October 2003
Summary: Dinner with Erik and Carol; Accidental Castro Street Fair; Chris De Lay starts blogging; Computer troubles; Blue Angels and Fleet Week air show with Patrick, Tony, and Travis; Patrick makes changes to Second Island; Yerba Buena Bowling with Jesse, James, Brian, Kelly, and Patrick; Asian Art Museum, Ben and Jerry's, and dinner at home with Travis and Patrick; Patrick and Sam see Evgeny Kissin play at Davies Hall.
Dates on this page
Wed Oct 1, 2003
Cindy brought in bagels and orange juice to celebrate Kristina's birthday. Melissa also contributed with delicious red and green tomatoes from her garden. Printed out floorplans for Cindy. Delivered IP address info to Mike R. Called back Mike L about his computer—we set up a drop off for tomorrow morning. Kirk Hudson left a voicemail for me that I thought was so wonderful, so you-did-the-right-thing I called him back and said, "You're the perfect employee, you know that?" Met with Chris and Cindy about VPN problems. They are very supportive, and I feel very lucky to have them as co-worker and supervisor. Went to the Associated Students of the School of Pharmacy Skit Night 2003—a kind of talent show and entertainment put on by the students. It's a great deal of fun. Ross had gotten the staff to mimic the opening credits of The Brady Bunch, and it turned out splendidly even though Joel was away on outreach. (They inserted a still photo of him.) The opening act went on to provide a tongue-in-cheek introduction to many of the professors. The fun then went as follows: First-year students were quizzed on their pharmacy knowledge and presented with a variety of pharmaceuticals and asked to demonstrate how to use them on a teddy bear. The pharmaceuticals were: a dental dam, an enema, a tube that worked in conjunction with an inhaler, and something else I couldn't identify. There was a dating game skit in which Cindy was 1 of 10 participants (and, sadly, one of the "departing contestants"—she didn't win because Amber stumped her on a very tough question). After a brief intermission, several students lip-synched numbers to Chicago, a popular movie in the past year. We watched video of students playing pranks on each other. And the final skit was a video parody of the television show "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" called "Asian Eye for a White Guy." I was quite impressed with the video—each year these student mini movies seem more and more sophisticated. They always forget good lighting, but the results that come out are still worthy of a great laugh. Dinner at Nan King Road Bistro with Patrick: hot and sour soup for Patrick, wor won ton soup for me, oyster chicken with vegetables, steamed rice, brown rice tea for Patrick, jasmine tea for me. Under US$30. Patrick thinks he did well. I asked him when he finds out his grade, and he said he doesn't get a grade. So I ask him, "How do you know you did well?" and he said, "If she doesn't say, 'You got to do it again!'" then you probably did well. The 9:00 PM bus 66 left 9th and Judah at 8:57 PM. We saw it as we were walking from the restaurant—"Was that the 66 that just left?—Early?" Since we weren't sure we waited until 9:05 PM before deciding it was indeed the 66. There wasn't enough time for us to walk two blocks to Le Video to pick out a DVD rental and then get back before 9:30 PM (the next bus). And if we took a 43 or 44 to Forest Hill and then an L train to 30th Avenue it probably would have taken us longer than waiting 30 minutes for the next 66 bus. So we spent 30 minutes of our lives standing at the corner of one of San Francisco's ugliest intersections. I realized today that I've spent so much time waiting for the bus here that this intersection is ingrained into my memory. Let me describe it for you. On the corner where I wait is a Taoist school of some sort. It's mostly just a plain wall with a few translucent glass windows beginning at about 8 feet up from the sidewalk running horizontally across a portion of the big wall. Since it's just a plain wall, it's a hot target for graffiti "artists," and I'd like to add here that whoever Giuseppe is—he or she is no artist. He's (or she's) not even an "artist." All he or she can do is write his name, which I've seen in several other places in the area. Giuseppe, can't you draw? It's not enough these days to just write your letters G-I-U-S-E-P-P-E, even if it's done creatively. Babies can draw. Kindergarteners can draw. There are many others who are much more talented than you are—take a class in graffiti art, for the sake of the public, please! There's an entry inset into the building creating an alcove which is too small in which to permit a homeless person to lie down. The entry door is made of glass and (I believe) a portion of it is mirrored. The wall is painted the color of green tea ice cream. The building is perhaps 3 or 4 stories tall, and higher up are some columns and planters and eaves where pigeons nest. Conveniently using the telephone wires above as a stooping place, the pigeons poop all over the sidewalk, creating art with the bubblegum globs that have accumulated over the decades. The bird poop and bubblegum is usually covered with free range trash—usually newspaper, packaging from convenience foods like potato chips and Burger King cups, and cigarette butts. The trash is alway circulating due to the breeze that comes in from the ocean. A City of San Francisco trash can sits next to the telephone pole on the corner which is next to several newspaper stands. The sidewalk surrounding the trash can has grime buildup and stains from liquids the nature of which I probably don't want to know. A medium blue awning sits above just around the corner from the laundromat on Judah. The awning is dappled with bird shit all over. A Muni bus stop also sits on the corner. If Muni can be commended on anything, it might possibly be the cleanliness of the bus huts. They hire people to drive around all day long in white pickup trucks to wash them. They usually work in teams of two and are pretty efficient. They report broken glass, remove graffiti and stickers, and wash grime off the entire structure. Why Muni doesn't send them inside the busses as well is a mystery to me. They don't—at least not as far as I can tell—and I have the pictures to prove it. Laughed at Margaret Cho's weblog at margaretcho.net. I ask Patrick if he thinks she was stoned writing one article we'd just finished reading. He says, "I think she was high when she wrote all of them!" But she's a reformed sister, isn't she? Go read for yourself and make your own determination.
Thu Oct 2, 2003
Couldn't sleep last night because of problems at work with VPN. Granola for breakfast. Chatted with Mike R about wiring—he acknowledges receiving all the documents I sent him and he knows our schedule and has no questions. Morning was spent dropping off the computer for Mike L at 9:30 am—got to work at 11:00 am. He's all set up for now, we think. Spent most of the afternoon documenting VPN issues. Answered a few questions for Mike L about e-mail and Windows XP. Quick questions—no problems. Updated orientation pages and calendars and news. Rented Powaqqatsi from Le Video ($4.33 for 3 nights)—perhaps the closest thing to Scarecrow Video that San Francisco has. Neither Patrick and I knew that George Lucas was involved with this film. Cool! However, neither of us liked the soundtrack by Philip Glass. I kept wanting to mute it and play something else instead—even Enya would have been better. We both loved the cinematography, but it was a much slower film than Baraka, which Brian and Kelly introduced us to. Parts of it reminded me of the Portraits book by Steve McCurry which Eric Sanders and Maia Williamson-Sanders gave us a long time ago. All the people carrying heavy loads on their backs and heads made me more tired after my already tiring day. Every step of someone with an unbearable weight was a weight on my eyelids. About halfway into the film we were about to fall asleep, so we bookmarked it and turned it off.
