August 5, 2014

School starts in less than a week and I am no where close to being back on my school sleep schedule. It is almost one o'clock in the morning right now. I need to get back to going to bed at ten o'clock and waking up at six o'clock. That is going to be rough.

Things were done today. I haven't gotten around to it all summer but I finally scheduled an eye exam for tomorrow. My goal is to see if they could just put new lenses in my current frames. If that doesn't take too long because I can only see a foot without my glasses so I would have to wait there and hold a book up to my nose until they were done. I would also like to get a copy of my prescription so I can eventually get some new glasses from Warby Parker. We'll see how things go.

I attempted to schedule a dentist appointment, just a check up. Another summer goal that I have put off until the last week. I called in the afternoon and they were closed so I guess they're on summer hours or something. It was strange but I'll try again in the morning. Maybe.

I went with my mom to decline the insurance from the school district that we're not even eligible for. That is a really strange way of going about things. I'm not allowed to have it but they need a record of me saying I don't want it. Something I couldn't have even if I did want it. Kinda dumb.

Tonight was our back-to-school picnic and it was nearly 100 degrees out today. Despite that it wasn't as bad as last year. I think it was hotter this year but the humidity wasn't as bad. I was sweating but there was an occasional breeze which felt really nice. As I predicted I spent the first part of the picnic either standing a little ways behind my mom while she talked to people or against the wall. That is my go to move at social functions. I'm not good at going up to people and starting a conversation. In general, I'm just not good at smalltalk. Social situations aren't for me. But I did eventually end up talking to people and having an alright time. More so than last year. I had conversations with the second grade teachers, fifth grade teachers, the principal, a resource teacher, para, the new gym teacher, the librarian, and maybe a couple other people. It was very strange but conversations just kept starting and I managed not to kill them in the first five seconds. Very strange. I'm not against it but walking away from the picnic I found it hard to believe I actually talked to so many different people.

At dinner at my mom's table but when I came back with dessert my seat was taken so I moved over with the librarian and fifth grade teachers. One of the fifth grade teachers (my old para friend) had come late and sat down at our table originally but moved over with the librarian because she also arrived late. As the fifth grade teacher got up she joked and said “It's not you, it's me.” When I went to join their table with my dessert I assured her I wasn't stalking her, my seat had just been taken. Then she tried to say again that it wasn't me but instead of saying “It wasn't you” she said “It wasn't me”. It was an amusing slip of the tongue. I carpooled with my mom and her para friend, and for the first time ever they had to come get me because they were ready to leave. Usually I'm the one ready to leave way before anyone else.

When I got home I watched some YouTube videos and a CoD livestream. I also finished my third coaster. One more to go. I still need to finish my sister's project and get started on my mom's. I also discovered a really cool program called Rainmeter, that is kind of like a way better version of Windows widgets. I'm way late to the part with this but I spent awhile looking through a bunch of different skins, which are user created layouts for the widgets. I downloaded a couple and at the moment I am using a couple different widgets from each skin pack. I even got to mess with the code behind them a bit and it made me want to start coding again. For the weather one I had to go into the HTML of Yahoo's weather page and find a code that I had to put into the config file for the widget. There is a widget that shows the space available on my hard drives but the default only showed two hard drives, so I went in and added the code to show all four of mine. There are a lot of different cool widgets out there so I'm going to have to spend some more time customizing. At some point I'm going to have to put it on my laptop. You can get to the point where you can hide your taskbar and get to everything by just clicking on icons or symbols to launch programs or open windows. Some of skins look like how they make cool, futuristic computers look in movies.

Some else I discovered recently and am also really late to the party to is cmd.fm. It is a website set up like a Command Prompt window that you type commands into to bring up a genre of music that you want to stream. And then you stream it, controlling whether you listen to or skip a song or fast forward or whatever else, with more typed commands. I guess they pull all the music from SoundCloud and it doesn't have any commercials. So not the mainstream selection of Spotify but the lack of commercials is nice. The music stream also has a chat room like feel because as a song is playing all the comments left on the song on SoundCloud will pop up whenever they were embedded in the song. So it looks like someone is commenting in real time, even the artist sometimes. This text shows up in orange but I think if you create an account “real” people who are actually listening to the song in the present can write comments that show up in green, and have a conversation with anyone else who happens to be listening at the same time. At least I think how that works. I have no interest in chatting, I just like have the music on in the background. So, much like Rainmeter, I'm way behind, but I'm glad I discovered both recently.