Wednesday, November 8, 2006

A person I spoke with at the California DMV today said essentially that the reason they send driver's license renewals so many months in advance (I believe it was 3 for me) is that it takes that long to process them. Since the renewal form didn't say "IMPORTANT BUREAUCRACY WARNING: WILL TAKE 3 MONTHS TO PROCESS," I had no way of knowing this, and not wanting to give the government my money 3 months in advance of when they were supposed to have it, I waited until about 3 or 4 weeks in advance to send my payment, which I realize now was a mistake since I'm no longer legally permitted to drive after my birthday until my renewal arrives in the mail. When I returned to California in 2000 after living in Seattle for 7 years I remembered enough from my childhood to know that one should deal with the DMV only when necessary and that you essentially need to make extra concessions for that agency because it is so inefficient and bureaucratic—perhaps more so than other government agencies. One cannot hold the DMV to realistic expectations of service, and this is no exception. Fortunately, I don't need to drive very often, so I don't think this will present much of a problem. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Student laptop virus removal work where I solved the puzzling problem of Sophos Anti-Virus failing to install. The problem was really strange—the beginning of the installation proceeded normally, but near the end the progress indicator ran backwards and then the installer appeared to finish but Sophos was not installed, and I knew because the Sophos blue shield did not appear in the system tray as expected. I restarted, then ran McAfee Stinger which found and removed a variant of sdbot. Restart again and now Sophos is able to install successfully. Restart again and run a full scan in Sophos and it finds and removes two more viruses. Restart again, turn off System Restore. Restart again, turn on System Restore. Run a full scan in Sophos and it's clean. Run a full scan in Webroot Spy Sweeper—it finds and quarantines a bunch of registry keys. There appears to be no way to delete them from the quarantine—the checkboxes are grayed out. Restart, run full scans in Sophos and Spy Sweeper—it's as clean as can be now. Today Esther showed me her secret blog and subsequently asked me to not read it. Lunch with Patrick at Hahn's Hibachi. I think I've only been here twice before. Once Joel and I ate here and there were huge, bothersome flies in the window next to where we ate. The window is really big and it looks right out onto the sidewalk, so it's nice, but the flies caused us to not return for years. The other time I also came with Joel and we were seated at a table (or maybe we sat ourselves after no one greeted us) and waited perhaps 5 or 10 minutes and no one came by to give us menus or take our order or anything so we got up and left. Today Patrick and I had a similar experience—the place is so small that there is no greeter so eventually I picked up 2 menus and we essentially sat ourselves at a clean table. There were no flies today, and service was better than before, but the food was only okay. The BBQ chicken was good, but the BBQ beef (cow) had gristle along the edge—Joel would have hated it, and I actually did. Flickr work. Student database work. Applications training for Scott. Showed Chris Parallels. Home. Dinner at home with Patrick: pasta with red sauce. Afterwards, we watched funny things on YouTube.