Fri Oct 3, 2003
I forgot to mention Kristina's birthday on Wednesday so I went back and put that in. Spent the day working on the student directory project. Got the first part of the authentication process built. Shopping at Andronico's. Mike L called me to report that someone was trying to hack into his computer from Beijing and what should he do? I confirmed that he understood what the firewall was doing and all is well and he's thankful so I sent him on his way. Dinner at home with Patrick: vegetarian DiGiorno pizza. Watched more of Powaqqatsi—this time we only got to the three-fourths mark before we were too tired to watch anymore. Good thing this is a 3-day rental! Patrick thought it was the music alone that made him sleepy, but for me it was both the music and the slowly repeating patterns of beautiful images. Patrick thought they should prescribe this film to people with insomnia. Wouldn't that be hilarious if you go to the pharmacy with your prescription, pay your co-pay, and they give you Powaqqatsi? "Once a day, just before bedtime. Do not combine with any other sedatives or sleep-inducing drugs or you might not wake up."
Sat Oct 4, 2003
Last night I dreamt I was part of a theatre show. The performance had started and my part at the beginning had something to do with handing out tabloid-sized sheets of paper printed with something (music lyrics?) and the tops of which were cut to resemble (I think) choir boys. I handed out about 6 of these to the audience—it was just part of the act, maybe a way of getting the audience into a participatory mood. After that, however, I realized that I had not studied any of my lines for the rest of the play, and I panicked! I casually pulled out a 3-ring binder while onstage as another actor came on and started doing his or her lines. I figured I could just get by the rest of the play by reading out of the binder. I don't remember anything else from this dream.—Breakfast at home with Patrick: Biscuits with mini cow patties and shredded cheese. House chores. Patrick prepared meatballs and funghi marinati for tonight's dinner with Erik and Carol. After installing Nero's 2.0.1.59 aspi driver (wnaspi32.dll) for Win XP, I downloaded and installed an open-source CD ripper called CDex 1.5.1 and tested it with Dido's "Life For Rent" and my computer blue-screened with "STOP: 0x0000008E" on track 5: "see you when you're 40." Normally when software crashes the first time I use it, I immediately uninstall it. However, I'm out of options. I tried Audiocatalyst and that crashed on me. I tried CD-DA X-Tractor but it wouldn't fetch names properly and seems to have not been updated in 2 or 3 years. Restarted and confirmed that I have plenty of disk space available (3 GB on C and 40+ GB on D). Simply played the Dido CD in Winamp—blue-screened with "STOP: 0x0000008E" on track 8: "sand in my shoes." Fried meatballs for an hour. Ripped Madonna's "American Life"—blue-screened with a fatal system error (c000021a). Uninstalled Nero's aspi driver. Attempted writing data to CD-RW using Windows XP (no application)—it was almost finished and then I got a blue-screen error: BAD_POOL_CALLER. Uninstalled Roxio UDF Reader and Onstream Echo 3.7 (aka 1Safe) because after these recent blue-screens I was getting alerts that Drive T—a drive set up by Onstream's software—was low on disk space. Restarted. Ran Scandisk on both hard drives. Edited my hosts file to block out unnecessary sites which I recently ran across which caused annoying pop-up and pop-under windows. Removed sfcenter.org from my bookmarks for the same reason. Added Margaret Cho's weblog to my bookmarks. Ran Windows Update on all computers (Q828750 and Q828026). Prepared our absentee ballots and assorted paperwork for voting purposes. Samsung's support website is down, so I can't find out if I have the most recent driver for our SM-348B combo drive. Their site says: "Try Again—Service is delayed due to the unusual numbers of users in the Download Center. Please try again shortly." I try again an hour later and get the same message. Tried writing data to CD-RW again—blue-screen: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Dinner at home with Patrick, Erik, and Carol: spaghetti and meatballs in red sauce, steamed artichoke with garlic mayonnaise dip, funghi marinati, Italian country bread, assorted marinated Italian olives, Villa Claudia Chianti 2001, Italian cookies.
Sun Oct 5, 2003
Last night I dreamt I was nearly killed by a roller coaster car which had fallen off its track inside of a giant co-ed lockerroom while I was trying to find my locker because I had somehow left my stuff unlocked. A woman and her child were following me around, as though I were guiding them around, but I wasn't, and I turned to her and said something like, "See how unsafe this place is?" and continued past the fallen roller coaster car. I didn't notice if there were people in the car, but I remember not being astounded at the incident at all—no one was. It just happened and that's all.—Ran memory tests from memtest86.com on computers—no problems. Laundry. Some house cleaning. Patrick and I completed our absentee ballots. Went to the Castro with Patrick for a haircut appointment for me with Bao at Nice Cuts. We didn't realize today was the Castro Street Fair. Fortunately, we were able to find parking with little problem. Got my hair cut. Then we had dinner at My Friend: garlic chicken, broccoli cow. Patrick's fortune: Good news will come to you from far away. My fortune: The smart thing is to prepare for the unexpected. Said hi to Jesse who had ordered takeout from My Friend. Said hi to Adrian and Little Brian and their housemate Kim, then—later—Karl and Kevin. We saw whoever it was who did the show called "20 Years of Madonna in 7 Minutes" which we saw at Trannyshack in March 2001. He was doing the same old act on the Castro Street Fair stage but added the newest hits—American Life, Hollywood—at the end. It was really hard to see because the sun was setting and the stage was facing east and was uphill from the crowd. So not only did we have to look in to the sun to see the performer who was mostly backlit, but we also had to be 12 feet tall to see well since we were way in the back. (Who chose to put the stage there instead of the bottom of the hill letting everyone take advantage of the natural vantage points that would create?) I wondered if we'd still be seeing this same act 10 years from now—"40 Years of Madonna in 18 minutes" and later still: "60 Years of Madonna in 53 minutes." Errands at Walgreens. Installed updated drivers for the Soundblaster Live! Value sound card I have. When it restarted and was waiting for a login, just before I touched it it restarted automatically—very voodoo! I can't decide if I need to give up on Windows XP or the hardware I have—not sure if one or more hardware components have gone bad or if the problems I've been having are a driver issue with Win XP. I could conceivably spend $300 to replace all the hardware components I think might be at fault, hook it up to the new hard drive with Win XP and it still might give me problems. Might be safer to set up a BSD with a new drive, run it for a while, and see if the same auto-restart problems occur. Yes, I think I'll do that. Grrr! I don't like when computer problems drag on for a whole month!
