It has been a good while since my last journal. In fact, it has been over a year. The most significant thing on my agenda at the moment must be higher education. I'm not in higher education yet but rather, I am currently sending off to universities that offer courses that interest me. By far, I am most interested in Bournemouth University's Computer Visualisation and Animation course which has been widely praised. It has been voted as the best UK animation course in '3D World' Magazine and has gained Skillset accreditation.

In other news, I am currently trying to get work experience with EA Games. Me and some friends walked into EA's Guildford HQ yesterday and were told that they no longer offer work experience. I'm planning to go back next week with my CV and see if I can get past reception - persistence is key. If that doesn't work, I know someone who has EA contacts.

Parking my driving instructor's car after a forty minute test this Wednesday, I was told that I had failed my driving test – again! Learning to drive began as an exciting experience for me but now, a year later, it has become a time consuming bother. I have reached the conclusion that I am best off focusing less so on getting a driving license for the moment. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a bad driver; I just have a tendency towards making the odd mistake that getting a license would allow me the time to overcome.

Normally I am anything but brief but in all honesty, I'm not in much of a writing mood today. I will finish by thanking those who watch, favourite and comment on my work for doing so. deviantART is yet to see my last submission. I promise that.


Those who watch me:




































































Those who I know from real life:








Clubs that I am in:

Mood: Neutral

Hey guys. It's been a while since my last journal, so here I am, in the process of writing a new one.

"So how is our little procrastinator since his last journal?" you might ask. In answer to that, I have gone to a whole new level of low. I am currently watching daytime television to escape from revision. For my whole existence, I have lived in a similar manner to this, and have still performed fine in exams. I suppose that I could go as far as to say that I'm psychologically allergic to revision. To be honest, I have done some revision this week, the night before my biology exam. And did it pay off? Hell no! In fact, nearly everything that I went to the bother of revising ran a mile away from being a question on the exam paper. But I still did fine. I got a B grade in my mock exams, and I hadn't even gone near a book or syllabus outline on that occasion.

It's funny, I suppose you could say, how what one has been dreading for two whole years, can suddenly become missed. I have feared the GCSE exams for so long now, that they have become a part of me. And now that they are going one by one, it feels as though I am losing a part of myself.

In a way, I'm both relieved, and disappointed that school is no more. I out-grew school about a year ago, and ever since then I have been subversive towards its policies, and protocol. For some reason, I like seeing the negative side in things but it certainly isn't healthy. I strongly advise that you don't become accustomed to such criticism of life. There are ego-advantages to having left school though: when I log onto MSN, and some annoying 12 year olds somewhere in Australia have added me to their friends list, when they ask me what Year of school I am in, I can laugh at them for still being at an age at which schooling is compulsory, and immediately feel a great sense of importance; very immature of me, indeed.

I'm hoping to find either a job, or work experience for the Summer holidays. Luckily, I have quite a few connections. Perhaps an exciting career awaits me, or perhaps not. It all depends on my performance in this next week of exams, but the hardest are out of the way now. Anyway... Damn! I've just forgotten what I was about to type! I hate it when that happens. Oh, now I remember: anyway, if my career life fails, I can always become a stripper.

For those of you who don't know, I've accepted a place at Guildford College (it's in Surrey, England, UK). I received an unconditional offer for the National Diploma Media National Extended course (level 3 obviously). Hang on, I mentioned this in my previous journal. The first year is mainly film production, digital editing, and so on while the second year deals in optional, more specialized, sub-criterias. I'm hoping to get somewhere in the movie, or marketing industry. On the creative forefront, of-course. Maybe I might end up in the gaming industry, or even in the media. Regardless of where I find myself in the world of careers, my future self will sure as hell enjoy where-ever I manage to get!

Well, in other recent news, I have somehow managed to completely fill up my laptop's 80GB hard drive in just over a year. My photographs are one of the main offenders in this case, and have managed to create a mini-tyranny all over my poor computers filling systems. It surprises me, how many pictures I have taken in these past two years; they're in the thousands! It's got so bad now, that I can't even fire up my friend, Adobe Photoshop, without it bitching about there being no memory allocation for the scratch disk's temporary files.

