Frank Farm

Joe's Os with banana. Cindy brought bagels in for the office. Met with a student to discuss Outlook and building a website. Met with another student to discuss VPN and e-mail migration. Secret meeting. Set up the laptop for the Law Review presentation. E-mail naming decisions. Dinner at home with Patrick: tempura prawns, mac and cheese, peas. Don Don sent me an invite to Yahoo 360. Today one of our students gave me a gift card for Best Buy to thank me for helping with her laptop. I always love getting these!

Breakfast: Joe's Os with banana. Showered. House cleaning: washed the insides of windows to remove dirt and mold. Took out trash, recycling, compost. Did some cleaning in the shower. Folded some laundry. Snack: a banana. Swept the entryway. Lunch: leftover linguine with red sauce, leftover mac and cheese. Showered. Went to Melissa's place to help her migrate files from her old desktop computer to her new laptop. Patrick and I watched the first episode of Battlestar Galactica, the entirety of which is available as a Realplayer stream online at the official site. The audio and video quality were crappier than our antenna reception, but -- amazingly -- it was still decent enough to watch. I liked the show except for the parts with the jerky camera and the parts where flying ships and explosions made sounds when there should have been no sound. When will humans be brave enough to depict space the way it really is? Is it too much to ask for this much honesty in representation? In exchange for my helping Melissa with her computer, she took Patrick and me to dinner at Gaspare's (415-387-5025, 5546 Geary Blvd), a charming Italian restaurant where we had a very enjoyable meal -- all of us Gaspare's virgins. It's a long, rectangular room: 4-person booths line the walls, larger adjustable tables line the middle. On the walls are paintings of memorable vistas of San Francisco and Italy. The ceiling is a trelliswork from which grapes hang vineyard-style. (The grapes are fake, but it's still charming.) The most thoughtful part of the decor was including a thick-curtained foyer to bar the cold breezes from outside and to retain privacy for booths near the front. We shared garlic bread and a 2-person deluxe salad, fresh gnocchi alla bolognese, and a small pizza with mushrooms and italian style sausage. For dessert, we shared an order of spumoni and an order of tiramisu. All the food was delicious. The garlic bread had real bits of garlic, very strong on one side, weak on the other, which was good because you got to choose what you wanted. The pizza is thin-crust, done much to my liking. The spumoni is tri-color with bits of fruit within. The tiramisu is very, very delicious -- my favorite part of the meal. Our server was very polite and mostly efficient. The one time she let our glasses run dry, she was very apologetic upon her return. We drove back to Melissa's where I did some final work with her laptop (for today, anyway). Patrick and I drove home. I chatted with Dex on the phone, then briefly with Tony Q on IM. Sleep.

Brunch with Patrick at Baghdad Cafe: we both get our standards. Me: eggs with sausage, wheat toast. Patrick: pancakes and sausage. We planned to read in a cafe and had sat down to some green tea at Sweet Inspirations but Patrick's allergies were so pestering that we went home. Patrick had a shower, and then we watched The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) on DVD. Napped. I cooked dinner at home with Patrick: carrot soup, pesto tortelloni with red sauce, bread and butter. Patrick has recently started composing some original music using Reason.

Pumpkin granola with banana. Set up Chris's new Dell docking station, removed his old computer and old monitor. Lots of e-mail migration followup. Helped Melissa with her laptop. Lunch: bacon cheeseburger, onion rings. Dinner at home by myself: biryani, naan.

Missed out on breakfast because the 8:08 AM bus didn't show up. Student computing committee meeting. OSACA staff meeting. Troubleshot a problem with Outlook 2003 on a student's laptop: "An unexpected error has occurred." Lunch: Panda Express. More work with the student's laptop, ended up sending a detailed problem report to Mark B. More e-mail migration issues -- a lot more in this batch than the previous batch. Talked with 2 students: one about its accidentally closing her account, one about how she can't remember her password for McAfee privacy service and how it's very difficult (or impossible) to reach anyone at McAfee. (Again, as I have done many times in the past, I told her it's simply easier to uninstall McAfee and purchase and install Norton.) Updated next year's block calendar for Cindy. Dinner at home with Patrick: cow tacos.

