November 6, 2014

I woke up this morning with a sore throat and a headache. Never a good way to start the day. I took some stuff for it and both subsided for the most part but I was aware of both throughout the day. I'm going to take some more medicine tonight and hope I feel better in the morning. It's going to make for an even longer day tomorrow if I have to be at the theater until the middle of the night feeling like crap.

Yesterday when I got to school there were two fourth graders standing outside the front doors like sentinels and they opened the doors for me. This morning there were two sixth graders and they sang a brief song, welcoming whomever came through the doors. It was pretty funny.

Today was uneventful. Sixth grade came down to the lab this morning but it was all quiet on the western front. No drama. The other day there was a big fight during PE over who got the solo in the choir but I think that was the last of the drama. For now anyway.

I also helped out with both kindergarten classes this morning for literacy centers. I had to deal with another cassette tape but it went much better than the last cassette tape. Both groups I had were also really well behaved. I'm usually not that lucky but it made it an enjoyable experience.

This afternoon I had both kindergarten classes in the lab and that was also uneventful. They were relatively subdued, and I think I got lucky because a lot of the teachers were complaining about the kids and the full moon (which looked really cool coming up tonight).

With my abundance of downtime today I finished downloading all the American Libraries back issues and sent them to the librarian. I also started going through tutorials for the inforgraphic website I used for my project (which had the due date bumped back to the 10^th, I can't remember if I mentioned that, but it is annoying). I need to send out an email looking for more work. Or jump into some school work. I have so much to write for my reflective journal.

After work I went to pick up Jimmy Johns and Chipotle. Chipotle was a bit of a disaster. My burrito ended up being alright but that is a shocking result. Both the girls on the line were new. I'm assuming one just started today and the other one may have a day or two under her belt. Having someone who started a couple days ago be the voice of authority to someone who started today is not wise. It was an excruciating process to witness.

I didn't have a visit with the new volunteer kid tonight. Apparently he had a boxing lesson from one of the dudes who lives a the hotel. He was supposed to have one last night but the guy fell asleep. He said everything is going pretty well, in terms of life, other than some annoying kids at school. He's also still looking for a new job. None of his applications have gone anywhere yet.

I watched the Neebs live stream again tonight. Once again I'm not going to get to see all of it because I have work in the morning and I'm tired, but I have enjoyed what I've seen. I want them to get partnered on Twitch because I think at that point they will have past streams saved on their page so I can go back and watch what I missed. Hopefully in the near future we'll have the internet at the new house so I can at least watch a little longer and not have to worry about having to drive home.

November 5, 2014

Well, the election didn't go very well. How is Brownback still in office? I can't even comprehend how that is a thing.

I didn't have a lot going on today. I stitched a PDF image together because it was spanning across two pages and the resource teacher wanted it on one. I also kind of helped one of the interns with his Pages problem. I feel like if I had more time to mess with it I could figure it out but we got it working well enough that he can survive.

The gifted teacher brought some blank CDs so I could burn a robot program onto them, like I did for her last year. Luckily I still had the program saved on the computer so I didn't have to go searching for it again. She handed me the stack of CDs because she wasn't sure which ones were actually blank. Turns out all but one of them was blank. And the not blank one was a Jazz CD. A really mellow Jazz CD that I ended up listening to the rest of the day while I was sitting at my computer. So that was a happy accident. An unintentional accident was getting one of the CDs stuck in the CD-ROM drive on one of the computers. But it turned into a learning experience because I didn't know that the little hole on the front of the drive was a release thing. I also learned that you need to turn the computer off first because the CD wouldn't stop spinning and it go really angry when I tried to open the drive. You gotta sneak up on it.

I had another good conversation with one of the fifth grade teachers this afternoon in the computer lab. We covered a whole bunch of different interesting topics.

I spent a lot of my day downloading past issues of one of the library magazines I was subscribed to when I joined the ALA. The electronic version opens up in a browser and you can download it as a PDF (a process that takes way longer than it should). Today I noticed an 'Archives' tab and that took me to a page with issues all the way back to 2008. So I went through and started downloading them. I think I made it to the first issue of 2013. There isn't one every month so I haven't had to download a whole bunch but the downloading process is a bit iffy so I've had to attempt the download a couple times on several of the issues before it would actually go through.

