Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Rainy day. Continued laptop troubleshooting for student ML: RAM installation, tune-up. Problem: When attempting to uninstall Symantec Client Security, the following error message appears: "Please enter the uninstall password." Found the following solution on mydigitallife.info: Run regedit.exe. In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ INTEL\ LANDesk\ VirusProtect6\ CurrentVersion\ Administrator Only\ Security\ change the value for useVPuninstallpassword from 1 to 0. Helped student NT set up an IMAP connection to UCSF Exchange. NT also gave me an orientation t-shirt. Backups maintenance: MozyPro is giving MozyServerError1 and the Retrospect backup drive filled up so I have to reset it. ML's laptop had a worm on it called W32/Rbot-JV. The Sophos website did not describe some of the behavior I saw: the computer would restart automatically after an hour or two of use—perhaps this was a different, overlapping problem. I observed this restarting behavior also in Safe Mode (!). When editing the body of an e-mail message, Entourage 2008 behaves like Windows when you press the Home and End keys but it does not behave like most OS X apps do when you press Command+LeftArrow and Command+RightArrow. Ctrl+Home does nothing and Ctrl+End jumps to the end of the current line. Ctrl+LeftArrow behaves exactly like LeftArrow, Ctrl+RightArrow behaves exactly like RightArrow. Option+LeftArrow and Option+RightArrow both behave like OS X. To me, this means that Entourage 2008 completely respects neither OS X nor Windows standard keyboard shortcuts for navigating text, which makes it quite painful to use. Installed KeePassX 0.2.2. Continued laptop troubleshooting for student ML. Helped Lucia with an InDesign document. Computer maintenance: Tweaked Retrospect settings for Alyssa. Quicktime 7.4.1 and uninstall Apple Software Update for Cindy. Firefox 2.0.0.12 for Cindy. Acrobat 8.1.2 for Cindy. Windows and Mac updates for my computer. Terminal Services / Remote Desktop has been consistently crashing computers with bsods after I log out remotely. These computers appear to restart successfully with no problems. I did not get a chance to record the error message—I was on my way out. The problem is not isolated—nearly all the computers I worked on remotely crashed in this manner. Another problem I've experienced lately is that Outlook in Win XP in Fusion seems to close properly but when I shut down windows a dialog appears asking if I want to force outlook.exe to quit. Home. Weight training: barbell bench press, stretches. Dinner at home with Patrick: lemon chicken, steamed potatoes, corn off the cob. At work for the past 6 consecutive workdays I've been starting my morning walking up every flight of 9 floors taking the steps 2 at a time. One of those days I happened to catch the N-Judah and walked up an additional 8 flights of stairs. I had been doing this before, but never so consistently. It leaves me winded for a few minutes when I'm done, but I enjoy starting my day knowing I've already accomplished something healthy. Sold the sticky firewire cables I didn't like for almost as much as I had paid for them. No buying from pccables.com for at least the next year. Late dessert: small scoop of sorbet—part mango and part lowfat coconut. My left hand has been hurting a bit near the base of the thumb I think because of using Windows XP inside of Fusion with the Apple keyboard which has the Alt key a further reach than on a PC keyboard. I'm aware of it, at least, and have been doing hand stretches while waiting on the computer to respond to commands. Weight training: advanced plank, stretches.