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With the DailyCreates, I had forgotten how to flatten a file, so that was a good lesson in re-learning to copy one image to a PowerPoint slide, inserting art onto the image, then saving it as a .jpg. At that point, the new image is a flat file and I could then insert it into my Tweet. Thanks Professor! I’m getting better with Twitter and only pay attention to the DailyCreates (although I actually sent a tweet to memorialize the passing of Meatloaf today–my first personal tweet ever), and am following only people who are engaging in DailyCreates. I did reach out to four people, responding to their tweet on Magic Realism on the 19th, and commenting on their response then asking them how they created their response but I did not get a response in return. I’m slowly responding to other tweets on DailyCreates, having done five or so other response today (Friday), so have begun some engagement there. Here are my five Daily Creates for the week:

I was grateful to get the assignments for the upcoming week last Friday but the snow storm called me out to clean up broken limbs on Saturday, so that set me back from my plan. I had a difficult time with my laptop with Google Chrome locking up more and more each day, and for longer periods. Wondering if it’s because I didn’t have enough memory, I spent over five hours on Sunday organizing a few thousand photos then today (Friday), moving them to an external hard drive. I’m hoping this will speed things up because Chrome was taking 30-60 seconds by Thursday night, every time I moved my mouse. I worked as much as possible on Firefox like Twitter, but couldn’t get WordPress over there. It’s been crippling, to say the least. Today, after moving files off my hard drive, I wasn’t experiencing any problems. I also had closed all files Thursday night and shut down my computer, which I had not done for a few days. That may have been part of the problem–too many things running that I was not aware of. Here are my three assignments, completed, for this week:

I chose OceanWP for my theme to begin customizing my website. I’m not sure how much more time I will spend to make the site look pretty because my priority has to go to learning the software, processes, and meet deadlines for assignments. I’m very frustrated and dissatisfied with the technology. It is not plug and play, and the learning curve is steeper than I expected. Especially for a 100 level class. I’m spending a lot of time going in circles because I don’t know what I don’t know. Right now, I think this course would be well suited in a lab environment where we could have someone to guide us in the moment. Or maybe I could go to the HC? Is there a Lab-type set-up where I can work and ask questions as they come up? There has to be a better way than just groping around in the dark with technologies not working together and things broken here and there but with many solutions to pick from but I have no clue what they are. This may sound like rambling, but this is what my time is like right now, trying to figure everything out.

For instance, I tried for over two hours minimum to get an audio file to embedded onto WordPress from SoundCloud. As far as I can tell, I’m did everything correctly. If I was in a Lab, whatever the problem is, it probably be solved in a matter of minutes. As it is, it’s been since last night since the problem came up, and the deadline to turn the assignment in is tonight. Working with the professor, neither of the URL links worked to embed the audio file, so the work-around was to insert the file code directly using Code Editor. That worked great and was finally a solution! I have printed the email with the solution so I have it for future reference. I am keeping hard copy of all fixes to problems and keeping them in a binder for future reference. I’ll tab them for easy access for now until I know how to better organize them in the future. I’m also keeping all emails electronically so I can organize everything digitally when I know how I want to organize them.