October 2009
Summary: Dim sum lunch with aunty Helen, cousin Beverly, the Honmas, and Patrick. Oktoberfest dinner party with Chris, Adrian, Carlos, BJ, Patrick. Patrick and I begin eating more ovo-lacto-pesce-vegetarian meals. Dia de los Muertos party at Danny, Drew, and Phil's.
Dates on this page
Thu Oct 1, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Student JY reported a problem accessing Barracuda from off campus. I was unable to confirm (because we voluntarily turned off the modem data line in my office a long time ago). I gave the student a workaround and reported the problem to OAAIS. Met with Eric D to do Drupal work—updated modules then core then documented our process. Made live some changes and announced The Kiosk—a 32-inch display in our elevator lobby that displays announcements and reminders to elevatorgoers. We use Flickr to store, moderate, and deliver our announcements. We use Slickr to display them. So far feedback has been overwhelmingly positive; only one person said she hated it (and, just fyi, she isn't part of the School of Pharmacy). Followup with JWG who is testing instructions for letting our students know how to get to web archives of our LISTSERV mailing lists. Followup with a student about ID card access—solved. Cindy asked me to create a large sign for this afternoon's celebration, so I did. I didn't really have a proper lunch today—just grabbed a bagel and cream cheese and some fresh cut fruit from the free food table in the work room. ICRD work for Rodney. Chatted with student DY about email woes due to system problems on our end, continued followup with Registrar and OAAIS. Followup with Shawn H about "Enable the ActiveSync" login screen problems. Management activities. Special reception for Chris C at the FA House. Management activities. Dinner at home with Patrick: Patrick had leftover tamale, we both had steamed dumplings with soy sauce mixture (soy sauce, water, crushed garlic, dash of ground ginger, red vinegar, a few drops of sesame oil). More troubleshooting of "The backup volume is read only" error with Time Machine on Patrick's computer—still unsuccessful. Stretches. Weight training: superslow one-arm dumbbell row, superslow shrug, wrist curl, crunch. More maintenance for Patrick's computer.
Fri Oct 2, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: superslow kneeling kickback, superslow side-lying leg lift. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Kiosk announcement followup. I learned yesterday and today that I don't run into any problems sending messages to our 4 class year student listservs but when I go wider to mailing lists for students outside our school the system thinks I'm spamming. Tamer says these need to be spaced 30 minutes apart—not a problem; I just have to remember this in the future. Began weeding the UCSF Communicators Network Google Group. This was the first time I used Office 2007 to create an email mail merge—it was easier than I thought. I knew what I was doing—it might not be so easy for someone not already familiar with mail merge. Also, the process permitted a preview of the message body but not of the entire message including the message header. Microsoft Office development team: to improve the email mail merge process, let me preview what message will be sent to what email address. Currently if you make a mistake on the last screen where you select the column of email addresses you could easily end up with an email merge fiasco. ICRD work for Mike F. Listserv administration. More ICRD work for Rodney. Followup with WeID about an ID card issue. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: You will be successful through innovation and determination. Management activities. I learned today that iPhoto does not let you add text to an image. I recommended picnik.com and photoshop.com instead. Discovered a problem with my journal—it's not Class B no-www. Will fix later. Met with a student to set up email on a BlackBerry—successful. Backed up website data to external portable hard drives. Met with 2 students, wireless setup—took 75 minutes to set up all 3 UCSF wireless networks. More followup on the problem of no confirmation requests for messages sent to listservs. Management activities. Calendar management: scheduled new planning meetings. To home. Chatted with upstairs neighbor Caroline about trash duties in our household. Dropped my iPhone, learned that Apple charges the same price as what we paid for the phone brand new. Dinner at home with Patrick: lemon-garlic salmon, oven-roasted new potatoes, boiled peas, hot water.
Sat Oct 3, 2009
Fixed Class B no-www compliance for the journal. Linkchecking for home websites. Breakfast: sticky rice from Simmone, hot oolong tea. Very windy today; we didn't want to leave home. Hand-sewing: a sock, the left pocket of my winter coat. Prepared my winter coat by defuzzing it and clipping away loose threads. Edited Folsom Street Fair photos. Watched some slideshows of Quyen's photos from the cruise. Printed notices and flyers about recycling and composting to post near our waste bins. Lunch at home with Patrick: homemade cow burgers, frozen wedge fries. Did some vacation planning research with Patrick. Patrick took a nap. Edited Folsom Street Fair photos. Dinner at home with Patrick: seasoned, grilled filet mignon; corn on the cob; mashed potatoes. Watched Watchmen (2009, theatrical cut) on Netflix DVD with Patrick.
