14 posts tagged “work”

i'm sending out a question for anyone who does web dev work, or who closely follows trends in web interface development (not the behind-the-scenes stuff). i find myself in the position of quietly creeping up on a time when i will need to go forth and find a new dev contract... and the realisation suddenly dawned on me that i actually haven't worked *as* a web dev in over a year now, because my last contract, while having web-devvy elements, consisted of masquerading as an "e-learning technologist". (Edit: I should probably say that I have more than a decade's solid coding experience, so I don't need to learn the basics, just to update my skillset a bit)

of course, i keep an eye on the web standards' group's marvellous "links for light reading", i browse magazines and regularly peruse a truckload of webby blogs, but right now i need to give myself a little refresher course - and i'm being overwhelmed by the information on what's happened in the last year, so i ask you:

1. what new technologies/skills/approaches from about the past 18 months do you think are the most important?
2. what are you most commonly asked for (e.g. ajax, css3, mobile web, whatever)?
3. which dev blog could you not live without?
4. if you read any paper dev magazines, what are they?
5. what, if any, webby book or article changed the way you think or work in the past year?

any and all responses will be leapt upon with delight and a thirst for knowledge :-)

it's funny. ever since i started on trying to fix my brain a few years ago i have these random moments of revelation. while skiing i realised that my absolute terror of falling/slipping stemmed from the time i was bushwalking in the blue gum forest with my parents and slipped on casuarina needles and fell over a cliff. today's revelation relates to desks.

djeli and i have been discussing workspaces in the house because while i'd managed to achieve a setup that was working for me while he was away, the lack of space in our house means that it doesn't work when he's around. he has the whole of the spare room for his workspace while i have to take what i can find, something that isn't at all conducive to sustained work on creative things. so we've been talking about what can be done, given that the loungeroom is public space and so interruptions and laundry happen there, and the bedroom sort of likewise in that if i work on the bed i have to pack everything away entirely every night when he wants to go to bed. i can't work on till i'm ready to go to bed even, plus i find i sleep badly if i'm working on the bed all day because there's no separation of work and rest places and i feel like a slob. but the built-in desk in the bedroom is minute. it's barely wide enough for a laptop, with pretty much no elbow room. its one consolation is that it has a nice little bookshelf above it, where i keep all my music and art books, and it's a space where i can blu-tak up bits and pieces relating to what i'm working on on the wall.

i discovered when i first moved out of home that i don't like staring at a blank wall when i'm working. i like to have either a window or a large space in front of me. in lilyfield i had a room to myself that i hardly ever used for a variety of reasons. part of that was because the desk was too small and the window both too small and too high to see out of when i was at the desk.

now i'm staying with my friend in dundee and have been very taken by her tiny 1940s fold-up desk - you know, one of those ones that have storage space in them and divider-pots for pens and envelopes and things, but the desk part folds up to contain the whole thing so it takes very little room, and have been thinking about how that might be a solution, to have something like that beside the minute desk in the bedroom, so it would take up minimal space and give a little more surface space for when i need to spread out.

ANYWAY, to the point, which is the revelation. i've been wondering for years, without really thinking about it deeply, where this need for space and light in my work area comes from and this morning it just came to me in a flash and i suddenly realised that it's because i *used* to have that! when i was in high school, my mother had the clever idea of extending all the bedrooms in the house by adding bay windows to them. the bay windows in my father's study and my bedroom had desks built into them, so i had a desk that was very nearly the full width of the room, surrounded by large windows on four sides (in front, sides, plus it had a glass roof). the light in the daytime was fantastic and when thinking i could stare out into the beautiful pittosporum tree outside the window and see pictures in the leaves. when i worked there it never occurred to me that i might not want to sit at a desk, that i might want to move to the couch sometimes or otherwise shunt about the house, whereas i seem to have spent all my time since i left home doing (or wanting to do) just that in an effort to find some sort of work area where i could actually work.

the space i was using before djeli came home was the closest i've got to the ideal in the 10 years or so since i left home - we have a double-gateleg dining table that sits in a corner of a large bay-window-like niche in the loungeroom. it's a nice space but not really terribly useful so it tends to get used for drying the laundry because it's close to the kitchen/laundry, near self-contained so it doesn't seem to intrude into the living room, has plenty of light and a heater for the winter. i fold out one side only of the table, so there's still not a vast amount of desk space, but i just love being by the window. it makes concentrating so much easier and enjoyable. so i think there's a lesson learned here. let's just hope i can put it to good use and find a space i can set up properly and get some work done in!

