Friday, November 30, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Overslept some and missed a meeting in the moring—rescheduled. Hardware inventory work. Eric Rick Rolled me today, but he didn't know you were supposed to disguise the link. I didn't know about rick rolling before this, but—of course—it's on wikipedia. Investigated how to get a replacement UCSF ID card. It's not clear on the WeID website, but I was told that I needed to call my HR person. There is currently no paperwork I need to fill out. Made live the Pharm Sci Career Research page for Carol, Fran, and Dick. Today I learned a new feature that I've never used in Acrobat Pro 8. With our self study, we needed to collect all our appendices in one PDF—that was easy and took only a few minutes. They were already in PDF, so I simply used the combine feature in Acrobat. One PDF file, an org chart, had XML forms data included with it and couldn't be combined unless I created a "package" which I didn't want because I wanted the greatest amount of compatibility with older versions. I separately opened the problematic PDF in Acrobat, resaved it as PDF (it sounds silly, I know), and then it was able to combine with the others without error. I was told that we also needed to number the pages in the PDF sequentially so that in a printed copy people will have those to quickly reference pages they need. In the past, a request like this would have been impossible or you might have required a special plug-in or third-party application. Our documents originated in Word, Excel, and other applications and many had their own page numbering, sometimes excerpted from larger ones. Others were received 2-up. Acrobat Pro now (I have version 8) has a feature to add headers and footers to a PDF file; I don't know when the feature was introduced. I was amazed at how fast and easy it was to add the page numbers I needed. We decided that by adding "Appendix: Page XX of XX" to each page we didn't need to remove pre-existing page numbers—people will figure it out. Lunch: cheeseburger and onion rings from the cafeteria. Linkchecking. HTML e-mail—worked on the unsubscribe page to which we'll link from the HTML e-mail messages. I got it all working but now I just need a representative, unnecessary image or graphic for the top left corner of the page to add visual interest. The UCSF Technology Store has recently switched over at least part of their website to ColdFusion, and now it's not as easy as it was in the past for students to find the current computer configuration we recommend, so I sent an e-mail to Garrett about it. Today I learned how to put Darik's Boot & Nuke on a USB drive and boot off the USB drive to wipe drives. The reason I needed to do this was because I had a Dell Latitude D800 and a CMS backup hard drive that plugs into the modular bay of the laptop. I needed to wipe both drives. I had figured out how to wipe the laptop's built-in hard drive using a cdrom with DBAN on it—that was easy. But it's not as easy to wipe the CMS drive because you can't take the cdrom drive out after DBAN starts—for some reason it still needs to read from the cdrom while it runs. Since I didn't have an easy solution I was going to just abandon the drive by sending it to GreenDisk. But then I later learned that I can't yet send the equipment away—it still needs to be handed off to someone else but it needs to be securely erased first. I didn't have an external or modular bay floppy drive, but I did notice that the BIOS supported starting from a USB drive. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to create a DOS startup disk on a USB drive. Windows XP SP2 could not do it—the option was grayed out. I ended up using a huge (~45 MB?) HP utility that everyone on the web said worked, then overwrote the HP installation with a simple operation I found in the FAQ for DBAN. I'm not sure I needed to do the HP installer part, but I got it to work. The laptop started from the USB drive and it erased both hard drives at once. (The main hard drive was already erased, but I saw no easy way to have it erase only the CMS drive.) Was going to deliver the finished laptop to Rodney, but he had already left for the day. Chatted briefly with Eric, let him borrow a keyboard to set up his KVM hotkey. We suspect that the USB hub in his Apple keyboard prevented his Avocent SwitchView DVI KVM from receiving the default hotkey of ScrollLock (aka Scroll Lock) correctly. He plugged in a Dell USB keyboard which had no USB hub, switched the hotkey to a different key using the instructions provided by Avocent, and now it works. Today is the last day of finals before winter break for our students—you can feel the relief and joy as they walk by. I stayed a few minutes late to accept some paperwork that some students were supposed to turn in by 5:00 PM. Took the shuttle to Mount Zion. Walked to California and Divisidero where I got a small skinny almond latte from Martha Brothers Coffee. Went to Solstice for Thom's farewell party. It's his last day at Public Affairs and a bunch of others mostly from Pub Aff were there to celebrate his contributions to UCSF and wish him well at Golden Gate University where his new job is. We're going to miss him. People I knew there: Jeff M, Julie B, John K, Tony T, Kirk F. I met Laura S and Nada. The coffee from Martha Brothers earlier upset my stomach—probably too acidic. Dinner at Pasta Pomodoro on Market Street with Patrick. I learned today that mafaldine is ribbon pasta with wavy edges. I had a small order of mafaldine with hot water. Pollo alla griglia and iced tea for Patrick. Walked in the Castro afterwards. Home. Watched Heroes 210 on the web with Patrick. I arranged with my Apple-employed cousin to purchase an iMac for myself—thanks, J! It's time! Years after Apple's Switch campaign, I'm finally a switcher after having switched a few others in the previous year. Tina used to be on Mac, switched to Windows, then I switched her back to Mac. Our office has two Mac laptops now where before there were none—one MacBook and one MacBook Pro. (Both just run Boot Camp, though.) My computer at work is a Mac Pro, and our new web developer Eric has both a Mac Pro and an iMac. (Eric appears to be a longtime supporter of Apple—no switching necessary.) I'm using OS X and Parallels on a daily basis now. I am no blind follower of Apple—I follow toward the rear of the pack and then off to one side and still am not convinced that everything Apple does is the right thing (FileVault corruption? lack of keyboard shortcuts? keyboards without keys I need?). But information technology professionals cannot deny the general excellence coming from Apple on many fronts in, particularly, the last several years, and I'm not talking about the iPod, iTunes, or the iPhone even if they have contributed significantly to Apple's bottom line. No one else makes computer hardware that can run Windows, Linux, and OS X. Three years after its introduction, still no one else makes a desktop computer that is as small, visually beautiful, quiet, and energy-efficient as the Mac Mini. (Have Dell and Gateway and other PC manufacturers even been trying? I have to wonder.) OS X is faster to market than Windows or Linux with some very useful features that work better than anything else available. Apple's excellence in (mostly hardware) design is what's winning me over, and it's the small details that make a huge difference: magnetic power connector, ambient light sensor, integrated webcam, shake sensor, being able to view the path to a folder in the Leopard Finder, and so forth. I'm sure that soon after this iMac purchase Apple will release the touchscreen Cover Flow iMac with a stand that permits 360-degree landscape-portrait rotation with something analagous to what Samsung calls (but does not clearly promote) AutoPivot and height adjustment and more easily accessible USB ports at the same or nearly the same price. It's all in the long tradition of buying computer hardware that becomes obsolete the week after. To all my friends and family who work at Apple, here's my (monetary) contribution to your company's success, and thanks for the iMac and Leopard. Keep up the mostly great work! It does indeed just work. Most of the time. And sometimes after a little bit of research.