House hunting is simultaneously soul-crushing and exciting. After all, this is a home…something you’ll be living in forever, and you’re browsing through entries and squinting and photos like you’re at the toy shop. It’s exhilarating, looking through the listings and seeing what’s new, trying to get in before anyone else…and then you realise that your budget isn’t unlimited and there are plenty of people like you vying for positions, and it all becomes little bit of a slog filling out form after form and knowing that you’re probably going to get rejected.
Fortunately, I have a cunning plan. My cousin’s second cousin’s aunt’s step-daughter is doing an app development course, and I got them to hook me up with some killer app designers. What I want isn’t just something that alerts you to new houses, because those already exist. No, I need something streamlined, something designed just for us to give us the edge in the hunt for houses. I’ve already supplied a list of ‘ingredients’ as such for the app, though without proper experience I don’t know if any of them are possible. Hey, what am I…an app development student? I’m not one of those!
I’d like the app to send me a buzz whenever there’s a new house available, obviously. That’s just a given. But I need to it to really get my attention, so I want it to produce a high-pitched whine, the sound that gives you a feeling in your ears like nails on a blackboard. Then, it’ll scream all the details so we know how much cupboard space and how big the back garden is (for the dog). I want a child-friendly rating out of ten, also screamed in the voice of a major celebrity, and by that time I just have to pull out my phone and take a look. Oh, and I want it to instantly send a pre-filled application when the house is made available. If we look and see that it’s not what we want, we’ll withdraw. Easy as that.
I’m still thinking about what I want, but this seems pretty efficient for a start. Hopefully just being in an app design course means one is able to make such a thing. But what would I know? House searching is really tiring…I need to make this quick.
-Ben
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My story is a bit of a strange one. I went from being terrified of technology to addicted to it in a matter of months. Usually people are one way or the other, but somehow my personality totally flipped one-eighty degrees. It all started when a mate of mine was looking into game design courses in Melbourne. I thought this was a rather ambitious undertaking on his part, as he wasn’t particularly arty or creative. I also didn’t realise how much IT and programming was involved in studying gaming. But when he started his course, he really surprised me with how smart he was.
I guess this mate of mine had a particular talent at dumbing down techy concepts for an outsider like me to comprehend. Whenever I had problems with my computer, my other friends would scoff at my ignorance while my mate who was studying video game design was much more patient. He would explain in everyday language how I could do simple and then complex things using on the computer. I started to realised that computers aren’t all that arcane after all. In fact, most problems or queries can be solved by looking up simple instructions with a google search.
I think the reason why it took me so long to overcome my technophobia was because I tend to become flustered when the computer doesn’t do what I’m expecting it to do, and because it’s not human, I can’t even talk to it! This to me felt like reaching a frustrating impasse, but these days I’m less intimidated by computers like my friend in the video game design course. Melbourne has a few courses like these and I actually find game design and web development quite fascinating. And now that I’m pretty much glued to my computer screen, I’m actually thinking about taking one of these game design courses myself! Thank God I’m not the hopeless technophobe I used to be!
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