May 19, 2015

 I knew I was forgetting something yesterday and I remembered almost immediately after I finished writing yesterday's entry. And wanted to go to bed so I didn't add it in. That forgotten thing was that I finally got a grade for my research paper. I got 24.5 our of 25. I got 0.25 off for not having a clear enough thesis statement, or stating it soon enough in my paper. I also got 0.25 off for not including citations in a few places where I possibly could have. A couple of those places probably could have used a citation just to back up my point. And a couple of those places were completely based on my own opinion so finding a citation would have been a little difficult. So, along with the extra credit I got for doing the last discussion post, I ended up with a 101.6% in the class. Along with the 100% I got in my other class, I would say it was a fairly successful semester. It would be nice if transcripts showed when an 'A' was actually an 'A+'.

Today was finally field day. It had been canceled two or three times because it was either raining or there was standing water from all the rain. The original plan was to have field day at school but after the rain caused a lake that seems to be a permanent edition to the playground, field day was moved to the park. It sounded enjoyable but I did not go.

My morning classes had field day in the morning and my afternoon classes either had field day in the afternoon or were watching a movie. This meant I had a lot of time on my hands. To start my day I helped one of the resource teachers with her iPad. Thankfully that went smoothly because I was kind of making it up as I went.

This afternoon I spent over an hour scanning a couple workbooks for one of the second grade teachers. During the year I recreated a couple worksheets for her and every time I mentioned that she should have digital versions of her worksheets so she could print them off whenever she needed and wouldn't have to worry about them getting messed up or making progressively worse copies on the copy machine. Well, she finally took me up on that. Thankfully I learned a few months ago that I could use the copy machine to scan and email documents. Using the flatbed scanner in the lab to scan all the pages I did today would have taken weeks. It took a little longer than it should on the copier because it took me awhile to figure everything out. My main discovery was picking the size and orientation of the thing being copied. I have always had trouble knowing which way I needed to orient a page in the copier and I managed to get it wrong almost every time. Well, no longer because I figured it out. After all the technical things were learned it was just a matter of standing at the copier for an extended period of time and scanning and emailing pages. I'm glad that isn't my full-time job.

The vast majority of my day was spent working on the slideshow. Like several hours. And I would say it was worth it because I made a whole bunch of progress on the menu. I ended up being able to add in extra menu pages and included thumbnails that would open up the individual slides. I couldn't figure out a way to add a control button on the individual slides so they just open up for five seconds and then it goes back to the thumbnail page. Oh well. I also added in a page that lists the songs and clicking on those will play the song. Those just go to a black screen, again with no control buttons, but it will go back to the song page after the song, or if you hit the menu button on a remote. And I made a title slide for the slide show, which threw off all of the song timings so I had to redo that. But the title slide is pretty good and I got the songs figured out again.

I took my cutout home today. I haven't looked ahead at the forecast but I didn't want to risk waiting until the last day and having to get it to my car in the rain. And my timing couldn't have been more perfect today because droplets started to fall as I was lowering my backseats to get the cutout in my trunk. For once I was glad I parked under a tree because it blocked the light sprinkling long enough for me to get the cutout in my car without it getting wet.

Tonight my third textbook arrived, the first for my management class. I started reading it but ended up spending most of my night working on the slideshow. Nothing is immediately pressing in my classes at the moment and the slideshow needs to be done by Thursday, so that takes precedence at the moment. I made final layout changes to the main menu and rendered a copy of the slideshow to insert into the DVD menu software.

My first attempt to burn the DVD stalled out. The time remaining kept climbing and the progress remained at zero percent. The second time it worked a lot better, which is to say, it worked. The downside is that the quality really went down compared to the original video I rendered and it pretty stuttery when the camera is panning across the slides. So I'm going to keep messing with it because I am assuming it is something in my settings. I've got a lot of spare blank DVDs so I can afford to try a few different things. And, if all else fails, I can just play the rendered video of the slideshow. The DVD and cool menus are far from necessary so I can cut to the chase and just show the video if it comes to that.

I'm going to stop worrying about it for now though because the night has flown by and I need to get to bed. I've been looking forward to that all day.