April 8, 2013

I keep meaning to write the interesting things I have recently read but the mood has not struck me. I've talked about them in my daily recordings but it is a lot easier to read a passage than it is to type it up. But I still plan to write about them. Eventually. Or I'll wait too long and forget about it.

It ended up not hailing last night so I didn't really need to park my car in the garage over at my sister's but better safe than sorry. I might end up parking over there again tomorrow night because we are supposed to get a decent storm including hail on Tuesday night.

This morning when I walked into work one of the receptionists asked if I wanted to try some baked kale. She had a painting restorer staying at her house over the weekend and she was a vegan so the receptionist had been introduced to some new foods. I think she was trying to get rid of the baked kale. It actually wasn't awful but it wasn't that good either. It tasted like I was eating foliage.

Shortly after that I was in the principals office to pick up assessment tickets and she had one of the second graders in there from my reading group. She basically chewed him a new one because over the weekend him and one of the other kids in his class climbed up onto the roof of the school. They got up there by putting a trash can and probably something else on top of a picnic table. They were discovered by one of the fourth grade teachers who was in her room on the third floor. They both got in-school suspension and lost recess for the week. A small price to pay for something that could have ended in horrible injury or death.

State assessments have started again and this morning one of the fifth grades classes took the first part of their Math assessment. Several of them came into the lab vigorously stroking their pencils in a somewhat inappropriate manner. None of them were giggling though which told me they didn't get the suggestive part of their actions and they weren't doing it to be inappropriate. It turns out their teacher had given them color changing pencils, similar to a mood ring, and the kids stroking their pencils were trying to make the pencils hotter in order to change the color.

This afternoon one of first grade teachers was telling me that she ate lunch with her class on Friday in the lunchroom. One of the little boys told her he was going to eat his fruit like a white person and then started to eat it with his fork. She then asked him how black people eat fruit if white people eat it with a fork. Then the little boy changed his mind and decided he was going to eat the fruit like a rich white person. So he stuck his pinky finger out. I wish I had been there when he was told or figured out how white people eat fruit.

Also this afternoon, a fourth grade class was coming into the lab immediately after the other first grade class. The last few first graders were engaged in some random conversation that had them turned away from the door, so they missed the rest of their class leaving. The fourth grade teacher is a bit of an authoritarian and she was waiting on these kids to leave the lab so she could come in. She didn't know the kid in front with his back to the door so she just called out “Hey, blue shirt. Come on.” It was hilarious. It reminded of me of a comedian (who I can't remember) who has a bit where black guys call out to girls on the street by referencing their clothes.

My favorite substitute was subbing today so I got to talk to her for quite awhile when she brought her class to the lab at the end of the day. We talked about a whole bunch of random stuff and were laughing through most of it. At one point my para frame came in and the sub hijacked her for awhile into our conversation. The topic of our unpaid chair job after assemblies came up so I printed off the letter I wrote to Obama for the sub to read and I have never seen her laugh so hard.

After work I didn't do much until dinner. And I didn't do much for dinner other than eating food, which is what I tend to do at dinner. So yeah. After dinner I watched DVRed stuff from last week and worked on the interior of my Minecraft TARDIS. More specifically, the false night sky above the swimming pool. I haven't worked on that in forever, mostly because it is incredibly tedious, but I think I have finally made it past the halfway mark. I might finish it at some point. So far the only room I have finished in the TARDIS, other than the control room, is the library, the most important room in my opinion. I still have two more doors leading off the control room that have no hallways attached. I want one to lead to bedrooms but I'm not sure about the last one. At one point I thought about making a meadow. I really need to put more time into it.

April 7, 2013

Today was a somewhat productive day in terms of game capture. The biggest hurdle was getting sound and the internet was partially helpful. I found a couple videos that showed settings that I didn't have the option for but then I kind of accidentally stumbled across something about TVs how an HDMI-to-DVI cable wouldn't work for sound because DVI cables don't transmit sound. I had the Elgata hooked up to my computer with an HDMI-to-DVI cable so that wasn't going to work. By moving one of my monitors over to that cable (which is plugged into the mini display port) I was able to plug the Elgato into the HDMI port. Originally my problem was that I couldn't have two DVI monitors and use the HDMI port for the Elgato but luckily I am able to use one DVI port, one HDMI port, and one mini display port.

So in theory that should have given me sound but I still couldn't find the option that was shown in the few videos I found on YouTube in the Recording Devices sound menu that would allow me to get sound. Then I found a video of how to get that option if it wasn't in the menu. I ended up not having to do what was mentioned in that video but I did learn how to show disabled devices, which made the option visible and allowed me to enable it. But the option within that option wasn't there so I did a lot more internet searching. To no avail. Eventually I just started to just work my way through each option in the list, picking one and seeing if the sound showed up in the Elgato software sound meter. And after a lot of trial and error I got it to work.

I don't want to read back through everything I just wrote but I feel like it probably doesn't make a lot of sense. But as I mentioned, I don't want to read back through it, so I'm not even going to try to decipher it. Moving on.

Recording a game in fullscreen mode seems to have no rhyme or reason for when it will work and when it won't. I have to start recording, start the game, and then alt-tab out of it and open it up several times before I can get it to show up in the recording. I have no idea what is happening there but I was tired of reading internet stuff and watching videos so I haven't looked into it. The only problem I had with recording sound was that there seemed to be a very slight lag to it. It seems like the solution to this will be to record the sound with Audacity and then sync it up with the video after the fact. I'm going to have to figure that out later. The point of all of this is that I have managed to get my Elgato hooked up to my computer and I can now record PC gameplay with sound, even if it is slightly laggy.

This afternoon a thunderstorm rolled into town and there was a possibility of hail later in the night so my sister said I could park my car in her garage. The problem being the couch on that side of the garage. The first time I pulled in I still had about two feet of car sticking out. So I climbed around and moved stuff and got the couch to slide back quite a bit further. But not far enough because that still left about two inches of car in the path of the garage door. So I climbed around again, moving a tiny motorcycle and boards and more pots and boxes and managed to get the couch to move just a bit more. Thankfully it was enough and we were able to get the garage door shut. I just hope we get some hail tonight to make it all worth it. Even if we don't, I'm going to pretend we do.

When I got home I started to read and record the letters I have sent my friend. I do my best to write in a conversational way but when I am reading what I write it seems to come across in a very dry, monotone sort of way and doesn't sound as good as it does in my head when I am writing. But if I keep at it maybe I will get better at reading out loud. I made it through the first two letters tonight and we'll see if I can keep it up. One of the hardest parts is actually reading my handwriting. I try my best to write legibly in the letters by not writing too terribly small and not dragging my letters together. Sometimes I succeed in this but my writing is still hard to read out loud on the first pass. I really need to improve my writing.

This coming week state assessments start again which I am not looking forward to. It is so boring. Friday is an early release day so I have that to look forward to.

April 6, 2013

Today I tried out using my Elgato with my PC and it was kind of a success. I didn't go through the effort of getting the sound to work so I won't count that against the Elgato. My test involved playing Saints Row: The Third and my first discovery was that I had to play in windowed mode, rather than full-screen. This left the little bar at the top of the screen which is kind of annoying. I know some games don't show that in windowed mode but Saints Row: The Third is not one of those games. There is software where you can select the area of the screen you want to record but I don't think that works with the Elgato. I'm thinking that is recording software which would defeat the purpose of the Elgato. Anyway, the game capture looked alright except when there was a lot of stuff happening on the screen or stuff was moving fast because that lead to a lot of screen-tearing. It wasn't as evident when I was playing but it was obnoxious when I was watching the playback. I had all the video settings on high so I don't know if that had anything to do with it. I am going to try tweaking those tomorrow to see if that helps. And maybe try out some other games. We'll see.

Tonight at work I finished an issue of National Geographic that I have had for several months now, and I started reading The Book Of The Dead: Lives Of The Justly Famous And The Undeservedly Obscure by John Mitchison and John Lloyd. It reminds me of the compilation scientist biography books I read in middle school. In those, each chapter was a short biography on a different scientist and I found those books fascinating. The Book Of The Dead is a compilation of a bunch of mini-biographies. Each chapter has a theme to it and includes several different famous or obscure people that had similar threads in their life. So far there was a chapter on people who had less than ideal childhoods and one about people who tended to be “glass half full” kind of people. It is a really interesting book. There is some stuff from it that I will probably add to my entry tomorrow because it is too late to add in tonight. Something to look forward to.

April 5, 2013

This morning I read with kindergarteners, helped out with literacy centers in both kindergarten classrooms, and had my second grade reading group. The reading group actually went fairly well relative to earlier in the week, despite a little housing around at the beginning. We managed to make it through Freckle Juice, almost all of the first packet, and about half of the questions that go along with the book. The second grade teacher is working on the same book and they still have more more chapter to read (granted it's six pages in a kids book) so we are ahead of them but I don't see that as a good thing necessarily. I imagine her group is getting a lot more out of it than mine considering she's a teacher and I am only moonlighting.

This afternoon I had classes in the lab and in between I worked on my Excel flowers while listening to This American Life. Not necessarily productive but the flowers look halfway decent. I also helped out the Math Enrichment sub with computer things and finished the enrollment sheet for summer school so I was a tiny bit productive.

I feel like there was something else but it isn't coming to mind. Yesterday I forgot to mention that I think the substitute receptionist was blatantly staring at my crotch, or at least my crotchal region for several seconds as I walked through the main office. It was kind of awkward. Maybe a brief glimpse into what it is like to be a girl, or a hot guy.

After work I wanted to take a nap but I'm not sure how successful that was. It seemed like I was just laying on my bed, trying to pretend I was asleep. Especially after the UPS guy showed up and the dogs went nuts. It was nice taking a little break though, even if it didn't help how tired I felt.

The UPS guy brought the cables so I cam hook my Elgato HD up to my computer. I had the chance to plug it in but I didn't actually check to see if it works. I am going to save that for tomorrow when I actually have the time to mess around with it.

At work I finished Space Chronicles by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It was an interesting book, as his tend to be, but it had a lot of repetitive information which did get a tad annoying. This was unavoidable I guess, due to the nature of the book, being s compilation of articles and interviews and whatever other short-form writings and speeches Tyson has given, but it still got a little old.

I also watched a large clinch of The Host. It was unfortunately a somewhat less than great movie. I liked the idea of it but the writing was ridiculous at times and it was just a little too cheesy. And not in the good way. Not surprising that it was based on a book written by Stephanie Meyer. Especially with the weird romance stuff.

Lastly, I may be slightly more deaf now. Or maybe my hearing is slightly less good? Because I'm not deaf. Anyway, I was given a few projector bulbs to destroy tonight. They are like mini-grenades and you have to explode them so they don't blow up unexpectedly somewhere in the garbage process. We used to have tall dumpsters so we could stand back and throw then really hard into the back wall of the dumpster with enough time to turn away from the shrapnel. Now we have a long shallow one so I was having to throw them down into it at a weird angle. The first one was a dud because it didn't hit right but I got the second one to blow up. I couldn't leave the first one unbroken and I didn't want to climb into the dumpster, not only because it was gross but I also didn't know if the bulb had been damaged and I didn't want it to explode in my hands.

So I went inside and got the old suction cup pole we use to change light bulbs that are too high to reach. The idea was to first try and grab the bulb with a suction cup, and if that didn't work, turn the pole around and blindly stab at the bulb with it until the bulb exploded. After several seconds I managed to grab the bulb with a suction cup and start to lift it out of the dumpster. As I lifted I was trying to slowly move it to the right over a small trash bag so that if it fell it would it that and not the hard dumpster bottom. It turns out I was wise to make this attempt but in the end it was just an attempt. When I had the bulb about a foot in the air the hold on the suction cup gave out and the bulb fell, hitting the bottom of the dumpster, and exploding. I saw a small flash of light at the center of the bulb before I was able to turn away, heard a really loud bang which made my ears ring a bit, and I got a tiny cut on my wrist from a piece of shrapnel. Not cool.

April 4, 2013

Nothing too out of the ordinary today. I once again had a lot of free time at work and had an opportunity to actually do work about thirty minutes before I had classes coming to the lab. I have all sorts of free time in the morning and then classes in the afternoon. But every time I try to find extra work it always ends up happening in the afternoon when I have classes. Kind of a pain.