I went home for lunch to let the dogs out because my sister was out of town getting her wisdom teeth taken out. Her being out of town is relevant here because she is usually the one that comes over to let the dogs out. With her being gone, I went over to her house last night and tonight to turn the light on her fish tank from a normal light to a blue one. I guess that's a thing that needs to be done. Before I actually switched the light I sat there and watched the fish for a little while. I also took some pictures and a few videos of the shrimp moving around. I like looking at fish but I'm not a big fan of having to take car of a fish tank.

Tonight I was going to read for my research class but the teacher still hasn't posted the questions for this week. I don't like reading before the questions because I inevitably have to re-read everything with the context of the questions in my mind. Regardless of the question status tomorrow I'll start reading. Or at least watch the video lecture.

With my sister's dental work I decided to move Chipotle night to tomorrow. I don't know if she'll be up for eating but she'll at least be back in town and might come over to hang out. Speaking of, I will hopefully get to hang out with the new volunteer kid. We have barely been doing that lately. Not from a lack of trying on my part, although I could always try harder. Other than that, who knows what the day will hold for me. I imagine it will be a fairly boring day but we'll see.

November 4, 2014

Voting went well this morning. It was the first time voting at the new place because of the move. My mom ended up getting a dude that took forever to find her name because he was more worried about his scones not being delivered. Then while I was voting and trying to read about an amendment to something he started struggling with his phone and eventually began a loud phone conversation with a girl at the coffee shop about the missing scones. So other than that dude, voting went well.

This morning I didn't have literacy centers in kindergarten because a Russian guy came to talk about Russia (the music and other cultural things, not politics). They broke the school into two groups to view the presentation in the library. It was really good. He played several different instruments, taught one kid how to play the “squeeze box” so he could play along with his accordion, showed a video of traditional Russian dancing and taught some dance moves to several of the kids. I was almost tempted to stay for the second performance, and I probably should have, but I enjoyed the one I saw.

The rest of my morning was spent downloading PDFs and researching some stuff about Pages for one of the student interns, who seems to be engaged in an eternal struggle with his new Mac computer.

This afternoon I had both kindergarten classes and one of the third grade classes. The kindergarteners were thankfully uneventful and in third grade I helped several kids with reducing fractions. It is actually kind of tricky trying to describe how to do that. It was all basic stuff that can be easily done in your head or know immediately, like that 3/6 or 5/10 is obviously equal to ½. But these kids haven't actually gotten to that point in class yet so most of them had no idea what was going on. I got to the point with a few of them where they were actually able to solve a least one or two of the problems without me walking them through it.

Tonight I took a break from school work. I feel like I have been working non-stop on annotated articles or making my infographic, and now that both of those projects are turned in, I needed a day off. Tomorrow I'll jump back into the weekly discussion reading. I also really need to dig into the reflective journal because that due date is coming up real quick and I've got a lot of writing to do.

November 3, 2014

I planned on working on my infographic most of the day but I ended up being fairly busy at work today. This morning I had second grade reading groups and then both second grade classes in the lab. During one of the reading groups, I was out in the hall reading a story with three kids. They were all messing around but not as bad as my small group two years ago. At one point one of them told the other two that he didn't want to have to come in at recess to read so they needed to stop messing around. I looked at him and said “Says the man tossing his pencil around.” He looked back with an I-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about grin as he tossed the pencil off to the side and out of his reach. It was pretty funny.

Speaking of second grade, I can't remember if I mentioned it before (so I'll mention it again if I have) but I beat a second grader at the 'why' game last week. He kept asking 'why' and if eventually got around to why I had to work at the school (because I need money). When he asked why I needed money my response was that I lived in capitalistic society and needed money to buy things. That threw him off because he couldn't really say 'capitalistic society' and not too long after that I somehow managed to turn it around so when he was asking 'why' he was actually asking it of himself. I wish I knew how I managed to do that because it would come in handy.

Right as I clocked out for lunch the librarian found me and asked if I could come help her get ready for her final presentation for her Library Science degree. It is kind of like the capstone project that I will have to give, summarizing everything that I learned. She was giving it through Google Hangouts to a three-person panel using a Google Presenter slideshow. One of the fifth grade teachers helped her figure out the slideshow because she wasn't familiar with Presenter, but they were both kind of stumped with Hangouts. I have watched several hangouts on YouTube but never actually tried it myself. The librarian wanted to know how to get the presentation to show so that the panel could see it. I messed with it and didn't really get anywhere so I tried some googling and found a possible solution but the presentation was in fullscreen mode so we couldn't really tell if someone on the other end would actually see it or not. I ended up going down to get my laptop so I could join the hangout and get the other perspective. This meant I had to figure out how to join a hangout, and in the end I wasn't able to because I think even though it wasn't a private hangout, it didn't technically start until two o'clock. I thought maybe people wouldn't actually be allowed in until that time. So I tried setting up my own and inviting the librarian. That took longer than it should have but after a few failed attempts I eventually got it working. We then opened up a new hangout on her computer so we could make sure her microphone worked and that the presentation was going to work. And it did.

