October 6, 2014

My goal it to get through this relatively fast so I can go to bed. It still won't be fast enough but I'll give it a shot.

Last night I didn't sleep very well and that was unfortunate. I prefer sleeping well. Especially when I am exceedingly tired.

I did some things at work but overall I didn't have a lot going on. This morning I helped one of the third grade teachers get Infinite Campus working. I think there was an update over the weekend and her computer didn't get the memo. My theory is that the old version was stored in the browser cookies. I verified that it was the browser by opening it up just fine in another browser. And, after deleting the cookies in her main browser, all was good. The cookies could have just been a coincidence but I don't think it was. And even so, the problem is fixed.

I helped the same third grade teacher's intern get a document from his Mac to the school's Windows desktop so he could edit it. Last week I had to figure out how to save a Pages document as a Word document. Originally I had to save it as a PDF instead but I eventually figured out how to Export it or something as a Windows document. Today the intern wanted to edit the PDF but instead I slowly remembered that we had been able to save as a Word document, so we did that and then I had him email it to himself so he could open it up on the school computer.

I put in a trouble ticket for fourth grade laptop with trust issues. In theory the guy is able to fix the problem remotely if you give him the computer's name, which I did, but he still ended up having to stop by. And he was really nice about it. He's been nice all year actually, It is kind of strange. I just wish they would allow us to fix the trust relationship problems, instead of having to send someone out. I don't know what they do but it only takes a few minutes and it doesn't make sense to make us wait however long for them to make it to the building when we could probably just be fixing it ourselves. Oh well.

I fixed one of the second grade teachers' laptops when the trackpad stopped working. There was a little light on in the corner of it and it turns out, if you double-tap the light it will go on or off. When it is on, the trackpad is disabled. I assume this is for people who want to use the top buttons and the little mouse nub in the middle of the keyboard.

There is a second grader who was born angry. He came in everyday during kindergarten with a scowl on his face. His anger at life has only increased with age. When his teacher has teaching students when they come to the lab she always has one sit with this kid and he's always surly. Today in one of his fits of anger he destroyed the teacher's poster on how to stay calm. The poster was obviously defective, not only in terms of structural integrity, but also in terms of useful content.

There were classes in the lab today but when there weren't, and when I wasn't out doing whatever I needed to do, I worked on my interview paper. It took me a surprisingly long time to work out what I wanted to say in the closing paragraph. I'm happy with what I came up with though. I never did get around to making direct reference to the book but of the students who have posted their papers to the discussion group, only a few have done that, so at least I'm not alone. I also followed the instructions slightly better than my group project partner who used the name of the person she interviewed as well as where that person worked. We were supposed to write it in such a way that our interviewee remained anonymous.

I also had time to email the person I interviewed and thank him for his time and ask a couple other questions. Mainly regarding what I have heard about academic librarians needing a second master's degree in another area so that they can specialize in that area. The librarian emailed me back and said that his university has never required that and said that when they do hire someone with a second master's degree they often struggle because they become too focused on their specialty and find it difficult to branch out. The librarian said they prefer people who can be knowledgeable about many things. That was good to hear. It means being an academic librarian is still an option for me. I also asked him if he knew any librarians familiar with digitizing old photographs because I will be doing that with hundreds of my grandma's photos. I wanted to pick someone's brain about the project and see what the most efficient methods were, especially when it comes to organizing them once I have them scanned. The librarian said they had just hired a digital initiatives librarian but they wouldn't be arriving for another few weeks, and he wasn't aware of anyone else. So the search continues. I still need to email the other librarian back that I interviewed and thank him. And see if I can come up with anymore questions for him. That is on my agenda for tomorrow.

I got a very brief start on researching my latest group project. I didn't get involved with databases yet because I'm still trying to narrow down what the actual research question should be. Instead I typed some stuff into Google and found several articles. Through these, I will hopefully be able to come up with something sufficiently focused and then get started with trying to find scholarly articles. I haven't actually looked but it would be nice if some of the articles I found tonight actually referenced scholarly work. I think I'll email them to myself and start looking through them during my downtime tomorrow at work.

And now the time has come for me to call this good. It ended up being longer than I was hoping for but it's too late for that now. The inside of my left elbow, whatever that is called (inner elbow) is feeling a bit sore as I type. Too much moving stuff yesterday at my grandma's house. Hopefully I can sleep it off. I'm going to go find out.