October 3, 2015

 I'm not going to have much to write about today, which will be a nice change for October so far. I woke up early but didn't really do much other than watch YouTube videos for the first couple of hours. Then, before lunch, I wrote a discussion post for one of my classes.

After lunch I took a nap. I was kind of tired but I didn't really need a nap. But I also didn't want to do any schoolwork so I crawled under my desk and listened to music until I fell asleep. After dinner I responded to a few discussion posts in my metadata class and did laundry. Sometime after that I started working on the final metadata project. It involved making a metadata crosswalk for a MARC record, turning it into a Dublin Core record. It is going to be a pain in the butt because MARC records look confusing as hell. I've never worked in a library and I haven't had a cataloging class so I have zero experience with reading MARC records. I'm going to need to do a lot of learning really quick. Yay.

I finally got a grade on my late metadata assignment and I lost 4.5 points. That drops me down to an 'A-'. Then a grade came out for one of the discussion posts and I missed a point, which dropped me to an even lower 'A-'. Now, if I get perfect scores on everything left for the class, which is doubtful, I would be at 95.9% in the class, and 96% is an 'A'. I think it should be 95% but what do I know. I think the goal now is just to maintain the 'A-' and hope I don't screw anything else up. I think maybe if I did get a perfect score on the remaining assignments she might give me the 0.1% to knock me up to an 'A' but I don't think it will come to that.

I ended my day with some Minecraft because it has been on my mind a lot recently. Earlier in the day I found a minecart station tutorial on YouTube, which is what I wanted to build in the latest basement in my house. Luckily the basement I carved out yesterday was pretty much the exact size I needed to build the station. But with that small margin for error I loaded up a flatland world first and built the whole station there just to make sure everything would work. This was good because I had room to move around and I ended up having to troubleshoot a few things that would probably have been more frustrating in the basement. When I switched over to my other world the whole process went much better having already worked through the build once. I also had room above it so I put in a glass ceiling and made stairs leading up to the top so I could walk around and see all the redstone and tracks. I really don't have the slightest clue how most of it works but it is pretty ingenious and works way better than anything I could have come up with. The station also had seven separate tracks so I have room to grow. I've got ideas for three or four of them but I could probably easily use all seven eventually.

Now it is late, so I'm going to go to bed. Tomorrow I need to work on school stuff. I'm ready for December.

October 2, 2015

 I did a lot of things today but hopefully I don't go into too much detail because it is late and I am tired.

Here are the things I remember. I scanned pictures for one of the second grade teachers of her kids so she could print them out and put them in a time capsule. Originally she took pictures with her phone and asked if I could help get them off. I still had the second kindergarten class pictures to edit so I was a little wary of agreeing to another editing project so I asked if she had the sheets of sticker pictures that each teacher gets that has four or five small pictures of each kid. She did, so I told her I'd scan those and see what she thought. This did involve a bit of editing but it was a lot easier than individually editing twenty-five pictures. She ended up liking it, so that was good.

I finished remaking the Lexile color chart for the library this morning and I set up the smart board for the ELL office in the back of the computer lab. The librarian found the cord for it last night so I got everything connected, downloaded and registered software, and set up the projector.

A fourth grader brought down a laptop that no one in her class was able to log into. Based on the error message I thought the hard drive might have run out of room to create new profiles. When this happens to the computer in the lab with the small hard drive I am able to go in and delete profiles. The problem with the laptop was that I didn't have a profile on the laptop already so I couldn't log in as myself. I tried several different students in the class, along with several different students from the teacher's class last year, but didn't manage to find one who had already used the computer. After a lot of research and failed attempts, I finally managed to log into the computer in Safe Mode, which gave me access to the user list and I was able to delete most of them. The hard drive was down to 49MB so I was fairly confident that was the problem.

The next problem was that in Safe Mode there apparently isn't a Recycle Bin and after deleting all those users, the hard drive space actually went down to 15MB instead of giving me more space. After even more research I found out where the Recycle Bin was located, in a hidden folder, which contained hidden files, for each of the recycle bins for all of the users. I was able to navigate to it in Safe Mode, find the one that most likely belonged to the Safe Mode profile based on the date of activity, and I was able to delete everything for good, bringing the hard drive up to 2.78GB of free space. It still seems like there is too much stored on it, somewhere, and I don't know how much space student profiles take up. Hopefully not a lot.