That all took around an hour and a half. But we got it working, which eased the librarians nervousness a little bit but not much. About fifteen minutes before the presentation the fifth grade teacher stopped by to check on things and give the librarian a little pep talk. As soon as the first panel member joined the hangout, the fifth grade teacher and I left.

I went down to the lab to finally eat my lunch and about ten or fifteen minutes later I got a call from the librarian because the lady couldn't see her presentation when she opened it up. So I briskly walked back down to the library and got it sorted out. I think I suggested the same thing the librarian had already tried but it ended up working and I sneaked out to go finish my lunch.

About forty-five minutes later I her excited shouting outside the computer lab and went out to see what was up. The librarian had originally been told that 30-50% of people usually have to redo at least part of the presentation so that had her worried from the beginning. But, the presentation (content-wise if not technology-wise) and she passed with flying colors. The panel lady told her right then, which is pretty cool. I found out later that the other two panel members hadn't been able to connect so it ended up just being the one lady. Anyway, the librarian survived the presentation, earned her degree, and gave me a big hug to thank me for getting everything sorted out. She later went up to the third floor to tell the fifth grade teacher and they both screamed and jumped up and down.

After school I went straight to the old house to work on my infographic. I decided at some point, maybe last night in bed, I can't remember, that I couldn't just do disinformation because that was basically just restated the information transfer cycle but in the context of disinformation. Instead, I went with Operation Mincemeat, which I think made a lot more sense and was more in-line with what the actual assignment was. So I started going through each step, relating it to Operation Mincemeat. Some of them felt like a bit of a stretch but I think I managed to get everything somewhat sorted out, while watching the documentary once again to get the facts straight.

I finished that bit up after dinner and then started going through the process of copying the text and pasting it into a text box I made in Gimp with the correct size for the inside of the frames on my infographic and with a transparent background. I'm fairly certain it is impossible to make the text small enough using the infographic websites' text boxes, so I was having to go through this process to make the text small, then saving it has a png file and uploading it to the site so I could drag it onto my infographic. I had to go through the same process for my reference list as well. And speaking of, it is almost impossible to find out how to write the reference for a physical dictionary. I found four or five versions for citing online dictionaries before I stumbled across one for an actual book. It still seems kind of made up.

When I got all that stuff added in I remembered that all the examples had the person's name and information and I hadn't really left room for that. It took me awhile to figure out how to put it in so it didn't look too awful. It would have been super easy if there was a way to adjust the size of the document or copy all my information onto a larger document, but I managed. It still kind of looks a bit tacked on but I'm going to live with it.

And now it is after midnight. Way too late for my weeknight blood. Especially because I plan on voted before school tomorrow which means leaving the house about fifteen or twenty minutes earlier than usual. Tomorrow morning is going to be rough.

November 2, 2014

Pretty much my whole day was spent working on my digital illustration of disinformation for one of my classes. I started off this morning trying to build it in Publisher but I was struggling trying to get it to look like I wanted it. In the last few days I found a couple different infographic websites so after lunch I came over to the old house and looked those up. They looked like they had potential, even with just the free stuff, but both required a monthly subscription in order to download them in as a PDF, which is what I want to do.

I continued searching and somehow came across a video for another website. I can't even remember how I found the video but that site ended up being just what I needed. The vast majority of it is free (there are some cool things that aren't but instead of subscribing you just pay a dollar for each non-free thing) and I can export my project as a picture or a PDF, which is good. I spent a lot of time trying to get the size of the document right, which took numerous attempts, but I eventually got it. It would be nice if you could adjust the size after the initial step but that didn't seem like something I was able to do. When that was done, it took me an even longer amount of time trying to figure out the layout. There wasn't an easy way to make a circle of information or a spiral, which is kind of what I wanted, so I ended up going with a long line. By the end of the day I got everything sorted out.

My only issue at the moment is trying to get the text small enough in the frames I made for my information to go in. It will only go down to 8, which isn't small enough. In some of the pre-made frames the text automatically adjusts to the size of the frame, but I haven't figured out if there is a way to manually do that. I might have to come up with another solution. I have until midnight tomorrow night.

