A.R. Van Halleorg

I decided to randomly look at my own blog today and I realize that I haven’t blogged in a week!…I thought that was utterly terrible of me and completely slack, so here I am, writing a post at 12:32 AM.

Learning Italian : I bought a book this evening called 501 Italian Verbs. I thought that having a book of conjugated verbs may help me in establishing a better understanding of the language. It gives really great examples with most of the verbs to be able to know how they’re used, so it’s great! I’m totally loving the experience. I haven’t felt this way about learning something, since I started learning programming.

Script Frenzy : Well, I’m 50 pages into Script Frenzy now. It’s 15 days in and we have another 15 to go. I’m on schedule! I’ll probably hunker down and hack out the next portion of it over the weekend. At least get most of the rest finished. I’m looking forward to getting to be able to go back over it all and make it into a polished piece of art. Fantastic.

Southern Gals : I’ve recently discovered that Twitter is quite a dangerous world. Flying tweets left and right. Everyone vying for attention and sometimes…sometimes you get a random message from someone and you’re thrown for several moments. You wonder if they made a mistake, surely no one responds to a tweet!

But they do!…who knew. So this southern gal, (who shall remain nameless, *cough*GO HERE*cough*) decided that I was deemed worthy of a tweet back! And I’m shamelessly linking you to her website, because I can. *waves banner and gushes in a southern drawl* “I’m her biggest fan, y’all! One day I could even get an autograph on my banner!”

What was I on about? It’s late and my mind is wandering lol. Right, so it was pretty cool to be able to meet someone on Twitter who had very similar interests to me. It’s rare that I get to talk to anyone who thinks anything I think is of interest, let alone it be their idea! So after hours of brain picking and confusing conversations about nothing in particular, I decided she’s cool and is now invited to the inner circle of friends. *crickets chirp in the empty field* …okay, it’s an empty space, but I have to start somewhere!

Okay, I’ll write more tomorrow. I’m too brain dead lol

Have a good day/evening all!

Ahh, I think this is now day 4 or 5 of learning Italian and I thought I’d share my improvements over the last few days.

So one of the last things I had a big issue with was the inability to properly process the information and spit it out in written form. Well, I got better at it. The last written submission I sent in only had 1 mistake! It made me so excited! (not in a dodgy manner) And then to make matters even better for me, I finally got out my microphone and decided to record my speaking submissions and see how that went. Apparently I’m much better at speaking Italian than writing it. Not a surprise. I’ve always been better at speaking random languages than understanding them.

But, apparently I speak shyly when I speak Italian, which makes sense, because I haven’t yet learned where to put the emphasis on the parts of the words in order to speak it confidently. I’m just trying to focus on saying it right, before I get overly sure of myself and manage to epically fail at life. Like Post 1 in which I described my failed attempt at trying to be clever by switching words out. What can I say, I learn fast not to make that kind of mistake again.

Small nuisance with the program I’m using is that the speaking submissions tend to use very different words than the lessons themselves, which is really odd to me. It’s like…oh hey 3 lessons later, why don’t we randomly use camion instead of autocarro. Or borsa instead of borsetta. It just messes with my head, I don’t know why they do it. I’m going to assume it’s like when you randomly run into someone in Italy and they’re suddenly using some warped language and they want you to be on your toes just in case!

So that’s all I had to say about that for today, as the days go by, I’m sure that it’ll get more interesting.

Well, it’s day 8 and things are finally starting to pick up some more. I’ve spent the majority of day in pain and after much Tylenol, I’m doped up enough to not feel much pain at all, so I’m writing this post. I’m sitting at around 37 pages now out of 100. Hopefully I’ll have a few more before the day is done. The last few days haven’t been too eventful, I’ve been trying to catch up on a bit of sleep and work on a website for someone at work, so I’ve been a little busy.