Mon Oct 6, 2003
Last night I dreamt I went to a theater and watched a B movie from (I think) the 1960s. The final scene was a blond-haired woman filmed from a slight distance. She was wearing a bathing suit and standing in (I think) water. She screamed a disturbingly loud shriek, and her face was painted with a giant mouth in the same expression as her scream. Since she was filmed from afar, it was quite convincing and, I thought, of artistic merit. After the film, I browsed in the lobby as people filed out. Somehow glue was featured prominently in the film, and consequently glue was for sale on the tables in the lobby. It was the flat bottle with the orange, pointy tip style of glue. I bought one, even though I didn't need any glue. In a separate dream my childhood dog Clark had run away and someone found him and brought him home and I took him by the collar and found a basket for him to lie in. He was rambuntious, as always, but also cold—shivering. I looked around for a blanket, and that's when I woke up.—Breakfast at home with Patrick: "homemade" sausage and egg on english muffins. Went back and put in dreams I had over the weekend. Helped Joel with an attachment he couldn't open because it had no file extension (it was a Word document). Helped Chris reconfigure his IP settings for his new laptop. Got a call from Mike R—they begin work tomorrow morning. Confirmed that fixes for Q828750 were installed for all computers. (I don't trust Windows Update after I confirmed that it didn't install some updates as expected.) Made adjustments to the minority students mailing list for Cindy. Made live the MPH changes for Chris. Prepared the MPH e-mail addresses that we had collected for notification. Made a small change to a graphic in the calendar section. Submitted my timesheet for last month. Created an archive document of VPN issues. Worked more on VPN documentation. Some things I ordered for home had arrived: GP 1800 AA batteries from Thomas Distributing and ink jet cartridges for our Epson CX5200—black is almost out. Dinner at home with Patrick: shrimp chow mein. From the tropics of Hawai'i, Chris De Lay sends e-mail saying he now has a blog! Cool!
Tue Oct 7, 2003
Last night I dreamt I had to deliver newspapers by bicycle. I had to fold them up and put rubber bands around them. I created a huge pile of newspapers that was enormous—bigger than me, even. I don't remember doing the route, only the preparation for it.—Send out notifications to people who requested info on the MPH program when it became available. Put together a who's who list for Chris and Cindy (VPN). Link checking. Made changes to the pathway declaration page for Kristina. She reviewed them and I made the changes live. Weeded old, temporary files, filed others that needed filing. Helped Kristina with sorting and borders in Excel. Went up to MSB9 to chat with Steve and see how things were looking before the carpet installation tomorrow. Dinner at home with Patrick: shrimp salad, bread. Set up Patrick's computer with YahooPOPs, migrated his Yahoo! address book to Outlook. He's getting comfy with the changes. YahooPOPs took a long time to set up—I don't know why but it kept failing to send. Eventually I played "setup by guessing" and it started to work. I think it's silly it has SMTP disabled by default—maybe that and you have to restart it was what screwed it all up. Anyhow, it's working now. Patrick and I looked at photos that my bro-in-law Rob sent from cousin Corinna and Patrick's wedding this past Saturday. They're all great, and Corinna is nothing less than a princess in them all. Read about Travis's adventures hiking Half Dome—yikes! Modified my bookmarks page so that I can still access menus in IE6 with keyboard shortcuts. The accesskeys I put in for items on the page were getting in the way, I realized. Added links to Chris De Lay's and Travis Wise's blogs. Patrick has had his Oyster set up for a few weeks now and already I can see his posture improving. The Oyster is a device that you insert your laptop into and the laptop stands up so that the screen is at eye level. You add a mouse and keyboard and whammo! you have a much more ergonomically correct computing environment. The keyboard and mouse is some Microsoft combination. The only problem is that the mouse light seems to blink all the time—a common complaint on message boards. So we may eventually need to replace the mouse—we'll see. Anyhow, the Oyster we highly recommend. It's $150, but that's a lot cheaper than back surgery, I figure, and that's really what caused me to say, "Stop the madness!" In the past month, Patrick also joined the Asian Art Museum as a charter member at the student rate. $40 gets both him and me free admission and a bunch of other discounts I can't remember, which is great because he's very interested in Asian cultures and they frequently have special events and performances. A week or so ago Patrick went there to see a performance of Beijing Opera by people from China. The membership card is plastic like a credit card and has, of course, art on it—a Japanese wall panel of Mount Fuji, clouds, mountains, and trees—very stylish. "Chatted" in live e-mails with Joel W. Gonzales about his grandmother and Courtney Love. Caught up on old e-mails (but I'm still behind). Got an invite from Michael Smith to a Halloween party—cool! Ran across something in Google Images that made both me and Patrick laugh outloud: the name of a band called Shirley Temple of Doom (see shirleytempleofdoom.com). We were looking for one of the dresses that Kate Capshaw wore in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to see how closely it resembled one of Corinna's dresses on her wedding day. It wasn't that close of a match—they were both red but that's about it.
Wed Oct 8, 2003
Spent much of the day documenting VPN issues. Helped Joel configure his new iBook. (Thanks, Kelly!) Made changes to the White Coat Ceremony page and sent it to Joel and Cindy for review. Joel and Kristina and I checked out the carpet installation today—only the student lounge is done. Gave Leslie Kleinberg suggestions on site architecture tasks and testing. Sent an e-mail to Tina today that went like this: "LOL! You know I can keep a secret. In fact, I often don't remember them—I'm a bad friend and a good friend at the same time. So only a hypnotist can get it out of me. Today for dinner Patrick made mini penne with mushrooms, red bell peppers, zucchini, green onions, garlic, parsley, spinach, olive oil, and Italian sweet sausage from Andronico's. For bread we had generic crescent rolls out of the can-tube! Ha ha! So bad, huh?! Good luck with the class tomorrow, though I'm sure you'll do fine. You saved a copy of Stars's balance sheet, right? :-) We're not sure about Halloween. We've been invited to watch vintage gay porn in a gay bar in the Haight called TRAX that no gay man I know has set foot in in years. The vintage porn theme is crossed with a Dracula theme to create TRAXYLVANIA—an event likely to amuse, arouse, astound, and attack the senses." Recently a prankster had been subscribing people who didn't want to be subscribed to Lodestar Quarterly, so I added code to track IP addresses and automatically protect the victims from being subscribed. I got a letter from Bilal Loubie (aka Maria Williams) from San Francisco Muni today. It was addressed to Ms. Rachel Friend and was the same form letter I received months ago when I complained about the bus driver who forced an old woman with a cane to run one block to get on the bus. Three hours after I received the e-mail, I get another one from Bilal/Maria. Here it is letter for letter: "Please, Disregard this e-mail it was sent to you by mistake. Sorry." To this, Patrick said something like, "It's nice to know that Muni is hiring the most competent people available." Set up more e-mail accounts in Outlook.
Thu Oct 9, 2003
Helped Thao by e-mail with wireless configuration problems. Chatted with John Mugge, a Web developer for the cancer center, and set up a meeting with him to explain how things with our Web site work. Helped Jeff Beck troubleshoot Dreamweaver configuration. Made changes to Robert Weinbert's bio page for Jeff Beck. Helped Amy Yim set up a mailing list for the campus Women's Health Organization. I realized lately there have been few problems with bus 66. Yesterday was the most excitement in a few days: the driver forgot to let people get off. Two different times he started taking off at a stop sign and people who had rung the bell to get off had to shout out, "Back door!" or "Hey!" to be let out. He didn't actually miss stops—people got out after they asked him to stop—but it was annoying since he wasn't paying as much attention as he should have. Computer support coordinator meeting. Student database project. Listened to a bunch of streams linked to from earplug.cc—a new newsletter by the people at flavorpill. Dinner at Palio with Patrick and Joel: Patrick had a full-sized sandwich and a side salad, I had a half-sandwich and a bowl of soup. One Aranciata for Patrick, one Nantucket Nectars Half and Half for me. About $17. Palio has been testing out dinner hours and running ads for meals for 5 to 7 dollars and this was the first time we tried it. The food was good—for deli service—but overall I feel it wasn't worth it. For only $2 or $3 more we could have had a table service meal at a number of our favorite restaurants. (See September 21 last month: Eric's Restaurant.) James gave us a ride home on route 66. Installed Trillian 0.74 Patch F for all of our computers. Added ads.nandomedia.com to my hosts file. Tried to catch up on e-mail but failed.
Fri Oct 10, 2003
Telecommuted from home and worked on the student directory. Dinner at home: leftover pasta with meatballs. Watched "Bleu" (1993) by Krzysztof Kieslowski on DVD with Patrick.
Sat Oct 11, 2003
French toast at home for breakfast with Patrick. I did house chores. Patrick returned the DVD, wrote at Jumping Java, and had coffee with Aaron. Dinner at Blue: bowl of salad for me, grilled chicken boob for Patrick, 2 iced teas: $23.77 before a $4 tip. We got Cathleen again—very good service. Stopped in on at Brian, Kelly, and Jesse's place but they weren't home. We stopped to look at articles posted in the window at the Stop AIDS office and we saw a woman coming out of a nearby doorway with a Great Dane about a yardstick tall. She eventually introduced herself—Jennifer—and her dog, Disco—a female as well. She works in the pet grooming store that's right there at street level—I didn't catch whether she was the owner or not. We've passed by before seeing doggies in the window awaiting their shampoos and haircuts and other assorted beauty treatments. Jennifer went out of her way to say hello, and she explained that working all day with just dogs made her yearn for human contact once the workday was done. We introduced ourselves to her, admired and petted Disco, and chatted for a few more minutes before parting ways. We browsed books at Books, Inc, then chatted with Jesse at All-American Boy. Rented a Wash West film for nighttime entertainment.
Sun Oct 12, 2003
Basic 4 for breakfast, although for Patrick, it's Basic 4 - raisins + walnuts + sugar. We washed the car by hand in the driveway, although the hose doesn't quite reach well enough to spray everywhere. A lite lunch at Harvey's on 18th and Castro: Big Gurl salad and popcorn shrimp with honey mustard dressing, 2 iced teas. We drove to Fleet Week, although parking was so bad we had to park more than a mile away, on Divisadero and Bush, then bussed it 5 blocks up the hill, then walked another 7 blocks to the Marina Green to meet Travis and his friend, Tony. Afterward we went to Tony's place in the mid-upper Sunset for leftovers from the previous night's potluck and three-fourths of Baraka. Travis was a Baraka virgin.
Mon Oct 13, 2003
Spent much of the day reformatting Kristina's hard drive and setting it up anew. Printed extra cabinet diagrams for Cindy. Created the WHO mailing list for Amy Yim. Updated another mailing list for Cindy. Joel and I got Subway sandwiches and brought them back to the office to eat. Dinner at home with Patrick: shrimp chow mein. Shopped on walgreens.com.
Tue Oct 14, 2003
Brought in to the office some rice krispie treats with chocolate chips which I made last night. Staff meeting: mostly office move and outreach updates. Kristina's computer: more setup. Joel's computer: installed Meeting Maker, tried to install Office X but couldn't copy it over using the ZiO CompactFlash adapter—OS X wouldn't recognize it at all. Met with John Mugge about Web sites, design strategies, methodologies. Updated our Web site with info on our office move. Added more hosts to my hosts files. Dinner at home with Patrick: ginger and scallions chow mein, side of pan-fried salmon. Read chapter 1 from the original Second Island. Read and edited chapter 1 from the new Second Island.
Wed Oct 15, 2003
Brought lemon poppyseed muffins to work for an office potluck. Melissa brought a gourmet mixed greens salad with a homemade vinaigrette and dried cherries—delicious! Kristina brought crunchy purple grapes which everyone loved as well as tasty cheddar cheese on Ritz crackers. Someone else brought Le Petit Beurre cookies by LU. I finished setting up Kristina's computer, helped Joel do more setting up of his computer, troubleshot video problems and Sophos problems on my computer. Made several updates to the Career Fair page for Joel. Signed up for Google SiteSearch. Visited MSB9 with Cindy: the carpet is all in and the window shades as well. Made cdrom jewel case jackets for Office:max v.X. Updated news and calendar for current students for Kristina to indicate the pathway presentations. Ran out of disk space and discovered 2 gigabytes of temp files in the Sophos temp folder—what's going on there? I don't have time for that. Fought with PartitionMagic which gave me Error 1555 and access violations when attempting to resize partitions—bad PartitionMagic! Bad! Fortunately, my computer didn't blue-screen or otherwise lose data. Lots of critical Windows Updates—yesterday Microsoft released about 6 of them variously for XP, 2000, and NT4, so I was very busy installing these all day. Patrick went to class then came home and studied, did laundry, and cooked dinner: chicken chow mein, Hong Kong style. Yesterday the news headline told that electricity prices were expected to increase 30% this winter. There was no 7:30 pm bus today! Installed Windows Updates for the home computers, updated current students news and calendar from home (since there were some items that described items only for today). Paid bills, examined our money situation, moved money out from a new wimpy etrade sweep account into one that earned better interest, collected political propaganda for Joel (who for some reason seriously collects the junk). Got my new drivers license in the mail today. Expires in 2008! Shopped online for gifts for people. Pulled photos off the digital camera: Patrick in the kitchen and photos from riding the bus. Made more Muni spooves.