When I wasn't working on the infographic, I watched a documentary on Operation Mincemeat because it is one of the most famous instances of disinformation being used. I still kind of want to add that into my project somehow but I feel like I'm going to run out of time before I figure out how to do that. I also crossed my fingers and submitted my annotated bibliographies. I hope I did everything right and didn't unintentionally plagiarize. After that I responded to two of my classmates discussion posts so I could be done with everything for that class and go back to my infographic. I am hoping I have a lot of time at work tomorrow to mess with it. I wrote down a general idea for each step in the information transfer cycle but I haven't actually decided what I want to put in the infographic. That may take some time.

And that is all I've got for today. It's almost 10:30PM and I want to go to bed. I've been staring at computer screens all day and I need a break.

November 1, 2014

It seems a little ridiculous that November is already here. Wasn't it just August? What is happening?

I slept in today, at least according to the clock. I think I only ended up getting maybe seven hours of sleep so it didn't really feel like sleeping in. But I got up anyway and eventually went to work. I spent most of my time kind of half-assedly working my information life/transfer cycle project. I read through the PDF chapter about the cycle and copied down the relevant information for each stage in the process. This was needed because I had been a bit in the dark as to the meaning of each stage and couldn't really pick it up from the examples the professor gave us. Now, I feel a lot more comfortable with it. That doesn't mean I have much of an idea of how I'm going to do my project, though. I'm still somewhat set on doing it on disinformation because I think that would be interesting, but I need to read a lot more about disinformation and get a better understand of how it works. That will need to be done tomorrow. Along with turning it into a infographic-like illustration.

I was reminded of how often the the staff turns over at the theater in the last couple of days. There are a few familiar faces but for the most part I don't recognize anyone. Although, I didn't really pay much attention before so I would be hard-pressed to recognize anyone if they hadn't been there for over a year. Anyway, I went down to help clean and in the first theater the kid I was helping asked me if I worked there. I don't think he's the brightest. I was dressed up just like he was, with the company logo on my chest, carrying a broom and dustpan, and cleaning a theater. I would have thought my employment was obvious. But to be fair to him, he started working two months ago and I haven't worked since before that, so he had never seen me before. But also to be fair to him, I was dressed just like him, so maybe his question shouldn't have been whether or not I worked at the theater.

Tonight I wrote my discussion post for this week. Or rather, I avoided it for the majority of the night and didn't start writing it until after eleven o'clock. I looked over some stuff as the night progressed but nothing was coming to be so I just let it sit there in the back of my mind for awhile. Sometimes that just has to be done. In the end, I ended up writing a whole but and I think it is pretty good. And I posted it so hopefully it is actually good and just not my late-night perception. Tomorrow I'll have to go back and comment on two other peoples' posts. I really didn't want to have to try and come up with intelligent responses at one o'clock in the morning.

And now I am going to go to bed so I can get some sleep and be capable of intelligent responses tomorrow. As well as come up with a kick-ass visual representation of the information life cycle of disinformation. It will be a productive Sunday whether I want it to be or not. Although I do in fact want it to be because it has to be, whether I like it or not. I'm leaning toward not.

October 31, 2014

My main goal for my time at work this morning before the actual school day started was to get everything set up on my laptop so I could record a local radio station. One of the paras at work has a son in a band and they were on the radio this morning for a brief interview and then to play a song. My mom asked me if I could record it and I knew I could as long as I could find a stream of the radio station online, which I was able to do. I then did a few trial runs just to make sure everything was going to work out. It would have been real annoying to get done recording everything only to find out the volume was muted somewhere along the line. I can't remember what it was but I did have a hangup at some point but I got everything worked out about ten minutes before they were supposed to be on. About five minutes before they came on I started the recording. I listened to a little bit of the interview but then I had to go down for second grade reading groups.

The second grade teacher was gone today and my favorite substitute was there, so the class didn't have their normal centers. I didn't really have anything to do, other than write an annotated bibliography, which I was avoiding. Plus, my favorite substitute is always entertaining.

Instead of the regular reading groups, the substitute was going of the outline of a story (characters, setting, beginning/middle/end). They had done one example before I got there and shortly after I arrived the substitute read a story and then as a class they figured out the outline. It turned out maybe they were supposed to do that individually after she read the story but she just told them to copy down what was on the board. I wish it were surprising how many kids weren't able to finish that relatively simple task in the considerable amount of time they were given. Then she handed out another blank outline sheet and told the kids to make up their own story. This was also a fairly difficult task for some of the kids who just couldn't quite get it. At the beginning of the task the substitute suggested they write a story about “the computer guy” and several of them took her up on that. I didn't hear all of the stories but I know in at least two of them I go married, which all the kids found hilarious.

