June 2009
Summary: Patrick's mom meets my parents, Remi and Jesse's commitment ceremony and party, we buy the iPhone 3GS, Tina's summer solstice visit including KitchenAid mixer and 12-layer mocha cake, Underworld, quantum13 visits, Pride Parade and Festival
Dates on this page
Mon Jun 1, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. 1-on-1 coffee meeting with Susie. Gathered and delivered photos for Mary Anne. Followup with OAR on 2 issues: one is a resident who never received a password, the other is a student whose middle name was spelled incorrectly in OAR's system. Delivered a photo to Tara M for Susie. More photo followup with Mary Anne. Helped student KB with a question about email. Small edit for JWG to the change of schedule web page. Lunch from the cafeteria: mac and cheese, mixed vegetables, cornbread muffin. Edited images in Photoshop with Eric V. No N train for 15 minutes, took a cab from Parnassus Avenue to Castro and 18th. Met Patrick at Bearbucks. Dinner at La Tortilla (415-861-3990, 495B Castro Street, San Francisco, California, USA). Earlier today we had decided on rather short notice to see UP in 3D at Castro Theatre. We both enjoyed the film very much—a touching, funny, adventurous story, recommended for all. Home. More troubleshooting of Time Machine still running and Spotlight still indexing ("waiting for indexing to be ready"). Turned off Time Machine. Deleted the .Spotlight* folder on the Time Machine drive, manually restarted indexing on my primary hard drive (sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/Macintosh\HD). Throughout the day I read more from Using Drupal. Snack: crackers, hot water. Cardio warmup: 20 minutes. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly, superslow dumbbell press. Stretches.
Tue Jun 2, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. More troubleshooting of Time Machine still running and Spotlight still indexing ("waiting for indexing to be ready"). Primary hard drive indexing completed, so I started indexing for the music hard drive—Time Machine is still turned off. To work. Fixed a scripted message problem with our admissions pages following Eric V's report. Redirected fellow Mark P regarding an email question. Posted new news for Susie. Yesterday's WinHTTrack archive completed successfully, so today I began backing the archive up to our portable hard drives and migrated it to my XP VM since I'm abandoning my Vista VM. Flickr work. Paperless Office talk by Heidi S in Cole Hall. Lunch: Subway sandwich. Archived website data to portable hard drives. Dinner at home with Patrick: mushroom and asparagus risotto. Worked on Patrick's website in Drupal. Had a lot of trouble installing fckeditor but eventually figured it out. There are 2 downloads and the second one doesn't work with wget I think because of the way the download URL is formed. Tried the administration menu but didn't like it—I don't like most dynamic menus. And this one doesn't work well with RSIGuard's AutoClick feature. I got all the content in and the navigation worked out, but the content needs massaging since Patrick wrote it as a single Word document. More "waiting for indexing to be ready" problems. Turned off Time Machine.
Wed Jun 3, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Board of advisors page edits for Susie and Paula. Submitted a ticket to DLS—my admin account doesn't have the right permissions. Reviewed and implemented web edits to the admissions section with JWG. More XP VM setup: installed and configured Firefox addons. Completed a proposed cdrom build and sent it out for review. Realized that when I send messages in Entourage and use HTML and use Calibri everything looks beautiful in Entourage but when I view my delivered message in Win XP in Outlook Web Access and Outlook 2007 I see Courier or some other monospace font. I was horrified. If I use Arial instead, it comes out as Arial, so I guess Arial is my default font for Entourage now. Wah! Sent Outlook tip 16 to Shirin. More board of advisors page edits for Susie and Paula. Calendar management. Supp app installation troubleshooting—finally figured out that we don't have mysqli support for PHP installed, so the admins will install it for me tonight—no downtime they say. Printed a DAL spreadsheet for review. Chatted with Eric D about the DAL spreadsheet and about the Drupal project. Management activities. New phone setup for JWG. Recreated the Windows Briefcases on my USB drive in the XP VM—the ones created in the Vista VM wouldn't synch anymore even though they were pointing to the same network volume. Patrick picked me up in the car. We drove to the Castro Farmers Market and bought some Rainier cherries and white peaches and dessert for tonight. Snack at La Fajita Grill (415-593-0031, 2312 Market Street): 3 chicken taquitos, water. Drove to Danny, Drew, and Phil's for dinner: Costco pizza. Dessert: chocolate chip cookies, fudge cookies, palmiers. Home. Stretches. Weight training: crunch, hammer curl, superslow tricep kickback variation, superslow lateral raise. Late meal: hot nonfat milk, lowfat pomegranate yogurt, steak and potato chunky soup. Uninstalled Time Out now that I'm comfortable using RSIGuard instead.