Thu Oct 16, 2003
Visited MSB9 with Cindy—the furniture started to get installed today. They'll finish tomorrow. I made signs to post on our office door after we move and signs to guide people to our new location. Link checking. Answered some questions for Martha about font sizing and Web sites. Talked with Robert Weinberg about the timing of data cable installation today and tomorrow. Mike Renoude's voicemail greeting says he's out of the office until Monday the 20th. Cindy expressed frustration at his lack of proper follow-up—we had to bother Robert with an emergency call because we hadn't been getting details quickly enough from Mike. Helped Julie Dang set up a mailing list for Clinical Pharmacy 152.03. Worked on the student directory on the web project. It's been very hard to concentrate on this project because of the many distractions and the many things that come along that can't be postponed, such as gathering phone numbers and IP addresses for the office migration. Worked on the for-internal-use-only web page project. Chatted briefly with erico and bk on IM. BK has been back from Germany a week or so and had beautiful photos to share of Dusseldorf, Amsterdam, and other places with which I'm not familiar. Played a bit with our Google SiteSearch setup. Bought money. Made sure MSB9 was all locked up as Cindy requested before I left work. Dinner at Chow with Patrick. I waited a few minutes in front of the restaurant, and while I was waiting one of our pharmacy students—Carolyn Wu (Woo?) graciously introduced herself and thanked me for designing a great website for the students. She said something to the effect that everyone in the class thinks I'm really cool. She too was eating at Chow tonight; a going away dinner for someone. It's always very nice to hear stuff like that, so I thanked her and Patrick arrived just then. We shared a bowl of mushroom soup, Patrick had autumn mushroom pizza with goat cheese and arugula with an iced tea, I had tomato, basil, and mozzarella cheese pizza and a tropical green tea (hot). We shared an order of the ginger cake with caramel and pumpkin ice cream. About $32.39 before a $4.50 tip. We had intended to watch Pirates of the Carribean at Cole Hall but by the time we got back to my office we were too tired for the show which we knew would have ended around 10:45 pm, so we just went home. Chatted with Auggie a minute before leaving. The 8:30 pm bus 66 left at around 8:42 pm—some new driver instead of reliable James. Patrick received 3 copies of the new Ontario Review which has a story of his in it—"Where It Takes Us." He's very happy with how it turned out. I asked him why his name wasn't on the cover with some other writers, and he said, "Oh, I'm not that big yet." At home we looked at our absentee ballots: 14 measures, mayor, D.A., and sheriff to decide—oh, the burden of democracy! Read The World According to Shane—a blog by a high school and college friend of my pal Chris De Lay, then read Chris's blog, then Travis'. Read Google news (Staten Island ferry accident, iTunes for Windows ["Hell froze over."—heh!]).
Fri Oct 17, 2003
Abs workout at home with Patrick. Breakfast at work: sausage, whole wheat toast, scrambled eggs, hash browns. Stopped in at MSB9—there was a work crew drilling the entry point for the data lines. White Coat Ceremony today. Joel's planning was flawless, near as I can tell—everything went very smoothly. Claire Lee made two giant arrangements of tall stems of yellow orchids and some other red-orange flowers which I found stunning. In between helping with the ceremony, I worked on the student database on the web project, got a sandwich at Subway (6-inch roasted chicken boob on wheat), did some listserv maintenance, made minor updates to other Web pages. Left work around 7:30 pm. Nearly all of Claire's flowers were left in the office as I was closing up, so I packed them all up and took them with me—they wouldn't have gotten enough water to live through the weekend otherwise. Patrick met with Yasuto for dinner tonight, so I went to Brian, Kelly, and Jesse's place. Gave them 2 big bunches of the flowers—they look great in their mustard-walled living room. Brian and Kelly and I went to dinner at Four Season: potstickers, kung pao chicken, vegetable deluxe, sesame beef, steamed rice. Yummy! My fortune: You will have good luck in the summer. Returned to their place. Patrick showed up, then all of us and Jesse and his new boyfriend James went to Yerba Buena for bowling because Jesse wanted to bowl. I asked him if he wanted to go bowling because that's what he did in Michigan and he said no, but I didn't believe him and I think Brian didn't either. Eventually, Jesse said, "That's not all we do in Michigan" or something like that. Brian said he only bowls once every 6 years, and I guess the time was about right. It was thought that we wouldn't get a lane because it would be crowded, but there was no wait at all at about 8:30 on a Friday night. Jesse proved to be the top bowler, but Kelly had the best form. Kelly was happy just that he broke a hundred, and afterwards Brian said , "Okay, that's it for me—you can ask me to bowling again in 2009." I thought it was fun even though I didn't bowl that well. Patrick did better than I did. We returned to their place and eventually Big Brian dropped by and so did Nico. We sat around and talked. Nico laughed because Brian used the word "rigamarole." Everyone laughed at our collective erotic fantasy of Monster Garage Bukkake filmed from within the woman's welder's mask. Jesse wanted to get his blood sugar tested so Nico left to get his kit from home but after a long time he didn't come back and Brian joked that he had had a Towlie moment. Patrick and I were tired, so we left for home ourselves.
Sat Oct 18, 2003
Breakfast at home with Patrick: Eggo waffles. Patrick went to Jumpin Java to write and to meet Aaron. I napped, ironed, mended clothes, cleaned the kitchen. Lunch at home by myself: leftover pizza from Chow, leftover ginger and scallion noodles, leftover lemon poppyseed muffin. Patrick and I met at Tully's on Castro to go to a reading: Rik Isensee at Magnet. Magnet ( magnetsf.org ) is a health services office in the heart of the Castro, just half a block off 18th and Castro. I really like the lights inside—they're fluorescent, but they're diffused by a wavy framework of plastic panels suspended from the ceiling. They're very hard to describe. The reading was very much not to our liking so we left at the earliest polite opportunity and went to Brian, Kelly, and Jesse's place. (Kelly said, "We're being geeky.") Jesse 'n' James were playing chess, and I think Brian was unsuccessfully trying to load a Powerpuff Girls theme onto his cellphone. Although James played well, Jesse won the chess game. Why does Jesse win all the games? Dinner at Sparky's with Patrick: grilled chicken salad with sesame vinaigrette for me, chicken burger with fries for Patrick, 2 iced teas: $18.45 before a $3.00 tip.
Sun Oct 19, 2003
Patrick went to assertive behavior class—a 2-full-day class offered at City College—today and next Sunday. Cleaned the house: vacuumed, laundry, dusted, rearranged furniture, filed papers, organized stuff in boxes, threw out rotting food, changed water in the orchid vases, repotted an orchid, washed dishes, showered. Went to Stonestown Mall, ate at California Crisp: pasta salad, cornbread, iced tea: $5.61. Went to Macy's, bought a gift for Corinna and Patrick's recent wedding. Stopped at Eppler's to pick up 4 petit-fours (US$1.25 each). Safeway for groceries. Cooked dinner and dessert: more recipes from 50 Ways to Feed Your Lover, the book that Melissa recommended to us. Martha Washington's Chicken Breasts. We always laugh when we hear the name of this recipe: "Martha, your chicken breasts are so juicy and delicious!" Smoked salmon quesadillas. Chocolate negrita with homemade Mexican vanilla whipped cream. Petit-fours from Eppler's. Chatted online with Travis, set up a weekend outing with him. Read Google News about the new Frank Gehry Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Today's SF Chronicle article by John King had the best photos and article.
