Driving Mission #6 was just plain old "Drive around my small town by myself for about an hour and not freak out and enjoy driving." Which worked out splendidly. I cruised around the west side of town that I don't get to much without a car--turns out there isn't much to do there-- and ended up at the Nugget getting myself dinner as a treat. I only had a little trouble-- when pulling out of the parking space the wheel froze up and suddenly the trunk opened itself somehow-- but it started working again and it was fine. Huzzah.

The next trip I am planning is on the day off, with perhaps a drive to Vacaville. Monica wants to come along and hit the craft stores. We'll see.

My weekend is going to be irritatingly juggling-y. I have to go to Mom's tonight because I have two appointments there in the morning: to pick up my new glasses and to try going to the credit union to see if they will give me a real credit card and a car loan. I am not going into this with overly high hopes or much of a clue, but I need to check sometime, I guess. Then we are coming back up here for the requisite post-holiday pretend-it's-Christmas dinner with my aunt. Feh. Whatever.

I am feeling the pressure to go visit Jackie this weekend, given that she's injured and all, but I really don't want to have to bounce back and forth and back and forth between here and the Bay all freaking weekend, nor do I want to start the trip from here via train and BART and another BART and then back again in the same day. Bleah. I don't really want to juggle that-- I'd say "do it next weekend," but that's the only weekend the CC is open before classes start and I really want to use the spinning wheels to finish off my accumulated roving stash before the spinning class takes over the wheels.

Argh. Too much juggling. I got very little sleep last night trying to pack and figure out all this shit.

I spent the last two days mostly offline due to my taking classes for work. I had one class that ran for 2 days in the morning and another class that ran for 2 days in the afternoon. The morning class was on how to do presentations-- after the bombing out of the last time I did presentations at the con, I felt like I needed a class. I did spectacularly in it, but then again, we were only doing speeches for 5 minutes and I know how to do those. It's the hour and a half ones that are difficult, and perhaps kinda "Death by Power Point"-y. I made up a speech on how to handle newbie drivers and it went over very well. I'm pondering writing up a giant primer on this someday, perhaps. I love that instructor and it was a lot of fun.

The afternoon class (on accessible web pages for the disabled) on the other hand...I took a class from this dude years ago and I remember liking him, and god knows he KNOWS HIS STUFF, but his presentation style has gone downhill since I first took this class (was doing it as a refresher). Maybe he's been teaching it so long that he burned out? That's my theory. They made this class longer. Normally I am always writing down on the evaluations, "make this class longer!", but this was the first time I've ever thought a class should be shorter. Because man, he did everything the presentation teacher said not to do. He walks in, apologizing for how the presentation is going to suck, he really needs to rewrite it and re-order it, he was up all night doing everything at the last minute...basically pissing away his authority and looking bad and setting off the class bad. He also had an enormous amount of Power Point death.

Now, to be fair, we needed that info and I'm glad he handed us all the notes, but he also gave us a lot of background information he didn't expect us to use, and the history of doing these kinds of websites, and I think he could have ah, pruned a bit. Or a fair chunk. He also didn't bother to give us the notes for day 2. And there were typos. And bizarrely enough, he had all these text-embedded links in his Power Point so he could click on web pages during the presentation. I'd like to point out out that when you print out notes like that, that means that nobody actually has all these important URL's to look at, and you can't even type them in to look at later because the paper just says "Name of Web Page." This does not strike me as being accessible. I am interested in the topic and about 2 hours of the 8 had stuff I plan on using later, but...it dragged on. And on. And half the class did not come back on day 2. I just kind of found it funny how this guy had become what the first teacher says not to do!

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