What have I gotten done in the last few days?…

1) I’ve managed to learn how to pace myself much better. One of those most difficult things that I struggle with is learning to pace the storyline instead of trying to force feed the information to the reader in 5 minutes time. It’s actually kind of satisfying to be able to do that. Now even I think it’s more interesting this way.
2) I’ve learned to drop hints/clues in order to prepare the reader a little better for the upcoming scenes.
3) My bad guys and good guys are a little less clean cut. I tend to be a bit of an extremist when it comes to characters. They’re either really horrible people or really sweet-tooth worthy. Now my bad guys show that they have some feelings beyond anger and hatred and my good guys show a side that shows they have moments where they don’t care who they walk over either.

I guess I didn’t do anything major in the storyline, but it’s an interesting learning experience nonetheless.

Have a great day everyone and I hope that your Script Frenzy is going well.

Hi there,

My name is Audrey-Rose and I’m a workaholic.

At approximately 10pm on Thursday night, I sat staring wide-eyed at the clock and found myself daydreaming about being back in the comfort of my workplace. Why? Because, it’s the long weekend. I should consider myself fortunate that I had the time to work on my screenwriting and started to learn a new language, but as every moment passes, and the hours begrudgingly pass by, I’ve been wanting to go back to work.

The worst part is, it’s not even because I’m stressed out and have something to get done there. No, we’ve gone into Agile mode and things are pretty bloody organised, so it’s most definitely not that. No. I just love to work. I love having a list of things to do and I love getting them done. It’s a little addicting. The problem that then follows as a consequence of such an addiction is that I tend to procrastinate on the things I do enjoy doing, just because it’s all I can think about!

Is there a cure? Probably not. It’s probably one of those things where you get a chip out, try to focus and not go overboard each day and then the day you do go overboard, you tend to revert back to that first chip like a good little failure that you are. Don’t take it as an affront to your inability to stay sober (for those of you who might have gotten insulted from that remark), but I would consider it a personal failure on my part if I didn’t have the self-control and willpower to keep myself on my own leash. There’s just no excuse. I would fail because of one simple fact. Working is fun. I like working. I love the feeling of working. And I’ll work again. Addiction is just insane to try to handle. So long as it feels good to the person, they’ll never drop it.

Anyways, so that’s my random ramble of the day. I thought that perhaps my other rambles were due to the utter lack of sleep that I was projecting at the time, but it would appear that even with sleep, I’m just as mentally unsound. I’ll work on it.

Have a good rest of the day!

Ahh, another day come and gone in the lovely world of learning Italian. It’s still random, I still don’t have any sound basis for wanting to learn it, but I can tell you one thing. I love it! I’ve always heard from people, especially here in Quebec, that Spanish is super easy to understand, especially if you know English and French, but personally I’ve always found it a little difficult to get my mind around. Which is odd, but eh. Italian on the other hand…seems like French has a pretty big Italian base to it and is MUCH closer to sounding French than Spanish does. Someone could explain something to me in Spanish and an Italian could explain the same thing and odds are that I’ll understand the Italian more than the Spanish one.

Sorry, I’m rambling a little, it’s pretty early in the morning and I haven’t slept yet.

Yesterday didn’t really have any huge dramatic episodes of corrections, but I also haven’t done the written submission portion of Lesson 2 yet. I’m almost having nightmares in my waken state just imagining the resulting commentary I’m going to be receiving once I do complete it. I can just imagine the grilling. Hopefully I don’t try anything clever and manage to get the singular/plural/feminine/masculine right this time. Now that I understand that the language is styled much like French, this will be much easier for me to understand. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it that way before, but eh.

I’ll be sure to update as regularly as I can. As boring as it all is, it keeps me wanting to push forward and keep learning the language, just so I can rant about the whole experience and enjoy the fact that I’m understanding it more and more

All in all. I’m loving this! What a beautiful language.

Have a great day!

