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.