Week 1 Summary

I think this week was a pleasant surprise for me. When I saw the initial assignment email and subsequent “sorry forgot to add this” emails I had a small bout of anxiety. I was like “man I just wanted to get back into school and this wacky class is first up… and its due dates are on Friday…and I must set up a web page…and I must link it to this web page…and…. I did not sign up for this”. But I took a step back, slowly followed the instructions, and in no time, I was cooking with gas.

First up was setting up my accounts. I am very familiar with discord as I admin one for my friends to play videogames and tabletop games over the web. So naturally I started with the one I was most familiar with. I set up mastodon quickly also as I was somewhat familiar with it after following the Twitter nonsense that was happening over the last year.

I really enjoy doing the daily creates, like way more than I thought I would. Little five-to-ten-minute creativity bursts to make you think a little and stretch those muscles. I look forward to seeing these every day now so I can get my little creativity fix… thanks for the new addiction.

Next was the word press website. Now I have never used this before so even after following the instructions to set it up, which I luckily executed flawlessly, I had to go watch a YouTube tutorial on where to start. This didn’t give me as much trouble as I thought it would once I got the layout down and kind of learned what I was looking for. I was able to change and edit almost anything I wanted with ease. Until I started using the pages function. I wanted to set up an about me page (I did), but I just couldn’t figure out how to make a link to it on my home page. I switched my home page to be the about me but then I lost my post feed, which would be a better home page for a blog. So, for about an hour I tried to figure out how to do that but totally didn’t figure it out. But fortunately, today in my meeting with Paul and Jim they were able to point me to the correct tabs and functions. I have yet to work on it, but it is my goal before the next weekly post to have a menu functioning appropriately.

For my movie review/thoughts I chose iRobot, one of my favorites. The summary can be found here. In retrospect I could have gone into more detail about the plot of the movie, but my main goal for this post was to discuss the themes it presents and questions it raised for me. I have never analyzed the movie this way before, so it allowed me to go deeper on a movie I was already very familiar with. I don’t think I will ever watch it the same way again.

Next was my expectations and desired takeaways from the course. My post can be found here. I feel that this will probably change from week to week based on my enjoyment level, but I think overall I really do want to just absorb what skills I can and enjoy the ride.

I was able to look at most of my classmates’ posts and I commented on a few of them that spoke to me. I find it so fascinating the different directions we went with our move reviews and our goals for the class. I am really excited to work on the group projects with you all!

Overall, I think the week went well. I will admit I was extremely anxious to see Paul’s email with a small novel’s worth of to-do’s, but after I got moving it ended up being a rather pleasant experience. Take it from a prior Army guy, bootcamp was a pretty good way to describe it, just with less yelling.