Chelsea Bingiel
2009/01/30
M T Θ F, 10 hrs
Murray

For Monday and Tuesday, I worked on creating an example of a Premiere video to show the kids for a class project.  It's an African American Athletes research project where the kids research their athlete, find pictures, and then create a short video on Premiere complete with music, narration, and sound effects.  My example was of Wilma Rudolph, the first African American woman to win 3 gold medals at the 1960 summer olympics in track and field.  What I found most interesting was that she was diagnosed with polio as a child and from the ages of 5 to 12 was crippled...so I learned something this week!  I also learned the Premier can get to be a pain in the butt, especially when it tries to think for and shift over a bunch of slides, shorten the length of things, and in general mess up all your previous hard work.  Grr grr grr, but it got done, and I even drew up a storyboard for it!

Thursday (had to exchange Friday for Wednesday this week, homework hit me really hard the first half of the week and I needed to be in the linux lab of the Reg) mysterious reports arose of projectors that I witnessed running fine last week all breaking.  After I investigated, it was indeed certain that they all now had something wrong with them.  Two start fine but the light never comes on, and then after a minute or two the fan kicks in really hard and it whirs likes it about to explode and the happy little green light turns orange.  The other two can't detect and input signal from the computer, and computer tells you something is wrong with the projector it is detecting.  The troubleshooting is absolute garbage, it goes from "make sure it is plugged in" to "make sure it is turned on" to "pull out your wallet and throw money at the problem."  For the last bit of the day though, I went to the language lab and inspected the mysterious case of the nonworking microphones.  Turns out some aren't plugged in, some were muted in the sound preferences, and some microphone settings are pointing to the wrong mic input.  The mysterious case of why they change?  The kids have discovered that it is very funny if you quickly take out the headphone jack and project what the computer is saying for half a second, then plug the headphones back in.  Giggles ensue as people look around for the strange voice, and merriment is enjoyed all around.  I suspect that sometimes they are unplugging the mic jack instead, which may be messing up the settings on the computer to a different default and thus when the mic is plugged back in it is not set up correctly.  Whether this is true or not I don't know, it's just a hypothesis.

On friday, I got to play with the setup scripts Mitch showed me on Thursday!  I set up the media room (aka library) computers so that they had the correct printer.  Now everybody can print their papers that they type up in the library on the library printer, huzzah!  It was great fun playing the scripts, even if was copying and pasting mostly.  I did take a moment or two to inspect files I found in the startup, and even removed something pesky I had noticed that was making one of the machines slow way down.  I found it strange that almost none of the machines had the same startup configuration, although how they change this much I don't know.  I blame windows.

In other news, I checked my email today to discover that I had been cut down to 4 hours per week!  At first I was a bit yikes, since work is my only income (how my friends without jobs get money I'll never know, allowances maybe?  that was soo 8th grade).  However, just as I do every quarter when it comes time to pay the university money I don't have, I just breathe and remind myself that my loans have a 6 month grace that don't require payment until after college, society does not punish the hard working college student (we get babied, seriously I will never have so much free food ever again after college), and comp sci majors get paid a ton, even if they're just code monkeys for a while.  It's like the Buddha says, if you're a tad broke, at least you're not in debtors prison, and for this feel blessed and happy.  The point of this rant though is that I'll be emailing Joe and Sara and working out a new schedule, so that it'll probably shift to Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Personal news:  I'm embarking on a cs 16200 project of my own design.  The premise is to create a game that teaches the player efficient algorithms by trial, error, and practice.  A pseudo code of input variables and data structures will be used to find efficient runtimes for desired outcomes.  How this will be implemented is the fun part!  The variables will be elements with different properties, the algorithm will take the form of a laser cannon that shoots the elements, and the purpose will be to hunt dinosaurs who will then loot more elements to recharge the ammo!  This will be epic, and I'm very excited and have no idea how to do 99% of this project, but I'm in a learning environment so it'll be okay.  This weekend I'll be working on a scaled down version of the initial libraries, wish me luck!