My Life on the Net

I only realised last Friday that it was in fact, the last day I would ever have a proper university course meeting. That means that soon I’ll be moving out of what has become home only to head back to Edinburgh for 3 tedious months and moving, yet again, into another university hall in the middle of September.

This place has become so comfortable, and as I’m here writing up my executive summary of my first year of university, I have to sit back and realise what I’m going to be leaving.

This year has been an extreme, and welcome, change to my life. I left high school and my old city to start afresh with new friends and new ideas–meeting people with like minds and genuinely enjoying myself.

I’ve started learning new things and filling in the gaps of my knowledge of my most favourite topics - web design & development. And while it’s been fun, it’s allowed me to branch out into other mediums and ideas.

The freedom I have had without a 9-4 school day has allowed me to enjoy education without it becoming too overbearing. Not only that, but it has allowed me to enjoy the time I have with friends and to enjoy my hobbies (however, since it’s been so cold my photography has been hard to deal with!).

It’s taught me that there can be, after all, happy and friendly lecturers who even stick xkcd comics and lolcats into their presentations. That’s what I call entertainment! But i’ve also learned there’s the bad ones which make you want to find a way to slip a sleeping tablet into your own drink!

And last but not least, it’s helped me learn how to live with a budget. With a fixed income, I’ve found it interesting trying to afford what I want while affording what I need–once meaning that I had to live off scotch pies for a week due to the fact I bought a new xbox game.

In four weeks I’ll be returning to the streets of Edinburgh, faced to get a job and keep myself busy. But I only wish I could stay here for as long as I wanted as I’ve become so used to the idea of student life and how much I’ve enjoyed my time in Dundee and in my course so far. I feel a little bit like Harry Potter during the summer months–I’ve got the scar and the institution I’ve come to love–but I’ve ditched the glasses and while I don’t have such a terrible family I would love to stay here all the time!

Here’s a tip.

If you want to socialise more when you’re living in halls and you don’t know why people aren’t coming to talk to you–leave your door open. Seems to do the trick. Also, go and say hi. Oh, and I almost forgot–talk back. That also seems to work. However, screaming and starting for long periods of time doesn’t.

Other tidbits:-

• My sister just got unconditional placements at both Abertay University and Duncan & Jordanstone Art College. She definitely deserves it.
• I might be in Germany and the Netherlands during August. Anyone from there?
• It’s the first time in 2 months I’ve picked up my clarinet, and the first time in 7 years I’ve sung and it sounded relatively good compared to my choir days (back in primary before my voice broke).
• My Nabaztag is saying random things to me.
• I’ve finally realised what I’m doing wrong in one of my ventures and will be getting busy for the next month and a half and hopefully will be earning a bit of money if I’m lucky.
• I still find it very bad that prices for mobiles in the UK from Skype to be very expensive (14p per minute). Talking in conference for an hour with my sister and a friend in conference cost me almost £7!
• I can code an AI for Connect4 in under 4 hours–it works, but doesn’t mean it should.
• This semester is a waste of time.
• Loving the fact my work is digital as I had to pick up my sister’s portfolio today - all 9.2kg of it.
• It is impossible to have too much tech. In a universe with ever expanding volume an inherent mass of tech is irrelevant even if a room in which it’s being stored remains in constant volume. [1][2][3][4]

I have had another weekend that I wish that as a photographer I wouldn’t have to deal with. I’m hoping to complete a photo book for December titled ‘Age’ and in that, one thing I am looking for is decayed buildings. Bored and thinking of enjoying the nice weather that appeared yesterday, I took my camcorder and camera out for a long walk around Dundee.

Now, taking footage with my camcorder was easy. No problems whatsoever. I could even say I had a little fun. See:

Sunny Day from Craig McCreath on Vimeo.

Then, after walking a few miles I found a nice warehouse that had seen better days. It was boarded up and even had some bollards marking where they would prefer the general public not to stand. I didn’t. I took this picture from the pavement (a completely legal act, might I add) and was confronted by a man who demanded that I stopped shooting.

I had only taken one shot and I was hoping to get the bigger lens out of my bag - but this guy kept insisting that in no way I could shoot here. Here’s basically what I remember from the event:

Him: You can’t shoot here.

