per Aspera ad Astra
The title is a challenge to Jonny T. I�m just sitting here at work doing what I�m not really supposed to do, hoping that the manpower reviewers don�t walk in and notice that, though I am typing industriously, I am not actually doing anything productive. I just supposed that it was time for me to update my largely ignored blog. The summer is in full swing, Aaron and Katie are finally married, my Crusade friends are in Vail on project, and I am in the �big city� living life to it�s fullest on my own. Not entirely on my own, I am actually spending quite a large amount of time with my honey, Becca. There is some very good news relating to the Becca angle of my life, she now knows for sure that she can go to Kearney as a grad student next year. She found out that she will get a Graduate Assistants position, and she has been in touch with a gal that she will be renting a house with this year. As great as the summer is I�m sure that it will be quite nice to actually have Becca in the same city while going to college.
I have finally gotten in touch with some of my fraternity bro�s here in town and am gonna go check out �The Chronicles of Riddick� tonight. I would normally give my own take on the movie as soon as I get back from seeing it, but I am, obviously, less inclined to update my blog regularly during the summer.
I suppose my official title now is �Flash Developer�. I�m not saying that I am really an expert or anything like that, but I have been working pretty much exclusively in flash for over a month now, and I have definately learned a lot about the program and it�s capabilities. I feel a little gipped that there is no class at UNK that actually teaches Flash development. Admittedly, UNK is not a technical college like the Peter Kewitt Institute here in Omaha, but as a multimedia major it seems almost necessary to learn new technologies like this before I get out into the job market. Though, I actually am not terribly upset because I learn new programs and technologies far more easily on my own than from a class. Another shortcoming of my education so far has been some basic multimedia design concepts that seem vital to being a successful multimedia professional, design documents and functional specifications are two things that I have never really heard of before. Design documents include your process work from the actual graphic design stage of a project, (although I never actually learned what process work was from my design classes at UNK, they just expect you to know how to do that, I am lucky I learned that on my own before I came to college) but design documents should actually include much more detailed material from the development of ideas for any project. Functional specifications (Functional Specs) are long and detailed documents describing each component and section of a multimedia project. I realized immediately after reading about these concepts in a new book that they are very important to an organized development process and seem like ideas that a multimedia student needs in order to be successful. I already have some basic concept of project organization and scheduling from the work I did with PHP Collab when working on a website for Level 1 Media�s first real client. These ideas about Gantt charts and Flow charts and Organization Charts are all important to keeping a consistent development process, but things that I am learning on my own as I go. I hate to sound like I�m complaining about the university, but well that�s what I do best. Complain about the university.
Alright, enough of this, I need to get back to work.