Thursday, April 27, 2006
Announced Lodestar Issue 17. Breakfast: an orange, a banana, oatmeal. Minor web updates for Cindy and James. Updated a student org listserv for a student. Lunch: turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, dinner roll, roasted vegetables. Chatted with Joel about entering student issues: Yahoo! forum, entering students page. Lots of Medicare Part D work today: HTML transcript page, PowerPoint to PDF conversions, tested Jeremy's SMIL file, print templates for forthcoming translated Q and A documents (Russian, Spanish, Chinese). Archived web archives to cdrom. Played with Google SketchUp in Google Earth today after reading about it on Slashdot—it's really cool and interesting. I haven't looked at SketchUp yet, but the playback is certainly impressive. It makes me wish I could control Google Earth using better input devices than a keyboard and mouse. I still recall when Adobe purchased some smaller company, rebranded their software, and then rereleased it as Adobe Atmosphere before I left in 2000—they thought they were going to revolutionize and/or control the authoring of virtual environments, but I haven't heard anything about Atmosphere since. This evening while browsing Flickr I stumbled across the naughty profile of someone I know. I stayed up late uploading and organizing photos on Flickr. On the bus home today a woman named Madeleine introduced herself to me and we chatted for a while. She has been working at UCSF for 6 years and she was friendly and nice to talk to.