Me: What I am doing is completely legal.

Him: No it isn’t–this is private property.

Me: Well, I’m on a pavement and last time I checked that was public property.

Him: [quietened down a little, I think he was getting a little unsure of the whole situation]

Are you press?

Me: No, I’m just an amateur photographer. If anything has happened here I don’t know about it. I only walked by thinking that this was an attractive building and I thought I’d take a couple of shots.

Him: You can’t shoot here… unless you cross the road. If this is for a school project (what age am I?) or whatever, just cross the road. As long as you’re not going to see it to the press.

Me: I don’t see how that would be any more legal, I’m on the pavement. But I’ll do what you ask only due to courtesy. But I know my rights and I suggest you learn about them.

Him: [leaving slowly.]

How come so many people don’t seem to understand the rights of photographers in the UK? That is twice now (in a row) I have been asked not to shoot a specific building because it is private property. It’s not only me - many photographers I know have been stopped by complete strangers and sometimes even police(!) that don’t know the law. With the fear of terror in the UK and especially in London there’s a negative sigma placed on photographers and somehow I don’t think me taking a picture of an off load bay would constitute and act of terror or would aid in planning one - or in this case, give me extra money if I did sell it to the press.

From now on, I’m always going to carry a copy of Photographer’s Rights in the UK so that the people I meet and try to invade my right to take photos can leave with a better knowledge of the law and therefore not disturb a photographer or let others do it in their steed because it’s really getting annoying now.

Extra - Thanks to islandboy for sharing the BBC’s Article ‘Innocent Photographer or Terrorist?’

Before I start… might I tell you that Fused Reality Studios is back up. Now back to scheduled programming.

Now, before you start thinking that I’m going to start podcasting on a weekly basis I have to warn you that this may not be the case. It all depends.

But, somewhat interestingly I’ve recorded my big question in audio form because I think that half of the way to make a podcast successful is if you have anything close to ‘the voice’. Some people have the charisma, the energy and put all of the effort they can into their podcast.

Well, go and listen to it and see what you think.

Download the mp3.

Most of us spend our time complaining about the little things - be it that you don’t have enough money for something, your food is too salty or you just can’t seem to get things right. Whatever is wrong, we always seem to find that we forget the good things in life and forget all the important milestones.

At the start of this month I was happy to celebrate that I had finally surpassed a year of blogging and that I had learned a lot since I started. Now, I’m happy to celebrate I’ve managed to make a hundred posts!

Now through some marvel I’ve finally managed to make a hundred posts. Normally by now I would have lost interest and this blog would have found it’s way to depths of my server and never to have been seen again. But thanks to your interest, thanks to your comments, thanks to your words and your appreciation I’ve managed to make it this far and I just wanted to say… thank you.

It’s all because of people like you i’ve kept blogging for so long.

I’ve been meaning to do a review/rant of twitter for a long time. Well, ever since I began using it over a year ago. Since then, I’ve posted over four thousand tweets and gained quite a few followers from what I’ve said or done over there.

But while most of us have been in the mix of twittering, following and being followed in turn - how have we not acted as a community to fix some of the worst problems faced by twitter? There are so many little things, but the one integral part that isn’t being sorted is simple to remedy.

Some people just don’t understand it and in turn, abuse it.

If you’re a twitterer who followed a link to this blog post then you know that I, as well as others, use it to promote their content. No problems there as our main use of it is to share ourselves and in turn learn about other people. But some didn’t get the memo and see this as more of a content delivery system and never have a two-way conversation between twitterers.

These people follow thousands of people a day and only publish about their own work. Almost every twitter update is a link to something of their own creation and somehow they expect us to be nice, follow them back and even go so far as to sharing their content for them. No way.

Why haven’t our twitter techs sorted this? It’s a sad thing that if you’re a sheep, will you stop yourself from falling off a cliff or get pushed by the crowds? Without people writing and complaining, these spam-tweets will continue to grow. We need a revolt. We have spent that past few months ignoring these spammers and only thinking of it as a minor inconvenience.

This needs to stop.

Will you be a sheep or will you simply ask the twitter techs to put a limit on how many people you can follow a day? These people are following thousands a day so limiting the follow count to 20 or 50 per day would be simple enough not to cause problems to almost every twitterer. It seems like a simple fix, so why aren’t we asking demanding?

