Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Windows and anti-virus updates on the shared office laptop. Created a very simple PDF for my presentation today. Did my computer services presentation at first-years orientation with Chris C. today. Got overwhelming and spontaneous applause when I said that I thought they had the finest Web site at UCSF. That was very nice; I wasn't expecting that kind of response. Burned more Mac cdroms. Chow mein in Cole Hall chatting with Joel and Cindy about how orientation was going and answering computer questions for people. Leftovers at desk: Caesar salad (which Patrick claimed wouldn't keep) and pasta with stir-fried vegetables. Worn out from the busy day, took a brief nap in the office. Patrick's wireless keyboard and mouse arrived today, and so did our fixed (?) combo drive from Samsung! Troubleshot why our nightly backups are taking longer than usual—seems to have been Internet Explorer temp files gunking up the works. Ran Disk Cleanup on my computer and Joel's—will see if that improves the situation tomorrow morning. Helped James with understanding sequential global search and replace steps to convert data into a more usable form. Got a bit further with his data problem, but we're still constrained by PharmAdMIT's limitations—we can't resolve it, so he's sending in a problem report. I'm so proud that he's doing complex problem reports like these on his own now. Uploaded a schedule change for Debrah. Converted Susan and Christie's new issue of School of Pharmacy News from Microsoft Word to PDF, edited the Web site accordingly, then uploaded the file. Needed to check my work calendar, so I attempted to log in only to discover that the redirect I had in place is no longer working—it redirects to http://pub.ucsf.edu/newsservices instead. Left an urgent message for Julie Bernstein, our server admin. I believe she's supposed to get paged when I do so. No response after a few minutes, and during that time I discovered that it's not just my one redirect—the entire site behaves that way (!) so I called her cellphone and found her imbibing at a noisy bar. Turns out this evening is when Bruce Levin and company decided to make their "there will be no downtime" adjustment to our server to accommodate Rob Duca's mail domain request for pharmacy.ucsf.edu. According to the conf file, the adjustment was made at 18:02 this evening. No one told me the change was taking place tonight. Julie suggested I reboot and that might fix it and that I can also check our site again in an hour or so. I can tell she empathizes with me, and I am helpless because I know this problem is essentially not her fault. Although the reboot-and-check suggestion doesn't make sense to me, at 9:44 PM, I hang up with Julie and I reboot both my computers and recheck at 9:46 PM—now instead of http://pub.ucsf.edu/newsservices I get "Cannot find server". More Lodestar edits. Pharmacy site still down as of 10:31 PM. Microsoft releases new mouse hardware today—ooh ahh an overpriced black leather mouse. Watch me roll my eyes. Is this our Microsoft attempting to intrude upon Apple's sense of fashion and style and high pricing? Tilt-wheel might be quite worthwhile, but not enough to justify ditching a working mouse. The redesigned mouse and keyboard Web site for Microsoft is awful—a huge step backward. It feels much slower to load—even over a very fast (1254 kbps) DSL connection—I'm guessing they added twice as many rollover graphics and accompanying Javascript to each page's download time. The helpful, interactive comparison chart is gone. The Office keyboard is gone. And there is no new trackball choice. You (still) can't see close-up photos of the keyboards. The 6 key on all of their split keyboards is still on the wrong side (and the Web site doesn't show that clearly or easily). You can only compare 3 items at a time whereas in the past you could compare all at the same time in a single, interactive chart. Pages now have "Get Prices and Buy" links, but it would be far more helpful to see the prices right on the page rather than to have to click each link separately to get each item's price. Yeesh! Way to not go, Web team! Couldn't easily find a way to send Microsoft my feedback. Just plain gave up! It was too hard to figure out how to just give them a simple opinion. One of Patrick's classmates (Toby?) gave him a Chinese calligraphy brush and well set from China. Patrick did a reading from "Where It Takes Us" and Q and A session on the business of publishing for a class of Bob Gluck's. In return, Bob gave him a bottle of Villa Teresa Prosecco Veneto—an Italian wine "Made from Organically Grown Grapes." Pharmacy site still down as of 11:25 PM. Gotta wake up early, so bedtime for me now at 11:26 PM.