Monday, February 11, 2008

Usual oatmeal breakfast. After 40 minutes of troubleshooting, I was unable to resolve my Apple Active Directory problem, so I unjoined from the domain. Fortunately when I set up my new local-only account OS X asked me if I wanted to use the same home folder and I said yes and everything now is essentially back to normal except my computer is no longer part of the domain, which is okay. Did some research on Office 2008 for Mac. Confirmed that Tasks has no interaction with the server, so it would be a lot more trouble than it's worth for me to exclusively use Entourage 2008 instead of Outlook 2007. This (continued) lack of parity makes me want to stop using Microsoft software, but as our university campus is committed to using Exchange with no sign of seeking alternate solutions, I am powerless. The kind of thing that needs to happen is a directive from UCOP that says something like all software procured in 2011 and later must have feature parity for users on at least 2 leading operating systems and on at least 2 leading web browsers. This action would force Microsoft (and any other software vendor) to promote a competitive environment for operating systems and web browsers, and it would ensure that the university were not tied to a particular vendor. Helped student CHK with a problematic CDRW/DVD drive. Hardware problem, still under warranty—she can likely call Dell and have a replacement unit sent overnight. Helped student LC with mailbox too full problems. Lunch at Ten with Eric and Joel. Received word from OAAIS that a mailbox was enabled, notified student TD that the account was active. Web edits: Board of Advisors, the final of Big Bird - still some questions, which I sent Lorie in e-mail. Mark B called me to let me know that RESOURCE accounts should not require a new password but "password never expires" needs to be set in AD, so I set that for all my resource accounts. Helped a staff research assistant (not PharmD) understand new strong password requirements. Web hosting followup work. Helped Joel with spam filtering issues (prereqs). Web edits: handling spam. Installed OS 10.5.2 at work. Dinner at home with Patrick: Indian food delivery. Installed Mozy 0.9.2 (RC2) for Mac. Mozy has not been operating properly since I think Sunday—it said it had 3 days to go to finish backing up the current data set and then the next minute it said it was done. Subsequent manual starts of the backup finish successfully saying that nothing new was uploaded. Sent a problem report to Mozy. Sent a problem report to monitorus—a domain I removed is still appearing in my reports. Paid bills. I received a jury summons today. Installed Apple Software Updates including OS 10.5.2. Did some more offline thinking and writing about the problems with URLs in electronic communications. I don't like IMAP because it's too slow or doesn't behave properly. If I'm composing a message offline and then save it, Outlook 2007 gives me an error message instead of connecting to the server and saving the message. I don't understand why IMAP works that way. Or maybe it's Outlook—I don't know and can't tell. Stretches.