I'm thinking of starting up a new website, for portfolio purposes of-course. The domain name that I am considering is, "Maxwell-ALIVE.com" so don't you dare register it before I have a chance to! I'll probably design a Flash interface for it - with lots of special effects, and swoopy camera effects (yes, expect 3D animations to be integrated into the GUI). The main issue for me will be bandwidth. That's what destroyed my previous website, "MaxTaylor.co.uk." I just simply couldn't dish out the dosh to my ISP for all of the visitor hits that I was receiving. But this time - once I have gotten a job - I will be able to finance it; just as long as you guys don't keep visiting my website, to clean me dry. That would just be mean.

Well, what shall I mention next? Hmmm... I suppose I could mention Second Life, created by Linden Labs. So what's Second Life then, eh? In simple, it's a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Player Game - that certainly is a mouthful). But if I was to just leave it there, with no further explanation, my ignorance-O-meter would go off the charts! Second Life is a digital society. It includes an economy using its very own currency (Linden$), and yes, for that to happen it has its very own currency conversion market (US$ to L$, L$ to US$). Some freelances make a lot of money from the game. Everything in the world is user defined; there is a 3D primitive engine that allows Second Life's users to make whatever they want. You can buy land that can then be stored on Linden Labs' servers, or your own for those who have one. As-well as the ability to model objects with primitive shapes, the game has its own user scripting system, similar to Java, Objective C, and C++. The potential is literally limitless! I recommend to all, that they at-least give Second Life a try.

OK, so far I have managed not to complain about anything but I can't resist any longer. Right, so let us spin the wheel of complaints: dut, dut, dut, dut! Brrr.... Ching! "Big Brother." Let the complaining begin! Big Brother lost the plot a long time ago. I actually am slightly offended by the fact that they call the system "Big Brother." It's almost an insult to George Orwell, the writer of "1984."

I now realize that Big Brother's number one aim is to reek havoc, and cause upset so that us viewers can laugh at the house-mates' misfortune, and patch up our insecurities with a constant reassuring reminder of others' hardships. Let's think about it for a moment. Every series what do they do? They select minority, or eccentric groups for us to laugh at. And this year they have gone a step further! Not only have they hand picked, a transvestite, and two camp homosexuals, but also a terrets sufferer. And for no other purpose but to give us Big Brother viewers an excuse to laugh at a poor subject, screaming at the top of their lungs, "c**t" again, and again in compulsive urges. It is all so blatantly engineered for the intention of chaos. You can see that straight away by examining the types of people that they put in conjunction.

Oh, one more thing. I promised someone (I can't remember who) that I would submit my photographs from Kew Gardens but haven't yet done so. I apologize for this, and I'll try and get round to it in a few weeks time. Furthermore, about a year ago I composed [link] - "Which Button?" and said that I was planning on making an entire suite of wallpapers following its theme. I'll try and get round to this soon as-well.

I would just like to end this journal by thanking all of you great people who watch me for doing so!


Those who watch me:


































































Those who I know from real life:








Clubs that I am in:

Mood: Stressed, confused, currently procrastinating and disorientated

Firstly I would like to boast that I've been offered places on two courses at Guildford college. I was offered a conditional place on the BTEC National Diploma Graphic Design course and then a conditional/unconditional place on the BTEC National Diploma Media National Extended course (an extended version of media studies). In the end I decided to accept the media studies course because the interviewer flattered me more and the course seemed have a broader range of topics/projects. The course consists mainly of filming and digital editing in the first year and then in the second, there are specialist sub-catagories to choose from. All I have to worry about now is passing my GCSEs.

I have three weeks until I will be sitting in the notorious environment know to us all as the exam room; this time for my 12 hour art exam. We were given a choice of questions to choose from for it so I went for the question on plants. Not that I am particularly into plants or anything, I choose it because I wanted to show a different side to plants, a deeper, more intense, meaningful side.