Thu Jun 4, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Chatted with Jane G, helped her and Aaron C make a choice about web hosting for Perfect Pitch. (They went with Bluehost.) Forwarded a question about Lexi-Comp to Rodney. Reviewed accessibility tool offer from Heidi S. Revised code for the job postings form (valid email address not recognized as valid). Communicators followup. Uninstalled Time Out at work. Uninstalled trials: TextMate, Coda, Espresso. Of these, Espresso came closest to what I want in an HTML editor for Mac. Still wishing Chami would make HTML-Kit for Mac, but not enough to wait around for it. Supp app installation troubleshooting. Installed FileZilla 3.2.4.1 for Mac. To home. House chores. Sold our old 802.11g wireless access point and router (Linksys WRT54G) for $29. Snack: really sweet rainier cherries. Dinner at home with Patrick: angel hair pasta in marinara sauce, biscuits with lite white cheddar and green onions.
Fri Jun 5, 2009
Weight training: leg lift. Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. CLE access followup. Began creating a congratulations message for Cindy. Lunch: leftovers from last night, rainier cherries. Uninstalled RealPlayer. Submitted a surplus pickup request to Eric V for Shirin's old UPS that used a serial port instead of USB. Completed ergonomics training and office safety training. cdrom building followup with Sarah M who provided a new Mac Sophos installer—all looks good. Home. I took a nap with Patrick and woke up after about an hour, but Patrick was too tired and stayed in bed. Dinner at home by myself: last night's biscuits, chunky soup. Dessert: a white peach, palmier crumbs. Worked on Patrick's website: home page planning. We received Patrick's business cards today. They are a little off-center horizontally but otherwise turned out well. Patrick also received his first student sign-up for tai chi chuan lessons. After over 72 hours Dotster finally got around to transferring my domain registration to Bluehost, so I spent some time reconfiguring email and closing the old web hosting with 5dollarhosting. Again, IMAP did that thing where after I changed my settings all the messages in my inbox disappeared which is not what I was expecting, but after several panicky minutes I got everything back. Uninstalled Flock. Rewrote a script to back up all my Bluehost data. Web edits for Drew. Troubleshot Spotlight indexing problems possibly related to Time Machine.
Sat Jun 6, 2009
Breakfast at home with Patrick: french toast, hot tea. House chores. Worked on Patrick's website. Late lunch at home with Patrick: biryani, chicken tikki masala, naan. With Patrick: hung out at Duboce Park, in the Lower Haight, got a snack and a drink at The Grind Cafe, ran an errand at Walgreens. More work on Patrick's website. Dinner at home with Patrick: korean cow, steamed rice, stir-fried spinach and garlic. Watched The King of Comedy (1982) on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Liked it even though it's not a very likeable film. Installed Apple software updates. Abandoned Time Machine backups for both computers due to continuing problems with my computer's Time Machine showing "Preparing..." forever and my computer's Spotlight indexing forever. Repartitioned the Time Machine drive, gave it a new name, verified the volume (all is well), plugged it back in to the Airport Extreme, set up Time Machine configuration anew for one computer.
