Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Stretches. More computer maintenance. Weight training: superslow lying-down overhead tricep kickback. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Sent a birthday card to Sam. To work. Today was the first time I used NextBus to view an arrival time for my bus. A long time ago NextBus only worked for the light-rail trains and one or two bus lines, and I never heard when Muni added more busses to the system. I saw it say 4 minutes and knew I had to run, so I did. As I neared the bus stop, the bus slowed down, so I slowed down, too, thinking the driver was going to stop. Within a second, the driver accelerated again, so I started to run again, and then he stopped again. This is the kind of thing that Muni drivers get away with all the time because you can't ever prove that it was purposeful. I got on the bus, and it turned out to be the driver who wears dark glasses and never, ever smiles. I can't figure out his motivation, though. As far as I know, I've never done anything to hurt him. Why me? Arrived at work. Converted a document to Office 2003 format and sent it to the person who requested it because that's easier than asking all the information technology support people in my organization who have not yet deployed Office 2007 (available since January 30, 2007) or Office 2008 (available since January 15, 2008) to install the compatibility pack on all those computers. And it's better than blaming the user for the poor practices of the IT support people upon which they rely. Reviewed and provided feedback on the VPN bookmarks and settings transfer instructions for Quinn H. Followup with student RE about Scribd and how to send an announcement to all students. MSCR web page work. Notified Susie of numbers on our website that need updating. CCDWG and CTSTF report review. Made live the MSCR page. Listserv maintenance. Followup with Danica—we have RSS feeds now! Woo! Linkchecking. Viewed videos from Sun Microsystems about MPK20 and WonderlandPhone, which were sent to me by way of important people, but I couldn't help occasionally laughing to myself as I watched the videos. Sun has obviously spent a lot of time on these projects, but I just can't see them being very useful, especially if they plan to keep using Courier and Times New Roman. I kept expecting the scenes to turn either salacious or comedic—or both! It's ripe for parody, if you ask me. If you're interested, let me know—I'll write you a few scripts. psychobauble today sent me the link to a story on Ars Technica about the Windows 7 preview. Here's my reply: "Thanks! I think most everything looks good so far except that with Libraries they fall into the same pitfall that OS X does by presuming people want to sort data primarily by content type. This is problematic, for instance, with a digital camera that takes both photos and video—when you download your session, photos and videos automatically get put into separate folders based on the content type rather than keeping them together because they were part of the same photo/video session. Still, so far Windows 7 seems like incremental improvements that resemble things OS X has had for years rather than anything groundbreaking from a UI perspective." Dinner at home with Patrick: turkey meatloaf with marinara, corn on the cob, sourdough breadsticks, Smart Balance Light. Watched extras from Heroes Season 1 Disc 7 on Netflix DVD with Patrick. I heard back today from Canon—they're going to fix my camera it sounds like at no charge, and I should have it back within about another week. Hooray! Uploaded photos. Printer maintenance. Archived documents. Downloaded JanusVM. Stretches.