well, things have been terribly confused for weeks now, but they slowly seem to be getting back on an even keel - the tidal wave of bad news seems to have passed, the tax is coming along nicely, with the end in sight, and it seems we're not about to be evicted, so YAY!

djelibeybi and i are currently up in shropshire - with the end of his telford contract, he has the coalport flat until the end of april, so we figured we should make the most of it and do a little exploring and walking and seeing of castles and old blast furnaces and so on, so we're having a fine old time. i also have a probable contract (possibly in germany) coming up towards the end of may, which doesn't leave much time in between for contracts, so i am taking my courage in both hands, putting my trust in Providence and have started telling employment agents that i won't be available till august (when the parents leave). it feels a bit scary - that's a long time without either of us bringing in any income, and of course it includes traipsing about france with parents and a possible trip up to scotland and who knows what surprises, but it feels like the right thing to do. i was freaking a bit about having to try to find a job and the money situation, and i think it'll all be better if i just calm down and take this opportunity as a chance to keep doing what i want to do.

assuming our visas are renewed, djeli may find employment quicker than last time (heck, maybe revenue & customs will pull their finger out and finally do their budgets and he'll get his job back!), and if they're not, then at least we'll have made the most of our last weeks and not randomly wasted them on work. and while i owe djeli a truckload of ££s (he finally worked out the true state of the joint account which revealed £3000-worth of debt for me) he does have some savings so we won't starve or not be able to pay the rent or anything.

so it's scary, but it feels like the right thing to do.

that said, if you need an experienced web interface dev for a couple of days, don't hesitate to call!

since i wrote my last post i have become employed! yes! a real live job! and i'm really enjoying it to. i am a "learning technologist" in the e-learning department of the imperial college business school, working on an assortment of online courses, which is proving very interesting and not too taxing (yet. ask me again when the students return in october...). the people are lovely, the office is nice and the commute a reasonable length. the college is in south kensington, literally just around the corner from the royal college of music, royal college of art, royal albert hall and the v&a museum, just to start with. i really must plan to go to a prom while i'm there because it couldn't be more convenient! but the best bit is that i discovered the library...

now, i should clarify that imperial college is a science and technology university. their students are all engineers and biochemists and doctors and mba-types. not an artist to be found anywhere on campus (they're all round the corner :-) but i came across the campus central library on my second day and figured i might as well find out if i was allowed to borrow books. i figured it never hurts to belong to another library and there was the slim possibility that the computer books section might have some useful webby books (it does. planning on checking out quite a few of them very soon). so i joined up, checked the list of floors and discovered that 'computing' was on the top floor. and that, unexpectedly, so were 'cds'. well, i didn't really hold out much hope. it's not unusual, after all, for libraries to keep a few random cds for the students and given student preferences, they'd probably mostly be pop music. but it was worth checking.

HOW WRONG COULD I BE?

honestly, it's like there's some weird terry-pratchettesque L-space thing happening on the 5th floor of that library. yes, there are computing books; yes, there's a bunch of studious sciencey bods scattered around the tables with their books on dna strands and how to build a bridge and whatnot, BUT there's also a whole freakin' arts library up there!

ok, to backtrack. i sauntered over to the cd section, seeing, as i approached that it looked a pretty decent size for one in such an unexpected place. then when i got there, discovered that 2 of the 3 large double-sided racks contained exclusively classical cds. and a quick glance led to an estimate of about 40% of that being music written after 1900, which is just unheard of in any cd library and like heaven on earth for me. next i decided to check out the books and see if i could find the css tomes. and the first thing that caught my eye was a book on segovia (famous spanish classical guitarist for those who don't know) and i thought "huh?" so i toddled over... only to find three racks of music scores of all types - including scores for (relatively) modern operas such as britten's peter grimes and tippett's child of our time. next discovery was row after row of music texts - from the standard norton scores to biographies, harmony texts (even one written by the university of western australia's david tunley). then art books. philosophy. poetry. history. just an amazing collection! and all for meeeeeee!

