Monday, December 29, 2008

Usual oatmeal breakfast. House chores: laundry, vacuuming. Took the bus to 9th and Judah. Walked to the California Academy of Sciences. Saw extremely long lines. Within minutes of my arrival, a woman announced over a loudspeaker that all of today's tickets were sold out. I already had tickets, but even the general admission ticket line was very long, and all the passes to some of the shows were already gone. Not a good day to get to calacademy late. I couldn't warn my parents who were driving in. I had told them to park in the underground garage, but it was already full and traffic coming in to the park was heavy. I asked the announcer where the nearest public telephone was, and she said she didn't know. I checked in the garage—no public telephone. The de Young was closed today, so I couldn't check over there. I walked to 9th and Lincoln—none there. I walked to 9th and Irving—none there. I walked to 9th and Judah and found one on the southeast corner. My parents were still in their car on the road and had just entered the park at 9th and Lincoln, so I told them to turn around and pick me up, so they did. We all needed to eat lunch but spent several minutes being unsuccessful at finding parking near 9th and Irving, so we drove to Irving and 22nd instead and found a metered spot. Lunch with my parents at a Chinese restaurant whose name I forgot to record but which is at or near 1928 Irving Street. Afterwards we decided we needed to find someplace to go in San Francisco where tourists didn't go but was still interesting. I took them to 3 hilltop parks, none of which I had ever visited. First was Grand View Park, next was Sunset Heights Playground, and last was Mount Davidson. I took lots of great photos and a few short movies. We stopped at home so that I could drop off lunch leftovers and pick up Patrick. Dinner at Eric's Restaurant on Church. Afterwards they dropped us off at home and headed to Honma House. Continued Time Machine troubleshooting. Last night's backup completed successfully, so I removed more exclusions one by one and let them complete successfully. However, after I got home today, I found a Time Machine error again: "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume." Opened Console, filtered on [backup], found this: "Error: (-43) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users /username /Music /$RECYCLE.BIN to /Volumes /Time Machine /Backups.backupdb /computername /2008-12-29-170436.inProgress /81059C26-EFD9-4A64-B6C1-D24C31328222 /Macintosh HD /Users /username /Music". Shut down Vista. Modified the VM settings: unchecked all mirrored folders. Found all occurrences of $RECYCLE.BIN in my home folder (and all subfolders). Started the VM. Deleted all occurrences of $RECYCLE.BIN from within the VM. Crossing fingers now that Time Machine will give no more errors. Apple could improve Time Machine by providing a more helpful error message instead of "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume." Maybe tell what the error is? Maybe provide instructions on how to resolve the problem or what to look for? Reviewed today's and yesterday's photos with Patrick.