March 31, 2015

 March is over. Good grief. Where is the time going.

I keep forgetting to mention two things. The first is that when I was coming back from lunch on Saturday, returning to campus, my car hit 10,000 miles. So many miles. The second, is that I saw a couple Indian dads teaching their kids to play cricket the other day at a school playground. I thought that was pretty cool. I realize the sport is incredibly popular around the world but I've never actually seen a cricket bat or people playing it in real life. With the diversity of our community I would have thought I would have seen it at least a few times by now, but I also rarely go outside so that could be part of it.

There was more testing this morning. Sixth grade finishing up their writing tests. Most of them anyway. There are more tests tomorrow, three or four I think, so the sixth graders who didn't finish will probably be sprinkled in.

All the teachers finally signed up for MAP testing so I was able to make those schedules today. The next six weeks of my work life are completely planned out. The sixth week is the last week of State Assessments, and so far there aren't any tests scheduled that week, but there will be plenty of testing on the daily for the next five weeks.

For the rest of the day after testing it was the same old thing. Regular classes in the lab and editing baby pictures. It's kind of crazy to think how many hours I put into the slideshow, which will last less than ten minutes probably and only be seen once.

Tonight I read a chapter about categorizing. Boy was it a page-turner. My reading was broken up by a visit from my sister, who needed me to scan some stuff for her, and a phone call from my friend, who was telling me about one of the yards his landscaping company works on being featured in a magazine. No mention of his company appeared in the magazine so I told him he should go back to the store and put his business card in all of the magazines.

When I finished reading I practiced guitar for about twenty minutes before writing this. And now it is nearly 11:30PM, and I've been tired since the middle of the afternoon, so I'm going to go to bed now. I can't wait for all the testing and textbook reading tomorrow.

March 30, 2015

 Only two tests today. Sixth grade came in for the first part of their writing test this morning and this afternoon a few fourth graders came down to finish. Two of them weren't able to finish completely because they still need tickets reactivated. I would write more about testing but it is the same old crap. And it's late.

When I wasn't testing I had normal classes in the lab and I scanned and edited baby pictures. The pictures I got today had their corners cut off for some reason. I thought this would look weird when I added a border, and I want there to be a uniform look to all the pictures, so I used Gimp to add the corners back in. It was fairly easy on two of the pictures but on the third I had to recreate a dress and a column. I think I made it look passable though.

Today was the tenth anniversary of Mitch Hedberg's death. It is hard to believe that it has been that long. Still sucks because he is still my favorite comedian. I was reading an article about him today and learned that he had a different ending to one of my favorite jokes. The joke, with the added ending, is “I was at this casino minding my own business, and this guy came up to me and said, 'You're gonna have to move, you're blocking a fire exit.' As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run. If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit... unless you are a table.”

Tonight I read a textbook chapter. That took me most of the night and I've still got two more chapters to read for this week. I'll also have a discussion post, two posts for one of my group projects, and I need to start working on an individual assignment and continue working on my other group project. So much stuff. Mildly overwhelming.

I spent the last hour or so learning the main riff for the acoustic version of Krewella's Alive. It is a badass riff and I've almost got it figured out. I am using a couple YouTube videos slowed down and tab that is kind of right. Combining those I've come up with something that sounds pretty good. It would be better if I still played guitar regularly and my fingers were up to the task of pushing on metal strings. But I don't and now my fingers, along with my left wrist, are killing me. But I can kinda play the riff now so that's cool. I also remembered how to play the opening to Life By The Drop by Stevie Ray Vaughn and Blackbird by The Beatles. It would be nice if I hadn't forgotten ninety-percent of what I used to know how to play.

Now it is time to go to bed because it is after 11:30PM. I didn't mean to play the guitar for so long but I was getting so close with the Alive riff. And I'll probably regret it tomorrow, not only being tired but also my sore fingers and wrist, but oh well.

March 29, 2015

 Today was a pretty laid back day and I am okay with that. I finished reading a textbook chapter before lunch and responded to a discussion post but then I took the rest of the day off from schoolwork. I may regret that later but preparing for my presentation this weekend, and spending most of my weekend out of town, was enough school for me. I'll jump back in tomorrow.

I didn't really do anything with the rest of my day. I watched the livestream for the Ultra Music Festival in Miami. I listened to it on the radio going to class and coming back, and watched the livestream last night and all day today. It was interesting seeing the differences in production from the guys on the side stage and the guys on the main stage. The main stage shows are over the top. It's pretty incredible. I would like to go to a show sometime. Even if you're not into EDM it just seems like something everyone should experience at least once. The festival ended with Skrillex, who had cameos from Puff Daddy and Justin Bieber. Crazy. His set was definitely better before those two came out but to each their own.

I had thought about livestreaming some Minecraft tonight but didn't because I wanted to watch the Ultra livestream and didn't want to mess with setting up my laptop to I could watch the Ultra stream on that and then play and stream Minecraft on my PC. The point of that being that I wouldn't have the Ultra music on my stream. Not that anyone watches my stream but it would most likely get content IDed and the whole thing would get muted. So instead, I watched the Ultra stream and just played Minecraft without streaming it.

I basically just did the preliminary work for a future stream. I had the idea that I wanted to start a new world, a Stream World, and keeping with that theme, I wanted to build my house near a stream. Clever stuff. So I created a new world and went looking for a stream. And I got super lucky. There were a couple streams really close to my spawn point and a good mix of biomes. I decided to build my house on a little hill in the bend of one of the streams. I want to do the actual building while I'm streaming but I did level off the hill and laid out dirt as a kind of rough outline for the house. A decent start. It was also nice to just zone out for awhile and wander around in Minecraft. Zoning out is good after a long week. With another long one ahead of me. Can't wait.

March 28, 2015

 It's nearly 1:30AM so let's see how short I can make this entry.

I slept really well last night. The hotel bed is always way more comfortable than my own bed. And it is humongous. I'm a fan. I slept in a little bit and then laid there going over my presentation in my head. After I took a shower and got ready I ran through my presentation for real and felt about as confident about it as I was going to get.

We didn't have internet access for the first hour or so of class. Last night they did a whole shutdown of the building our class was in, electrical and internet I think, and the internet didn't come back online. The first two presenters were volunteers who didn't need the internet because they had everything they needed embedded as screenshots in their presentations. I managed to get screenshots of everything last night but I wasn't going to volunteer. And I didn't even have the opportunity though, even if I had wanted to, because the internet came back up sometime after those first two presenters so we went back to the normal schedule. Not too long before lunch the wireless started working again, too.

At this point I can't remember any presentations that were completely awful. There were a few with technology issues but no real train wrecks. I wasn't really keeping track of the time but there had to be at least a few that went on far longer than the allotted fifteen minutes. One of the last ones in particular really felt that way. He only had four PowerPoint slides and he looked up at the screen to read the bullet point and then looked down to read from his long script. That was kind of painful to watch. Then he moved to the website he was covering and that dragged on for what felt like forever. He went into way too much detail and it felt like he was all over the place. And he just kept talking. I didn't think it was going to end.

The original plan was to end the weekend around 4:30PM, thirty minutes early, but we ended up going until around 5:45PM. It was annoying during the last two presenters, especially the last one, because some people were getting frustrated with them. As if it were their fault that a lot of the people that went before them went over the fifteen minute time limit.

As for my presentation, I don't really know how long I took or if it was actually any good. As I have probably mentioned before, I completely check out during presentations and don't come back to reality until sometime after I finish. I got a good laugh from my Mitch Hedberg clip and later learned that several of my classmates were fans of his comedy. One guy even came up to me after and asked me if I knew the homemade Sprite joke before reciting it for me. I hadn't quite come back to reality when he asked me so I missed what he said at first because it sounded like he was speaking from far away. All I know about the presentation itself is that I missed at least one of the jokes I wanted to make, which is kind of annoying. It felt like I was going really really fast so I am hoping it didn't feel that way to the class. I also hope I didn't forget anything major. About half of the class should have filled out evaluations on it so I'm interested to get those and see that perspective. Hopefully they aren't too bad.

