Thursday, March 7, 2002
On the way to work, MUNI broke down at Duboce and Church. We had just come out of the tunnel, and a few minutes later the manager of the MUNI hut there declared that all overhead power was lost. I don't wear a watch, but it must have been around 9:00 am. I ended up taking a 22 bus to the Haight and then a 6 up to Parnassus. I got to work just before 10:00 am. I spent the morning troubleshooting software installation problems for Kristina's computer. Meeting Maker, Eudora, and Sophos were all giving me grief. Turned out to be weird permissions problems for Meeting Maker and Eudora and registry problems for Sophos. It's still not all perfect, but I'm making progress at least. I converted Debrah's class schedules to PDF and uploaded them to the old and new websites. I put in plenty of site changes for Susie, including what should be almost the last of our images. At home, Sam drops off some gifts for us: his mom Dianne had sent me and Patrick some gaudy beaded necklaces, a painted ceramic mask, and a big Mardi Gras king cake from Randazzo's Goodchildren Bakery in Violet, Louisiana. It's awfully sweet of her. We had dinner at Opera Plaza Sushi (formerly Tempura House), then went to Christopher Rice's reading of his new book, "The Snow Garden." He read a passage about a man who had just learned from police that his wife was dead. He seemed intelligent, perceptive, mature, and engaging. Patrick was surprised to learn that Mr. Rice said his childhood influences upon his writing were more from films than from books. There was a large crowd, a packed house at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books. Patrick wanted to talk to him, but there was already a line of 30 people for book signings, so we left. Patrick said, "I'll just send him e-mail." I drafted table structures for Lodestar's back end and did more tweaking to the front end designs. A long day, and it's midnight now, so I'm going to bed. Oh, Patrick said today he wrote Chapter 14 in 3 days.