Saturday, December 15, 2007
Couldn't sleep due to coughing still from the cold I've had all week, so I got up at around 2:30 AM and computed. Archived documents, drank dayquil and hot water. Yesterday's big news at work was the resignation announcement of David Kessler, dean of UCSF School of Medicine. His announcement made it clear that his resignation was not voluntary, and it made it seem as though the university was responsible for some financial wrongdoing (Kessler very politely says "financial irregularities") that had occurred before he arrived. The story is being covered so far by USA Today and bizjournals and the San Jose Mercury News, but with few details beyond what he said in his own announcement. UCSF Today provides the university's opinion of the matter. The manner of this departure is particularly unusual for a person at his level in the university hierarchy. It will be interesting to see reactions from the other deans at UCSF and from other related bigwigs, though I would not be surprised if there is nothing but silence—the university works in strange ways sometimes. The university has not had a stellar reputation lately, so I am currently inclined to believe Kessler's claims that he was forced out and his implication that there's a larger story still waiting to be told. I'm sure the San Francisco Chronicle is working at least that angle right now. It's hard to believe that Kessler could have a motive for creating false allegations or that he was mistaken about them. I find it interesting that the reports mentioned in the UCSF Today story do not seem to be readily available (no link?). Wait and see. Presuming Kessler's announcement was all honesty and truth, it was as elegant as one can get for someone in his situation. I learned yesterday that I need to update my Google Analytics code snippet on all my tracked website templates. This wasn't clear to me when Tony Q and I chatted about it a few days ago. He had just signed up and his code to paste in looked a lot different than mine did, and I had signed up a long time ago. A blog I stumbled upon recently informed me that Google updated the code snippets (tracking code) one is to paste in to accommodate newer features. I wish that Google Analytics would have made this more apparent when I logged in to my account recently—it's not obvious at all unless you look at your tracking code page, and I didn't because mine was still working for most of my sites. Recently one problem I had with Google Analytics is that it would not detect my site as having the code even though I did everything correctly. The message I received was "Tracking Unknown (Last checked: 2007-11-25 4:38 AM PST.) The Google Analytics tracking code has not been detected on your website's home page. For Analytics to function, you or your web administrator must add the code to each page of your website." There appeared to be no way to contact Google for support, so I just waited and a few weeks later when I logged in to Analytics again it was working, so to me this means that the service is sometimes flaky. I've been using Photoshop CS3 at work and noticed that the Ctrl+Spacebar keyboard shortcut to zoom no longer exists—grr! 5:30 AM. Did some labeling. Recently I also added more velcro to our bathroom medicine cabinet. Updated Google Analytics tracking code for some websites. Updated validation footers for some websites. Did a lot of work for websites hosted on 5dollarhosting regarding their migration away from NaviSite. On my Mac Mini, when I open iTerm and enter the clear command, I get this warning message: "terminals database is inaccessible". If I try to use the man command (e.g., man man), I get this warning message: "WARNING: terminal is not fully functional." I tried deleting com.apple.Terminal.plist as one web page suggested, but that did not fix the problem. TERM is set to xterm-new. To resolve this problem, in my home folder I edited .bash_login (you can create it if it doesn't exist) and added this line to it: TERM=xterm-color. Now iTerm works as expected. Installed Flickr Uploadr 3.0 for Windows. Did some party prep. Chatted with Nate on the phone. Installed the student version of Sygate firewall on one of my home computers to test it out before I announce to students that it's available. Late dinner: leftover noodle soup for me. Snack for Patrick: grits. Late snack: canned soup.