Monday, December 22, 2003
Over the weekend, ITS reported a security breach to the itsa mail server which forced them to reset passwords for some accounts. Cindy also notified me that the vacation service message was not working: "Error: Cannot connect to server!" so I reported the problem to ITS. Cindy and I seemed to be the first to report the problem. itsa was scheduled for emergency maintenance today from noon to 12:30 pm so I got the word out to students on the current students page. I manually updated Cindy's vacation message. Finally resolved the problem with Melissa's computer playing music too fast. She had AC 97 sound card drivers installed, and a search on Google found lots of other people with the same problem but no solution. I uninstalled the AC 97 drivers and upon reboot Windows 2000 automatically reinstalled different drivers which seemed to work properly. Cable management for Melissa, Kristina, and Debrah. Chatted with Steve and a painter about the paint color for the doors—no one knew the exact paint code. Potluck in the office for lunch. The theme was "Meat" because Kristina—the only vegetarian in the office—was away in Europe. Debrah brought porcupine meatballs (made with Rice a Roni). Debrah called her own dish "ghetto" and I don't think any of us had heard her use that word before, so we were all quite astounded. I brought pasta shells in pesto with proscuitto, romano, pearl onions, yellow and orange bell peppers, tomatoes, and whole fresh leaves of basil. I also brought white cake cupcakes with creamy vanilla frosting and red and green sprinkles. Joel brought a garden salad with raspberry vinaigrette and diced mini tomatoes. He also brought mystery meat ravioli with cream sauce. He also brought heart-shaped cookies with different colors of frosting and multicolored sprinkles. They looked professional—or at least store-bought—but I thought for certain he made them himself because what store manager in her right mind would be selling heart-shaped cookies the week before Christmas? Ena brought plates and bowls and Welch's juices. Melissa brought dim sum: potstickers, shau mai, and ha gow. We'd decided on the potluck at the last minute last week, so James didn't know about it but we let him eat anyway—there was plenty of food. I think Joel called it the best potluck ever and promised that next time he'd make sushi for everyone. Started gathering images for the student database—a harder task than I had imagined since the filenames are not all normalized and since some students are 5-year students so there's some jockeying around I need to resolve. So to start out, I need to make a mapping table from all the old filenames to all the new normalized filenames and resolve the 5-year-program students in the table before naming the files, resizing them, and uploading them. Melissa and I made some wrapping paper to rewrap Kristina's Secret Santa gift. Converted a travel reimbursement form to PDF and uploaded it for Debrah and Cindy. Uploaded an updated copy of the electives schedule. Did link checking. Created a new mini template for thumbnails of downloads. Dinner at home with Patrick: veggie boboli pizza and leftover dim sum. Watched videos online: Royksopp "Remind Me" (cool, astounding, weird) and "Poor Leno" (sad in a cute kinda way), Cassius "I'm a Woman" (Patrick thought the diva looked perfect in it) and "The Sound of Violence" (the image quality was too low to adequately appreciate it). Watched some videos on pleix.net. Watched trailers at apple.com: Troy, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Peter Pan (Universal), Paycheck Featurette, Stock Car 3D IMAX, Billabong Odyssey, Shrek 2. Watched Bjork's "Cocoon" from her website. Read Roger Ebert's review of Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. Ten twenty-two—it's time for bed. At 11:19 am today, an earthquake measuring 6.5 hit central California, but I didn't feel it at all. Patrick said he was on Muni in a tunnel and the train stopped for about 10 minutes—he didn't know why until he got home.