Monday, July 11, 2005
Pre-breakfast: a banana. On the bus today, an unusual thing happened. I got on the bus and it was empty, except for the driver, of course. Not a single person got on the entire run. I had heard the 8:30 AM bus show up at 8:40 AM so maybe that's why—the busses were too close together or something. Today I threw a box of 3.5-inch floppy diskettes into the recycling bin. These were, I believe, the last floppies I owned at home. I hadn't touched them in years, so it felt good to finally say goodbye to the archaic things. Usual breakfast at the cafeteria. Yesterday I installed Google Desktop at home primarily because Outlook's Find Message feature is so powerful as to be unusable. I'm hoping Google Desktop will enable me to type in a keyword and let me sort through a results list, narrowing further if needed. Installed Google Desktop at work today. I'm pleasantly surprised that they created an enterprise version of it. If it works out well, I might deploy it for our entire office as well. Migrated Joel from itsa to Exchange e-mail. His computer has the same problem mine does at home: The error message "Cannot start the reminder service. Unable to show reminders." appears when starting Microsoft Outlook 2003. Lunch: Unexpectedly, Ena brought nachos and Joel brought Nebraska's Cream of Tortilla con Pollo soup—yummy! Prepped Cindy's and James's computers for e-mail migration. Migrated Kristina from itsa to Exchange e-mail. Home. On the bus home, only one other person was on the bus. Dinner at home with Patrick: cheese ravioli in vegetable marinara sauce, toast with butter. Recently we installed Winamp 5 so that we could get the ml_ipod plugin to work. I hadn't trusted Winamp 5 for the longest time because when I first used it it would crash or freeze when playing some Shoutcast streams. However, this installation seems very stable, and we've discovered a whole library of music videos which we can watch on demand. We watched Diana Krall, Al Green, Dido. We watched several videos of Madonna's live performance at the recent Live 8 concert in London. The quality ain't great, but it's free, the sound isn't bad, and it's on demand—all a worthwhile tradeoff. Watched 3 Simpsons episodes, 2 recorded, 1 live. I accidentally used the feature that pauses live TV for the first time—it's kinda neat but I kept wanting it to take me into the future (past commercials) instead of only the past or the frozen present. Set up a free Flickr account so's I can see Chris's private photos (woo!).