When we were finally able to leave I stopped by Spangles and then hit the road. An uneventful drive. There was one car that was with me almost the entire way home. Every now and then they would fall really far behind but would inevitably catch up again. On the final stretch, when it opened up to a divided highway, not just a two-lane highway, there was a car that decided it was going to pass me and they came up pretty fast but then I don't know what happened. My rough estimate is that they somehow slowed down right when they got in the lane to pass me and were only going a quarter of a mile faster than me. They were driving alongside me for so long that it was starting to get awkward. They did eventually manage to pass me but they certainly took their sweet time.

Not too long after getting home, like within fiver or ten minutes, I got a call from my dad asking if I could help move my sister's husband motorcycle. He had to go to a hospital out of town tonight to have an emergency appendectomy and my dad picked up his motorcycle on his trailer and was going to put it in my sister's garage but didn't have a key. So I met him over there and with the help of my brother and step-mom, the bike was successfully stored.

I spent the rest of my night watching the Ultra Festival, and EDM festival in Florida this weekend, which was being livestreamed on Twitch. I knew the festival was happening because it was being broadcast on one of the XM channels and that is what I listened to on my way down to class. I didn't know that it was being streamed on Twith. Just the other day, like within a day or two, I learned that Twitch was experimenting with music and this is apparently a part of that test.

While watching that I worked on installing mods to Minecraft. After they all crapped out on me I was a little reluctant to waste my time messing with them but tonight went much better than the last time. I actually got most of the mods I wanted up and running. I substituted the tree cutting one with a different one because the one I normally use hadn't been updated yet to the version of Minecraft I decided to go with. For the same reason I also couldn't use the mod that lets me have a big garden with all sorts of different crops. Hopefully that will happen soon but it looks like maybe the mod creator is holding off until they raise a certain amount of money on their Patreon account. That is annoying but I totally get wanting to get paid for your work. If it doesn't happen soon I may start looking for alternatives.

Shortly after 11:30PM I went over to let my sister's dogs out and I turned the light in her fish tank to blue. Her husband got out of surgery and was in the ICU so she was going to stay for at least awhile so I covered the dogs and fish.

Now I'm going to go to bed because this was obviously far from a short entry and it is after two o'clock in the morning. My kidney also kinda aches. Not to the point of pain but similar to how it felt yesterday and however many days before that. I hope nothing happens tonight because I need sleep. More than one kidney stone has happened on a night where I was really in need of a full night of sleep.

March 27, 2015

 My kidney is still bothering me, so that's stressing me out. It seems like it has been bugging me off and on for months now. The past couple of days it feels like it has gotten within striking distance of escalating to full-on pain. Something is obviously happening and I am worried.

Today we didn't have testing in the morning so we got to go back to a normal lab schedule with both second grade classes coming to the lab. It has been awhile since that has happened and it was kind of weird. It was nice to talk to both teachers though.

We had another yearbook club meeting. They got switched to Thursdays and Fridays. The pictures haven't been uploaded yet so the kids are still just playing with the layout of their assigned page, but we should have pictures for them to start adding next week.

This afternoon we had one test. It went relatively well other than the drilling or augering that was happening next door. I don't know if the kids were bothered by it but it was bugging the crap out of me. I tried to knock on the door but they couldn't hear me over the racket, so I went to the office and the librarian went down and talked to them. It went on for another five minutes or so before they were done. It was kind of funny that nothing really important was happening in the lab all day and then as soon as we start the test (for kids who have accommodations for quiet testing locations) they start drilling next door. That, on top of my kidney, and stress over my presentation, and trying to explain to a kid that he was taking a new test even though he was convinced he had already taken it, was almost more than I could handle. I just want to curl up in a ball in a dark place for a week or two. Shut off the world so I can take a little breather.

A tech guy came and replaced the broken computer and printer in the lab today. The computer is a loaner until they can actually fix ours, but I'm not sure about the printer. I was talking to someone else when the guy had me sign for stuff. Originally I was told that they would have to call an HP repair guy to come look at the printer and that the school would have to pay for it. The other option was to do nothing. We were leaning toward doing nothing because it isn't really a necessary printer. But then they came today and swapped it out with a new printer. I'll have to ask about it next week.

The drive down to class was uneventful, which I'm thankful for. When I stopped for a bathroom break and got back on the road on that last stretch of highway I got stuck behind a truck but it was actually going the posted speed limit most of the time, occasionally slightly over. I was okay with that because usually the trucks I get stuck behind drive well below the posted speed limit. And I was almost boned because there was a truck hauling a big piece of equipment in front of the truck in front of me, but it ended up pulling off the road fairly quickly. The driver behind me, riding my ass, was not okay with the truck in front of me. He was eventually able to get around both me and and truck.

Class tonight started with a brief Q&A about our assignments for class and a small activity for the groups who weren't currently speaking with the professor. Then we started our group presentations. The first one involved a complete technology fail. Embedded videos weren't working and there were browser issues and all sorts of stuff, but the lady handled it really well. I would have become completely flustered and forgotten everything, but she managed to roll with it all. And I let her know how well I thought she handled it a little later when I saw her in the hallway. I just hope my presentation isn't as plagued with issues. As long as the website is working we should be good but I'm thinking of taking screenshots of everything tonight just in case.

Right now I really want to just pass out but I want to go over my presentation at least once, and probably take screenshots. And I'll probably go over my presentation again in the morning. All the practice will go out the window when I get up there because I kind of shut down and go into autopilot, forgetting everything I have said as soon as it comes out of my mouth, but the practice can't hurt.

March 26, 2015

 Last night I wasn't able to fall asleep. I tried it out for awhile but ended up reading my textbook for awhile. So I guess that is a plus. It did lead to a lot of yawning today, which isn't preferred.

The principal decided that since the writing portion of the test isn't going to count for anything, it is just a field study or whatever, so the accommodation kids can take it with their classes. That meant we didn't test this morning because both classes were going to take the writing test. There was only one test this afternoon because fifth grade were one day behind the other classes and forth grade weren't testing today.

The lack of testing left a lot of time to edit baby pictures. I was able to catch up with all the baby pictures that have been submitted. Now I'm going to edit some of the ones that have been taken this year and maybe some of the old school portraits I found.

After school I was talking with some of my coworkers and one of the topics of discussion was the fact that one of the fifth grade teachers and one of the office ladies both say “pigpile” instead of “dogpile”. She apparently yelled at her kids at recess to not pigpile, who were confused, and one of the second grade teachers looked at her and said that was cute but the word was dogpile. I guess pigpile is a Northeast thing. It probably makes more sense than dogpile but I don't think I'll change my ways.

When I got home from work I practiced my presentation. I eventually ran through it about three times and each time it came in right around fifteen minutes, maybe a minute more. I figure that's pretty good because when I get up there and actually give the presentation I'll probably forget things and come in at least a couple minutes short. I had to stop reading it out loud, though, because my voice gave me a headache. It has a tendency to do that if I talk too much.

Now I'm watching the Neebs livestream but I'm freaking tired. I can't go to bed yet, despite the sleepiness, because I'm waiting on laundry, and I need to post a reply for this week's discussion. I was a bit lost on this week's discussion though, so it is a struggle finding a question I can bullshit on, especially given my current state. And going back to my current state for a second, my left kidney felt like it was flaring up (the slightest hint of a feeling) last night when I was laying in bed, and I have felt it again tonight. It makes me uneasy. If it could hold off indefinitely, that would be great.

March 25, 2015

 While staring at kids take their state assessments today I came up with a decent testing analogy. The only benefit of spending hours a day watching kids test is that it allows for a lot of time to get lost in your own head. I guess that is a 'for better or worse' scenario. Anyway, my analogy. Or realization. I don't really know. But here it is. Testing really is a race, despite teachers always insisting that it is not. It is set up in class tortoise and hare style, but each are running an entirely different race with different end goals. The goal of the hare is to finish the test as fast as possible because their goal is to get to whatever they are missing, whether it be recess or PE or music or anything that isn't testing. Then we have the tortoise, whose goal is life or their future, whether they know it or not. The test is important to them, for whatever reason, but lead to better results on the test and potentially better results in life. Something to think about.

