april 7 2024

happy autism month y’all

finally am getting around to writing blog posts lol. I’m not writing them straight up in my IDE, I’m using word. but it keeps auto capitalizing everything and that’s so not the vibe for this site.

yesterday (saturday) i took a shower at 3:30ish and then went to play sims. i decided to restart and update my computer so it would be happiest, but then I got an error saying something like “too many password attempts.” called IT. said come to the helpdesk. It’s like 4:10 and they close at 6.

get my ass on the freeway (bc I don’t live on campus, I commute) and there is a fucking baseball game. and always the eastbound traffic on 94 is so much worse when there’s stadium traffic then anything westbound. and of course i’m going eastbound.

I pull off of the freeway and was trying to navigate myself to the alternate route I usually take (state st) but I fuck it up several times. end up on a different alt route that I don’t like to take but it got me there. and alt route was wisconsin ave and that goes past the convention center and of course the time I need to drive down this road is when there is a convention happening.

I get to campus and the it guy types in the password. then I go home. westbound traffic is fine past the stadium. fuck everybody.

I don’t even stop anywhere and I get home at 5:45.

I needed to go in right away to get in to my laptop bc the helpdesk is closed Sundays and I usually go to the coffee shop maggie works at sunday mornings to work on homework and to keep her company, and I was not going to wait until monday.

on fridays I work from home for my internship and I had a meeting with my new supervisor (bc the other girl left. but this guy was and still is the director for the whole creative team. I just talked to him less when I was working more directly with this other girl)

and I was excited to share my portfolio site because I was done coding it for my portfolio class. I had such a hard time explaining the stuff to him because he was an actual professional. much different then explaining things to people or professors at school.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to say! I had never practice it before! and because I mentioned that I coded it myself, of course this man had to test out how well I coded it and mess with the viewport sizes and inspect my html markup!!!!11!

I was explaining to my professor that I chose to hand code my portfolio and she said to include that. and I thought to myself the reason I didn’t include that is because I know that my coding is absolute dogshit. and I didn’t want a professional who would hire me to see that I mentioned that my site is hand coded and then immediately go to inspect how I coded it and start criticizing it!!!!

he did give me other tips that made sense. and I actually value his feedback because he has more experience than me.

my professor gave me some low level and valuable feedback about the structure of my site when reviewing my wireframes one on one. but we have peer review time tomorrow (monday) and we’re supposed to have our home page and one case study ready for review. the people in my peer group I know will not give me intellectual feedback.

I was proofreading a term paper maggie was writing. something about psychology. and she said that she wanted to ask me because she knew I would actually give feedback. She didn’t want to diss on her friends and roommates at her college, but they typically tend to give feedback of “good paper” and maggie wanted more than that, she wanted to make sure her paper was the best it could be.

I think there was some discussion about how I would give constructive criticism and point out areas that could be confusing or need to be rewritten or currently isn’t following apa style guides. and give an example on what she could do to change it.

not just me giving comments like “don’t say this” or “clarify this”. I would give examples on what I meant that she could write in herself.

and I’m not afraid to tell people what I think is a problem and start nit picking. I try not to shit all over something, I compliment their stuff of course. and I make an effort to give the feedback in a way, trying to frame it as an area of improvement, and not talking down to the person who’s work I am reviewing.

I hope that makes sense. remind me to write about this guy in my agile class who is an ‘agile coach’ and he sucks so bad. he gives his feedback horribly.

anyway. so I appreciated the feedback my supervisor gave me and I’ve already implemented a lot of it. there is one piece where he said to cut down on the text or add more visuals to the last two sections on my about page.

and im not entirely sure how im going to do that. like a ‘show more’ ‘show less’ button? or do I add visuals to those sections?????

I don’t know!!! I would have to ask my professor for what she thinks, but when I sent her the link to it, she didn’t give a lot of a response. I don’t know how long she looked at it for, and shes out of town (in the netherlands!) for next week so I can’t go in one on one during office hours.

my supervisor also told me that this powerpoint manual thing that I made some edits to didn’t really look like ‘me’ and that he expected me to put more of ‘myself’ into the work. and I get that, because I didn’t really make edits to the information in the flie, I just cleaned up the slides visually.

I have more information about the audience of this file now too (the final, actual users, not just internal staff) and I know what my supervisor is looking for, so now i feel a bit better about what the fuck im supposed to do.

but it was most definitely a bruh moment during this meeting. because I couldn’t tell if he was just giving feedback or if he was disappointed/upset with what I delivered. and this leads to the thought of how will he review me in the supervisor evaluation that he has to do for me to get credits at school.

this guy is tough to read sometimes. but I think he likes me???? I can match his energy during our standups when i’m in the office.

ugh and I’m so bad at going back and forth between being an intern and being a student. I have the flavor of autism that makes me bad at adapting to change and trying to switch modalities for 5 hours, 2 days a week and then also go right back into school mode after those 5 hours are up is just impossible.

I’ve talked a little bit about it with my supervisor and my old supervisor/lady I shadowed. that they know I’m an intern and that my schoolwork comes first. but I don’t know if I’m doing what they expected from an intern or if I’m doing more than the expected (like what’s the work ethic of previous student interns you’ve gotten from my school?).

hheheuuuhghh. is this enough for a first blog post??