Teabass - Andrew Nesbitt's Blog

Thought 11

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 - No Comments

My internet connection has been playing up the past few days, I seem to have fixed it now. A post coming later tonight hopefully.

Web Development

Saturday, July 15th, 2006 - 14 Comments

Rails Recipes Despite the lack of frequent posts, I am still here. I just haven’t really had a huge amount to write about.

I’ve been working hard recently and it is paying off. I’ve been doing lots of driving, mainly parking quite a lot, with 3 weeks until my test, practice makes perfect and the more practice I can do the better.

I’ve also been enjoying my Rails book, so much so I bought myself another Rails book: “Rails Recipes”

I have also started work on a website for a company, currently in the planning stages, I can’t say too much, but it is just the break into web design I needed.

I can also push my own rails app forward and hopefully I will get more work from both sites.

My daytime work has been consuming a lot of my time and ruining my evenings, I get home from 9 hours of standing up building heavy fans and I don’t have much energy or motivation to do much more work in the evening.

I am getting paid for the company website mentioned above although I’m not really sure how much to charge, it is a large project (at least a month long) involving about 200 pages, I’ve been asked to spec the costs from both a dynamic site with user logins and a fixed static site. Any suggestions?

erm.. I’d love to write more but to be honest nothing much has really happened since my last post eariler this week, still playing the waiting game, making sure I pass my test and then I can carry on with sorting out my business.

I found this very cool site via a video on youtube; “StolenSnapshots” it’s a site for Zork, he has some great videos and poems so check him out!

One of my fav videos of his here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=_YfgmusXRJw

I guess the only other thing I have is that Team Fortress 2 is coming out with HL2 episode 1… W00t!!

Team Fortress 2

Weekend Away

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 - 6 Comments

Last weekend I went to Cardiff, with 3 of my best friends, to see Billy Talent.

I’m usually not very good at gigs, I get shy and usually stand at the back somewhere and listen with a beer in hand feeling self conscious. I’ve been to a few.. Incubus, Electric Six and Reading Festival twice but never really enjoyed it as much as everyone around me seemed to be.

This time was different.

I think there was a number of things that changed it but one thing stands out… I was with Lauren.

She made me feel incredibly relax, confident and happy with myself, more so than anyone else ever has and I love it!

It was the most awesome gig I have ever been to, Billy Talent has been my fav band ever since I first downloaded their album over 3 years ago. I’ve since bought their first album twice (an ex girlfriend stole the first one), loads of of merchandise and just last week their 2nd album.

We were in the Cardiff Student Union, Solus, quite a small venue but it made everything so much more intense. You could get so close to the band, and it sounded awesome no matter where you stood in the room.

I also managed to have some geeky fun whilst I was there, along with Lauren, my friends Stacey and Mike came with me, they are both single and looking so I turned on the bluetooth on my mobile and sent out their numbers to loads of people in the room with bluetooth enabled as business cards! Stacey got a reply and a few texts out of it!

I have not been working on Rails much this week, as much as I like it I have not really had the time, Lauren has been staying with me this week and we have been out and about doing all kind of things.

^^ A couple of Lauren’s Photos, she getting really good

Results

Thursday, July 6th, 2006 - 15 Comments

I got my exam results today, and as expected I failed one module, but I can still retake the module over the summer so I still get the degree, I just can’t go to the 2006 graduation, but I can go to the 2007 if I pass the module in September, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

I’ve got strange feelings about Uni; I’m not using what I learnt on my course in my life directly, but I learnt a hell of a lot over the past 3 years, so much of it outside of lectures, it was defiantly not a waste, it helped me realize what I want to do with my life, what I’m good at and what I’m not and it instilled in me that exams do not mean anything.

Just because you know the answers to every question on a certain test, does not relate into a huge amount in the world of business except that you are perfect candidate for working under someone else and following their orders well.

My family are a little disappointed about the results, I think everyone feels like I’m doing nothing at the moment and it’s quite frustrating. Everyone apart from my Dad felt that I should go straight into a standard job and go along the standard path.

That is certainly not for me.

At the moment I feel like I have too many good creative ideas to just give them to a faceless business and never see the benefit of them, I have the drive and creativity to make it on my own, but it’s just starting a little slow.

I’m in a situation which I’m sure many young people have been in, where I am going to have to prove to everyone that I can do these things by myself and that my ideas and skills are not worthless.

There are a few people close to me that completely support me, namely Lauren and my Dad, they know I have what it takes, it’s just going to take a bit of time.

This week has been rather frustrating, I’ve been working my ass off at ACI, earning some money to go towards insurance for the van which is likely to be about £1000 and waiting on Mark, the graphic designer, to get back to me with some designs for the logo. I don’t want to rush him because no-one likes rushing the creative process and what ever he comes up with is going to be amazing.

Until I pass my test and sort out the logo my business is standing pretty still, I can’t advertise heavily without the logo because I don’t want to seem like I’m jumping the gun and come off looking amateurish, and even if I do get work, I have no transport of my own and have to rely on lifts to people’s houses, which again does not look professional.

I’ll just have to play the waiting game for a month and them wham!

In the mean time I’ve been flying through Ruby on Rails, I’m about to start my first site (after I finish this post ), it’s going to be more of a test to see what I can do, and what problems I run into and once it is in a reasonable state I will put it online as a closed beta for all you faithful readers to destroy and criticize, it’s not going to be amazing or feature-full but at least you can sign up and have a go.