Sun Oct 4, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Patrick wrote lyrics today. Edited Folsom Street Fair photos. Archived documents. Brunch at home: hash browns; omelette with grated cheddar, red bell peppers, green onions; hot water. Early dinner at Taygiang Restaurant (415-682-8886, 2543 Noriega Street, San Francisco, California, USA) with Patrick. The food at Tay Giang is slightly above average, and it's great that there's a very large menu. Tay Giang could improve immediately by training waitstaff to be more attentive and personable. Tay Giang could improve in the long term by completely remodeling the interior which clearly was not designed properly and currently isn't very inviting. Home. Had fun reinstalling and reconfiguring Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) on the Dell Inspiron 700m that Sam gave back to us because he couldn't use it. I was surprised to find that Ubuntu has the same 2-finger scrolling feature that Apple MacBooks have on the trackpad. Installing some things (Brother printer drivers, VLC, KeePassX) and upgrading Firefox were a little painful, but I have it where I want it now. I'm still very impressed with Jaunty, particularly the keyboard shortcuts and accessibility.
Mon Oct 5, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Listserv management. Web edits followup with Susie. Made live web updates for SCWG (email setup). Followup with recent grad MB about accounts closure. Cindy's cdrom drive wasn't working properly, so I copied files from a cdrom and moved them to the network for her. UCSF ComNet weeding followup. Web edits for Cindy: health insurance co-pays. Calendar management. Lunch: carne asada fries from Carmelina's. Helped student BP with how to email all students. More followup with Tamer S about students not receiving confirmation messages. Eric and I began work on the facelift today. "Facelift" is our nickname for our home page refresh to pharmacy.ucsf.edu. We both were reluctant to do it at first because we both thought it wasn't needed, but I'm glad now that we are doing it. We spent about 6 person-hours on it today. I will try to keep track of how long it takes. 47 items in my inbox. To home. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftover Thai food, garlic naan. Dessert: fresh strawberries for Patrick, fresh sliced strawberries and cherry vanilla ice cream for me. Uploaded photos to Flickr. Discovered posterous from funcrunch's delicious stream. My delicious bookmark note for it: "lifestreaming and autocrossposting via email - the social web just got a little bit scarier." Pretty soon the companies that aren't providing APIs and the companies that don't figure out how to use APIs are no longer going to be very relevant. MailChimp is one company that seems to be at the forefront of API handling. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly, superslow wrist curl, superslow front raise.
Tue Oct 6, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Sysadmin followup work. White laptop hard drive upgrade: Carbon Copy Cloner and Winclone—it works! Lunch with Eric, Shirin, JWG at You See Sushi. Drupal planning with Eric. Sysadmin followup work. UCSF ComNet work. Designed School of Pharmacy peechee folders for Shirin. Sysadmin followup work. Dinner and Ask a Scientist: The Science of Magic at Axis Cafe with Patrick. Unexpectedly encountered Leslie K at the same event; we met sysadmin Bea M.
Wed Oct 7, 2009
Skipped oatmeal breakfast at home. Shuttle to lhts. Breakfast to go from the cafe: currant scone, V8 juice. Web team meeting with Susie L and Eric D. Learned today that yongfook is using posterous—interesting. Followup on name and email address change for two students. Lunch: pineapple agua fresca, two tacos (one cow, one chicken) from Carmelina's. Supp app planning with JWG—all done for now. Dinner at home with Patrick: vegetarian pasta with marinara sauce. Stretches. Vacation research with Patrick. Searching Google today on ["snow leopard" unusable] = 31,800 results. Stretches. Weight training: superslow tricep kickback and other exercise. Stretches. Checked on CrashPlan backup for Patrick—all is well.