so my lunchtimes have been spent working away at library books. at the moment i'm focusing on research for my article on erik satie and dada. i've had such a hard time getting hold of decent scholarly books on dada up till now - i've had to buy every book that's been of any use at all because normal libraries just haven't provided anything that was helpful. and this brings me to another of the joys of this job. i have done research at lunchtimes at other jobs, but always ended up feeling a bit like an unsociable freak. now i can just plonk myself down and beaver away at what i want to do without a care in the world - because all the tables around me are filled with people doing exactly the same thing! HUZZAH!

so extremely happy in the new job and for once hoping that it goes on for the full three months. i'll barely touch the tip of the iceberg of books and cds in the library in that time, but at least i should be able to get through a fair few!

one of my projects at work at the moment has also seen me dipping my toe into the murky waters of open source development. and i must say, it's been quite a challenge. it seems to be an unwritten law that anybody who's even thinking of getting involved in an open source project must be an uber-geek who lives and breathes the unix command line and has an intimate knowledge of arcane programmes that run only from that command line. woe betide the newbie who, while she has a certain amount of programming experience, hasn't touched a command line since dos and has never so much as shaken the paw of unix or subversion or python or any of the other behind-the-scenes wonders that seem to be required. it would seem that the easy part of the whole thing is the actual coding. getting the source code took far longer than identifying the file i would need to tweak to do what i wanted. and the project, of course, has nothing so simple as a "how to get involved" page. you just know, apparently. and unfortunately i didn't, so i've been flailing about for the past day and a half trying to work things out. fortunately, around 1.30 this afternoon, things started to click into place a bit and now my key concern is why won't the source code (which i haven't touched since i checked it out) build without errors. i wrestled with that for a few hours, then come 6pm gave up and posted it to the project forum. too hard. need expert advice. the frustrating thing though is that i can see pretty much exactly what needs to be done to the particular file to achieve my goals, but i need to get through all this setup dross first. honestly, the uber-geek who takes pity on us less experienced souls and writes an introduction to open source dev and its tools will win bucketloads of undying gratitude and will no doubt be responsible for a ton of eager new helpers, so very keen to do the dull jobs, on open source projects all over the web...

i just had an insight descend upon me as if from on high. i am obsessed with publication. and along with the insight came the realisation of the starting point. it began way back in primary school at the age of about 8, when my class was set a project to produce our own newspaper. being about 8 it was a frog newspaper, called the slippery slimy times and two of my friends and i were assigned the fashion column (this will amaze anyone who's ever met me. fashion is *not* my forte!)

and now this manifests itself in oh so many different ways:

• 4 regularly updated blogs
• publication of my own scores
• plans for publishing other peoples scores
  
• ongoing writing of articles intended for publication
• constant development and planning of new websites
• a website publishing my honours thesis and other articles
  
• a bizarre desire to make full use of the services offered by sites like lulu.com and issuu.com even when i don't have a specific project in mind - i keep coming back to what i *could* do...
• binding up random documents (bank statements, printed-off articles from the web, recipe cards) to create neat and organised books
  

and i have, indeed, been published by other people as well as myself:

• a book i edited, published jointly by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian Music Centre
• my music recorded on a commercially published CD (even if a hard-to-find one)
  
• articles published in music magazines
• a piece published a long, long time ago (and littered with typographical errors by a careless copyist) in The Flute magazine

and i have also worked in publication:

• editing, copy editing, proof reading, writing, music copying, design and layout for sounds australian journal and other AMC publications, including CDs
  
• copy editing for independent film magazine
• a brief stint working on the website for australian arts publisher currency press.

it's one of the greatest pleasures i know - to produce something and see it as a final, complete end product. one that is ready for its audience, even if it doesn't have one yet. it's way up there, almost on a par with having other people perform my music, to the point where the latter, happening rarely, takes the role of the icing on the cake.

