So, What Have I Actually Been Doing For the Past Half Year? - Part 3
December 28, 2007
This is the conclusion to the 3 part series where I fill in all the gaps over the past ½ a year. Just thinking back, I’ve had a number of memorable moments over the past few months. Quite special indeed.
Anyways, although I don’t know yet I presume that I have made it over to the second year of University. I feel very fortunate as most of my subjects haven’t required an exam and the ones that have were all done on campus. What this means is that instead I had major assignments for my subjects. When it comes to study, during the working year I like to concentrate on finishing my work load as soon as possible, as well as possible so that I can have larger spaces of free time which in some cases I use for early revision. I sound like a real square bear here eh? But I don’t think its the case because my goal is to work quickly and productively so that I can enjoy myself earlier than everyone else. If I have some time a few weeks before an exam, I’ll go back and revise early so that during the exam week I can just sit back and watch everyone else freak out. Or in the case of last semester; I finished all of my major assignments as early as possible. Which gave me two weeks free to revise Chinese. Now because Chinese I’m learning Chinese all the time now, I didn’t see the exam as a big deal. Also because of my friends, I had already been revising well in advanced. So putting this into perspective, my holidays basically started a month before most other students. Which I think is huge.
So in this time I’ve been breezing through a pile of games and when possible catching up with my mates. This month of free time has also been dedicated towards making a fresh start over the holiday period. My goal has been to clear any distractions so that I can just push through and do what I need to do. So as you already know I have fixed up my blogging situation. This is just one of those steps.
Over this time I have started something that is slowly overtaking my life; eBay. I never use to think much of the service but now that I have realized how excellent it is I just can’t stop. My brother and I wrote a list of games that we need to fully complete our video game collection and thanks to eBay we are filling that list at a brisk pace. We’ve gone back and rebought the NES, the only videogame console that we have sold. It was pretty unfortunate actualy, we had a slew of 13 games and an extra dogbone styled controller (the best controllers). So the last few weeks have also been a trip down memory lane and a real nostalgic hit to the senses. So far we have managed to grab a nice slew of games, we have bought back most of the original 13 incluing our two first carts; a rare 3 in 1 with Super Mario Bros, Tetris and Nintendo World Cup and the other being a game called Totally Rad. I’ll be posting up more about these in the gaming blog. I think that our list so far is probably around about 15 games, we still have another 6 being shipped and then about 10 more to pick up. So about 30 NES games in all.
Overall our game collecting goal is to own the best/the games that interested us for that particular console. The consoles? NES-Wii, GameBoy-DS, PSone-PS3. And about 20-30 games per console. Really what we are doing now is filling in the gaps and ATM the NES has the largest gap.
So that pretty much concludes this 3 part series. To wrap it up, the last ½ a year has been fantastic. I know that I said it this time last year but I’ll say it again, I feel as though I am at a high point in my life. I don’t think that I have ever been happier than I have before.
Tags: Life, ebay, totally rad, nintendo entertainment system, video game consoles
Posted in Life | Comments (0)
So, What Have I Actually Been Doing For the Past Half Year? - Part 2
December 20, 2007
Okay, so its time to answer the question. The middle break was quite a good one, I finally got to play a decent amount of games, I spent a decent amount of time with friends and worked a bit in preparation for this new store. I also set up a new blog; success in the Digital Life and wrote 20 articles to post on the site. This was eventually canned due to time constraints.
Something that became apparent to me in the first month at Uni was that they whole community vibe from school last year wasn’t there. I no longer had someone on my shoulder every minute of the day to talk to. This really bothered me because it was so comforting. I also needed to improve my Chinese, I had lost my nack over the Christmas holiday break and still, by one semester in hadn’t got it back yet. The lack of contact hours at Uni also frustrated me, because I finished earlier than my friends and often wasted more time going home earlier and missing the afternoon express trains. I wanted to fix all of these niggling problems and become busy and ‘on the ball’ again. Although I was enjoying Uni life at the time I don’t think that I was getting 100% out of it. So first week pack, I decided to fix these problems.
This week was a fantastic week, I managed to fix all of these problems and regained the ‘community’ feel back into my Uni life. I began catching up with one of my Chinese friends for a few hours to practice language together. On the way back from Uni one day I saw a Chinese guy listening to his iPod with the song names and title all in Chinese. I’d also been looking for some Chinese music at the time so I introduced myself and asked if he had any suggestions. We were talking for a little while and he gave me his email in the end. A day or two later he emailed me and we had planned to meet up to practice during the week. Unfortunately I could not meet my friend on the first day that we had planned to meet because my other chinese friend had some serious accommodation problems that I needed to help her fix. But eventually we started practicing. We generally practice together for about 6-8 hours a week, during the afternoons, this fixed the traveling issue substantially, helped me improve my Chinese and made me feel on the ball again. With this I also practiced with my other friend as well, so it each week I got about 8hrs of extra practice in and as a result this fixed most of the other problems that I was having.
