*chills*

having finished my program in a movie-related field, i think i’m ready to start enjoying movies again!

Filed under: school

no lie

just remembered – this is what my program director said, during my portfolio panel, about my website:

I liked clicking the buttons.

Filed under: best thing, school

quickies

1. this sounds like an awesome weekend project. it’s almost enough to make me go to SF! (because super happydevhouse and bay to breakers just aren’t enough)

2. i got a de facto extension on my midterm. i couldn’t handle both that and my portfolio presentation being due the same day. i say de facto because i simply forgot to finish it in time. the instructors couldn’t be cooler about it, just telling me to email it when i was done.

3. i kicked ass on the portfolio. don’t know why i worried about it so much. i think they were blinded by the great photos I used on my Keynote slides (most of them are in my flickr faves). the program director, normally a crabby old coot, was actually cordial, which is like, majorly unusual by his standards.

4. okay, actually, this midterm thing is bugging me. it’s haunting me like helen thomas haunted stephen colbert in that white house correspondents dinner video. i need to finish it, but i…just…can’t!

5. according to the iPod death clock estimator, my iPod mini is due to die on Memorial Day weekend. That is the worst possible time, because I have to work all freaking weekend (network switching party, gah!). on the bright side, if it were to die, i could try a project i’ve always wanted to try, and score major bonus points on the scale of g33kitude – turn the 3rd gen mini into a flash mini!!

Filed under: computer, personal, school, work

worse than me

The nonprofit where I have my second internship runs a film festival every year. It’s in the first week of May, so things are understandably a little crazy these days. I’ve asked them if there was anyhting I could do to help out but so far few takers. Most of them have been there for years so it’s a well-oiled machine, just one that happens to go insane this one month every year.

Still, I feel guilty going into work these days, since most of the tiem I’m just transcoding video files, which involves little more than sitting there, and shuttling a hard drive back and forth between computers every few hours. Plus I’m only there twice a week, 6 hours each day, so I can go home while it’s still light out.

I write emails to my supervisor and get responses as late as 1AM. I just wanna be like, omg go home!

On the other hand, maybe it’s good I’m not so involved. Especially since tomorrow’s COMPS!

Filed under: school, work

stupid tests

The “good” thing about comps is that we don’t get our questions until Friday afternoon. The finished thing is due Monday morning. Which means that there is a very valid excuse for turning in less than stellar work.

And this excuse is bolstered by my history of extreme procrastination, where I’d write entire term papers in about the same amount of time.

Of course, I’ve never had a term paper that was more than 25 pages long. This one looks like it needs to be about 35. So that’s the BAD thing about comps.

That, and the fact that, well, it’s comps!

Filed under: school

order!

augghh

i’m tampering with the original arrangement of my school files in preparation for comps. i had lovely SVN version control on all my directories, which are organized by quarter and where possible by assignment.

now i have to look through everything and figure out what important articles and papers i might need to answer my comprehensive exam questions (which i don’t get til Friday). which means messing up the versioning (not that I can update it anyway because the repository is on my Dell, 35 miles away)

the question in organizing them is this: will it be easier for me to search for articles by their provenance? in which case, disturbing the fonds will have done more harm than good.

except, going through them, they’re so messed up i can hardly figure out what is even there. so i really have to go through everything just to figure out what the file contains. so if i organized them nicely, maybe it would help. and then i could rename them for easier mind-indexing. except for the files that i already know by filename.

i think i’m gonna have to find a middle ground – something neater than what’s there now (a hodgepodge of indecipherable file names and document types), but leaving things where they were in general – ordered by quarter, then class, then assignment.

Filed under: school

the business of getting down (to work)

alrighty.

i’ve spent most of last week panicking about my portfolio. i’ve gathered up the materials I think i’ll need, and now it’s time to actually look at my old papers and see how i can best dress them up so they’re ready for show.

at best, i’ll just need to edit them together so the disparate works flow nicely.

at worst, i will have to rewrite and re-research them to fix all the bad crap i wrote.

i’ve been putting it off long enough. the thing is due this friday, and i ahve to prepare it well beforehand so i can print it out and stuff.

so yeah. now it’s *really* time to panic.

Filed under: school

procrastinatin’

Ok I only tricked one person with my post yesterday. (I probably only got one visitor yesterday).

Anyway, so duh I’m still in school. Today was my first Human-Computer Interaction class, and it was nice to see so many grad students from all different departments. THe vast majority of my classes have been all-IS, or TFT or MIAS people. This class has people from Psych, CS, Public Health, IS, Education, and even Medical Imaging or whatever the hell it’s called. It sounds even more made up than “Moving Image Archive Studies.”

Anyway, the course seems interesting. The readings have a fair amount of pop-psych stuff to it, but I guess HCI is still in that fuzzy, psychology kind of area so it makes sense. So I guess I’m finishing my grad school career in an old Psych major state of mind, which is funny.

In other news, I checked out portfolios made by past students, and they are insane. I was kind of blowing it off until today but now I realize I have a ton to do.

Why am I even writing this down? I have work to do!!

Filed under: school

and the new quarter begins…

Today I started my second internship at this place where I intern. This one involves working with (ta-da!) actual film!

Yes it’s hard to believe, but I’m in the last quarter of my 2-year program in moving image archive studies, and have not touched so much as a reel of film since our orientation back in ‘06.

So there’s plenty of novelty, and since I’m pretty familiar with the place where I work, it wasn’t too awful. I was still plenty nervous, though. Imagine, handling film! And it was old Russian 16mm film, in color. I would love to watch some of these one day.

I also got my first workplace-related injury, less than an hour into the job. I was winding film and a bad sprocket caught on my finger and RIPPED across it. It was like a paper cut, only with film, and almost an inch long. It was pretty painful, and gross. So now I wear a glove when I wind film, even though they say it’s harder to detect damage, and if somethign gets caught on the glove, it could rip the film.

Well, better the old film than my finger, I say. As I plummet to the bottom ranks in my program.

Tomorrow I officially start my other internship, at another place where I’ve interned before. I’m excited, because that internship is located in Little Tokyo, and there’s going to be a Yogurt Land there soon!

Filed under: school

another excuse to buy more crayolas

I’ve been trying to figure out how best to organize the hundreds of articles I’ve gathered over the course of my program – two years’ worth of courses with dozens of papers, most of which I’ve printed out to paper. I want to have them handy and easily searchable in case I need to use them in my comprehensive exams that are coming up in like, a month (HOLY CRAP A MONTH?? I AM SCREWED!)

Anyway – do I file them by topic? But then what about papers with overlapping themes? Do I file by author? But how am I supposed to remember what article I need, if I don’t remember what article was written by whom?

It’s a funny quandary for a pseudo-library student to be in.

I think that instead of filing them, I’m gonna label the articles, gmail style. That means an article can have more than one color label (for each topic that the paper covers). I think I will then graffiti the article with the color(s), and use post-its to summarize the point of the article. I would use post-it flags to label the articles, but they tend to fall off/be annoying. Thank goodness I have crayons! I just hope I have enough for all the labels I will need.

Filed under: school