The Book Project

I suppose it is about time that I post something new so everyone stops thinking I am so depressed all the time.

For my print publishing class I need to do one final project using Adobe InDesign to finish off the work and skills we are learning this semester. The interesting thing about this class is that it is almost identical to the first print publishing class that I took, only each of the projects is a little bit longer or bigger than the last time. It sure makes for an interesting experience.

It's also strange that there are 7 people in the class. 6 girls, and me. Funny, eh?

Anyways, the final project is a book project that has to be at least 70 pages long and have at least 4 chapters when I am done. I've known about this project the entire semester and have been trying to think of something to use for me "content" but had been coming up blank until just a couple days ago. I decided that instead of being like everyone else and making a personal history or some sort of cookbook that I would write my own content that was fresh and new and then put it into a format that was more stylistic than a run of the mill 6in x 9in book.

What I decided on was a 4in tall by 10in wide book utilizing 4 columns (trust me, it looks cool) and that my subject matter would be Conquer Club. Why you ask? Well, on March 12th I had my two year anniversary as a member of Conquer Club and in that two years I climbed from a "newbie" all the way to the top of the ladder as the "admin" that I am now. I thought it might be fun to write a sort of memoir of the experiences I've had on the site and then use that for my content. Obviously it wouldn't be too serious or weighty, but it could be a fun little read if you ask me.

I'm thinking of a title something along the lines of From Newbie to Admin: My Journey Through the World of Conquer Club or something just as entertaining.

Busy Week

Most of you know by now that Holly and I are moving back to Wymount this coming weekend, which means that we've been spending a lot of time packing and trying to plan things out properly. Holly packs several boxes each day, and then we take them over to the new place each evening when I get home from work. The goal is to get all of the small stuff over there without having to get a massive truck to do it. So far it is working out nicely.

On Saturday morning I'll get the smallest U-Haul available and have a few guys from the ward help me move the big furniture like the bed, couch, and crib, and then we should be mostly done. Thankfully if there are a few straggling items, Grandma Chatfield isn't going to care if we have to come back for them over a couple of days next week. That takes the edge off the stress of getting everything done right at once.

The weather has picked back up, which means I'm back on the Federation of Joy every day, which pleases me to no end. I like being able to feel like Holly has the ability to go somewhere if she needs to, and do things with her sisters or someone without needing to wait for me to get back from campus. The other plus is that by living in Wymount again I can come home for lunch if I have time between classes because the scooter makes parking next to the buildings I need to be in so convenient.

Also been working on a massive project for my CHum 489R class this past week or so. Russell is my technical advisor and has been very patient with me as I worked through a few hurdles. However, the past two days I've managed to clear the hurdles myself as I am finally understanding how a while() loop is supposed to work, and the proper ways to refer to objects and join database tables together. It is nice to feel like I'm learning something and having it stick, even if it seems like it is always a small piece each time.

I have to give a presentation on this project tomorrow morning and I'm hoping that I have enough done to keep myself from looking like a slacker/fool. Russell seems to think that I'll be much further along than anyone else, but until I see that I'm still a little bit worried. The core of the project site is working now, but I'm hoping to tack on a couple of "bells and whistles" before the presentation tomorrow to try and make it a little more complete. I do like the style that I've applied to the site though, I'm quite proud of that. It looks very modern and sleek. Once I have it up on an actual server (curse you slow BYU people) I'll post a link so people can see what it looks like so far.

Let's see, what else is going on... Oh, I was sick, then Holly was sick, and Jack wound up catching a little bit of it, but nothing too bad. He even learned how to shoot snot out of his eye the other day, which I told him was not a skill that we really needed to practice a whole lot if he didn't mind.

That's all of the big news for now, mostly just trying to get my list of things done each day and help Holly as much as I can when I get home in the evenings.

It's Raining Today

Once upon a time I used to enjoy a good rainstorm every once and awhile, but it seems that as I've gotten older the rain just means it is a gloomy day and I don't deal very well with gloomy days.

I stayed up far too late last night making sure that I didn't get behind on schoolwork, which was a good thing, but the bad thing was that I overslept this morning because of it and didn't make it to campus as early as I would have liked. After talking it over with Holly I am trying to get to campus early each morning to focus on schoolwork and make sure that I stay on top of the big projects for my classes this semester.

