Wednesday, February 26, 2003
I thought up a haiku on the way to work this morning: Health care costs go up / Health care quality goes down / It's America! Met with Susie about Web issues. She's just back from a business trip in Asia, so I got to hear all her stories. She said Tokyo was spotless ("It's so clean you can eat off the streets.") and that they had delicious dinner at a dive joint for US$10 per person, they had dinner another night at the home of an alumnus of the School, Hong Kong was filthy, Shanghai's architecture was so amazing it rendered her speechless, Beijing was depressing with Russian-like concrete buildings and people dressed all in black and gray, and all the professional meetings they had went very well. They also got to see how people lived in the slums. She ended up not taking the digital camera because Mary Anne asked her not to, but Mary Anne took 450 photos with her own. Susie brought back a small gift for me: two miniature Japanese maroon-colored spoons, painted with a black and gold design. as for serving salt from a small dish on an elegant dinner table. She accidentally left the price tag on! It was 300 yen (about US$2.60). Nonetheless, they are beautiful, and I know Patrick will love them, too. Completed a lengthy e-mail explaining why we avoid PDF as the primary method of delivering information on a Web page for Barbara Sauer. The reasons primarily are accessibility, usability, and cost-efficiency, though other less important reasons exist (marketing, user experience). Lunch with Joel and Michael at Beijing on Irving: I had sweet and sour fish, Joel had sweet and sour pork, and Michael had tofu with spicy sauce. Michael's dish was disappointing because the tofu looked like it was dry and because he thought he was going to get vegetables with it. (It only came with a few thin slices of cucumber.) The sweet and sour dishes were both delicious. My fortune: You will inherit some money or a small piece of land. Added Tablin to the footer of all School of Pharmacy pages to make it easier for me to test what the pages look like with them linearized. Spent over 2 hours trying to find an AGP low profile graphics card with a DVI-D connector on the Web. Impossible! Patrick called to say he wasn't feeling well, so I went home a little early. On the bus ride home I chatted with Kevin Souza and got to meet his boy Xander. When I got off the bus, a woman walking a beautiful marbled-brown greyhound was at the bus stop and I paused to admire the dog's beauty. We shopped on the Web but didn't buy anything; decided we might go downtown to Urban Outfitters this weekend and look at a zip-up sweatshirt that Patrick likes. Walgreens.com was not working properly—when we clicked on items to add them to our cart we got an error, something like "the page you requested is not available or no longer exists." Oops!