Monday, October 4, 2004
Banana for breakfast. Back to work after having been in Windows Server 2003 training all last week. Caught up on the 167 e-mails that had collected, resolving or following up on open issues and took care of about two thirds of them. Chatted with Joel and Heather and D--? briefly about TV and about yesterday's fair. Heather, who had worked a booth at the fair, said the crowd at times was packed in like Halloween—crazy. Made mass changes to our mailing list configurations to reduce worm-related spam. Chatted with Kirk H. (Thanks, Kirk!) Lunch: chicken cacciatore with brown rice and mixed vegetables, an orange. Helped James resolve a problem in which Microsoft Word would print an unwanted summary statistics page (or information page) every time he printed a document. (Answer: Uncheck Tools > Options > Print > Include with document: Document Properties.) Somehow that option got checked and he didn't realize it. The answer was hard to find in Google but I eventually found it doing an advanced search, excluding all filetypes that were PDF, and searching on the most unique text of the unwanted output: "As of Last Complete Printing." When I got home, I found that Patrick had put old bath towels down on the kitchen floor, which meant that the overflowing water problems had returned. Within minutes after he got home and filled me in, more water started coming out and onto the floor—the neighbors upstairs were doing laundry. I couldn't reach our upstairs neighbors on the cellphone number we have for them, so I ran to their front door to explain the problem. After that I left messages with our landlords who called back after a little while—they'll try to bring the plumbers back in the morning. It's been very frustrating, but I know the landlords have been spending a lot of money on plumbers to fix the problem. We certainly can't complain that they aren't trying. Exercise. Dinner at home with Patrick: fried salmon, leftover mac and cheese, green beans. Caught up on some e-mail. Checked out Tony's photos from the Love Parade, which we thought looked like a daytime rave—everything looked so 1991! We're sort of glad we didn't go. Finished watching Speed (1994) taped from broadcast TV. It loses a lot on a 15-inch LCD screen, but we were still entertained by it despite its many faults. (Why was Jack Traven written to be so irresponsible?) I kept wanting to swat at the corner of the screen when reminders to watch the station's other TV shows would appear out of nowhere just after the movie returned from a commercial break. Oh, how TV has changed. Unless we tell them, young'uns today will never know that such things didn't happen. And the crazy reality shows we saw advertisements for in between! I can only hope that Americans in 2054 will look back on this era of TV with shame. I know I already do.