Something unpredictable…
27 Jan 2006[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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!</li> </ol> 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!