I fixed one of the sixth grade teacher's laptops by turning it off and on again. It was tricky though because the off button wasn't working. It also had a bunch of random lights that kept flashing and I had no idea why. It was an odd looking laptop. After the power button wouldn't work I tried pulling out the battery but the latches got stuck and I couldn't get the battery out. I was finally able to shut the laptop down by holding down the power button along with another button that I had no idea what it was for but it looked important. And that turned out to be a true because the laptop shutdown and when I turned it back on, everything worked.

There was a break in the day for an assembly this afternoon that was about storytelling. It was basically African fables about a spider and the origins of stories. It was interesting, and funny at times, but definitely geared toward younger children.

When the fifth grade teacher came to the lab this afternoon with her class she also brought her broken flash drive. I tried a couple different things that didn't work so I finally suggested taking it out of its case to see if anything was obviously wrong. It was kind of hard getting the case open but when I did I saw that two of the four little prongs had come unsoldered from the board. I have a soldering gun but it isn't made for such precise work and I don't have the necessary skills even if it was the right tool.

Before the teacher left the lab I had the idea of plugging it into a USB extension cord so I could play with it and not worry about it getting stuck in the computer. I went down to the library after her class left to see if the librarian happened to have an extension cord. And she did. I looked through cabinets but she ended up finding one after quite a bit of searching in her closet. I was kind of surprised.

I went back to the lab, plugged it in, plugged the flash drive into it, and then used my small pliers to push down both of the unsoldered pins to the board. After a bit of messing around I got the sound of something being plugged into the computer. It said the driver failed to install but I couldn't actually looking into it further because both of my hands were occupied.

School had ended about five minutes earlier so most of the teachers were still standing out front. I went and told the teacher that I had managed to get a sound but needed another set of hands. She got excited by the sound part so she came down and we spent quite a bit of time trying to get the flash drive to work. I held it in place while I told her what to do on the computer. Nothing ended up working though. We tried everything I could think of as well as everything we could find online. And we did that on my computer, her laptop, and another laptop she had borrowed from the library. It was kind of frustrating.

Tonight I managed to prop the flash drive up with another flash drive so I could push the pins down with the pliers with one hand and tried several more things but nothing worked. At one point I think I saw a faint red flicker of light on the flash drive but it didn't lead to anything. And after awhile I couldn't even get the connecting sound anymore. It seems safe to say that it is really out of my hands at this point. It has all of her teaching stuff on it and she is willing to pay at least some money to get the information back so hopefully there is a place in town that can fix it.

After I gave up on that I watched YouTube videos and eventually got around to responding to someone on the discussion post for this week. Late tonight my academic libraries professor sent out a message that he would be offline for the weekend because this morning his car was hit head-on by a drunk driver. At 10:30AM. The drunk driver than fled the scene but a stranger on a motorcycle followed him and after about two miles was able to subdue the driver until the police arrived. The professor said he was alright other than bruising from the airbag and seat belt but had gained a new perspective on life. He also said that he had seen it coming and knew it was going to happen and I can relate to that because when my pickup was totaled I could see the other car coming right at me and knew I was screwed. It's a very uncomfortable feeling.

When I had finished my discussion post I took about thirty or forty-five minutes to play a little Minecraft because that has been on my mind a lot recently. I have an idea for an underground mine cart track system and I wanted to build the hub for it which will be under my house. I built a third basement with plenty of room to make things happen. Hopefully. I've never actually experimented with mine carts before. I've seen them a lot in videos but I'll have to brush up on the idea behind them. That won't happen any time soon though. I've got a lot of stuff to do for school.

Tomorrow I need to figure out all the reading I need to do for classes and seriously look at the final metadata assignment because it is due next Friday. I know it involves making a crosswalk between two metadata schemas but that's about it. It would be nice if I could get most or all of it done this weekend but that seems very unrealistic.

