From an HTC near medefinitldey been marked by some ups and downs. I moved house, yet again, swapping space for mo familiar companthe down, the up comes in the form of a new phone, a shiny HTC One X, which mirrors my friends. As I get used to the new phone, my first smart phoe, it is bit by bit helping me get by without access to my PC.
That’s about all I can manage to type on here, I’ll post more soon 
Regrettably I haven’t kept up to my commitment for a post every weekend, and its time to put that right. I’ve had rather a lot going on over the past few weeks, and have had even more on my mind. Two key events have taken place this month, the first being the Socialist Party’s Congress. It was the biggest event that I have been involved in with the party, much bigger than the regional conference that I attended previously. I’ve been so busy recently, mostly regarding this months second key event, of moving house, that as yet I haven’t put together an article on my experience and how my local branch participated, so I’ll have to just briefly summarise the experience for you; it was invigorating, inspiring and eye-opening.
In many ways, moving house has been an even bigger event, being perpetual broke, it was stressful to have to rely on others, both for their time, and their facilities for the actual logistics of the move, and it was even more stressful due to the fact that I have been forced to downgrade from renting a house, to effectively living out of a single room… which as had an even bigger effect on me than I could have imagined, and although I’ve been at my new place for nearly a week now, I’m still only getting used to it.
I’m still seeking employment, my CV seems to be doing what it needs to, only now it seems to be my interview skills that are letting me down… something I will have to develop. I know I have a lot to offer any employer, but I’m used to under selling my abilities and breaking that habit is hard enough, coupled with a very unconventional work history, and it ensures that gaining employment is the hardest thing on my to do list.
Now that I’m living closer to Leeds, I’m able to commute on foot, so I can commit to more interviews and development opportunities, which is a huge positive that I intend to make the most of whilst I’m living here.
Having a few days doing little but watching video's at home as built up an appetite to get some work done. I've made a few small tweaks to the Socialist Party’s branch website that I'm developing, and its now putting this site to shame, so I'll have to spend some time improving this site once again. Regarding that, I’ve just added another new page to the site, called Downloads it’ll feature various documents or templates that I've produced and have made available. The first addition is a basic spreadsheet I have created to help track items that'll be going into storage whilst I move house.
I had to spend some time working on my spare computer earlier, which my parents have been using connected to their main TV for the past few years. The mouse and keyboard stopped working as soon as the Windows login screen was loaded, after all other options failed, I began reinstalling the Operating System, which as got the keyboard and mouse working again. Sadly another problem has developed, the wireless card is now not being recognized, I didn’t have the original driver discs with me, so either the latest version isn’t recognizing the card, whereas the original might still work, or its broken and will need replacing. As a temporary measure I’ll be using a length of Cat5 to connect the computer to the router upstairs and will continue setting things up tomorrow.
Unfortunately I’m still not fully recovered from my cold, but I’m miles better than I have been, and hope to get more done each day now.”
I’m battling another cold at the moment, and its come at a terrible time. I’ve had to miss an enrolment date at college, which would have been the start of an ECDL course, and still being ill, have had to miss out on attending this weekends Youth Fight for Jobs & Education event in London.
More bad news came the other day when I used up my months data allowance on my dongle, so am back to daily top-ups until next week. I’ve not long since been back online, and although I always miss being able to go online as and when I feel like it, this cold as also hindered me in that regard too, as one of my main objectives that I would be working on through the internet would be applying for jobs, but there isn’t much point whilst I’m still too ill to attend any interviews, or even hold a clear conversation over the phone.
The majority of my time over these last couple of days has been spent on watching DVD’s, and in doing so I’ve identified an audio problem. At first I thought it might just be a bad disc, but it happened on multiple discs, than I began to worry it was my new dvd drive, but the problem also occurred on some video’s playing from my hard drive. Playing around with VLC it looks like there is something wrong with my surround sound system, has switching from 5.1 to another selection under VLC’s Audio Device menu fixes the problem. I haven’t investigated it further yet, happy for the time being that switching devices seems to be a working hack, but its a symptom I’ve not yet come across before. What happens is that when playing certain video’s you can hear the background music, but not the dialogue or the dialogue would be very quiet compared to the background music. It may be that one of my speaker leads have just become loose or unplugged entirely, hopefully it won’t be a more serious problem.
