Busy busy
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Well it’s been a rather hectic few weeks. Being back at uni, the work naturally is coming in thick and fast now with no fewer then 5 projects on the go at once. Try balancing that with freelance work, a social life and pro evo 2008 and it gets a bit messy. It’s been both fun, stressful and a big learning curve in this second year of uni. The projects are so much more demanding and we get a lot less “spoon feeding” and are more of less just told to go out and do it with little or no guidance on the technical sides of things. This is both cool but a little daunting at times. I will hopefully have some cool stuff to show off around here pretty soon.
Elsewhere, you will no doubt be aware that mighty Apple have released their biggest update to mac os x with the release of Leopard. I’m delighted to say that I will indeed be getting my mitts on it tomorrow afternoon as I have been told that is has arrived back at home in Cornwall. I’m literally sat here dribbling while I type this. I think I’m most looking forward to Time Machine and having bootcamp already set up. No worries about installing drivers for windows, which is great because I have some 3D work I need for uni and mac os x isn’t ideal when you have been taught 3D Studio Max in uni. Windows will have to do as much as I hate to say it. Back to time machine for the minute though, I think this is going to be great because I am so slack when it comes to backing up my work. I know I should but it just doesn’t occur to me often enough, which is bad because I’m on the move with my macbook pro quite often, especially traveling home every weekend and carrying it about with me. Anything could happen.
I have decided that first of all I am going to back up everything before even putting the installation disk in. Then I may try just do a straight upgrade rather then a fresh install, mainly because I’m lazy and it will be a pain in the ass having to reinstall everything and digging through old emails trying to find serials and activation codes for all the apps I use such as TextMate and CSSEdit. After this I will see how she runs and if I’m not happy with it I will just take a deep breathe and go for the fresh install, which I know is probably the best way to go about it in the first place, but it’s time consuming having to get everything back when I need it. Decisions, decisions. We will see how I feel over the weekend I guess. If I’m feeling brave and adventurous I may well just go for the clean install. One thing is for sure though, and thats that I cannot wait to get Leopard purring.
Another thing that I have been spending a lot of time doing recently is learning processing. It’s been good fun and I’m really starting to get into it now. I have mainly been playing with making use of the web cam and seeing how I can use that to manipulate and interact with things on screen. We even based our organism project using processing, which was good. I got myself two really good books on it which are linked to from the processing website. I recommend for anyone looking to get into it, they really are good and the project would not have been possible for me without them by my side.
While we are on the topic of uni projects, I’m working in a group with four others and we are redesigning and re-branding Solution:Web which has been a site of mine for years. It’s both exciting and a little strange to be working on it, but it’s an ideal chance to push ourselves and get it sorted. We had talked in the past about teaming up for work and this assignment was the perfect opportunity to just get on with it, no excuses. I have been working on the design for the last couple of weeks and we have got a good idea of the direction we would like to take the site and the brand. I’m looking forward to getting in a few new projects and getting the whole team involved on them. It will be good to be able to take on bigger and more demanding projects and clients. Spreading out the work and being able to specialise in fewer areas will be good I think and should take a lot of stress off my shoulders.