Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Yesterday's report of the death of my keyboard was greatly exaggerated. However, for a while it was a bit of a scare. Today is my telecommute day, and without a working keyboard bits don't move. I don't normally store a backup keyboard at home like I do at the office in case of such a problem—maybe it's time to start? I knew something was strange because my mouse still worked. Everything is hooked up to a KVM, which can complicate troubleshooting, but I knew somehow that my keyboard couldn't have simply stopped working for real. To fix the problem, I simply unplugged it and plugged it back in. I am told that normally you don't want to do this when the computer is on (it's a PS/2 keyboard) but my OS X Mac Mini login screen gave me no obvious way to shut down the computer using only the mouse, so it was either that or force-power-down by holding the on-off button on back (which I tried but did not resolve the keyboard problem). I also tried resetting the KVM, a Belkin OmniView SE 4-Port. I suppose I could have force-powered-down and then unplugged and replugged the keyboard, but nothing bad happened. My keyboard is ancient—a Cirque Glidepoint Wave Keyboard 2. If this one died, my first choice in keyboard hardware is Microsoft—because of reliability, robustness, and quality of materials and finish. They never put all the keyboard features I want in the right combinations, and I've always thought their hardware website made it really hard to choose from all their choices, but at any given time I know that at least one of their keyboards will be satisfying to me. It's really frustrating to shop for keyboards on Microsoft's website and not be able to see a closeup of the keyboard layout. I must have the 6 key on the right side of a split keyboard (as is the case with the no-longer-available Cirque Wave Keyboard 2), and I believe Microsoft split keyboards always have the 6 key on the left side instead, even though I've specifically sent them feedback asking them to put the 6 key on both sides (among other things). Consequently, none of the Microsoft split keyboards will make me happy, but I know I can fall back to a lower level of happiness with one of their non-split keyboards. I never buy Logitech keyboards anymore because long ago they designed their drivers to also install lots of marketing crap—things like special keys on the keyboard to take you to Logitech's shopping website and stuff I considered adware or spyware. The only way I'll consider Logitech today is if a trusted friend says they are really happy with a Logitech keyboard or mouse and I can confirm that the marketing nonsense is gone. Just now I found the settings in the Accounts system preferences to show the shutdown and restart options at the login window; I had turned them off for security reasons to protect me from myself! So now my keyboard works, but the mouse scroller no longer works in OS X. (See September 2006). I don't have a solution to this problem—sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and I can't control it. Started work. I'm preparing new web pages for our 2007-2008 academic calendar. Previously I've coded these pages by hand, but over the years I've realized that there's not too much variance—the dates change by one or two days but are otherwise mostly the same. So this time I'm coding the dates so that everything is controlled from a single file and that dates are relative instead of fixed. For example, instead of coding that the first day of fall quarter starts on September 14, 2006 and then September 13, 2007 and then September 18, 2008, I'm coding it so that it is specified as always being the second Thursday of September. This doesn't work for 2008, as September 18 is the third Thursday in September that year, but at least this will be the default, and we can more easily and accurately change everything from a single file than we can across several different web pages. This date handling is tricky only in the sense that you have to understand how to get what you want from PHP's mktime, strtotime, and other date functions. In the middle of work, Tina called to check on our travel arrangements and to remind us to bring a long-sleeve black or white t-shirt. Jenny's call interrupted ours—she had some news that their friend Julie with whom they worked at Stars together had passed away this morning from cancer. I remember Julie as always having a lively spirit and a commanding chef's presence in the kitchen. She will be missed dearly. Spent most of the day coding calendar pages through 2010. Lunch at home by myself: turkey burgers. Vacuumed, cleaned, and tidied the apartment. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers.