September 21, 2017

 Today was an interesting day. Waking up sucked but that's fairly normal. When I got to work I was able to safely deposit the wire I untwisted last night because my boss was running late. I then did all the usual stuff.

I was on desk for two hours when we opened and a lot of that time was spent messing with Makey Makey stuff. The goal was to get stuff working offline so I wouldn't have to worry about whether or not we would have access to the internet at the faire. I started trying to go way too hard with it, looking for ways to save Scratch programs as an executable file. That was all very convoluted. I ended up just saving the Scratch files to a thumb drive and I can open those with the offline Scratch player, which I downloaded onto our laptop the other day. I found a piano and drums, and I found a few different games as well. I also had the thought of playing Ragdoll Runner. Turns out the keys work out and I was able to play the demo of it using the Makey Makey. I'm going to try saving Steam and the game to my thumb drive and see if it will let me play it from the thumb drive. Originally I thought of Clop, where you control the legs of a unicorn, each leg with a different keyboard key. But the keys don't match up to the Makey Makey and I don't want to spend the time figuring out how to get it to work. Ragdoll Runner is the same concept but with two legs.

When I was off desk I had walkthroughs, I refilled a couple displays, I printed out two hundred bracelet instruction sheets and cut them with the big cutter in the basement, and I did other stuff that is slipping my mind at the moment.

I took a slightly longer lunch because I was supposed to leave a little bit early but that would have left our assistant alone, which isn't a thing we do. I wish our lunch breaks were longer than an hour, especially because I end up having maybe thirty minutes if you figure in drive time and walking to and from my car.

This afternoon I did more things. I came up with a checklist of things we need for Saturday and sent it out to everyone who is going to be working at the faire. I checked off the things I would be taking home tonight and mentioned what I thought everyone else would be getting and what was left, just so everyone was clear and there wasn't any confusion. I didn't hear back from anyone so I assume they weren't working or they didn't check their email.

I heard back from my conference partner and I believe we'll be meeting tomorrow afternoon. She got back to me right before I left work with times that would work for her. I suggested the mid-afternoon one but didn't hear back before I left so we're going to assume that works.

We're also not going to tell my boss that I was at work until almost 5:30PM, when I was supposed to be off at five o'clock. I had to quickly print and cut some more adulting fliers, so that added some time. And then I had to take one load of stuff out to my car, and then move my car to the library parking lot so I could run in and get the big Makey Makey board and the really big canopy. I don't know how much the canopy weighs but it is over five feet tall in the bag and really dense. The new library at work is into lifting weights and after I struggled with it a little bit when it was first brought to us, she grabbed it and lifted it with ease. It was ridiculous. I'm weak.

When I got home my new pen and ink arrived. It was not love at first sight with the pen but I am loving the ink. It is such a good green. It takes awhile to dry but it's worth it. As for the pen, I like the look of it but it doesn't have much flex to it, it squeaks when it writes, and it feels like a five dollar pen, not a forty dollar pen. There are ways to adjust the feed and nib, which should improve the flex, and maybe get rid of the squeaking, so at some point I might try that. I wrote with it before dinner a little bit and then again afterward, so I'm going to give it some time to grow on me. I think I need to stick with sub-thirty dollar pens, preferably sub-twenty dollars. The price of this one was so high because of the handmade features and the small size of the company making it. I need to stick with mass produced pens that have a pretty decent grasp on quality control. My daily pens are my two Pilot Prera pens. I'm also a big fan of the Platinum Preppy pen, which is super cheap. A lot can be said for inexpensive pens.

Other than playing with the pen, I watched YouTube videos. Because that's what I do. And now I'm going to record my audio journal so I can go to bed. The list of things I want to do tomorrow is long and it would be good if I could get most of them done.