I’m not entirely certain whether it’s healthy to be up at 3:30 in the morning just to write a script. Personally, I think it’s a little ridiculous, I mean, I should be in bed, sleeping, enjoying dreams and soaking in the rest and relaxation before the sunlight streaks its way through the windows….That’s the logical thought process and yet here I am.

In my defence, my storyline has mutated quite a bit from yesterday. Certain things that had initially been brought up, are no longer in the picture and others are a little fairer. I needed a more distinct difference between the protagonists and antagonists. Before, I had an issue of them meshing a little too much, but hopefully I’ve managed to smooth it out.

So here I am. 31 pages into my screenplay, 69 to go!

Let’s see…what have I learned in the last 24 hours?

1 – There’s such a thing as too much Coca Cola. When you’re talking a mile and minute and manage to have 7 conversations within 16 minutes with the same person, you’ve just surpassed the limit and need to lay off.
2 – Sometimes, you don’t need to create drama where none is need. Sometimes, it’s just better to let the story flow.
3 – When they say that every interaction should have conflict, it doesn’t mean outright conflict. In the case of a scene I was writing, there was a situation that came up that normally the cliché would suggest being argumentative and cause some kind of friction. Instead I made the character reluctantly accept, while making a backhanded comment that would suggest dissension, but much more subtly.
4 – Watching movies while writing is such a bad idea. I wish it were because it wrongly inspires you, but for me it just kind of distracted me from getting any writing done.
5 – Pushing through a scene by writing crap is sooo much easier to work with. You can always go back later and correct it.

So, I hope you all have a good day or sleep when you get there (I can’t be the only one up at this time, who should be in bed)

I’m in the process of randomly beginning to learn Italian. I don’t know why, I just woke up this morning and thought ‘I want to learn Italian’. So I went on to Live Mocha, which is where I’m relearning my German. I use this because it has a community of people who are also learning other languages and people who are native of the language you’re trying to learn can correct you and tell you what you did right/wrong. This is generally awesome and with my German I didn’t see much trouble when I received corrections. But I also used to know German, so I guess that helps.

Well, Unit 1, Lesson 1 of the Italian one is just nouns. It’s just knowing boy, girl, man, woman, you, me. And then saying stuff like..is rich, is poor, is whatever. But this thing also doesn’t tell you how to switch between feminine and masculine yet, because that’s in a later lesson. Well let’s just say that in my clever attempt to switch out nouns, I sent up a red flag among the Italians and suddenly I had tips on how to switch from feminine to masculine and some confusion was thrown in by also pointing out the difference between singular and plural terms.

That didn’t bug me. But their explanation for it was written in Italian. So you can imagine how difficult that was to try to decipher what they were trying to tell me was. My only saving grace was that French is very much based on Italian/Latin, so I got there pretty quickly. On the plus side, here’s what I learned.

1- By default, switch the e at the end of a descriptive word when dealing with a female actor. (pretty standard, we have this in French too)
2- Don’t be clever and switch things around until you have at least a minor grasp of the language or else people send you complicated explanations back with words you’ve never even dreamed existed.
3- Even when you see words you didn’t dream existed, having a backup language helps a lot.
4- Think about what I’m writing in my submission. If I don’t want them to correct me based on something I didn’t mean, then I need to be clear.
5- Take it all constructively and be even more determined.

Consider that my random useless post of the day. I just wanted to talk about it.

If any of you are using Live Mocha as well, go ahead and add me to your list! I’m arvanhalleorg on there.

Hope you guys are enjoying your day.

It’s officially day 3 of Script Frenzy, for many abroad it’s already nearing the end of it, but some of us are still mid-way through. I have yet to write a single word today, which is unfortunate, but I’m giving myself a bit of leniency, since I’ve already obtained 15 pages, which puts me 4.5 days into the competition.

