Friday, October 17, 2008

Last night I dreamt I was eating and enjoying a brown-sauced-covered biscuit wrapped with bacon (wrapped in the style of filet mignon). Yesterday Mozy unsolicitedly offered to extend my subscription 1 month at no charge. I was planning to ask anyway, so I'm glad they made the offer. Someone there must be reading my blog! (joking) Despite much back and forth troubleshooting, they still have not resolved the problem I reported on September 30 in which Mozy crashes upon startup or otherwise simply doesn't work. Their action restores my faith in Mozy, but only partially. It still remains that if there were an earthquake today and both my computer and my local Time Machine backup were destroyed that Mozy would be unable to restore my data even though that's what I paid them for. Today I got sick of seeing the reminder in my system tray for the past several days that said I needed to change my password in 9 days... 8 days... 7 days... 6 days...—I don't have a password set on Vista because it's running inside of VMware Fusion and OS X has a password on it so I feel I don't need one for Vista especially at home and especially since I don't store documents in Vista. To resolve this problem, I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del (not CTRL+ALT+DEL or CTRL+ALT+DELETE [for a domain-joined computer, why does the Vista login screen shout like that? that's rude!]), left all the password fields empty, and clicked the right arrow button (what happened to OK?)—now it seems that Vista is happy that I changed my password. Woke early. Stretches. Weight training: side plank (2:00 each side). Stretches. Breakfast: granola with raspberry yogurt and diced peach. Shower. To work. Followup with and about student SL about email address change. Followup with student JN about Sophos reportedly slowing down Vista especially at startup. Followup with Cindy about career services external links. Followup with a student about cardkey access. Followup with DC and TBS about cardkey access for late admits. Reviewed the office's disaster plan that Lucia distributed. Our office held our annual white coat ceremony. All went well except the photographer we hired (KM) was late. We stalled for about 10 or 15 minutes telling jokes and then got the students grouped in the courtyard in case KM showed at the last second. We also asked one of the guests who had a serious-looking camera to take the photo for us. Student JU showed up just before the group shot to take photos for the student newspaper. And KM did finally show up at the very last possible moment to get the photo we paid for. During the ceremony I was asked to run the lights. During the light check, Doug from IRTS stopped by to check on things, and he helped me configure the presets as we want them. The spotlights were not pointing to the right places on the stage—we did not need to put the spotlight on the base of the podium—so I asked him to adjust at least one of the two right spotlights. He agreed. Joel and I got sandwiches at Subway. When I returned the spotlight was adjusted exactly as I had asked—to light the speaker standing at the podium. Joel and I ate lunch in Cole Hall. At one point, student PE asked how we could switch over the entire campus to Open Office and/or a UNIX- or Linux-based mail system. I told him that I thought the order would have to come from the top down either from the Chancellor or from UCOP. There are a lot of reasons why our current situation exists, and there would be a lot of challenges as well as benefits to a change. The ceremony went very well. Just a little feedback on the microphone throughout, but I was not in a position to be able to fix it. Joel later mentioned that stage right was not bright enough during coating—he's probably right. When I had set the presets at the light control panel I could not see well past the podium to determine how much light was falling in that area. Afterwards, we didn't even visit the reception—Cindy went, and we knew it would pretty much took care of itself. Joel and I left on Muni—him heading for a documentary (Hi my name is Ryan) at the Roxie, me heading for dinner in the Mission. We rode the N-Judah train to Church along with Eric D who was heading to the East Bay for climbing. Joel and I walked to BriKel's, stopped to say hello, chatted with Brian a bit. We continued on our way. It was unusually warm this evening. Left Joel at the Roxie, walked to Janitzi (1152 Valencia Street, San Francisco, California). The restaurant opened only 5 weeks ago. When I arrived, a man was handing out flyers that included a 10% off coupon. Eventually Patrick, Tony Q, psychobauble, Nate, and David arrived. The restaurant doesn't yet have its license to serve liquor, so we were welcome to bring our own and they would—for now—charge no corkage fee. We tried a large number of dishes, and the consensus at the table was mostly favorable. I most enjoyed a beef dish with a deep-fried coating, and a fish taco. A side of cactus tasted mostly like bell peppers to me—I had never had cactus before. A side of polenta tasted like polenta—I'm not a fan of polenta. We also had turkey-bacon-wrapped chicken. I don't remember it specifically—I think it was good. (This isn't a very good review—sorry!) We were surprised when we received the bill because it seemed extraordinarily low. I don't think they applied the 10% off coupon, either. We ended up paying much more than the bill stated, a show of support for this new restaurant with satisfying dishes. psychobauble and Nate brought 2 bottles of wine—thanks!