Sun Jun 7, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Worked on Patrick's website. Learned more about spam configuration in my new email environment (after frankfarm.com migrated hosting), made some changes. Picked up sandwiches at Ike's, ate in Dolores Park with Patrick. On our way out we encountered and said hello to BJ who was on his way in. Home. I took a short nap, Patrick took a long one. Stretches. Weight training: superslow lateral raise, superslow front raise, one-arm dumbbell row. Cardio cool-down: 20 minutes. I worked on Patrick's website. Uninstalled Winzip—it didn't work in Vista. Uninstalled Winamp—we never listen to music in Windows anymore, and I could never figure out how to get the occasional jittery sound problem with Fusion to go away. Installed 7-Zip. More work on Patrick's website.
Mon Jun 8, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Completed the congratulations message for Cindy. Set JWG and Scott up with accounts in the supp app. Lunch with JWG and Shirin at Ten. I had to leave a bit early to catch my 3-hour meeting with Eric D, Susie, Mike, and Joe: our first look at hands-on tagging in The Archive. So far it's looking very well. Apple announced new iPhones and other things today—sounds good. Updated current students news and entering students news for Lisa C: promotion of data security story. Set up orientation web pages on the staging server for Shirin. Today Eric V asked me if he could use the insert calendar feature in Outlook 2007 to send Cindy's calendar, but I did some hunting and found no evidence that even delegate users could do that. To home. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly. Dinner at home with Patrick: salad, pizza, hot water. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, various other upper body. Chatted on the phone with Nate. Troubleshot Time Machine error: "The backup disk image could not be mounted. (OK)" Ran Disk Utility on the drive, got "Warning: The following disk images failed to mount. (OK)" and it listed my image with reason "no mountable file systems." (I looked for a Not OK button but there was only an OK button.) Disk Utility repaired the volume. Time Machine failed again: "The backup disk image could not be mounted. (OK)" I abandoned the partial backup, repartitioned the drive, and started Time Machine anew again—the second time in a week. Worked on Patrick's website. Late meal: chicken noodle soup, hot water, granola bar.
Tue Jun 9, 2009
Woke up late. Half of my usual oatmeal breakfast. Chatted again with Christina C on the bus to work. Student computing working group meeting. Staff meeting. Followup with Cesar G about Pointsec cost. Followup with Karl M about web stuff. Sent staff a reminder about data security awareness. Sent Rob S info about blip.tv. Followup with Eric V about a surplus pickup request. Notified all about the forthcoming listserv rotation. Sent Rebecca WS recommendations on containers for organizing. Posted the date for the graduation ceremony next year. Followup with student AD about making videos. Submitted my software licensing survey. Helped resident Michelle D with email. Ordered phone changes for JWG. Delivered a UC ID number to a student. Sent the websteering lunch reminder. Chatted briefly online with quantum13. Lots of calendar management. Dinner at home with Patrick: salad, Annie's beef stroganoff, leftover pizza. Worked on Patrick's website. Stretches. Weight training: various lower body. Late meal: chunky soup, hot nonfat milk, lowfat strawberry and banana yogurt, hot water.
Wed Jun 10, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Telecommute day. Installed Office 2008 12.1.9 update at home. Time Machine backup completed its initial backup on my computer—it took 2 or 3 days, I can't remember exactly how long now it's been. How exciting! Added a new group to Flickr for APhA-ASP and updated the OPML file then undid my changes after realizing that the desired group already existed under a slightly different name. Other Flickr group maintenance. Posted updated schedules for Lucia. Spent most of the day building pipes in Yahoo! Pipes. It's a lot of fun and a lot of aggravation at the same time. It has a lot of power to do really neat things, but you have to have clean RSS sources or other sources, and it helps if you know your regex. Sometimes it's really slow when saving. The documentation is not bad, but it could be better. By the end of the day I was creating surprisingly complicated pipes to achieve specific results I wanted. For example, to get info about the budget situation, I took a general news feed from UCOP, filtered it for the word budget, then combined that with searches from Yahoo! Search of "ucsf budget" and "uc budget". The date fields weren't all named the same, so I had to resolve that with more pipe pieces, then I sorted it most recent first and trimmed the result to 7 items. It's still not working exactly the way I want—one of the fields I created shows in the final pipe output but doesn't show in the resulting RSS feed. Lunch at home with Patrick: stir-fries, hot water. My fortune: Your smile brings happiness to others. Snack: cherries, cheesy square crackers. Dinner at home with Patrick: parmesan-crusted tilapia, rice pilaf, steamed asparagus, hot water. Watched Young Sherlock Holmes on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Set up Time Machine configuration anew for the other computer. Late meal: tomato soup, cheesy square crackers, applesauce. Time Machine hung while Preparing... again. Cold restart. Console reports "Backup failed with error: 18" and just before that: "Cookies do not match." I reselected the disk in Time Machine preferences. Now my last backup says—and my oldest backup says—when before it had June 10. I entered Time Machine and it appeared to still show the June 10 backups throughout the day. To bed.
