Step One

Finally… having patience is starting to pay off because I’ve received some wonderful news yesterday. I’ve been invited to meet up on Monday morning to be part of a group of people who will be given the opportunity to study and work at the same time. This in itself is nothing new because there are quite a few possibilities to accomplish the same.

In this case however, the government and a few other organisations expect a lack of psychiatric nursing staff in the next three years so they have invested money in a special project to train people. It means that the required study which would normally take four years will be taught in three years instead, starting with a three months crash course.

After the crash course you’ll be working four days a week and attend school on the fifth day for the next three years to get a bachelor degree. My goal is a master degree because I’d like to finish the psychology study that I started years ago. At the time -causing disagreements- I was forced to stop because of an unwilling/unsympathetic partner.

I’m really looking forward to start the study and try to get another degree. My personal situation and this recession have forced me to think about my future in a creative way. I’ve been lucky to have turned a hobby into a career at the time, but things have changed and I’ve come to the conclusion that I need a career that will provide for the next twenty years.

Don’t get me wrong, there will be side projects and I will never give up on the creative part of me. In fact I’m still working on the long-term business plan which involves design and that along with the webdesign business will be the creative outlet that I’ll be needing to keep things interesting in that area. I’ll need that outlet because it’s part of who I am.

Although I’m totally committed and enthusiastic to make this application work for the next three to seven years it will still be ‘a way to pay the bills‘ and live a comfortable life. I’ve to choose security over current instability, people are still getting laid off and no one knows what’s gonna happen next but it doesn’t mean I’ll be giving up on creativity, far from it!

There are more steps planned ahead but for now I’m taking one at a time because that one step will cause a chain reaction once I’ll be on a roll and I’m getting all excited thinking about what lies ahead. It seems I’m finally about to get that long deserved break *wink*

Flash 8 Actionscripting

Things have been hectic last week when I started the Flash 8 Actionscripting course. It was quite an experience and I’ve met some really nice people. I thought I wouldn’t be able to follow but I realised I actually learned a lot when I explained some of the scripting to A.. During those three days I learned to build a game entirely in coding. On Friday, the last day of the course, the game contained only four movieclips, everything else was code.
It was a very interesting course and my brain was fried each day when I left Holborn to go home by Tube but it was definitely worth it! I’m just feeling slightly uncertain about whether I will use coding or not; I’m a visual person, therefore I chose to become a graphic designer, I have a trained eye for design subtleties and find myself nagging about letter spacing or kerning whenever I see something totally wrong design-wise.
I can easily point out five centimetre between my two index fingers, if I would ask you to measure it, it would be exact five centimetre [or any length]. This is caused by the fact that at graphic art school I have been drilled to draw exact 5mm by 5mm squares with exact diagonals within a 10 by 10 centimetre square. And if one would be slightly [read plus or minus 0.1 mm] wrong I had to start all over again. I had to draw characters [typography/display typography and typeface design] by hand in different sizes using different techniques, ink, paint and a Burmester Curve Drawing Aid Set aka a French Curve.
Coding is not a visual thing, it’s more or less a maths thing, typing lines while using certain methods to create actions/output. Actionscripting is object oriented programming, you could create a simple circle by coding it instead of drawing and I’m still not sure if I would rather draw or use coding to create the same object. According to Matt Weisfeld [The Object-Oriented Thought Process] learning Object Oriented concepts is not accomplished by learning a specific development method or a set of tools. Doing things in an Object Oriented manner is, simply put, a way of thinking…
I’m trained to be visual and not a programmer, although I now understand the concept it still doesn’t make me a programmer, I will probably end up being a mixture of both. It was a hectic course and I’m glad I did it, I have another certificate to mention on my CV. For now I will re-read the book and start practicing what I’ve learned but I’ve promised myself if I won’t be able to code that circle within a certain amount of time I will allow myself to simply use the drawing tool…
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