Wednesday, August 10, 2005

I'm up to my ears in computers requiring brain surgery, and it's stressing me out. Most of my day was spent going back and forth among different computers needing Win XP set up. Chris's laptop has been acting very unreasonably ever since I activated encrypted folders in Windows XP SP2. Things no longer install properly, anti-virus stopped working, the computer started responding really slowly. Eventually I could not get it to log in with networking at all—only Safe Mode as local admin would work. I'm very disappointed with the encrypted folders feature in Windows. It has been touted as simple and effective, but I'll never use it again because it essentially destroyed this machine. We're lucky we have 2 levels of backup for it. This was particularly painful because I thought I was doing good when I encrypted the folders. Fortunately, Chris doesn't seem to mind as much as I thought he would. I guess he feels secure in the BounceBack backup device we have. Debrah's computer has been backed up and needs to be wiped clean before a new person comes in to fill the position she had left. I'm also setting up an entire workstation just so that it can run Outlook 24/7 as a delegate to automatically accept meeting requests for resource accounts. I'm really quite surprised that the Microsoft Exchange team couldn't include a better solution with their product. Joel's computer might need brainwashing too because it has a problem with IE that can't be fixed any other way. (No uninstaller makes it a little hard to perform maintenance on it.) And my own work computer—I think I've mentioned this before—has been refusing to accept cookies even though I tell it to (and it indicates it will accept them). Helped Uerica W with Macromedia Dreamweaver today. It's DW MX 2004 which I've never used before but I found the interface incredibly difficult to use. I probably need to view the tour and tutorial they provide, but I was really quite annoyed at the wysiNwygness of it. We also ran across a problem in which it would upload files but then set the permissions to really bizarre settings, sometimes removing write access for the owner—WTF? I couldn't figure that out at all. umask was set correctly for the account and there was no way I could find within Dreamweaver to see permissions of files before or after uploading. The answer might be in documentation but I just didn't have time to go do that while I had a student anxious to put a site online. Students really probably need something simpler—possibly Macromedia Contribute—and some simple templates. Browsed at the new Cost Plus in Daly City. Now I know where to go when I want to make a really expensive gift basket of cute miniaturized gourmet foods. Grocery shopping at Trader Joe's (cute checker guy and bagger guy today). Dinner at home with Patrick: bagel sandwiches with swiss and roast turkey and organic greens salad mix as lettuce. Reformatted the Mac Mini to get rid of the problems I had yesterday. Web server is down again.