i don't mean to brag about *being* published, just to say that this realisation has made me think, and now i wonder a bit about where i am and should be heading. yes, i want to write music, but i also have about as strong a desire to lay the stuff out as i do to write it. i suspect that over the next few weeks, i will start to think a little more clearly about this and maybe it'll show me a new way to organise myself. maybe i've been confusing myself by relating score layout with composing. maybe in the many many pigeonholes in my head, i need to make a new label for one and separate out the publication component from the creation component of the various things i do. hmm. that will take a bit of thinking about

i've been silent a while, eh? well, that's what accidental employment will do for you. i must say, i'm really enjoying the job. it's exhausting and takes every waking hour i have, and the three-hours-commuting-daily isn't exactly what i was hoping for, but the work's interesting and the people are lovely, and then, of course, there's the toast. and i'm learning an absolute ton of useful stuff. i've also learnt that i hate bill gates with a passion - as if ie6 wasn't bad enough he has to go and inflict ie7 on us. with its non-functioning zoom and assorted oddities both new and old. but i won't go into details over that because if i did you'd all run away and that would be no fun at all, now would it?

i finished reading julia cameron's walking in this world a few weeks ago and felt at a bit of a loose end, still feeling a need for some general creative encouragement but not wanting to embark upon another of cameron's books just yet - they're great books, don't get me wrong, but i felt it was time to try something else. so tchatchke very kindly recommended make your creative dreams real by sark which i duly ordered from amazon with the remnant gift vouchers from my bonus last year. i confess i was a little nervous. all those watercoloured borders and random-looking handwriting, i was rather concerned it was going to turn out a bit girly for me, tomboy that i am, but i have to say that it's coming through with flying colours. ok, there's a slight girly element, but it's more a feminine whimsy than true girly-girl girliness, and the content is great. i've read the first two chapters and while quite a few of the concepts expressed i'd read in cameron's books, sark has a really fresh take on them and i'm learning plenty of new stuff and coming to fresh realisations too. in particular, this week's chapter, "the land of no" has been excellent - she details a bunch of strategies and character traits which can hold us back - from simple procrastination through to bitterness, jealousy, anger, and feelings of not being understood. i like the approach she takes with some of these difficult emotions and tendencies - not that they're out and out wrong, but that we shouldn't dwell on them - we should recognise them for what they are and then she provides keys for dealing with them so we can move on. some of them really struck a chord with me - i'm a terminal procrastinator and perfectionist, but i'm proud to say that i'm becoming more aware of both and yesterday evening overcame both to do something that will really benefit me - i received an email from spnm, the society for the promotion (we used to say "prevention" back in australia. *giggle*) of new music, announcing a web composition workshop being held online on sunday evening this week - send your scores in to be included, first come, first served. this is exactly the sort of thing i'd have procrastinated on, and sure enough i came very close to just plonking it on my rememberthemilk list which would have been a sure step towards it being forgotten until it was too late (not everything falls into this hole - most of my RTM to-dos do actually get done, but this sort of thing i just have a resistance too and then i regret it later) when i realised that if i did that then, no, i wouldn't get my piece looked at, wouldn't get any feedback and would have missed a great opportunity. so i pulled myself together, decided on the piece to send and started pulling out bits. the the perfectionism kicked in - the mp3 was a bit dodgy cos finale is a little unsubtle in its rendering of dynamic changes - maybe i should pull the dynamics out so it's a bit more even. maybe i should move this or that in the score so it looks better. maybe i shouldn't send this piece because i know it has problems and perhaps i should send one that's closer to being complete. maybe maybe maybe. but i know that there's pretty much nothing i've written that i feel is really ready to face the world. and it's a workshop, which means it's going to be pulled apart a bit anyway, and if that's going to happen, surely better to ease into it with something that i know i need to pull apart anyway (it has genuine problems of register and i have booked a harpist to help me with them once i'm not working again) and then i can incorporate any recommended tweaks at the same time. it took a lot of mental pulling-together, but i'm proud to say that within an hour of receiving the email, i'd sent off my submission. haven't heard back yet about whether it's going to be looked at, but at least i submitted it!

i've been working through a real variety of creative things lately and am keeping up with one creative thing. i'm finding this really helps - i'm being made more aware of the creative and creativity-supporting things i'm doing and keeping an eye out for what i can do rather than just drifting along not feeling like i'm achieving anything at all. there's only been one day in the (exactly!) one month since i started that i haven't managed to do anything creative at all, so i'm pretty pleased with that.

