Wednesday, April 22, 2015

April 21, 2015

 It's late and when I try to think my mind draws a blank. There was more testing today, as per usual. Two tests this morning and two this afternoon. The two this afternoon were actually done by the same class. They came in after lunch to take their Math state assessments, went out to recess, and came back to take their Reading MAP test. This is the kind of crap that happens when state assessments and MAP are so heavily overlapped, and crammed into the end of the year. There is so much other crap going on that scheduling becomes a nightmare. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that you have to figure out with your feet while blindfolded. It's a bit absurd.

When I wasn't testing, which was not often, I worked on editing one of the pictures I took yesterday of one of the missing kids for the yearbook. It seemed a little white in comparison to one of the official portraits, which seemed warmer somehow. After a cursory glance through the Gimp options I couldn't find anything that looked like it could help me with this but I ended up coming up with a solution. I put a layer on top of the picture and colored it a medium shade of brown. Then I lowered the opacity to around 7% and it gave just enough tint to make the picture look a little more like the official portrait, at least with regard to the lighting.

One of the kindergarten classes was supposed to come in after lunch, and I got them all set up and started my lunch a little early so I'd be done by the time they got there, but they never showed up. The teacher apologized after school and I gave him crap about it, but it's all good. It was annoying at the time but it gave me time to edit the yearbook picture.

And keeping with the out of order thing, I was talking with one of the paras this morning, the one who wearing a different, often crazy, headband every day. Today it was a purple, flowery, fluffy, looking one and she said she could figure out if she was a peacock or a lilac bush. As we were talking one of the fifth grade teachers walked by and briefly joined the conversation and then started complimenting the para as she was walking away. Her final compliment was that the para looked breathtaking, and then she started to act like she was having trouble breathing. I thought it was pretty funny.

Tonight I started reading a textbook chapter on bibliographical sources. It is the chapter I chose to be in charge of for the group project. That means that along with picking a source, I am in charge of summarizing what bibliographical sources are, and formatting the page that everyone else will submit their bibliographic source examples to. I kind of wish I had chimed in earlier in the selection process. Not only because I would already be done with it but because bibliographic sources seems a little hard to summarize. And to pick an example that would be of use to a student interested in going to graduate school. In my reading tonight I learned that there are subject bibliographies, which obviously cover specific subjects, so I might look and see if there is one specifically for liberal arts.

I also think I settled on a research paper topic, which is linked data and its use by libraries. I emailed the professor to see if that was narrow enough or if I need to focus on a specific type of library. We'll see what she thinks. I did a very brief search and found some interesting information so hopefully this topic will work out. I haven't actually started collecting sources or writing but the whole thing seems a little less daunting now that I have a topic. I'll probably think otherwise once I actually start writing the paper, but for now I'm going to embrace the feeling.

We got our grades back in my other class from the information literacy standards assignment, and I got twenty-five out of twenty-five. So she liked my caution signs. I am glad because I really liked what I was able to come up with and I think the final product turned out well. The professor also said that another professor might be interested in using some of our projects on the campus library's website, which would be cool, not only for being picked, but also because it could be added to our resumes. I can't exactly see my caution signs fitting into a library webpage but we'll see what happens.

I got another message or two from my partner. Nothing productive though. In the last one she rhetorically asked how many times she needed to apologize. And that she is seriously thinking about whether she should continue with the program. That all seems a bit melodramatic. I told her I didn't want or need her apologies. All of that is in the past and apologies can't fix it so we need to focus on the very near future, which is the presentation this weekend. We still need to figure out how we're going to divide that up and I'm seeing if she has any input. I'm so close to being done with the whole thing, then I can devote my attention to my research paper and wrapping up my other group project.

I played a tiny bit of GTA 5 tonight because I just felt like driving around for a little while. I didn't partake in any missions or races or anything, I just drove around. I kind of wanted to get a hearse, which is apparently one of the rarest spawns in the game. It spawns at the cemetery but very infrequently. I ended up driving back and forth and all over getting new cars to spawn there but the hearse never showed up. I did manage to steal two other cars and added them to my garage so I can sell them later. I thought you could steal any cars except the super expensive ones and store them in your garage to sell but even on some of the regular cars it won't let you store them because it says they already have a tracker on them. That is kind of annoying to find out after driving it all the way back to my garage.

I spent a lot of time driving around on a motorcycle and it made me realize I need to buy a motorcycle, or find one that will let me store it in my garage, because the one I found tonight had a tracker. It is so much easier weaving through traffic on a motorcycle. I also discovered that it kind of sucks stealing cars and storing them in my garage because when I come back out on foot, there are no vehicles parked on the street anywhere near my apartment building. And I don't want to go through the hassle of stopping a car in the street. I also couldn't get my melee attacks to work, which was a sad realization when I was getting attacked by a random NPC. I think maybe it was because I was in passive mode.


Anyway, it's midnight now and that is going to make tomorrow morning suck. So I'm going to bed.

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