Wednesday, August 28, 2002
Moved Chris's computer from our office to a nearby office. Set up the office computer he brought from home in our office. Sent e-mail to the developer of PharmAdMIT regarding problems with printing and Office XP and a separate problem regarding space characters in the installation location path. Set up a monitor and old SCSI Zip drive to be sent to surplus. Set up Chris's two computers to share a single folder on the server for all his documents. Accidentally broke one computer's network connection while editing the registry to resolve problems with a DLL that Windows was trying to load but shouldn't have loaded. Troubleshot a bad tape problem—ended up needing to trash the tape because the tape backup unit wouldn't read it anymore. Helped Joel resolve Meeting Maker and Palm syncing problems. Well, sort of. We ended up proving that sometimes it would properly synchronize banners and sometimes it wouldn't. We'd get an error known as "cannot translate HH record" and only a few web pages explained what this error meant. Meeting Maker's web site said, "This error is due to a record on the Palm that cannot be translated to meetingmaker. If the error happens while the datebook is syncing, it will most likely point to an event in the Palm datebook that does not have a start time or end time associated with it. If the error happens in the address book, it will most likely be an entry in the address book that uses non-standard characters. The other cause for this error is if there is some corruption in the user's data on the server. To repair the corruption, the meetingmaker admin must stop the server and use the MMRx utility to clean and repair the database." After trying many, many combinations and seeing inconsistent synchronization behaviors, Joel decided to get rid of the Palm Pilot because duplicate records made him crazy and not knowing whether a calendar item got synched also made him crazy. In other words, it didn't work like it was supposed to, and for that I don't blame him one bit. Who does Palm think he is? A soccer mom? Worked through lunch: leftovers from last night. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers. Patrick and I watched the extras from the Twister DVD. Fun to watch many of the scenes in slow motion or frame-by-frame. "The Making of Twister" and "Anatomy of a Twister" were not bad, just occasionally embarrassing, such as Jami Gertz, hands in the air, saying, "It's man versus nature!" Brian Kusler called at 10 PM and said (paraphrasing), "We're eating brownies and watching The Simpsons and it would be great if you were here. And Makiko is here, Brian and Eric are here, Jesse is here, Nina is here, and we didn't plan this at all but I thought you might want to know. Oh, and did I tell you we're eating brownies?" Patrick has his first quiz for Chinese class tomorrow, and I'm already yawning, so we can't go tho we appreciate the invitation. I started reading The Page Turner by David Leavitt today, and I like it. It's almost the opposite of Han Ong—less description, more dialogue and plot.