Above is the picture for my DailyShoot entry on the first thing to come to my mind when I see the word “deadline”. It’s a blank Word document. If I’m in the middle of working on something, I’m probably pretty confident that I can get it done; the hard part is getting started. Usually I spend far more time thinking about what I’m going to do than I spend actually doing it.

I never turned in a third audio assignment, and at this point it looks like I never will. I kept waiting for a good idea to pop into my head, and it just never happened. It doesn’t help that this is an online class where all work is done on the computer, where there’s plenty of distractions.

At this point, I don’t have time for the last audio assignment, because I’m running up into another deadline: the video assignments. This one is going to really consume my time, especially considering how little I know about making videos. I’ve downloaded all the programs, and I’ve watched (and re-watched) Andy Rush’s tutorial, but it still all confuses me. But that isn’t even the main obstacle in my way at the moment.

Several months ago, my computer started messing up in weird, indescribable ways. After a week or so of this, I took it to Best Buy for help… only as soon as I tried to show them the problem, it started working fine. I took it back home, and it worked fine for a few days. Then it started messing up again. I knew I had an online class soon, so I was really worried about what to do. Then, almost the moment my ds106 class began, the problem went away again. And it didn’t come back; presumably, it was gone for good.

Four weeks later, it’s finally back. And it’s really crippling. Even writing this is difficult – my computer keeps stopping me in order to tab forward infinite times. You’d think my tab key is stuck, except that 1. the problem keeps coming and going sporadically, and 2. the tab key doesn’t even work. Not most of the time. There’s definitely something wrong with it, and it’s probably related to the problem, but it’s not as simple as a stuck key. If only it were.

So I have no idea if I’ll actually be able to make two videos on time, since not only do I have to wait for my computer to stop being a jerk, I have to learn the software from scratch as well. And it doesn’t help that I’ve been procrastinating like crazy on that second part, due in part to letting the confusion basically paralyze me. For now, I guess you could call this a progress report of some kind.