April 15, 2015

Testing. There were two tests this morning and one this afternoon. Then we had an assembly. The day went by really fast.

When we weren't testing I worked on an idea I had for my “group” presentation. We are creating a metadata schema for Marvel superheros so I thought it would be cool to move around a comic book page in Prezi, rather than just a plain old PowerPoint slideshow. I haven't ever used Prezi before so I set up an account and started playing around. I couldn't get the layout I wanted, the one I saw in my head, so I ended up making a PDF page in Publisher that looked like a comic book page. I might end up having to make a new one when I figure out how many slides we are going to have but for now I put ten panels on the page. I thought it would be cool if they were real panels and the speech bubbles contained our information but I also thought it would take forever to find individual panels that had big enough bubbles. Instead, I just went with pictures of popular superheros from the Marvel website. I then added a white layer on top of them and adjusted the transparency so the pictures are still visible but hopefully the words on top of them will be legible. I'm obviously biased but I think it looks really cool. Way better than I thought it would.

As for the presentation, in my head I envision it starting with a pulled-out view, showing the comic page I made with a background of a bunch of different comic book covers. Then it will zoom in to the first panel, which is the title slide, and then progress from panel to panel, which will be filled with a whole bunch of interesting information. The last panel is a picture of Daredevil holding his hand up to his ear, listening. It didn't occur to me when I chose that picture but after putting it in the last slide (because it was the last picture I had), I thought it made a pretty good Questions slide.

Of course, all of this is still in my head. A cart before the horse situation. I still need all the information to put into the presentation. I secretly hope my partner has amassed all of that and is going to surprise me soon. Realistically, that isn't going to happen. The only real input she has had, since we first talked about it during our initial meeting, was to apologize for not contributing anything by the date we agreed on. And now we're back to radio silence. So who knows. At least the presentation will look cool, even if the content sucks.

Tonight was Chipotle night but my sister is still out of town so it was just my mom and myself, and she wasn't eating Chipotle. Oh well, the burrito was decent. Not award winning. Or really that great. But it was decent.

After dinner I thought a lot about school stuff but didn't actually do anything tangible. I spent a lot of my day at work, when I wasn't testing, working on school stuff. I was burnt out. But the thinking was good. A lot of graduate school so far, at least when it comes to my process, involves getting lost in my head. There's a whole bunch of thinking and then bursts out output. Like my caution signs over the weekend. Or coming up with the comic book presentation idea. And tonight I was back to the thinking phase.

Around nine o'clock I gave up on the thinking stuff and played some GTA5. I knew it would be a distraction. I think I'm maintaining my self control, though. Only an hour or two a night, after I have made progress with other things. Tonight I did a couple main missions and side missions. The exploding phone thing was a bit of a shock. One of those unexpected, holy shit moments. I did all my driving with the mouse and keyboard tonight and I did alright. Even participated in a race. I still wish the camera would lock onto the behind-the-car view quicker. When you turn corners it sometimes takes forever to lock on so you'll be staring off in the direction you used to be going while your car runs into something. There might be a way to lock it but I haven't figured it out yet. It's still too tricky for me to use my mouse to move the camera. The sensitivity is too high. Although there is a probably a way to fix that.

Now I'm going to bed, because that's what I do at the end of the day. I'm looking forward to sleep. Tomorrow is the last day of the work week for me, which I am looking forward to. But my weekend will be packed with school stuff. I need to make a lot of headway in the next few days. I believe in myself. Because I can't believe in my partner.