Thu Jun 11, 2009
Shower. More Time Machine tshooting: "Backup failed with error: 18" and "Cookies do not match." Repaired disk permissions on my primary hard drive. Turned Time Machine off. To work. The registrar's office recently changed their authentication system to match Active Directory and in the process I discovered a problem: their system does not support the same password length that Active Directory does. What's funny is that I immediately suspected a password length problem since I frequently use passwords that are longer than most, so I reported the problem and suggested that they look at password length first, and the first reply I received from their office was that their system "does not have a character length restriction" (which I know is not what the person meant, but those were the exact words). I replied, and the second reply I received said, "It seems our database has [a] problem with your ??-character long password. Let me work on that and get back to you later." (where ?? is a particular integer). Flickr work. Spent most of the day working on health events process and form for Chris C. I created my first form in Wufoo—it's pricey but very slick, recommended if you can afford it. We can't, and I didn't realize until too late that their free version is limited to 10 fields, but I enjoyed my short experience with Wufoo. Began investigating LimeSurvey instead; Eric D has already been using it and liking it. It's a big user experience step backwards going directly from creating forms in Wufoo to creating forms in LimeSurvey, but you sure can't beat the price of the latter. I discovered and reported a problem with wufoo.com—it would accept a password that I created during account creation but it would not accept the same password upon a subsequent login. ACPE notice changes for Susie. Kevin's art showing at Splash. Dinner at California Pizza Kitchen with Patrick.
Fri Jun 12, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: reverse leg lift, sidelying leg lift. Troubleshot Time Machine error 18 "cookies do not match" and "no such file or directory" when attempting to use ls on the Time Machine volume's root folder to find the cookie. I did sudo cp -v /Volumes/[volumename]/.[macaddress] /var/db/.TimeMachine.Cookie which resulted in cp: /Volumes/[volumename]/.[macaddress]: No such file or directory. where [volumename] is the volume name and where [macaddress] is my computer's MAC address. Unresolved, no more time right now to troubleshoot. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped student PY with a question about email. Listserv maintenance. Lots of calendar maintenance. Spent most of the day working on health events process and form for Chris C. Francis R's art reception at Recharge Spa. Late dinner at Miss Saigon Restaurant with Danny, Drew, Chris G, Nate, Romy, Phil, Quyen, Dave, Scott, and Francis. Continued troubleshooting Time Machine, "Backup failed with error: 18", "cookies do not match." I think I resolved the problem with "sudo cp /var/db/.TimeMachine.Cookie /var/db/.TimeMachine.Cookie.backup" followed by "sudo cp -v /Volumes/[volumename]/.[macaddress] /var/db/.TimeMachine.Cookie" where [volumename] is the volume name and where [macaddress] is my computer's MAC address. Troubleshooting this problem was very difficult. I frequently saw very strange things. For example, "sudo chown root .[macaddress]" would result in "chown: .[macaddress]: Operation not permitted." Or, ls -al would result in "ls: .[macaddress]: No such file or directory" followed by the expected directory listing (without the .[macaddress] file). Installed Safari 4.0 on Patrick's computer. Troubleshot the same Time Machine problem on his computer but it was fixed more easily—just forcing Time Machine to do a backup now resolved it. Forced Crashplan to back up.