Granola for breakfast. Telecommute day. Mostly did research for implementation of a message board. Made live home page news for Susie. Updated the jobs listserv for Joel. Some e-mail migration issues. Helped Chris with VPN. Lunch: steamed shrimp dumplings. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftover tacos. Watched Simpsons.

Granola for breakfast. Joel brought in some tasty buns from Sunset Bakery for the office. Cindy, Joel, and I met to discuss an optional web message board for entering students. Based on their requirements, we're going with a closed Yahoo! Groups group. It helps that Joel has owned a group of his own for over a year, so he's well familiar with the moderation and admin tools and settings. We pretty much just have to choose colors, a home page photo, and then get a feed from James of the e-mail addresses we plan to invite. Filed a problem report with ITS -- there's a partition that's out of space. Reviewed Chris's notes about PDAs in preparation for content for the website. E-mail migration issues and followup. Rodney got me admin access to the AD accounts for our students, so I spent a few minutes updating display names to match what students really wanted, e.g., Steve instead of Stephen. Julie reported that she thinks she resolved our application/pdf filetype problem, and I tested, and it seems okay. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: You are next in line for promotion. A student mentioned again that the computer in the student lounge wasn't working, so I checked it out, and Chris R at Dell Chat quickly ordered a service technician to replace the motherboard. Returned a student's laptop. Created and posted a sign for Joel for the cleaning staff. Dinner at home with Patrick: baked lemon chicken.

Joe's Os for breakfast. I forgot to mention yesterday that Cindy brought a dead mouse into my office. It was all white. She handed it to me, and I picked it up and turned it over, and it was the old-style ball mouse, so we chucked it in the trash and I set her up with a new optical mouse we had lying around just for an occasion like this. E-mail migration issues. Helped Christopher, a repair technician from Dell, to repair and set up the student lounge computer. Replacing the motherboard did indeed fix the problem. He pointed out where capacitors on the mobo had burned up, causing the problem. Scanned in purchasing documents to archive as PDF. Helped a student with instructions for building a website (spindocs). Helped a student understand how to leave mail on the server with Outlook. Partial lunch: Vietnamese sandwich for $3 from a pharmacy student doing a fundraiser. Installed Firefox 1.0.2 updates, Office updates, Spywareblaster 3.3 updates for some office computers. Helped Chris set up his CMS BounceBack drive -- it seems to work despite an unintuitive interface. It also wasn't very easy to set up. Installed Microsoft Antispyware Beta for some office computers. One of the students brought in a small, expensive-looking cake for the office as a thank you gift, but so few of us were around, Cindy and I decided that Ena should just take it home to share with her kids. I got photos, though. Dinner: Subway sandwich. Home. Computer maintenance. Today was Joe's birthday celebration at the Metro, but my eczema has been bothering me lately, and I feel miserable. I blame it on stress.

Eggs, hash browns, toast for breakfast with Patrick. Shower. Shopping at Stonestown Mall. We had gone looking for cinnamon chocolates at Godiva and underwear at Macy's but instead just bought new bath towels at Macy's. Lunch at Jitra: Patrick had yellow curry chicken, I had cashew chicken, we both had Thai iced teas. Picked up Patrick's birthday cake at Ambrosia Bakery. Groceries at Parkside Farmer's Market (415-681-5563, 555 Taraval Avenue). Patrick and I watched Enter the Dragon (1973) on DVD. Sam brought over birthday presents for Patrick: a ceramic bunny rabbit coin bank; a stuffed animal (duck); a red, bejeweled hair clip; a stuffed birthday cake plush toy that plays Happy Birthday when you press its center; a Norelco Acu-Control personal groomer; 2 D batteries; instant prehistoric dinosaurs ("just add water"); a neon alarm clock with the price sticker still attached ($9.99 on sale, regularly $14.99). Patrick got birthday cards from his mom and from Dianne, and a little bit of cash, too. Dinner at home with Patrick (I cooked): biryani, naan. Patrick and Sam went to a J.S. Bach piano recital featuring music friends of Sam. I stayed home and edited 4 tracks from Sandra Bernhard's Without You I'm Nothing CD so that the tracks have the singing parts only -- it's nice to be able to hear just the singing separate from the non-singing. I tried doing my taxes again, asked Travis for help by e-mail, and he replied very thoroughly and quickly -- he's so sweet and helpful.

