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.