Thursday, May 27, 2004
Breakfast: oatmeal, brown sugar, cinnamon, banana. Double-checked measurements for ordering blinds in my office and James's office. Met with Susie, belayed home page news changes, updated current students news, returned her Lonely Planet guide to China. Installed Acro 6 Pro and Office 2003 on Chris's laptop. Checked that Meeting Maker was working. (Chris had reported some trouble, but his system restore seemed to have fixed this.) Reinstalled VPN, then tested with the dialup line. Chris's laptop also had trouble seeing the local network. I spent 55 minutes on the phone with Joe from SF Micro. We thought it was a corrupted IP stack like before but then after some pings he helped me realize that ZoneAlarm was missing some trusted host configurations for our server and the DNS server. After hanging up with Joe, I was able to log on to the network but still unable to get Retrospect to connect—error -541 and -530 variously. I eventually got it to work by logging in as myself (an admin account) on the domain (not the local computer) and disabling all the network adapters except for the local network adapter. From a real UNIX shell on my primary computer I ran 'telnet [computer_ip] 497' to test whether Retrospect was running and open. In Retrospect on the server, I was able to choose Multicast and although the computer I wanted was grayed out I selected it and clicked Add and finally I got it to connect. In Retrospect the greyed out computer is misleading—I'll never trust it again to mean "can't connect to this computer". Impromptu meeting with Chris and Rodney about the IRC and software requirements and the student computing subcommittee. Put in a reimbursement request for padlocks for our computers. Installed Debrah's replacement speakers which had arrived today from Dell. Packed up the suspected-bad speakers and gave to Ena for return to Dell. Tried to fix Melissa's desk which had gotten nicked from a recent visit from a laser printer repair person. Couldn't fix it with a file or a stone so I'll try my Dremel kit after I get back from vacation. Ordered the pleated shades for office windows for me and James. Backed up Chris's laptop to tape. Captured 4 pages to PDF of a manual for Cindy. Left a voicemail on Joel's cellphone apologizing for forgetting to also give him the power brick for his UC Davis presentation today. Home. Snack: raw carrots and broccoli with ranch. Dinner: linguine with portabello cream sauce with fresh mushrooms and broccoli. Watched Simpsons episodes. Studied Firefox.