Thu Oct 8, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Management activities. ComNet work: weeded group members, I think we found our spammer. Listserv management. Facelift work with Eric D: continued megadropdown work. Lunch at NKRB with John K, Ed C, Eric D. Facelift work with Eric D: got one menu of megadropdown mostly working. Sent Susie a summary of the recent meeting I attended with UCTV. Troubleshot BSOD "Stop: 0x00000024" with my Win XP VM. Dinner at home by myself: leftovers from last night. Stretches. Weight training: various lower body exercises, crunch. More troubleshooting of "The backup volume is read only" error with Time Machine on Patrick's computer. I opened the sparsebundle and ran a Disk Verify on it. The result: "Invalid key length" and "Volume check failed." Trashed 3 months of backups and started over.
Fri Oct 9, 2009
A recent tweet: "Time Machine: the backup volume is read only, invalid key length, volume check failed, 3 months of data. good thing I have @crashplan also." followed by this Facebook followup: "My opinion: Anyone interested in assuredly backing up his or her data must have more than one backup solution because every affordable backup solution available today will eventually fail. I've seen this over and over again not only with my own data but also with that of friends and students I help and with stories from other technology professionals. At least one backup must regularly take data offsite—outside of your local zone of environmental disaster. However, this is currently too difficult or too expensive for most people; even I do not yet follow my own recommendations. Apple's Time Machine works beautifully under ideal circumstances, but it also frequently can fail spectacularly. I've tried Mozy Home and Mozy Pro. Mozy Home on OS X repeatedly failed after working well for several months. Mozy Pro on OS X and Windows seems to be performing flawlessly, but I've never had to do a restore yet. Consequently I do not recommend Mozy Home, and I cautiously recommend Mozy Pro. After much research and testing, I have decided that CrashPlan is the easiest and least expensive option for offsite backup; you just need to find a backup buddy who will do it with you. Currently I use Time Machine for onsite backups at home and at work. I would like to use CrashPlan for offsite home backups but have been unsuccessful finding someone I trust outside of the Bay Area to be my backup buddy. I really like the simplicity and elegance of Time Machine, but I think it's time to abandon it for home use. If I do, I'm not sure if I will ever return to it. My list of Apple technologies I do not trust currently includes Spotlight ( http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9939572 ), Active Directory integration ( https://frankfarm.org/journal/2008/02/08/ ), FileVault ( https://frankfarm.org/journal/2007/06/26/ ), and Time Machine ( pick one: http://www.google.com/search?q="time+machine"+site%3Afrankfarm.org ), and the list grows longer every year I own a Mac. Time Machine does not back up online. A service similar to this is http://www.macminicolo.net/transport/ but it's very expensive in the long run, and I do not recommend it. Just compare the cost of Transport to CrashPlan, Particularly if you have a lot of data, it's a no-brainer." 1-on-1 meeting with Rodney. Minor web update for Carol: pharm sci pathway declaration. Met with student BA: iPod Touch email setup. Minor update for Shirin: grad fairs. Kiosk followup with Sierra A. Met with Eric D: facelift work. Met with student BA about iPod Touch email setup. Management activities. Dinner at home with Patrick: veggie burger with cheese and mayo, tater tots, steamed broccoli, hot water. Uploaded photos to Flickr.
Sat Oct 10, 2009
Updated the iPhone and iPod Touch setup instructions for work (even though it's Saturday) because I realized yesterday that the instructions on what credentials to use had changed a few weeks ago. Canceled last night's partially uploaded then completely stalled batch of uploads to Flickr, swept up the mess. I love Flickr, but Uploadr is not something I would call reliable and it hasn't ever been for me. I don't think there are any more reliable ways to get large numbers of photos into Flickr, though, and I can always manually clean up the messes it leaves behind. To account for Uploadr's inconsistencies, I now never start another upload batch until one is finished. Nice feature to let people prepare and queue multiple uploads without waiting, but it doesn't do much good if it doesn't work properly enough to be trustworthy. Web work for Danny. Breakfast at home by myself: plain nonfat yogurt with cinnamon and diced pear and a few drops of honey, V8 high fiber, english muffin, Smart Balance Light, english breakfast hot tea. Linkchecking for home websites. Cut my hair, showered. Went to the party of James and James (aka The Jameses), met Tatiana, Sam, Tim, Ray, Greg, Jon, Jason, Laura, Michael, Nikole, Steve, Buster, and more whose names I cannot remember. Others I already knew: psychobauble, Nate, Gwen. Late meal: takeout from King of Thai Noodle: fried rice and fried chicken, chicken pad thai.
