August 2006
Summary: Jamie's Memorial; Dinner at Xiao Loong with Stacey and Tim; Stanford Shopping Center and lunch at Max's Opera Cafe with Melissa, Mom Ryan, and Patrick; Kiana's 1st Birthday at Ortega Park; Chicken casserole dinner with Phil and Drew
Dates on this page
Tue Aug 1, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Supp app workshop edits. Dell ImageBuilder work. Helped student KL with an e-mail question. Updated schedules for Lucia (who is on vacation this week). Helped Polly with a personal Snuggle t-shirt project. Tiki took me to lunch for helping her with her security awareness campaign. I designed the short informational posters they're using in print and on the web. I chose Ton Kiang, and we had a great time eating dim sum and talking. Dinner with Patrick and Mom Ryan at Raja Cuisine of India (415-255-6000, 500 Haight Street). We had assorted naan, tandoori prawns, chicken korma, vegetable biryani, saag aloo, raita, and 3 chai teas ($72.66 after a $10 tip). For some reason they chose to bring the chai teas with the meal rather than shortly after we had ordered as we expected. The meal took a really long time to arrive considering we were the first people seated for the evening and only one or two other tables showed up while we waited. The food was all delicious. The vege biryani was spicy even though we had requested every dish to be mild. (We didn't send it back or complain.) Home. Installed OS X software updates.
Wed Aug 2, 2006
Weight training: push-up. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Supp app workshop page made live for James. Polly: Snuggle project. Helped student JH with a question about VPN. Reinstalled DemoShield after the makers of DemoShield reactivated it for me. (The Serial Number that you entered cannot be activated. It has been used more times than allowed.) School of Pharmacy staff appreciation day: SF Giants baseball game versus Washington Nationals. Joel, Ena, James, Polly, and Julia went to the game. The school gave us $15 in Giants bucks as well as a blue School of Pharmacy mug, a UCSF badge/key lanyard, candy, a small package of Cracker Jack, and a small package of peanuts. The weather was hot in the sun and perfect (later cold) in the shade. I ate fries and chicken fingers with ranch ($8.50). I drank bottled water I brought with me. (16 ounces of bottled water in the park is $4.50.) I also ate a nectarine I brought with me. On the way home, MUNI was a mess—there was emergency maintenance in the tunnel, so shuttle busses ran along Market Street and it took a long time for everyone to get everywhere. I got out at Church Street station and did some hardware store shopping for supplies. Home. Chatted with Drew on the phone. Dinner at home by myself: sandwich. Did some catching up on e-mail. Uploaded photos. There was a 4-point-something earthquake nearby this evening around 8:00 PM. I was home, but I didn't feel anything and don't recall an earthquake. Late meal: Healthy Choice frozen dinner.
Thu Aug 3, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast with some of Joel's granola sprinkled in. Tweaked the supp app workshop page for James. Approved the estimate for our cdrom duplication order. Updated the career fair registration form for Joel. Hand-delivered the cdrom master to DMM. Followed up with Garrett, Apple, and Dell regarding our computer offers going live—almost ready. Uploaded and edited photos from yesterday's baseball game taken with the new office camera—a Canon PowerShot A620 with wide angle lens. Joel sent me and Ena photos of a disgusting kitty litter cake. You use a (new) kitty litter pan and create a cake with a crumble topping which looks like kitty litter. And then you add tootsie rolls to it to make it more realistic. If you search Google, I'm sure you can find some examples. He was serious about making it, but I thought it was a crappy idea. In the discussion of the kitty litter cake, we explained to Ena the various definitions of the word "scat." Met with Susie—we had a lot to talk about since I hadn't met with her in a long time. Helped Joel create his first document in InDesign. He had been a devoted PageMaker user and only a problem with copy-pasting text from Microsoft Word into PageMaker convinced him to migrate. (The problem was that his RTF filter needed to be reinstalled, but he just wanted something that would work and I happened to also have InDesign installed on his computer.) He is getting the hang of it readily enough, as I had expected. Helped James troubleshoot a problem with his computer. Turns out his network card has failed, so I placed an order for a USB ethernet adapter to be overnighted. Lunch: Subway sandwich. Dinner at home by myself: a sandwich. Weight training: hammer curl, squat, pec fly, front raise, bent over lateral raise. Snack: yogurt. Late meal: Healthy Choice frozen dinner.
