November 7, 2013

Today I finished the card art. Again. I finished it yesterday but we had two more turned in today. They didn't really take long to make but it is a little annoying considering the due date to turn in art was last Friday. It is also stressing out the librarian because she is in charge of printing everything off on top of teaching classes, running the book fair, and running the library. She's got a lot on her plate at the moment. After I made the last two today we went through and made sure we had everything printed so they could be put on display. We ended up catching five that had been missed and discovered one that I had made upside down. It was the one I had to scan in two pieces and put them back together. I thought it was supposed to be a mash-up between pumpkins and flowers, so pumpkin flowers with the green stem on bottom and the pumpkin flower part on top. Turns out they were just pumpkins. I like my interpretation better. One card had already been printed off so I kept it as a reminder of my handiwork. All-in-all, I made fifty-seven cards. That is a lot of scanning and editing.

I got a start on digitizing the sixth grade storybooks. The cover, title page, and two pages of one book. I decided to scan each half of a page, put it back together in Gimp, erase the text, edit the colors, resize the whole thing to an 8”x13.5” image so it fits on legal size paper with a quarter-inch border, insert it into a picture frame in the actual story the kids typed up, and then send it to the background so the original text is on top. This technique is working well for the first story but it looks like most of the other ones continued their illustrations in and around the text on the page, which is going to be a pain in the butt. The easy solution would be to continue in the same way but put the text in a white box. That will interfere with the illustrations but my scanned image is slightly smaller than the original so matching the typed text with the scanned text isn't going to be a thing. And I don't want to use the scanned text because I don't think it would look as good as the typed text. But I might try it out to see what it looks like.

Tonight I didn't have a visit with the new volunteer kid because he had homework. I ended up having to call his foster dad because I didn't hear back from the kid when I texted him after school. While on the phone with me the foster dad yelled at the kid to call me. So he texted me a minute later saying he had too much homework. So another week of not see him. Not really a bad thing considering there really isn't a case anymore.

I spent my night watching YouTube videos, clicking randomly around the internet, and farming Terraria in the background (I didn't get the Ninja Turtles costume but I did get a reaper costume that is pretty cool). I also wrote my monthly report for my volunteer thing. Pretty much a non-event of a night.

November 6, 2013

Today was a productive day. Before lunch I was able to finish all of the card art. At one point I forgot to switch the font on the vertically ones but I got that fixed and so far I haven't heard of any typos but I'm sure there are at least a few. On all the horizontal ones the information on the back of the card was typed upside down so that it will be right-side up when the card is folded. It would have been better for proofreading to flip all the pictures upside down instead but that would have taken a lot more time and I just continued the theme started by the sixth grade teacher, even if the only thing remaining from her input is the font. Hopefully she doesn't actually notice that though. I kind of feel bad because she did put at least a handful of hours into putting cards together in Publisher and I changed all of it. But I did a better job. I'm just a little more particular and I have more time on my hands.

I also managed to finish cutting all the stuff I laminated the other day for one of the resource teachers. That was a whole bunch of cutting. I lost count of the number of pages. But it is finished and it actually wasn't too bad. It was kind of nice to just sit on the floor, listening to This American Life, in my own little world, and cutting stuff.

I took a short break from the cutting to design something for one of the other resource teachers. She isn't at the school in the afternoon so I left my rough draft on her desk. I can't remember what they are called but they are still starburst things with double letters in the middle and two words that show an example of the sound they make. Not sure if that makes sense but she wants to put them on the wall next to the the posters she has that demonstrate the sounds the vowels make. So maybe they are letters that make vowel sounds? I don't know. Anyway, I think I may need to make them bigger but I'll find out about that tomorrow.

At the end of the day I got a brief start on digitizing the sixth grade storybooks. Very brief because I only scanned one cover and got about a fourth of it edited in Gimp. It's a start though. I did confirm that the scanner is only big enough for normal paper, not legal paper, which means I will need to scan each page twice and then stick them back together in Gimp. That will more than double the length of the project, depending on how lucky I am with scanning. Hooray. But I'm done with card art so I welcome the challenge. Although I might need to check back on that sentiment when I'm knee deep in frustration.

We had an assembly today and it was really good. It was Richie Castro as the History Hunter, accompanied by a very enthusiastic girl playing Scout. He goes into a giant history book, finds a dreamcatcher thing (that he called something else), puts it into his magical guitar, and it is turned into a song that he and Scout sing. It sounds pretty ridiculous, and it was, but it was also a lot of fun to watch and the kids loved it.

At Chipotle the girl thought she knew my order and I jumped the gun so I ended up with corn salsa instead of cheese. To be fair to her that used to be my order. She was moving down the line and said “just corn” but I assumed she was going to say “just cheese” so I said “yes” right after “just” and she piled a bunch of corn on. I could have corrected the mistake but I don't like confrontation (note the card art situation with the sixth grade teacher mentioned earlier) and I would have kind of felt like a dick because I did say yes. And it ended up not being a bad thing because it has been awhile since I've gotten corn.

My new headphones arrived today. I like them but wearing them is going to take a bit of getting used to because they don't have an actual size adjustment. They have a little wing on each side that touch your head, instead of the top connecting pieces, and they automatically adjust to your head. I'm not sure about it yet. It is weird not feeling them on the top of my head but I keep expecting them to slide down my head. And they do a little bit but I think most of it is just in my head. We'll see how it goes. Other than that, they are an open air design, which means the ear pieces only have a mesh covering over them. This allows you to hear the environment around you, and lets everyone around you hear what you're listening to, but it apparently leads to a better sound. They do sounds pretty good so there must be something to it. The first thing I listened to with them was the 3D barbershop. Freaky. I had my eyes closed and I kept having to fight the urge to turn my head and look for the dude. Being able to hear the sounds going on in the world around me really added to the realism of the barbershop clip. It is cool enough with regular headphones, and even earbuds, but it was on a whole different level with my new headphones. Next I want to try them out with an FPS like Battlefield 3 because they are supposed to be really good with directional cues, allowing you to not only easily hear enemies but know where they are coming from. It'll be fun to try out.

Tonight I watched YouTube videos (until I remembered the CMAs were on) and farmed a bit more in Terraria. I got several goodie bags but didn't get anything new out of them. I think the only thing left that I want is the Ninja Turtle costume but I keep getting rotten eggs and cat ears. I have no need for such things.

November 5, 2013

Today was busy and tomorrow will be the same. Slightly overwhelming but I kind of asked for it and it is nice to be doing stuff. I started my day with a little quiet time, cutting some of the stuff out that I laminated yesterday. That lasted for about ten minutes. Then one of the kindergarten teachers stopped in to ask if I could print out more of the small pictures I made for the kids in her class. I was sitting on the floor cutting stuff when she came in and she sat down with me to talk about it. I thought that was kinda cool. And a sign that she works with small children and she is used to getting down on their level. As for the picture thing, I had to remake it because it was one of the things lost when my computer got wiped a couple weeks ago. Thankfully it didn't take too long to recreate.

While I was talking to her, I got paged over the intercom because the librarian needed to ask me something and when she peeked in the lab she didn't see me sitting on the floor. That is the second time I have been paged over the intercom. The last time was last year during one of the MAP tests. Fun fact. The librarian had questions about card art. She was going to start printing out the ones that the sixth grade teacher put together (I finally found out that she was just putting them into Publisher, so what I did last year) but the font she used wasn't coming up. And she had put 'art' instead of 'card art' and the librarian wanted to know if I could fix that. So I went back to the lab and after finishing the picture thing for the kindergarten teacher, found the correct font online and downloaded it. I also sent it to the librarian so she would have it on her computer when she went to print the cards. I also downloaded the font we used last year because we briefly entertained the idea of using that again but decided the sixth grade teacher picked the font she thought worked and we didn't want to step on her toes. So I kept the font and just added 'card' in front of 'art'. And changed it all to capital letters. And centered it on each card because they were slightly off.

Later on in the day the librarian came down to the lab to show me one of the cards she had printed and it wasn't very centered on the paper. The left and bottom borders were a half inch and the top and right borders were about a quarter inch. It was kind of distracting to the librarian and really distracting to me so she asked if I could fix that. So I dug around and found the blank templates I made last year, edited them to work for this year, and then did a bit more tweaking after a few test prints. Then I basically redid everything the sixth grade teacher did. I don't know if the librarian was going to mention it to her or if I was just going to keep doing it. I only did the ones the teacher had already done but that if far less than half of the overall total now, which means there is a lot of work to still be done. And I got an email tonight saying there was more card art to be scanned. It is never-ending.

I also got a stack of storybooks from the other sixth grade teacher. His class has been working on them for a couple of months. The wrote the story, typed it up, illustrated it, and then glued it all together. I believe they originally did this for something to read with their second grade book buddies. The teacher wants me to scan them so he can have a digital copy of them and be able to print out copies. I didn't check but I am hoping the scanner can handle legal sized paper. My fear is that it can't do fourteen inch long paper and that I will have to scan each page twice and then put them together. Originally I thought I could just scan the illustrations and put them into the typed version of the stories but looking through one of the books I saw that several of the illustrations were mixed in with the words so that would be kind of tricky. I'll have to look into that tomorrow. But not actually start scanning because there is still the card art thing. And all the stuff I need to cut out for the resource teacher.

