Archive for March, 2004

Seven is supposed to be a lucky number, but week seven of the flash couse proved to be anything but. At 6.15pm we were given our first task, to create a pre-loader, enabling large flash files to be completely downloaded before the main action gets underway. By 6.22pm I had completed this task, then sat there for two hours twiddling my thumbs and reading the Guardian whilst a couple of the others struggled with this mammoth task. Suffice to say, I didn’t actually get anything done at all, and have nothing to show for my “effort.” We actually seem to be regressing as the course progresses, and I’m certainly not looking forward to the excitement that next week’s installment will surely bring, when we’ll be “learning how to scan photos” and “setting up our own webspace on Geocities.” For fuck’s sake.

Like Salam Pax… but reporting from Cricklewood. It’s a nonsense, of course, the current title of this weblog: a pathetic and cowardly reference to a much worthier blogger in a flawed and unsuccessful attempt to boost this site’s flagging google rank. However, it might not be so far fetched for much longer. Monday sees my sister (an electrician) fly out to Baghdad for ten days to play a small role in the rebuilding of the city. She’s agreed to document the holiday experience in these very pages, so blogjam might just be worth reading for a change. Stay tuned for further developments…

Progress was slow again in class this evening, as the battle of the swots versus the remedials reached a critical level. The tutor spends his time rushing round the room attempting to teach one thing to everyone, then covertly gathers the bright sparks around a single PC to demonstrate what else can be achieved with the same technique. I was able to produce a new magnum opus, however, a small film demonstrating my ability to create sloppily animated buttons. I call it Goat! Gibbon! Greyhound! Goose! You’ll see why.

That’s it. We are all going to die.

This evening in Flash class we had to build a website. Nothing too impressive – nothing like Amazon or Yahoo, you understand, just something with a few simple pages we could navigate around using text links. Sadly the class has slowed down somewhat to accomodate its slowest pupils, who try hard but don’t appear to have progressed much beyond week one. It’s unfortunate, but there’s a definite split in the camp, with those who are computer literate impatiently kicking their heels and not really learning much while a couple of the others try to figure how their PCs actually work. What’s that? Save it on my desktop? How do I do that? How do I get it off my computer? So anyhow, I made my website (it’s not really a website, of course, just a few pages with some token content), and added an impressive (and by that I mean clunky and badly synced) splash page while I was hanging around. It’s what Flash was made for, after all. Here it is. I’m not proud.