Mon Oct 20, 2003
Abs workout. Breakfast at home: scrambled eggs, sausage, toast. Lunch with Joel at L'Avenida: one beef taco and a soda for him, one chicken taco and water for me. Tacos are about $3.20 each here and for me it's about 90% of what I'd prefer to eat. Helped Joel with some iPod decisions. He's worried that he's getting Kelly mad with all his questions. Nothing particularly eventful at work today except: installed patches for Office XP vulnerabilities, network connectivity spotty today because of more SQL server attacks, and I took more photos of MSB9—some of our furniture is in and things are finally shaping up. We have to have everything packed by the end of the week! It's hard to imagine that I'll have a new office only a week from now. Dinner at home with Patrick: cheese quesadillas, five taste chicken, steamed rice, bok choy, leftover chocolate negrita. Got a package from walgreens.com today. Finally the Brita filter we've been using for the past year can get changed out! Did dishes and shopped for gifts online while listening to The English Beat (Special Beat Service and What is Beat?). Left a message for Amy and David—haven't heard from them in a long time. Chris De Lay's iBlog got moved to TypePad—cool! I can post comments now! Whee!
Tue Oct 21, 2003
Basic 4 for breakfast. Student directory on the Web project now has mirroring set up. Our office move date got delayed, so we're now moving on Saturday, November 1. Did some packing and organizing. Made changes to our Web page announcing our move date. Met with Susie—we talked mostly about Web accessibility and new guidelines forthcoming from the Web oversight committee in which she participates. Our pharmacy site is the most accessible site I've seen for UCSF, so we have very little to sweat about. Put in reminders on the current students page about daylight savings time ending on Sunday. Dinner at home with Patrick: spaghetti with red sauce (mushrooms, spinach, shallots, grated mozzarella) and garlic herb bread from Arizmendi Bakery—yummy! Migrated my Yahoo! calendar from Yahoo! to Outlook using IntelliSync—it was easier than I thought possible even though there was every indication that the IntelliSync application was from around 1999. Started reading my voter information pamphlet. Received a package from macys.com today: a black long-sleeve shirt. Set up categories for address cards in Outlook. E-mailed Tina.
Wed Oct 22, 2003
Leftover spaghetti for breakfast. Student directory on the web: accesskeys and Javascript keyboard shortcuts are working! Tried to get error logging to work but couldn't, so I submitted a ticket to our web hosting provider. Visited MSB9 with Cindy—the cabling work has begun, and they've gotten ceiling gunk all over our brand new carpet and left marks and nicks on the walls. Cindy is rather upset because Mike Renoude has not been communicating with us very well causing us to incur additional charges, so I told her that she should simply be prepared to have carpet cleaners come in after our regular cleaners and bill ENS for the work. She thought that seemed like a good idea, I think. Made live changes to the supplemental application workshop page for James. Prepared distribution of secret ePocrates discount codes to students. Put in a notice of downtime for our Web site on Sunday. Dinner at home with Patrick: shrimp and veggies salad, garlic and herb bread.
Thu Oct 23, 2003
Went to work early to unlock MSB9. Caught the 6:48 am bus which had a driver I'd never seen on our route before. I introduced myself and she offered her name: Andrea. The route this morning was quieter than I'm used to. This particular bus doesn't have the extremely loud beeping sound which hurts my ears every time the bus kneels or signals. Instead, it has a wimpy beeping sound which is barely audible, as though someone like me intentionally crippled that "feature" of the bus's mechanics. After unlocking MSB9, I went to the hospital cafeteria for breakfast. I was trying to figure out which spigot had hot water when a well-dressed woman accosted me through an opening in a wall partition and said, "You shouldn't eat here! It's a ripoff!" I had no idea who she was, but she looked a little familiar. After a few more exchanged words during which she admitted, "I'm joking!" I learned she was one of our first-year students named Deanna. She had come to have breakfast and study before an exam and was mildly upset about having been misled about the breakfast package plate and about having been overcharged due to a misunderstanding. She invited me to sit at her table while she studied, and as she took breaks we chatted. She had forgotten my name since the presentation I gave about a month ago, and that immediately made me feel more comfortable. Started work: link checking, read Sliding Doors of CSS by Douglas Bowman—a brilliant work of clarity. Read the new A List Apart. Updated my personal bookmarks page now that ALA seems to be back online. The new logo looks oddly like a man's genitals—whatever. Student database on the web project: visual indicators for accesskeys are in. Bought a few pastries from Sunset Bakery: a mini lemon cake, a chocolate muffin, and an eclair: $2.10—a bargain! Dinner at home with Patrick: vegetarian risotto, garlic and herb bread, mini lemon cake.
Fri Oct 24, 2003
Abs workout. Breakfast at home with Patrick: he had yogurt with walnuts and honey and banana, I had scrambled eggs, sausage, hashed browns, toast. Telecommute today. Link checking. Updated news and calendar. Updated template files to the student directory on the web dev server. Got called in to work: Cindy and Joel needed help with a 32-megabyte (!) PowerPoint file that wouldn't open. I copied it to my computer, made a PDF out of it, copied the PDF back to the laptop, then gave them all instructions on how to use Acrobat Reader as a presentation tool instead of PowerPoint. Picked up Patrick at Sweet Inspirations, grocery shopping at Super Sunset—boneless, skinless chicken boobs for $3.00 per pound! crab claw meat: 50 claws for $5.00! I didn't like that Super Sunset had no restroom, however. I went to the nearby Round Table Pizza with every intention of ordering a personal pizza as a snack but when I saw their restrooms were closed, I left. I went to a nearby Chinese restaurant, ordered combo chow mein to go, then used their restroom. The chow mein was noteworthy for the 7 meats in it—chicken, barbecued pork, fried tofu, octopus, abalone, shrimp, and scallop—and doubly noteworthy for it's nearly complete lack of vegetables—only bean sprouts and a few scallions. I'll never eat there again. Back home: Patrick cleaned the apartment while I continued to work. Finished breadcrumbs modifications necessary for the student directory on the web project. Breadcrumbs can now be locally overridden, and there's now a new default method of handling that provides local webmasters greater control over their breadcrumb naming. Listened to MC Solaar and Alliance Ethnique during the day. In the evening, we listened to feeds found on earplug.cc such as DJ Ulysses, which we liked. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftover risotto, yesterday's pastries from Sunset Bakery.
Sat Oct 25, 2003
Brunch with Travis at Baghdad Cafe: Western omelette and diet Coke for Travis, pancakes and coffee for Patrick, breakfast croissant special and orange juice for me. After brunch, we all went to the Asian Art Museum. Just before the museum, we happened upon the start of an anti-war protest marching up Market Street. Somehow none of us had heard about this one. We watched for a bit and it seemed quite large to me. The current exhibit at the Asian Art Museum focuses on contemporary Korean art. It's called Leaning Forward, Looking Back: Eight Contemporary Artists from Korea. My favorite piece in it is an installation that is difficult to describe. Water drips onto 2 different glass plates from a few inches above while cameras mounted above project the result onto the wall about 8 or 10 feet in diameter. Somehow a heated plate is part of the mechanics, so as the water drips you can hear the plop plop and—occasionally, if the heated plate is involved—a corresponding ssssizzle. The water droplets that remain on the glass combine and separate repeatedly—it's very meditative and seducing to experience. After a short time, a flood of water is released and a rubber wiper is drawn across the glass by a motor. If you wait long enough, you get a surprise. (I won't spoil it by saying what it is.) The installation intends for the changing water to reflect the constant change of the Korean landscape—both physical and political. Water is a very appropriate analogy because Korea is surrounded on 3 sides by water. This piece is a magical delight for the eyes, the ears, as well as the brain. Patrick particularly liked that one, too, as well as the mirrored, Rorschach-like photographs of Korean pagodas printed onto handmade paper. In Samsung Hall the museum had tables set up where you could try your hand at Asian calligraphy—fun! We didn't realize until we got home that we missed the Dogs In The Pit outside exhibit. To reach it, you must go through the cafe and walk along the terrace to the back of the museum. It wasn't very clear from the inside exhibit in the North Court how to get to the related outside exhibit. The only place it was marked was on the back of Dogs In The Pit brochure. If we return before January 11, we'll have to check it out. After the museum, we went to the Castro, chatted with Jesse at All American Boy, and got ice cream at Ben and Jerry's: coffee ice cream for me, chocolate brownie mix for Travis, and oatmeal cookie chunk for Patrick. It was a very hot day today. After ice cream we went home and Patrick started dinner while Travis and I goofed off on the computer. Travis brought us a bottle of 2001 Coppola Merlot—thanks, Travis! Dinner: deep-fried crab claw wontons, deep-fried pork wontons, three-animals chow mein (shrimp, crab, chicken), steamed egg cream buns, oolong tea.
Sun Oct 26, 2003
Slept in while Patrick turned the clocks back and did homework and dishes. Woke up, cut my hair. Orange juice and leftover noodles for brunch. Read about RSS and how to use it with PHP and Perl. Had to find a new air freshener since the one we prefer—Ultra Citrus by Medo—has become increasingly hard to find. We'd discovered it several years ago because a bed and breakfast we stayed at in Vancouver, B.C. had it in our room. We like it because it's non-aerosol and because it's 100% natural, made from orange oil. It seems Walgreens no longer stocks it at all, I couldn't find it on walgreens.com, and the few other web sites I can find it on don't look all that trustworthy. I settled on Ecco Mist made by a company called Ecco Bella and bought through mothernature.com despite having found a few broken links and a few links that generated frustrating but non-critical errors. Dinner at home with Patrick: ordered in from Seniore's Pizza (415-661-2222, 2415 - 19th Av at Taraval): Caesar salad, chicken special (with red and green bell peppers, garlic, onions)—very tasty pizza and our pizza was delivered in about 30 minutes (they promised 45). Archived receipts. Watched trailers on apple.com with Patrick. I'm glad someone finally made Michael Crighton's Timeline into a film. It's hard to tell, but it looks like it might be good. We both laughed at the Scary Movie 3 trailer. Everyone we know has been going to see Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume One, and we've only heard favorable reviews, so we'll probably see that soon. We still have free matinee tickets from the Century 20 in Daly City we've been meaning to use but hadn't found good movies to watch since then.
Mon Oct 27, 2003
Abs workout. Went to work early to meet with Cindy and the Cabinetmaker. Got details discussed—a good meeting. Set up K9 for Ena and me, gave Ena instructions on how to use it. Tried to work on the student directory on the web project putting in custom breadcrumbs but the network has been having problems today. Our e-mail went dead around 9:45 am—connections timed out or immediately came back with errors—unable to connect. And I couldn't connect to our remote servers for the directory project. Packed boxes for moving. Updated Sophos to the latest version on our server and all clients. Updated news and calendar. Added a bit of automation to the calendar using conditionals and mktime functions so that headings and items would disappear automatically after the event had passed. Got "relaying denied" errors after installing K9 but only on messages to our listserv server. Added "UsePOPSend=1" to my eudora.ini—that seemed to resolve it but I haven't yet gotten confirmation that the listserv server actually sees my messages. Decided, however, to not use K9 and try out Eudora 6.0 instead—fewer interfaces for people to deal with, and Eudora 6.0's spam filtering seems to have gotten good reviews. Reconfigured my computer and Ena's with Eudora 6.0. Dragged Joel to get our free flu shots—someone brilliant at UCSF decided to give all employees free flu shots. In the past employees had to pay. You'd think that an entire UC campus that focuses on medical science would just know that the cost of the flu shots is easily worth whatever possible employee downtime there might be from even a small percentage of its 17,000 faculty and staff getting the flu, but this is the first year I've been here it's been offered for free. The process was faster than I thought, and no confounding, bureaucratic paperwork either! Swept most of our computers for security issues: disabling Windows Messenger and Alerter services, verifying that Windows and Office updates had been installed, and checking that the latest build was installed for PharmAdMIT 2004. Met with Susie, discussed minor changes to the home page and Bob Day's request to include commencement speeches for graduation online. Locked up MSB9 for Cindy before I left work. Dinner at home with Patrick: lemon and dill shrimp over mini penne with shallots. Updated my Amazon wish list because Patrick bugged me to do so. "People have been asking," he says. My birthday is coming up on the 10th. I don't particularly like getting (or giving) gifts because I think American culture is too obsessed with gift-giving to the point that it's no longer a joy. For instance, I'd rather get nothing for my birthday and then 10 gifts randomly distributed throughout the year—each being truly a nice surprise. I still give gifts sometimes—tradition overlaps with politesse and courtesy. Got weird error messages while browsing belkin.com today: "Unexpected upstream server failure!" Sent my sister an e-mail with a bunch of tips on how to handle eczema. Finished a game of e-Scrabble with Patrick, Brian, and Kelly. Patrick won with 151 points. Edited my hosts file to add speed.pointroll.com and sublit.com. My ATM card wouldn't work today. I tried 3 different machines, but they were all Golden 1 Credit Union machines. Every one gave me a weird error message which I now can't remember.
Tue Oct 28, 2003
8:30 am bus 66 didn't show up today until 8:45, and it was followed by another bus 66 right after it. Took me 50 minutes to get to work instead of the usual 25. Left a message for Mike R asking him for our new IP addresses (which he promised to deliver by last Thursday). Resolved some links to the old ITS web site. Random trivia: searching Google for "an error occurred while processing this directive" (in quotes) results in about 1,440,000 pages. Coded changes requested by Chris C to include a new category called Instructional Facilities on our home page. Still need photos before those pages can go live. Worked on accessibility issues regarding display:none versus visibility:hidden (inspired by Joe Clark's recent article on alistapart.com called "Facts and Opinion About Fahrner Image Replacement"). Bought money—it worked today. Picked up a City Batard at Arizmendi Bakery, picked up a can of tomato sauce at the corner store. Missed the 6:30 pm bus by about 2 minutes. Got home around 7:20 pm. Dinner at home with Patrick: spaghetti with ground pig and green bell peppers in tomato sauce. Read from Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark. (He comes out on pages 388 and 389!) Looked at jobs on craigslist—there are a lot more jobs now than there were 8 months ago. Shopped on amazon.com.
Wed Oct 29, 2003
Melissa brought in pumpkin chowder today—delicious, even though she says it didn't turn out like she imagined. Programmed a news story to start displaying on December 1 and run through January 11 regarding the decommission of the Library's proxy service. Organized information sent to me by Mike R about our new IP addresses. Notified Julie Dang about a problem with someone's Hotmail e-mail account getting full. Link checking. Alerted campus Web developers about the new Campus Housing Office going live without any notice whatsoever. A few links on my site were broken, and worse yet—the pages were 404 not found, which means they didn't even bother to set up redirects with the launch of their new site. Lunch with Melissa and Joel at Masala, which has an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet for $6.99. The food was quite delicious even though I found a hair in my food, which I quickly swept into a napkin and hid under my plate. We sat near the front window, me with my back to the window facing Joel and Melissa across from me. During lunch, Joel pointed out the window with a surprised look on his face, so I turned to look and was immediately sorry I did because he was pointing at a dog crouched in mid-poop with one log already on the sidewalk. Met with Cindy and Chris about resolutions for VPN issues. They say they had a good meeting with others about it, but I'm reluctant that things will improve, given ITS's long history of poor service. Changes for James telling applicants in Southern California what our expectations are regarding the recent wildfires and documents required by our November 1 application deadline. Many students have been calling because schools down there are closed and they can't get the documents required by our application process. (We're not holding them to the deadline if we can confirm that their school had indeed been closed.) Dinner at home by myself because Patrick had gone to a piano recital with Sam at Davies Hall for Evgeny Kissin. My dinner was: fresh spaghetti, leftover red sauce with ground pig and green bell peppers. Optimized Patrick's laptop by disabling services as recommended by Black Viper. Installed a new version of Sophos Anti-Virus for all home computers, reconfigured automatic updating.
Thu Oct 30, 2003
Eudora 6.0 seems like a dream—Bayesian spam filtering is built in to the application! When you get spam, you right-click it and select "Junk" from the popup menu that appears. Eudora automatically files the e-mail in a folder called Junk and learns for future filtering by storing the words found in the junk e-mail. Eudora saves the junk messages 30 days before automatically throwing them out. My only complaint is that they didn't make the workflow obvious. K9 uses big buttons with a green check mark and a red circle-slash symbol—very ideal. Eudora instead provides no icons by default. If you're smart enough to right-click the toolbar and choose "Customize..." and spend several minutes figuring out where they are, you can find icons that work similarly to specify Good or Bad. The Bad icon in Eudora 6.0 is an envelope next to the bones of a fish carcass which had defecated green slime before it died. The Good icon is the same fish bones carcass and next to it is something I can't identify at all. It looks like a diamond with a fly sitting on it. But it's a little too smooth to be a diamond, so maybe it's a funnel with a fly sitting on it. There's even more green slime spooge here than in the Bad icon. The icon to open the junk mail folder looks like it's supposed to be a sardine can with the lid open and the same fish carcass and a LOT of green slime spooge. I'm not sure what Eudora intended to communicate with these pictures: Envelope + Stinky Fish = Spam? Diamond/Funnel + Stinky Fish = Good? Sardine Can + Stinky Fish = Spam Mailbox? It's too bad they couldn't use an actual can of Spam on the icon. But despite the poorly designed icons they are easy enough to figure out. Did a bunch of work on Chris C's computer: installed Eudora 6.0; upgraded PharmAdMIT 2004, Real Player, Netscape, Opera, and Sun Java; verified updates for Windows and Office. Tried to install an updated version of QuickTime but when I did the download the installer said "iTunes for Windows" instead of "QuickTime" so I cancelled it—I don't want iTunes, I want QuickTime! If Apple thinks they're going to install iTunes along with the QuickTime installer (a la Netscape/Spinner and RealPlayer/RealJukebox) they have another thing coming. I remembered that my cousin Johnson works in QuickTime marketing for Apple, so I shot him an e-mail asking what's up. It's his fault QuickTime still has that nagging screen begging you to upgrade whenever you launch the free version. Stop nagging already! I'm happy with the free version, and you're not going to change my mind no matter how many times you ask! Went up to MSB9 to see the new offices after the furniture installers returned yesterday to finish their job. Took some photos. Set up folder synchronization between a USB key and some work files. Lunch at desk: leftover spaghetti. Made live James's wildfires notice changes. Link checking. Ran up to MSB9 to meet with Roberto about some final cabling issues. Met with Phillip, a student who had questions about networking. I answered everything he asked, gave him things to try. Double-checked code for our admissions application deadline. Met with Hamden, a first-year student who had questions about access to a computer lab. Gave him the code for it. Everyone in the office is in high packing mode. Boxes, trash cans, shredding bins, and recycle bins are everywhere. Ena brought ice cream to share with the office: pumpkin ice cream embedded with bits of crust—yummy! Dinner at home with Patrick: deep-fried wontons with homemade sauce, country basil salad: green leaf lettuce, basil, mushrooms, red bell pepper, parmesan, parmesan ranch dressing. Shopped on amazon.com for gifts. Set up folder synchronization between a USB key and some home files.
Fri Oct 31, 2003
Morning abs workout. It's our last day at work in UC Hall Room U-12. Everything is getting packed in boxes—the movers come tomorrow. I bring all natural pumpkin pie to share which Patrick picked up for me at Buffalo Foods. For lunch, Cindy buys two large pizzas. They tell us it will take an hour, so I go to the food court intending to bring back a bunch of egg rolls and potstickers from Panda Express, but there's a line with about 25 people, so I get 2 orders of nachos from Carmelita's. By the time the pizza arrives, both nachos are about half gone, and I realize I'm not as hungry anymore. Kristina has been away doing outreach, so her office is all packed up already. Dinner at home with Patrick: pasta with shrimp. Patrick chats with his mom for a while on the phone. We watch An American Werewolf in London on DVD. We eat pumpkin spice cookies which Patrick made.