Three Vlogs Down, None to Go

Here's the link to my final video tutorial. I met with a mechanic, Mr. Axelrod, yesterday. I explain in the video a little of what I learned...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Vxgs4Aig6M

Busy Last Day

This morning I had planned on spending my last day with my team of sponsors but unfortunately did not get to meet with them. I woke up to a broken computer so I headed over to Hawken early in the morning to get things fixed as creating the video is essential to my project and final presentation Friday. Although my computer is now working I did loose a large portion of my edited video and have been spending today re-creating my project. Luckily, my sponsors are available to meet tomorrow and help me with the finishing touches of my production not to mention allow me thank them one last time! (I bought them these really cool coffee mugs that look like camera lenses!!)

So if loosing my film wasn’t enough I also need to finish writing my final report for tomorrow and film my last video tutorial. Yesterday I met with a mechanic, Pete Axelrod, so today I’ll film and upload some quick mechanic tips. In addition I’ll be mailing out thank you notes that I wrote yesterday. 

Although these last few days of project have been hectic the past three weeks have been really powerful. Although the lives of blue-collar workers might seem far away from our academic school days these professionals have taught me that our worlds aren’t too far apart. Meeting with these common professions has allowed me to really value the working class. Not only do I look at blue-collar workers in whole new light but also I see myself as capable of more than analyzing literature. Hopefully, my video will show just a fraction of what I’ve experienced.

Week 4 Day 1

Today I had to look for missing products on Amazon. It was really annoying because it turned out all 450 products I looked up were all missing and I could have just written it off but as I was checking there was always that potential for there to be one or two products that I actually found. After finishing that up I started finding images for products we are planning on uploading with products on Amazon. To find these images I needed to download them with a program called FileZilla. Once I found all the images I had to reference their names in order to select the ones we actually needed and get rid of those that we did not. After finding all the one we needed I had to rename them so that they had their serial number as their name so that Amazon would know which products to assign them to. Again I feel like if people were just super organized from the start no one would have to go back and rename everything which took almost five hours. The image uploading process was absolutely ridiculous as you can only upload one image at a time and I had about 300 images to upload.

Week 3 Day 3

Today I continued working on my Amazon spreadsheets and finished them. I started to work on setting up a new computer for an employee coming in for training next week. It was kind of frustrating because I basically had to use mismatched parts from different computers to set it up. For example I used a Logitech monitor from 2011 with a desktop from like 1999 and it was really a pain to get them to be compatible. Essentially I just had to keep referencing Google and try using different cables until I finally found one that made the monitor compatible with the desktop. Then I had to figure out how to connect a Windows 95 computer to the internet, which I had no experience doing. While figuring that out I realized that if you have a problem don’t ask another person how to do it just type it into Google and actually look for the information and not just click on the first site that comes up expecting that all my answers will be there. I ended up hooking up to the internet and then found software that I needed to install, Microsoft word, outlook, office place, etcetera.

Week 3 Day 2

Today I checked and went over my inventory to make sure everything was correct and that I had everything in the office in my inventory. After that I started working on Amazon spreadsheets and basically what I had to do for that was go over every aspect of a product prior to Amazon shipping it or listing it as an available product. I had to get all the information for over 500 different products and everything from whether or not the product has batteries to what warning labels are on the product, whether it could be drop-shipped or whether it needed to handle with extreme care. I thought it was interesting that there was a category that asked whether or not the product has any radioactive properties or potential hazardous waste to deal with; just goes to show they’ll let you sell just about anything on the internet. Unfortunately this was not the most exciting of jobs as all I really did was data entry from various spreadsheets. One thing I keep noticing is if the information is organized in the right format to begin with people would have to waste hours and hours reformatting the same information

All-City Musical

Today was super exciting because I got to see a free performance at Playhouse Square in the Ohio Theater of this year's All-City Musical, Aida (a story about a love triangle between and Egyptian princess, an Egyptian nobleman and a Nubian slave). The All-City Musical is an annual event run by Great Lakes Theater that allows students from all over the Cleveland Metropolitan School District to participate in a professional production at Playhouse Square. This is especially wonderful considering that many of those schools don't have good arts programs, or may not have arts programs at all. The show I saw today was technically a dress rehearsal, so there were plenty of technical issues (but that was to be expected). The actors, however, were spectacular, and they really had a lot of talent. Many of them had astonishingly good voices. Although I thought the plot was not that strong, I really enjoyed the actors' performances and the large amount of time it must have taken to pull a show like that together. I also got a chance to usher the performance today, since their were other Cleveland schools coming to see Aida, which was exciting since I have never ushered before. The other big event of the day was that I got to sit in on a meeting about GLT's summer theater camp program, for all ages. The discussion I heard before I had to leave was mostly about the varied activities that the campers will be participating in, such as writing and acting out their own fables or practicing classic scenes and monologues, or perfecting their audition technique. Overall, it was a very fun and busy day!

Slow Start at WSCC

The first few days at West Side Catholic Center (WSCC) were really pretty slow.  We didn't find a single lady that wanted to talk to us so we spent some time babysitting some children while their parents were at an employment clinic and we spent a lot of time at home.  We left early when nobody agreed to be interviewed by us.  There seems to be a great difference in these women compared to the men we encountered at 2100 and North Point.  I don't know if the difference is solely due to gender but it seems like the women are far more conservative when it comes to sharing their stories.  Another difference about WSCC is that it is much cleaner than either of the first places we went to.  It has rooms specifically for art and for teens and for small children.  Their's also a community room where the interviews were planned to be held.  The good news about having so much down time is that we had a lot of unexpected time for editing all of the film that we had already.  There's already a lot of film, and we're having trouble narrowing down what we want in the video because so much of it is so good.  This video is getting long.