I also made a few overall lifestyle changes which helped this move as well. In the second semester I did less linguistics and more design work. Infact one of my design courses was a second year course (thats 2 second year courses I studied that semester). Because my design courses were more advanced I had more free choice and opinion. Instead of being bound to lame practicals with tedious constraints, I got to focus more on creative output. This also meant that I began to not dislike my design tutor, in fact she was a fantastic help during the semester.
This part of my life wasn’t great just because of these things though. I was now working in a more relaxed working environment where I got my customer respect. E3 was on around that time (I get really excited about E3). Makes me remember my roots.
Also because of E3 I had some fantastic opportunities to write my best content yet for the gaming blog. I am still very proud of the Resident Evil 5 trailer analysis posts.
This set up pretty much formed the base for the second semester. From here things just got better, design classes became fun as I got to use my own photography work and selected themes. I became better friends with most of the people at Uni and very good friends with my Chinese buddies. I started enjoying my Chinese classes more as the extra help allowed me to understand the work better.
I feel as though that week helped formed the base of a successful semester which has followed on to a more cheerful year.
Tags: Life, university life, chinese tutoring, iPod
Posted in Life | Comments (0)
So, What Have I Actually Been Doing For the Past Half Year? - Part 1
December 12, 2007
Before I answer that question I’m going to talk briefly about how the first semester went, skipping past the first 2 months. By that time I had gotten over a major dilemma which was bothering me substantially. I wasn’t sure if I should be studying Chinese or if I should study design. With this I also had a few other pressing issues going in which weren’t making this any easier.
As you might have guessed I decided to study Chinese which looking back was the safest and best choice. I don’t regret that decision.
Looking back, the first semester in several ways wasn’t all that great. One of the linguistics courses that I was studying I downright hated, it just seemed pretty worthless. Although linguistics makes up a decent chunk of my program, some of the courses/topics are just pathetically weak.
I also wasn’t having much fun with inDesign in my design course, the work was o so tedious.>< I think that because of this I became unfairly frustrated with my design tutor. Chinese was my favourite course but man I struggled a bit along the way. I spent the majority of my study time on Chinese.
Throughout the semester I’d continually get this feeling that I was all over the place. The thing is, what I do at Uni means that I don’t have a lot of contact hours, I’m also located at two different Universities. Back then I also had Thursdays off as well which was usually dedicated to working on my linguistics. The way it worked out was that I spent more time traveling to and from Uni as I started and finished quite often in the middle of the day (less express trains). So the small amount of contact hours meant that I only saw my home University friends twice a week and switching between Universities meant that I saw less of the same people. So it kinda felt that I was never at one place long enough to be settle. Although on Fridays us boys that went to school together would meet up and go out somewhere, we’d also spend a few weekends catching up too.
Around this time the retail store that I was working for at the time was preparing to transform itself as the store was bought by another retailer. So this there was a lot of uncertainty around this time of the year.
What I have said above doesn’t paint a very positive picture does it? I want to stress that these are just the bits that sucked about the first semester. There were a number of highlights, obviously fitting into University life is an achievement.
I also managed to surprise myself a few weeks in with how many friends I’d actually made. Further more last year I would have never thought that 80% of my University friends would be female. It turns out that they are which I still find somewhat surprising due to my nerdish qualities.
I also managed to kick start my blog, instead of writing about me I wrote about games and produced a few decent articles.
On the whole the first semester was good, not outstandingly fantastic but still good.
Tags: Life, university, chinese, design
Posted in Life | Comments (0)
Yearly Traditions
December 4, 2007
Over the last 3 years I have noticed a trend of sorts emerging. Its something that I have been talking about in this blog for the last..well most of the time since its been up. That is for the last 3 years each year seems to adopt the same set of circumstances.
The year begins with a promising start which for the first month works out quite well. Despite this the first semester on the whole doesn’t maintain the momentum from the first month. Along the way theres a number of bumps in the road.
The start of the second semester generally tends to be the time of enlightenment. Where everything click into place. New relationships are formed, old relationships are rebuilt, every facet of life seems to be running at a flawless pace.
The last month of the working year is crunch time, where everything I’ve worked for comes to a close. This time generally is when the struggle is at its greatest and it is te greatest triumph of the year.
Now before or after this struggle there is a strange time where I seem to lose total control of what is going on around me. No matter how hard I try to hold on, everything gets away from me. Throughout this time a number of iconic events take place which strangely seem to represent life lessons of sorts. Eventually I get back on track.
At the moment I seemed to have stepped out of that fuzzy state of no control and am putting myself back on track.
Tags: Life, yearly traditions
Posted in Life | Comments (0)
Next Page »
Have you checked out my gaming personal blog yet? No! Then take a squiz:
