Tuesday, September 6, 2005
Breakfast: a banana. Student computing committee meeting. Staff meeting. Figured out the OmniLock device that Kirk uses to reprogram his door locks won't work for ours, so I put in a request with the lock shop. Coded City Tours page. Checked in with Rick S about VPN for Mac OS 10.4—it's still not available and School of Medicine starts today. Posted final fall schedules. Worked with John K to repair the VPN test page. Found out from Ian that students living at Mission Bay will indeed still need to use VPN. Lucia discovered that she has a duplicate object in Active Directory for herself, so I asked ITS to remove that duplicate object. Lunch: cheddar cheeseburger, onion rings. Home. Did work for Corinna. Snack: a banana. Dinner at home with Mom Ryan and Patrick: battered shrimp and artichoke hearts, mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli. Confirmed for Patrick that we don't want to install iTunes for Windows after reading the April 13, 2005 entry on mrclay.org. I got daily backups for the Mac Mini going a day or two ago. Technically, I'm only backing up the website and my home folder so far. I figured out why I couldn't burn to CD-ROM before—it was a permissions issue. I still don't understand why I was forced to go to Console to figure that out. Why couldn't Apple have put a dialog box in the application with the error message? I still haven't figured out how to get Automator to automate burns to disc. I thought Macs were supposed to be easy to use? I must have spent at least an hour trying to figure it out. And Apple Help is No Help, over and over again no matter what I ask it. I ended up getting my backups to work by turning on Windows filesharing and instructing my Windows-based Iomega REV drive to back up the files I want in the shared folder. Still to do: I need to make the tarballs more efficient by refreshing only if files had changed rather than always rebuilding the entire tarball no matter what. I had a strange experience with an ATM machine today. I've used this ATM dozens or perhaps hundreds of times before and never had a problem. However, today, while I was punching in how much money I wanted, I changed my mind at the 4th digit. I saw a button that said CORRECT, so I pressed it because I wanted to CORRECT the value I entered. However, instead of letting me correct it, the machine proceeded to make some funny noises before unexpectedly spitting out the amount I didn't want! It seems to me that OK is a better label than CORRECT in this situation. Fortunately, this did not result in the machine spitting out my entire remaining balance, but it did make me feel uneasy about future experiences with ATMs. "I trusted you! And this is how you repay me?!"