Wolfpack & Web design

Today I was walking up beside my car after World Religions class when a car, just pulling into the parking lot, stopped behind my parked car. The guy in the car had the passenger window half rolled down by the time I glanced back at the car. The guy called out, "Hey, did you go to Walla Walla?" I was shocked as to how he would know that and squinted to see him better. Maybe I knew him from Walla Walla and would recognize him. But for all my squinting and leaning closer to the car behind mine, I still wasn't sure who the guy was. I realized I hadn't yet answered his question and blurted out, "Yeah, I did." He responded with something I couldn't quite fully understand. At first it sounded like "Oh, so did my grandson," but the guy was pretty close to my age as far as I could tell so that didn't make much sense at all. When I thought about his response later I figured he must have just said something like, "Oh, so did I," but it didn't really sound like it at the time. Anyhow, I tried to process what he was saying while also trying to come up with a reasonable response even though I hadn't yet figured out what he'd said to me. I finally just said, "Well, that's pretty cool." Then he said, "I saw your Wolfpack sweatshirt and guessed you'd gone to Walla Walla. I looked down a realized I was wearing my black Wolfpack (WWC's hockey team is called Wolfpack to go along with the school's mascot, a wolf) sweatshirt. It all made sense. I said something like, "Yep, I am," or some such other randomness and he said, "Well, you have a good day," smiled, gave a short wave and drove off up behind Hackman. It was a random event, but was interesting so I wanted to record it here so as not to forget that I like random stuff.

Later the tone of the day changed from randomly interesting to annoyingly depressing. I went to the Mac lab in first floor Brock to work on my Web design project at around 6 p.m. I spent the first hour finishing my design in Photoshop and was pretty happy with it by the time I was done. Then I was stuck as to the best way to slice the design and put it into Dreamweaver. If this project had been like our first two I could have done it quite nicely on my own, but this time our project was to take a template and an external CSS sheet and format it all by basically just changing the CSS. In general I can't stand the designing process in Photoshop, but usually enjoy the html and coding part in Dreamweaver. But since this was something I've never done before, I needed a bit of help to get my going. Once I'm given a little help I can usually continue alright on my own. So I put my hand up to get some help from our TA. This was about at 7:15 p.m. About 10 minutes of waiting later, I called out to Ryan, telling him that I was waiting for his help when he got done with whoever he was helping at the time. He said that he'd come over to my side of the room soon. Well, basically, he didn't. He just kept going around the room clockwise and then all of a sudden, when he was halfway around the room, he'd turn around and work counterclockwise going back to all the same people he'd already been to, usually spending a really, REALLY long time with a few of the people. I was getting quite annoyed after about an hour or waiting and trying to try things on my own and messing up and having to undo a lot of stuff and then trying new things. I asked Tyler and a few of his friends for some help and they told me what they knew, but they didn't know all of the answers to my questions, being first time Web Design students themselves. They were also trying to figure out their own questions since Ryan never seemed to come over to our side of the room. I kept trying to tell Ryan we needed help, as did Tyler and his friends. Finally Ryan did manage to get over to our area. He helped Ty with something for about four minutes and then all of a sudden he was back on the other side of the room again. I was about ready to try out a punching bag by this point. Luckily for those sitting around me, Ty's friend Aric walked into the Mac lab. He'd just been doing interviews and videos of tonight's Yefim Bronfman concert and had just come in to the lab to hang out for a few minutes. He started talking to Ty and his friends and then all of a sudden, Ty and I, almost at the same second, realized that Aric is rather proficient at all things Web. We asked him for help and he agreed to stay for a little bit longer to give us some help. He helped Ty first since his problem was pretty short and then he gave me advice on how to slice my design and input it into CSS. I was absolutely relieved and started to feel like I might actually get my design done by class tomorrow. Then other people began to realize that Aric knew stuff about Web design and asked him to help them. He knew he'd never be able to leave if he started helping more people so he got out of the lab rather quickly. I set to work on what I had been told. Then I got re-stuck. My hand went up again. Ryan kept ignoring our side of the room. I grew angrier. Finally, at 9:45 p.m. Ryan ambled over to my computer and I told him all of my problems (including that I'd been sitting there waiting for help from him for the past two and a half hours!). He looked at how my design was sliced and told me that if I just changed a few of the more difficult-to-slice parts of my design that it would be easier for me to put it into CSS. So he helped me reslice my Photoshop design and then told me I'd have to download the template and external CSS stylesheet and start again in Dreamweaver. I was fairly disconcerted, considering now there was less than 10 minutes before the lab closed. What made it worse was that the girl beside me was watching movie trailers with Ty and his friends by that time and Ryan kept watching the trailers along with them instead of helping me. Finally he managed to focus enough to get the template and CSS stylesheet set up for my specific design and gave me very unspecific directions of how I should move forward in my project. And then it was 10 p.m. and people were leaving the lab and the lab assistant and Ryan were getting ready to lock up. I had no choice but to save the little that I'd gotten done tonight and log off my computer. So now I'm super stressed out about my project since it's basically nothing and is due at 12:30 p.m. tomorrow. I only have an hour and a half to work on it tomorrow from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and the lab assistant working then knows Photoshop and InDesign, but not really much about Dreamweaver, which is basically what I'll be using for the rest of this project. I'm not quite sure how it'll turn out or even if I'll have anything to show the class tomorrow. And I'm not even sure how this happened since I have been working consistently on this project since it was assigned a week and a half ago. It's not like I've been procrastinating. I guess that such is life, eh?
(to be continued tomorrow...)