Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Breakfast: half rice krispies and half Joe's Ohs, cottage cheese, nectarine and banana fruit smoothie. Fixed a listserv problem. Got my new UCSF ID card. It's called a proximity card, or prox card, and when UCSF is all secured it will enable me to get past locked doors. Finished a new supp app draft, sent it to James for review. Cleaned up my temp folder somewhat. Reread Proxy Magazine 1 and 2 from Adobe. I can't help thinking: this is great info, but if I can't link to it on the web, what good is that? A friend of mine would be interested in only certain pages—how can I easily send him or her that info? Attach the whole PDF and tell them in the message the pages to which I'm referring them? So uncool, especially for dialup users. Extract just those pages to a new PDF? So cumbersome. So I didn't bother. The event pages were already out of date when I read them. I used to say, "If it's in print, it's out of date," but now I guess I have to change that to: "If it's in print or PDF, it's out of date." To me, Proxy is Adobe's way of saying, "I'm reluctant to embrace the web." Everything they do in Proxy can be done better in so many ways on the web: availability, device accessibility, human accessibility, linkability, viewing speed. Adobe (still) needs to learn to use the right mediums for the right messages. Another example: the gloriously long URLs generated by studio.adobe.com. (Search Google on ghost illusion Andrew Purviance for a specific example resulting in a 132-char URL. I can't send that to most computer users with any confidence.) "I'm reluctant to embrace the web." I hear you, Adobe. Installed Netscape 7.2 and 8.0. Worked around a problem using Remedy with IE6. Helped one of our faculty with SFTP. He says Fetch 5.0 was released today (!). Helped a student whose computer restarted over and over again. Admissions pages changes. Linkchecking. Updated SFTP info to include Fetch 5.0. Researched encrypting folders in Win XP. Dinner at home with Patrick: shrimp and vegetables with stir-fried noodles. We watched more Star Wars II extras from the DVD.