So, we had more testing today. Four tests in total, all as boring as the ones that have come before. The last test of the day was fourth grade, who were retaking the first Reading test that they all flew through. It kind of proved my point in wanting them to retake it when one of the kids called me over. He pointed out that all the questions were already answered and I explained to him again (because the principal had literally just told him what was happening) that we reactivated the test so it still had all his old answers. He was confused because he said he had never seen the passage before and didn't remember answering any of the questions. I told him that was probably because he hadn't actually read the passage the first time and just clicked through the answers really fast. To almost all of their credit, they did take their time today. Minus the one kid who I watched once again stare at the clock for awhile, then click one answer (on a question asking for two or more) and then going onto the next question, clicking an answer before he could have even glanced at the question, and then moving onto the next question. I had him go back but his score will still probably be awful. He definitely needs someone sitting with him and making sure he stays focused on the test, not on what he might be missing, like recess.

I might not have to worry about his score though, or the scores of the other two kids who hadn't finished yet, because when they did finish, they all got error messages saying that the test couldn't be saved. It appears that the server crashed for the first time this year. Perfect timing, right before we start testing whole classes next week. I'm hoping it doesn't turn into the absolute clusterfuck that was state assessments last year, but it doesn't bode well.

When I wasn't testing, or coming to realizations about testing, I edited baby pictures. I scanned two and managed to fully edit four or five. Not bad.

After work I stopped to get Chipotle. One of the slow girls (and I mean her work speed, not her mental speed) was working at the end of the line, being slow, but there was a manager there and things got awkward. I'm not entirely sure what was happening but near the end of my order it seemed that he was swapping the slow girl with the first girl, so she would be doing the initial tortilla, rice, and beans stuff, and the other girl would handle everything else. The slow girl got really flustered and didn't speed up but she did accidentally put the guacamole spoon in the cheese. I will say, however, that she finally managed to wrap my burrito decently, so she is learning the right techniques, if not building her speed quite yet.

Tonight I watched a couple videos on linked data and the semantic web for class. They mostly went over my head so I'll have to try them again. There was a third video lecture on linked data but it was presented horribly with a lot of long pauses and mistakes and I couldn't make it more than five minutes before giving up. Maybe after putting so much time and effort into my recorded presentation I have become a bit of a snob when it comes to that sort of thing, but now I know what is possible. No excuses ladies and gentleman.

I spent the rest of my night writing my discussion post. I still need to read the chapter for this week but that might not happen until I get home from class this weekend. I didn't practice my presentation at all and that only leaves tomorrow. But I will be rehearsing the hell out of it tomorrow. And fingers crossed I don't present on Friday night so I can go over it again when I get to the hotel. I just don't want to suck.

March 24, 2015

 I forgot to mention I talked to the school librarian yesterday and she said there might be a job in one of the school libraries this summer. They are open during the month of June and a few of them may still need someone to cover. I haven't heard anything about the practicum yet but I doubt the theater will be a thing and the library would only be four hours a day, four days a week. So that, with two classes, would still leave plenty of time for a practicum. And it would give me something to put on my resume.

Today I was expecting three tests, two in the morning and one in the afternoon, but the last one was canceled so my afternoon was better than expected. The testing was a little rough, not in terms of mechanics, but because pretty much all the kids struggled with the math. It was painful to watch. And really it has only just begun because the full classes start testing next week. Then testing will continue until May. Testing blows.

In my free time I edited baby pictures. I also found a track listing for the Harry Potter audiobook chapters. Now I can go through and chop up the first book so I don't get hours into it and have it reset again. And I made some desktop icons for the library clerk's computer.

At the end of the day we had our monthly character award assembly. At the end of it several teachers and staff went to the front and had a pie thrown in their face by one of the students. Early in the year students (their parents) were able to bid on the opportunity to throw the pies. The kids love. The ones not throwing the pies probably enjoy it more than the pie kids. They went nuts. It was pretty entertaining.

Tonight I worked on a script for the website tour portion of my instructional presentation. I can very close to finishing it. Tomorrow I should be able to finish it and run through everything to see what my timing is like. Hopefully close to fifteen minutes but not close enough that I'll accidentally go over when I start to ramble. And not so short that it becomes super short when I talk fast and forget most of what I planned on saying.

Tomorrow I also need to submit my first discussion post of the week, because those are thing again. I'm ready for a break from school, which won't come until the semester is over. After the instructional presentation this weekend, I still have my group project in that class, a solo project in that class, and my group project in the other class. It feels like so much work. Probably because it is a lot of work. I need to work on my time management.

Right now I'm watching Goldy, Vern, and the rest of their crew play through the last heist in GTA5. There still in the setup missions so I'm not going to make it to the end because I'm going to call it a night soon. But I'll be able to catch the recorded streams later. Something to look forward to.

March 23, 2015

 Last night I took an unintentional nap rather than sleeping through the night. I made it to bed around midnight and woke up an hour and a half later. Wide awake. I laid there for a half an hour trying to pretend I was tired before finally getting up and reading a book for an hour. I finished my book, so that was a plus, but I only got three hours of sleep. So that sucked. It hit me around eleven o'clock this morning and then again around three o'clock, when I lost track of how many times I yawned.

Pretty much all of my day was spent scanning and editing baby pictures. With a few classes thrown in to mix things up. Not really much to say. It was nice being back because I had an excuse not to be spending my whole day doing school work.

Tomorrow we start testing again. Can't wait. When that isn't happening I'll probably be editing photos. Back to the grind.

After work I wanted to take a nap but there was so much noise. Dogs barking, dogs running around upstairs, vacuuming, heavy things being dropped. It was like an absurd comedy. Every time one noise would die down it was replaced by another. Needless to say, no naps were had.

Tonight I streamed again. All by myself as the song goes. It wasn't a good night for CS:GO because my best ping was 94 and I think almost everyone else was in the 30s and 40s. It was rough. In my final game of the night I managed to get to level 15. I think the final level, the golden knife, is level seventeen or eighteen, so I was pretty close.

We're creeping up on eleven o'clock and I'm going to give sleeping a try. It'd be real nice if it works out for me tonight. I miss falling asleep within a reasonable time of going to bed.

March 22, 2015

 Spring Break is over. A glorious week that didn't feel like a break at all because every single day involved some at least some form of school work. The first weekend was all my first presentation, then my other presentation went on throughout the week, with a little bit of textbook reading thrown into the mix. Wonderful. And now I get to go back to watching kids take the State Assessment. I think we have tomorrow off but the fun begins again on Tuesday. My days will be spent with testing and editing baby pictures.

Going back to that first presentation for a second. I got my grade today and I got a 24.6 our of 25. She really liked it but I got 0.4 off because it was ten minutes long and the rubric said it should be five minutes long. All but one or two of the presentations uploaded before me were well over the five minute mark and I'm pretty sure my score would have been a lot worse had I tried to squeeze everything into a five minute presentation. I think the tradeoff was worth it.

Today I made a couple edits to my instructional handout and presentation before turning both of them in. I also wrote a script for the first part of my presentation, based on my slides. The second part will be me actually going through the website and showing the class the different features. I still need to figure that out, like the order of things and what I'm going to say. I'll probably do that tomorrow so I can spend the rest of the week rehearsing it. We meet again next weekend which means I also give my presentation next weekend. I won't be reading from the script but I figure a week of practicing it will make me more likely to cover everything and not go off on a tangent. Fingers crossed.

I also woke up early and finished reading my textbook chapter. Nearly forgot about that. It was so long ago.

And I filed my state tax return yesterday. Forgot about that, as well. I finally decided to just bite the bullet and pay to file them. Doing it that way it cost me two dollars, subtracting my return from the cost to file. Had I not paid I would have had to go with H&R Block and that would have cost me over forty dollars. I made the right choice.

I messed with more Twitch stuff today and tonight I did a couple test recordings to see if I could figure out my mic sound. Yesterday it was inaudible. I bumped it up today and it was way too high, so I moved it back to where it was and it was still a little high so I had to move it down a little bit. No sense really. I did move the game volume down quite a bit though so maybe that had something to do with it. Who knows.

