk table” still has junk, but that’s because I used it to clean the rest of the room… I’ll post a picture of its’ clean prettyness later, maybe. It’s nice to move furniture around once in a while, for a bit of a change. The rest of my house doesn’t really change, except when my parents renovate, so it’s nice for my own little basement domain to switch up.
The end of reading week, I finally got to spend some time with Kim. We’d been apart for most of the week, and I think we were both dying a little inside. Good thing we did, as yesterday we got back to school. The headaches resumed, with an essay for me to write and her brochure printing to mess with. Luckily, that got all done, and we relaxed for most of the night.
I played Opoona for Wii for a somewhat lengthy time last night, much to my enjoyment. Firstly, it was $19.99 at Staples. With Sonja’s discount and generosity, that’s turned into 4 Second Cup coffees. I’ve already bought her one. It’s 1/4 paid off! Yay! Secondly, it’s awesome. It’s cutesy, and takes a lot to get into it at first, with a lengthy intro sequence and sort of guiding you around the first town, but then you’re free to take on missions and fight stuff, using the somewhat unique battle system. I’m really enjoying the fact that the game is basically a full-blown world with all kinds of things going on and many terms and such to remember(which the nerd in me loves), all while staying simple to play and control. You only have to use the nunchuk! I love just sitting back and being able to control the game with one hand. It’s got just the right difficulty curve too. If I were a more hardcore RPG fan, I might find it easy… but its’ difficulty seems to be in the vein of Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars so far. I just made it to the second dome. I also have to comment on the music, as it’s extremely reminiscent of Phantasy Star Online, which had an excellent soundtrack. In fact, I think I’ll go get that now for nostalgic value. The game is also similar in feel to that of Phantasy Star Online… although it’s only a one-player experience. Damn, now I just want to get back into that. Still, Opoona is fun.
Damn it all. Just got the pop-up again. For running Winamp. What the hell. Back to scanning for the stupid thing.
Busy Week – Things I’m Working On…
So, this last week has been pretty busy. Last weekend my Valentines’ plans fizzled out because Kim’s grandma passed out and wound up in the hospital. Kim and I only saw eachother for a few hours, and we were both really tired, so we had a Valentine’s day nap. It was nice. Turns out her grandma had to get a pacemaker put in, and she went in for surgery Sunday night, but she was pretty much out the next day and up and about as usual. A little scary, but I’m glad she’s okay… and that through a magical medical miracle she’ll be okay for years to come!
Tuesday at work was really busy, a lot of people asked me for help with the suites. I got through it, although I didn’t get to work on a lot of work… instead, I wound up working on a vector trace for a bit because it was something I could easily leave and come back to. Kim took me out for dinner at our usual Thai place in the evening, and I enjoyed it very much. It was a nice break from going there with everyone else, and it was good to get out on our own.
Wednesday morning, Project Management was cancelled… and we almost didn’t go until we found out from Samina that our groups had showed up anyways. By the time we got there, our groups were gone… but we worked on some stuff for Aviva’s Print class later in the day. I played some e-mail tag with one of my group members, and then we ended up meeting in the first few minutes of Aviva’s class and delegated our workload. I fired off e-mails to everyone so that they’d all have it in writing, and they’re supposed to have all their parts to me tomorrow. Only one person has sent their part so far. We’re to meet Monday night after Combustion class at 7pm. Hopefully that turns out.
Aviva’s class had us working on fictional brochures for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. Mine’s pretty simple so far, but Samina seems to like what I have. I’m not too far into it yet though.
In the evening, Kim and I got down to business on our first real Advanced ActionScripting project. We had to make a tutorial on how to make a document class. I made mine in a .pdf file. I’ll tack it onto the end of this post. I found it to be a good project because I had to go through both actually doing it, and documenting how it’s done as well as how all the different parts of the code work. It was only supposed to be 1-2 pages, but I managed to flesh mine out to 6 plus title page when I added in images and made it easy to use. Overall, an enjoyable assignment I think!
Thursday morning, we had to do a debate in Art and Technology on whether or not the internet isolates people. Our side (Kim, myself, two others) was that it does in fact not isolate people. Our side won by vote of the rest of the class… and not only did we have some good arguments, but the other side seemed very wishy-washy. Their argument was basically “the internet does connect people, and allows you to talk to people all over the world, but it isolates us because there isn’t human contact and stuff”. Two of their group members were prepared, and the other two had no idea they were going that day because they hadn’t checked their Seneca WebMail in a week. How can you go a week without checking it? Silliness.