Fri Aug 4, 2006
Set up James to work at a different workstation while we wait for new ethernet hardware for his computer. Polly threw an impromptu cheese party with yummy fizzy grapefruit juice. I continued helping Joel with his curriculum document project in InDesign. Troubleshot problems printing to our tabloid printer. Chatted briefly on the phone with Tina who was trying to get connected wirelessly in a cafe—she had the 169.254.x.x problem and it was not easily resolved even after renewing and repairing the connection, so we gave up. Spent most of the day putting together the city tours page. It's about half or more done. Lunch with Joel at Ten Japanese Cuisine (415-665-1010, 524 Irving Street between 6th and 7th). We got the lunch special bento boxes, cow teriyaki for me, chicken teriyaki for Joel. These $8.95 bento box lunches included miso soup, steamed rice, 2 gyoza, a salad, 3 pieces of California roll, tempura vegetables and prawn. After lunch, Joel and I stopped briefly to check out a new tiny grocery store in the neighborhood—Essential Foods (415-242-1936, 403 Irving Street at 5th). Their hours are 8 to 10 daily, which is helpful because the grocery across the street closes just when I'm leaving work. Essential Foods even has Niman Ranch and organic chicken. Prices seemed higher than normal, but the convenience might be well worth it. I had so much food that I fell asleep for a short while at work (!). Dinner at Kathy's Chinese Cuisine (415-665-6888, 408 Dewey Blvd) with Patrick: steamed dumplings, garlic chicken, mu shu pork, steamed rice. It was our first time to this restaurant. Although the service was not as polished as we had hoped, it was polite and attentive, so we were satisfied. Although we were expecting to see a lot of garlic in the garlic chicken (which appeared to have none), all the food was delicious. My fortune: For best way to open conversation... use cork-screw. Patrick's fortune: You are thought to be the most charming character in the world. Google Maps Saved Locations is a cool new feature. Love it.
Sat Aug 5, 2006
Woke up around 7; did my usual morning run; took a shower; washed dishes; had my favorite breakfast plus fresh white nectarines; tidied a bit in the apartment; donated $10 to Gabriel Handford, the author of Slickr, the best Flickr screensaver I've seen to date. Went to see the 12:00 noon show of An Inconvenient Truth at the Embarcadero theater followed by Jamie Schindler's memorial service at Aaron's place. The film was very convincing, and I have greater respect for Al Gore after seeing it. I liked how he wove in his own personal journey into the story. The music is at times overly dramatic, and when I later went online and saw a trailer for the film I thought it felt really weird to hear the standard Hollywood announcer voice pitch doing the voiceover for it—that didn't seem to fit unless it was a way of convincing the media-saturated American people into thinking it was a Hollywood movie. Anyhow, go see this film in the theater if possible—I think it'll mean more statisticswise if you see it in the theatre than on DVD. After the film, we felt guilty driving to Aaron's place. The memorial went well. Patrick said afterwards that it went perfectly and that it was exactly as Jamie would have wanted. Everyone was there, and I can't remember all the names, but here's an attempt: Aaron, Patrick, Alina, Kai, Nicole, Demetrius, Evan, Victoriana, Pauline, Ken, Joanne, Judah, Jared, Brian, Brian M, Stephen, Apphia, Kelsey, Paul, Gregory, Kenny, Paul Edwards, Jennifer, Jason, Ian, Greg, Mike, David, Marsha, Noodles, Budgie (sp?), and more.
Sun Aug 6, 2006
Spent most of the day working on Lodestar and doing chores at home. Weight training: dumbbell fly, dumbbell bench press, crunch, leg lift. Cut my hair, showered. Patrick was at work all day. In the evening Mom Ryan had had a small emergency—she had lost her step walking along Market Street and had scraped her elbow and knee. Kind people nearby assisted her and a shopowner helped bandage her elbow. She made it home by herself, and Patrick went over to see her right after work. He called me and I brought some first aid supplies and went to Safevay for more. She's doing fine except for the scrapes, which will take one or two weeks to heal, we think. Afterwards Patrick and I got dinner in the Castro. We ate at Taqueria Zapata. In Spanish, zapata means shoe, and I don't know why someone would call a restaurant Shoe Taqueria, but maybe Zapata is also a family name like Shoemaker. Grocery shopping at Safeway. Home.
Mon Aug 7, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Updated a listserv. Helped James print to a printer. Installed updates for Acrobat 6.00 to 6.01. Installed updates for Acrobat 6.0.1 to 6.0.2/6.0.3. Installed updates for Acrobat 6.0.2/6.0.3 to 6.0.4. Installed updates for Acrobat 6.0.4 to 6.0.5. (Grrr!) Installed a new DVD±RW drive. Removed restored files I didn't need. Defragged. Lunch with Joel at Pasta Pomodoro. New news for review for Susie. Attempted to set up the new Avocent SwitchView PC KVM that I received, but discovered that the ports are of the opposite gender on it than the Belkin KVM setup I had before. Quickly researched the least expensive way to make it work. I'll try using VGA male-male gender adapters. New cables are unnecessary and much more expensive. Placed the order online. Retrieved my overnight order of a USB ethernet adapter from Natasha. Tested the USB ethernet adapter. It still failed. Tested the ethernet connection with a known-working laptop. Still failed, so I know now the connection went dead. I report the problem to ENS. Made new news live for Susie after receiving her okay. Tested the DVD±RW drive. Burning failed. Uninstalled Roxio, restarted. Installed Nero. Tested again. Burning failed with InCD, but Nero works. Began archiving. Maynard from ENS arrived and fixed the ethernet problem in James's office. He says construction on the 8th floor must have accidentally disabled his connection. Returned James's keyboard to his computer. Moved the temporary keyboard to Cindy's computer. Left a message for James that his computer was working now. Encountered the error message "The security log on this system is full" and quickly found the resolution to this problem on microsoft.com. Dinner at home with Patrick: chicken cacciatore over pasta. We reviewed photos from Jamie's memorial, and then I uploaded them. Weight training: tricep kickback. Late meal: yogurt, leftover pasta.
Tue Aug 8, 2006
Student computing committee meeting (Jon Johnson's first). Dell and Apple followup. Installed PharmAdMIT 2007 for James. Helped Joel insert an EPS file into his InDesign document. More Dell and Apple followup. More helping Joel with InDesign. Helped James with an Outlook problem (work offline). More data archiving to DVD. Left work. Stopped in at BriKel's and said hello and goodbye. Dinner at Mom Ryan's, Patrick cooked non-spicy jambalaya which we had with bread and butter. Watched an episode of The Simpsons. Cherries and It's It for dessert. Home, very tired. I started getting a sore throat today, and Patrick said the same thing, so we probably picked up the same sore throat somewhere some days ago.
Wed Aug 9, 2006
It made me very sad to read news today that my favorite movie theatre chain Century Theatres has been sold to Syufy. Patrick and I loved the Century 20 Daly City theater because they don't show film commercials (except for Fandango—and, yes, they do increase the volume for just that one commercial). We pay a fair price for our tickets, and unlike other theatres, we are spared the ads of charitable organizations begging for money, race car drivers selling some product, ads for the US military, and so forth. It's unclear whether Syufy will continue their policies regarding commercials, but I'm not counting on it. Most people simply don't seem to care, or they can't easily travel to a Century Theater. I found a list on shinybluegrasshopper.com called "Movie Theaters That Don't Show Ads" which lists only 5 theatres in San Francisco which don't show ads: The 4 Star, Castro Theatre, Red Vic Movie House, Roxie Cinema, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In Los Angeles, there's only one listing (Arclight), and there are no listings for the entire state of New York. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Telecommute day. Worked on the registration form for orientation city tours and caught up on a lot of e-mail messages. Lunch at home with Patrick: sandwiches and funyuns. Mid-day mini meal: leftovers. City tours edits. Dinner at home by myself: vegetable stir fry with steamed rice.
Thu Aug 10, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. I got so much done today at work. Packaged the loaner Dell laptop for return. City tours edits. Requested several new e-mail addresses. Helped a student with e-mail setup. Chatted with Susie. Student organization website followup. Filed for reimbursement of purchases. Met with other campus web people for our monthly lunch: Thom, Beth, John, Julie, David, and Julia. We went first to Nan King Road Bistro, but a construction crew was digging up the street right outside the door—too noisy. We went down the block to Sukhothai. I brought my camera but forgot to take photos. Reviewed the proof cdrom which came back from the duplicator. Burned and tested a new master cdrom. Delivered the new master to DMM. Archived data to DVD. Installed the Avocent SwitchView PC KVM which arrived today. It works! And the scroller works even on the Mac—I'm so happy. (The scroller doesn't work on my Mac at home using a Belkin KVM.) The SwitchView PC hot keys are slightly different than the Belkin I had before, but it's not a problem getting used to new keystrokes. Set up the other 3 computers to the KVM. Returned Cindy's borrowed keyboard back to her computer after setting up the KVM. Made live Part D web pages which feature the first text on our website in Spanish, Chinese, and Russian. Archived documents to PDF. Dinner at Subway by myself: roast cow with swiss sandwich on wheat. Coded some Lodestar works. Patrick and I watched Democracy TV and excised Star Wars clips that Chris had posted on his blog. Fun. A few days ago I received some bizarre error messages on the display of our Lexmark Color Optra 45 inkjet printer: "910 service carrier stall" and "939 service rip-eng comm." These error messages are essentially undefined on the web—they don't even appear anywhere on Lexmark's website. I did the only thing one can do: unplug the printer and then plug it back in after a few seconds. The problem occurred while printing a relatively simple document from InDesign CS. Other documents print properly, so it's either the one document or the single EPS file in it that's causing the problem. I spent about half an hour today calling mail order catalogs to have my name removed from mailing lists. One place asked why I was asking to be removed, and I responded with "global warming." Normally I don't get many catalogs, but recently some entity sold me out, and I got a treesworth all at once. Paper catalogs are sometimes useful to me, particularly when I'm doing really intense shopping (e.g., right after moving into a new place it's nice to have a paper IKEA catalog). So why can't there be a law that says catalog vendors must permit customers to specify the number of catalogs they want per year and then honor that request? It would be no different than raising emissions standards for gasoline-powered vehicles. Oh, right... Weight training: crunch, leg lift, bench press, lateral raise, bench fly.
Fri Aug 11, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Updated supplemental application workshop page for Julia and James. Created draft of new oath of a pharmacist in InDesign. Made live city tours. Homepage news small edit. Archived data to DVD. Lunch with Joel at Ten—I treated. Coded admissions calendar 2007 for James, sent it to him for review. Archived student cdrom source files to DVD. Started work on a new video to go online. Dinner at home with Patrick. Patrick cooked a delicious Chinese meal: chicken glazed in hoisin sauce, Chinese flowering cabbage with oyster sauce, tossed noodles with ginger and scallions, steamed rice, fujian jasmine. Afterwards, we watched an advance copy of The Promise on DVD. This film is so Chinese, filled with poetic storylines bordering on saccharinity and in the story nearly every character is forced to choose between two seemingly arbitrary and absurd fates. It's part of the poetry of the film, but it just didn't work for me. Unlike many recent martial arts films that have made it to the USA, this one does not include a scene in which Zhang Ziyi's clothes are passionately torn away from her body. Patrick was disappointed that the film did not contain as much martial arts as, say, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but he still enjoyed it for its cinematic beauty. The film is somewhat noteworthy for integrating more fantasy and fantastical elements than similar films of the past, and it also has more horror and suspense film techniques which bring a unique perspective to modern martial arts films.
Sat Aug 12, 2006
The sore throat I started getting on Tuesday has gotten worse. I woke up at 4:30 AM this morning and couldn't get back to sleep for an hour. Got up, took some Nyquil, read Slashdot, then went back to bed. Woke up around 10:30 AM. Patrick cooked us brunch: Denver scramble, fresh blueberry muffins, yogurt, green ginger tea. Back to bed. Woke up around 4:00 PM. Linner: leftovers from last night, tea. Patrick and I received a wonderful postcard from Melissa 4 days ago. It's the first time I realized what beautiful penpersonship she has. it's very nice to hear about her adventures in Japan. Patrick and Aaron are planning to attend an event tonight called Writers with Drinks (which I mistakenly called "Drunk Writers" but then Patrick said, "Pretty much."). I don't know what this event is about—perhaps some kind of social event for writers.
Sun Aug 13, 2006
I spent essentially the entire day in bed resting except for food and bathroom breaks. This sore throat and cold isn't particularly nasty or painful—just fatiguing. Chatted briefly with Nate, left a message for Tina. Patrick worked today.
Mon Aug 14, 2006
Filled out the Meyers-Briggs test that Cindy has asked everyone in the office to take as a staff development exercise. Put together a proposed health events policy and form for Chris. New news mockup for Susie, sent it to her for review. Made live admissions calendar 2007 for James. Website setup for student AC representing one of our student organizations. Lunch: takeout from the cafeteria: lemon chicken with brown rice and roasted vegetables, orange juice. Dinner at home with Patrick: turkey burgers, fries. Worked some on Lodestar. While reading a news story on canada.com about identity theft, I came across this sentence: "Give your SIN only to those who are entitled by law to ask for it." This humorously illustrates the importance of using the abbr tag to clarify that in Canada SIN stands for Social Insurance Number. I was a little surprised to read today that Joe Clark is reading the same book I am right now—My Lives by Edmund White. I read fawny (Joe Clark's blog) primarily for typographic amusement, secondarily for horror entertainment, and tertiarily (is that a word?) for the insight he provides to web accessibility. He's right about the book being poorly edited.
Tue Aug 15, 2006
Set new news live. Followup with Apple. Refreshed support documents for cdrom and Dell laptop. Updated Nero and InCD. This resolved my problem of InCD not working before. The problem would appear when attempting to format a DVD+RW disc—an error message would appear saying it was unable to format. (I don't remember the exact message.) Posted info security posters in the computer lab and student lounge. Chatted with Melissa. Lunch: takeout from the cafeteria: fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, roasted vegetables. Began migrating the student directory on the web project from our outside provider to our inside provider. Dinner with Patrick at a Thai restaurant. Grocery shopping at Safeway with Patrick. Very tired. Sleep.
Wed Aug 16, 2006
Woke up early, got in some weight training. Usual oatmeal breakfast. When I arrived at work, I had to wait for my office to be freed up. Some men were doing construction in the ceiling in conjunction with construction on the floor above us. Worked through e-mails. Staff meeting. Lunch: Panda Express. A while ago I had overheard one student express disapproval over the nutrition value of Panda Express, so today I looked it up on their website. It wasn't as awful as I had suspected, though orange chicken—a popular favorite—is among the least healthy of all their items. If you don't have it every day, I don't see a problem. Helped a faculty member resolve the problem I found last week ("The security log on this system is full") on the instructor's computer in the computer lab. I'm providing backup for Rodney who is out on vacation. Also checked on reports that two printers were not working. One was okay, the other had a weird message in its display: "CHANGE MP FEEDER B5" which was not found on the web. I canceled the job, and the printer spit out two successfully printed pages, and then went ready again—problem solved (?). I ran test prints to both printers, and both were fine. Spent most of the day working on orientation presentation materials, then sent them to Chris and Cindy for review. Chatted with Chris R. about the Apple offer. Still not live yet, but she had been on vacation and is trying to make heads roll to fix the last remaining problem upon which I'm waiting. Dinner at home with Patrick: grilled chicken over rigatoni in marinara sauce, Italian pillow bread and butter. Watched Rick Steves Dublin. Weight training: crunch, leg lift, barbell fly, barbell bench press. Yogurt.
Thu Aug 17, 2006
I forgot to mention yesterday that my Panda Express fortune said, "Plan to have some fun," which amused me because I immediately thought, "Well didn't I just have some fun?" but although fun also means noodles to me Patrick tells me I have it wrong and that fun in Chinese means (I think) rice, or in the context in which I learned it—rice noodles. When I arrived at work this morning my computer wouldn't connect to a variety of things properly. Sophos wouldn't update and Outlook wouldn't connect. I walk over to James's office and his computer is the same. I check in with Cindy and she hasn't even bothered trying things anymore—she's just waiting for someone to fix it. I restart my computer, try to get an IP and instead get a 169.254 address. My 8:00 AM appointment shows up at this time. A student needs help setting up Outlook. We go over it and I have her running in a few minutes. (She can connect through wireless.) I return to the network problem. The 169.254 IP is bad news. I call the help desk to report the problem. No one answers, so I leave a message. Within a few minutes, Heather calls back to say that construction on a nearby floor has broken connectivity for certain subnets and we're in one of them. She'll call back to report when the problem is resolved. There's not a lot me or my unit can do when this happens. They can't even connect to the server where all their documents are stored. I resort to dusting and tidying my office and continuing my archiving of data to DVD. Betty-ann—one of our most celebrated faculty members—has declared today Scarf Day. She arrives to hand out free scarves that she made while watching TV. She says she makes about one every hour. (They're on the thin side, but nonetheless the results are amazing.) Every one was different and she chooses really interesting, sometimes outlandish yarns. I take photos with the office camera. Around 10:00 AM Heather reports that the network problem is resolved. Apple followup. Helped Laura M find a photo of the dean. Data gathering for Barbara S. Updated a listserv for Joyce. Minor edits to the orientation materials. Lunch with Cindy and Melissa at You See Sushi. Melissa is back from a 2-month trip to Japan following her first year of law school. We all enjoyed catching up on her activities, and Cindy really grilled her on all the student affairs and curriculum administrata. Joel wouldn't join us saying I've been mean to him but I honestly don't know why he thinks that and of course he won't say. The Apple deal is finally confirmed fixed, so I announce to our students and give the committee a heads up that they can announce as well. Helped entering student BS with a question about computer purchasing. Responded to Claire's question about ps numbers. Minor admissions web page update for James. Checked in with Albert H about our cdrom duping. Downloaded and uploaded photos of the scarves. Followup with a potential captioner. Dinner at home by myself: leftover noodles. Downloaded and uploaded photos. Vacuumed. Cut my hair. Washed dishes. Weight training: crunch, leg lift, tricep kickback, front raise, wrist curl, reverse wrist curl. Late meal: two turkey burgers with swiss, lettuce, and tomato.
Fri Aug 18, 2006
Sent Chris and Cindy the final draft of the computer services handout. The finished CD-ROMs arrived. I checked them out and they appear to work properly. New news for Susie. Delivered e-mail address info to student JA. Helped graduated student SH with a question about migrating Outlook e-mail to Gmail (you can't). Electronically delivered computing services handout print job to DMM for printing. Updated our VPN web page to more fully describe the new SSL VPN (Juniper) option versus Traditional VPN (Nortel), still needs one final review. Dinner at Xiao Loong with Stacey and Tim. Fortunes: Stacey got May all of the 365 dreams you have this year come true. Tim got Your suitor needs subtle encouragement to open up. I got Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it. Patrick got Those who can laugh at them selves have true happy hearts.
Sat Aug 19, 2006
Slept in. Woke. Napped. Helped Mom Ryan and Patrick move Mom Ryan from one apartment to another in her building. Bought deli items for lunch at Safeway, ate in the courtyard at Mom Ryan's place. Home. Nap. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers for me, turkey burger with swiss for Patrick. Saw Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man's Chest at Daly City Century 20. Tickets were $10 each, a 130-ounce root beer was $4.95, a 32-ounce popcorn was $3.37. We were entertained by the film, but it was long, and it was meandering. At the end, things don't entirely make sense; there is no conclusion in this film. It's foreplay for the third film in the trilogy, and in a sense it's disappointing for that. My favorite scenes involve a giant wheel. We both particularly enjoyed the kebab. I enjoyed identifying things stolen from the Disneyland ride. Stay past the end credits for an extra scene. I also thought the special effects were amazing.
Sun Aug 20, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Wrapped up an eBay sale, prepared another. Checked Patrick's laptop for the Dell battery recall. The battery from his Inspiron 700m is unaffected. Dinner at home with Patrick. I prepped, he cooked. Shrimp stir-fry with noodles. Afterwards we watched two Rick Steves episodes: Paris, Venice. Very tired, early to bed.
Mon Aug 21, 2006
Breakfast: a banana. Made backup copies of Office 2004 for Mac CD-ROM and Xubuntu 6.06 Desktop CD-ROM. Linkchecking. Scanned, straightened, and converted to JPEG 17 pages of paper document for James. This took a little over an hour. My scanner, an old HP ScanJet 4470c, is not working properly, so I'll need to order a new one. Contractor Ken came to work in the space above my office. While he did the work, I ate leftovers for lunch and took a few photos around campus with the new digicam. Made live new VPN page describing SSL VPN and announced. Updated current students news. Met with Polly and Cindy about new web pages for the pharm sci pathway. Chatted with Susie. Inserted curricular outcomes text for Barbara S on our curriculum page, sent it to Susie and Cindy for review. Attempted to copy a DVD from UCTV so that we could send it to our captioner, but the copy failed. It appears I have a DVD+RW disc, but the copy requires a DVD-R or DVD-RW disc. Who knew? Counted our CD-ROMs from DMM and found that we ordered 150 but only received 129. Sent out a message asking everyone to count their CD-ROMs. Christina had 54 more than she should have, so I'll pick them up from her tomorrow. Flickr broke their RSS feeds a few days ago, which is very annoying for people like me who have set up dozens of feeds for groups I admin or read. Grr! Dinner at home with Patrick: chicken with tarragon and sherry vinegar, a delicious recipe from Patricia Wells at Home in Provence. House chores. Absentee voter paperwork. Discovered cin-o-matic.com while visiting dack.com. It looks interesting, so I added it to my bookmarks page. It's super fast and doesn't have all the ads and smiling white-people movie stars chrome at imdb.com. Best of all, it has keyboard shortcuts via accesskey attributes in the XHTML code.
Tue Aug 22, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast, except with blueberries instead of banana. Apple flyers followup. Helped two students mitigate spam. Minor web update for Cindy and Susie. New news for Susie. Mocked up links to virtual tour from the admissions pages, sent it to Cindy and James for review. Helped Chris configure a new Dell D820 laptop even though he's still on the fence about my recommendation of a MacBook Pro instead. Application workshop page update for Julia and James. Purchased DVD-R blanks at the campus techstore. DMM followup with botched computing services handout job. Lunch: takeout from Panda Express. Copied the DVD to send to our captioner—it copies successfully! My fortune: You create enthusiasm around you. Doctor appointment. Picked up extra cdroms from Christina. Tried to stop in to say hello to Kirk but he wasn't in. Dropped off cdroms for John McW. Took photos at the library. Met briefly with Polly, showed her how to create bookmarks and hyperlinks within Microsoft Word. Sent some required software cdroms to Ian in interoffice mail. Helped Chris with freeing up space on the C: drive. Student computing committee followup. Downloaded and installed the web browser called Flock 0.7.4.1 just to see what all the noise was about. My first impression was that it's extremely fast at Flickr operations. Instead of clicking on the link for the Flickr Organizer, all my sets are instantly available to me within Flock. I don't have a traditional blog, so I can't test out those features of Flock. The installation was very, very simple and fast, and it included connecting to my Flickr account. Flock copied all my bookmarks over from Firefox, and exporting my Sage feeds from Firefox and importing them into Flickr was a manual operation, but simple enough. I also signed into Delicious where I have perhaps 5 bookmarks stored, but the bookmarks I have in Firefox (and now Flock) are a mess, so I've chosen to not share them yet. I've set Flock as my default browser for now and we'll see how it goes.
Wed Aug 23, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. People database project work. I had used PEAR DB to build our project and asked Julie if she would install that or PEAR MDB2. She's thinking about it. Attempted to connect to smb shares with our new SSL VPN—still unsuccessful. Sean is looking into it for me. Made live the new curriculum outcomes text that Barbara had provided as well as thumbs and links to Flickr from our admissions section which James approved yesterday and which Cindy approved this morning. Researched the purchase of a new scanner. Our old scanner was an HP ScanJet 4470c. In the past year, I've gotten a lot more requests to scan multipage documents to PDF, so I think it's time to purchase a scanner with a document feeder. Chatted with Corinna. Chatted with Nate. Late dinner at home with Patrick. Patrick made the recipe called Lion's Head from the cookbook called Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook. The recipe is sort of like Asian meatballs or meatloaf. Patrick's version came out very similar to the picture in the book. We both liked it.
Thu Aug 24, 2006
This morning I did the longest run ever—30 minutes—since I started running regularly, usually before weight training workouts. I did some running a few times last year but stopped since I still didn't have enough strength in my quadriceps to prevent the patellofemoral pain with which I had been diagnosed some time ago. Now, however, I seem to have worked up that strength to the point that neither running nor any other physical activity causes a problem, and the running is helping me continue to gain strength in that area, so I am pleased. My runs nowadays are not the traditional running outside, they're simply running or jogging in place inside the apartment. This is so untraditional that I feel some people probably have strong feelings against it or would make fun of me for it, but it actually works for me on many levels. I have a controlled airspace (no car exhaust or cigarette smoke), controlled temperature, I can break for water or a light snack at any time, I don't have to worry about angry dogs or strange people, and I can stop any time I want and I'm instantly at home. Also, if I ever happen to accidentally injure myself (like I did in April), I know I won't be lying in the gutter where someone can accidentally run over me in a car or worse—mud can get on my clothes. When I first started this running, I always wore my shoes with orthotics, but now most of the time I run in place without shoes or socks which I believe helps to strengthen my foot arches which provide the support that helps prevent my knee pain. So far so good. Pretty much all these runs were undocumented, but I'll start being better about that now. Morning run: 30 minutes. Weight training: tricep kickback, crunch, leg lift. A nectarine for breakfast. Today was staff development day. It took me an hour to get to Laurel Heights by Muni. Cindy had us take the Myers-Briggs personality test about a week ago and we found out the results today. I had hoped I passed even though I didn't study for it, and as it turns out, we all passed. In a nutshell, Myers-Briggs is the categorization of individuals into seemingly arbitrary category types for the purpose of helping people understand each others' behaviors, values, motivations, desires, and so forth. Susan Calcagno moderated the discussion, and I believe we all enjoyed the event and gained some insight into the process. Cindy provided lunch—sandwiches and pasta salad from A.G. Ferrari. Today I gave Joel an advanced copy of a book about making wedding cakes that Patrick had gotten for free from work. It might have been a nice gift for Tina, but Patrick thought she was so far ahead of the book that he convinced me that it wasn't really good for her. Joel seemed to really enjoy it, and I hope he bakes a fabulous wedding cake and brings it into work for all of us to eat. Grocery shopping. Washed the car. Dinner at home by myself: turkey burgers, fries. Shopped online on eBay, uploaded photos. I didn't know that Microsoft Virtual PC for Windows is now free. (Thanks, IEBlog!) Interesting. Late snack: yogurt.
Fri Aug 25, 2006
Morning run: 35 minutes. Weight training: crunch, leg lift, wrist curl. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Linkchecking. Installed ATM Deluxe. Installed Flock 0.7.4.1. Link updating for Davide (pcweb to pharmchem). Handcounted Apple flyers, distributed. Chatted with Chris about the PC113 website, educause, airbus. Checked in with Susan M about setting up a new one. Listserv updating for Joel. Bought wrapping paper at the hospital gift shop. Archived a USPS return receipt (Google Analytics) to PDF. Bulk-erased an old Palm m515 handheld computer for surplus. New news mockup for Susie. Prepared old equipment for surplus. Faculty page updates for Susie. Archived a receipt to PDF. Dinner at home with Patrick: beef bourguignon, mac and cheese, asparagus. Watched Inside Man on DVD, which we borrowed from Sam. It's a bank robber film, but everything isn't what it seems. It's the perfect heist, but this is a very different bank robber film than I've ever seen. We liked it a lot; trying to figure things out was fun. I realize today that Flock 0.7.4.1 doesn't import bookmarks properly. There appears to be no concept of subfolders in this version of Flock, so a bookmarks tree from a different browser (e.g., Firefox) is imported into Flock so that every subfolder is at the top level. (I think.) This is very painful—I couldn't function for a while because I couldn't find certain bookmarks I needed. Uploaded photos.
Sat Aug 26, 2006
Breakfast at home with Patrick: mini chocolate chip scones, yogurt, oatmeal. Picked up Mom Ryan at her place, and the 3 of us drove to Stanford Shopping Center. We got beverages at the Nordstrom espresso bar, bought mixing bowls and dishtowels at Crate and Barrel. We strolled through the mall for a while. We observed some people sitting at tables by the farmer's market with 6 large dogs (whippets?), each of which had its own soft blanket for lying on. Melissa met us there, and we soon got a table indoors at Max's Opera Cafe. We started with a shared plate of potato pancakes (latkes). Melissa had half sandwich and matzo ball soup, Mom Ryan had a chicken sandwich with fries, Patrick had a chicken salad, and I had a salmon burger with fries. Afterwards we did a little more shopping. Melissa went off to study, and Mom Ryan, Patrick and I went to Ortega Park for Kiana's first birthday party. The weather was perfect, and the park had everything one needed—grills, massive lawns, a fun water play area for kids, a playground, tennis courts, and more. Back to San Francisco. Dropped off Mom Ryan. Home. Tired, early to bed.
Sun Aug 27, 2006
I realize today that in Flock 0.7.4.1 the Favorites management is not working well for me. It's very slow—deletions take several seconds (why?), no subfolders, I can't get some keyword searches to work properly. I had never known what demos and demogroups and the demoscene were until I accidentally discovered farb-rausch today. It's multimedia computer art tailored for geeks. fr-08, released in 2000, simply astounded me for its tiny size—64 kilobytes. Morning run: 15 minutes. House chores: laundry, dishes, vacuumed. Read news, caught up on e-mail, downloaded photos from the camera. Cut my hair, showered.
Mon Aug 28, 2006
Morning run: 5 minutes. Weight training: tricep kickback. Usual oatmeal breakfast. New news for Susie. Asked Ena to handle the door code change for the student lounge. Responded to a student who had a question about VPN passwords. News edit for Susie. City tours web page correction—I had a wrong formula in my code. Updated prosp students calendar. Met with Susie, showed her what people do with RSS feeds. Helped a student figure out the address for one of our listservs. Helped an entering student with computer requirements. Chatted with Chris about the seismic retrofit. Handled a photo request from Chris. Rebuild the info day page with new code to make it easier to maintain. Restored some data for Cindy. Installed Reader 7 for Cindy. Attempted to install PharmAdMIT 2007 for Ena, Lucia, and Julia. Only one of the three installs appeared to be successful. On one, the error message I got was: "Error: Resource file version mismatch (OK)" followed by "Microsoft Visual FoxPro: Visual FoxPro cannot start. Could not load resources. (OK)" As yet these error messages are unresolved. Home. Weight training: front raise. Dinner at home with Patrick: another recipe from Patricia Wells at Home in Provence: fettucine with roquefort, lemon zest, and rosemary. Yummy! With bread and butter. Prepared to work on Corinna's website again. She had finally gotten back to me with a revised wireframe after a long time. Weight training: crunch, leg lift.
Tue Aug 29, 2006
Morning run: 5 minutes. Oatmeal breakfast. Helped Lucia troubleshoot a printing problem. Dropped off revised print job to DMM. Bought Muni passes. Created a revised Form A (lockbox revision). Helped entering student YW with a question about setting up Outlook. Minor HIPAA page and PHPM branch updates for Cindy. Lunch with Joel at You See Sushi. Sent Joel the URL to flock.com. Updated hardware inventory chart. Minor web edits for Susie. