Monday, October 27, 2003
Abs workout. Went to work early to meet with Cindy and the Cabinetmaker. Got details discussed—a good meeting. Set up K9 for Ena and me, gave Ena instructions on how to use it. Tried to work on the student directory on the web project putting in custom breadcrumbs but the network has been having problems today. Our e-mail went dead around 9:45 am—connections timed out or immediately came back with errors—unable to connect. And I couldn't connect to our remote servers for the directory project. Packed boxes for moving. Updated Sophos to the latest version on our server and all clients. Updated news and calendar. Added a bit of automation to the calendar using conditionals and mktime functions so that headings and items would disappear automatically after the event had passed. Got "relaying denied" errors after installing K9 but only on messages to our listserv server. Added "UsePOPSend=1" to my eudora.ini—that seemed to resolve it but I haven't yet gotten confirmation that the listserv server actually sees my messages. Decided, however, to not use K9 and try out Eudora 6.0 instead—fewer interfaces for people to deal with, and Eudora 6.0's spam filtering seems to have gotten good reviews. Reconfigured my computer and Ena's with Eudora 6.0. Dragged Joel to get our free flu shots—someone brilliant at UCSF decided to give all employees free flu shots. In the past employees had to pay. You'd think that an entire UC campus that focuses on medical science would just know that the cost of the flu shots is easily worth whatever possible employee downtime there might be from even a small percentage of its 17,000 faculty and staff getting the flu, but this is the first year I've been here it's been offered for free. The process was faster than I thought, and no confounding, bureaucratic paperwork either! Swept most of our computers for security issues: disabling Windows Messenger and Alerter services, verifying that Windows and Office updates had been installed, and checking that the latest build was installed for PharmAdMIT 2004. Met with Susie, discussed minor changes to the home page and Bob Day's request to include commencement speeches for graduation online. Locked up MSB9 for Cindy before I left work. Dinner at home with Patrick: lemon and dill shrimp over mini penne with shallots. Updated my Amazon wish list because Patrick bugged me to do so. "People have been asking," he says. My birthday is coming up on the 10th. I don't particularly like getting (or giving) gifts because I think American culture is too obsessed with gift-giving to the point that it's no longer a joy. For instance, I'd rather get nothing for my birthday and then 10 gifts randomly distributed throughout the year—each being truly a nice surprise. I still give gifts sometimes—tradition overlaps with politesse and courtesy. Got weird error messages while browsing belkin.com today: "Unexpected upstream server failure!" Sent my sister an e-mail with a bunch of tips on how to handle eczema. Finished a game of e-Scrabble with Patrick, Brian, and Kelly. Patrick won with 151 points. Edited my hosts file to add speed.pointroll.com and sublit.com. My ATM card wouldn't work today. I tried 3 different machines, but they were all Golden 1 Credit Union machines. Every one gave me a weird error message which I now can't remember.