guardian student media awards
Current mood: cheerful
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers
My hand hurts, from filling in the mountains of Guardian Student Media Awards entry forms.... my all you Pluto/PR1 people you write too much. Shall be attempting to get all the entries off by tomorrow, and who knows, we might get someone/or a publication, on the shortlist.
Cleared out the Pluto office today, just the big filing cabinets and the archive to sort and then it's all clean and ready to be moved to its new home over the summer. Two years of memories, 24 issues have been produced from the small goldfish bowl. We'll miss it, but not for long, as the new office has natural light.
Currently
listening
:
Is This It
By
The Strokes
Release date: 09 October, 2001
... in my feet after working at the Big Weekend. I think our whole house was shattered yesterday, but a good time was had by all. Earned a bit of money working on the bar and serving all the lucky people with tickets drinks, was it worth it? Not really. I did get to catch most of Bloc Party and Annie Mac's DJ set, the rest of the time was spent shovelling Smirnoff and Carlsberg into eager punters hands.
Uni's finished now, but yet things are busier than normal. Have to find somewhere to live from July, the house hunting is not going too well - I want to get a one-bedroom flat but there seems to be a lack of them, and I had planned to move round the corner into my mate Ben's place but I could only stay there until August as it has to be kept free for students who are in their first year at UCLan.
Going home soon back to London, will be nice to see everyone and chill out. Going to head down to Cardiff for a couple of days to catch up with Nat and see Daniel Kitson do some stand-up.
Got a student council meeting tonight, all part of the fun of becoming an executive officer in the SU. It looks like it could be a long one as it only starts at 5 PM and the agenda is a long one. Nick handed in his notice as Communications Officer today, so I'm not entirely sure when exactly I'll be starting the job. Technically it should be July 2nd, with a week's handover beforehand, but as Nick said there's no real need for a Pluto/Frequency handover as I've been involved for three years - I need more of a finance/organisational structure handover. We'll see what's decided.
Thanks to the legend that is Ben Sanderson (the new station manager of Frequency), managed to get into Source our Students' Union bar to see Pete Tong do a Radio1 show live from the bar.
There was an awesome atmosphere, and Becks the SU President got yet more fame by being on his show and making Tong the President of the SU for the night... shame he didn't make an order to drop the price of drinks, which Source had cheekily put up last night.
Vernon Kay made an appearance, but according to girls surrounding the stage area 'he didn't talk to us and was really sarcastic' - looks like he's forgotten his Northern roots then.
Finished the degree on Thursday, law for journalists wasn't too bad in the end. Three years of hard work and the last two days have been even busier than normal. My final project for my online part of the degree has been picked up Radio 5 Live and they are doing a documentary based around volunteering and meaningful travel. Had to edit some audio for the LEP ahead of the Big Weekend... and Friday was full of meetings about Pluto and Frequency next year.
Off to work this weekend at the Radio 1 Big Weekend serving drinks to the masses, it's going to be hectic. I do like the rule that you're not allowed to wear football shirts into the Big Weekend, keep the hooligans out, on the other hand you're not allowed alcohol or food in, and you're only allowed a litre of "unopened" water in a plastic bottle. That means we're going to be even busier on the 100 foot bar. For all those who have tickets or backstage passes, enjoy the weekend because we know we're never going to see anything like it in Preston again.
Currently
listening
:
Heathen Chemistry
By
Oasis
Release date: 02 July, 2002
top 10 for may, saw III and morden
Current mood: lethargic
Category: Music
Top ten songs for May, as per my lovely iTunes:
1. Incubus - Are You In? 2. Bloc Party - Two More Years 3. The Coral - Dreaming Of You (Acoustic) 4. Feeder - Turn 5. Mylo - In My Arms 6. Bloc Party - Uniform 7. Bloc Party - Helicopter 8. Bloc Party - Blue Light 9. Jamie T - Operation 10. The Killers - Bones
Just watched Saw III. Went to see it at the cinema but Matt bought it on DVD, standard gore-flick. Didn't time it very well as we were having dinner half-way through, nothing like trying to eat steak and potatoes while watching some guy get drowned in pig-swill.
Booked all my tickets home today, well home via Burton-on-Trent for a party at Claudia's mates and a return ticket to Cardiff from London to catch up with Nat et al and see Daniel Kitson. Should be a good show, although it's at the glee club which is ridiculously expensive.
Saw a great video today for Good Shoes track - brings back memories of the hometown. Apparently a 'local band' will be playing the Morden Park bandstand on May 28th.. hmmm I wonder who? Shame we never got Good Shoes to play MeMu, they are local boys.
