Thursday, July 29, 2004
Breakfast at the hospital cafeteria. Migrated Trillian settings, set up printer on the new computer, set up new computer on UPS, reworked computer names so things are back to normal. Investigated "unsafe expressions" error for James. Paid a bill for Patrick. Sent the following e-mail: "Chris and Rodney, Today I figured out a problem which Chris told me you both ran into earlier, and I thought my explanation of it was correct at the time, but today I happened to figured out what the real answer is. In the attached jpeg, the left half is a screen snapshot taken with ClearType on and the right half is the same thing with ClearType off. When ClearType is on, it creates a noisy halo effect around the letters which ruins the screen snapshot. So, whenever you're taking screen snapshots, temporarily turn off ClearType: Start > Control Panel > Display > Appearance > Effects and set "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts" to Standard instead of ClearType. ClearType is very useful otherwise, so remember to turn it back on when you're done. Frank" This issue doesn't appear to be documented anywhere on the Web. Reviewed and sent feedback regarding the UCSF-Dell site where entering students can buy preconfigured computers that meet our computer requirements. The URL for the site that Dell built for us was 324 characters long. Set up the new keyboard that came with my new computer. Scanned in the plastic bag that my Dell keyboard came in. It has really interesting universal symbols to indicate the danger of suffocating from a plastic bag. I think I'm going to make a t-shirt out of one or both of them. I have a fascination with universal symbols because they intend to communicate so much with so little without language and I find it interesting to observe which designs do and don't work. It's also amusing to think that some people thought some awful designs would work. School Plan Web work for Susie. Priced Windows Server 2003 training. Lunch: chicken quesadilla from the cafeteria. Dinner at home with Patrick: bowtie pasta in pesto with chicken and sausage, French bread with olive oil and garlic. Rented Raiders of the Lost Ark on DVD, then watched it. It was very confusing how to run the DVD extras, something about how you had to go to the Web site, so we put it away for figuring out possibly tomorrow or Saturday. Why did they make it such extra work just to see DVD extras? During the movie we had popcorn and black cherry Kool Aid with fresh cherries.