Friday, October 20, 2006
Morning run: 15 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Tried to stop in on Betty-ann's class to see the student response clickers she uses but it appeared everyone was taking exams so maybe the schedule was different today. Virus cleaning for a student laptop. Ogilvy meeting with Jeremiah H, Tara M, Helene, Marilyn, and Susie—a productive meeting. Helped Joel and Cindy set up for Ena's going away celebration in S-936. Cindy ordered (?) punch and brought cookies from Safeway. Everyone mentioned how she went crazy with the cookies—we had so many! Helped Esther set up a laptop in HSW303. Lunch with Patrick at Ten. Laptop setup for James at the fall adcomm meeting. Had trouble again with connecting to a Windows Server 2003 shared folder from OS X—got the error about deleting the alias or fixing the alias (neither of which help) from an alias which had worked in the past. I must have spent 15 or 20 minutes searching for a solution. And the most aggravating thing is that it was working in the past and nothing I know has changed except perhaps automatic security updates. I reinstalled the solution from last time (October 4, 2006), but I restarted and that did not fix it. The solution which finally worked was to type Command+K then type in CIFS://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of the server I was trying to reach. I don't know what CIFS is; I don't want to know what CIFS is. When that is entered, a dialog appeared listing all the shared folders on that server. I selected the one I needed and bam I was connected. Sometimes OS X doesn't just work the way I expect, and that really disappoints me. Reviewed dreamhost.com, the new recommended web hosting provider from the Ogilvy proposal, then suggested to the team that we probably don't need 500 GB of storage space and 5 TB of bandwidth for this project and that perhaps we can reduce our hosting costs by 87%. Archived documents. Minor Form E faq update. Said au revoir to Ena. She's going to work in a UCSF medical office at Mount Zion, I think it is the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center. Many, many students came by to say goodbye. She received a variety of flowers and small gifts, lots of well wishes and good lucks and we'll miss yous. I am sad that she's leaving, but after 8 years with the office she's doing what she feels she needs to do, and I wish her every success—she deserves it. Joel is about to take off on outreach—he'll be in and out of the office (mostly out) a lot the next couple of weeks. James is back today after 4 days of outreach. Today is Patrick's last day at Books, Inc. Although he liked some aspects of the job and he liked all but one of the people he worked with, he has decided to return to his writing and to his teaching which he liked a lot more. The Books, Inc. pay was not ideal and some of the advantages we thought he might have in the job (like making connections with other writers) turned out to not be what we thought. This evening he and Aaron (aka AJ) have a dress rehearsal for Halloween. They have both recently grown to love a television show called Little Britain. Patrick says it's not yet very popular here in the States. Patrick forced me to watch an episode, which I did not enjoy. It reminded me of Benny Hill, only cruder. At presumably great cost, Aaron rented women's costumes from the theatre (A.C.T., I believe) and he and Patrick plan to dress up for Halloween pretending (poorly) to be the two ladies from Little Britain. To ensure success, they have been watching and rewatching all the episodes, rehearsing lines from the skits they want to reenact, and so forth. We'll have photos and perhaps a movie in short order. Dinner at home by myself: leftovers from lunch. Weight training: push-up, crunch, lateral raise, bridge.