Thursday, January 20, 2005
Patrick made 2-2-2 for me this morning. Scanned in 8 pages for James. Called Dell about the KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR bsod that Chris has been seeing on occasion on his laptop. We had already check for viruses and ran scandisk and the problem still happens. Dell suggested I update the BIOS to the latest version and also run memory and hard drive diagnostics. I also reported to Dell that their support website has some compatibility problems with Firefox, but the tech was reluctant to gather that information and pass it along because (paraphrasing) "Somebody else takes care of that—not us." Steps to reproduce: Open Firefox 1.0. Go to the Contact Dell page. Click the link called Email Product Support. Enter your service tag. The Request Support page appears, showing the information about your computer and the service tag. It also asks you to log in. Log in. An error page appears, saying: "Please enter a valid service tag." Try the same steps in IE6 and no problem occurs. I asked the tech if he happened to have Netscape or Firefox or Mozilla, and he said, "No, they don't give us that here." Listserv updates for Chris. Curriculum page changes for Cindy. Kevin Souza and Chandler Mayfield demoed Ilios 3.0 for us. It's a custom application they built in VB and ASP to manage course curriculum. I am very impressed—they make it all seem really simple, but I can tell that they put a great deal of work in order to get the results we saw today. Chris C is trying to get us started with using it. Chris C, Rodney Y, and Don K also attended and were similarly wowed. Helped Joel with an RFO for a new palm pilot. Supp app form building in Acrobat. The more time I spend with Acrobat the more I like it despite it's authoring quirks. For example, I tried to figure out how to remove the inset background for a radio button and leave it transparent with no border. If you set the border and fill colors to none before changing the Line Style picklist to Solid, then you'll always have your inset no matter what. Change the picklist from Inset to Solid before setting the fill and border colors to none, and then you get what you want. If I hadn't stumbled across this answer on my own, I probably would have just accepted that I couldn't get what I wanted. Dinner at home with Patrick: tubini with chicken sausage red sauce, creme brulee with graham cracker. Watched The Simpsons "Catch'em If You Can"—funny. Prettified the journal index page. Ordered gifts for friends.