[Or, mak­ing up for a dis­tinct absence of post­ing for var­i­ous rea­sons not to be dis­cussed but hope­fully rec­ti­fied — the con­tent absence, that is — by this post.]

Until about three weeks ago, I was con­vinced I was going to take a year off between fin­ish­ing school and start­ing uni to work full time. I’d roundly insulted a small web firm a cou­ple of weeks before leav­ing for New Zealand, re-building their site with CSS in about three hours (it wasn’t per­fect, but it was a decent effort) and going into their office to tell them their ver­sion sucked and mine was bet­ter. To date, the web­site in ques­tion hasn’t been ‘fixed’, as it were, but I got a call the day after I returned from New Zealand ask­ing if I was inter­ested in com­ing in for an inter­view. I’ve been work­ing four days a week there since.

Tori came back. We spent some time together, and I kind of realised that putting off Uni­ver­sity for another year wasn’t a bril­liant move, con­trary to what more than a hand­ful of… older peo­ple… had said. The main rea­son is prob­a­bly social (which I don’t ever talk about too much on here, I guess), but finan­cially it’s not… com­pelling… to stay any fur­ther away from the other side of Uni any longer than is nec­ces­sary, because “that side” means a job/career I’m inter­ested in as a longer-term option, hence finan­cial sta­bil­ity more so than in an indus­try I’m per­fectly inter­ested in pro­vided I get to do the things I like — and where I am presently for­tu­nate enough to be in a posi­tion where that’s pretty close to what I’m doing — and indif­fer­ent about it (the indus­try) oth­er­wise. Social/political infor­ma­tion the­ory notwith­stand­ing, because that’s an entirely sep­a­rate ket­tle of fish that relates both to my pre– and post– uni direc­tions. Which are, inci­den­tally, IT/connectivity/accessibility now, and edu­ca­tion later. Some­where in the mid­dle there’ll be (is?) a fusion of the two, which has been bandied about a lit­tle over the last 12 months. I had a very inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion RE: some­thing along these lines last night, which will hope­fully evolve into some­thing in the not-too dis­tant future!

So yes, as of Mon­day I’m offi­cially an Arts stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney. In a way I feel bad about this because I’d said to work that I was plan­ning on stick­ing around in a near-F/T capac­ity for a year (and at the time I had been), but at the same time this feels so much more… sen­si­ble? Plus every­one was mind-blowingly nice about it, even though I called on Sat­ur­day to say I’d be in late Mon­day because I had to enrol (because of when the offer had come in, and because I’d been putting off say­ing it the week before).

Any­way, in sum­mary: I’m work­ing nearly full time doing web devel­op­ment in an awe­some role where I get to do lots of CSS, semantic-web junk, usabil­ity work, and some occa­sional JavaScript (though mer­ci­fully not too much! Still learn­ing. If any­one else in Aus is inter­ested in get­ting a copy of Jeremy Keith’s allegedly-excellent “DOM Script­ing” book, let me know so we can order a few copies from Ama­zon and get cheaper ship­ping, because no-one in Aus­tralia is stock­ing copies for another month or three!). And as much or as lit­tle server-side work as I want. At the minute I’m unequiv­o­cally say­ing “lit­tle”, but that might change at some point, maybe. I’m going to uni, too. That doesn’t start until March, so I’m going to be work­ing ‘nor­mally’ up until then, and after that feel­ing my way accord­ing to timeta­bles, how much of a life I have, how broke I am, etcetera!

Tied into the whole work thing, my first to-be-promoted-on-TV web­site is going live some­time in the wee hours of Sun­day Mon­day, which is auda­ciously excit­ing. Not in the least because it will hope­fully attract insane amounts of traf­fic, and the CSS-is-good-for-your-bandwidth-costs argu­ment car­ries weight here!! It also fea­tures AJAX, chiefly for usability/bandwidth-saving rea­sons… but also because it’s just damn cool! Any­way, there will be posts, screen­shots, etcetera (prob­a­bly say­ing the same kind of thing I just said, only nam­ing names and with pretty pic­tures!) sched­uled for release here to co-incide with the site’s launch, so… watch this space.

As for Uni? Eng­lish, Phi­los­o­phy, Clas­sics and (Ancient) Greek are cur­rently on the menu. Greek… may be swapped out, pos­si­bly. For Lin­guis­tics or maybe Latin if any­thing, but pos­si­bly not. The rea­son­ing behind it — because I’ve attracted many strange looks as I tell peo­ple I’m plan­ning on study­ing Ancient Greek — is essentially:

1. Learn­ing another lan­guage (any other lan­guage) helps me under­stand Eng­lish bet­ter. Doing Eng­lish, no-one will ever explain gram­mar and struc­ture of lan­guage to me. It sucks. Admit­tedly, Lin­guis­tics could prove to be use­ful in this depart­ment, too.
2. Ancient Greek ties in with the Clas­sics courses I’m tak­ing. Don’t ask me to remem­ber what they are, or even look them up, because I don’t have a copy of my pref­er­ences (they took it, because their stu­pid com­put­ers were stu­pidly bro­ken. I’m so glad I’m not study­ing IT!) and it’s not avail­able online yet and I’m just lazy. And try­ing to get this mas­sive post fin­ished so I can get back to hav­ing a life, or something.
3. The New Tes­ta­ment is writ­ten in Greek. As Kris­ten so elo­quently expressed it last night:
   

   You can be one of those peo­ple at Bible stud­ies who go “Well, the greek word for that actu­ally means ‘this is ambiguous…’”

   Heh. Marcelo coughed some­thing that sounded sus­pi­ciously like “Moore Col­lege” (a Syd­ney Bible col­lege) when he found out, but that’s not really what I had in mind choos­ing it… maybe, though!

Any­way. The blog has nearly caught up to me. Almost. There’s a bunch of other stuff hap­pen­ing, but this is the glut of stuff I needed to write at some point and had been putting off!

Tags: Amazon, australia, DOM, JavaScript, Jeremy Keith, Moore College, New Zealand, semantic-web junk, time doing web development, University of Sydney, web