I pondered the title of this post for a good 5 minutes… okay so that’s not that long, but still. Given that this site will be made up of a collection of different topics, with probably varying degrees of focus, and the fact I’ll repeatedly want to chat about whatever takes my fancy, I really need to develop a system of naming the posts I categorise as “casual chat”, both for aesthetic and SEO reasons… I’ll give it some thought.
Earlier in the week, as I mentioned I had an appointment to picked up some contacts to follow-up regarding some courses I need to take. I ended up being distracted by other things Friday, so I’ll be following up those leads on Monday. Another in road into improving my career prospects is to get my CV up on here, which is now listed under my new page, Hire Erika! The new page will only feature on the menu when I’m seeking work, so I’ll probably link to my downloadable CV via my about page too. In fact I’ll get that done after I publish this post. The new page is very short at the moment, effectively just acting as a place holder for my CV. I was planning to publish my CV on the page itself as well as making it available for download, but at the time I was too tired to lay it out nicely so I’ve left that for the time being. If I do publish it up, I think it makes sense to expand it and elaborate on my experiences, as the version I host here doesn’t have to be limited to the standard two or three page limit, that you’d aim for if you were mailing it to a prospective employer. There are probably some sophisticated techniques for displaying online CV’s in an interesting and creative manner, which I will have to investigate. Even if they don’t work on my current WordPress.com hosted domain, becoming familiar with the methods will help me should I move to another host.
Always trying to improve the site, and in doing so learn new, and refresh old techniques for working with websites and WordPress in particular I’ve made a few small changes to the sites navigation. I’ve created a new drop down menu entry for the site’s blog categories, and also removed the category widget which was displayed at the top of the sidebar. I did investigate placing other widgets up on the side bar, having created a little more room, but the ones I’m interested in are not suitable for my hosted domain.
Yesterday was a really good day, I did a proper good shop at the supermarket. Having ran low on so many things over the past few weeks it was really good to stock up again. I could still do to pick up more groceries, as a 1/3 of my shopping seemed to be taken up by toiletries and household items. Before hitting the supermarket I visited a local farm shop and picked up a bag full of vegetables and free range eggs. I hope to make use of much of the veg by making some vegetable pies, something I’ve only done a couple of times before, the first time making a bulk supply. There always a great thing to have in your freezer, easy to cook, surprisingly filling and packet full of veg I’d imagine fairly healthy despite the pastry, especially as I only use pastry on the top of mine.
WordPress support got back to me today regarding a problem I’ve had on the Socialist Party’s branch website I’ve been developing, so I hope to complete a couple of pages on their a bit later on. So far this morning, I’ve already finished the hoovering, had breakfast, done the dishes, emptied the washer and topped up my internet dongle, so its set to be a productive day.
Lots of stuff has happened as you’d perhaps expect from my last blog post. A surprise for myself, but perhaps not for some of my readers was that I got back involved with Occupy Leeds, and to a smaller degree the wider Occupy Movement. I remained on the fence as to whether I was “official back”, at some point I probably would have blogged about it, but as was usually the case with the Occupy Leeds Occupation, when there you get busy, and when living there, you get very busy and all sense of normal routines just flutter away. A quick stop by turned into a night stay, which turned into 2 day’s, there was a new “crew” on site, one or two I’d seen before under less pleasant circumstances, but the feeling was different, there was hope, and it was intoxicating. Soon I was on my way home, once more, only this time to pick up supplies, and from then I was once more a fixture of the camp… until near the end, when we parted ways for good… only to be reunited as part of the deconstruction process.
I probably should go into depth about those final few weeks I spent with the Occupation, but that’s for another post.
Since then I’ve been easing once more back into what one could say was to be my usual routine, spending way too long at my desk being less than productive, and then opposing that side of myself with bursts of frantic productivity, rather desperately seeking my next objective, but at the same time, enjoying the moments of calm before the storm. I’ve got a couple of new “ventures” in the pipeline at the moment, all of which seem to be being held up by one thing or another too, which is a shame… I’ve had an opportunity to further develop my web skills a notch however.