October 1, 2015

 Yesterday morning when I got to work, along with several monitors being out of place and having to push in stools and put headphones back on towers, even though I had done all of that before I left the day before, my office chair was also missing. I ended up finding it completely lowered and pushed in at one of the computers in the back row. That monitor was also pulled forward as far as it could go and tilted up, and the stool that is normally there was far under the desk. To me it looked like a small child wanted to get comfortable. A small child after school under the “supervision” of a Boys & Girls Club worker. It seems that a lot of the workers want to be friends with the kids, not disciplinarians, and I learned recently that they really stress the “club” part of their name. Which I guess is an excuse for the kids to misbehave in the school, before and after school hours, when school employees aren't there to keep them in line. Things get broken, go missing, or are left in shambles, but it's okay, because it's a club and there are no rules or sense of responsibility.

Anyway, I know my office chair gets used when I'm not there but I can ignore it, until it is left in the back of the room in a blatant display of its misuse. That was the last straw and I emailed the principal to see if we could institute a “policing your area” policy in the computer lab after school so I don't have to come in every morning and pick up after Boys & Girls Club. She ended up talking to the new girl in charge of it and she spoke with me yesterday afternoon and said she would do a better job of making sure things were in order. I am hopeful. This morning I didn't have to push in any stools or put up any headphones, that's at least a one day improvement.

I finished watching the second season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. this morning. I'll be honest, I was getting kind of tired of the drama over the last several episodes. Maybe because I was spreading out my watching, only seeing small chunks at a time, but it seemed like it was dragging on forever. It was also the drama built out of misunderstanding, which I can't stand, especially when I am the omniscient viewer, privy to details that would easily clear a situation up but are lacking for the characters in question. It's over now, though, so I can move on to other things. Or maybe just back to Psych.

Before work this morning I went to the Treasurer's office to pick up my vehicle registration. Instead of taking a number they have a new system where you type your phone number on this large touchscreen. Then you get a text message and someone calls your number out when it is your turn. Helpful I guess if it is really busy but I was the only person in line. Also, they don't read out your whole phone number over the intercom, which is good, but also unexpected. I was kind of zoned out in my own world when they read out a number. I was wondering who it belonged to, maybe someone in the bathroom, because I was the only one not being helped and no one was coming forward. Then the lady at the open desk got my attention and asked if that was my number because I was the only one not being helped. When she said the number again I realized that it was in fact my number. The last four digits of my phone number. It is weird only hearing the second half of your phone number, especially when you are programmed to hear phone numbers read all the way through. Anyway, I told her about the message I got, verified who I was, and got my registration. It was actually in the mail pile to be sent out so it is a good thing I went before work.

I spent over an hour this morning cleaning all the desks and computers in the lab. This included the monitors which tend to get covered in snot because kids can never quite managed to turn their head or cover their face when they sneeze. I also replaced all the mouse pads. I've been holding off because the mouse pads are crap, I guess we got them for free at some point, and they don't hold up to kids very well. Namely, Boys & Girls Club kids. When I put them out originally, at least a few of them were damaged by the next day, and it happened at Boys & Girls Club. Slowly but surely they were all damaged. I had been planning to put out replacements and I figured right after attention had been brought to the undesirable state the lab was being left in, would be as good a time as any. Maybe for a little while longer there will be a reprieve from the disregard for school property.

There were classes in the lab throughout the day. The only one really worth mentioning was the second kindergarten class, which was logging into Compass Learning for the first time. For the first two years I think I logged them in the entire time. Last year I had them start logging in during the second half of the year. And this year, I've started them from the beginning. And they can handle it. Most of them, anyway. They'll get better. There were eight kids missing today out of the twenty-four in the class, which made a big difference. The best part was that no one cried. Last year there were criers but we managed to avoid that this year, so I'll say that was a win.

We finished up the last MAP tests today, with one day to spare, so I'm pretty happy. Now I just need to wait for tests to be deleted so I can print reports. I just had the thought that I didn't shutdown the computers in the lab and that has to be done on computers that were used for testing in order for scores to be submitted. I didn't do it yesterday either because we didn't test, and most of the computers weren't shutdown by Boys & Girls Club. Hopefully they managed at least the three that were used for testing today. I think last year or the year before an email was sent out about a computer still being on in the building that was preventing scores from being uploaded. That ended up being a laptop that they were still testing on. I didn't get an email today so we'll hope for the best.