After I decided that was alright I decided to try it out in a stream. My test games when I was recording were Minecraft and Trials Evolution. Turns out I wasn't really in the mood for those games so I tried out a little CS:GO. Arms Race, none of that bomb stuff, whatever that mode is called. I played a handful of rounds and managed to make it into the double digits two or three times. I think my highest was level 13, so up in the pistols somewhere. Not bad for me. A rare occurrence. I even saw my viewer count go up to one a couple times. And I got one person that said “Hi” in chat but it was right after I stopped streaming on my end. I've gotta give it up to streamers. It was hard enough to remember to glance over at the empty chat window every now and then, and actual streamers manage to interact with a bunch of people in chat. Definitely a skill. But it was still fun play.

Now I'm going to go to bed because I actually have to wake up for work in the morning. Not really looking forward to seeing 6:00AM on my alarm clock.

March 21, 2015

 I've recently been craving beef jerky. That is one of the things I miss most about eating meat. That and steak. And the McChicken sandwich. Anyway, beef jerky is awesome and I want to put it in my mouth. It's probably for the best that I can't eat it though because my kidneys probably wouldn't appreciate all the sodium. Damn kidneys.

I once again had trouble falling asleep last night. But it wasn't as bad as the night before so that's something. On top of that I was out of bed this morning by 8:45AM. I read a textbook chapter and then half of another one before taking a short nap before lunch. I think I was originally awakened by frantic dog barking, it wasn't an alarm situation, because that wouldn't have happened after getting to bed so late. Regardless, I was glad to at least knock out some of my reading. I still have a sizable chunk of a chapter to read tomorrow but I can handle that.

Before lunch I added in the reference slide for my instructional presentation but that was pretty much all the schoolwork I did today. I needed a break. Not just a night off. And it was great. The Neebs crew had an unexpected livestream this afternoon so I watched that and spent more time making things in Gimp for my own livestreaming endeavors. I also filled out a few things on my Twitch page so it didn't look so barren.

Tonight I finalized an overlay and tweaked some settings in OBS and streamed for the first time. Just a test run. My test game was Squishy the Suicidal Pig, a game with an awful story but it was only $0.14 on Steam the other day. The story involves a pig who lives with his parents on the farm until a barbeque truck backs up and hauls his parents off to the slaughterhouse. Then the pig decides to kill himself so he can join his parents in Heaven but he ends up in Hell and the Devil decides to play with him, giving the pig 31 lives and putting him through a bunch of trials. The goal of each level is to die and once all the lives are gone the Devil will let the pig go to Heaven with his parents. I have no idea what kind of twisted mind came up with that storyline. Someone disturbed obviously. But I like the idea of burning through lives rather than trying to gain lives.

Anyway, I was only going to play that for a little bit just to see how things went but I ended up playing for about forty-five minutes because I got into trying to figure out some of the levels. One was deceptively simple but a couple of them took me quite awhile to figure out. When I finally called it good I waited a bit and then checked out the recorded broadcast on Twitch. The quality was good but the game sound was so loud that my microphone sound was imperceptible. That is something I should have known about because in all the streams I watch they are always having to lower their game volume. Next time I'll spend some time and tweak the sound. Not that it really matters because it is a tree falling in the forest situation, but it would be nice to get everything figured out. I have a few goals when it comes to streaming and actually getting viewers isn't really one of them.

Now I'm going to go to bed. Maybe I'll actually fall asleep within thirty minutes of laying down. That would be a nice change.

March 20, 2015

 It is one o'clock in the morning. Way too late for my blood.

Last night I didn't get to sleep until sometime after three o'clock. I apparently missed my fall asleep window because when I went to bed it wasn't happening for me. I ended up having to read a book for quite awhile. Not that I'm against that because I've been working on this book for a really long time now. And it's a Book Fair book.

This morning I woke up before ten o'clock. I think. I'm pretty sure I remember seeing nine-something on my clock. Then I worked on school stuff. I don't think I did anything on my PowerPoint but I did work on my instructional handout. It went three versions. I started in Word but then thought I'd try an infographic. I played around with that for awhile but the saved output wasn't very high quality so it looked fuzzy when I imported it into Word and turned it into a PDF. So I moved on to Publisher and that's where I made my final product. I like the look of it. It could probably be better. And it's not due until Sunday so I might end up tweaking it some more. But I think it's a decent effort.

I finished the handout after dinner and took the rest of the night off. I watched some YouTube videos and streams while working on my own Twitch stuff. I made a notification overlay which turned out pretty cool, and I messed around with some other stuff. I also spent a good deal of time reinstalling Rainmeter on my PC and playing around with that. So far I have only installed an audio visualizer thing. And lastly, I made a couple wallpapers. A purple, honeycomb looking one for my left monitor and a green version for my right monitor. I'm kind of surprised with how good they turned out.

Now it is nearly two o'clock in the morning because I got a little distracted while writing this entry. I'm headed to bed and I hope I can actually fall asleep. I will probably try and sleep in. Sunday I'll set an alarm so I can wake up early and then be tired enough to get to bed at a decent time so I'll be somewhat rested for work on Monday. This break has flown by. I'm not a fan of that happening during “vacations”. Those quotes due to all the time I spent doing homework over break. Speaking of, I still need to read a couple chapters. Maybe tomorrow.

March 19, 2015

 I forgot to mention yesterday that my audiobook screwed me over after Chipotle. I got back in my car to head home after picking up my food and my audiobook started itself over. I don't know how many hours I was into it because my car only goes to a certain number and then starts over again. And it takes for freaking ever to fast forward, which also involves me holding down the button the whole time. It has inspired me to chop the file into chapters instead of having the whole book in one single file. Probably should have thought of that genius idea at the beginning.

This morning I set my alarm and woke up at 8:30AM. I didn't actually get out of bed though. I spent the next half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour, I don't know. I spent however long laying there and figuring out my instructional presentation. It was all a bit overwhelming when I was sitting at my computer with the PowerPoint and Word opened on one monitor and twenty tabs (no exaggeration) opened on the other monitor. I needed the separation. And it worked. I was able to get it all sorted out in my head.

I was able to come sit down at my computer and it didn't take me too long to rearrange things and add things so that it made a lot more sense and had a better flow than yesterday. I was still at a bit of a loss on how to end the presentation, give a tour of the website, and make my instructional handout. I messed around with the website some more, hoping something would come to me.

I started a new project on the site and used all my different email addresses to set up different accounts so I could populate the project with people and maybe make it look like a real project. That didn't really work out. I could occasionally get it to recognize the different versions of me but the majority of the time, no matter which address I used to log in, it showed up as my main account. So I eventually gave up on that.

Not long before dinner I had a revelation. Not only on how I could end the presentation part of my presentation, but also how I could show off the website. And at least some of what I could put in my handout. Shortly after that I also had an insight into my metadata group project, which I had started working on briefly after I took a break from the presentation.

After a break for dinner I got back to work. I roughly laid out a slide for my presentation and then spent a good bit of time writing out an outline for my group project. When I got that finished I posted it on the group page for my partner and then I called it a day. I accomplished enough today.

I spent the rest of my night watching the Neebs livestream and working on Twitch stuff. That stuff mainly consisted of making stuff in Gimp. I made donate and YouTube buttons, as well as the screen that shows when I'm offline and a screen I can put up if I need to do something on my computer while I am online. I'll probably never get to the actual streaming phase but working on all the setup stuff is a nice distraction from homework.

The best quote of the night from the Neebs stream was from Simon, who said “What is better than packing peanuts? The answer is not books.” This was in response to someone sending them a box full of books along with something breakable in the box. Which ended up breaking.

March 18, 2015

 Today flew by way too fast. Tomorrow is already Thursday. This Spring Break is slipping away from me. So far it has pretty much all been spent working on homework and avoiding homework. Overall a lack of accomplishing much of anything. At least that is how I feel. It seems like one of those situations where I have too much time to work on something so I end up taking all of the time I have, rather than knocking it out quick and then moving onto other things. I'd like to say that I'll learn someday but I've made it to grad school and I still act like I did in grade school.