Sun Oct 11, 2009
Worked on Danny's website: new promo, laser treatment health and safety, sent proposed pages to Drew for review. Lunch: leftovers. Napped. Dinner at psychobauble and Nate's with psychobauble, Nate, Patrick, Romy, Danny, Drew, Phil, Paul. Nate cooked chili, Patrick cooked sage cornbread, Paul brought a circust-tent-shaped German chocolate cake from DeLessio Market and Bakery. Home. Stopped using Time Machine on Patrick's iMac and instead set up Carbon Copy Cloner 3.3. I'm still using Time Machine on my iMac, but I've had so many problems with Time Machine that I'm certain that it will fail again within the next year. Usually I can fix whatever the problem is, but it's not worth that much of my time. I used to think that Time Machine was elegant and beautifully designed, but if you have to restart the Airport Extreme once every few days then that's really not insanely great design. Our setup is a 1.5 TB drive connected to our Airport Extreme. I think if your backup hard drive is directly connected to your Mac then you're probably going to have a more reliable time with it. With all the time I've spent trying to deal with Time Machine problems, if I could know for certain that directly connected disks would give no problems then I would not hesitate to spend another $120 on another 1.5 TB drive.
Mon Oct 12, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Management activities, beat back the inbox. Lunch: roast turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce from the carving station in the cafeteria, fresh cut fruit with some cottage cheese. Dinner at home by myself: roasted pork loin with rice and vegetables. Web work and followup for Danny's website.
Tue Oct 13, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. SCWG meeting. Staff meeting. 1-on-1 meeting with Cindy. Lunch: leftovers. Dinner at home with Patrick: baked Pacific cod, steamed asparagus, leftovers. Patrick and I baked an apple-cherry pie. Checked out Google Squared and Google Building Maker—both look interesting and useful. Web work and followup for Danny's website.
Wed Oct 14, 2009
The Book of Odds might have some interesting facts, but it is not very useful beyond that. I tried it out, attempting to compare my odds of getting skin cancer with a caucasian man my age and gave up after several minutes of trying. Interesting data presented in a list is not bad, but I kept wanting to see multiple data sets on a single graph a la Wolfram Alpha. Book of Odds would be much more interesting as data within Wolfram Alpha. Telecommute day. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Spent pretty much the whole day working on megadropdown for the facelift. It's in a pretty good state now—just have some width issues and IA issues to sort out before fade and opacity styling. Noe and Market Farmer's Market with Patrick. Dinner at Zapata with Patrick: burritos, tortilla chips.
Thu Oct 15, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Megadropdown work with Eric. Management activities. Lunch: chicken salad from Palio, water. Management activities. Made live the new Twitter widget on our current students page. Dinner at home with Patrick: chicken kinda-cacciatore over steamed rice, hot water. Dessert: cinnamon almonds, one piece of salt water taffy. Watched Serenity "Out of Gas" on Netflix DVD with Patrick.
Fri Oct 16, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Management activities. Facelift megadropdown IA work with Susie and Eric—lots of great progress. White Coat Ceremony for the Class of 2013 with Nkansah and Tang—all seemed to go well except somehow the lights went out even tho no one touched the lighting panel, but I got them back on within a few seconds. I'm now known to hundreds as "the lighting guy"—I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I discovered yesterday that the student lounge door is not closing properly again, so today I made a sign for the door warning people to pull or push it completely shut and asked Lucia to report it on Monday. Management activities. Left work. Bus 66 left a few minutes early again. Chatted with Aunty Helen while waiting for the next bus. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers, potato bolani, basil pesto, hot water.
Sat Oct 17, 2009
Dim sum lunch with aunty Helen, cousin Beverly, the Honmas, and Patrick at Dynasty Chinese Seafood Restaurant (408-996-1680, 10123 N Wolfe Road, Cupertino, California, USA, 95014-2509). Dinner party prep. Oktoberfest dinner party with Chris, Adrian, Carlos, BJ, Patrick.