It worked out great yesterday, but the late night last night really messed up my plans this morning something fierce. Luckily I still got to campus a little bit early, and have managed to get some good work done. Now when I go home this afternoon I can watch Jack for a few hours while Holly works on her text that is due this weekend and then do homework later in the evening.

Thank goodness tomorrow is Saturday, I'm going to need it to get caught up on everything going on right now.

Crunch Time

I go through this same situation every single semester. The first couple of days there is nothing of consequence to do because everyone is still adding and dropping classes, shuffling their schedules, and learning about the course syllabus. The next couple of days you start to learn some stuff, but the teachers don't really assign much in the way of homework just in case half the class changes from one day to the next. It really isn't until after the add/drop deadline about 12 days into the semester that things really start to settle down.

That is when crunch time hits. You finally have to start paying attention to the assignments that are due and the things the professors say in class.

Crunch time was today as I started looking ahead to the things I need to get done in the next 10-14 days and planning out how I was going to make it happen with a little baby boy at home that I need to help take care of each evening after I return from campus.

I've been very diligent so far this semester in staying on top of my reading assignments and doing things a day or two early, perhaps more diligent than I have ever been before, but despite all of that, I still feel like there is some sort of impending pressure that is going to be piled onto my shoulders at any moment, most likely when I least expect it.

I don't really like that feeling.

Something Finally Clicked

Russell is notorious for commenting in his class that we have to "make new pathways in our brains" in order to really understand all of this stuff he is cramming into our heads. As it turns out, new pathways are something quite difficult to achieve when you can't spend 4 or 5 hours a day working on writing PHP or mySQL queries, but Russell just keeps right on saying "Don't worry, at some point it is going to 'click' for you and you can really start moving forward."

I think last night might have been one of those moments for me. I had been working on getting the functionality to change your password or your email address for my mid-term to work for over a week, and for some reason it just wasn't working. Then, while waiting for Russell to make his way back around to me during office hours a light came on in my head and I went back to look at some of the functions we had written weeks before. All it took was one little line of code and I was off and running. I added it to the other two functions I was working on, moved a couple of other things around and suddenly passwords were changing and email addresses were updating.

I had one small glitch that Russell helped me identify (I was referring the incorrect column in one of my database queries), but for the most part I finally made the connection on how to take information and pass it into the database properly. I was really, really excited about that.

On top of all this, prior to the start of the office hours I had been working for about an hour to let the members of my website see which groups they had been invited to. I wasn't too confident in my abilities to get it right and thought I was going to need a lot of help, but after writing things out and double-checking them it all worked perfectly! Needless to say, it was another 'click' moment for me and I got up and walked down the hall to call Holly and tell her all about it. Rarely have I been able to get something to work right without some outside help, and certainly never on the first time. Talk about a confidence booster. I did have to have Russell help me with the next step in the process, but still, it was a victory nonetheless for me during a week or two when I was really starting to doubt whether or not I could figure this stuff out well enough to earn a living off of it.

Now I need to get my stuff so that a member can edit an item on their wishlist working completely. I'm close, just have to figure out how to pre-populate the form on the page with the information from the database. I've researched a thing or two, and might have it, but we'll see. I'm going to work on that this afternoon.

Slaughterhouse Five

I have to admit that my American Novel class has by and large been the best literature class I've taken so far at BYU, mostly because I actually get to read books and not just inane poems that have no real influence on my intellect.

We have already read several books for this class, but this past week we just finished Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I was all about this book, and didn't have any trouble motivating myself to finish it in time to talk about the passages for class each day.

My favorite thing about the book is the character of Billy Pilgrim who seems to think that he was abducted by an alien race known as the Tralfamadorians. These aliens just so happen to look like a toilet plunger with small hands at the top of the plunger handle and eyes in the palm of the hand. Strange? Yes. Excellent book? Yes. Would I read it again? Definitely.

I don't often get excited about reading the "classics" as often I find them mind-numbing or boring, but this one was an exception. We have to write a 5-7 page paper about one of the four books we've read so far this semester and I've decided to write mine on Slaughterhouse Five because I actually understood what was going on and could more easily see the "deeper meaning" behind the words so to speak.