alex.mullr.net/blog

These two years I’ve spent at the University of York have been absolutely fantastic, and it’s impossible to overstate how big a part the media societies have played in me having so much fun. I’m working away from university on a placement this year, but before I start in the big and scary world of “real work”, I wanted to write a little about the things I’ve done at York that have totally completed the experience.

Nouse Website, Spring 2009

This was the first time I got involved significantly in something society-based at university, in the second term of my first year. Working with Ali and Mike, under direction and with massive effort from Chris, we recreated and iterated on the theme for Nouse, the student newspaper (if you know what’s right for you). It meant a load of late nights in the office, fixing things up and getting them ready for launch; my favourite tweet of the early morning “office HTML cluster-fuck” (after one such launch) has to go to Henry.

YSTV Video Production & Website, October 2008 – Present

Looking back, over the last two years YSTV is the best thing I’ve done at York. I’ve met so many more people there than I would have anywhere else on campus and I couldn’t be more pleased that I decided to get involved. From being Matthew’s bitch in the very first term (filming footage for the York Sport Show) all the way up to last term, working on the website with more people than I’ll be able to mention. Mark and Simon somehow managed to get me in front of the camera, though I’m not sure how that even came close to happening. Hopefully I’ll be staying involved in the website this year, from about two hundred miles away.

York Students In Schools, January 2009 – May 2009

I’m not sure why I decided to join YSIS, but I’m so glad I did. In the second term I was helping one afternoon a week in a primary school (Dunnington Church of England), and this year I’ve been assisting with ICT at All Saints RC School. All the teaching has been valuable experience, but seeing the ICT curriculum being taught in a real school, to real kids, has made David’s somewhat different approach so much more important. The teaching quality that I saw at All Saints was amazing, but when the syllabus dictates that you need to teach pupils how to print from Microsoft Access and exactly what that obscure button in PowerPoint does, there’s only so far you can go.

Do More Stuff

If there’s one thing that it was important for me to take away from here, it is this: you might not get on with every single person you come across (can you ever?), but there is absolutely no reason you won’t get along with most of them. You might even have fun.

Rumour (well, the YSTV quotes board) has it that I once said, when asking for confirmation on something television-related: “I have the attention span of a raccoon!” I think I've started to have problems with the tiny length of time I can keep focused on a task…

Something that I've been noticing increasingly lately is that the more “stuff” that gets thrown at me, the more I’ve reduced the amount to which it can bother me. When I started out with a Mac Mini and 4:3 display a couple of years ago, I had Google Notifier set up to make an obscene noise, show me my unread email count and display an overlay with the new message summary. I had system wide notifications set up for IMs, tweets, iTunes changing. In short, my computer was really annoying.

Since then, I've switched off pretty much everything. Tweets appear in the background, and I'll read them if I want. New instant message conversations show a tiny exclamation mark in the menu bar. Google Notifier… well, I actually just quit Google Notifier. I want to see how long I can do without it, but hope this is the start of something productive. Honestly, didn't realise how much all that stuff pained me until I got rid of it, and I don't think I'll be going back.

So consider this a poke for you to do something about your pain-in-the-arse computer; the revelation that the world won't implode if I don't reply to email just hit me, and it feels good.