Monday, March 29, 2004
Ena showed up to work today with her hair in cornrows! It looks fantastic, but she says it hurts her head and that'll be the case for awhile. Chatted with Bill Gayle, then with Richard Trott about our student directory on the Web project. Google has a new look! Learned about Google numrange searches at google.com/whatsnew/—cool! Lunch with Joel at Beijing on Irving. My fortune: Don't let doubt and suspicion bar your progress. Joel's fortune: You are deeply attached to your family and home. Shopped for a new fax machine for the office. Fixed links broken by SAA. Did research on how to transform our supplemental application process to electronic fill-in forms. It really, really is bad that Acrobat Reader can't save form data. I would prefer to stick with Adobe apps for this project, but for us, since our application is so long, the deal-breaker is that Reader won't save form data. Instead, I'm building fill-in forms in Microsoft Word. I say yuk to that because I don't have the control over layout I would in PageMaker or InDesign, but the bright side is that whatever form controls I put in are supported by Visual Basic which gives me plenty of interaction (validation) control. And there's no problem with saving form data in Word like there is with Acrobat Reader (aka Adobe Reader). There's something new coming down the pike at Adobe called Adobe Designer which addresses electronic forms in a new way. I signed up for the beta today specifically because of this feasibility study for our supp app. Adobe's March 8, 2004 press release claims that Designer will go gold "in mid 2004" but that means only 3 months for beta testing? I'm no program manager, but I think that's just plain not long enough. Northwest-Chinese-American dinner at home with Patrick: pan-fried salmon, fried Chinese broccoli and baby bok choy, battered french fries. Explained to Chris De Lay in e-mail what IWSN means—I Wouldn't Say No. Headphones arrived today from Cyberguys, so we played with Skype a bit. It works (it works!)—at first there was a noticeable delay, but it got better after a short while. We still haven't gotten calls from anyone else, though. If you're reading here and want to try it, let's set up a time, okay? Oh, we also got 2 organizer boxes from Cyberguys, so I dumped out some desk drawers and got junk all tidy. Chatted with BK today, told him we'd try to stop by later in the week. He'd just gotten back from Portland to visit his biological brother for the first time. Wow!