Sat Jun 13, 2009
Breakfast: Spinach scramble. Spent the whole day working on Patrick's website and troubleshooting Mac problems—Time Machine and Spotlight. Patrick reported that Spotlight is not indexing the Music volume that is attached to my computer via USB hub built into an OWC MiniStack. I soon realized that my computer was not indexing the volume, either. There are a lot of web pages that say "I tried everything" findable on the web and Spotlight is still giving people trouble—that was true for me, too. However, after a restart, the Music volume appeared in the Spotlight Privacy exclusion list when before the restart it did not. I manually removed it from the exclusion list, and that fixed it for my computer. The share is AFP, not SMB. However, Patrick's computer still has the problem. "sudo mdutil -sav" reports that the Music volume has indexing enabled. "sudo mdutil -pv Music" reports "Error: datastore publishing not implemented" which sounds like it could be helpful but it's really not since Apple doesn't appear to publish information regarding "datastore publishing"—the only information on the web related to datastore publishing and Spotlight are experiences with the error message. I didn't keep track of my troubleshooting sessions, but in total it was probably several hours, and some of my recent Google searches were: ["cookies do not match" "no such file or directory"], [spotlight stores empty mac], [spotlight stores empty], [spotlight problem server], [spotlight problem], ["indexing and searching disabled"].
Sun Jun 14, 2009
Patrick and I picked up Mom Ryan. Brunch at Yank Sing with Suzan, Norman, Stan, Pat, and Patrick. Errands. Home. Patrick napped and when he woke up he decided that he had a sore throat. Stretches. Weight training: superslow lateral raise, superslow tricep kickback. I made cupcakes. Dinner at psychobauble and Nate's with psychobauble, Nate, Quyen, Dave, Romy, Danny, Drew, Phil, Leo, Jeff (sp?), Antoine. Nap. Gave Chris G a ride home. Stretches. Weight training: shrug, wrist curl. Late meal: hot nonfat milk, leftover dim sum. Hundreds of "kernel SCSITaskUserClient - Invalid arguments: scatterGatherEntries = 1, requestedTransferCount = 0, transferDirection is 0" showing up in Console? I solved it by quitting VMware Fusion.
Mon Jun 15, 2009
Hunch is down as of 8:09 AM—weird. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Email address change for a student. Phone change followup for JWG. Helped student SL with a question about mailing lists. Redirected a request to post a fellowship to Frank M. Staff Council meeting about the budget. Chatted briefly with Sarah P about tomorrow's meeting. Health events process and form for Chris C—sent to Chris for review. Password management. Installed Windows updates for my computer. Helped a student with mailbox too full problem. Minor web updates: added SF bike map to our maps page and current students page. Set up extension cord to work room, announced to staff. Researched monospace fonts for programming. My choices so far in order of preference (favorites first): Consolas, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Lucida Console, Monaco, Andale Mono. Computer maintenance for Shirin: uninstalled Workrave. 17 items in my inbox. Did some catching up on email. Worked a little on Patrick's website.
Tue Jun 16, 2009
Stretches. Breakfast at home: 2 eggs, 2 hash browns, 2 toast, lowfat cherry yogurt, orange juice. To work. Helped student CH with email setup on iPod Touch. Delivered UC ID to a student. Followup on an entering student's name misspelled in OAR systems. Followup with Leslie W about a fellowship opportunity posting. Followup on student email address change—OAAIS said the ticket was complete but it did not look completed to me. Short staff meeting. UCSF Communicators Group meeting. Beth B talked about analytics, Terri M talked about Google Docs, Laura M talked about writing for the web—all very good presentations. Web planning meeting with Eric D. Uploaded photos to Flickr. Dinner at home with Patrick: tacos. Watched Robot Chicken on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Time Machine has given no complaints for 24 hours! Researched anti-spam solutions. One bad thing about switching from 5dollarhosting to Bluehost is that Bluehost is not very good at preventing spam on non-Postini accounts. Installed Sender Verification Anti-Phishing Extension 0.9.0.2 add-on. Spent a lot of time working on Patrick's website: table-free layouts. Wanted badly to give up and use tables but didn't.