My extra work today was helping the principal and the Boys & Girls club lady proofread a letter to parents about summer school and then folding the letter and other stuff up and putting them in envelopes. Due to the timing of this I only got to fold however many things before having to head back to the lab but it was nice to feel a little productive for a bit. It was certainly better than making a pixel flower in Excel.

I was reminded today of how funny two consecutive P's can be to second grade boys. In my reading group we were working on a word search, one boy found the word 'appendicitis' and when he was showing one of the other boys where to find it, he was spelling it out loud. He had already cracked a smile by the first P and they both completely lost it by the second one. Sometimes the best laughs come from the simplest things. It is hard to get any more simple than letters in the alphabet.

I actually had my visit with the new volunteer kid tonight. The first one in three weeks. It only lasted thirty minutes and it was fairly uneventful. He gave me the order form he printed off for his ring so now I need to get that to my supervisor and figure out how to go about paying for it. She got the money but the form looks like the only accept credit cards so I don't know if we'll have to put it onto one of those prepaid cards or what. It also seems way more expensive than the one I remember us putting together several weeks ago. We'll get it sorted out though. Or we won't.

When I got home from the visit I hung out for a bit and then I went over to my friend's house to hang out and finally give her the birthday present I made her. It was really nice being able to hang out and just talk with her. It is always far too long in between getting together with her. Generally months. It is like that with my friends who live out of town as well, which is unfortunate. I like hanging out with my friends. That is why I am friends with them. But I don't get to do that enough. I either need to work on that or add more friends to the rotation. I'm not the best at making new friends though so I should probably just work with the ones I have. Anyway, tonight was good times. We kind of watched an episode of Psych but really we just talked for about four hours. About everything and anything, jumping from one random topic to the next. Those are the best conversations.

I feel like I could write more about my time with my friend but it is now three hours past my normal bedtime. So I am going to go to bed now. I didn't get around to recording my day verbally but I figure I can do that after school tomorrow because I will probably be postponing my talk about tomorrow until Saturday and then Saturday's until Sunday because of my closing shifts at the theater. Unless I am in the mood to talk when I get home from those. But that is something I can worry about when the time comes. Now I need to sleep. And hope that five hours from now I am coming out of a REM cycle so I wake up ready for the day and not feeling like I got too little sleep.

April 3, 2013

This morning I read with kindergarteners but I didn't have my second grade reading group because I think they were on a field trip. I would be lying if I said I missed them. Before I found out my second grade group wasn't happening I went up to help in the sixth grade room. They were working on making stop-motion movies in Windows Movie Maker. I may have accidentally opened that program once but I don't really have any experience with it. So I just wandered around. I ended up being able to help several groups to import their pictures faster because they were going to the import menu every time and importing one picture at a time. I showed them how to just open the folder with their pictures in it, click on all the ones they wanted, and then drag them all at once into the Movie Maker. I also showed one group how to rotate their pictures faster. So I wasn't completely useless.

I ended up having a lot of downtime once again today and toward the end of the day I started drawing a pixel art flower in Excel. This is way more challenging and time consuming than turning on the grid in Paint and zooming all the way in. But I had a lot of time to kill. The main benefit to using Excel over Paint, other than the time-wasting factor, is that you can make the “pixels” bigger. In Paint you can only zoom in so far and the “pixels” are still pretty small.

After school I spoke with the mom who was in charge of doing the yearbook last year. Just to touch base on what I had been doing so far and what else needed to be done. The receptionist had made the mom out to be a horrible dictator but she is actually pretty nice. One of her sons is in the kindergarten room I help out in a lot. So I don't think it will be a big deal. We'll see if the receptionist still talks to me after she sees me cavorting with the enemy.

Tonight was Chipotle night and the burrito was good but not great. I've had better.

