shakeelnaim » Personal

New Job

SuperShaka — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:24:16 +0000

Wow! It’s been almost 9 months since I last posted. I am ashamed.
Basically, last year was a really bad year overall. The deteriorating economy affected many people, including me. In order to avoid redundancies and struggling with financial issues, my employer had introduced pay cuts in April. Unfortunately, this did not help and by the end of November, the company went into insolvency and I became unemployed.
Thankfully I had already been for a job interview prior to this and had been informally accepted for a new job (many thanks to Ian for this).The only caveat was that the job was not for web developer which I preferred and it was based in Glasgow and would mean relocating back to Scotland …
After becoming unemployed, I searched for suitable jobs locally for the first few weeks, but it soon became apparent that with the fragile economic climate, there weren’t that many jobs within reasonable distance. With no income and no redundancy pay to support me, my hand was forced and I accepted the Glasgow job offer.
I moved in with family and started the new job in the new year. Other than my clothes and a few essential items, all my remaining belongings are boxed up and stored away which, at times, feels like I’m staying in a hotel. However I’m grateful to the family for putting up with me and for having a full paid job. As I said, it’s a departure from what I was doing before so time will tell how I get on.
In the meantime, I hope to get back in to blogging, creating and finishing the photo blog site which I’ve been intending to do for over a year now and finally to be more contributing to the DigitalOutbox tech podcasting website.
I can’t imagine anyone reading this blog anymore (can’t blame you to be honest) but hopefully with frequent content, I might attract some readers soon. Ciao for now.

Juggle, juggle, juggle

SuperShaka — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:50:13 +0000

It’s been so hectic the past few weeks that my plan to have the blog structure and style finished by this weekend have slipped considerably.
I have so many balls in the air at the moment that I’m struggling to get anything done in time. Therefore I am declaring the status of the blog as BETA until further notice.
My interest in Lightroom 2.0 was invigorated after taking some nice photos at the recent London trip. This led to the desire of wanting to learn Photoshop again, something I’ve been attempting to do, on and off, for over a year. So I’m trying to read Scott Kelby’s The Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers book again. At the same time, I’m trying to catch up with about 5 back issues of my subscribed Digital Photo magazines. On top of this, I have discovered a couple of fantastic websites offering some really nice Photoshop tutorials, Web Designer Wall and Photoshop Lady, and I constantly find myself spending what little free time I have, browsing the tutorials.
If this wasn’t enough, I am also desperate to learn Cocoa programming so I can start developing for the Mac and iPhone. I already have the Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X book, which is supposed to be one of the best available on the market. I have also just ordered Programming in Objective-C 2.0, which has recently been published and is getting good recommendations.
I have no idea how I’m going to get all this done. I guess it will be a case of do a little at a time instead of trying to do everything in one go. So I am going to try and create a study schedule to cover all these subjects and will do my best to stick to it.

A new year, a new blog

SuperShaka — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:00:55 +0000

Well, after a couple of years since giving up my previous blog, I have decided to start a new one.

During this period a lot has changed – I find less and less time to play computer games; I have taken up amateur photography and my interest in photo editing and graphic design has grown immensely. This is probably the main reason that I have started this blog as I’d like to have an elegant online portfolio to display some of work, with a simple blog front-end.

The blog is using the ever popular Wordpress. Thanks go to Ian for letting me exploit his vast blogging experience to help with the set up.
The photo blog is using PixelPost app and will be populated over the next few days.

I’m very excited about this project and hope that I can produce something that will encourage me to learn more about photography and digital imaging and also provide a personalised online digital portfolio to present my work.

Happy New Year.