Wed Jun 17, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: kneeling kickback, sidelying leg lift, sidelying 90-degree leg lift. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Prepared new PowerPoint templates branded with School of Pharmacy for Shannon. Lots of followup on issues I've been working on the past few days. "Finding (Legally Safe) Graphics for Presentations and Websites" webinar by Mary Minow—very informative despite problems with audio and video in WebEx. (Note for future WebEx meetings: WebEx is not very friendly to Mac or Firefox—use Windows and IE instead.) Began work on the new supp app. Scott E reports that while listening to music at pandora.com (Windows XP, Firefox 2.0.0.14) the Backspace and Control keys on his keyboard fail to work as expected in other applications. The problem only seems to occur while Pandora is playing music. I suggested that he listen to Pandora in IE instead to see if the behavior changes. Alternately, one could try one of several Pandora desktop applications to isolate the problem, but I don't want to install a new app for this for him just yet. Upgraded Firefox for Scott. Answered computer support questions for student LN on the way home. Dinner at home with Patrick: tacos again—yum! Worked on Patrick's website.
Thu Jun 18, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: crunch. Checked on Time Machine and Spotlight—all seems to be well, finally. Still having Spotlight problems on Patrick's computer but haven't had time to put together a proper Apple forums posting. Installed Apple updates for both computers. Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Chatted with Eric V. Followup with Claire L about IDAF. Helped Lisa A in San Diego with mail to UCSF blocked. Sent JWG a new form A draft. Drupal planning meeting with Eric D. Posted a photo of me and Eric D to the School's Flickr photostream. Dinner at home with Patrick: parmesan-crusted talapia, roasted garlic new potatoes, boiled peas, hot water. Finished watching Robot Chicken on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Worked on Patrick's website.
Fri Jun 19, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Drupal followup with Eric D. IDAF followup with Claire L. Telephone meeting with Susie and Eric D. Supp app draft discussion with JWG and Scott E. Lunch: sandwich, triscuit. Drupal planning meeting with Eric D. Minor updates to our Flickr participation guidelines. Worked on Patrick's website. Error message encountered when attempting to start VMware Fusion: "Pipe: Write failed." I think quitting and restarting Fusion resolved it for me.
Sat Jun 20, 2009
Cut my hair. Remi and Jesse's commitment ceremony and party.
Sun Jun 21, 2009
Breakfast at home with Patrick: banana almond pancakes. Bought two iPhone 3GSes from Eli at the Apple Store with Patrick. Visited the AT&T store. Other errands. Home. Lunch at home with Patrick: grilled roast beef and lowfat swiss sandwiches, tortilla chips. Completed iPhone setup and account configuration with AT&T Wireless. Prepared a package to ship. Picked up dessert at Mollie Stone's. Dinner at Danny, Drew, and Phil's with Danny, Drew, Phil, Romy, Patrick: bun bo xao and 3 other dishes. Dessert: almond raspberry crostata, Polly Ann's mango ice cream.
Mon Jun 22, 2009
Stretches. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Worked on Patrick's website. Fixed some problems with the frankfarm.org RSS feed and April 2009 entries. Prepared for Tina's arrival. Picked up Tina at the airport. Home. Drove to Bed, Bath and Beyond. Tina bought us a KitchenAid mixer—she said it will really help for the 12-layer mocha cake we are planning to make while she is here. With our 20% off coupon, she saved $80! Dinner at home with Patrick, Tina, Mo: deli items.
Tue Jun 23, 2009
Took photos of Patrick and Tina performing tai chi chuan. Home. Patrick showered. Drove to the Ferry Building Marketplace where we got Blue Bottle Coffee and had sandwiches from Lulu Petite. While eating we saw Gavin Newsom stopping at Peet's Coffee with some other people, and Tina ran over and got a photo with him. Parking at the Embarcadero was $21 (!). Unpacked the new KitchenAid mixer. Patrick and Tina started preparing the cake. I uploaded photos and optimized Tina's laptop. We 3 drove to Jenny's mom's place to meet up with Jenny S and Peggy B. We had a really long, really delicious dinner at Nopa (415-864-8643, 560 Divisadero Street, San Francisco, California, 94117, USA) with Tina, Jenny, Peggy. Saw Jeff and Thom dining there separately, said hello. Home. Stretches. Weight training: superslow lateral raise, superslow modified tricep kickback, wrist curl, reverse wrist curl. Installed iPhone apps: Google Mobile App, Facebook, Yelp.
