December 15th - Today's the Day... Concluded

After an intense wait, and not hearing from our group mate Tish until just a few minutes before the official start of our exam period, we finally got the relief of seeing our magazine for the first time that morning. It was well past 1 o'clock at this point, and all other presentations were coming to a close with everyone seemingly anxious to see us present so they could start their vacation. It was an unbelievable morning for me to say the least, and while I quite literally can’t recall myself ever being caught in such a clench of a situation during the whole of my academic career, things worked out quite ok at the end. 

Our classmates did a great job presenting the material associated with their magazine, and it was obvious that all of us were familiar with our end product and content to an extent that required almost no notes or cues. It really was nice to see everyone maintaining such a high level of eye contact and commitment to their presentations. While some last minute realizations on the missing of some of my content in the final magazine led us to make some quick improvisations on our presentation, we managed to coordinate the use of pc and projection stand effectively. I have to say though that when I realized my creative element was nowhere to be found in the magazine, I did start to panic, which left me feeling quite guilty as Ms Newsam had to remind us to remain quiet and attentive during the presentations of others.  After all of us had gone on to present, I felt that the class concluded on a very positive note, which probably had much to do with Ms Newsam’s joyful announcement that she was indeed pregnant. I for one had not considered that to possibly be the reason for her absences at all , but we all know us men can be very oblivious to these types of things, as many of my classmates had been expecting this for some time it seemed. 

I’m glad to see how things turned out, happy with my progress though out this class, and definitely happy for Ms Newsam. With the fifteenth of December, our English 102 class has ended, and I can honestly say that while it was my hardest class this semester, it was also one of my most enlightening, a combination that often goes together in life.

December 15th - Today's the Day

Today marks the day of our final magazine presentation, and our complete magazine is due and to be handed in today at noon. The way this day was supposed to go was that I and my two team members, Amber and Tish where to meet up and review our project one last time, possibly discussing our presentation and making sure everything is in order. All of this was supposed to start this morning at 9:30, yet I find myself sitting here with Amber, at 11:20am, waiting for Tish who has our project. She however has not responded to any phone calls, messages, emails and face book comments at all today. Amber and I are in a situation of absolute disbelief, we're sitting here literally without option, we have no project to hand in or present, we have nothing without Tish showing up, and that is driving me insane just thinking about the idea that I will surely fail this course without completing this project. I don’t want to make any assumptions on where Tish might be, I really hope she has some kind of valid excuse for not answering any of our calls or messages. To leave your team members hanging for a final project of this weight, and leaving them without any hint as to where you might be, or what might have happened that you cannot respond is something I could never in my life do. I have honestly never been faced with a situation like this in my entire educational career, and right now it seems as though I will not see a happy end in this dilemma, all the work for this could have been for nothing...

December 13th - Magazine in its Final Stages

With meeting in the library until late into the night, and working countless hours at home creating, shaping and finalizing texts and images it seems that we are finally concluding the work on our magazine project. We had gone though many different versions and considerations while creating this project, and it seems that we have such a volume of visual and textual media that we could create a few different versions of this magazine at the moment. While the bulk of our text has been finalized to a point where we have narrowed it down to its best so to speak, we find ourselves with 2 extremely nice cover pages as well as table of content designs, along with several extra creative elements and ideas. 

The only problem with such a nice accumulation of media is that a team can be differing in their opinions on which to use, and so while I would have liked to change a few of the designs we used, I do realize that in a team effort there have to be sacrifices in the compiling of information to a final product. After all the hard work on this project however, I am quite proud of our finished magazine, and I look forward to presenting it soon. My team mates Amber and Tish have definitely been helpful, and both of them have been very committed to the project. Me and Amber especially were able to correlate a lot on our work, and often ended up emailing each other back and forth, drafting away at things like our creative elements to generate something we would all agree was worthy of being in our magazine.

While we still need to think about the presenting of our material, I feel as though with a finished magazine we should have no problem finding 15 minutes worth of presentation in our content. With that our project has been finalized, and we have just the final exam period on the 15th to worry about, which will hopefully go as smooth as most of the progress on this magazine.

With that, i will leave with a sneak peak at one of our alternative designs for a table of contents, created by yours truly.