Thursday, August 10, 2006

Usual oatmeal breakfast. I got so much done today at work. Packaged the loaner Dell laptop for return. City tours edits. Requested several new e-mail addresses. Helped a student with e-mail setup. Chatted with Susie. Student organization website followup. Filed for reimbursement of purchases. Met with other campus web people for our monthly lunch: Thom, Beth, John, Julie, David, and Julia. We went first to Nan King Road Bistro, but a construction crew was digging up the street right outside the door—too noisy. We went down the block to Sukhothai. I brought my camera but forgot to take photos. Reviewed the proof cdrom which came back from the duplicator. Burned and tested a new master cdrom. Delivered the new master to DMM. Archived data to DVD. Installed the Avocent SwitchView PC KVM which arrived today. It works! And the scroller works even on the Mac—I'm so happy. (The scroller doesn't work on my Mac at home using a Belkin KVM.) The SwitchView PC hot keys are slightly different than the Belkin I had before, but it's not a problem getting used to new keystrokes. Set up the other 3 computers to the KVM. Returned Cindy's borrowed keyboard back to her computer after setting up the KVM. Made live Part D web pages which feature the first text on our website in Spanish, Chinese, and Russian. Archived documents to PDF. Dinner at Subway by myself: roast cow with swiss sandwich on wheat. Coded some Lodestar works. Patrick and I watched Democracy TV and excised Star Wars clips that Chris had posted on his blog. Fun. A few days ago I received some bizarre error messages on the display of our Lexmark Color Optra 45 inkjet printer: "910 service carrier stall" and "939 service rip-eng comm." These error messages are essentially undefined on the web—they don't even appear anywhere on Lexmark's website. I did the only thing one can do: unplug the printer and then plug it back in after a few seconds. The problem occurred while printing a relatively simple document from InDesign CS. Other documents print properly, so it's either the one document or the single EPS file in it that's causing the problem. I spent about half an hour today calling mail order catalogs to have my name removed from mailing lists. One place asked why I was asking to be removed, and I responded with "global warming." Normally I don't get many catalogs, but recently some entity sold me out, and I got a treesworth all at once. Paper catalogs are sometimes useful to me, particularly when I'm doing really intense shopping (e.g., right after moving into a new place it's nice to have a paper IKEA catalog). So why can't there be a law that says catalog vendors must permit customers to specify the number of catalogs they want per year and then honor that request? It would be no different than raising emissions standards for gasoline-powered vehicles. Oh, right... Weight training: crunch, leg lift, bench press, lateral raise, bench fly.