Sun Oct 18, 2009
Slept in. Stretches, weight training: crunch. Brunch at home with Patrick: leftovers. Watched Firefly "Ariel" on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Read articles about "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan. Nap. Stretches. Dinner at home with Patrick: baked sesame teriyaki salmon, tater tots, steamed baby bok choy, hot water. Web work for Danny's website: animations investigation for Phil. Watched Firefly "War Stories" on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Updated a module for Patrick's website. Checked on Patrick's Carbon Copy Cloner backup—the sparseimage had gotten corrupted and would no longer mount in Finder. I don't (yet) have DiskWarrior, so it was easier to trash the existing sparseimage and start over from scratch. This event could provide more evidence that the earlier problems I had with Time Machine were really due to Airport Express not properly keeping volumes mounted and not Time Machine like I had suspected. Either way they're both Apple products, though. CrashPlan still seems to be working properly, though, and that's going through Airport Express, too, so who knows what's really going on?
Mon Oct 19, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Management activities. Cindy and I went to procurement card training. Management activities. Lunch: salad from the cafeteria. Showed student JU how to upload images to our kiosk and how to use photoshop.com to add text to an image. photoshop.com is pretty snazzy—it connects to Flickr and like magic makes all your Flickr photos available to photoshop.com for editing. (If you have a lot of photos, it will take a few minutes for everything to show up, but you can continue working while it works.) Let student MM borrow a VGA-to-mini-DVI adapter. Spent the rest of the day working on the facelift megadropdown: added transparency, changed the rollover colors from black-on-light-yellow to white-on-540-blue, restored parent-title rollovers, made many small adjustments, determined that drop shadows might be too hard to implement properly. I'm using a transparent PNG pixel to do the transparency for 2 reasons: (a) for some regions I want the background to be semitransparent but the text on top of it to always be 100%, and (b) dealing with cross-browser opacity is less tidy than the PNG method. Started getting a sore throat today. Dinner at home with Patrick: salad, hot water. Our Sonic Fusion DSL got installed today. Before the install our line was purchased at 1500 Kbps down and 384 Kbps up, and we were getting 1213 Kbps down and 335 Kbps up. We had purchased 6000 Kbps down and 1000 Kbps up. Fusion is Sonic's way of saying headless or dry-loop—no voice phone line is required. Essentially it means the money we were giving to AT&T can instead be given to Sonic and we would theoretically get somewhere close to 4 times faster downloads and somewhere close to 2.5 times faster uploads. After the install we are now getting 3716 Kbps down and 889 Kbps up. I spent the evening rerouting cables and trying to see if I could get the speed any faster. (I couldn't.) Chatted with Nate on the phone. Time Machine error 18 on my iMac—restarting Airport Express and the Time Machine drive fixed it. Installed IPNetTunerX 1.6.9 but none of the basic choices matched my DSL and I couldn't figure out what else to do with it so I deleted it.
Tue Oct 20, 2009
Home with a sore throat. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Asked AT&T to disconnect our land line. Checked in with Sonic support for suggestions on improving the ~3700 Kbps speed. They said: try removing the surge protector from the phone line path (and go directly from jack to dsl modem), try a different cable, remove possible interference (e.g., dimmer switches). He confirmed that we're less than a mile from the CO so we should be getting much better than ~3700. Troubleshot and resolved "Unable to move message to trash" error message with my iPhone. I'm using IMAP with my Bluehost-hosted email attached to my domain frankfarm.com. The solution I used: subscribe to the Trash mailbox from Thunderbird, then on the iPhone in advanced mail settings specify the Trash folder on the server instead of the Trash folder on the iPhone. Made more changes to the phone line and DSL install, got it up to ~4900 Kbps—woo! Afternoon meal: dos tamales. Dinner at home with Patrick: basil pesto pasta, hot water. Watched Firefly "Trash" on Netflix DVD with Patrick. DSL speed test: got 5048 Kbps down and 858 Kbps up—pretty sweet! Ran another test later and got 5208 Kbps down and 894 Kbps up.
Wed Oct 21, 2009
Home with a sore throat. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Asked Sonic to disconnect our old DSL connection. Lunch: leftovers. Began listening to Marianne Talbot's lectures in Philosophy for Beginners. Chatted with the landlord. Dinner at home by myself: turkey burger, wedge fries, hot water. Dessert: Breyer's cherry vanilla ice cream. Time Machine error: Backup failed with error 18. Fixed it by restarting Airport Express in Airport Utility.
