Perfection may not be everything

…but I do refuse to publish my portfolio until I am satisfied with it. I can’t have people judging me by incomplete works now can I?

Things are rainy here in Karlskrona, at the end of the world. Rainy and windy. We are struggling with the class promotion site and it’s promotion. Not running smooth yet, but I really do think that the final outcome will be great.

Feel like I got lost in the organisation of the marketing groups, I was in the strict marketing of the site group, but I came in late since I thought that I might be in production. But that turned out to be false, so I was handed over to marketing. Where everyone had already started, forgot that I had joined, I didn’t get any information about meetings and well… In the end I wasn’t really in marketing anymore. Now I am going to be part of some sort of left over group, working on marketing ourselves. I should be trying to think positively and on all the things we might do, but I just feel depressed.

Not a very positive post, it might be the weather.

Coding might be my nemesis

This is the last day in school; tomorrow I will go away for Christmas celebrating, family time and other nice things. I had hoped that I would somehow (I realize now that magic would have been required) be done with the coding of my portfolio so that I wouldn’t have to worry about that while stuffing my face with gingerbread.

But now there is only a few hours left and I am nowhere near finished. I am tired and a feeling of hopelessness is beginning to spread. I know what my portfolio will look like, I know how it will work, but I have no clue to how to make it work.

We also handed in our final decision on what specialization we would work on for 9 weeks next year. Fully aware that it would mean 9 weeks of solid frustration for me, I chose tech. Only a few hours of coding later, I am ready to kill myself.

Part of me knows that the reason I chose tech is so that I will be able to do these things in the future, another part if me wonders if I will survive…

Foiled by Flash!

It’s sad, isn’t it? That even though I followed 5 different flash tutorials to the letter my short movie doesn’t work. I blamed the tutorials the first 3 times, but now I am not so sure. My hate for Flash increases.

This is the “portfolio” module, which means that it is both individual and probably loads of fun since we can do what we want. I still haven’t purchased my domain though, seems like such a huge decision. It will probably be rebeccaberg.se (.com was taken), but the fact that rebecca.com is free is nagging me a bit. Maybe I should go with just my first name?

Here at the end of the world (Karlskrona) all is well. Every window has the Christmas candles lit day and night, making the town glow and the advent feeling spread. Environmental thinking has no place when it comes to Christmas lights apparently.

Creative people

All this effort, trying to think outside the box. Trying to be unique, go where no one has gone before. It seems all our lecturers are trying to tell us that the simpler the idea is, the better it is. But of course thinking inside the box would be the simplest solution? Can you tell I am tired yet?

I'd like to quote one of my favourite authors here;

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

- Terry Pratchett

Wrapping up and new beginning

I have been bad at updating. As usual this has nothing to do with me having nothing to write and everything to do with the fact that a lot of things is going on and I don’t have the time to write about it.

Last week we made our pitch for the bank and the investors. It was more fun than expected, I felt so proud when we could actually answer all their questions. We almost got a thumbs up, they didn’t like that we had so many employees so they wanted us to limit our market so that we could cut down on them and by doing that, on costs. Of course.

It felt really good. Our prognosis on how much money we will make is a bit optimistic, but according to that we could all be millionaires in three years. Should we go through with it?

Now we have a new module; Visual Communication. The lecturers so far have been great, both entertaining and enlightening. Today we had a French guy by the name of Stevens Henri and his accent alone made his lecture worth attending. He went through the basic shapes and colours with us, a lecture that could have made us all fall asleep, we have all heard most of it before. Except we didn’t, that’s how good he was. Then he gave us brushes and paint and had us painting the entire afternoon. Can’t say I produced anything worth sowing to anyone at all, ever, but I have a feeling that wasn’t the point.

Autums are great for walks, walks are great for thinking

New module, this time we will explore the possibility of earning embarrassingly large amounts of cash by finding and filling a need. New business idea time! I have a new group as well, Jocke (the captain), Tilde (doc), Isak (ship drunk) and Peter (we don’t know what he is yet). The most social group so far, we seem to spend a lot of time in cafés and last week we had dinner at my place. The social thing is important to me after the last module where I sort of fell in between groups so I have been pushing hard for the weekly dinners. The others have been pushing for the constant tea and coffee breaks, so we are all good.

I have been thinking a lot about branding these past days. Not so strange perhaps considering the module, I guess I get no points for creativity by Teo Härén (we had a seminar with him via videolink two weeks ago).
But whatever, I am thinking about it. So much that I went to the library and picked up “No Logo” by Naomi Klein, I haven’t started reading it yet but I am looking forward to it.

I love the library here, the way they actually have the books I want standing patiently waiting for me on the shelves… In Lund, a city full of students who haven’t given up on books the way these digital media students have, the books I wanted were never in. Here I seem to be the only one visiting the library, which is both sad and practical.

But back on track, I haven’t come to anything that might be considered a conclusion with my thinking so far, but I do have a video for you guys. Microsoft made it, probably to get management to stop butting in on all their good ideas…

Frustration land

There is frustration in the air, it has been there all week and it is slowly driving me mad. Nothing works, if feels like all I do is wait. I can’t go anywhere cause something might happen, I might be needed, I can’t let these people down. We have so much to do, but we never seem to have all the components to actually be able to do it. It is so frustrating and so maddening.

We finally got a Printfabriken as a sponsor for our print yesterday. A huge relief I tell you, we had just about decided to just print everything here at school and were all very depressed when they called me back. But now everything is jammed again (of course) because there is no communication. Not one that works anyways. Not between us, the press group, and the design group; responsible for the poster design, and not between us and the teachers; who are away in Stockholm and has to clear everything before we go to print.

Now I am going to get the press release done at least, although I have no great pictures to put in it, not even after both mailing everyone about it, and asking around. But then my mail have been bouncing mails for some reason, so a lot of mail have probably been lost.

I am not in a happy place right now.