Tuesday, October 7, 2003
Last night I dreamt I had to deliver newspapers by bicycle. I had to fold them up and put rubber bands around them. I created a huge pile of newspapers that was enormous—bigger than me, even. I don't remember doing the route, only the preparation for it.—Send out notifications to people who requested info on the MPH program when it became available. Put together a who's who list for Chris and Cindy (VPN). Link checking. Made changes to the pathway declaration page for Kristina. She reviewed them and I made the changes live. Weeded old, temporary files, filed others that needed filing. Helped Kristina with sorting and borders in Excel. Went up to MSB9 to chat with Steve and see how things were looking before the carpet installation tomorrow. Dinner at home with Patrick: shrimp salad, bread. Set up Patrick's computer with YahooPOPs, migrated his Yahoo! address book to Outlook. He's getting comfy with the changes. YahooPOPs took a long time to set up—I don't know why but it kept failing to send. Eventually I played "setup by guessing" and it started to work. I think it's silly it has SMTP disabled by default—maybe that and you have to restart it was what screwed it all up. Anyhow, it's working now. Patrick and I looked at photos that my bro-in-law Rob sent from cousin Corinna and Patrick's wedding this past Saturday. They're all great, and Corinna is nothing less than a princess in them all. Read about Travis's adventures hiking Half Dome—yikes! Modified my bookmarks page so that I can still access menus in IE6 with keyboard shortcuts. The accesskeys I put in for items on the page were getting in the way, I realized. Added links to Chris De Lay's and Travis Wise's blogs. Patrick has had his Oyster set up for a few weeks now and already I can see his posture improving. The Oyster is a device that you insert your laptop into and the laptop stands up so that the screen is at eye level. You add a mouse and keyboard and whammo! you have a much more ergonomically correct computing environment. The keyboard and mouse is some Microsoft combination. The only problem is that the mouse light seems to blink all the time—a common complaint on message boards. So we may eventually need to replace the mouse—we'll see. Anyhow, the Oyster we highly recommend. It's $150, but that's a lot cheaper than back surgery, I figure, and that's really what caused me to say, "Stop the madness!" In the past month, Patrick also joined the Asian Art Museum as a charter member at the student rate. $40 gets both him and me free admission and a bunch of other discounts I can't remember, which is great because he's very interested in Asian cultures and they frequently have special events and performances. A week or so ago Patrick went there to see a performance of Beijing Opera by people from China. The membership card is plastic like a credit card and has, of course, art on it—a Japanese wall panel of Mount Fuji, clouds, mountains, and trees—very stylish. "Chatted" in live e-mails with Joel W. Gonzales about his grandmother and Courtney Love. Caught up on old e-mails (but I'm still behind). Got an invite from Michael Smith to a Halloween party—cool! Ran across something in Google Images that made both me and Patrick laugh outloud: the name of a band called Shirley Temple of Doom (see shirleytempleofdoom.com). We were looking for one of the dresses that Kate Capshaw wore in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to see how closely it resembled one of Corinna's dresses on her wedding day. It wasn't that close of a match—they were both red but that's about it.