Recent Things
Everything happens in April!
I finally managed to pass the practical driving test. Yes, I should have done this four years ago, yes its for an automatic license rather than manual, and yes it was my fourth try. I like to think that for all those reasons the fact that I actually passed this time is more special than if I'd passed it straight out when I started driving when I was 16. I still have to do 25 hours of supervised driving before I'm allowed out on my own, but it won't be long until I'm let loose on the streets - so be careful!
After working hard to enter the MIX06 competition to go to the web convention in Las Vegas, I realised that I don't even make the time to participate in events held by the web communitiy in my own city. So I went to the IDEAS3 held by Port 80, which was an interesting experience. I think I need to work my confidence and social skills - I'm just way too shy. The talks were fascinating and opened my eyes to a few new concepts, which I need to look into more when they actually put the podcast up and I can find out the url's of the websites mentioned.
My work is sending me and two of my colleagues to a six week graphic design course, which is a dream come true for me because 1) I've been doing print design for the past few months with absolutely no idea what I'm doing and 2) I don't have to pay for it. It does mean I have to get used to having homework and doing assignments again, but with the classes only being once a week its not a huge deal. It's interesting where everyone in the class is coming from though: we've got a photographer, some marketing people, an animator... no other engineering dropouts.
I'm trying to get more serious with building up my sad illustration skills, but posting nude studies here in my main blog didn't seem like a good idea, and the blog I made for it in my Projects section was too out of the way and didn't really allow me to post the actual images due to the way I designed the site. So my Sketchbook now has its own subdomain and layout. I still need to fill out the other pages a bit and fix up some issues with the tiling, but it was a fun layout to make and a good chance to try out Wordpress, which I'm finding to be much more flexible than Blogger which I'm currently using for this site.
Oh and happy Easter everyone!
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Graduated!
In all the excitement of being a graduate, I forgot that I hadn't actually graduated yet.
For some strange reason my university likes to have its graduation ceremonies months after students have finished and passed all their classes. Mine was a couple of days ago. Maybe I would have felt more excitement if I had just recently finished my course, or if my friends weren't doing combined degrees and were graduating with me, or if I actually had some passion for my course. I made friends with the guy sitting next to me, taught him to make origami stars and had my five seconds on the stage shaking the subdean's hand without tripping over my graduation robes or doing something stupid. It was nice to know that I had my parents, best friend and boyfriend in the audience feeling proud and clapping for me amongst the hall of people politely clapping for all of the hundreds of graduates (everyone was appluaded individually - that's like two hours of almost constant clapping!).
Thinking back on my course... I suppose the mostly useful and applicable skills that I learned was how to use and manipulate people. Which is sad in a way, but I guess those skills are more useful than learning how to program in Haskell or Smalltalk. I guess what you get out of a course depends on what you put into it, which in my case wasn't a lot - I knew what I wanted to do, and programming wasn't it. Still, I know I'm not the only one who felt that the Compter Science course at my university lacked practicality and seemed to have a lot of useless fluff that is quickly forgotten (Haskell and Smalltalk!). I don't miss the actual studying part of my degree at all.
I really miss having student discounts though. After having concession for 15 years of my life full priced anything seems like a rip off! I only manage to get away with it on buses - who would question that a short girl carrying a laptop in one hand, another bag in the other, sketchbook under one arm and a pencil behind the ear heading towards UWA is anything other than a student?
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