When my time was up and the class had to go to PE, I went back to the lab to check on my recording. The radio stream crapped out after an hour and a half of recording but that was more than enough to get what I needed. I then spent quite a bit of time chopping it up. There was a fair bit of struggle because at certain points I couldn't get it to cut or copy and then I ended up pasting the wrong stuff. But I got it all figured out. I ended up making to MP3s, one that included the band's entire appearance, with the interview and the song, and then a second one that was just the song. I then emailed both to the para. I didn't know if maybe the radio station would give them a copy of their time on air or what but if not, maybe the para will like my recording. If she ever checks her email.

After lunch I briefly stopped down in the kindergarten room because they were having their Halloween party. The kids were sitting at their tables with a plates of food and drawing on tiny pumpkins with markers. It was one hell of a party.

From there I went upstairs because the gifted teacher told me she was having trouble connecting to the wireless with her tablet again. The Guest wireless was set to automatically connect which was part of the issue but I also think maybe she was typing in her username and password incorrectly. The physical keyboard she has for her tablet is kind of a pain. I ended up typing in my information and it worked straight away. After that it started connecting automatically so we'll see how long that lasts.

Later in the afternoon we had a chemistry assembly. Every year a few kids from the chemistry fraternity on campus come and put on a little demo. Minus the kindergartener who was burned to the point of blisters all along his backside when one of the guys dumped liquid nitrogen on the floor, it was a really good show. And the burned kid didn't come to light until much later so that didn't affect the show. It was the same old thing as the last two years in terms of the parlor tricks but the presenters were much better. I don't even remember who did it the last two years. I could probably go back and check my entries to see what I had to say about both but I am almost positive neither of them even came close. The one guy must to standup on the weekend because he was real quick on his feet and had comebacks for everything. He would called kids out by what they were wearing, like “turn around tiger stripes” and “yes, you, blue shirt”, but the best was probably when he called a kid “green sleeves” and then in an offhanded way, like it just came to him, quoted a line from the song. As for the demonstrations, because the presenters had more personality, they were better, and the last one, which involves exploding two balloons, they both made a huge boom. I am vaguely remembering that maybe last year the weather was kind of bad and the people then blamed the lackluster explosions on that. No excuses needed this year.

Tonight was my first night back at the theater in a long time. At least since August. At least I think I worked in August. Either way, it feels like I have been gone forever but at the same time it feels like just yesterday. I feel sad about that. Coming back here feels comfortable because I've been here so long but I also hate it. I really hope this library thing works out.

The reason for my return is basically because corporate implemented a few new things, and along with some other things, a lot of stuff is kind of broken. At the moment: one projector has to be wired into another one in order to work, one has to have the move manually started (it was two but the second was fixed tonight) and that one has to be technically started three times because the first two times it stops after a few seconds, one has to have everything manually started, and at least one won't bring the scope lens down when the movie starts. That last one is part of the new corporate thing. Apparently they got tired of mislabeled trailers so instead of putting scope trailers on scope movies and flat trailers on flat movies, now it is just flat trailers across the board, regardless of the aspect ratio of the movie. This means if it is a scope movie, the lens has to stay up during the trailers and then go down right before the movie, which means another cue, which means one more thing that can go wrong. And it is already going wrong. This all seems ridiculous to me but at least for the time being, it means I have a job. Although, I was pretty much having to do all of this stuff before, I just wasn't making a big deal about it. If tonight is anything to go on, however, things have certainly gone downhill since this summer. Along with fixing all the projector stuff, I also cleaned the stairs leading up to projection because they hadn't been cleaned since I left and they were covered in popcorn. And I went down and helped clean theaters because now they have to justify my position more. Which means going down to clean every now and then. Whatever.

We had a late show of Halloween (which a whole nine people showed up for) and I needed a break after reading the assigned chapter and article for my research class, so I went down and watched the last half of Fury. That is a really intense movie. I feel like a lot of times they held the viewers hand in terms of making it obvious what was going to happen at certain points, but I still enjoyed it. At some point I'll have to watch the whole thing. But not tonight because they theater is closed, obviously, and it is also almost two o'clock in the morning and I have been up since before the sun.