November 17, 2015

 Somehow I completely forgot that I nearly got T-boned yesterday morning on my way to work. At the first intersection after turning onto a side street near the school a car apparently ignored the stop sign they had. And completely ignored the presence of a vehicle passing in front of them. I saw them out of the corner of my eye at the last second. I accelerated, jerked the wheel to the right to create a little more space for me, and then jerked it back to the left so I didn't go up on the curb. Video game reflexes. Had I not accelerated or jerked the wheel I would have been hit full-on in my door. That would not have been a great way to start my day. When I was hit head-on in my pickup truck it almost felt like time slowed down when I saw the car coming right at me. The same happened today as I saw the car coming so close to running into me. It all happens incredibly fast but also incredibly slow. It's an interesting paradox.

Last night I finished my research paper, not too long after midnight. I even finished my reference list, minus a few things I wasn't sure about. Today at work I read through the whole thing once and made a few changes. I also looked up the reference stuff and got all that sorted out.

I had classes in the lab throughout the day and I spent at least a few hours helping the librarian with one final project for the football banquet tonight. They decided they wanted to make a slideshow using some of the pictures they used for the photo books they made for each kid. One of the moms was up until 4:30AM last night picking out the pictures and coming up with the order. It was the librarian's job to get the pictures off of that mom's laptop and turn it into a slideshow. That turned into a bit of a project.

Getting the pictures off was no big deal and then we tried to create a slideshow in Picasa because that is what they had been using for the photo books and it seemed pretty straightforward. They knew what song they wanted so I went about obtaining it. I downloaded a video, uploaded it to a converter, converted it to an MP3, downloaded it, and added it to the slideshow. All the pictures were out of order but I created the slideshow as a test to make sure it worked before I went through the effort of rearranging 126 pictures. This was a smart move because the audio ended up randomly stuttering throughout the slideshow, even though it was fine during the preview. I tried a different conversion of the song but that didn't help.

My next option was downloading Microsoft Movie Maker, something I knew was free because I messed around with it very briefly years ago. I uploaded the pictures and song, messed with a few things, and created another test slideshow. This one took forever so while I waited on that I went through and renamed all of the pictures, just giving them numbers, in the order that they appeared in the first mom's photo album. That took awhile because there were 126 pictures, the thumbnails were small, and a lot of them looked the same.

Right before the rendering completed the program crashed. The slideshow still worked up but there wasn't any audio, which kind of defeated the purpose of the test. I tried again and it crashed before I even got to the rendering phase so I called it quits on the librarian's laptop and went to lunch.

Thankfully I never got around to deleting Movie Maker off my computer in the lab so during lunch I worked on the slideshow. I uploaded the newly renamed pictures so everything was in order, added transitions, added automatic pans and zooms, tweaked several of those pans and zooms because they didn't look right, adjusted the timing, and started rendering the slideshow.

Many many minutes later it was done and it turned out just how I wanted. Which I was thankful for because my next option involved running home to get my laptop so I could use the program I use to make the sixth grade slideshow at the end of the year.

I put the slideshow on the librarian's thumb drive and her laptop and she started watching it but also started crying so she had to walk away. This happened a couple times. I ended up standing there and talking with the fifth grade teacher as the slideshow played through, just to make completely sure that it was still working. And it was. Hopefully someday these kids will fully appreciate the amount of effort their parents put into this football banquet.

Tonight I wrote the abstract for my research paper, added in all the formatting stuff, made a few edits, and called it good. For tonight. I didn't turn it in yet because I want to read through it at least a couple more times tomorrow just to make sure it is decent. It's certainly not good but I'm shooting for decent. I also made a few edits to the group slideshow for our presentation this weekend. We only have to speak for a minute each so it shouldn't be too bad.

It was after nine o'clock at this point and decided to take the rest of the night off because trying to read for class would have been pointless. I wouldn't have retained any of it. I can do that tomorrow night.

Instead, I played Black Ops 3 because I needed a momentary distraction. I played a little bit of zombies. I'm not good at that game, especially rolling solo, but I did make it to round five, which is a new record for me. I tried the free run game mode and I was unimpressed. It is a cool concept but it is way too slow. It feels like you're running through waist-high water the whole time. If they speed it up it could be pretty fun. Next I played the campaign a little bit. I'm still trying to beat the train level and I made it all the way through the inside of the train for the first time. And then almost immediately died when I got on top of the train car. There are robots in front of me and a bunch come up from the side of the train. I have no idea how I'm supposed to get through that. The worst part is that there wasn't a checkpoint after the inside of the train so I have to do the whole thing over again. I attempted it several times but couldn't get there. I ended up having to turn the voice acting off because I was sick of hearing the same line over and over again. I played all of these gametypes with a controller just to try it and I continued playing with the controller when I went into multiplayer. It didn't go great but I've also played a lot worst, so there's that. I did better after switching back to mouse and keyboard but I think that was mostly due to getting put on decent teams. At some point I need to jump into a bot match and work on my keybindings. At the moment I don't think the slide option is bound and it was fun to play around with on the controller so I need to get that added. I also need to map the two buttons on the side of my mouse. All things to work on in the future.

Now I'm going to go to bed so I can wake up and do stuff tomorrow. Reading school stuff and Chipotle are definitely on the agenda but who knows what else is in store for me. Time will tell.