We’re the community. We should set the ground rules.

Plans never seem to come to fruition. We all have our little busy lives and our little schedules we have to keep. I hate that. Sometimes you want to give something back, and with all the stuff people need to do we never seem to get them out of the door.

A few thoughts of extra-blogging plans I’ve either not started yet or never thought would work.

Tell me which ones to do think you’d like to see. It’s for you as well as me.

Free Wordpress Templates

This was something I thought would be pretty interesting to do. Not only would it be good as I would be able to train my web design skills every couple of weeks, but you’ll have templates you can use and edit for your own blog. They’ll all be creative-commons attribution non-commercial license.

Video Podcast

I’m not too sure about this one - but I thought it would be slightly cool to have a student food podcast. It’s something I haven’t seen in the iTunes Podcast Directory and could be possible. Not sure it would be successful though.

Blog dedicated to Dyslexia

This is in the works. I’ve got the website up and running but the design and content isn’t ready yet. If you want to help (anyone with knowledge of dyslexia who wants to share their story concerning it) you’re more than welcome to.

More readers!

Well, it’s more of a dream. But an attainable dream.

Comic

It’s something simple I’d do on another site that I had a plan for a while ago - but I haven’t drawn anything in a year. I used to be pretty good, so I thought this would be a good way of bringing that skill back from the dead. No gamer storyline, promise. Something… different.

Stories

I’m planning on doing NaNoWriMo this November and with a target of 50,000 words in one month I have to get used to writing again. Sure, the mini-novel will be released free of charge here in December - but to get prepared I thought I’d write a few shorter stories each month before the event.

There’s a few things that will probably be unattainable, but some I thought you’d like. Don’t forget to share your thoughts about which you’d like to see.

Today is the third annual CSS Naked Day which is used to promote web standards. It’s as simple as that.  This is your chance to show how your website is still accessible and usable with it’s clothes off.

There were just over 1,500 people who were stripping everything off today, so why don’t you join them?

I was thinking the other day about stuff nobody knows about me. Some are just normal, some are personal and some are ones that I only realised that day.

• I had two eating disorders when I was younger.  I ate everything one portion at a time, depending on preference (worst first) and almost always finished the plate because I wanted the tastiest food.  Also, I had a problem with deciphering between hunger and thirst - meaning I’d normally eat either loads or drink too much.
• I procrastinate too much for my own good.
• I love to cook and I’m thinking of starting a student food video podcast.
• I didn’t know I was dyslexic until I was 12 - which was also the same time I started learning photography.
• I had a stutter.
• I could never play any sport - I just don’t have the hand-eye coordination for it.
• I remember too many random things like people’s addresses that I’ve only seen once, the location of a stapler I haven’t seen in months or my family’s entire DVD collection - but can’t remember to get the milk with the rest of my shopping.
• I can almost always tell which show someone is watching on TV just by the cinematography, setting and clothing in less than 5 seconds. I always freak my mother out when I do that.
• I know how to play the Clarinet - but only well enough to get through Grade 5.
• I could operate the video recorder when I was 1. I could stop, play and rewind the same tape over and over again as I was obsessed with adverts (My mum recorded an hour’s worth of adverts as it was the only thing that would stop me crying while she hoovered).

This is part two of a ten part series on what I have learned throughout a year of blogging.

When you start blogging you never seem to have a schedule. When something happens, you blog. Somewhat like a diary. It makes sense, but mostly every professional blogger will tell you the same thing - the best thing you can do is keep a shedule even it’s once a week.

Why should you do that? It’s simple, if you keep a shedule of any sorts you’ll never forget you have a blog and will have a deadline for new content. It’s like when you have homework when you’re in school - you complete for a deadline but if you don’t have one you leave it forever (see some of my web projects that are still waiting to be done).

How am I doing this?

• A few weeks ago I started upping my blog schedule from every three days to every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for written posts and a photo post each Sunday.
• Super-secret content is going to be released every two weeks (it’s not finished yet).
• I’ve started to put deadlines on my personal projects so hopefully they’ll be out soon (albeit the deadline is until May).