I am joining the blogging community at last. Well, joining for the second time. My friend persuaded me to start a diary online of my upcoming move to Prague, which is at this site and hopefully will be updated soon, but I think I've caught the bug, and since I'm in the process not only of moving to a new country, changing job, possibly starting a new university course as an adult learner and (hopefully) becoming a published author, I figured I might like to have somewhere to keep track of everything. And why not put it online, so I can bore many people!
At the moment I live in Scotland and work for a regional broadcaster here. It sounds really cool when I say I work in TV until I say what I actually do and then people's interest generally peters out. But basically I edit and produce subtitles for teletext for the hearing impaired. If you're in the UK, that's the 888 teletext subs. I type them for our Scottish output. I can hear the snores already, I know. But we are very good typists and we type fast! I also occasionally do autocue work, which for anyone outside the UK is the teleprompter, which is a laugh, and lets me get my nose into a lot of current affairs. Last job I did was an election broadcast for the upcoming Holyrood elections on May 5th, a live debate between the Scottish party leaders. And I got my first ever unsolicited credit onscreen too! Only time I have ever had my name in the credits before that was on the last ever episode of a sports programme we used to make, and we all kind of asked for that, since it was the last one. But current affairs actually acknowledged I exist, which was great.
I'm just finished working on a programme that goes on overnight, which is a kind of montage of aerial shots of Scotland and clips from the archive, with a DJ talking over the shots, reading out texts and emails from viewers. It's a funny old programme. We have a load of regulars now and it's weird, we're actually starting to talk around the office as if we know these people. It's pretty hard going though. We do have voice recognition software to make it a bit easier but problem is it only works right now on one computer, so one person has to type live for three and a half hours. Not fun. But this is why I'm blogging now at 6.25 in the morning, only just got home a while ago.
Only one more shift to go though and then I'm off to Canada on Wednesday for a four day convention in Vancouver. For Stargate, I will unashamedly say. I'm going off to buy tat I don't need and drool at a few actors and get some autographs and I'm hoping I thoroughly enjoy it. I have my uniform from the show and everything. It's a bit of a celebration as I had some fantastic news this week, but I can't go into details about it for a while. Then when I get back, I only have a couple of weeks before I'm off to the Isle of Man with dad for a few days. Used to love the place as a child when I went there with my parents so it'll be interesting to see if I like it as much now. After I come back from there, it's going to be pretty hectic I imagine, because from them on it's a rundown to moving, flat hunting in July, job hunting, at some point an exam in Czech at Charles University's language centre in Podebrady. Gonna be a busy old year.
So there, that'll do for a first post. I'm sure eventually as I get into the swing of things I might have something interesting to say! Right now though I have to go do my Czech homework for my distance learning course, as I have been slacking off lately.
Sees ya!
