Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Breakfast: coffee. Prepped and made live new news stories for Susie. Worked on schedules. Snack: pretzels. Helped Chris with a mouse issue. Submitted various tickets to ITS. Chatted with Rodney about residents and entering students and Active Directory. Lunch: lunch bowl from Panda Express. They have new entrees now! I tried chicken breast in lemon ginger sauce and found it to be just as good as the other Panda Express entrees. My fortune: Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded. Completed schedule drafts, submitted them to Cindy for review. Prepared and submitted paperwork for reimbursement of things I bought for the office on my own credit card. Trained Stacey on PharmAdMIT, bringing up the ASSIST login screen, KeePass, and additional Firefox tips. Today I started using the Ctrl+Y keyboard shortcut in Outlook 2003 for Windows. Outlook 2003 doesn't have any keyboard shortcut to go quickly to Inbox, Sent Items, or Trash like Eudora does. Outlook does not provide a way to configure your own keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+Y followed by I followed by Enter is the fastest way I've been able to find to jump to my Inbox without setting up special third-party macro software. Reinstalled Acrobat for Stacey. I started reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown today. Got to chapter 2 on the bus ride to work—wow, what an opening! I think it's going to be a fun read. Dinner at Carl's Jr. with Patrick. We needed to catch a quick meal before seeing a film, and we weren't in the mood for a Subway sandwich. Patrick got a chicken burger and fries. I wanted the chicken salad but they were out so I got the taco salad instead. The meat in the taco salad was too spicy for me, but I ate some of it anyway. While we waited for our food, we noticed a sign advertising a breakfast hamburger which included a hamburger patty, bacon, cheese, hash browns, and egg all piled on a hamburger bun. Ugh! I like all those foods, but not all piled together and usually not all in one meal. The film we saw tonight was The Beautiful World, the story of a man's journey to find the mother and father who had left him with (we can only guess) an aunt at an early age. Tony had suggested this film, and Patrick, Peter, Galen and I went along, so it's ironic that he ended up disliking the film and the rest of us liked it. The film has a slow and steady pacing that I think feels very unusual to American audiences. Tony felt bored most of the film, but I found the change refreshing. I liked how—with the exception of Nick Nolte—I didn't feel like I was watching familiar Hollywood actors acting new roles. I felt like I was watching real people in a real story because it was like real big city life where you see an amazing diversity of people: beautiful, ugly, young, old, fat, skinny, rich, poor. There are a few plot elements that don't seem very realistic, and many of the peripheral characters are sterotypes, but the main players were really great, and I enjoyed this film for attempting to show a very large idea regarding the widespread and long-lasting effects that war has upon the humans who have survived it. At the end of the film, I felt kind of the same way I feel after an hour-long massage—relaxed, content, happy. Afterwards, Galen drove us all home—so sweet.