As part of my preparation for the exam I am expected to gather research either on the internet or by visiting art galleries etc. So I strained my mind to think of the most plantyish place I could think of and Kew Gardens came to mind (well actually I've exaggerated that a little, my art teacher recommended Kew Gardens to me). So off I went to Kew Gardens. I can't say that I have ever seen so much green in my life before which I think was true for my camera also since it's white balance became light green. And due to the high humidity of the green houses, my camera's lens steamed up which meant that I would have to wait 10 minuets for my camera's lens to reach the surrounding environment's temperature upon entering and exiting green houses. Anyway, the trip was a lot more fun than thought it would be and the pond had frozen over so the ducks were running around on the ice. In total I took around 250 shots with the use of a 16mb flash card (pathetic), a 128mb flash card and a 256mb flash card. I would have taken more had I the storage capacity, oh well.

In other recent news, I have just taken back my 4th MP3 player. The first one that I purchased was the Samsung YP-F1 (£90) which one of my mates was quick to scratch. I naughtily took it back complaining that the ID3 tagging feature wasn't working which wasn't a lie. I then went on to buy the Sony NW-E407 display model (£85) with a £5 discount. It has a great interface and I was going to keep it, well that was until I downloaded some songs onto it and realized that it wasn't compatible with my Apple computer even though the woman who sold me it swore blind that she had it also and it worked fine on her Macintosh. So I took the bloody thing back to Dixons and traded it for the Q-Be (£40) which was on a clearance sale. This one actually said that it worked on Apple platforms on the packaging and in the manual but guess what, it didn't. Well to be fair I suppose you can say that it was more successful than the previous purchase for it would accept music files and even play some of them. But that was the thing, it only liked some of them; and it would play the same damn songs again and again until I wanted to physically tear the thing open and beat up the MP3 files themselves. But of course, that is impossible so I had to result to taking it also back to Dixons.

The woman at the counter looked at me as though I was mad and said that all the Dixons staff owned that particular MP3 player and they all worked fine meaning that it wasn't the product that was faulty. She offered to replace it and I stupidly accepted. So how do you think this one got on? Well I'll tell you, it was even worse. All the problems of the previous one were there on top of some new ones. In the week that I owned it, it seemed to develop a liking for cutting the ends of songs and would regularly greet me with the words, "Not Play" meaning that it would just skip a song or two if it felt like it. As well as this, it soon became evident to me that this thing didn't like exercise one bit; when I did push-ups it would crash, when I used my sisters punch bag it would crash, when I ran on our tredmill it would crash, when I did wheelies on my bike it would crash. The only type of excercise that it wouldn't restrict me from doing was lifting weights although it's lanyard would get in the way an awful lot. Anyway, as of today I have removed it from my life forever and I will go near anouther MP3 player never again in my life or Dixons either for that matter.

And that's about all I have time for today, I just though I would update my journal since I haven't done so in a while. Back to biology coursework for me now. Over and out.

Mood: Positive

I've just spent a week on a digital editing course at London College Of Communication. We used Avid (a footage and multimedia editor), which is pretty cool since it's the industry standard throughout Hollywood and employers are looking for people with experience using Avid. After learning the interface basics we brought in our own footage and music (which I'm sure must of violated some copyright laws). We then resequenced, enhanced and generally edited the footage so that we could finally interlace the audio with the footage and transfer the media onto DVDs. Next week I'm going on a digital video production training course at the BBC Broadcasting House.

Mood: Cheerful

Today was my first day of work experience at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, Surrey. I was in the Graphic Design Department and they gave me a nice Apple Power Mac G4 running under Mac OS 9. It was a pretty laid back day with few projects flying around the place so I was allowed to do personal projects between assignments. I spent most of the day using Photoshop 7 and QuarkXpress with a warm mug of coffee at hand while everyone else (who were getting their systems upgraded to Mac OS X) played around with the new interface. I talked to some very interesting people that had never made the upgrade to Mac OS X up until now and were pleased that I was already very familiar with the interface. I had a great day and I'm looking forward to tomorrow (I'm making a trip to an industrial printing factoring in Oxford, Oxfordshire.)