What a Day!

Hi everyone, I’m here with another post! Yesterday (July 5th) was pretty boring, I sat in the lab most of the day doing some work. I volunteered to design the media player controls for the site. Timeline, play button, scrubber bar, volume sliders, etc. I spent most of yesterday and this morning working on it.

There was a huge discussion about the functionality of the player last night and a semi-argument about it during our designers´meeting this afternoon. Basically our media player has to play more than one type of media: photo slideshows, video and interactives. We want the users to have 2 ways to experience a story on the site: the first way is to have a simple, automatic timeline with color indicators on it that let you know where a photo story is, where an infographic is, etc. The user just hits play and sits back and enjoys the show.

The second way to experience the story is manually. There will be a button called “view story assets” below the timeline mentioned above, and when the user clicks it, the timeline flips over to reveal little blocks that represent the actual content (pictures, video, interactives, etc). The user can click on those blocks and manually visit a specific picture, watch a specific video, etc.

Anyway, the argument involved disagreement over how to display the “story assets” in the expanded view. I´ll spare you the details except to say that we finally reached an agreement in the end. And pictures were being taken during last night´s frustrating discussion because we´re going to look back on it after all this is done and laugh our heads off.

We also have 2 people (Brian, the one we took to the airport, and my friend Kristen) working on the logo for the site, they have been cranking out so many possible combinations and all of them look great. We´re supposed to vote on one tomorrow. It´ll be a hard choice!!!

Now a word on the medicine story I wrote about on Monday. The first person (Mr. Martinez) we were going to feature doesn´t do healing any more, so they contacted a list of other possible healers. None of them worked out. We were thinking of doing the alternative story (one about sailing) but Rich (he was my multimedia professor and executive producer of the project) really wants a medicine story in there because we already have 2 fishing stories. He doesn’t want another water-related story. Anna and Nacio will be leaving tomorrow at 7 a.m. to visit another possible subject who is 2 and a half hours away. I would’ve gone with them but I need to be at the design meeting in the morning to vote on the logo and on other design decisions. I hope this new person turns out to be someone we can do a story on. Next time they go I’ll go with them, because I don’t want to spend this whole trip in that one room!

Moving on, today I went shopping with Kristen and Elizabeth. We walked around the town some, each time we walk around we see something new. We found a clothing store with cheap prices and so I bought a black sweater that zips. Something to wear when it gets chilly at night.

Lunchtime today was hilarious. The people on this trip are really funny. We ate at this sandwich shop that’s close to the Journalism School. I’d been there several times already. Apparently some of us are getting a little tired of the food here. It was nice the first few days, but now it’s getting boring. Mike, the design director, commented that “no wonder people in Galicia don’t eat much — the food is nasty.” The way he said it really made me laugh. And then when he got his food, things got funnier. He had ordered some fish plate that came with white asparagus. Tom (our lead programmer and a programming genius; I had a class with him before) said: “oh, that’s asparagus? I thought it was string cheese.” Even thinking about it makes me laugh. Mike was afraid to eat the white asparagus, and so Colin (one of the design team members) tried it. When Tom asked him if it was good, Colin said yes, but then a few minutes later he said he was being saracastic and that in reality it wasn´t all that good. It was funny because he was so sarcastic that he didn´t even sound sarcastic. I had a boccadillo (which is a cold sandwich) with ham and some other kind of sauce. It´s pretty good, but I think we were all just craving some familiar foods.

At dinner, my craving was satisfied. I went with my friend Katherine to good ole McDonald´s, which about 10 minutes (by car) from the dorm. It was declicious!

Now it´s almost 2 in the morning and I’m going to bed. The time throws everyone off because it´s always later than it seems. Good night, and I hope everyone is doing well! I love you!!