Tags and Semicolons

Blogger Resignation

2010-08-07T13:32:00.000+01:00

I'm thinking of giving up blogging. I given a good shot but I'm just not finding it enjoyable. I'm not really a writer type. Instead, I might devote my time to developing a gadget to transfer my thoughts to text so I can just think up my blogs instead of writing them!

A Working Woman

2010-07-18T16:01:00.002+01:00

On Monday I started work. My first ever real job! I am now a "Communications Assistant" for A New Direction (no, it's not a Glee club). To explain what either of those are would take an extremely long blog. So I'm going to try to tell you in a nutshell.

A New Direction is a registered charity that aims to help young Londoners explore their city's culture and find ways of being creative. Their three main focuses are:

A New Direction to Careers
A New Direction to Creative Potential
A New Direction to Audiences

They work with a lot of schools to achieve this. They help schools find ways of making lessons exciting by using creative techniques or bringing in artists, musicians, writers etc. They also work with young people who are not in school to help them achieve their dream of working in the media and arts sector by providing the tools, contacts and work opportunities to gain experience.

How do I fit into all this? I work with the communications department who deal with the communication of the company to the outside world such as through, marketing and advertising, social media, the press and their website. I will be assisting with all these areas. And I get to go to cool and interesting events! (Went to Lovebox on Friday, though it was only for a couple of hours).

After a week of working (although it was mainly induction stuff), I think I will really fit into this company. Everyone is so friendly and the environment is great; we don't have to wear formal clothes. I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in. The first few weeks will be hard as I'm trying to get used to waking up early every morning, which I haven't done since uni (even then I used to skip morning lectures!). It takes about 40 minutes to get there, which isn't too bad I guess.

So I'm officially a working woman (and the only one in my family!). It's also great to be earning money as I've missed buying random things from Ebay or Etsy. Once I've started doing actual work , I'll report back on what it's like to be a Communications Assistant. Ta ra.

Terrible Thursday

2010-07-15T22:49:00.001+01:00

I feel like I need to vent out my frustration to someone or something so I am doing so via my blog! This morning I had the worst start to the day - I woke up late! I slept right through my alarm somehow. Or maybe it didn't ring because ,,, how can I sleep through my alarm?? It's pretty loud and vibrates. Well anyways after I jump out of bed and shower quickly and get dressed, all in half an hour, I rush out of the house.

And as luck would have it, disaster strikes again - I can't find my Oyster card! I madly scuffle through my bag while other commuters rush past me, up the stairs to the platform. I start to feel a little embarrassed but carry on searching, hoping it will appear magically, even though I know deep down that it's not there. Realising I'm going to be late for work (I have a job! More on that in a future blog post), I reluctantly decide to buy a paper ticket. I spend about 5 minutes trying to work out which ticket to buy as I wanted the cheapest possible ticket. All the travelcards were ridiculously overpriced but I eventually hand over seven pounds something for one.

But it doesn't end there. After my train ride, I arrive at my destination. I put my ticket through the barriers but it doesn't work. I sigh and go over to the man that stands there and told him my ticket doesn't work. He tells me something I didn't expect, I bought the wrong ticket! My ticket didn't include zone 3. He mumbles something about not being able to change it since it was issued from somewhere else or something. I look at him, wanting to scream but instead I wave my hands about and huff and puff. He told me to go over to another platform to a ticket office and sort it out. I glance at the time and I have 15 minutes, give or take, to get to work. I rush to the ticket office, face a grumpy employee, change my ticket, get out of the station, walk as fast as I can since running would make me look like an idiot, and surprisingly I made it on time-ish. Maybe about 2 minutes late.

I sat down, took a deep breath and hoped the rest of the day would only get better. Well it didn't get worse for sure.

Well that's my ranting done. Sorry I've bored you. You probably didn't even reach the end to read this bit so I can say anything I like. You smell.

We've made a browser that looks like a Fisher-Price toy

2010-07-07T16:51:00.001+01:00

A few days ago someone posted on twitter this hilarious video. It's another Hitler Meme. I've seen a few of these but this is the first geekiest one I've seen so far. It shows Hitler's reaction to Opera's new browser beating Chrome on speed. I love geeky things to do with computers so this was laughs aplenty!

My favourite quotes from it include:

You idiot! Nobody uses developer builds!
You call yourself developers because you spent years in univeristy where you only learned to make YouTube videos and Pac Man games!
We've made a browser that looks like a Fisher-Price toy.
Most people still don't know what a browser is! They think a search engine is the same as a browser. - It's okay, I didn't know either, when I started.

I wonder if there are anymore geeky ones. I think I'll do a bit of searching to see what I can find! If you've got any favourite Hitler Meme videos, do let me know!

By the way, I'm with Hitler on this - if you think this means I'll switch browsers, you are seriously mistaken. Chrome FTW!

Remember using WordArt in School?

2010-07-04T23:48:00.000+01:00

I remember when I was in secondary school, thinking how cool WordArt was. Practically everybody was overusing it. Especially as titles on their coursework! When I think about it now, it is so cringey! What were we thinking? Well I played around with WordArt today in Microsoft Publisher for old times sake and a little giggle.

Delicious.com

2010-07-04T17:24:00.001+01:00

Recently I've been coming across some useful websites and interesting articles. Sometimes I find a tutorial/tip that I might need some day. The obvious thing to do is bookmark it. But I started thinking about how effective this really was. What if I was using a different computer and needed that link? What if my laptop breaks and I lose all those bookmarks? I needed a better way to store my bookmarks.

So a Google search of "social bookmarking" led me to this Wikipedia list of all the social bookmarking sites. Ones from the list that I'd heard of or used before were Delicious, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. I knew what kind of site I was looking for. I wanted somewhere to just store my bookmarks basically. I've used Digg and Reddit briefly as research for a project at uni so I was familiar with how they worked. Those sites were more about sharing what you have found with other users and voting on them, which I wasn't interested in. My bookmarks weren't that interesting. After reading the Delicious and StumbleUpon pages on Wikipedia, I got an idea of what they do too.

I decided to give Delicious a try. Delicious is owned by Yahoo!, therefore you need a Yahoo! ID to sign up. I already had a Yahoo! ID from years ago so signing up only took minutes. I got started straight away, looking through my browser bookmarks and tweets to find links to add. After building up a small list, I explored the features of the site. When adding a bookmark, you can tag it with a number of keywords and choose to make it private if you wish. The tags proved to be useful for finding similar bookmarks so I ended saving a lot of these new bookmarks I found. Now I have a backlog of bookmarks to read! Next to each bookmark there's a number which indicated the number of people who have also added it, which gives you an idea of it's popularity.

So that was my journey through social bookmarking. I'm pleased with my choice and intend to use Delicious for a long time coming. I hope this also helps you make a decision.