I made some progress on my instructional presentation today. I'll probably end up tweaking most of what I added today. I'm still struggling a bit on wrapping my head around the presentation itself. We're supposed to pretend that the audience is an undergraduate class, not our classmates. We have to show them the website, tell them a little about it, why they might want to use it, and how to use it. But we also need the handout which would be an activity that they could go through after the presentation. I'm getting hung up on how much information to actually give them as a background on the website itself. Like information on the company and stuff like that. Information that I know as an undergraduate I would not have cared about. But I also need to fill fifteen minutes. I think I should focus briefly on the history of the website and then spend the majority of my time going over what the site can be used for and showing what a project looks like once it is set up on the site. My handout will be something along the lines of having them create an account and start a project. I do know that I'm over-thinking the whole thing. That's just what I do. It would just be nice if I could not do that. If I could just sit down, and go into super-focus mode. That will never happen, sadly.

Tomorrow is a new day. One filled with quality presentation work. And thoughts on my next group project because my partner and I said we would touch base tomorrow. So far I still only have the ideas for the name of our metadata schema. I'll try to knock out some ideas on the elements we should include in the morning, hopefully, and send her a message. I'll probably use that as a distraction from my presentation.

I read a chapter in one of my textbooks today. But apparently it was a chapter from the week before last. Not sure why I never got around to reading it. So now I have two left, those being the ones that were assigned for this week. Thankfully neither of them are ones connected to my group project for that class so I only have to read them, not come up with a resource based on them. I also want to re-read the instruction chapter from that book, or at least glance through it, and see if I can get any ideas for my presentation. I wish I could record the presentation, rather than give it in class. Recording my last presentation was a bit of a pain in the butt to get sorted out, but I liked being able to figure everything out beforehand and read from a script so I knew I included everything I wanted to.

Tonight was Chipotle night and my burrito was decent. The dude really loaded up on the rice and black beans, so I can't complain about that. The videos I showed tonight were video game heavy so I lost my mom almost immediately. But she laughed a few times so I didn't lose her completely.

After dinner I spent the rest of my night trying to get OBS set up on my computer for possible future streaming on Twitch. I wanted to play games on my PC and have OBS set up on my laptop so I could switch between scenes and stuff without having to alt-tab out of the game and have my desktop show up on screen. Not that there is anything wrong with that but I would like to be able to seamlessly transition to a placeholder image when I wanted to switch games or switch to a different monitor

In order to get that setup working, I tried using my Elgato, which is hooked up to my PC. I plugged in the USB cord to my laptop and was able to get the image working but I couldn't figure out the sound. Once I started playing around with the sound options OBS started crapping out on me and stopped working. At first I thought it was related to what I was doing but when I tried it on my PC, where I hadn't done any of the Elgato stuff, OBS was doing the same thing. So who knows what was up. (I just tried it on my PC again and it was working). I had my fill troubleshooting that tonight so I might just go with using OBS on my PC. There are probably a few options for switching scenes without going to the desktop. So now I just need to figure out overlays for followers/donations/subs. I won't really ever need to worry about those things because I don't plan on streaming regularly, or ever while I'm in school. And the sub overlay won't ever be a thing because you have to be a Twitch partner to get a sub button. But I kind of like the idea of coming up with a cool overlay more than the idea of actually streaming. So I'm going to continue messing around with that. I tried one thing briefly tonight and it didn't work out at all. Sometime in the future maybe. If I could knock out this damn presentation and give my metadata partner some decent ideas, I might not feel guilty about taking a mini-break from everything school, and can actually work on the stream stuff without feeling guilty.

I have already typed way more in this entry than this day warranted, so I'm going to call it good for today. But I'll end with a random question that came to me last night before I fell asleep. Would you rather be able to hear the thoughts of other people (an ability that could be very selective so you can pick who you hear, and turned on/off so you can take a break) or have complete control over what you dreamed and complete control inside those dreams? I can see the hearing of thoughts ability be good in very select situations but I would almost one-hundred percent go with the dream option. I'd be taking naps more often than I did back in college.

March 17, 2015

 Going to bed early tonight is not going to be a thing. So much for getting back on schedule. I slept in this morning for no other reason than I didn't want to get out of bed. I just laid there and thought about things. School things. Life things. All the things.

Today I made significant progress on my presentation but I didn't finish it. Not even close really but I made a lot of progress. I found a video on the website the does a really good job of explaining how to set up a new project and basically do everything I would need to go through in my presentation and handout. It would be really nice if I could just start the video and then sit down. I'll probably base a lot of my handout on that video and also reference it in my presentation as a good resource for anyone who is interested in actually using the website.

In other productive news, I did a whole bunch of laundry today. Clothes, sheets and pillowcases, and towels. I still need to make my bed. And put my clothes away. Probably should have done that while the sun was still in the sky. I should just sleep on a pile of sheets tonight. I won't but at one o'clock in the morning it is kind of tempting.

Tonight we went back over to the old house to put out a lot of trash. My mom was originally planning on bringing it all to the new house and then slowly putting it out each week. Then she decided it would be a lot easier to just call the trash company and have them come for a one-time pickup, which is apparently a thing they do. I also moved all the stuff we brought to the new house yesterday downstairs. I'm definitely going to feel that in the morning.

After all of that I watched the livestream I missed last night of GoldGlove and Vern and that crew playing another heist mission in GTA5. It was as entertaining as their previous heists have been. I think they've got one more to go.

Now I'm going to go put my sheets on my bed and my pillowcases on my pillows and I'm going to go to bed. Tomorrow is already Wednesday. I am happy for that because it means I'll be eating Chipotle for dinner. Maybe I'll even wake up early enough to have homemade apple butter on homemade biscuits for breakfast. Something to look forward to.

March 16, 2015

 Today was not nearly as productive as yesterday in terms of school work. I read a long article and watched an hour long article on RDA, which is apparently the cataloging standard that is meant to replace AACR2. I managed to make it through both without remembering that RDA stands for Resource Description and Access. Somewhat interesting but not really. I think I kind of like cataloging but I also think it would get kind of boring after awhile.

I also read a lot about the website I'm supposed to make my instructional presentation on and kind of started making the presentation. I made the title slide and added another blank slide. Tomorrow I want to finish the outline and maybe turn that into a full presentation. At the moment, turning it all into a fifteen minute presentation seems a bit daunting. I'll get there.

Tomorrow I also need to put in a little more effort on my metadata schema group project. The one where we are creating a schema based on superheroes. So far I haven't gotten farther than trying to come up with a name for it. That will eventually turn into yet another presentation I have to make.

Tonight we went over to the old house and loaded up a bunch more stuff. We are very nearly there. And yet there is still so much crap. I'm so tired of crap. I want to just get rid of everything. Like to the point of packing a backpack and moving into the hills. If I had more than one life to live, and I didn't like my computer and the internet so much, I would spend a few years as a hermit in the mountains.

When I got home I played a little CS:GO and Nazi Zombie Army. In my first match in CS:GO I was very briefly the leader in Arms Race. It was all downhill from there but for that short period of time I didn't feel completely terrible. I think I was pretty close to getting to the knife, I was somewhere in the pistols. And in Nazi Zombie Army I came across my first skeletons and an elite. It wasn't nearly as terrifying as it seems watching Sark play but I play on Normal and he plays on the highest difficulty, so that makes a bit of a difference.

Right now it is a little after 11:30PM and I would like to get to bed by midnight, half-past at the lastest. Slowly getting back to a decent sleep schedule.

March 15, 2015

 Today I finally finished my metadata presentation. Such a mistake going the presentation route over writing a paper. Live and learn. I wrote my script this morning and read through it a few times. Then I jumped into the program we had to use to record the presentation. The recording process was a pain in the butt. I could read through the script just fine when I wasn't recording but as soon as I hit record and started juggling everything it all went to crap.

The process involved hitting record in the program, which would start the recording and start my slideshow. Then I had to maximize the program (because it would minimize when I hit record) and click on the slideshow so that it had focus and I was able to control it with the arrow keys on my keyboard. I made the effort to maximize the recording program so that I could easily stop the recording when I was done, not have a long awkward silence at the end of my recording. While I controlled the slideshow with arrow keys on my desktop keyboard, I had my script pulled up on my laptop and scrolled through it with the arrow keys on my laptop. I kept one hand on each set of arrow keys and used them as the need arose.