The rest of my night was spent looking at capture card stuff. AverMedia has a new one coming out that is small like the Elgato HD that I have, but it can also capture PC gameplay. I play games a lot more often on my PC and being able to capture that gameplay is enticing. But I've always thought the Elgato HD should be able to do that. When I first got it and managed some really weird workaround and was able to capture some PC gameplay but it was incredibly laggy. I did a lot of looking around on the internet tonight and found a way that might actually work but I need more cables to do it. I currently have two monitors and I believe my graphics card supports a third but I have to use the mini display port to connect it, not the HDMI port, which would have been convenient. The idea behind this new workaround for the Elgato HD is that you plug it in as another monitor and then you duplicate the display with another monitor. So everything that appears on that display appears on the Elgato HD “monitor”. 

Without the mini display port cable I would be down to only one monitor because the second one would have to be disabled in order for the Elgato HD to act as a display. And it would be a pain in the butt to start recording, then get into a game, and then back out again to stop recording. It would be much easier if my second monitor could also be up and running so I could have the Elgato HD capture software on it and I could monitor the playback to make sure everything was going smoothly. For it to work on my computer I ended up ordering an active mini display port to DVI cable, and a DVI-to-HDMI cable (because the Elgato HD uses HDMI and it looked like mini DP-to-HDMI doesn't work for a three monitor setup). I hope my theory is correct and that when the cables get here everything will run smoothly. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like getting the AverMedia device would lead to the same three-monitor problem. So if the Elagato HD solution doesn't work, then I don't think the AverMedia would work either. But I don't know. We'll see in a few days.

April 2, 2013

Last night I had an interesting dream. It took place in a quaint village that was also a theme park. Each house in the village had a different theme. In one house, there was a small entryway with a door leading into another room. On the door was a sign that said “Little girls must have an appetite to enter here.” And the theme of that room is Alice In Wonderland where he the “eat me” and “drink me” stuff to make her bigger and smaller. I am a bit biased but I thought that was pretty clever of my sleeping brain.

This morning before work I went to vote in some local elections and the lady taking me over to the voting machine asked me how I was doing. I said “pretty good” but she thought I said “pretty and good.” She responded “Really? Pretty and good? At the same time?” I went with it and simply replied “most days.” It was hilarious and throughout the day when it came to mind a smile would come to my face.

My second-grade reading group was pretty awful today. We normally sit in the hallway outside the computer lab but today I wanted to start in the lab. They had to list all the kids in their class, putting them into columns for whether or not they had freckles. I have all the class photos for the yearbook so I figured I would click through them so they could see each kid. It took at least five minutes to get them over to my computer. They were too busy trying to find a place to sit in the lab and fighting over chairs. Completely ignoring my repeated attempts to explain that we weren't working in the lab and that I wanted them to come over to my computer. It was incredibly frustrating.

We eventually got that done and made it out into the hall and they didn't get any better. I wanted them to read chapter three of the book because one of the kids hadn't read it yet and we were supposed to answer questions about it so I figured it would be a good refresher for everyone. The one kid who needed to read the chapter wasn't very engaged or paying attention and the other three were constantly distracted. It may have been the longest thirty minutes of my life.

Including my lunch break I had about two and a half hours this afternoon with absolutely nothing to do and it was boring as hell. I ended up messing around with editing a picture of the front of the building that I took awhile ago and making a really crappy looking yearbook cover. I had nothing better to do.

This morning I asked the principal if she had any jobs for me and after my two and a half hours of nothing, she emailed me three minutes before a class was scheduled to come to the lab. Amazing timing. But work is work. She is recommending a bunch of kids go to summer school based on MAP scores and other stuff and she wanted to personalize the letter to the parents with their kid's scores. So she gave me the list of kids, I typed it up, and then put in their scores. I thought about drawing out the work a little bit just so I would have something to do tomorrow but I was able to get it done by the end of the day. I think tomorrow I might either put the scores into the letters or put the letters into the envelopes or something. I don't know. But hopefully it will be something.

Tonight I once again had the incredible urge to do something with the exact opposite amount of motivation to do anything. I just couldn't talk myself into anything. Which was surprisingly exhausting. I just want to sleep. Apparently more than I want to accomplish something with my time outside of work. That sucks.

On a positive note, I have been keeping up with recording my days with my microphone. It is getting easier to do. Actually easier than writing about my day because I just have to ramble and not form complete sentences, but I am going to continue writing because I like writing. Most days, anyway.