Friday, February 3, 2006

Usual breakfast at the cafeteria except raisin bread instead of wheat and no orange juice. Regalia web form: working on the last piece now, checking to make sure it works gracefully with a browser that rejects cookies. Helped Chris with his Treo not synching as expected. When he attempts to sync, nothing happens for a long time (a minute or two) and then an error message appears. No errors in the error log on either the Treo or the computer. This sounded similar to the problems Joel was having, so I did Start > Run > outlook /cleanreminders and that fixed it. I bookmarked the web page describing the fix for Chris, told him what was going on, he's back in business now in about 5 minutes. Found instructions on the web provided by Charles Srisuwananukorn for configuring Outlook 2003 to defer (delay) all outgoing messages a certain number of minutes before sending. In Eudora, it was really easy to configure this. I didn't even know Outlook 2003 could do this, but I knew there must be a way. I needed this feature because lately I've composed messages and sent them and a second later I realized I forgot to include the attachments I talked about in the message. So embarrassing! Only problem: when you want to send something immediately, you can't. Maybe I can write a macro to work around this. We held a birthday party for Cindy. I made chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting topped with sugar crystals (a single color for each one) and a Mother's circus animal cookie. Joel made chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal raisin cookies wrapped festively in cellophane bags tied with red ribbon and decorated with colorful stickers. He also made a special package of cookies for Cindy to take home "to the men in her life." We talked about grocery stores, emergency room costs, KitchenAid mixers, how to frost cupcakes without crumbs getting in the frosting (answer: do a thin layer, let it harden some before putting another layer on—or—create a simple sugar glaze and do the same thing with that). I can't believe it—Joel voluntarily switched over to Firefox from Internet Explorer today. He was the only holdout in our office, and he had a pretty good reason: Bug 78510 (Link should become :visited color if URL is loaded in another window/tab/frame) which made Craigslist forums very unusable. Why did he switch? We determined that Internet Explorer was the reason he kept seeing his CPU usage jump and a long several-second delay almost every time he clicked a link in Yahoo! Mail. Closed IE, opened Firefox, tried the same thing, almost no delay, even without the AdBlock plug-in. (Joel prefers seeing ads.) Worked on adding Center for Gender Equity links to our current students page. Installed Netscape 8.1 for Lucia, who needed it because one of our UCSF websites she needs to log in to uses a plug-in that works only in Netscape. Sent user education e-mail to all students regarding computer viruses which fake e-mail headers.