I had several failed attempts where I'd get one or two slides in and completely screw up. Eventually I made it through the presentation, and it had mistakes, but I decided to upload it just to see if I had any editing options on the website. There were but when I tried to clip out one of my mistakes I learned that the editing was pretty poor. I also learned that there was a slight delay when I switched slides so I ended up talking about the next slide before it appeared.

After a few more tweaks to the script, and waiting for my dogs to stop barking, I made a couple more attempts at recording and finally got something decent. There were a couple minor mistakes but it was passable. And at least in terms of sound quality, it was better than all the other presentations I looked at, probably thanks to using an actual microphone, not just one built into a computer. So I have that going for me.

Now I need to start working on my instructional presentation for my other class, and my metadata schema group project for this class. And my group project for the other class. And do the readings for both classes. I am enjoying this semester so far but all this work seems to be piling up. It doesn't appear that I am going to get much of a Spring Break.

Tonight I went over to the old house with my mom and we loaded up some more stuff. I brought my old hardshell guitar case home. I say old because I bought it years ago, maybe in high school but I think it was college. But I never actually used it because it always smelled like a skunk on the inside. I tried everything I could think of but nothing worked so I ended up just leaving it out in the garage. For years. Tonight I opened it up just to confirm it stilled smelled skunky and it didn't. I was surprised by this and decided to keep it instead of putting it in the giveaway pile. With my luck my nose was probably just stuffed up and it will smell awful the next time I open it.

When I got home I played a little CS:GO. I'm not good at the game and it has been forever since I've played it, or any other FPS, but I've watched a lot of it recently on YouTube and streams, so I decided to jump into a few games. The main gamemode with the bomb planting isn't for me because I'm awful and I would end up just spectating the whole game. It's the same reason I never played Search & Destroy in CoD. I do enjoy Arms Race, though. It's like Gun Game in BF3, or maybe the other way around. Every couple of kills you advance to the next weapon, until you make it to just a knife. I'll never get to that point but it is fun for awhile.

Now I'm going to go to bed. It's half past midnight and that is early for me this weekend. My sleep schedule is horrible at the moment and I need to change that. Baby steps.

March 14, 2015

 Today was such a long day and it was almost entirely filled with working on my metadata presentation. It's getting a bit ridiculous. I originally decided to do the presentation because I didn't want to write the three to five page paper and worry about in-text citations and all that crap. And now I have spent almost two full days working on this freaking presentation. I could have knocked that paper out in an afternoon. I obviously made the wrong choice.

Despite all the work I put in today I still need to write a script and then record the presentation. I was going to just use my outline to speak from but after doing some practice runs today to see where I was at on time, I ended up just rambling and was obviously speaking out of my ass most of the time. So I'm going to take advantage of the fact that I'm recording the presentation, not giving it in front of the class, and fully write out what I'm going to say. And that script will probably end up being as long, if not longer, than the paper I should have written in the first place.

On the plus side, I've probably learned a lot more about PBCore making this presentation than I would have writing the paper. And I'm pretty happy with the overall look of my presentation. Also, the schema is written in XML and we had to provide an example of the elements but written in plain language. I did that using a table to show the elements and the values but I also decided to try out the XML. I have no idea if it is actually correct, and I think I made some of it up, but it looks pretty much like all the examples I have come across in my research.

Tonight, after finally finishing my reference list for my presentation, I decided to call it a night. I'm rewatching Sark's latest stream of Zombie Army Trilogy, and that inspired me to play the first game because that is the only one I have. I'm really not that great at any of the zombie games. Certainly not the CoD versions and the Sniper Elite version doesn't go much better, but it is fun getting the bullet-cams. I also briefly played Tera until I got in way over my head in a cathedral and died.

Tomorrow I will need to write my presentation script and then record it. I also need to go over to the old house to make sure I don't have anything left over there. Best case scenario, I will also be able to start working on my presentation for my other class. My goal had been to finish it by tomorrow but the due date got moved back so it won't be the end of the world if I can't get it done. We'll see what happens.

March 13, 2015

 I slept in later than I would have liked, turning off my alarm after it went off and then going back to sleep. But I still got a lot accomplished today. I read a bunch about my metadata schema, watched a webinar about it and took copious notes, and then I made a detailed outline of the information I want to talk about in my presentation. Many hours later I, so many that it was after dinner, I started making my PowerPoint presentation. I only got the title slide finished but in order to do that I had to download a theme from the internet and used Gimp to make a couple pictures for the background of my slides. Tomorrow I want to finish the presentation, figure out what I'm going to say, and actually record the presentation. Lofty goals. I ran through just reading my outline and it took longer than the allotted five minutes so I need to make some edits.

Tonight I went through an active security training for the movie theater two and a half times and and took the final exam twice. It got real annoying. Halfway through the training the first time my browser unexpectedly quit. After running through the whole training thing again I took the final exam but forgot I needed to put in my manager's email address instead of my own so he could get the results. So I had to go through the training again and take the final exam again so I could put in the correct email address. I guess you could say I'm super ready for an active shooter incident now. If only I could actually get scheduled for a shift at the theater.

Tonight we had a family pizza night. Little Caesars is delicious. When I was growing up we used to do a family dinner night with my grandparents almost every week. I kind of switched that to a Chipotle night every week with my mom and sister. But I'm thinking we should maybe bring back pizza night because pizza is always good. Maybe that could be a reintroduced weekend thing.

Somehow it is already after two o'clock in the morning. I need to go to bed so I can wake up and be productive once again tomorrow. Two days in a row would easily be a record.

March 12, 2015

 Today was another day of testing and photo editing. Groundhog Day. Everyone was doing Math, which goes a lot slower than Reading. It is also harder to watch because it is a lot easier to see kids getting the wrong answers.

I sent out an email today about yearbook pictures and it was the most successful one so far. I got three cameras to get pictures off of and a few different teachers put pictures in the folders on the share drive. Looks like we'll actually have a yearbook with pictures in it, not just words.

The weather was really nice today and I got to experience it briefly when I went out to the playground to let one of the first grade teachers know that testing was over for the morning and her class could come to the lab. I probably got a nice five minutes of sun, which is more than I usually get.

Tonight I watched livestreams and set up my microphone in case I go the route of recording a presentation rather than writing a paper for my metadata assignment. So once again not a really productive night. Not surprising.

We don't have school tomorrow, it's a professional development day, so my plan is to accomplish some things. I want to set my alarm and wake up at a decent hour and knock out the research and outline for my metadata assignment. I should also be able to write the paper or make and record the presentation. I also need to start my project for my other class which involves making an instructional presentation and coming up with a handout that could be used for an actual instructional session in a library. In theory I should be able to do all of that and more tomorrow but I probably won't even accomplish a fraction of it. Especially with that attitude.

March 11, 2015

 I was up really late last night watching a livestream and it is currently almost 11:30PM. My sleep schedule is a tad screwed up at the moment.

My workday involved more state assessments and photo editing. Testing went well. We still aren't able to reactivate tickets, and it was decided that the speed-demon fourth graders yesterday were going to take their Reading test from yesterday again, so today they started on their Math tests. One of the SPED teachers also came down to the lab while they tested just to make sure they weren't going too fast. It went a lot better and it was a lot less frustrating than yesterday's test.

Near the end of the day when testing was over I went down to the library to look at the library clerks computer because it has been running really slow. She put in a trouble ticket awhile ago but nothing has happened yet. I ran the disk cleanup and defraged the hard drive, even though I think I read somewhere that the defrag thing doesn't really help much in the modern world. I can't remember. But I did it anyway. I think it had already started to run a little faster by the time I did my thing but we'll pretend I did something worthwhile. I also got two homemade cookies from the clerk out of the deal, so that was nice.

After work I went and got Chipotle. There were more people working but the two slow girls were at the end of the line and on the register. The burrito could have been wrapped better but it was a considerable improvement over recent weeks.

I keep yawning and it is interfering with my typing.

The favorite part of my day now is driving in my car because I get to listen to the Harry Potter audiobook. I believe I've made it to chapter seven of the first book. They have just reached Hogwarts and are about to be sorted into houses. It's real temping to just drive laps around town.

