The Long Holiday Overview

March 4, 2008

Originally Written on the 18th Feburary 2008

One of the reasons why I write for this blog is to keep an account of what I am doing for previous reference. I think that this post is one of those which fits this bill perfectly.

In the past hour I was looking over my Rainlender calender app. For those whom aren’t familiar with Rainy its one of those small calender desktop applications which you can pin dates to etc. I use mine quite a bit and mark down any important dates on it. Because I reformatted my laptop several months ago Rainy goes back to just about when I believe that my holidays started.

Cut to the chase, I was looking over what I have done over the long holiday break and decided that I should clarify a lot of it. You see I love looking back at who I was at various dates etc which is partly why I have this blog. For me the holidays are a huge opportunity to make a lot of progress across the board. So I want to run through how my holidays have progressively played out:

Prelude

I like to think that my holidays started on the 5th of November 2007 and will finish the 3rd 2008. So I have (had) 4 months up my sleeve which is huge. There are two reasons why I have such a long holiday firstly because I am a Uni student and Uni holidays rock and secondly because I started mine earlier. You see on the second point, most Uni students probably finish up from around the 12-25th Novemeber but I consider that my holidays started on the 5th.

I wanted to start my holidays as early as possible which I could do and did end up doing. You see, the majority of my courses don’t have an exam but instead major assignments. Fortunately with the help of fore sight I managed to plan out my assignments well enough so that I would be basically finished by the 5th which is actually the earliest possible date. Otherwise I might have finished u two weeks later.

I started my major linguistics essay as soon as possible because well it was the most dreaded and dull assignment that I had to finish. So I finished the essay maybe a month or more early. This left me with design and Chinese work left and although Chinese is hard work and design takes a lot of time but they were easily much more painless than the linguistics work. So once I finished all of those all I had was a Chinese, two man presentation and the final Chinese exam. My presentation finished on the 5th which is where I want to start the holidays.

Now you are probably wondering about that exam right? which was about 12 days later..I think. Well It didn’t really bother me because I was going to be studying Chinese over the holiday period anyways.

Beginnings

This long holiday period is simply so generous. I’ve never had such a long holiday period before. I’d been hanging out for the holidays for so long that I wanted to make the most of it.

This meant that I started setting goals and planning what I was hoping to do right from the start. The day after I’d finished my Chinese exam I spent the day catching up with my friends from high school. We’d all finished our exams in the last 2 days. That weekend was my last shift at work as well. 3hrs on a Sunday. It had been about 3 weeks since I had last worked and they had rearranged the department I was working in. It was a terrible final shift which showcased the lack of communication and relevant in store training from other staff members.

The following week I finally got to meet up with my Chinese tutor. To provide some context, my Chinese teacher before the exam sent an email out to the class asking if anyone was interested in being tutored by a fellow Uni student fro China. Only two students decided to take it up. Not sure about the other student but I’ve been practicing with my tutor almost every week. Its the usual he helps me with Chinese and I try and help him with English.

It was election week as well which I tried to follow in the news. The two people that I voted for both got in. Yay. I also continued my Chinese revision throughout this time and up until now. My first goal was to cement last years(2007) grammar, I’d already been working on this before the exam so it was a natural continuation. That Friday I had the new gaming blog up as well.

The next week I spent doing the same thing; practicing with Chinese friends, catching up with other friends, tweaking the new blog, and revising Chinese. I believe that it was around this time that I was eBaying quite a lot as well.

In December I got to catch up with one of my favourite Chinese friends. Originally we had planned that over the holidays we would catch up and practice almost every weekday. Unfortunately he was taking on additional work (he writes for a Chinese basketball site) which was messing up his timetable and sleeping patterns.

Video Editing

Up to the 10th it was usual business. From then until almost Christmas I was spending a couple of days a week trying to figure out how to capture, crop and edit video for upcoming video reviews and video content for DP.com. You see my capture card only captures in Mpeg2 format. Because of the PAL letter boxing in our games I had to crop out the ugly black border. Just figuring out how to do this for free was god awful and so damn frustrating. Basically my production flow runs like this:

Capture video at I dunno about 576i in MPEG2 format. Then convert and shrink to 480 resolution thru Cyberlink Power Director. From there load Windows Media Encoder and alter the crop dimension to crop the frame. From there I can export it and use the video.