Wed Jun 24, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: kneeling kickback, leg lift. Processed and uploaded photos. Brunch at Brenda's French Soul Food with Tina, Jenny S, Mom Ryan, Patrick. Processed and uploaded photos. Mo came over to visit followed by psychobauble and Nate.
Thu Jun 25, 2009
Slept in. Brunch: leftovers. Took Tina to the airport. Nap. Dinner: leftovers. Uploaded photos. Shared 12-layer mocha cake and a delicious Yalumba muscat with Danny, Drew, and Phil. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly. Late meal: leftovers. Michael Jackson was reported to have died today in Los Angeles, and the news has hit people hard.
Fri Jun 26, 2009
Breakfast: one nectarine, one plum. House chores: dusting, vacuuming, garbage, car wash. Late lunch: beef brisket noodle soup and hot lemon tea at T-28 Cafe ($5.95 after a $1 tip). Nap. Dinner at home with Patrick: grilled pork chops, steamed blue lake string beans, boiled corn on the cob. Dancing at 550 Barneveld (Underworld). Attending: Ted, Scott, Andy, Dave, Jonathan, Lawrence, Brad, Ric, Cory, Tim, Larry, Michael, Antuan, Danny, Quyen, Quan, Vincent, (not my) Patrick, Horatio. DJs Lee Decker and Kevin Lee mixed in a fair amount of Michael Jackson to the house mix. When leaving the clothes check was all messed up and it took people hours of waiting in line to get out. The clothes check was advertised as being secure and easy, but this turned out to not be the case at all. Afterwards I went home, had a usual bowl of oatmeal, and slept til early Saturday afternoon.
Sat Jun 27, 2009
The fan in the Other World Computing (OWC) miniStack v2 I have has been making lots of noise lately, and the miniStack is not yet 2 years old. I sprayed compressed air into the rear vents because that fixed the problem before, but this time it didn't work. I might need to abandon the miniStack and replace the whole thing with a new drive and enclosure. Searched Google today on [iphone earbuds fall out] after attempting to use handsfree yesterday. Patrick takes a nap. quantum13 stopped by for cake. We took a walk through McCoppin Square. He leaves. I join Patrick for a nap. Dinner at DDP with Danny, Drew, Phil, psychobauble, Nate, Quyen, Dave, Sandip, Lawrence, Shawn, and a bunch of guys from an Orange County GVA. Home. Updated identity documents for Corinna (address change).
Sun Jun 28, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast plus fruit smoothie. Updated identity documents for Corinna (address change). Went to the pride parade and festival by myself, met up with sneeper, Scott, pachooey, benca, M--? (I forgot her name yet again), saw lots of people I knew. Instead of buying food and drink at the fair I brought 2 sandwiches with me, a small box of organic raisins, some tortilla chips and wheat thins, and a sip bottle of ice and water. I figure I easily saved at least $18—about one-third the price of a Muni fast pass now. Home. Was planning to have dinner at home with Patrick, but after a shower and we both lay down for a supposed short nap I woke up around 2:30 AM and turned out a kitchen light that had remained on.