Tonight I spent a lot of time trying to download the software we need to use to record our presentations for class, just in case I want to go that route instead of writing the paper. It was more of a distraction from actually doing work than an actual desire to go with the presentation over the paper. The problem was that there wasn't a link anywhere to download the software. I tried three different browsers and two computers and all sorts of other things but nothing worked. Then I emailed the contact at the university and to my surprise he responded really quickly. After a few emails back and forth he was able to do something on his end that made the download button magically appear. Then I no longer had that as an excuse to not do work.

After that I watched a multi-stream of Sark and APL playing Zombie Army Trilogy, picking up where they left off last time. I also texted a bunch with one of my friends and put in a very small amount of effort on one of my assignments. Good grief.

March 10, 2015

 Thanks to the minor flood in the lab yesterday there were two giant fans blowing all day, one in the lab and one right outside in the hallway. It made things a bit breezy but I kind of liked it because of the white noise it created. Sometimes the silence is just too loud. It also blocked out a lot of the hallway noise which was nice for testing.

As for testing, we only had one real issue where one section of the test didn't load at all for a kid. And we weren't able to reset the ticket because there was an internal server error. The only other issue was an invalid ticket but I think that was because they were trying to use the wrong ticket. We're still doing way better than we were last year.

The last test of the day was a group of fourth graders and they all rushed through the test. It was incredibly frustrating because I kept reminding them to take their time and they said “okay” and then went back to rushing. They all took less than half and hour to read a couple long passages and answer thirty questions. One kid was done with the first fifteen questions in about five minutes which I know wasn't even long enough for him to read the main passage. They all needed someone sitting with them and forcing them to slow down because it was way more for me to handle.

When I wasn't testing I worked on editing photos. I also went and talked to the librarian about random stuff. Web Design will probably be my elective for the summer but I'm still gonna give it a day or two just to make sure.

Tonight I accomplished nothing. Once again. It's becoming a frustrating problem. Much like trying to get fourth graders with testing accommodations to take their time on a test. Right now I kind of want to make and record a presentation for my metadata analysis, rather than writing the paper, even though the paper only has to be three to five pages long. Whatever I decide I just need to pull the trigger. I am unable to put into words how frustrated I am with myself and my inability to do any work whatsoever. Something needs to change. I need to stop talking about it and actually do something. Story of my life.

March 9, 2015

 The first day of state assessments started with a minor hitch. That being all the kids for the first test who were supposed to test out of the lab on laptops couldn't because the test wasn't working on any of the laptops. It said something about the browser not being compatible so my first thought was to update Firefox. A good thought you would think but it didn't help anything. Then I looked around the global drive to see if I could find a copy of the testing software so I could try reinstalling it. There wasn't one. So I did a Google search and found the testing website and downloaded the program from them. I had to do the same thing last year I think. Thankfully that ended up working and I was able to go around and update all the laptops that were going to be used for testing.

For quite some time the water fountain on the second floor, right above the lab, has been broken and today there were a couple guys there working on it. They started out messing with stuff in the ceiling right outside the computer lab. When they thought they had things figured out they poured three gallons of water into the fountain. Not too long after that we heard a bubbling and gurgling sound in the lab and when I looked back there was brownish water bubbling out of the metal plate thing in the floor. I never knew what that thing covered up. I thought it was an electrical thing but apparently it is a drain thing. The water slowly came out of the drain and then creeped its way around the corner and out the door into the hallway.

During lunch the guys came back with a camera that they shoved into the hole to look at things. I think there was some more routing and they left before the next test started but I don't know if they actually fixed anything. My fingers are crossed. The thing that annoyed me most was that they made no real attempt to clean up the water. That was left to the night custodian. I'm not a fan of guys working on things, making a mess, and then not cleaning up after themselves. It has always bugged me. It really isn't that hard to clean up after yourself. It's part of the job.

The tests themselves went pretty well. We made it through all of them today, minus the two kids that were absent. I was mildly surprised by that but didn't mind in the least. The laptop thing right off the bat was stressful but it was nice not having a whole bunch of broken tests on top of that. But we had good days during testing last year, at least I think we did, so I'm not holding my breath. We've got a long way to go.

When I wasn't watching kids test, I did productive things. I scanned baby pictures for a few sixth graders. I'm all caught up with the scanning so far but I'm definitely falling behind on the editing. At some point I'll probably need to do some of the editing at home. I fixed a laptop that wasn't recognizing Microsoft Office. I was able to run the repair thing and that seemed to get it working again but I don't know if it will be a permanent fix. I also helped out the gifted teacher with her technology issues: shared drives not showing up, setting the authentication page as her homepage, getting email to update on her iPad, setting up Outlook on her laptop, and probably some other things. At the very end of the day I helped the librarian with Twitter things.

I emailed the two librarians I interviewed last semester to get their opinions on what electives I should take. They both had interesting perspectives. I'm leaning toward taking Web Design this summer because I've always enjoyed coding and I haven't messed with HTML in a long time. According to the description you work on websites for real clients, which sounds pretty cool. The problem is that I want to take way more electives than I will actually be able to.

Tonight I once again accomplished nothing in terms of schoolwork. I just couldn't bring myself to do anything. It's kind of an awful feeling. I just sit here knowing I need to be working on several things but unable to do anything. There's gotta be a pill for that. And I need it.

March 8, 2015

 Today was kind of a waste. I should have done so much more. Or anything, really, because I accomplished nothing. Something that will probably come back and bite me in the ass next weekend when I have two assignments due. I feel like maybe one or both of the assignments had their due dates pushed back but I can't remember. I'm going to act as if they haven't, however, because pushing them back will only interfere with other assignments and projects that are currently ongoing.

I did a bit of research for the various assignments but I didn't actually do anything to contribute to their final product. I wasted a couple hours tonight trying to file my state tax return. I accidentally found the site I used last year but it felt very truncated in the questions I had to answer and at the end of it all it said I owed almost fifty bucks, whereas the other two times I have gone through the process this year I was supposed to get money back. It comes down to the other two sites saying my taxable income was a few thousand less than the site I used tonight. I think it comes down to credits and deductions but they default ones on the site don't apply to me and their isn't an option to add other ones in. I've still got a month to figure it out.

The coming weeks are probably going to suck. My days will be filled with testing and my nights will be filled with school work. Time will fly, for better or worse. I imagine I will spend a lot of time doing nothing and feel bad about it.

March 7 , 2015

 I want to go to bed. It is so late. And in a hour it will actually be two hours later. I prefer falling back rather than springing forward.

Today in class we talked more about metadata, had a guest lecture from the librarian who came last semester that reminds me of a fairy godmother or the Glenda the Good Witch. We also talked a lot about the personality tests we took at the beginning of the semester and did some activities based on those, breaking into small groups based on our results and answering questions. For the last one, I can't remember what the category was, but we had to plan a group vacation. There is one lady in the class who is loud and blunt and basically kind of an ass. It was a simple, made up task but every time someone brought up an idea she took it entirely literally and said it wouldn't work because she didn't have the time or the money or the whatever else she could think of to be a contrarian. It was annoying and we didn't really get a chance to discuss the more interesting parts of the vacation, like what we would do, because we couldn't get past the loudmouth shooting down every idea. Thank god I didn't get paired up with her for the group project.

I was a little worried about my partner because my initial impression of her was similar to the loud lady but not quite as severe. She just seemed like she could be the blunt, bitchy type to be honest. But we were paired up based on our personality test scores so my initial impressions were either not quite accurate or one of us sucked at taking the test. Regardless, now that I've actually met her, I can say I was completely wrong. She is actually pretty cool and really easy to get along with.

For our group project we have to pick an information object and design a metadata schema for it. I thought about it over lunch but couldn't come up with anything. My partner did the same and she came up with two ideas. The first was alcohol but I said that would be a bit of a struggle for me because I don't drink. Her second idea was superheroes. Turns out she's a bit of a superhero nerd. We narrowed it down to Marvel heroes because people tend to be more familiar with them and our audience is going to be teenagers. We spent a good amount of time talking through everything and then spoke with the professor and got a little more insight. I feel really good about the whole thing. It should be a pretty fun project.