It's Patrick's birthday today! We made aram sandwiches for Kristina's baby shower tomorrow. We drove to Golden Gate Park and got a hot dog and Icee snack at the boat house. The sky was mostly clear and the weather was warmish in the sun, cold in the shade. The water level of Stow Lake was currently too low for the paddle boats and rowboats to operate. For some reason, an elderly man sat with a handwritten sign which said as much at the boat house counter -- we couldn't figure out why he had to hold the sign. (I thought he wanted to feel helpful.) We hiked to the top of Strawberry Hill, a small mountain in the middle of Stow Lake. The view was disappointing because of all the trees. Why doesn't someone chop them down to make paper? (Just kidding about the chopping but not kidding about the view.) The artificial waterfall wasn't running, either. If you're thinking about doing this same short hike, I recommend Buena Vista Park or Twin Peaks instead of Strawberry Hill. The other not-so-nice thing was that we smelled poop a whole lot while walking through GG Park. I could only hope that it was from a dog and not from human animals. After the park, we drove to Divisadero Car Wash, then we stopped in the Castro. Patrick wanted some new jeans but we went from shop to shop, saying hi to Adrian (we saw his new double-phoenix tattoo -- cool! sexy!) and Jesse and Hussein. Stopped at Safeway on the way home. Snack: ham sandwich on a bagel from Safeway. I sang Happy Birthday for Patrick and we ate slices of the birthday cake we bought yesterday at Ambrosia. The cake is chocolate cake on the bottom layer (dark brown), chocolate mousse in the middle layer (light brown), and white chocolate mousse on the top layer (white). Deeeelicious! Patrick napped while I did laptop maintenance. Dinner at Aziza (415-752-2222, 5800 Geary Blvd) with Patrick. We really like this Moroccan restaurant whose dark but enchanting interiors reminded us of Tantra in Silverlake. (See 2002/08/01.) There is lots to like about Aziza: the staff is friendly, accommodating, and efficient. The seating (padded, colorful chairs and benches) is comfortable, even luxurious. The walls and ceiling are artful -- painted tiles, patterned and stained woods, exposed wooden beams. After we ordered, the first item to arrive (not counting water glasses) was a pot of hot Moroccan mint tea (sweetened traditional moroccan tea, packed with fresh mint & a splash of orange blossom water), pre-sweetened but not too sweet -- just the perfect amount. We also ordered a side of moroccan spiced mission almonds -- these were coated in something sweet and slightly spicy; I was able to tolerate about a dozen given a proper pacing. They put a smile on our faces; maybe we are easily pleased, but it's not often we taste something so unique as these nuts. We also received a bowl of slightly sweet (honeyed?) anise bread encrusted with sesame seed as well as a small bowl of marinated olives and almonds. Our first course arrived: Patrick had tricolor, steamed Coke Farm beets with goat cheese pearls and balsamic vinaigrette, and I had seafood triangles (prawns & alaskan halibut tucked into phyllo, parslied couscous with pine nuts, saffron essence). Patrick wants me to mention specifically the artful arrangement of the beets dish. The plate was square with the beets and goat cheese in one corner and clover sprouts and dots of balsamic in the other then an empty space in the middle. "It was like looking at a piece of art," he says. We thought the tea was so good that we ordered a second pot. Main courses: Patrick had saffron-infused Hoffman Ranch cornish hen (capped with house-preserved meyer lemons, purple potato mash), and I had grilled Hoffman Ranch thyme chicken brochettes (with steamed saffron couscous and something they called "vegetable stew" but it's not a stew -- it might be stewed vegetables, but it's not a stew). Patrick's braised cornish hen was pre-sliced and arranged like duck, and it tasted like duck, too, with a crispy skin and a rich, thick, flavorful sauce. My chicken brochettes were well marinated and grilled perfectly -- they remained astoundingly juicy throughout. No dry corners or edges. Patrick had a glass of Cairanne (grenache / syrah / mourv