martin.wedvich.net

So much for active blogging.

To elaborate, I just haven’t had the enthusiasm or drive to blog about stuff, and like so many times before, I haven’t posted anything because of this. I’m hoping it will change, but… meh, I wouldn’t hold my breath. After all, this blog is mostly for myself, and I don’t expect anyone to actually read it unless there’s something concrete of interest here. On a completely uninteresting and unrelated note, I have some news about my school/work situation.

My Bachelor’s degree was originally set to complete in the summer of 2013, but that’s about to change slightly. I’ve been admitted into an Industrial Bachelor program, which is a joint program between my school NITH and an IT consulting firm, namely Avanade. This adds another two semesters to my studies, which brings the total semester count up to eight, and sets the completion date back to sometime in the summer of 2014. However, three of the remaining semesters will be spent working as an operative IT consultant instead of attending ordinary lectures. This is a great opportunity for me, as I get real working experience and expand my network during my studies. I’ll complete my studies with 1,5 years of practical working experience, which will allow me to enter an operative job position immediately.

It does mean I’ll need to resign from my current position at Get AS. It’s sad because my working environment there has been fantastic and my colleagues are great, but this choice will ultimately be more relevant to my studies and my later career, so it’s a necessary step to take. And I do have to admit that I am looking forward to having just one major activity to spend my time on. Right now, I have a part-time job alongside full-time studies. The long days and the mental restructuring between studies/work can be quite exhausting, with school days from 9 to 4 and then work from 5 to 10. It doesn’t leave much time for social interaction if you also need to eat well and get enough rest and sleep. It also ruins any consistency I might have in a week – some evenings I work, some evenings I don’t, and these change from week to week which makes it much harder to plan recurring activities such as football practice.

Well, that’s my thoughts for now. Maybe I’ll post some code soon, too, which was my original intention!

Hi there!

If the URL didn’t already give it away, my name is Martin Wedvich. I’m a 22 year old guy from Bergen, Norway. I currently live in Oslo (which is also in Norway for the geographically impaired) and on Tuesday I started on my second year of a Bachelor’s degree in Game Programming at the Norwegian School of Information Technology (NITH). I enjoy programming and I enjoy gaming, so I can’t imagine a better direction for myself than that. I also have a part-time job as a customer support representative at a large Norwegian telecommunications company, so I spend a quite substantial part of my day in front of a computer screen.

All in all, I really love computers and everything you can do with them, but I also really appreciate physical activity to compensate for all the hours I spend in my chair. I’m a big sports fan in general, but football (the one where you kick a ball around with your feet) is my clear favorite. Being from Bergen it should come as no surprise that I’m a Brann fan, but outside of Norway it’s the English Premier League I prefer, and more specifically Chelsea. I play on a local team with some friends here in Oslo on a casual basis, and I also watch a lot of football matches with my friends at their places or at downtown pubs.If there’s some squash or volleyball going on, you can count me in too. I’m not really much of a weight lifter, but I’m an avid runner and I go jogging whenever I get a good opportunity. Back when I was a teenager I did organized swimming as well, but I don’t get to do as much swimming as I’d like these days. But to summarize I consider myself a pretty active person in the real world as well.

I used to draw a lot when I was younger, but I’ve never felt like I had any artistic talent, even though I did enjoy it. Now I’ve lost the little touch I did have, so I don’t really do that anymore. I love looking at art though, from drawings to fancy Photoshop contraptions. I’ve also poked a bit into 3D modelling and video editing, but neither feels particularly natural to me, so it’s not that much fun either. Music is something I’ve never made any real attempts at – eJay doesn’t count! – but I absolutely love music in general and can’t imagine everyday life without it. I listen to it when I play computer games, I listen to it when I’m on the metro, I listen to it when I want to relax and I listen to it as I’m writing this very post here. Like so many others I have a varied taste in music, and I find it shifts from mainly rock, through hip hop, through dance, etcetera etcetera, depending on my mood and probably a bunch of secondary factors I can’t come up with right now.

So, that’s a few paragraphs about myself and my background. What about this blog, then?

I’m not a native English speaker, but I’ve always had flair for languages in general, so I quickly picked up on the language in school. I’m constantly looking to expand my vocabulary and improve my verbal and written communication, but I don’t get many opportunities to do that as I’m living in Norway. The people I’m surrounded by on a daily basis write in Norwegian and talk in Norwegian, so I have to look at other ways of putting the English language to good use. Being a computer enthusiast, I naturally spend a lot of time on the internet, and one of the things I do a lot is read blogs. I consider myself a good listener, mainly because I’m genuinely interested in people’s opinions about pretty much everything, even though I might disagree with them. I read blogs about sports, I read blogs about programming, I read blogs about politics – I even read blogs about religion, as even though I’m an atheist myself, I like to have an understanding of other people’s values and beliefs. All of this reading has made me very good at… well, reading. I’ve come to excel at extracting information and finding meaning through deduction in what I read, so I’m quite confident in my ability to read English.

Even so, I want to become a talented writer as well, and the only way for me to achieve this is to write. A lot. And since the working language at my job is Norwegian, and I write my university assignments in Norwegian as well, I need to find a different way of honing my writing skills. How about some logical thinking? I love gaming and I love programming, so I’ve chosen to study game programming. Following this train of thought, I love blogs and I really want to write. Why not write a blog? Not because I expect anyone to read it or agree with what I have to say, or because I expect anyone to find it useful – although if you do, that’s great! – but because it’s an excellent way of putting words together in a logical fashion and making something sensible out of it. Writing someting.

However, this “something” needs to be… something. I’ve tried blogging on several occasions before, but my feeble attempts have fallen flat like hockey pucks because I haven’t been able to consistently come up with fresh and meaningful material. Something with substance. It needs substance if it’s supposed to make any sense and actually improve my writing flow. I could write about my life, but I feel like I have to write about something I’m enthusiastic about. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t enjoy life, because I do! But my life isn’t really writing material; it’s actually kinda boring. I’m not involved in any international covert operations, I don’t sleep with sharks, I don’t parachute off cliffs and I suck at martial arts. I’m not good at anything including but not limited to the things I just mentioned, nor do I know much about them. I sleep, I eat, I go to school, I go to work. That’s the bulk of it. So what can I write about then? Logical thinking comes to the rescue again! And no, I don’t mean writing about logical thinking. But what did I say my interests were just earlier? Gaming, programming, football, music. I spend a lot of time keeping up to date on these subjects, so why not write about them? Things I’m enthusiastic about, things I devote a lot of time to, and things I thoroughly and genuinely enjoy.

And there you have it. I want to write about my interests. I want to write about programming; my field of study, my future field of work. Gaming, my greatest and most time-consuming hobby. Football and all of the emotions this fantastic sport can invoke. And music, which I can’t imagine living without. Time will show how much of this blog each of these categories will make up, but it gives me something to write about. And I hope to write a lot.

So, with that, I’ll end the first post of this blog. But I do have two final things to add.

To you: thanks for reading this far, and I hope to see you again!

And to myself: happy writing, and keep it coming from now and far into the unforeseeable future!