The Installation For Assessment

What a tumultuous day!

It kicked off in the early hours when the hard disk I've been storing all my work on decided to fail, but fortunately I managed to get the necessary files burnt to CD and DVD. Unfortunately it took longer than I anticipated and I didn't get to bed until 7AM which meant I didn't take up till 12PM. Ideally I would have liked an early start because there was still much to do.

When I arrived at university Bill and Aaron were nowhere in sight and I still needed to get the computers and projectors to use for my installation. Since I couldn't remain idle I decided to photocopy my Rationale to A3 size so I went to the library only to discover I hadn't printed it out, so the obvious remedy was to be print another copy. I soon discovered that I'd saved over the Rationale with another text from another document leaving me no choice but to rewrite the Rationale. I rewrote it in the E-Media lab thinking I could use the printer to print an A3 sized sheet of paper by creating in Illustrator. Of course the E-Media printer wasn't working as usual so I had to take the file to the library. Typically the library has an older version of Illustrator which misintepreted extended characters and didn't allow text hightlighting when I opened my Illustrator CS2 file. So back round to the E-Media lab I went to transfer the information from the Illustrator file to a text file which I took to the library then transferred to Word and successfully printed. Then I spent about 10 minutes and many trial runs before I finally got the photocopier to enlarge the A4 page to A3 size and stay within the margins.

Thew! Then it was back round to the E-Media lab to get the hardware.

Fortunately Bill and Aaron were both present this time so I loaded a trolley with everything I needed and carted it around to Art Theory Room 1.8. Problems soon arose when I couldn't log into the Art Theory computer as I needed the administrator's user name and password, but I was promptly rescued by Ona who logged me in. The same problem arose again when I attempted to change the Power Save Settings, Bill was able to give me adminstrator privileges for the E-Media computer but neither he nor Ona could do anything to help. Its quite annoying because after 15 minutes the monitor powers down and the projector loses its signal.

The next problem I encountered was the E-Media computer had no signs of Flash installed which meant I'd have to install it from across the network. A stroke of luck enabled me to connect a network cable and log in, but there was no Flash 8 on the E-Media sever which meant I'd have to download it. I couldn't download it because Safari kept asking for my user name and password and Firefox didn't work. The problem was resolved when Aaron copied a Flash 8 to my account from a computer in the E-Media lab and finally things were underway.

With the assistance of Mr Rolly I began testing the best interaction for the tree animation and began tweaking the Action Script to suit the space. Things were finally going according to plan and I even managed to iron out a bug in the Action Script programming. After Mr Rolly left I made a few final adjustments to the projection screen and locked down the projectors and E-Media computer.

When I was satisfied everything was to my liking I dashed downstairs and grabbed John so he could be my final test subject. It was a good thing too because John suggested I should turn off the projectors before leaving to preserve their bulbs which I wouldn't have thought of by myself. John was thoroughly impressed as was Hugh Thomas when he saw an earlier version so that's a reassuring sign.

If a certain Bill is impressed during the assessment that'll make everything worthwhile...