I’d been speaking with my mate Matty Jay about doing the voice work for all of this stuff. He decided to take it up and w were discussing ideas regularly. I did this for two reasons, firstly my voice just does not work well for recording. It sounds too muffled and unclear. I really would like to do the voice work but it just doesn’t sound as clear. Also Matty Jay has always been interested in doing some voice work, so I threw this opportunity his way.

Anyways heres the rest of my work flow:

Choose a game to review
do any further research if necessary
finish the game
write the review
send review text to Matt
gather the appropriate images and media
capture the video
crop the video to the correct size
record the voicework with Matty Jay
work with Matt to output the best voice
take all of the recorded files and stick them together and tweak the levels and any slight niggles with Audacity
now I can start producing, import the video and media
edit the video to match the voice work and flow of the review (this takes a few hours)
export, get some critque from my brother
upload and review strengths and weaknesses

Matt and I recorded on the 21st and I did all of the editing that night and the following day. The video was uploaded on the 23rd. Matt did the whole 5 minutes speech in one take which is why it didn’t sound that great. Unfortunately doing it all in one take was my idea which is why I defended his voicework because he did a stellar job.

Christmas Period

Because Christmas was on the way I was also organizing what to buy people and did the usual bit of shopping. By early December I had made my way onto writing a few Chinese essays, all of last years grammar was much clearer so the essays allowed me to further improve my writing. I think that I wrote about 5 essays that month ranging from 500 -2000 characters each. This, my video editing, planning with Matty Jay and buying Christmas gifts were taking up most of my time.

There is a gap for the Christmas week on my Rainy calender which is a little confusing. I think that I had decided to calm down on the work load. I had already got the new blog up, done heaps of Chinese work and was building up my video game collection. I also had a week off from meeting with my Chinese friends. So I think that this was the week in which I just relaxed, built up a few blog posts and was reunited with my old friend video games.

New Year Week

My new year started off really well. I spent New Years Eve with my high school buddies. It was a great bonding session. The day after we went into town and also went to the arcades for a few hours. I beat all of them at air hockey which I am very pleased about. That Friday we also caught up again.

Mad Season

The next three weeks were tough but necessary and because of them I have made a lot of wiser, smarter decisions for the future. The second week of January was dominated we me enrolling into my Uni courses, it sounds like a lot, to spend one week to enrol but unfortunately this is basically what it is like. I had to first figure out what I wanted to study that year based on the year’s default template (my program is extremely flexible and not just set in stone). Then I had to figure out which tutorials and lectures to enrol in so that I wouldn’t end up with a clash (I have two clashes in total). Then I have to enrol cross institutionally for Chinese. Which means running from one University to another to fill out forms and stuff.

That weekend we had a party we was a relief. Umm yeah after enrollment I had been brainstorming ideas about releasing a new site. It had seemed as though I had basically lost my job at work so I needed to think about the future. I spent a series of days pondering what to do when eventually it hit me. Once I got the idea I straight away planned and designed the site and started working on content. Unfortunately all of this was brought to a halt as I had to and am still waiting for my brother to program the content management system. I need a special system to deal with this new site and it is something that I am going to have to wait for.

Throughout this time I was still doing the usual Chinese studying and tutors. In January I had moved onto intensive reading, I was going through my additional readings book and ensuring that I full understood every sentence. If I ever had any problems then I would write them down for vocab and grammar lists. Which I have produced a few of so far.

Throughout this time I had decided to step up my bloging and see what I could do with it. I went on a long hunt for other blogs to read and affiliate with. I nailed down which forum communities I wanted to be a part of and started posting. I was basically on a complete blogging blitz. I also was tweaking like mad, adding tags to all of my posts, tagging images, reworking the design.

The Wind Down

I was grinding myself against a wall and needed to apply the breaks. So one day I decided to get back on track. This was at the start of January’s last week.

I cut down the blogs in which I was reading to only the essentials, from 60 RSS feeds (mix of blogs and other sites) down to about 35. I put all of this work for this new game website on hold (because I couldn’t really do anymore anyways). I finally decided to go for my drivers license and finally quit my job at Myers.