Going to watch Panorama tonight when John Sweeney ends up shouting with Scientologists, and reports on all their weird goings on.
Nearly finished for the year now, just law exam to get through. Got the website project out the way now, which is a massive relief. Nearly 100 HTML pages, 20 flash pages, it was a major geek undertaking but I was proud of it in the end.
Currently
listening
:
Dog in the Sand
By
Frank Black and the Catholics
Release date: 30 January, 2001
Been an interesting couple of days, went to see Wild Hogs on wednesday. At least the Orange 2-4-1 actually came through, it was a pretty cool film. It was a bit of pointless fun really, was impressed at how they didn't let John Travolta steal the show which was good to see. Tim Allen was awesome in it, although I kept wanting to shout 'Tooltime!' after his star turn in Home Improvement on ABC1. Must get a DVD of his stand-up if there's any out there, be interesting to see what he's like.
Above: Travolta revs up and gets ready to hit the road. Damn I want to ride a motorbike, it'd be awesome.
In the evening I was at work, and went to see Peter Pan at Preston's Charter Theatre. It was a musical, now I'm not normally a big fan of musicals, but it was good. Although there were some dodgy sexual undertones going on between Wendy and Peter, not good when there are kids in the audience but quite funny to watch. Not a patch on the Disney original though.
Below: Some classic Pete
My dad came up last night and brought lots of supplies, which should tide me through the revision and online assignment stressing. It's going to be a long hard slog. We drove out to Croston last night and went to a little Italian restaurant called Fresco, was a great place, I ate more than I should of, but what the hell, I'm a student and I'm poor.
Knuckling down to some revision at the moment, been sticking faithfully to my revision schedule. Done a whole weeks worth now, then it'll be revision cards and sitting in my room and talking to myself trying to memorise everything about law and public administration.
My online assignments are getting there, got a surprise yesterday when I signed into the blog I've setup for my Assignment 3, ivolunteer, and it had 75 visits in one day on a story about Adam Birdsey, the backpacker who got killed in a road accident in New Zealand. Who says death doesn't sell?
And in response to Heather's blog about not attending graduation, you've got to be there, it's the last chance to go, ha!, I still managed to get a damn degree despite everything. Plus it's my freakin' birthday, thank you UCLan graduation schedulers, fucked me right up there in the birthday celebration stakes.
Getting closer to completing my Easter task of putting all my CDs onto my laptop, iTunes top 10 currently stands as (being dominated by Bloc Party as that was the only CD on my laptop at the start!)
1. Are You In? - Incubus 2. In My Arms - Mylo 3. Pulp Song - stellastarr* 4. Plans - Bloc Party 5. Two More Years - Bloc Party 6. Dreaming Of You - The Coral 7. Uniform - Bloc Party 8. Like Eating Glass - Bloc Party 9. Helicopter - Bloc Party 10. Waiting for the 7:18 - Bloc Party
Currently
listening
:
Everything Must Go
By
Manic Street Preachers
Release date: 13 August, 1996
Phil Brown, who was a pig farmer in Lancashire, has passed away. I covered his story last year while I was at the Lancashire Evening Post, he was a top bloke.
The final day of my two weeks as part of the Scotsman.com team and it was a late start, didn't have to be in the office until 4.30 PM so I had plenty of time to get myself all packed up and ready for the long night ahead. We were to be filming the debate between two senior Scottish politicians on whether the 300-year-old Act of Union was still relevant.
We checked through the kit and the AVID import once again decided to stop working, but with some frantic button clicking I managed to persuade it to do what it was told. Stewart and I took the kit upstairs to the debating area and planned what to do.
Stewart's attention to detail and 'what-could-go-wrong' strategy taught me a lot as we prepared for every eventuality and got the cameras into position. We filmed an intro with Les Snowdon, the editor of Scotland on Sunday, who had organised the debate, and then we did what any good journalist learns to do - sit around and wait.
We filmed the debate from two cameras, and unfortunatly with the real-time playback, we had a lot of footage to important onto the system. We managed it and with the clock ticking on towards midnight we began to chop the footage down and pick out the highlights for the package.
Much cursing and coffee later, we managed to get the video online at around 2 AM - with no one else in the office apart from Stewart, me and the cleaners. It was great to work against the clock and be part of the debate, the whole article is here. Even though it did mean not getting back to the flat until nearly 3 AM!
My placement has been a good one, and a great insight into how a national newspaper runs itself online…it's taught me a great deal.
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