The focus now, needs to be on career development, or more accurately career choosing as I still haven’t rooted myself on to any sort of career path, but I’m hopeful my recent experiences will prove useful.
The cold I thought was leaving me has hung around a little longer, which feels like an increasing drain on my day. The good news is that I’m catching up with chores and starting to fall back into some sort of a routine. In many ways my life as always been a rollercoaster ride, going between the highs of investing everything into something, and the lows of leaving that behind and awaiting the next thing. I’m at one of those lows now, but its higher up the slope then what has previously been the norm.
I’m going to take it easy for the next few days, give this cold a chance to leave my system for good, and to settle into being back at home. I will however be ramping up my job search, getting to grips with some new learning material, both via websites and the relatively new books that have sat unread on my self over the past few weeks.
Hopefully in a week, I’ll feel well enough and have organized my house back to a point where I can start doing some exercise again, until then I eagerly await those happy moments of post work out joy.
Its been a hectic and emotional three weeks. An invitation to an event got me started on a roller-coaster of Occupation, which at least for the time being as now slowed to a halt. After seeing an event listing for an Occupy Leeds event, I happily signed up, after developing an increasing awareness of Occupy themes via Facebook and Twitter over the previous week. My reactions peaked when I realised this was an event without a group, I recall it being odd, and was excited about being involved in a movement from the group up, so I quickly setup a Facebook group, it was the 30th of October 2011. Soon after I was alerted to the fact that a Facebook Page had already been setup called Occupy Leeds, funnily enough both the Facebook Page, the group I created and the event had all been setup independently of one another. The same individual was then pivotal in linking us all up together, so even though each effort began as an individual effort, soon all 3 Facebook initiates began to converge into one unified presence, albeit with still a lot of independence.
A wonderful member of Occupy Britain was soon involved and hooked us up with the domain name and hosting for www.occupyleeds.co.uk and from that moment on I took on the role of webmaster, and loved it. I’ve used WordPress a lot previously, but this felt new and refreshing, it was a great pleasure in developing a new site that seemed to look more and more polished with each passing day and having our kind “sponsor” on call to help me tackle any difficulties made it a really enjoyable experience. For the next few days, things developed at a rapid rate, I setup a Skype account, however it got seldom used, I setup a Twitter account, the credentials of which have been used by the initial “founders” of Occupy Leeds and eventually other members who took on either a “web-role” or an “admin-role”. A forum soon appeared and I believe within a week, with help of our “sponsor” we had also setup an e-mail forwarding system given us the use of official looking e-mails, such as info@occupyleeds.co.uk and we even had a public phone number, working via a call forwarding system. These steps where crucial during the pre-occupation phase in my opinion and quickly became swamped after “occupation day”, which facilitated the need for a mobile phone for camp use to remain on site.
The occupation began rather haphazardly on the 11th of November 2011, I personally felt annoyed by the lack of organisation of the group as a whole, despite doing my very best. Perhaps I should have expected, to my knowledge only the 3 “co-founders” had met each other before occupation day, and everyone inevitably add their own priorities and biases towards what needed to be done, and how it should be achieved. After lots of discussions throughout the night regarding the setup of the camp, laid out in my absence whilst I was purchasing supplies elsewhere, the next morning, those of us who capped the night before got busy and remodeled the camp in time for the 2nd general assembly (GA).
My priorities at this time, was in setting up a well organised, functioning camp, so I recall being even a little annoyed that work had to stop to facilitate a GA, which felt a little pointless as tents still had to be fastened in place, etc… but it happened, and during this GA, the working groups were created, those already existing from the night before were either confirmed or modified. After getting other my frustrations with the actual camp, things got on nicely for a few days. There was a very small number of us who remained close to 24/7 and we all seemed to get on well. Up to a week in, a rift could have developed between those who remained at camp, and a larger majority of people who seemed to only appear for the GA’s then disappear, and to an extent I believe it did, though it didn’t halt progress.
