Sunday, May 13, 2007

The Eurovision Song Contest was last night. I stayed in and watched it.
As you may already know, Serbia won.



Well that's over for another year.
Fun fun.

So far today, I have been struggling to decide which modules to take for my final year. I'm thinking to do Free Speech and Censorship in the first term as my unrestricted module, and perhaps Political Communication(JNL312) in the spring. But I'm unsure whether to take PolCom as it's a 3 hour exam and essay...and urgh...aparently the lecturer isn't the most inspiring of people...and if I have him for Free Speech and Censorship (JNL315)in the Autumn, it might be something like boring overload!!! So I may yet do a module in Philosophy (you can do one from another department to the value of 20 credits) as long as I get it checked by the department first and so forth. Also, as long as I meet the criteria of 120 credits for next year I will be fine.

Good news however. I am going to be seeing TOOL not once, but TWICE over the summer, for Gary's birthday! Which I know is just gonna be beyond AWESOME. I can't wait, I'm sooo sooo excited!! Oh and also, I bought ISIS tickets for in two weeks time, when Gary and his mate are gonna come up and we can go see them, on Sat 26th :) yayyyyyy.

Work wise, it is getting done. Slowly but surely. I've nearly completed my Quark Xpress page, which I had to recreate from a real life newspage. I think it's all pretty accurate, however I shall have to check every minute detail, so as not to lose out on valuable marks. Other than that, my web news stories are nearly complete. I have four of them done. So only have to find one more...the deadline for that is Friday, so I have plenty of time. I will start my research for it today and then over Tues-Fri I will just focus on that and hopefully get it done. Yay. The essay I did over Easter so I just have to print that off, it's not something I really need to worry about. Hmm what else? Oh I had my 'News Day' on Friday the 11th...bloody hell was that stressful! Yet rewarding.

Me and Holly latched onto a story happening in Hackenthorpe, where an elderly person's residential care home was opening...so we decided to drive down there and have a look at it. We got an interview with someone in charge (unfortunately the manager was off sick, so we make the most of these bad situations...) and we got to speak to some really sweet elderly people. One was an old guy called Gerald who was showing us all of his paintings he had done. Yet another was an old lady who didn't really like her new carehome all that much, but made the most of it nevertheless. I felt kinda sorry for her, I'd hate to die in a carehome. But I guess that is happening to thousands of elderly people every day. Grim.

We got lost trying to find the darn place though! Which took up about an hour out of our journey...we got laughed at by guys on the way there, telling us we had gone in completely the wrong direction! :p Arrgh. &also the traffic was incredibly bad that day- I mean, EVERYWHERE was teaming with traffic and all those bloody red lights we kept having to stop at...I swear we ran a few out of sheer stress after a while. Bloody Sheffield, it's so hard to drive around (apparently the second worst in the country, after London).

In the afternoon once we got back to the newsroom, we wrote up our stories and made them into a 'wrap' which is a radio piece with a voicer...which then goes to a clip of the residents speaking (gives a sense of 'actuality') before moving back to the reporter speaking, which gives it a final closing sentence, so to speak. The radio bulletins were done by the hour, at 1pm, 2pm, 3pm and the final one being at 4 o'clock, with a couple of minutes of sport and weather attached to the last one. I think by the end of it, we had shown that we could produce stories like on a typical Radio Day and move them on, etc. It was kinda fun in a way, but highly, highly stressful!!!

I didn't exactly appreciate my housemates arriving in from clubland at like, 3am that morning either,shouting and screaming! That didn't help much. Infact it woke me up and I barely got a decent night's kip after that. Grrrrr.

Nevermind, it's over with now. Unfortunately, I have to write up a 1500 word+ critical evaluation of the news day assessment...I have to write of what I learnt, criticise my team members (we were in a team of 12) and write about what we did best...and it has to be handed in by May 25th. I've already written around 500 or so words, so I'm not doing too bad. But it's just...more work. Yeuch. Still, at least it is getting done.

I just wish it would stop raining.

19 days until I finish for the summer however :)

xo

0 comments: