Thursday, February 10, 2005
Usual breakfast at the cafeteria. Pulled a list of past year graduates for Cindy. Today Joel sent me an e-mail saying: "Have you seen this? http://maps.google.com/"—no, I hadn't, and a tip of the hat to Joel for finding this before I did! Worked on cleaning up symlink problems with Julie. Quick salad lunch from the cafeteria. Town Hall Meeting for CSCs and admins about the Exchange migration. CSC meeting followed. Sat and chatted with Christine and Rodney. Wrangled with rsync and MySQL to permit syncing from the new staging server to the old live server. Didn't get to work on the how to choose a password section like I thought. Snack: a banana. Made my e-mail migration web pages live. Listserv update for a student organization. Answered a question from a student about the migration. Dinner at Banana Island (650-756-6868, 311 Lake Merced Blvd, Daly City) with Patrick: roti canai, half Hainanese chicken, coconut rice, fried pearl noodle: about $25 before a $5.00 tip. It was our first time dining here. Patrick said it was weird for him because he used to work in this restaurant when it was Appleby's. Neither of us had had roti canai before. It's a bread product, and I don't know how they make it, but it's delicious. Parts are very crispy and paper-thin and other parts are chewier and thicker like naan. It comes with a curry dipping sauce which has a little bit of chili oil, but I was able to withstand it. We got 2 bonus potatoes in the curry bowl that we didn't know we were gonna get. All the food was delicious, and the service was very polite and attentive. More than one waiter kept trying to take our order, which confused me at first, but that's their regular routine, it seems. The menu is overwhelming because there are so many choices and because there are photos of some but not all the dishes. The menu could be improved by mirroring the chili pepper hot and spicy indicators next to the photos instead of just next to the line of text describing the item and the price. Or, make it all pictures. It was tedious to look at a picture, see the number next to the picture, find the number in the text listing nearby, then read the text. Just make the menu all pictures and put the text and the chili pepper indicators right next to the photos. We ordered in stages because it was so hard to decide, and all told it took us about 15 minutes. More than one server helped us, but our receipt said "Simon." After dinner we shopped at Trader Joe's, finishing just before they closed. Home. Put away groceries. Watched Simpsons: Bart Gets An F. No medical knowledgebase I could find seems to know that dyshidrosis (aka pompholyx or dyshidrotic eczema) can also be caused by shoelaces or plastic rings on certain easy-open containers like half-gallons of orange juice or soy milk. Quaker oatmeal also has an easy-open plastic ring that is similar and causes similar problems. Any kind of pulling on an object where relatively great force is applied to parts of the skin can do it, but shoelaces and plastic rings are more common than others, and the fingers are the most likely site for this particular cause since people use their hands every single day. I believe this happens because it causes deep-lying blisters to be disturbed, which begins the cycle of itching and blisters worsening. Were these deep-lying blisters left alone, they would not be problematic, but a single action of tying shoelaces or opening a beverage container can set it off. Workarounds: don't pull too tightly when tying shoes, and use a bunched-up cloth or a potholder to grasp the plastic ring before pulling.