alas, now it is a quarter to eleven, which is a quarter of an hour past my required-bedtime-if-i'm-to-get-up-in-time-to-not-be-late-for-work-tomorrow, so i bid you a fond farewell with the word of the day: ARRRRRR!

just a very quick update before i have to take myself off to bed in order to be somewhat prepared to face 6.15am tomorrow. first day at the new job was awesome! i'd forgotten what it was like to actually enjoy your work. i spent the whole day playing with CSS and found a gnarly little button problem at the end of it that i think i'm halfway to a solution for. will finish it off tomorrow morning, i hope. the people are friendly and welcoming, IT were all sorted so my login and email were waiting for me and, after a tiny hiccup with my computer (desktop! yay!) i was all inducted and up and running within about an hour and a half of arriving. a few samples of awesomeness before i head bedwards:

• aeron chairs for all!
• toast on tap!
• bonne maman jam for the toast on tap! (although no vegemite - having to take in my own)
• reasonable coffee!
• much shorter journey than i had thought!
• courtyard garden!
• fussball table!
• beer fridge which magically replenishes itself in time for fridays!
  

i nearly got myself employed today. that was close! i came so close to agreeing to go for an interview tomorrow and it was only by the greatest of willpower that i managed to say "no thank you" and now, of course, i'm having a slight panic attack that i've done the wrong thing.

it sounded like a nice little job too - 3 months working for a design company on regent street working on a project for Abbey bank. which all sounds delightful, and especially once i'd calculated final returns from the money they offered me, but on the downside - that would have been 3 months without being able to get any composition done at all. it's been a real struggle to make any progress at all over the past few months, what with all the interruptions, and i really don't want to take on anything longer than a few weeks just yet. in 3 months' time it may well be a different matter, but for right now, when i'm panicking even at the thought of full-time work of any persuasion, and really big-time worried that any work at all is going to send every compositional impulse i have fleeing for cover, i think it's just too long, so i'm going to hold out for stuff that's one month or less, just for a little while. but gosh it's scary. and all the more so when i realised that, had i agreed to the interview tomorrow, i would have had to turn up in either ripped jeans or something very obviously designed for mid-winter. really need to go shopping! so i do hope i've done the right thing. i thanked the recruiter most profusely and explained my situation and he seemed to understand about wanting to ease myself in - and i asked him to keep me in mind for anything else, so i hope he hasn't been put off. today i also posted my cv to aquent's system (must call them tomorrow) and i now have the contact details for my friend's recruitment agency who have been getting him a bunch of freelance work, so i will have to call them tomorrow. then go shopping.

at any rate, djeli and i are all set up properly now - we are now directors of our own limited company, raspberry blue ltd, so no more nasty umbrella companies for us. it all had to be done in a bit of a rush this week because djeli starts his new job on monday, so needed some entity to sign forms and a bank account to be handed over and so on. i have also done a first attempt at a company logo, which i'm quite pleased with. djeli is working on his idea and then we will compare and contrast the outcome and make a decision from there:

it's been weeks and weeks now since i've managed to do a decent clump of work, but today i ordered myself to get a move on, and it's been really good - i churned out the melody for a new walt whitman song to keep the other one company, and had a play around in pro tools with midi exports of the parts i've been foozling with for the satie arrangement for america - my plan was always to include a tape part and i think i've made a good start. need to record some clocks ticking or metronomes or something now, i think. random ticky sorts of sounds anyway.

it feels good to be working again.

then this afternoon djeli and i went to maidenhead to take back the chair he bought six months ago which fell apart a month after he bought it. amazingly they did take it back, even if they only gave him a gift voucher in exchange instead of cash. but that's ok. we came back through slough. i don't think i need to do that again.

it feels good to have broken furniture gone from the living room too.

this is the poem i'm using for the current song. not quite so depressing as the last one, but still fairly low-key. it's a chunk from a longer poem called proud music of the storm:

come forward, o my soul, and let the rest retire,
listen, lose not, it is toward thee they tend,
parting the midnight, entering my slumber-chamber,
for thee they sing and dance o soul

(why does it only do opening quotes and not closing ones when i indent?)

and in a significantly better state than yesterday, but still too much to get through before friday to be able to get to the vox meetup tonight *sob*