After school when I walked out of the lab I ran into one of the fifth grade teachers in the hall and I ended up talking to her for awhile about her broken flash drive. After clocking out I walked by the principal's office and she asked me if I happened to remember her state assessment log-in information because she couldn't find it. I thought I might still have it written down from the one time I had to use it last year when she was gone so I went back to the lab and looked. Turns out I didn't. I probably shredded it. Which is good, but not when you need it. She texted me later that she ended up finding it so that's good. Finally, as I was walking by the library, the fifth grade teacher and the librarian were in there so I stopped in to tell the librarian I would have the Lexile chart for her tomorrow because I didn't have time to finish it today. It is the color chart I made for her last year but I didn't save the original, editable copy, only the PDF, so I had to remake it. She wanted me to take the grade levels off because a teacher wanted to show it to her class and the librarian didn't want the grade levels being shown, especially for the lower kids who would see their Lexile range attached to a lower grade level. After talking with her I'm going to also take off the label for each section so now it will just so the range and the associated color. I ended up standing and talking to them for quite awhile about all sorts of random things, and finally left the building a little after 5:15PM.

I will confess that I did not read the final metadata article tonight. I had a headache and I just couldn't read a thirty-two page PDF. Fortunately I was able to write my discussion post without it. I will probably want to at least skim the important parts for the crosswalk assignment, but for the moment, I'm good. I also posted my research topic for my academic libraries class to the discussion thread. Because that is something we were supposed to do this week. The professor also put up a second discussion thread but I decided to save that for tomorrow. It is about budgets and will be easy enough to bullshit but I wanted to put some thought into it when I wasn't so tired.

Tomorrow, I'm going to finish the Lexile chart and edit some pictures for the other kindergarten teacher because he saw the ones I made for the other kindergarten teacher and asked if I could do the same for him. I took the pictures today I just need to edit them. I imagine I will probably do a bunch of other stuff as well.

September 30, 2015

 I'm tired.

At work today I caught up on my spreadsheets, mainly getting all the formulas in order so the numbers at the bottom show up correctly. The tests that need to be deleted will hopefully happen soon so I can print off all the reports. Except for the two kids that still need to finish. The teacher, who is not only new this year but this is also her first year teaching, emailed me at the end of the day and said that things got hectic today which is why she didn't send them down. She suggested tomorrow afternoon when kindergarten will be in the lab and then a couple times on Friday. I replied that she should send them whenever she can and that the test is kind of a priority when it is this close to the end of the window because if they don't finish it Compass Learning won't be updated until the new year and their parents won't get an updated report at conferences. She seems a little too laid back about the whole thing. Or maybe I'm just uptight about it.

When I didn't have classes in the lab I worked on things for teachers. I made a change to a booklet I made for the resource teacher last year because she needed it tweaked a little bit. I remembered that I took pictures of the kids in one of the kindergarten class yesterday so I could make small pictures for the teacher to use for various things. So I edited those and made her a page with all the pictures.

My favorite project of the day was making a sign for the librarian. She is setting up a display or something for graphic novels and asked if I could make her a sign that said “graphic novels” on it. I already had a couple fonts from when I made my superhero metadata presentation last year so I was good to go. I did check online and downloaded a few more font options but I ended up going with the same one I used for my presentation. To give myself a little more room to work with I used the Legal size paper instead of the regular 8.5x11, which I think was a good choice. Then I typed up “GRAPHIC NOVELS”, which was probably the easiest part. The hard part was making it look interesting.

Originally I was thinking about a crazy spiked outline like they use for sound effects words. I tried all sorts of different combos but they all kind of sucked. Then I got back into the frame of mind my superhero presentation and decided I wanted to make the sign look like a single panel on a page. For the background I looked up graphic novels for children and arranged their covers all over the page. Leaving them like that would have been too distracting so I made a box, filled it with white, and set the transparency pretty low, so you could still see what was going on but the colors were fairly muted. I wanted a clean white border around the outside so I created a box in Publisher the size of my page and gave it a really thick white border, which covered up all of the book covers around the edge of the page. Then I added a slightly smaller box with a thick black border to give it the panel look. I finished by bringing back the text, which I made three copies of to make a top blue layer, a middle green layer, and a bottom black layer. I was pretty happy with it. When I went across the hall I could find any white paper so I went with tan, which may have actually worked out better. When I gave it to the librarian she really liked it, so mission accomplished.

