Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Drove in to work since I have an errand to run after work and I'm having dinner at PhilDrewDanny's. Handled a lot of first-year student questions by e-mail. Made corrections to two listservs which I discovered were needed, reported the errors and fixes to Claire. Prepared and sent preferred e-mail address change requests for the first-year class. Repaired an access problem to computer files for James. Checked in with Robert H about handoff of student photos from his unit to me. Notified sysadmins to ensure accounts were active for a student who returned to our program after a leave of absence. Followed up with 4th-year student NN about a VPN problem report. Helped Ena find our current academic calendar. Updated and distributed our current list of students to our office staff. Set up the laptop for a presentation for Chris and Cindy. Loaded the laptop with a presentation for tomorrow for Joel. Followed up with Mark B about moving a late admit's AD object into the correct OU. Gave Susie and Bill S a heads up about Google Co-op. Notified first-year students of the deadline to notify me of preferred e-mail address change requests. Left work. Returned the HP LaserJet 1320 because I couldn't bear to troubleshoot a printer that failed to print even a test page new out of the box due to lights indicating Fatal Error. I was expecting to pay a restocking fee, but luckily I didn't have to and I got all my money back from Best Buy (which sold me a used printer as new in the first place). Dinner at Phil, Drew, and Danny's with Antuan visiting as well. Danny is back in San Francisco after having returned to Philadelphia for a while. For dinner we had a Vietnamese noodle dish—a specialty of the region in which it originated but I can't recall the name now (nor how to spell it). Afterwards I fell asleep for a few hours in the living room. Home. Checked feeds and e-mail. Microsoft made some announcements today about new mice and keyboards. Usually I'm very excited over these announcements since Microsoft has a great deal of influence over keyboard design across the entire computer keyboard industry, but I don't see a great deal of innovation that's going to be particularly useful or compelling to me. I never once asked for a keyboard to be as thin as a graham cracker, for instance. I don't see the point except that you can use it in a martial arts film as a surprising kind of thrown weapon. Keyboard manufacturers add multitudes of special keys like multimedia keys and special buttons to activate Favorites or e-mail, but I have talked to many people who have keyboards with these keys and they never, ever use them. They don't even know they exist even though they have them—honestly. I personally thought the old Microsoft Office Keyboard had a great idea in having dedicated buttons for Cut, Copy, Paste, Back, Forward, Reply, Fwd, Send, Save, Print, Undo, Redo, Alt+Tab, Alt+Shift+Tab. But by the time I thought I'd try it out it was already so old that I figured the drivers for it must not work well in XP so I never bought it, and Microsoft never released another keyboard with similar shortcut keys. For office users, I also think a (possibly oversized, possibly colored yellow or gold) key labelled "Lock" and/or with a lock icon which issued Windows+L to lock the workstation would be very useful—a more prominent reminder for office staff to protect confidential data, but somehow they'd have to determine if having Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock caused confusion. I wish the industry could deprecate the usage of some keys such as Print Screen and SysRq and Scroll Lock which I think are no longer very much used for what they were originally intended. For example, if the Scroll Lock key were deprecated and we instead had a new key called "Switch" to reflect the popularity of using KVMs for switching amonst multiple computers, I think it would be a lot more useful. Also, Print Screen rarely, if ever for anyone nowadays, prints the screen—it more frequently copies the screen to the clipboard, so "Copy Screen" would be a more appropriate label. Shift+CopyScreen (aka Shift+PrintScreen) could copy the screen to the clipboard and paste it into a new e-mail message, which would likely make life a lot easier for technical support people. Microsoft has the power to make these kinds of simple, inexpensive, and productive changes. Why not? Weight training: push up. Bed.