Friday, March 14, 2008
Stretches. Weight training: leg lifts. Breakfast: granola with sliced banana. Password change help for 2 students. Met 1-on-1 with Susie mostly reviewing and editing photos. Worked on home page web edits: resolved problems with Flickr badge not displaying photos as expected. Plugged in Dan Coulter's phpFlickr class, got it working very quickly including caching. Actually, I had had it working before without the caching but commented it out because we weren't ready to launch this new code yet. I plugged the code back in, made some adjustments. This experience was so good I'm now itching to try phpFlickr with my home website—I've been wanting to write some code to automatically add thumbnails to my journal entries. Right now I don't add many photos to my journal entries because it's tedious—I manually add the code because there's no faster way. Superautomatic would be much, much faster. Lunch with Joel at L'Avenida, took a few photos of Joel. Student CB stayed after 5:00 PM to finish an exam—no problems. Updated schedules for Lucia. More web edits. Dinner at home with Patrick: grilled salmon over bed of arugula, steamed asparagus, fried potatoes. Dessert: one peanut butter Girl Scout cookie. Fixed printing problems to our color inkjet printer by turning the printer off, turning it back on, resetting the printing system in OS X, then readding the printer (I think). Bought airfare and reserved car rental for Patrick and me for a long weekend to San Diego March 28 to 31. Weight training: bench press, one-arm dumbbell row, concentration curl, wrist curl. Late meal: chunky soup, hot nonfat milk. After finishing The Golden Compass a few days ago I needed something a little sweeter and lighter to read. Patrick was still in the middle of the sequel to The Golden Compass called The Subtle Knife, so I reread I'm The One That I Want by Margaret Cho. If you haven't read this horror fairytale autobiography, you should. Even more astounding than the depths of despair into which she had fallen is the clarity of her mind after climbing out. Not only did she understand her mistakes along the way, but she communicates them by way of her book in a manner which entertains and forces you to both laugh at her miserable past and also examine your own. Tangent: I just had a weird idea for a drinking game: Someone reads I'm The One That I Want aloud and every time Margaret drinks in the book everyone else drinks. Bonus points for the host if he or she provides all the same alcohols that appear in the book so that people can drink, say, Patron, when Margaret does. End of tangent. Changed Energy Saver settings on the iMac so that the iMac sleeps after awhile. Previously I had it not sleep so that Mozy could run at full speed. But now Mozy is broken, and supposedly all my files are backed up now anyway. Mozy, which is still in beta for the Mac, is still giving me the problem that I reported on Sunday—it successfully backs up data but doesn't let me restore it. Backups are logged as being successful, but my Restore Files window is empty so anything that was backed up cannot be restored as expected. I reported the problem on Sunday, and it was acknowledged ("we're working on it" or something like that) but I've heard nothing since. It's not because Mozy is stealing my data, I know that. But they have a problem to fix and have not been terribly responsive this time around.