Monday, November 20, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Everyone had trouble accessing the server when I arrived at work. The server had done an automatic restart because of Windows Updates and since I took out the REV drive last week it stalled during boot because of CMOS settings. I started the server then at the end of the day revised the CMOS settings. Did surgery (Win XP repair) on Steaven's computer because it wouldn't start properly—it was stuck in a loop of Microsoft apologizing for the inconvenience. Surgery was successful—remember the tip: use the 2nd repair option, not the first, and all will go well. (I feel a little like Indiana Jones in the 3rd film.) Had to restore PharmAdMIT settings for PharmAdMIT users. Restored Stickies for Joel. Had to do validate the PharmAdMIT databases—one of the tables had gotten corrupted. Worked around a missing master password problem in PharmAdMIT for Scott by installing to one client and pointing it to the server's data. Posted a new news story for Susie, broke some pages due to the changes I'm making for the student database project, but I pulled out my backup tarballs and was able to easily restore and resolve within a few minutes. Got everything live and correct. Lunch with Joel at Ten. He had just seen the Dixie Chicks on Friday and watched the Lady Vols game against Arizona yesterday. Figured out what in my code was making our news pages display nothing—a change I had made to the breadcrumbs code in order to make it work with the student database project. Handled photo requests for student AV. Followup work with lecture recordings policy (Kevin, Joel). It's very quiet in the office this week, perhaps because we have Thursday and Friday off and perhaps because the quarter ends on Wednesday and then next week is finals week for our students. In the evening, Patrick and I got burgers, fries, onion rings, a chocolate peanut butter shake (Patrick) and iced tea (me) at Johnny Rocket's, about $30 after a $4 tip. I received a package from Chris and Nate today—a late birthday present with 2 books (wordless diagrams by Nigel Holmes, Lapsing Into a Comma by Bill Walsh) and 1 music cd (Michael Jackson's Thriller, Special Edition) from my Amazon wish list. I opened my gifts while waiting for our food at the restaurant. Thank you! Afterwards Patrick and I went to a showing of Almodovar's Volver at the Clay Theatre using passes that ynotswim had given to Ryan but Ryan later decided he couldn't use. The film was very good and we both enjoyed it a lot. Patrick meets with Simmone in the early morning every Tuesday and Thursday, so no more late nights on Monday and Wednesday for him—it's too much. Recently I started reading Dan Savage's Skipping Towards Gomorrah. Recently Patrick has been reading The Dragon's Village, an autobiographical novel of revolutionary China by Yuan-tsung Chen. We received D and C's wedding invitation today—it's beautiful, from the hand-lettered calligraphy address on the outside to the tiny, genuine seashell inside. I notice today that on one of my Windows computers Webroot Spy Sweeper doesn't stop running within the first couple of minutes after starting. We recently updated to version 3.1; I don't know if that has anything to do with it. I haven't seen this behavior on any of the computers at work so far.