Monday, July 28, 2003
Made changes live for Joel (orientation). Link checking. Organized software licenses and cdroms. Installed Adobe Reader 6.0 for Chris on both his computers. Windows 2000 SP4 update on the shared office laptop. More security updates and anti-virus definitions update for the laptop. Did shopping for the computer kiosk in our new student lounge. Tested Sygate software provided by ITS. Updated .doc and .pdf calendars to include Cindy's recent changes (graduation day, board exams days). Spent a long time trying to figure out why InDesign 2.0 would export a document with hyperlinks but then in Acrobat 5.0 and 6.0 the hyperlinks wouldn't work. Turns out that I was specifying Acrobat 4.0 for compatibility and 4.0 doesn't support hyperlinks. (There's a warning that used to always come up when creating a PDF file but it was very annoying so I disabled it, causing it to fail to appear when I needed it.) Dinner at home with Patrick: salmon with 3 kinds of fresh bell peppers, shrimp and spinach salad with raspberry vinaigrette, cheddar sage biscuits. Last Saturday Jamie gave us the Creative Nomad MuVo MP3 player that he got for free from work so that we could "figure it out" and then give it back to him. It didn't take long, as it's a pretty simple and pretty limited MP3 player. It plugs in to a USB port, you drag and drop song files to it, you connect it to a battery pack, and music plays. The worst part about the MuVo was the blister pack packaging. We could see the thing, but we couldn't figure out how to get to it! I tried scissors, then an x-acto knife. Neither worked because the plastic was too hard. Patrick stopped me after I attempted several snips with garden shears. (The first couple of tries didn't work.) If it were me, I'd have taken it back to the store and gotten my money back. I didn't watch, but Patrick eventually got it open. We estimate it took us both about 30 minutes to open the package to get to the MP3 player. Once we did, it was pretty easy to get working. After we set Jamie up with some test songs, I printed out a playlist for him, and we played Banja—a new game I discovered.