Hello, campers!

Nine months is a long time to be absent from a blog. A pregnant pause indeed!

Though, in my flimsy defence, I've always been crap at keeping a diary. Diaries are things that other people impose on me.

Anyways: what's up, Rik?

Well, thank you for asking, dear reader. The most important what's up that I need to report is that I am still actively seeking employment. I did manage to get a job last October - seasonal work that took me through to January - though, truth be told, I ended up a lot poorer from the experience. Since then, I average 5-6 job applications a week, and get responses on them maybe 2-3 times a month. I've had 3 job interviews in 6 months.

This may interest you: one employment agent came back with the feedback: 'your online portfolio is a little underwhelming'. Huh? But any feedback is good feedback, so I decided to do something about it. Over three months I developed an entire JavaScript library from scratch. I use it to draw stuff on websites using a canvas element. It's good stuff. I've even overcome my loathing of Twitter to tweet about it! (I currently have 12 followers - ain'tcha just proud of me?)

What I haven't got from all this intense coding activity is ... a job.

Whatever. Here it is. Enjoy!

Vreski Wards website redesign

In my ever-more-desperate attempts to garner a job offer, I've been redesigning bits of my website, to act as a portfolio of what I can do.

The latest update is to the Vreski Wards pages. I originally coded this playful little site as a Facebook App, specifically for promoting my first Novel.

This recode is far more ambitious, as I'm using it as a demonstration both of my coding skills (the code includes jQuery, raphael.js and moment.js tidbits) and my ability to build a fairly pleasing user front-end.

Vreski wards website
Vreski wards facebook app
Vreski wards facebook community page

jQuery gets more fantastic the more it matures. There's AJAX stuff hidden within the slidey pages and snazzy tags magic - who knew that AJAX could be made so simple to code up, huh?

And Raphael makes web graphics do-able - which is a godsend for me as I've never been able to play nicely with flash.

As to the Vreski Wards themselves? It's nice to have finally finished all the text snippets (including 90 sprite descriptions). The new site is finished, and polished, and a vast improvement on the old site. I'm proud to have it as part of my portfolio.

It's a bit of fun - feel free to enjoy it. (And buy my book!)

Telik Bead Game

My lack of posts can be explained - honest, guv!

1. I'm out of work looking for a job. Jobhunting takes up a lot of my fret time.

2. I might be in the process of wasting a bit of time developing a new conlang. It's like a sickness or compulsion: I can't help myself.

But the main reason for not posting is my Open University work, wherein I'm learning to program in Java. Typically, not much was soaking in from the course books, so I did what i normally do in such situations: I started mucking around with code.

See, a long while back I had an idea for a mad conworld-related board game - a sort of bastard backgammon crossed with an African bead game of my own design. I've no idea if the rules of the game are viable, so I decided to make a playable version - just for the hell of it really. To turn my efforts legitimate I'm hand-coded the whole shebang and, because it's summer and the heat deranged me, I decided to try and make it an interactive online thingy (to cover the networking and threading stuff I was having difficulty with on the course).

It's nowhere near finished yet, but most of the basics are in - including all the fun game rules stuff and a tweet-like thingy for the social side of stuff. I'm sure the project will keep me off the streets for a few weeks more ...

Some screenshots of my baby:

Jobhunting

Looks like the redundancy money will be running out quicker than I had hoped. Which means that I'm starting the process of looking for work. Though I won't have to look to hard this side of crimbotide. Bastard bankers and politicians ruining the economy.

Anyways, the CV is loaded onto the Guardian Jobs website (at least I think it is - they're sending me links to jobs they think I'll be interested in). This time next year I'll probably be comfortable in the shackles chaining me to the office workstation, and resigned to the daily commute.

In the meantime, I still have the luxury of applying for jobs that are a little more off the wall. I'm currently pulling together a submission for a work contract in a creative area rarely trod by others; the competition looks stiff, but you never know. The rewards, should I win the contract, will be modest - though there may be a credit involved too, my name appearing in the listings somewhere alongside Best Boy, Dolly Grip, and Assistant Teamaker to the Executive Producer's Chauffeur. More I cannot say: merely to bid for the contract I've had to sign papers promising to mention or discuss nothing (beyond what is already public knowledge) about the work or the employers. What I can say is that this opportunity excites me far, far more than any of the posting adverts the Guardian is ever likely to send my way.