Have you ever had one of those weekends? I’m coming out of one (which is why this post is so delayed).
I spent most of last week sick, and then tested for my yellow belt in Shaolin Kempo yesterday morning. (I passed. I’m now a yellow belt!)
Last night, a bunch of people invaded my tiny house, and I was forced to prove my lack of skills at Guitar Hero. (At least they let me play a Rush song. That was fun!)
Today started a new session of our SAT Prep class at work, and I was there like a good little math teacher. Before work, I uploaded some short stories I’ve been working on editing to the app formerly known as Writely (I just don’t like the name “Google Docs and Spreadsheets.) to work on during my non-teaching hours.
On the upside, I have those stories to work on, regardless of where I may be. On the downside, I lost time reformatting a document because it disappeared in the upload. That didn’t make me terribly happy, and makes me seriously wonder what would happen if I tried to upload something important.
I also found some of the behaviors in Writely/Docs and Spreadsheets odd. I couldn’t use the tab key or the delete key. It made things a bit more tedious than necessary. I might have also liked a word count functionality, but that’s easily worked around.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 1:16 AM EST
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“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”- George Bernard Shaw
Basically, if you wait for what you think the ideal opportunity is, you’ll likely miss out on the true opportunity. Keep an open mind, and work toward your goals and dreams. You’ll get a lot farther in the end.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:15 AM EDT
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I’ve been experimenting with Google Reader and Google’s personalized home page this week. It all started when someone directed me to Google Reader after Bloglines‘ current round of upgrades caused me many, many headaches (not the least of which was the cessation of Lifehacker and MetaFilter, both of which I had to read through another, less convenient source).
I have mixed feelings on Reader. Because they put all unread items onto the same page, I can catch up on my feeds in about a third of the time it took me to read the same amount of material on Bloglines on a good day. However, I can’t mark things as unread to keep them in my Reader. I have to star them, which moves them out of my view and, with my currently insane schedule and workload, out of mind. Otherwise, I have to open them in a new tab, and on a normal day, this leads to roughly five to eight tabs being opened, which slows down Firefox (especially if one of the tabs is for myoxisbroken.com).
Reader is in Labs, so with feedback, perhaps we’ll get some sort of abiltiy to mark read items as unread, but for now, I’ll just whine about it.
Google’s personalized homepage, on the other hand, has blossomed into something useful. I tried it this spring when Google was running the Da Vinci Code game, but found myself often frustrated. Modules wouldn’t work correctly. If they were updating modules, they often self-destructed while updating. It just wasn’t a pleasant experience for me.
I’ve been revisiting it this week since I can track both Gmail and Reader on it, and discovered it a bit more stable, and even happy. I currently have Gmail, Reader, Notebook (which will never replace EverNote in my book), Calendar (which shows today and tomorrow’s schedules), a To-Do list (that needs to offer a simpler way to move between the six possible lists), Bookmarks for the sites I visit on a daily basis, weather, a MySpace notifier, and a Mastermind game. I even added a second page to start dumping random things. It hasn’t become my homepage yet, but I might acutally consider it.
If I could find a more compact weather module I liked and if the to-do list offered a way to toggle between lists, I’d be tempted to use the sidebar hack to make it a dashboard on Firefox.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:03 AM EDT
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I’m starting to think that perhaps the most important lessons one should be learning in college include time management, prioritizing, and how to self-motivate.
I also think I want to start a project notebook, and structure it around this awesome motivation guide! What I like most about this idea is that you have a constant, tangible reminder of what you’re working toward and why. That, in and of itself, is pretty motivating.
It’s just one more tool to add to my Get Motivated file!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:13 AM EDT
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This month’s topic for Collective Genius is “getting unstuck”, and later this week I’ll be blogging there on getting unstuck in the day-to-day.
For me, though getting unstuck is pretty much a lifestyle at the moment, and I’m finally in a place where I’m willing to suggest the notion that I might need help from the greater community, from those smarter or more experienced than me.
I’m stuck professionally, and it’s not sitting well with me. It hasn’t set well with me for a couple of years. I took a couple of baby steps forward, and then got stuck again. I had a plan for getting unstuck, but I’m challenging myself to define what it is I’m looking for.
You see, up until five years ago, I was a museum educator. A pretty darn good one, or so I had been told. I went to grad school, pursued a Master’s in museum science to complement my education degree. I had quite the resume, full of teaching, program development, and training experiences.
Somewhere in the last year of grad school, things went downhill. My health forced me to move back to San Antonio, and no amount of effort could get my chair or research supervisor to speak to me. No museum would hire me, either because of lack of funds or because (and I was told this to my face repeatedly) I had more experience than either my interviewer or the director.
I’d have been perfectly happy hiding out in some dark corner of the education deaprtment developing workshops and special classes, and then occasionally coming out to train volunteers or teach these classes myself. I never really got the chance.
I briefly tried editing and proofreading. Both were fine as part-time jobs, but full-time in a high stress, high stakes environment was more than I could handle. (Freelance writng and editing has suited me much better, it turns out, even if the work is infrequent.)
Last year, after a disastrous stint in recruiting (it was a bad situation for the fourteen of us trapped in the job), I finally managed to get picked up at the same time by a tutoring center, an after-school science program, and a substitute teaching service. For the first time in a few years, I was back to my love- teaching.
I now only work for the tutoring center, and I love my job for the most part. But I know it’s not where I belong, that I could and should be doing something else. Something that actually makes use of my wide-ranging talents. The center has done everything in their power to give mke opportunities to use as many of my talents as possible, but it’s just not the same.
Right now, I’m looking at returning to grad school, and that’s become a challenge. I have to be able to define what I want, and I’m certain, “I want to develop curriculum intended to be delivered in an informal situation, and maybe write process and training docs on the side,” isn’t going to cut it. It also feels a bit short-sighted. I’m more than willing to entertain the notion that the perfect spot for me is somewhere I can’t even imagine. I considered instructional design until I learned that it focuses on adult learners, and I really enjoy programming for kids as much for adults. I’m now considering interactive media (which is more often than not studied under the same departments as instructional design), but I’m not sure where I want to go with that, either.
Perhaps I’d like to help develop educational games (that would actually be a lot of fun for me! I love playing games!). Maybe I would want to get on with some entertainment company to help them incorporate more educational themes into their offerings. I really do miss the development and writing sides, but understand I need a stronger technical side if i actually want to go anywhere near the kind of careers I envision enjoying.
At this point, I’m looking for advice, leads, a mentor or three. Someone who can see my potential and help me focus and direct it in a direction, because spinning my wheels isn’t helping me at all these days.
Posted by Rebecca as Personal development at 2:38 PM EDT
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