October 15, 2013

Today at work I did a decent job of earning my keep. When I got there a teacher had left a note on the lab door asking me to come up to his room when I had the chance. I put my stuff down and headed up there to learn that his computer was continuously restarting but never actually getting to the Windows screen. His network drives also weren't showing up on his laptop. I told him that the network drives thing was normal and that they only seem to randomly appear. Not very helpful but it is better than nothing. And I wasn't sure about his desktop but I told him I'd go do some reading and get back to him.

Back in the lab I learned that a computer continuously rebooting could be caused by any number of things. Great. I picked a few options and went back up to see if anything would work. While I was running a scan I went across the hall because one of the resource teachers had emailed me saying she needed help. Her computer had been updated or something over the weekend and she could get to her email. I pinned Outlook to her taskbar and I pointed out that she wasn't able to get to her email in her web browser because she had been typing the URL into the search box instead of the URL box. Then it was back across the hall. The scan revealed nothing but when I was looking around in the BIOS there was an error log that was saying something about a keyboard error. So I took a chance and turned off the computer, unplugged the keyboard, and turned the computer back on, and it worked. The computer made it to the log in screen and I was able to plug the keyboard back in and get to the desktop without a problem.

In second grade reading centers I read with one group before going to help the first graders log into the computers in the lab. And while I was there I helped a couple sixth graders print their stories before heading back to reading centers. I helped kids with their workbooks and then installed a printer on one of the sixth grade laptops because a couple sixth graders brought it in so they could print their story.

And this afternoon I helped one of the SPED teachers get the wifi working on one of their laptops. I pushed the wifi button. She said it was alright if I thought she was an idiot but I told her not to worry because that turned out to be the issue the majority of the time. Which I don't mind because it is actually something I can fix.

In between all of that I listened to This American Life and renamed school pictures. When we get the pictures from the photo place all the kids are labeled with their student number instead of their name. So I started going through and renaming them and sorting them into class folders. This is a bit of a process because I don't know the full name of every kid in the school. I know a lot of them but even for the ones I know I double-checked just to make sure I got the spelling right. I sped up the process by using a list I had already made in Excel and sorting it by student number because that is how the pictures were in the folder. That went a lot faster than looking at the picture and then flipping through my rosters to get to the right class. I nearly finished. I was told to do this last year to help out the people making the yearbook. Which ended up being me and another parent. So this year I figured I would get a jump on it because there is a chance I will be helping with the yearbook again this year. The parent I worked with last year wants to do it collaboratively through a website so more people can work on it but it will cost more money. One of the receptionists, also the adversary of this parent, hasn't liked the idea of that since the parent brought it up a year or two ago and wants to keep the cost down by designing it at the school and having it printed locally. I have no idea what's going to happen but I'm game for whatever.

Tonight I played Minecraft and watched DVRed stuff. I almost didn't play Minecraft because I tried a couple different methods to install the single player command mod and the last method ended up breaking the game. Thankfully I was able to reload one of the mods and it reset everything back to where it should be. And in that whole process I felt like an idiot because I remembered that I could get access to the commands by enabling cheats when I created a new world. I had forgotten that commands were a built-in thing now, and that you had to enable cheats before a world was created for them to work. So I made a new world and all was fine.

Originally I started on Easy but with the mo creatures mod, and nighttime, I couldn't get very far away from my spawn without dying. I ended up switching to Creative so I could fly around and look for a spot for my house and the beginning of my farm. That took awhile because I was surrounded by snow and jungle biomes. But I eventually found a relatively flat island with a village. I'd prefer there not to be a village but I think it will work out nicely. I want to be legit with all the building but I am going to leave it on Peaceful during the initial building phase so I can build in peace and not be constantly killed. Once I found my spot I got a start on my house but probably spent most of my time cutting down and planting trees to get wood for my house. I have made a decent start but it started getting late, IRL, so I had to call it good for the night. There is always another day.