There was a magic show assembly this afternoon but I forgot all about it. Turns out that was the reason the first grade class never showed up to the lab. I ended up spending that time working on the kindergarten pictures and listening to a Harry Potter audiobook, so at least I was productive.

After school I got Chipotle and my Powerball ticket. My burrito was decent but nothing amazing. I showed some good videos after dinner, at least in my opinion, and then I spent a good chunk of the rest of the night reading an article. Or rather a textbook chapter in the form of a PDF. I'm not a fan of reading long documents on the computer. I don't even like reading short documents on the computer. And this week all the metadata reading is electronic. I'm not a fan. And I still have one more article to read, which is thirty-two pages long. Good grief. I tried to start it tonight but my eyes weren't having it.

Tomorrow morning I want to maybe leave the house a little early so I can go down the the Treasurer's office and pick up my vehicle registration. I paid it online, and switched my address, but apparently switching your address online doesn't actually work. This meant the post office tried to deliver it to my old address and it bounced back. There was a message today from a lady explaining the whole situation, and saying that she had changed my address for me, but that I needed to come pick up my registration. And this was the last day of the month. So it would be nice if I could pick it up before work, not only to avoid a crowd, but also avoid getting in trouble for having an out of date registration, even though I paid on time. It probably won't make that much of a difference if I got after work but it would be nice to get it over with.

September 29, 2015

 In exciting news, I have a new health insurance card. This was the first year I could sign up for health insurance at work, which saves me a lot of money each month. The only problem was after I signed up for it I didn't hear anything about it. I knew coverage started on the first of October but that was about it. I stopped paying my current insurance so it would cover me through September (assuming you pay a month in advance) but not making the next payment meant my coverage would be canceled. I could have paid, just to be safe, but I decided to trust in the school district and it turns out that was a wise choice. The cards showed up yesterday. Better almost late than never.

Today was fairly boring. I had classes in the lab and had the occasional kids finishing up tests. When I wasn't engaged in those activities I worked on my spreadsheets, I sent off a list of kids who needed tests deleted, and I downloaded reports for classes who were completely done with testing. I also helped the ELL lady with some laptop and printer things. There is a small room in the back of the computer lab that for the past three years was used by math enrichment / Boys and Girls Club. This year it started out being used by Boys and Girls Club and the reading lady but yesterday they were moved up to the third floor and the ELL lady was moved in. This year we have eighteen kids in need of her assistance (last year we had five) and they have been working in the hallway at a small table since the beginning of school. Now they have a proper little space.

There are probably other things I could write about, like talking to the superintendent when he stopped by the lab, or the job of kindergarteners being back in the lab because testing is over, but I'm tired, so lets move on.

Tonight I read stuff for class. Three articles to be more precise. And I've got two more to read so I can make my discussion post for this week. I also have reading for my collection development class but I don't have a discussion post for that class so I decided to prioritize. I would like to finish the two metadata articles tomorrow but I think they're both long so we'll see. Maybe I can get some reading done at work. Today it seemed like whenever I had any free time a small group of kids would come in to use the computers. I remember to agreeing to some of that but I don't actually remember the schedule for it and the kids don't either because they never know when they're supposed to leave. I should get that figured out.

So yeah, tomorrow. More work on spreadsheets, maybe get the last two kids to finish their tests, maybe some reading. Then Chipotle night and more reading. Sounds like a fun day.

September 28, 2015

 I went to bed late and then this morning I woke up around 5:40AM. I had to go to the bathroom and I was worried if I tried to go back to bed for fifteen minutes I'd wake up super drowsy. I was already kind of awake so I said screw it and decided to get up. I paid for that by yawning the rest of the day. It was kind of annoying.

