Friday, October 26, 2001
Riding MUNI bus 43 home from work, I feared for my life. Some of the more jaded San Franciscans would laugh at that statement, perhaps with a mocking retort ready for firing. But this driver must have been on drugs. We went from the stop at 4th and Parnassus to 6th and Parnassus (which is downhill) at about 40 miles an hour. The rest of my trip was similar, with each stop ending with G-forces you don't come to expect on public transit, the beauty of the synchronicity as 100 bodies are lurched and 100 hands simultaneously reach up in fear to grab a metal bar to prevent injury. When we rounded the corner at 7th and Lawton, I thought the bus was going to fall over on its side as the rear wheels hiked up the curb because he took the corner too tight and too quickly. If anyone from MUNI is reading this, I didn't get the driver's name, but his bus number was 8832. He is easily the worst driver I've experienced on MUNI busses, and if you know how many bad drivers MUNI has, you know what that means. If there were justice in this world, he would be strapped to the front of the second-worst MUNI driver's bus for a year. If only I were dictator. Earlier in the day, I handled computer emergencies. Melissa's e-mail would hang whenever she started it. After much troubleshooting, turns out the Diamond III S540 graphics card drivers (5.12.01.8006-8.30.24) are not compatible with Eudora Pro 5.0 (paid mode) in Windows 2000 SP2 at 32-bit color. I dropped it down to 16-bit color and now e-mail starts fine. I introduced Joel to borders and shading and drawing tools and tabs in Microsoft Word. Ena needed a file restored from backup tapes, but it had been too long and we didn't have it on backup. In the afternoon, I worked on the code for the School's new home page. I built revised code for the global "navigation" bar, put in dummy local navigation, and created placeholder table cells for the home page images.