Saturday, February 1, 2014

January 31, 2014

Winter MAP testing is officially over. Right as school started this morning I went and got two first graders from one class, and a third from the other class, and got them started on finishing their tests. Shortly after that one of the second grade classes came to the lab to practice typing, and so a few of them could finish tests. And that was everyone, minus one first grader who hadn't been at school all week, including today. I'm calling it a success.

I spent a little time working on my MAP spreadsheets today but spent more time working on storybooks. I'm so close to being done. Sort of. Not really. But I'm getting there. One other productive thing from today was figuring out a workaround for Reading Counts on the third grade laptops. Whenever they would try to open the program they would just get a big white screen. It is Flash driven so I tried updating that but it didn't help. After a lot of Googling I found something off topic sort of but it ended up working. The post I found was about trying to watch internet videos fullscreen and getting a white screen, even when the video worked fine when it wasn't fullscreen. Reading Counts was doing the same thing because it worked just fine in a small, windowed mode, but not fullscreen. The solution to the problem was right-clicking somewhere in the Reading Counts window, clicking on Settings, and unchecking hardware acceleration. Or something like that. This change worked and seemed to be persistent so if you make the change, it will still be in effect the next time you log in. The only problem is I couldn't figure out how to make this a broad change, for all users on a computer. So every time a kid logs into a laptop for the first time, they will need to go through all the steps. It's not a great fix but it is a decent bandage.

This morning I did the mouth swab thing for the genealogy test and after school I dropped it off at the UPS store. They are sending it off tomorrow morning and in a month or so I should get a notification that everything has been analyzed. Part of me feels like it could be complete bullshit and I would never know, but it is through National Geographic, not an ad in the back of a comic book. I am intrigued. Certainly enough to pay the money for the kit in the first place.

At work tonight it was the same old thing. I made a lot of progress in my book, coming close to finishing it. I probably could have finished it but I got sent home early and I spent about forty-five minutes of my night watching the first half of That Awkward Moment. And I had planned on watching the second half during the last set but then got sent home early because I wasn't really needed and the snow was coming down pretty good outside and the managers didn't want to keep me there.

When I got out to my car there were about two inches of snow but it was cold enough out that their wasn't any melting going on, and I was able to just brush it off my car. I also drove home without turning the heat on in the hopes that I would melt any of the snow to my windshield. That way hopefully I won't have to worry about scraping ice off my car in the morning. I also put my windshield cover on so hopefully that stays on.

I was originally scheduled to close tomorrow night but I switched with the other projectionist (who is also a student intern at school now) because she had plans. This was a bit of a raw deal to begin with because I was supposed to come in at eight o'clock for a special show. But then the managers changed their minds so I don't have to be there until 11:45AM, closer to when the rest of the movies actually start.


And lastly, speaking of the projectionist / student intern, last week she accidentally started Wolf Of Wall Street instead of Frozen. From what I've heard the opening scene of Wolf Of Wall Street isn't very child-friendly, and a whole theater of children saw it. Understandably, a lot of parents were upset, and corporate got a lot of complaints. This lead to a new policy, rolled out nation-wide (and written by one of our managers) that basically states that a manager has to be present when a projectionist is switching from an adult movie to a kids movie. And I say 'basically' because I didn't actually read it, I just signed my name. In the end, it was a pretty big mistake, but she ended up causing a new policy to be enacted and leaving her mark on the company. Not bad.

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