I’m not entirely sure that it’s going very well so far, but it’s moving along. What I mean by that is; It’s not being written out how I’d prefer, but it’s getting out of my head and I guess that’s what’s most important during this first portion. My main difficulty is that I see this movie playing out in my head and I am trying to get it out in script form, but I’m lacking vocabulary and I think it’s the reason it just feels off for me. The dialogue and the quirks in the characters are coming out strong, just as I’d plotted them out, but I want the scenes to make an impact, not bore people to death, so I’ll see how it goes.

As is, at the rate I’m going, I’ll be able to finish this 15-20 days into the competition and then I’ll sit down and start rewriting scene by scene. I won’t remove anything or add anything vital, because that’ll just make me want to rewrite the entire thing, but I’ll at least start rewriting scenes and making them better.

On this fine, beautiful, over-heated day in Montreal, it is also my Mum’s birthday. She’s turning 44 today and she’s still looking as pretty as ever. I think what’s really making her happy about it all, despite getting a year older, is that everyone still looks at her shocked when she says her oldest (me) is turning 26 this year. They just can’t imagine being a mother so young. I think it’s pretty cool. My real grandmother is turning 60 or 61 this year, so we’re a pretty young family. It’s kinda cool.

So, my Mum is one of the coolest people I’ve ever known. She’s always treated us (my brother and I) with respect, kindness and understanding. She’s always encouraged us to better ourselves and learn more, without making grades a vital portion of that. It was more of a consequence of enjoying the process of learning. After all, if you love learning, then you retain the information you see. She’s always been there for us when life isn’t going so well and she also lets us in when her life isn’t going so well either. She’s one of my best friends and I’ll always be grateful for the things she’s taught me as a human being. I love helping people, being kind to people, showing compassion and changing the lives of others and it’s in large part thanks to her.

Thank you very much for being you, Mum. I love you with all my heart I know I can be very stubborn sometimes, but that’s just because you gave me my thick skull.

I hope you have an awesome birthday.

For those of you doing the Script Frenzy, I hope everything is going well for you and that writer’s block hasn’t hit you yet. Make the most of this long weekend!

Have a great day everyone.

After a day or so, I finally managed to get some basic Login/Logout functionality working on my Django project. What a pain in the butt, when you have no idea what you’re doing to begin with and you’re trying to do something without having to go back and do it later!

Several pages and much headaches later, I stumbled on one that made it pretty clear to me.

Since I am a fan of trying to lessen the trauma of people everywhere with similar issues as me, I will tell you that if you’re trying to make an authentication (basic one), go to this page. It’s part of the documentation on Django Project.

One mistake I made while trying to make the login() function work after my authentication was some KeyError…I think. No biggie. Just change the name of the view calling it. I had a wonderful stroke of mental prowess and thought…”Hey, why don’t I make this view login(), instead of something like login_page().” Well, I never claimed to be a rocket scientist. So just take my word for it if you’re a newbie and just make it something other than login().

If you guys want to see the result of the code itself, I s’pose I could paste it on here, but really the linked page in the above text was what I used. I haven’t deviated from it yet. Just visit the page and read it and hopefully it’ll help you if you’re having trouble with it.

Sadly, I’m not a python/django expert yet, so I can’t really help too much.

“The page I’m going on about.”

Have an awesome Easter weekend!

The following is just a small blurb from the post I wrote earlier today for a blog we’ve started at work among in the web team. You can go ahead and read more about it here.

“This is a snippet of code that I was working on this morning with the input of a coworker for the concept. Basically we needed to have a way to include a navbar at the top of every site, which includes javascript functionality, but also doesn’t conflict with already present jQuery libraries.”

Small note: In IE, you need the jQuery.noConflict() line to be separate from the rest of your snippet code if you want it to work. IE seems to have an issue with the XML connotation of CDATA Comments. It sucks. I swear I’mma just boycott them until they conform. Okay, I won’t, but it’s nice to dream. I don’t know why IE does this to be honest, it just does.

<script src=”js/jquery-1.4.2.js” type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript”></script>
<script>var $newJS = jQuery.noConflict();</script>
<script>alert(‘do a bunch of stuff here’);</script>