It sounds like it wasn’t all worth it but I have to say it was totally worth it. My blog subscribers jumped up substantially. I now have a strong list of blogs on my Blogroll and my Alexa rank has gone way up. I have produced some excellent articles which I am very proud of. Many of which have been praised by other bloggers which I admire. With some continued dedication I have a promising website in the pipeline which is almost all set up for me to just do the content and upload it. This site (and possibly my video game blog) I believe should also supplement the lack of a ‘real’ job. And my Chinese is continually getting better and I had enrolled into Uni.

Chinese New Year

I realized that because of all of this work I hadn’t seen two of my special Chinese friends for a while. I was still doing the usual weekly sessions but only with one of my friends. So I started trying to catch up with my other friends. One of them had actually gone home for the Chinese new year so that wasn’t possible. But it was okay as I was busy as it was.

I had actually forgotten but the week after was Chinese new year so I celebrated with my friends. One of them did a traditional dance thing and the other had a group meal. I’d also been practicing with them more. I also nabbed my L plates.

Conclusion

Well that is almost all of my holidays. I still have 2 weeks left and haven’t written a full entry about last week which was very exciting.

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Theres a Truth Begging to be Told

February 21, 2008

Originally Written on the 31st of January 2007

A few weeks back I enrolled into my 2008 Uni courses. I would have liked to have said that I had less trouble than last year but I didn’t. I have another unavoidable clash with Chinese which I can’t fix, I also almost flipped out when trying to enrol into Chinese, classes were quickly filling up and I had to wait a few days to enrol while this was going on. I think that in the end I was the second to last person to enrol.

Just yesterday morning I was woken by my phone going off, it was someone from UniSA ringing to tell me that I had to switch a tutorial time as I was the only student in that tutorial. Basically I have another clash, both on linguistics tutorials. So basically I miss out on a 2hr tutorial and on about 20minutes off another tutorial. Great, at least it gives me more free time. ^_^

What else has been going down with me, umm not a lot. I’ve been working hard on this new website idea, I have almost finished a design and am slowly building up content. It looks as though it will take me even longer to build up a strong database of content before I launch. Its not all bad though, it should give my brother plenty of time to work on the CMS.

I’ve also been meeting up with Matty Jay to do more video reviews for danielprimed.com and doing the weekly Chinese tutorials. I probably would have met up with a friends from Uni this week but my mind has been devoted entirely to this new project and has sometimes been occasionally distracted by the excellent Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam on the DS. I’m kinda pissed as I feel as though I have been very insincere by allowing my work load to get ahead of me.

Now that I’ve realized that its going to take a while longer to get this site done, have completely enrolled into Uni and quit my previous job, I’ve decided to relax a bit. I’m looking forward to spending more time with my friends and sleeping in some more as these other activities have been way too time consuming and straining lately. They’ve really distracted me over the past 2 weeks but were essential to what I need to get done.

I think that I’ll try to spend the last month of the holidays getting back into a healthy routine where I balance my spread of: blogging, spending time with friends, gaming and Chinese.

You see last year(at the start of Uni) my uncertainty surrounding my Uni choices, girl friend trouble and overall newbieness to Uni life threw me on a complete discourse which took a few months to figure out. And I don’t want to get back into that mess again, I just felt completely out of wack.

I ought to just throw out some rough goals to keep me on track:

Blogging
Continue the quality blog posts
Spend extra time (due to no job) to bank additional posts and improve overall quality
Advertise effectively through social bookmarking, foruming and continue network with other bloggers

Friends
When Uni is back on catch up more during the breaks
Spend more time at the arcades
Ensure that we continue to do stuff on Friday nights and on weekends
Work on other projects with Matty Jay
Continue to make more friends at Uni this year

Chinese
Spend just as much time as last semester practicing with Chinese friends
Do more intensive reading and listening
Fully understand all of the vocab, grammar, main text and additional texts each week

Website Work
Prioritize the spare time on weekends and days off to work on the upcoming websites

Games
Play more games, increase well being thru gaming
Round of the collection, dive back into eBay buying
Organize import games, arcade sticks etc.
Continue to learn more niche gaming

Personal
Relax a bit more
Keep blogging for yourself
Sleep enough

Yeah that ought to do it.

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