I have mentioned the second grader before who is always complaining about her classmates bothering her, when she is usually the one bothering them to the point of them bothering her. The teacher has come up with a brilliant solution to this problem. She gave the girl a square Kleenex box and a pad of post-it notes. When ever she has a complaint about someone she is supposed to write it down on a post it note and then put it in the box, her complaint box. Then, at the end of the day, she can pick one out and talk to the teacher about it and see if they can resolve the issue. I don't know where the teacher got the idea but it is genius. It saves all the annoying complaining that was probably happening several times every hour throughout the day. It also might show the girl how most of her complaints really aren't that big of a deal when she is looking back over them at the end of the day, most of them she has probably forgotten about. And she will eventually probably get tired of writing down the complaints when she realizes it isn't really something worth complaining about. It is just a really good idea. And she was a lot less annoying during reading groups today.

There was a fourth grade assembly today. They sang songs and there was some choreography and it was pretty great. Not so much the singing because they aren't the best at that, but they were delightfully awkward with the choreography. It was very entertaining. I like any singing assembly when choreography is involved because most kids do not have any sense of rhythm, especially in a large group. And it is fun to watch. Not in a mean way, though. I'm not judging them because I would be even worse at it. I like the effort they put in and it is fun to see most of them just go for it with absolutely no inhibition. I'm a bit envious really.

Tonight I did nothing. Just watched YouTube videos and did a bit of goodie bag farming in Terraria. I built myself a little dirt barrier in a jungle biome next to some water that had plenty of piranha. I read somewhere the mob spawning rate is higher in jungle biomes. I am completely protected in my little dirt fort and I can use my sword which calls down a star from above that will hit enemies. I really wasn't playing the game, just waiting for several bad guys to get on screen and then killing them. I ended getting several goodie bags and by best prizes were the unicorn costume and the robot costume. Not a bad haul. 

November 4, 2013

I finished scanning all the art before lunch so I went up to the resource room and got a whole bunch of stuff to laminate and cut. And while I was waiting for the laminater to heat up I was handed another big stack of art to scan. I ended up getting everything laminated and then spent the rest of the day, off and on, scanning and editing art. But I got it all done. We'll see if that is the end of it.

The rest of my day was pretty much the same old thing. Second grade reading groups were a bit of a chore. The first group went well because they are more independent. That doesn't mean they're always productive but they usually have a better idea of what is going on. My second group was more of a pain. And to be fair to them, the story wasn't set up well for the worksheet they had to fill out. But even when I was pretty much giving them the answers most of them weren't getting it. It would be alright working with them one-on-one but having five or six in a group is like trying to juggle without any arms.

On my way home from work I stopped by Target to get stuff. Stuff included more broccoli and cereal. To be eaten at different times because I don't think the two would be very complimentary.

Tonight I made pasta to mix into the mushroom and asparagus risotto I made last night to see if it would make it any better. And it didn't. It wasn't necessarily bad, it just wasn't working for me. So instead I made some fake chicken nuggets to go along with my steamed broccoli.

I have been tired for awhile now and even though it isn't even close to 9:30PM I think I am going to call it a night. I accomplished nothing tonight and I just want to curl up and sleep. That sounds amazing right now.

November 3, 2013

My big accomplishment for the day was getting my Elgato to record video and sound on my computer. It involved a lot of cord switching and cord digging and internet research. At one point awhile ago I got it to record video and sound somehow but recently the sound wasn't working. I found a video today that had a fix using analog audio cables. The Elgato came with a cable for use with the PS3 that was used for video and sound because the PS3 won't allow game capture over HDMI. But the cable could also be used on the computer to get sound. So I plugged that cable in and it had the three video cables and the to audio cables. I dug around my cable collection and managed to find an old speaker cable (that I believe was either for our old HP computer speakers, maybe even the Apple before it) that had the one small plug to go in a headphone jack and had the red and white (or black in this case) audio plugs on the other end. I tried this out and the Elgato started picking up my computer sound. Which was great. But it also meant that I couldn't hear the sound because my computer thought a pair of headphones was plugged in so it wasn't playing sound through my speakers. I did some more digging and came up with a cable I bought in college for my surround sound speakers that had the headphone plug on one end and three inputs on the other end. This ended up being pretty convenient because now I can easily swap between plugged in things. I can always leave the Elgato and my headphones plugged in and just unplug the speakers when I want to just listen through my headphones. I don't know if any of this makes sense but I was pretty happy I got it working. It was a lot of work and I really lucked out finding the two cables I needed because I was fairly certain I would have to go buy them. I don't know how often I will use the Elgato because I'm still messing around with game capture software options, but I'm glad it can also be an option.