Thu Oct 22, 2009
Home with a sore throat. Usual oatmeal breakfast, green tea. Rested. Began writing a script to automate the mounting of external hard drives connected to the Airport Express via AFP. Lunch: turkey burger, hash browns, triscuit crackers, graham crackers, green tea. My sore throat mostly went away over the course of today, but in the early afternoon a very runny nose took its place. I took some nyquil out of desperation, fell asleep. Late dinner: quesadilla on a bed of mixed organic greens. More script work.
Fri Oct 23, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Dayquil. Not feeling my best, but went to work because it's Stephen F's first day: introductions, campus tour, lunch at Milano's, visited Helen at Laurel Heights, did some project orienting. Lots of catching up on email, got the inbox below 40. Lots of small web updates, burned Windows 7 discs. Dinner part 1: leftover salad from Milano's, water. Dinner part 2: salad with mushrooms, hot water, nyquil.
Sat Oct 24, 2009
Woke up around 3:30 AM, took some nyquil, went back to sleep. Slept in. Recuperated. Brunch at home by myself: vermicelli noodles with baby bok choy and mushrooms in organic vegetable broth, green tea. Did some Thailand trip research. Dinner at home with Patrick: spaghetti with garden marinara, hot water. Tried watching Nosferatu streaming on Netflix instant watch but it was not interesting enough.
Sun Oct 25, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Redesigned Patrick's MySpace page. (Fonts: Desdemona, Dakota.) Cut my hair, showered. Errands with Patrick at Westlake Shopping Center. Lunch at Daphne's: falafel pita sandwich lunch special: greek salad and rice for Patrick, french fries for me, iced tea for both. Bought fabric at Beverly's, grocery shopping at Trader Joe's, drive-thru car wash at Chevron. Swept in the back yard, collecting lots of dead leaves and dirt for compost. Rested in the sun, read from a book, drank watermelon juice mixed with 7-UP. Shower. Rested in bed with Patrick. Cold is almost all gone—just a little congestion left. Stretches. Dinner at home with Patrick: quesadillas, organic mixed greens salad. More Time Machine woes on my iMac. Couldn't resolve them, so I deleted the sparsebundle. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Ended up reformatting the drive and losing Patrick's backups.
Mon Oct 26, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Updated a document for Cindy. Caught up on email. Lunch with JWG at NKRB. More catching up on email and updating a document for Cindy. Left Melissa H a voicemail while walking to the bus. Used iPhone voice recognition on the way home—sweet! Read about Google Sitemap Generator on the bus ride home. I printed out instructions for this almost a year ago but never got around to implementing it for anything on which I work. Home. Read more about iPhone handsfree shortcuts on the Apple website. These instruction pages are pretty well designed except the scrolling iframe creates a scrollable region inside a scrollable region and it's confusing to use at times. The other big problem is that it's not clear how much stuff there is because the indicator for the current tab is not very obvious. Dinner at home by myself: Joe's Os with basil chiffonade from the basil plant my mom and dad gave us—yummy! Time Machine completed its initial backup. I previously had the Time Machine drive connected to the Airport Express and had so many problems I was about to give up on Time Machine but then I thought I would try Time Machine when the drive is connected more directly to my computer. I say more directly because it's connected to the miniStack v2 rather than directly to my iMac. I then shared the drive with Patrick's computer and started Time Machine on it to this drive. We'll see how it goes. Carbon Copy Cloner—you're on hold for now, but I might yet come back to you. Quick web edits for Danny's website: the return of Jacques.
