Friday, June 2, 2006

Breakfast: yogurt, an orange. Created a new account in Active Directory for our new admissions assistant. Installed Microsoft Updates. Genuine Advantage update failed to install the first time—restarting Windows fixed it. Installed Demoshield 8, which has been generously provided by Kirk at the library. Helped Polly with arranging Excel spreadsheet charts in a Word document. Helped Joel install Firefox 1.5.0.4 for his Mac laptop. Minor web page updates for James and Joel. Lunch with Joel at Burgermeister. Medicare Part D video work—gave up trying to get captions to work with QuickTime. I'm certain the problem was with the SMIL file, but Jeremy and I could not figure out what the problem was. Very frustrating. Minor VPN web page updates for Rick and John. Lunch with Joel at Burgermeister. We caught the train right when it arrived and right when it left, so round trip it was 40 minutes including eating time—the fastest Cole Valley lunch hop ever! We really enjoy the quality burgers and friendly service at Burgermeister. Today we got the lunch special, as we usually do: $6.50 gets you a Niman ranch cheeseburger with fries and a bottomless soda—an excellent lunch deal in San Francisco. Dinner at home with Patrick: chicken soup. Patrick has caught the cold I had for the past week, lots of sniffling from him today. Lately I've been spending awful amounts of money trying to find clothes that fit me better. I have two stories to tell. I spent $11.95 before tax at Nordstrom's on a pair of Thorlo dress socks (thorlo.com) which say they fit shoe size 6.5 to 8.5. The front of the packaging has a white man in a business suit on it but you only see him from the waist up—apparently I'll look more like him if I wear Thurlos. Not for a single second did I believe these words on the back side of the packaging: "Thorlo's patented padding system transfers the shearing forces that normally occur within the foot's skin tissues to Thorlo's exclusive THOR*LON(R) yarns. This reduces blisters, calluses and foot fatigue." In reality, to me, this means: we added a bunch of yarn in certain spots to provide extra padding. However, the socks fit me perfectly, as my shoe size is exactly 8.5. This rather expensively solves my sizing problem for dress socks, but not for undress socks since I have never seen casual or athletic men's socks in sizes smaller than "9 to 11." My foot won't fit the largest of boy's sock sizes since I'm off the shoe scale for kids, and anyhow I haven't found boy's socks in black—only white—and I prefer wearing black socks with nearly all my outfits. The shoe and sock industries are also really screwed up in a couple of ways. First, kids shoe sizes go like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 1, 2, 3. I'll continue this tomorrow since Patrick is bugging me to start the movie. Briefly stopped in on the neighbors' house party. Dinner at home with Patrick: Patrick made homemade chicken orzo soup—yum! Watched X-Men 2 on DVD with Patrick.