Is it me, or is it quiet in here?

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Written by: Jed

Both. (Let me explain.)

Personally, it’s been a summer of nothings – which was exactly what I needed. Asides from a short Florida trip, and a few random nights with friends, it’s been a relatively uneventful summer. A lot of university/college graduates usually take a year-off after convocation (or at least they want to); I on the other-hand went right back into another program. This isn’t really out of the ordinary, but the fact that this has been my first real summer out of school is. In retrospect I took a unique scenic-route through university; sure I did it in four years, but it was a literal four years which included four memorable summers in lecture halls. After receiving a piece of paper that told me I graduated, I immediately took the chance to enroll into a program I believed was more tailored to my interests (sorry to all the sociologists and economists out there) – IT, which I also immediately discovered wasn’t. I finished up the first year, but eventually dropped out (call me a college dropout). But the year wasn’t a total waste. It reintroduced me to the world of web development. Sure it was just an intro course in HTML and JavaScript, but despite that, it was fun. But this time, instead of diving right into summer school, I thought better of it. Outside of putting some serious thought into the short-list of programs I was interested in for the coming fall term, I did as little as possible. A lot of the summer was spent on TWiT Live, and my 20 other podcast subscriptions. It was spent constantly refreshing Engadget, Lifehacker, MacRumors, and the handful of other tech-blogs out there. And oh yeah, there were the Twitters, and the FriendFeeds somewhere in between that. Call it a summer of Internet consumption.

It was also this Internet overdosing that made me want to go back to school. It came down to two programs, one in multimedia production, and the other in media communications. Both focused not only on content production, but distribution as well (each leaning in one direction). And after listening to months of TWiTs absolutely rip old-forms of media apart, I chose the latter. I know it’s been said for years now, but it seems like we’re finally seeing signs of everything moving online. The newspaper is finally showing signs of dying. CDs and records? I say digital downloads. The idea of pirating killing the music industry has also recently waned – ask Chris Brown. And TV, one word, Hulu (and three letters, VPN if you’re outside the US). And as much as I hate what it’s become, Twitter has changed the way companies communicate with their customers – for the better. A company’s online branding is becoming all the more important. It’s this fact that convinced me to go into Humber College’s new Media Communications program. As of now it seems to be the wiser choice, at least when it comes to employment possibilities. And if I’m late to the party, there seems to be enough of a focus on content production to give me some options. How could it go wrong?

As great of a sales job that past paragraph may have been, I’m not 100% convinced. If I didn’t have a habit of completely deleting old blog databases, I may have a post to link you to from last summer. To sum up, I think that post went something to the like of,

IT. I like computers. I like technology. It’s what I do at home. It has decent job prospects. How could it go wrong?

And yet, it did. My problem (one of them) is I subscribe to this idea that school should be fun. If it isn’t, why stay? (Though the price of tuition is a good reason.) Good and interesting course content is key. But the delivery of content is just as, if not more important. The teachers/instructors/professors and overall school environment contribute greatly in making the most interesting of topics, less so, and the uninteresting ones, even more (and vice-versa). It’s something that I wont really know until I sit in a class. But then again, maybe I’m living in an ideal world where education should be fun and rewarding. I also believe in finding a career that does the same thing.

Time will tell. A big difference from this summer from the last is how excited I am to start the new program. I’ve even gone through a couple of CSS books to update my HTML 1.0 repertoire. It was actually fun. Though I did have to sift through a number of CSS books to find a series suitable to my learning style (thank you SitePoint!). Do I sense some parallels going on here? I’m hoping this program, and this school does the same. If not, well I’m cutting my losses, and finding one of those real jobs a lot of grown-ups seem to always be complaining about. (Granted it’s a lot quieter in a recession.)

As for the lack of content on here. It’s hard to write about nothing. Though I’m working on it with this entry. We (yes there are three of us at flagrant3) recorded some rough ideas for some sort of podcast throughout this summer, but nothing polished enough for release. Blog-wise, it’s pretty clear that I’m the lone-writer on-cast. It wouldn’t be much of a problem, if my interest in writing an entry was a bit more consistent. The next few months should be interesting. I’m playing with WordPress theme development, and if school is all cracked-up to be, then this site should receive some sort of revamp. I’m even playing with the idea of moving away from WordPress onto a platform a little more versatile, like Drupal. And of course the idea of the podcast is always lingering. But all of this playing with ideas is moot, if there isn’t content to deliver. And I’m optimistic that the content will come, and more vital, that I’ll actually get around to keeping this place updated.

Our about us description in the sidebar makes clear our lack of direction with this site. It’s been our tagline since we started on WordPress.com just over a year ago. It may be that lack of focus that explains the similar lack of content – but we don’t  do focus well anyway. This blog was started to document topics surrounding the random conversations we three have – and maybe one day soon, it’ll get to that point.

Until then, I’ll leave you with this thought…

Whatever you thought about the recent Dragonball and Street Fighter movies, it’s clear that Chris Klein was cast in the wrong one.