I have had a very very slow start to the year with Studio and it was getting me down. In Year 3 we must come up with our own projects, and they will be a year long. I had been fortunate enough to have been warned a few weeks before we started semester that this would be the case, and really, it was something I was half expecting anyway. But I still wasn't really prepared. My team mate from 4 projects in a row starting from midway through year 1, Anneke was quite down about how last year went (as a lot of us were) and she was non-committal about everything. When I revealed my idea for a web application, a type of social calendar, she really didn't want to do it. Her two reasons were that she was sick of doing techy things that were beyond her skill set (I don't think that this really was, but last years project was though) and that she wanted to come up with her own ideas. I didn't pursue it any further but was a bit bummed that our working relationship was about to end. She was one of the few people that I really liked working with and worked well with. And because of that I didn't really look elsewhere for partners. I presented my idea to a new tutor who understood it well and said it was a good engineering project but BCT of course is also conceptual and because of that I'd have to work out a question and perhaps I could plumb my solution into the answer of that question or maybe I'd find something else. An example might be "how can cloud computing aid social networking?"

I understood this and drafted a presentation together. I mentioned Facebook and Google Plus and the original idea and it was a bit of a muddle. But it bought me time and I could think about it further. The feedback I got wasn't wonderful and I found that disheartening and I really wasn't feeling the project anyway. I had doubts about my calendar, and decided I cant be bothered making predictions about social networking. Especially now that Facebook is like... Microsoft. Crap, but big and business saavy enough to survive regardless. I was enjoying Digital Cinema Studies and that paper also had things to do. Where as Studio is always waffly to begin with. And if you don't know what you are doing then it's even more waffly if that is possible.

Also a social calendar has been done before (though nothing like I was planning originally), I just can't see how to get something like that to a tipping point of usage. I don't really think I care about organising other people's time either. I hardly organise my own time and I'm not sure I can be bothered working out how a tool world make me use it or help me. It's... boring.

So 5 or 6 weeks in I still had nothing really and was very down about it. I skipped a formative assessment because I had nothing to present. Well it turned out I wasn't the only person to do that and plenty of people who didn't skip had nothing decent to present either. Not that this really helped me, but at least I wasn't alone. The following weekend I decided to change to something I had been working on for a few weeks prior to starting this semester.

I hadn't been able to get work in my previous industry (if I'd told potential employers that I wanted to work there for years, not a few months until I went back to uni, I'd have had a job. Too honest for my own good it seems). I decided to build a website. I had a few website ideas, but this one was something I'd thought about previously but didn't have the skills to execute. But I was desperate for money. Alas I didn't just build some quick and dirty site, I spent a lot of time on one part of it then semester started so I shelved it. What was it? A dating website.

Now, it's not going to be a straight build a dating website and hand it in. That is not a BCT project. But I have questions, many, I can ask. And I can explore avenues. I can explore avenues that I wouldn't bother with if it was a home-job. I'll get more into that soon. But this is my basic project, build some kind of dating website or social network that is fun to use and solves some current problems that exist within the current crop of sites.