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.