Friday, February 4, 2005
Patrick says he got only about 3 hours of sleep last night due to lots of waking up coughing. Joe's Os with sliced banana. Went in early because of our domain migration. Checked with Cindy that her computer is working properly with the new domain. A server is down; I notified the admin. Updated current students calendar for student L.S. Updated a PID page for Joel. Turns out everyone logged in to the new domain okay, so the domain migration went very well—many thanks to Kraig K. Got a sweet thank you card from student N.S. Retrospect failed for James's computer, so I resolved the problem (Windows Firewall had somehow gotten turned on, so I turned it off) and ran a backup for his computer only. Helped Cindy resolve a problem in which Word 2003 spell check wouldn't work—we'd run spell check and Word wouldn't find obviously misspelled words like "appplicant." I found the answer on wtonline.vitalnews.com in Tip #0533. Lunch: Joel and I went to the cafeteria. He got a salad, but then ditched it when he found that the bin holding chicken breast meat was empty. We both got sandwiches instead. I also had a disappointing bowl of Annie Chun's Udon Soup FreshPak(TM) Noodle Bowl with tofu and spinach. I should have known better. The package promises that it's "quick and easy" and that it's a "restaurant-quality meal" and "great tasting" and that it has "noodles that taste fresh made" but they're all blatant lies. The so-called "tofu" is green (???) and has the flavor and consistency of a kitchen sponge. My favorite test is to make the meal as described on the package, then hold up the package photo next to your meal—do they look the same? Is it even close? No. Annie Chun is forever a liar in my book, if she's even a real person at all. Pfllttt! I'll have to have a word with that guy Joe I traded money with to get the noodle bowls. At some point during the day the fire alarm went off. I grabbed the data safe and snagged last night's cartridge out of the server just in case, and the whole office wormed down the stairs to Saunders Court to wait. We all had forgotten the emergency backpacks which Cindy had gotten for everyone a while back. Each backpack contains an energy bar and a liter of bottled water and a flashlight and the emergency flipchart with various instructions for fire, earthquake, chemical spill, nuclear war, and so forth. No fire or explosions, and we were let back in the building after about 15 or 20 minutes. Distributed the e-mail to collect preferred names for P3 students, and resolved various preferred name issues that have started to come in. E-mail migration web page edits, including making a new graphic in Photoshop showing an example login screen. Helped Sarah Ball with retrieving documents which were formerly in our alumni section—she's been tasked to migrate them to a new site. Career section URL fixing for Naledi Saul. Fixed Cindy's computer to not start Radio@Netscape automatically at her request. Dinner at home: I made a sage and thyme pork chop with a side of garlic spinach and some naan. Patrick has been eating radishes and cold medicines. He said today that all his skin was achy. I thought he meant his muscles, but no, he insisted it was his skin! We watched a Simpsons episode before bed. My nose is a little runny. Did I pick up Patrick's cold? I made a joke today while consoling Patrick over chat: Why does Lysol recommend that you buy 2 cans at a time? So that when you're done using one can, you can use the other to disinfect it! God, what a brilliant waste of money. I finally take time today to try to figure out why IntelliSync for Yahoo! is failing to synch my Outlook with Yahoo!. On January 20, I started getting lots of Error 4198.4198. The first occurrence was in line 161 of olk_Export.cpp and it was preceded by Error 0xf629b269.-165039511.30063 at line 654 of pumapis.cpp. Did a clean reinstall and now it's working fine except every now and then it cannot log in to Yahoo! but if I wait a few seconds and try it again (no changes) it works fine. Patrick had wanted to attend the Lillian Faderman reading tonight at A Different Light, but being sick there was simply no way he could make it.