Saturday, November 14, 2015

November 13, 2015

 Today was rough due to a lack of sleep and an overall feeling of exhaustion. I was not a fan.

Most of my free time at work was taken up with my selection assignment. We got a grade for it today and we lost a point because we didn't include ISBN numbers. We were never told to include the ISBN numbers so it kind of feels like a bullshit way to lose a point. So I spent my time today adding in ISBN numbers. I finished my list and most of another list. I figure it's too late for the grade but if it would be helpful for my other professor, who will be using our list to actually buy books, it's worth the effort.

As for actual work, I briefly helped out with kindergarten literacy centers and had several classes in the lab throughout the day. My patience was pretty thin today due to my exhaustion but I held out pretty well. Until first grade because there is a really annoying kid who causes trouble every single time he's in the lab. The teacher left after bringing them to the lab so she could go back to the room and set up for a party. I then spent most of their lab time telling this kid to stop doing various things, only to have him almost immediately start up again. The final straw was when he raised his voice and told people to log off their computers. This got other kids to shout out for people to log off and then one kid actually logged off. So I told the kid he was done and told him to go sit by the door. The kid has his moments, very brief moments, where he is tolerable, but then he ruins it. Every time.

I joined the Special Library Association today in an effort to learn more about corporate librarianship and possibly find out more about being a librarian at a video game studio. It seems like it is one of the best places to find this information. Or get in contact with someone who can point me in the right direction. I hope that it leads to something.

Near the end of the day I went down to the library because the office called and said the librarian needed help with something. By the time I got there she had it sorted out but I ended up staying and helping out with other things and we talked about random stuff. I also helped move book fair boxes out into the hallway.

Before heading down to the lab one of the fifth grade classes came to the lab. The teacher was working on a word poster thing for the librarian. I helped the librarian the other day figure out photo books that the parents of the senior football players are making for their kids. The librarian is one of those parents, hence her participation. The word poster is for the coaches. Originally the fifth grade teacher made the poster in Word on a regular size sheet of paper. Then they decided they wanted it bigger so she asked me how I would do that. I suggested changing the size of the paper in Word before she started because if she tried to blow up the small one it wouldn't look very good.

About an hour after getting home the librarian called me and put me on speakerphone with her and the fifth grade teacher. When they tried to save the poster as a PDF only part of it showed up and the rest was just a whole bunch of blank white space. I suggested a few possible fixes and then asked if she had tried copying and pasting it into Publisher. When she tried that all the formatting got messed up and parts of words disappeared. Basically, it didn't work at all. I tried everything I could think of but we couldn't get it to work. The fifth grade teacher was running out of time because she's going somewhere this weekend. By this point I was curious about the problem so I had her send me all the Word documents, a copy of the failed PDF just so I knew what it was supposed to look like, and a list of the different fonts she used for the different words.

After dinner I downloaded all of the fonts and got to work. I ended up having to copy the text boxes over one at a time and arrange them how they were in the original. It was tedious. I also had to arrange the text box layers sending some to the front and back to get them to fully show words and not get them to shift weird. Text boxes are annoying in Publisher. After a bunch of tweaking I finally got it all sorted out and sent copies of the PDF to the librarian and asked her to text a picture to the fifth grade teacher to make sure everything looked how she originally created it. The librarian said everything looked good so we'll see.

With my exhaustion, schoolwork wasn't going to happen tonight so I played a little Black Ops 3. I started with the campaign and made it to the train before I called it quits. It reminds me of the airplane mission in one of the Modern Warfare games. I played that so many times trying to beat it. And this train mission is turning into that. It is meant to introduce the melee ability and close-quarters combat is extremely difficult when one bullet kills you. And it is hard to jump around and strafe when you're in a tiny train with seats and median things. Every time I try and move around I get caught on things and destroyed by a robot. It's going to be entirely based on luck for me to beat the level. I should have started the campaign on the easiest difficulty so I could actually enjoy the story. I would also have a better idea of what to expect on all of the levels, which would be very helpful.

When I got tired of hearing the same dialogue over and over, and the death sound over and over, I moved onto multiplayer. I got my ass handed to me repeatedly. Every single time. It's rough. First-Person Shooters on the PC are unforgiving. Especially when all the players and jump all over the place.


Now I'm going to bed. Tomorrow, my research paper is happening. After I sleep in. Then I'm writing my paper. It's going to happen.

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