Even with all the yawning the day seemed to go by pretty fast. I helped out with literacy centers in kindergarten this morning. I was actually supposed to team up with whatever group had this one obnoxious kid but a parent didn't show up so I had a group of my own. It actually went pretty well because everyone stayed on task and took my suggestions for what to add to their drawings long enough to fill the whole thirty minutes. Always a plus.

I planned on doing some hole-punching after that but right after I got everything set up in the workroom across the hall from the computer lab a group of kids showed up to take MAP tests. Thank you teachers for giving me a heads-up. They had to leave at 11:30AM which gave me enough time to do the hole-punching before lunch.

This afternoon I had classes in the lab mixed in with kids finishing their tests. That was pretty much the entire afternoon so it went by pretty fast. In my brief bits of free time I updated my spreadsheets and started adding in stuff from the official reports. There are still enough kids that need to finish and tests that need to be deleted that I haven't gone through the effort of printing off any reports yet. That should happen sometime this week though.

When I got home from work I wrapped my sister's birthday presents. Eventually we went out for dinner at a Mexican restaurant and I ate too much. It was good though. Just to add insult to injury we had cake and ice cream when we got home before opening presents. It was good cake and ice cream, though. One of the presents I got my sister was a birthday song from the Neebs gaming guys. Now I have one, she has one, and my brother has one. I think I might get one for my mom for her birthday, even though she isn't really into the whole thing.

Over the weekend I started watching the first Minecraft videos I ever watched on YouTube. I started with the very first series I found that piqued my interest in the game. I came really close to buying it while watching that series but didn't actually commit to it until I started watching the Yogscast videos. I think I ended up getting it shortly before it went out of Alpha because I think the price was going to go up. Anyway, I have really wanted to play recently but I have so much work to do, so I have resorted to taking a nostalgic trip down memory lane. I watched a few more videos tonight but now I'm going to go to bed because I'm freaking tired and I have been since I woke up this morning.

Tomorrow will involve work and then when I get home, a lot of reading. Hopefully. I didn't get any done over the weekend because of class and assignments, so I need to play catch up again. Hooray.

September 27, 2015

 Around 1:30AM one of the smoke alarms apparently started chirping. My mom took the battery out of it but I think that is just a backup in case of a power outage because all the alarms are wired into the house. So I had to get up on a chair and unplug it. These alarms are definitely setting up a boy who cried wolf scenario because so far they have been more grief than helpful

I could have gotten up early but I ended up staying in bed until nine o'clock, which was pretty nice. Then I kind of worked on my metadata assignment. The bulk of the work happened after lunch, when I finished up my reflection and the lengthy reference section. At first I just had the things I referenced in my reflection but then I decided to include the digital resources I used and the resources I used to find all the metadata information. I posted just the reflection to the discussion thread and then after dinner, when I read through the whole thing again and made a couple edits, I submitted the assignment.

Also after dinner I came up with my research proposal for my academic libraries class. At first I wanted to look at how usage has changed in the digital age in terms of circulation of physical materials. Then I looked at the instructions which said we could pick anything we wanted except for stuff about materials and collections, two boxes which my original idea kind of ticked. So I switched it to how academic libraries are being used now that a lot of students get the information they need online, either from places like Google or through the digital resources of the library, like online databases. How do librarians keep the building itself relevant if the physical resources are no longer a draw. I think it is an interesting idea and hopefully I was able to word it well enough that the professor also thinks it is a decent idea. It would also be nice if I could find a plethora of information on the topic. I would prefer to have too many sources to pick from than not enough.

Tonight there was a supermoon lunar eclipse. It was better than the lunar eclipse for several reasons. To start, it wasn't in the middle of the night, it started not too long after eight o'clock. Second, it was in our backyard, not in the front of the house, so I didn't have to worry about the neighbor calling the cops on me for sitting in my own driveway. The sprinklers didn't come on and soak me. And the weather wasn't nice. I remember last year being cold because I was wearing a hoodie and a stocking cap, and because I was wet from the sprinklers. So it was a much better time.

Now I'm probably going to go to bed. We're done with full-class testing but there are still a few stragglers that need to finish up this week. Hopefully most of them will do it during their normal lab time so I don't have to spend my free time watching kids test.