Mon Jun 29, 2009
Removed vacation notices on voicemail and email. Installed VWware Fusion 2.0.4, Adium 1.3.5. Spent the morning catching up on email—not too bad. The UC budget situation has gotten worse—today the dean sent an email saying that the budget cuts for the next fiscal year are over 3 times what we thought they were a few weeks ago (22% instead of 6.8%). And, of these cuts, 10% will be permanent. President Yudof has proposed 3 scenarios for how to address the problems with various combinations of salary reductions and furloughs. These will be decided in mid-July by the UC Regents. Much is uncertain. Lunch at desk: roast turkey sandwich, unsugared graham crackers, water. Spent the afternoon coding JavaScript for the new supp app. While riding the bus home today I missed my stop because I was playing with my iPhone. Chatted briefly with Melissa today—she's starting a new one-year law program at NYU this fall. Dinner at home with Patrick: side salad and roast chicken with garlic, yellow bell peppers, mushrooms, olives. Small website edits for Drew. Worked on logos, documents, and website for Corinna. Began backing up the Music volume to a different drive so that I can send in the miniStack v2 for repair. Baked and frosted chocolate cupcakes.
Tue Jun 30, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped Patrick resolve a problem with our wireless network by installing a firmware update for our Airport Extreme, but I think the problem could have been resolved without the update—the device probably just needed to be restarted. To work. Birthday celebration for Eric D—everyone brought something tasty to share. I brought chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting and multicolor non-pareils. Staff meeting. Supp app web pages work, supp app PDF work, supp app workshop web pages edits with Scott. Helped JCB with a question about data recovery and undeletion. To home. Dinner at home with Patrick: grilled salmon, thai style lime rice pilaf, dinner roll, Smart Balance Light, steamed asparagus. Web work for Drew and Corinna. Followup on the Music mirror and the problem of the Time Machine drive not mounting. Recently Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar disappeared for me in Firefox 3.0.11 in Windows Vista. I tried seemingly everything to fix it with no success: dirty reinstalled the extension; uninstalled the extension, restarted Firefox, and reinstalled the extension; disabled all other extensions and restarted Firefox; restarted Firefox in Safe Mode; manually deleted the {c45c406e-ab73-11d8-be73-000a95be3b12} folder and attempted to reinstall the extension manually; clicked Restore Default Set in View... > Toolbars > Customize.... This problem took me longer than usual—I am usually not stumped by computer problems. I finally thought it was solved when I implemented the solution described under "Corrupt extension files" on the page called "Unable to install themes or extensions - Firefox" at mozillazine. Afterwards, in examining extensions.log, I found this:
2009-06-13 08:49:24 - safeInstallOperation: failed to back up file: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\zjsdz6ih.default\extensions\{0538E3E3-7E9B-4d49-8831-A227C80A7AD3}\chrome\forecastfox.jar to: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\zjsdz6ih.default\extensions\{0538E3E3-7E9B-4d49-8831-A227C80A7AD3}-trash\chrome ... rolling back file moves and aborting installation.
2009-06-13 08:49:24 - ExtensionManager:_finishOperations - failure, catching exception - lineno: 1944 - file: undefined - [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIFile.moveTo]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Firefox/components/nsExtensionManager.js :: moveFile :: line 1944" data: no]
2009-06-30 22:32:21 - safeInstallOperation: failed to clean up item location after its contents were properly backed up. Failed to clean up: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\zjsdz6ih.default\extensions\{c45c406e-ab73-11d8-be73-000a95be3b12} ... rolling back file moves and aborting installation."
But after removing the extensions.* files and getting the Web Developer Toolbar to reappear once, it would disappear again on subsequent browser restarts—very frustrating. I completely uninstalled all extensions and then uninstalled Firefox choosing to not keep my personal info. Today Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, so I ended up reinstalling with that version instead of 3.0.11 which I had before. extensions.rdf keeps getting corrupted even with Firefox 3.5—I don't know what's causing it, but quitting Firefox and deleting extensions.rdf and restarting Firefox seems to consistently work around the problem. Strawberry and nonfat milk smoothie. Stretches. Weight training: wrist curl, superslow lateral raise, superslow front raise. Installed Firefox 3.5 for OS X. Installed VMware Fusion 2.0.5 update. Late meal: hot nonfat milk, lowfat raspberry yogurt, chunky soup. Sage isn't compatible with Firefox 3.5, so I installed Christopher Finke's Feed Sidebar and OPML Support but couldn't figure out how to import my Sage OPML file.