Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Continued reinstall apps and updating them. Today we had our office gift exchange, and it was fun. We had a ton of food: vegetarian quiches, grapes, raspberries, clementines, muffins, stollen, chocolates, and more (most of it from Trader Joe's). I received a mistletoe-scented, 50-hour Yankee Candle brought by Alyssa. Joel brought a rectangular, white serving platter and also took it home. Alyssa received a silver oval serving platter and a little tapas cookbook brought by Cindy. Cindy received Crate and Barrel floating star candles brought by me. Lucia received a Borders gift card brought by Carol. Carol received a sherpa blanket with carrying handle brought by Scott. Eric received a tea pot set with flowering teas and 4 mugs brought by Lucia from OfficeMax. Scott received Teance tea and a tea holder brought by Eric. Many things went wrong for me today in the process of rebuilding my Windows XP installation. When deleting items I now get an error message saying the recycle bin is corrupted. I attempted some solutions involving the registry and deleting RECYCLER from DOS but they didn't resolve the problem. Mozilla Firefox was problematic—sometimes when opening it it would immediately begin repeatedly opening new windows. Once I started noticing this, I tried to log out, but it was too quick for me, even with keyboard shortcuts. I typed even faster: Win, L, L, Win, L, L, Win, L, L, repeatedly until finally I got it to log me out. I don't know what caused this behavior, and I'm not certain that my attempt to fix the problem has worked. (I deleted the Mozilla profiles that I suspect were corrupted, though I don't know how.) Once while attempting to wake OS X from screensaver it refused to wake. This has happened to me before, and I don't know what causes it. I changed to a different screen saver, but I don't know if that will help. Parallels froze on me again, this time while attempting to shut down Windows. I let it sit at the ending Windows screen for over 30 minutes, but it never closed. The more this happens, the more I'm thinking I might need to try out VMWare Fusion, and I mentioned as much to Eric. The geek squad (Ryson and Andott) told me that VMWare seems more stable. Worked on the spam section of the website. Other minor website updates. Restored mail archives. Began sorting through mail—I need to recreate all my rules - wah! Lunch: burrito from Carmelina's. Computer maintenance. Reconfigured Retrospect to back up all files. Stayed at work late working on the selected appendices for the self study. Recently while reinstalling apps for my poor BSOD Windows XP situation, I installed RealPlayer 11 and noticed it was a lot more polite than version 10, as though the entire company rethunk its relationship with its customers and decided, finally, to be more respectful in a lot of different ways. Some people might be wondering why I'm installing it at all, and the only reason is because I'm told that our students use legacy video content that was originally created in Real format. If you thought using Real was crazy, the unit at UCSF that does a lot of video work (IRTS) has standardized on Envivio player. I hadn't even heard of this player until I was told someone in my office needed it installed to view something related to work. The Envivio plug-in installation is not very user-friendly, either. Dinner at home with Patrick: cow tacos. For dessert: more marionberry pie with whipped cream.