Thursday, February 3, 2005
I dreamt last night my sister and I arrived at home but it was a home I didn't recognize from reality. We entered through the back—a tidy kitchen with a very high ceiling. The room was shaped like a big box. I don't recall seeing any windows, but there must have been big ones up high because we didn't turn on the lights and we could walk around and see things clearly in the low blue-black light—moonlight or street light which came in from somewhere. We rushed through the kitchen, and in the next room was a little girl, maybe 3 or 4 years old. She had been sleeping and crying, but I don't know why. I stayed with the girl to console her, stroking her hair and wiping away tears, but I was not quite sure of my ability to succeed. She eventually did grow calm, and I was glad.—Joe's Os, sliced banana. Helped Joel set up his Palm Zire 31, which took about 4 hours, primarily because Palm Desktop requires admin privileges during installation. Ugh! I'm glad I don't have to support very many of these devices. The answer which worked for us was found on a pa1mOne (palmOne) forum but it was not provided by a palmOne employee—a user called Desdemona posted a message called "Using the built-in software on your handheld" on January 19, 2005. The roughly 36-step procedure involved backup up the Palm Desktop data folder, wiping all traces of Palm Desktop from the computer (including registry entries), temporarily giving the user local administrator privileges, installing the palmOne software, restoring the backed up data folder, then removing admin privileges from the user. It really turned out to be a 40- or 60-step procedure based on a number of additional roadblocks which took some Googling to resolve. I will spare you the details simply because I want to spare myself the dread of having to relive it. I showed Joel pbase.com, and Joel subsequently mentioned all your base are belong to us, but he had never seen the little movie, so I showed it to him and then we together read the wikipedia entry for it, which—I was surprised—turned out to be not only very useful but also well written. I hadn't known its whole history, but I certainly remember seeing it long ago, and it's still funny. Made live graduation section changes for Cindy. Prepared to collect preferred names from year 3 students. Chatted with Ena who graciously agreed to handle the data collection duties. Chatted with Rodney to make sure he's in the loop on the e-mail migration. This affects him because the e-mail accounts will use the same Active Directory authentication as for the accounts which he has already generated for students in our computer lab. Lunch with Joel at Cybelle's (415-665-8088, 1385--9th Ave): bacon burger and fries and iced tea for me, teriyaki burger and fries and diet Coke for Joel. Joel originally ordered an iced tea, but sent it back when he learned that it had lemon mixed in. While we waited for our food to arrive, a person of no home walked by the window and rudely stuck his/her tongue out at us. Not threateningly, but still quite deliberately. We were more amused than insulted. I ordered my burger medium well, and J0el ordered his very well done. I didn't realize until I got home that our receipt said "medium" for mine and "medium" for Joel's, too! I didn't notice when eating, however. Our waitron was Rigo, and service was pretty good despite the weirdness with our burger temp orders and the receipt. UCSF people get a 10% discount, too! Finished preps for preferred name collection and sent it off. Chatted with Chris about e-mail and domain migrations. Chatted with student T.D. who helped me out with info about how students log in to domains at our various computer labs. I needed the info for the e-mail migration pages. Changed DNS and WINS settings for all office computers—tonight we migrate to the campus domain. Printed reminders for office staff logging in in the morning to use the new domain. Patrick has been sick starting last night—hopefully it's just a cold and not the flu. He couldn't go to class today and has been in and out of bed. After a dinner of broth and orzo, I got fresh groceries at Safeway. Did dishes, cleaned in the kitchen. Put away laundry which Patrick had folded earlier.