Tue Oct 27, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. SCWG meeting. Troubleshot cardkey and door lock problems. Web updates for Susie. Student email address change followup. Followup with OAAIS and Registrar about email address change process being inefficient. Listserv maintenance. Responded to Tiki's request for updates to the SATE security posters I created in InDesign. Prepared purchasing for Fusion 3 and Snow Leopard (OS 10.6). Submitted a purchase request for Don K. Lunch: Panda Express vegetarian: chow mein, mixed vegetables, veggie spring rolls. After I made all my selections, the server told me that the food was cooked in a chicken base, "is that okaaay?" I said yes, not being that picky yet. My fortune: Your confidence will lead you to success. Checked in with Helen about Stephen F. 1-on-1 with Cindy. Listserv maintenance for PDC. Helped Carol retrieve data form the Staff Portal. Email account issue followup for SR. Published to the kiosk the UCTV promo I had created. Followup with a request from Brandy L forwarded by student MM. Followup regarding student cardkey access to Genentech Hall and FAMRI Library. Followup regarding the continuing problem with links to Google spreadsheets and our listserv system. Installed VirtualBox 3.0.8 at work, then wondered why it took me so long to try it out. Met with Eric D: Drupal module updates, some facelift review. Sent Cindy an update regarding encryption for students. Met Patrick at Peet's, I got a pumpkin chai latte. Dinner at Danny, Drew, Phil, and Romy's with Danny, Drew, Phil, Romy, Patrick, Nate. Phil cooked pasta with meatballs in alfredo sauce, garlic bread, potato salad—delicious! Nate baked a lemon cake. Home. Installed VirtualBox 3.0.8 at home. Realized that I first bookmarked VirtualBox on April 26, 2007, and never looked at it again until now. Perhaps I didn't bother installing it before because it was still too early and not yet mature? Installed Windows 7 into VirtualBox, immediately installed Firefox 3.5.4, unpinned IE8 from the taskbar—so far so good. Took about 50 minutes. Along the way I discovered a download problem with Sophos from the OAAIS website and reported it in Remedy: "java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied". This is my first Windows 7 installation. Something disappeared.
Wed Oct 28, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Telecommute day. Lots of followup on existing issues. Watched Monday's recording of Chancellor Sue Desmond-Hellman. Researched mobile broadband for Don K. Gave Tom F tips on setting up wireless at UCSF for iPhone. MCCA product key followup with Valerie S and Cesar G. Management activities. Genentech Hall cardkey access followup. Lunch: leftovers, english breakfast tea. Shower. Dinner at La Oaxaqueña Bakery and Restaurant with psychobauble and Nate. I had shrimp fajitas, lemonade-raspberry agua fresca.
Thu Oct 29, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Notified Susie that the DSU website has been down for some time. Prepared the supp app project calendar then made copies for tomorrow's meeting. Followup with student ET about email address change. Sent Don K some questions about his expected mobile broadband usage. Listserv management: grad jobs list update for Cindy. Burned MCCA software to cds and dvds. Lunch: shrimp louie wrap from the cafeteria. Burned MCCA software to cds and dvds. Infrastructure meeting. Met with Eric D: Druapl and facelift. Facelift work: I put in the UCSF banner. Dinner at Cybelle's Front Room by myself: veggie burger, steak fries, hot water. Troubleshot Carbon Copy Cloner errors: "The following disk images failed to mount" and "resource busy" and "no mountable file systems". Did lots of troubleshooting involving Disk Utility and Finder and waiting. Attempted to delete the sparseimage, got an error: "Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occurred. (Error code -1407)" Went to Patrick's computer and successfully deleted the sparseimage from there. Set Carbon Copy Cloner up again with a new clone. Helped a student with a question about a computer virus. 30 items in my work inbox. Something reappeared.
Fri Oct 30, 2009
Supp app project kickoff meeting with Stephen F, JWG, and JCB. Lunch with Domenica and Robin at Chow. I hadn't seen Doe in a long time and it was good to catch up with her and remeet Robin. Followup on supp app project with Stephen F. Reviewed P1 photos. Updated the student leadership group photo sheet for Cindy. Dentist visit: normal checkup, all is well. Dia de los Muertos party at Danny, Drew, and Phil's. I dressed as a skeleton (same as 2 years ago). Patrick arrived separately with Joseph, both dressed in black but otherwise no costume.
Sat Oct 31, 2009
Brunch at Cafe Rain Tree (415/242-9000, 118 West Portal, San Francisco, California, USA) with Patrick: veggie scramble, potatoes, 10-grain toast, coffee for Patrick; mushroom omelette with Jack cheese, potatoes, hot water for me. Service was very courteous and attentive. Our waitron was Nicole. Home. Rested. Linkchecking for home websites. Dinner at home with Patrick: artichoke ravioli with garlic and tricolor bell peppers marinara sauce. Watched Wallace and Gromit The Curse of the Were-Rabbit on library DVD with Patrick.