June 20, 2017

Waking up this morning kind of sucked but I did it and then I went to work. Today the pencil sharpener got stuck running. Every now and then it will do that but the next time I stick a pencil in it will shut off. Today it did not shut off. I decided to take advantage of that and sharpened as many pencils as I could. And eventually, as it does, it passed out from heat stroke. Maybe five or ten minutes later I was going through emails when out of nowhere the sharpener started up again, all by itself. It scared me a little bit. I sharpened a few more pencils that weren't quite sharp and then I unplugged the sharpener because it was still running and I didn't want it to randomly start again.

I was on desk for two hours this afternoon, had one walkthrough (that I missed), and the rest of the day I didn't have anything scheduled. It was an interesting schedule day. I spent a decent amount of time this morning cutting out the circle shapes for my homebound patron's rating system. I then made some pockets for the shapes, taped them on the audiobook cases, and put the shapes in them. The idea being that if she likes a book she can pull the plus sign out of the pocket and put it in the audiobook case. And if she hates the book, she can use the circle. I thought using a rectangle as a minus sign might be slightly confusing with the sharp corners like the plus sign, so I figured a shape with no corners would be the quickest way to distinguish between the two. It all makes sense to me because I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. The true test will be tomorrow when we go out to deliver books. I hope my system makes sense to the patron and that she actually wants to use it, now that she can't see well enough to write feedback.

Throughout the day I worked on turning my PowerPoint slides with GIFs in just GIFs. It's a pain in the butt and no one will know or appreciate the effort that is going into this. But I will. The big pain today, and it continues to be a pain because I'm not done with it yet, is a slide with three GIFs on it, at least one of which I had to partially cover up because it was really wide and I didn't want that. That GIF has eighty layers so I had to create a mask for each layer and merge them to that layer. Super tedious. But it worked kind of. I'm getting a weird frame at the end of it and I'm not sure what that's about. I'll have to play with it some more. I also need to add the other two GIFs, which will be super confusing with all the additional layers added in. And I can't group each GIF by itself because the GIFs won't work if they are in a layer group. Because that would be too convenient. I might add in a hidden layer in between each set of GIF layers just to help me organize things a little bit.

On a slightly more positive note, I figured out how to access the GIFs I included in the PowerPoint. When you embed a GIF you can't just right-click on it and save it as a GIF, which I didn't realize. Most of them I copied and pasted directly from the internet. And I worked on the presentation on several different computers, so if I did download any of the GIFs, who the hell knows what computer they're on. So I had been going back and trying to find them again, which was a pain because I couldn't remember my initial search terms. Well, it turns out you can change the file type of a PowerPoint to a ZIP file, extract it, and navigate to the media folder, which has all the GIFs in it. I very interesting technique.

I emailed one of the possible presenters for our adulting series to give her an updated date (because we changed the schedule a bit) and got a response. I hadn't heard from her before today because she just got back in the office yesterday and was still catching up on things. She said she is going on sabbatical next semester and the other person who could teach the class may not be there either. Sooo, that kind of sucks. She said she was going to check with some people tomorrow, though, and my fingers are crossed.

I also heard back from my former practicum supervisor and she liked the idea of helping with the alternative facts class. Either her and some other librarians at the university or a joint effort with us. So that is cool. I think the only group I haven't heard back from are the car people at the technical school. Not bad considering it's still June.

I also emailed a presenter for a program next month just to touch base. So I was on top of things today.

I had a surprise of a whole bunch of National Geographic magazines when I got to work today. Over the weekend it came up that I kind of collect them (or at least never throw them out) and the lady from circulation that I was talking to was upset because earlier in the year she and her husband recycled their collection that went back to the 1960s. Well, I guess someone brought in a bunch yesterday, completely coincidentally. And now I have them. I carried half of them to my car when I went to lunch and the other half when I was going home. It was heavy at lunch and even heavier when I was going home. I definitely underestimated how far away I had parked and felt like I was close to dropping the box by the time I finally reached my car. I did managed to carry them all inside my house in just one trip. An impressive feat considering how weak I am.

Tonight I ate dinner, watched dinner, and played a little Elite Dangerous until it crashed on me. It was a frustrating crash because I decided to take a salvage mission, which I still don't fully understand. It took me forever to find them right spot and literally the moment I got it in my sights, the game crashed. I was kind of pissed.

I've seen a lot of similar descriptions around the internet but no solid answers. When there are solutions they seem to be very specific to individuals, nothing obvious for everyone. In my event log it looks like the crash might be related to Radeon stuff crashing. I have now downloaded the latest non-recommended driver and turned on shader caching or something in the Radeon settings for the game. So we'll see if that does anything. The really annoying thing is that it doesn't crash immediately, it seems to at least take an hour, so I can't just tweak something, jump in and see if it works, and then try something else. I have to get fully invested, feel like maybe I have finally fixed it, and then boom, crash. I still need to try the game on my laptop so see if I have any more luck. Although I've seen accounts of it happening with Nvidia, too. Who knows.

The most interesting version of the crash I read about was someone who could only fly in specific ships because other ships would crash the game every time he tried to jump to hyperspace. I kind of wonder if part of my thing is related to that because I played a whole bunch the first and second day I had the game and don't think I started having issues until I bought my new ship. If the game crashes again I might try switching back to the first ship and seeing if that helps.

I have rambled on far too long in this entry and it is now nearly midnight. I need sleep.