Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Took Muni to Laurel Heights—it took a little over 60 minutes door to door, much longer that I had expected. I took the L-Taraval to Castro Station then took the 24 Divisadero to California and then 1 California to UCSF Laurel Heights. Dean's breakfast. Fixed problems with the laptop and projector. Gave my Flickr presentation—it seemed to go well. Kim B gave Shannon W and me a lift back to Parnassus. Poster project for Cindy, submitted it to DMM for processing. Chatted with student CN about a laptop problem. This laptop was one of the strangest cases I've diagnosed in a long time. When powered on, nearly all indicator lights on the front panel lit and stayed lit. The hard drive light would light briefly and then turn off. The hard drive can be heard spinning up and then stopping very briefly. No fan could be heard. Nothing else happens. Windows does not start, and we don't even see the BIOS screen. Nothing shows on the display, no other noises come from the computer. But the power indicator and other lighted indicators on the computer remain on. Behavior was the same whether the battery was plugged in or not. Battery and power adapter were both genuine and had not been replaced or substituted. No physical damage, and the student says it was not dropped but sometimes it is carried in a backpack with no additional padded laptop sleeve. Vents were clean. Laptop was recently out of a 1-year warranty. Definitely a hardware problem, and definitely inside the computer, but otherwise hard to tell exactly what the problem is. Could be a bad motherboard or just one component bad. The student will seek service solutions. Attempted to duplicate a DVD of the graduation for Cindy, but encountered an error: "The disk inserted does not have enough free space" even though the disc is blank and is rated for 4.7 GB—much larger than the 1.77 GB disk image I want to burn. It took me awhile to figure it out, but someone had stacked a bunch of blank CD-Rs on my spindle of blank DVD-Rs. (!) Chatted briefly with John K about web hosting. Migrated mail archives from Outlook to Entourage by copying the folders to the server in Outlook and then copying from the server to Entourage. Lunch in the library courtyard by myself: Panda Express. Web server setup. Snack: Patrick's homemade cherry almond cookie. Dinner at home with Patrick: cashew chicken stir fry. Stretches. Weight training: superslow one-arm dumbbell row, shrug. Stretches. Realized that we have no more frozen juice, chunky soup, and nonfat milk and only one yogurt, so I went to the grocery late and bought more of all. Late meal: yogurt, chunky soup, hot nonfat milk.