Towards the end of the first week and into the second week, morale was low. After several nights myself and others ushered thoughts to the effect of another night with just 4 of us all day and all night and we may as well pack up. Bringing these concerns to GA, alleviated some pressure and we had a small bump in over night attendance for the next couple of nights. After two weeks I had, had enough and had to get away for a night at home, but you couldn’t really forget about the camp. I kept seeing things or being made aware of things that needed to be done, but camp life was so busy you can’t manage everything, and wish such low numbers around camp for the majority of time, especially in those early day’s, it was very hard achieving anything outside of keeping the camp running… and at least in my own opinion that problem has persisted to this day.
Up to 20 days in to occupation, more working groups have been setup, and they appear to be getting more organised, unfortunately that was tainted by a storm decimating the camp, and despite a call and tweet for an emergency meeting for the next morning, at most 3 people turned up until well into the evening, leaving us very under-manned to rebuild the camp. In the end we did a very through job of rebuilding the main tent and stabilizing the smaller sleeping tents, but the camp was a mess, and remained so for several days afterwards.
At 3 weeks in, the camp and its surrounding movement has enjoyed some real success, we had an awesome day when Billy Bragg graced us with his presence and sang a few songs, and a large presence of support from the N30 strikers also raised morale. However, the camp is still plagued with fundamental problems that have been present from day one, despite my best efforts these have developed to an extent, where I feel my presence on camp was a waste of energy, so I pulled back, hoping and expecting others to step up and take more of an active role, and to an extent that did happen. The camp so an influx, albeit small of new people, who were keen to keep the camp running, fetching water, charging the battery system and keeping watch on a night, etc. Sadly the day shift, has ever has been increasingly forgotten about, less and less people turn up during the day, and any active engaging with the public on a day-to-day basis has effectively ceased all together in my opinion. I tried to re-kindle things, but in part due to my lack of familiarity with “Occupy procedures” and my overt frustration over what to me is clear inactivity and inefficiency of everything from inter-group communication to even handing out information to the public, a key objective of the camp, those efforts have not amounted to enough positive change that I feel I can remain as part of the current movement within Occupy Leeds, without driving myself mad with frustration or driving others away.
It’s definitly a sad day, but also a relief to be away from what seems to me like increasing reactionary red-tape and hypocrisy. As of today I class myself no longer a part of Occupy Leeds, and wish everyone still involved a safe journey and good luck.
I’ve been pretty busy over the last couple of day’s working on another website for a grass-roots movement. Its been a lot of fun as I’m learning things about WordPress and web development that I’ve either forgotten or is totally new. I hope to start [re]learning HTML, CSS and perhaps PHP from the ground up very soon.
Today has been one of those kind of days that makes me very eager to start tomorrow. Not in that today sucked or anything, it was okay, even with the apparent boredom I have found myself simmering in at the moment. It just feels as if I haven’t really achieved anything, in comic terms, today was a filler, and I don’t much care for fillers, I’d rather just get on with the story.
I need to use this “meh’ness” to drag myself up out of bed nice and early tomorrow, get on the phone, get sending e-mails out, get writing letters, above all get creating some more positive change, cause things have slowed to a crawl right now, and I need something to get excited about. I’ve actually got a lot going on, or rather I could be doing a lot this week, if I could afford it. Its pretty pathetic when you can’t even afford a bus into town and back, but that’s become my situation, at least for a few more days.
Oh, so badly do I need a job, and its a rare feeling I admit, but oh, so badly do I actually want a job. I am sick of not actively working towards something, and even if its just rent payments or money for that new dress I’ve got my eye on, that’ll give me a real uplifting boos and give me some, pride I guess. Its my own faul, there is always something I could be working towards. I started to learn Italian last month, and I haven’t barley made any progress this past two weeks. I’ve also got a few new books I could be reading, but for whatever reason, lately these things are still left “un-ticked” on my things to do list, forever being past along from one day to the next.
Life is good, but I’m annoyed at myself for not getting ahead more, not getting back into employment as quick as perhaps I could have. I’m still uncertain about which career direction I want to head in, and its hard to make an honest commitment without getting some more work experience, and that’s been thin on the ground recently.
Now its time for a mug of green tea and some comfy nightwear, goodnight all xx