We spent much of Thursday afternoon finishing up our tutorials, and then we headed off to Flash. We just covered different ways to load different things, and a lot of people shoved off from the class early to “Ninja Pub 12″, a gathering of Digital Media Arts students that happens periodically, and enables networking among the students, as well as the ability to meet other people working in the industry. After Tim was done his talk, we headed there, but it was very loud and everyone was already pretty drunk at that point, and we’d had a long day, so we only stayed about 10 minutes before we headed home.
Friday we went to Motion Graphics and Jasmine was showing us how to put together crazy visualizations in AfterEffects. That looked neat, but I’m still not sure I like AfterEffects as a program all that much. Video has never been my cup of tea, AfterEffects is a little heavy on my poor computer, and I’m just not that into its’ interface. I prefers me Flash.
Anyways, I’m off to celebrate a friend’s birthday soon… I promised myself I’d keep this short because I’ve gotta grab a shower and call another friend to arrange a ride so… that’s all, folks. Toodles.
How to Make a Document Class Using ActionScript 3 and Flash
P.S. – Jet Set Radio’s soundtrack has got me through the week. Kudos to the crazies who scratched and mixed that.
Almost back.
So tomorrow, I start back into my fourth and final semester of college. I don’t know what I’m going to get into after this… hell I don’t even know what I’m going to do for an internship this semester. Over the holidays, besides getting some kind of site started in flash, I didn’t do much else. I’m a little upset that I spent so much time watching 24 and various anime series and not a lot of time getting some work done. I did enjoy the series that I watched though (Gankutsuou, Infinite Ryvius, re-watched a lot of Cowboy Bebop) and don’t regret their awesomeness. 
So I’ll probably update after school tomorrow, or possibly on Tuesday when I can find the time. Yay for Tuesdays off. I’m going to try my best at getting to work for A/V on Tuesdays, and Kim’s trying for the Tuesday night spot. If she gets the spot she can quit Galaxy! I’m excited.
Anyways, gonna get started on my last day of winter break, ever, with a nice session of Resident Evil 4, followed by some room cleanage. Woot. Just thought an update was long overdue, although I know nobody reads this. It was long overdue for me.
FINISHED… For now.
Haven’t updated in a while… but it’s because I’ve been busy finishing up my third semester. It’s been quite the crazy run. With projects due for every class these last few weeks it’s hard to find time to write a blog post when I’m trying to keep up with other things outside of school, such as taking some down time to keep myself sane, spending time with Kim (those two go hand in hand of course!), and… well yeah that’s about it.
I’m sitting at work right now. It’s my last day at Seneca in 2008, and it’s been a slow day. I finally got to finish Gungrave today, which was great. I’m probably going to be spending some time over the weekend to organize the files on my computer as well as my external drives and removable media. I’m running out of space again. I’ve heard of cheap-ish 2 (I think…?) TB hard drives at like Costco or something (Mom, Dad, if you’re reading this… *hint hint*), but I think it’s kind of funny that the last two years I’ve gotten external drives for Christmas and I’ve managed to fill both of them up. Craziness. Oh well, you can never have enough space… I guess. It would be a huge help if I had one.
So yeah, it’s great to finally be free of deadlines for a little while, but now I have a whole new set of worries. I have to get Christmas gifts for a lot of people, and on quite a tight budget. What to do? I’m sort of worried that I can’t pull it off… although this is a nice break from the much larger worries I’ve had over the last month that are deadline related.
Anyways, back to “work”.
First Blog Post
Welcome to my new blog.
…
…
…
Kind of a generic opening, don’t you think? Well I do. Either way… I hope I end up keeping this more updated than previous blogs. This blog will (hopefully) document my dabblings with digital media and (also hopefully) my eventual entry into the industry. It will also cover some things going on in my personal life, like the video games I’m playing, the books I’m reading, the music I’m listening to, and the TV shows, movies, and anime I watch.
Currently I am a student at Seneca College, specifically its’ School of Communication Arts in the Digital Media Arts program. I’m in my third semester now, and the work is heavy. Fun stuff, though. I’m also working as a lab monitor for the A/V Department there, which seemed like an easy job at first but is quickly becoming busier as the end of the semester approaches.
Anyway, that’s a sort of taste of what sort of life I lead at the moment… well not including a lot of the other stuff, but that’s why this is a blog documenting my foray into the digital media industry and not a blog about “the other stuff”. You get it. Any posts to do with personal things will be password protected. WordPress is great. I only have to manage one blog!
At some point I will bring in all my old posts from my old blog, Discovering Digital Media Arts. If possible (I’m still learnin’ WordPress) they’ll appear on a separate page linked from the main one. Look for it.
Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « May | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||