Other than that I played a little Terraria and Minecraft, caught up on YouTube videos, watched DVRed stuff, played some mandolin, and did laundry. Not a terribly exciting Sunday but they rarely are. Tonight I tried a frozen steamed dinner of mushroom risotto and asparagus. I took a few bites but it just wasn't working for me. I might try making some noodles tomorrow and mixing it all together and see how that works. Rather than mess with that tonight I just had hot dogs.

Tomorrow I have a whole bunch of scanning and photo editing to do. I imagine it will keep me busy most of the day but hopefully I will be able to finish it. I know the last day to turn in stuff for card art was Friday but I'm not exactly sure when everything needs to be done so we can start printing and selling the cards. Anyway, sleepy time.

November 2, 2013

I played more Terraria today and finally got some cool Halloween stuff. I got a couple Blood Moon events with waves of bad guys and that gave me several goodie bags, which contain all the good stuff. I got several duplicates but my favorite things were the Creeper costume and the black cat pet.

I also experimented more with game capture software. I tried a few different ones, but technically only two because one wouldn't work. At one point one of my games crashed and at that point I switched the recording software, rather than trying to replicate it, which I might do tomorrow. I also want to try my Elgato again on PC. So yeah, this paragraph really didn't go anywhere but I kind of want to go to bed so I'm not going to put any more thought into it.

Tonight at work I read part of a Goosebumps book, and a little bit of Divergent, but spent most of my night reading Lone Survivor. And that was incredibly heart-wrenching. I got read through the part where everyone dies and I had to stop several times so I didn't end up crying like a little kid while sitting upstairs at work. It reads like a movie. A very hard to believe, action movie. And in those big action movies the good guys are supposed to kick butt and survive. Which makes the loss of life in the book (and in real life) that much more jarring. I am interested to see how they handle the movie. I haven't watched any trailers but I am hoping they do a good job and don't just go for an action movie. I want something more realistic.

November 1, 2013

I finished typing up the fluency labels, printing them out, and sticking them on note cards. There were supposed to be three-hundred phrases, three lists of one-hundred, but I ended up with 261 note cards. Less work for me.

I also continued scanning and editing artwork for the card art thing. I made it through quite a bit but there was just so much. And some of it required a bit of work after scanning. And then the librarian brought down a bunch more. The hardest piece was an oversized chalk drawing. I had a couple long ones that I had to scan in two halves and then put together but it was pretty easy because they both had a bunch of white space in between the pictures, so I didn't have to be that spot-on when putting them back together on the computer. With the big chalk drawing there weren't any gaps in it so I had to scan it in two halves, hoping I scanned them both fairly level and that there wasn't any discrepancy in color between the two scans. I ended up having to scan one side a couple times to get it right but I was eventually able to line them up and paste them together without it be obvious that I hadn't scanned it as a whole piece. At least that was my first impression, closer scrutiny may prove me wrong but I'm looking at the pictures blown way up on my computer monitor and in card art form they will be a quarter of a page. I kind of got the impression that maybe I was just supposed to scan them and not touch them up at all, just pass them along to the sixth grade teacher who was going to work on them. But I thought she was going to put them into the card layout, which is what I did last year. So I don't know.

There is a girl in second grade that I have reading centers with. She is pretty new but pretty much instantly annoyed everyone because she is the know-it-all, tattletaling type. Eighty-percent of her adult interactions are her tattling on another student. Today during centers her know-it-all personality was in full swing when she kept correcting the kid across from her and saying he was lying when he was reading facts about bats out of a book. The assignment was to read a non-fiction book and write down the facts the kids were learning. Every time the kid would say something the girl would say he was wrong, even though he was reading it word-for-word out of the book. It was literally every single time the kid read a new fact. It was incredibly annoying.

I got to work in the lunchroom for the first wave of kids today. I guess the parents who normally work couldn't show up so I was in charge of dishing out shredded cheese, sour cream, and salsa. I only did that for about a half an hour because the librarian, who asked me to help, wanted me to have time to eat lunch before my next class came to the lab. That was nice of her because earlier in the year when I was helping out in the lunchroom for all of lunch left me with no time to eat lunch myself.

Tonight at work I read another Goosebumps book and a little bit of one of the other books I am reading. I also watched about a half hour of Ender's Game. Everyone I know who read the book years ago, completely loved it. I read it this summer and I can't remember my exact review but I'm going to say I thought it was alright. Not life-changing. I was interested to see how they would interpret some of the stuff from the book, like the freeze gun game. And at least in terms of some of the smaller things I think they managed a pretty faithful adaptation. I can't really judge the adaptation as a whole because I saw very little of the movie but it looked promising. I could also be entirely wrong.