Monday, October 9, 2006
Polly had left a super nice thank you card, some Haribo Frogs, and some metal tokens of appreciation for me in my mailbox from Friday. Met with Susie. Updated a listserv for Claire. Set up an account for our temporary employee EF who started today. Lunch with Joel at CyBelle's Front Room. I figured out by happenstance today how to make Retrospect 6.5 show values for the Elapsed Days column in the Backup Report. In the previous version that someone else had set up before I took this job, I could see Elapsed Day values, which indicate how many days since the specified backup took place, which is very helpful for seeing at a glance how current all your backups are. When I installed 6.5 anew on Windows 2003 server, none of the Elapsed Day values would appear even though a column for it existed and since I could find no information about this on the web, I figured it was broken and I didn't want to deal with Retrospect support. (The last time I did, they kept nagging me about upgrading to a version with more features when we didn't need it. I can't remember how many times their salesperson called me back, and I didn't even have time to call him and say please stop calling me and leaving messages—it was so annoying!) Anyhow, to show the Elapsed Day values, open Reports > Backup Report. Select the Report Options button (Ctrl+E). Change Report Layout from Standard Format to Performance Data Format. Select OK. You should now see values in the Elapsed Days column. If you still don't, talk to Dantz or EMC or whoever owns Retrospect now, not me. Today, about 3 months after I passed my 5-year anniversary of working at UCSF, I received an e-mail message from Mike T in UCSF Human Resources saying: "Congratulations on reaching your five year service milestone with University of California San Francisco. This service award recognizes the time you have given to support the UCSF mission and our reputation for excellence. You will be receiving a five year service pin within four to six weeks via UPS to your home address from our vendor Herndon Recognition." The first thing that came to my mind was, "What, no sabbatical?" After working at Adobe for 5 years, instead of a pin, I got 3 weeks of paid sabbatical and an extra fancy gold and green roman numeral five paperweight with a personalized inscription. I miss those days. And it came as no surprise to me that the university takes over 4 months to have an outside agency send a pin which was probably created in a manufacturing plant in China which probably cost Herndon Recognition 15 cents to buy and they're probably charging the university something like US$14.00 for the pin and shipping and handling. Still, it's a paycheck. And I get to look forward to my 10-year mark service award which I believe is a ballpoint pen that has the UCSF logo stamped on it. Home. Processed photos, reviewed them with Patrick then uploaded to Flickr. Removed viruses. Night run: 45 minutes. Weight training: tricep kickback.