Today was kind of a fail but it
wasn't my fault. I spent the vast majority of my day working on my
video tutorial. I made a wallpaper for the monitor I'm recording
that has a picture of the flyer I'm making and a notepad on one side
of the screen. I will have the browser window filling up the rest of
the screen. I also wrote down a list of objectives, which will
eventually be on the notepad but I think I'm going to put that in
when I edit the video. I also went through and wrote down all the
different fonts and sizes I used on the original flyer so I can
reference that as I recreate it. I made one dry run through the
tutorial without a script just to see how it would go. I came in
just under thirty minutes. And the tutorial is supposed to be
between five and seven minutes. So I've got a bit of trimming to do.
I think I'm going to rely heavily on cuts in the editing phase. And
possibly fast forwarding through parts that are redundant.
I did all of that stuff done before
dinner and the plan was to record the tutorial for real after dinner.
At least get all the various parts recorded so I had enough to edit
together. But then after dinner I couldn't log into the website. I
tried every password I could think of and I even reset my password,
but it didn't work. I also tried creating a new account but that
didn't work either. The log in screen would just refresh when I hit
Log In. When I had been doing my practice stuff I used random, made
up email addresses and random passwords. When you log in it shows
your username on the screen the whole time and I didn't want my
username in the video so I was going to make up a random email that
made more sense for the tutorial when I actually started recording
the tutorial. I thought maybe all the random log-ins got my IP
address flagged so I also tried using a VPN but that didn't work
either. The VPN either didn't hide my IP address or there is another
problem entirely. Multiple browsers and a different computer didn't
do anything either.
I decided to tweet Canva because
even though I don't use Twitter, I've heard tweeting a company can
usually get a quicker response than contacting them through the
website. They got back to me in about fifteen minutes but they just
gave me a link to contact them through the website. So another fail,
but I submitted my problem and hopefully I'll hear back from them
tomorrow. If not I'll have to start considering another tutorial
option. I am going to need all the time I can get to add the
captions so I can't really wait around for the problem to get fixed.
I'm going to check the website at work tomorrow and see if it will
work for me there. If it is, and it's still not working at home,
I'll assume it is an IP address thing. Which would be great because
it would mean I could record the video someone else. But that would
also mean I had to record the video somewhere else. I'm just going
to cross my fingers and hope everything is resolved by the time I
wake up tomorrow morning.
Before lunch today I was able to
write and post my try new tech post for this week. I was originally
going to do it over Squishy Circuits, which I learned about at the
teen event at the library last night. I looked up a bunch of
information about it and was about to start writing my post when I
decided to check the class wiki to see what other people had written
about this week. And someone had already written about Squishy
Circuits. What the crap. I'm just glad I checked before I started
writing.
I ended up switching to Sphero. The
Sphero SPRK to be more precise, which is a small robot in the shape
of a clear plastic ball. It's kind of like a hamster in a ball
because the robot drives around the inside of the ball and that
causes the ball to roll around. You can program it by dragging and
dropping command tiles, kind of like LEGO Mindstorms, or you can just
use your smartphone or tablet to drive it around. Without realizing
it I had actually heard of the company before because around the time
the new Star Wars movie
came out this company made a BB-8 version of their robot, and I saw
that all over the place.
I made my post and checked back a
couple hours later to see if anyone else had posted. That is when I
discovered my post had disappeared. I looked at the page revision
history, and my name and post were there, but there was another post
two minutes after mine, and my post disappeared after that post was
made. I assume that person had been working on the page while I
submitted my post, so even though my post showed up for me, when they
submitted their edits to the page, it overwrote what I had posted.
This was annoying because even though I write my post in a separate
document, I add in all the hyperlinks within the wiki. This meant I
had to open up my browser history and open up all the pages I linked
to again and create the links all over again. I checked back several
times throughout the rest of the day to make sure my post was still
there. And it is, so I think we're safe.
Tonight I recorded my first audio
journal in three years because I had my microphone set up and I felt
like voicing my frustration... vocally. It was almost three years
exactly, which is weird. I don't know that I will start recording
them on a regular basis again but I like the idea of it.
I accomplished things today, and
made progress on my video tutorial, but I'm still considering the day
a fail because I got locked out of Canva tonight and was unable to
actually record my video. It is very frustrating. My fingers are
still crossed for tomorrow.
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