I spoke with my adviser today about setting up a practicum for this summer. She is going to contact the university library and the public library here in town and see if anyone has a spot for me. I mentioned that I interviewed someone from the university library last semester so she may contact him. In order to work in a grade school I would need a teaching degree so for the time being I am still leaning toward working in an academic library. That may change if I get a practicum in one and find out it isn't for me, but there's only one way to find out. My adviser said there have been several instances of people getting jobs directly related to their practicums, which would be nice.

I got out of class at five o'clock, hit up Spangles, and then headed out of town. Listening to the audiobook of the first Harry Potter book. I didn't have to pass anyone on my way home, which made for a nice drive. On the last stretch of highway I had the opportunity to join a line of cars but I ended up just slowing down and matching their speed when I was still pretty far back so it didn't feel like I was actually stuck in a line.

Tonight I decided to take a break from school stuff so I watched videos and clicked around the interent and played a bit of Trove. Trove is kind of like Cube World, which was a fun voxel game filled with cubes like Minecraft but it had a different art style and had smaller blocks so it allowed for more creative designs. Trove has a very similar design style. It is pretty fun to play but I really don't have any clue what I'm doing. I believe it's currently in the beta but hopefully they'll include more of an introduction in the final game, if they ever make it to the final game. I kind of just run around and find dungeons to clear. But it's fun so there's that.

I just sprang forward and lost an hour so I'm going to call it a night. Tomorrow I will need to work on school stuff. And maybe file my state taxes. I need to get that done before I forget about it.

March 6, 2015

 We're gonna make this quick because I'm exhausted.

It is almost as if my workday. It went by so fast, and it ended a half an hour early because I had to go home and get my stuff for the weekend. The principal printed out all the state assessment test tickets last night so I spent my day cutting and organizing them. They print out nine per sheet and they were better organized than they were last year but still required a bit of work after they were first cut apart. Last year they came on the sheet in alphabetical order by grade, which sucked because kids generally don't test as a grade, they test in their classes. This year we got them by grade, test subject, and then alphabetical by teacher, which was so much nicer. I still needed to separate the teachers in some cases when they shared a page but my major effort came in separating the tickets by test session.

When that initial bit of organizing was done I went back through and separated out the kids with accommodations from the Reading test because that is what we're starting with next week. I wanted to get that out of the way in case I got sidetracked by something else. I finished that with plenty of time left so I went back and was able to separate out the accommodation kids for each test, which means each session for each test. It was ridiculous but I managed to get it done shortly before I planned on leaving for the day. Next week in between tests I'll work on going back and organizing the tickets for each class based on the seating chart for that class, that way I can have everything set up before the classes get to the lab. It is incredibly tedious to organize them in that way but it makes the setup later on a lot easier.

I was a little late leaving work because as I was about to shutdown the social worker came in and asked if I could get the videos of the basketball game off her iPad. That game being the kids against the teachers and staff. I skipped it to work on tickets, which kind of sucks because it was kind of entertaining last year. Anyway, she gave me the iPad and came back with a cord for it so I plugged it in and started copying all the files to the faculty drive. I had to leave it in the middle but the nurse said she would get the iPad and shutdown my computer when everything was done transferring.

I forgot that this morning, before I started with the tickets, I got “fixed” on of the kindergarten teacher's computers. When he wants to switch from his elmo projector thing to projecting his computer desktop, he's been having to get down on the ground and switch the cords under his desk. The cord he needed was actually already plugged into the elmo it just needed to be plugged into the splitter that was already plugged into the computer. He assumed the splitter didn't work because the last time he tried it nothing happened. I showed him how to spring up the monitor options, detect new monitors, and switch if they are extended or duplicated. It was exactly what he wanted it to be and I'm glad it worked out so easily.

Every time I say I want to make these entries quick I jinx myself. Now twenty-five minutes later.

I left work and went home to pack and make my dinner. Then I hit the road. It felt like an extra long trip because I was already tired before I even hit the highway. Not a good start. I had to do a lot of singing and head-bobbing to my music to keep myself focused.

I almost had a clear shot again on the last stretch of highway but I had to stop at the gas station to use the restroom. When I got back on the road I was sandwiched between trucks. And unfortunately there were two trucks in front of me. There is only one small section where the road widens to add a passing lane, and it seems like an incredibly small section. Well, whenever there are two trucks, inevitably the one in the back thinks he needs to be in front so he proceeds to use the entire length of the passing lane section to pass the truck in front of him. Leaving no time for any of the cars that are actually driving the speed limit the whole time, not just on the downhill parts of the highway, to get around the truck that was formerly in the back. The only time trucks seem to drive the speed limit is when there is a passing lane. It sucks. And then immediately after the passing lane they slow back down and you're still stuck behind a truck.

Class tonight was interesting. We talked a lot about metadata. At this point I feel fairly comfortable with the idea. At least the basics of it. Based on the class discussions we had tonight I think that puts me in a better place than several people in the class. I'm certainly not any better at deciphering the material, especially the books which I'm not a fan of, but I got lucky with some of my past experiences with technology things like databases and programming, and that gives me at least a frame of context when thinking about metadata. I'm by no means to the point of completely understanding everything that is involved with metadata, but I'm at least getting the basic concept, which I would say is a good start. I can only get better.

I'm now in the hotel room and I don't think they understand what 'non-adjoining' room means. This room and the one before both had a door leading to the next room. Oh well. Once again I seem to be doing alright because there aren't any loud people and my room has the train pictures again.

Now I'm going to bed. I've got a headache and I'm really tired. Sleeping in on Sunday is going to be amazing.

March 5, 2015

 I forgot something from the fifth grade teacher yesterday morning. One of the kids asked her how to spell 'triangular' and her completely genuine response was “T R I angular”. I pointed out that she had just spelled the easiest part of the word, leaving the hard part to the kid, and when she realized that she immediately started laughing. It was funny.

This morning I set up the second monitor at work. It causes a tiny bit of lag when I've got a bunch of stuff open and I'm editing photos but it is totally worth it. Today I was able to edit photos in fullscreen, leaving the toolbars and other stuff on the other monitor. That was so much better than having to work on a tiny picture situated between the toolbars. I could also have the original picture open on the other monitor as a reference. Life is way better now.

I finished editing the picture I started on yesterday that was crinkled and all sorts of messed up. Not to brag or anything, but it looks really freaking good. I have no real skills in photo editing, just a lot of time on my hands, so there is no reason for it to look as good as it does. But I'm completely okay with it.

I helped with kindergarten literacy centers this morning. One of the kids in my group arrived with only ten minutes left so instead of listening to the story and drawing her neighborhood I just had her looked through the book and I had a conversation with her about stuff in the book. She's a pretty cool kid who has been through a lot of crap in her short five years. Hopefully she can overcome all of that.

When I didn't have classes in the lab I spent pretty much all my time editing photos. My time for doing that is going to drop off considerably starting next week and lasting until the beginning of May. Not looking forward to that. Not even a little. I'm glad I had the thought to at least get the flow of pictures for the slideshow started before testing starts because that will at least reduce some of my end of the year stress. Even if only by a little bit.

Going back to the fifth grade teacher who was stirring her dip yesterday, she sent out an email today thanking the mysterious person who cleaned out the mini crock-pot the dip was in. I was knee-deep in photo editing, all by myself, so I felt compelled to respond with the fact that it was probably just licked clean. That lead to a brief but funny exchange.

Tonight was a lot less productive than I would have liked. I wanted to install my favorite Minecraft mods on my PC but that was pretty much an entire fail. The only thing I managed successfully was to add the resource pack I like. At least I don't have to look at vanilla Minecraft anymore. At some point I need to figure out the mod thing though. They all stopped working on my laptop as well, which means all the work I put into my garden and trees was completely pointless because they have all either disappeared or gone back to vanilla plants. And I don't think they will miraculously return when I get the mods working again. That is disappointing.

While messing with that I watched the Neebs livestream and later on in the night Sark started streaming as well. I have them both open right now. I decided to mute Sark's because I'll have access to the recording later on so I can watch it this weekend maybe.

Starting this weekend after class, or next week at the latest, I need to start putting some serious effort into my class assignments. Those due dates are creeping up and I would prefer not to get boned by them.