Friday, August 23, 2002

Cindy took the office staff up to the 9th floor of Medical Sciences to see some office space that we might be able to move into next year. It looked very cramped because there were people still in there and they had tons and tons of filing cabinets stacked against the wall. We all came away feeling that what we saw was much, much worse than what we have now. Cindy thinks we're getting no more than say 10% more space, but if we move, we'll get new furniture and I think that will make a big difference. Once Cindy gets me measurements, I'm gonna map the space out in Illustrator to see how we can work it. Replaced a keyboard for Ena. Installed Real One Player and PharmAdMIT 4.0 for Ena. Couldn't move Chris's computer to his new office because the painters had only begun painting today, Deborah Petrie told me. Made changes to the application download page to clarify that our form is not an electronic fill-in form—applicants must print out the forms and fill them in by hand. Made a lot of progress on the mail server: finished installing qmail, daemontools, fastforward, dot-forward, and Courier IMAP. It still amazes me that Linux advocates even believe Linux is going anywhere after today's activities. You can find forums where people say qmail is very easy to install, but then you go to install it and it's really several hundred steps and you're following about 12 different people's installation instructions because none of them explain every detail clearly—even the qmail author's—and you begin to wonder how old (and out-of-date) some of them are. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftover chicken from La Note with fried okra and rosemary bread. I took a nap at 8:30 PM because we were planning to go to Glenn's birthday party at End Up. Patrick said, "No, I'll stay up—I can't nap." Within about 15 minutes, he was in bed beside me, and in my going-to-sleepness I mumbled, "set the alarm." We both knew we had to get up at 9:30 PM to make it to the party. I woke up at 11:00 PM and Patrick was sound asleep. This procedure of taking a nap with the intention of going out later has deceived us many times, but it's never pleasant to be falling asleep at a party, as has happened to me on many occasions. Unable to go back to bed, I stayed up until about 4:00 AM catching up on e-mail and reading things on the Web.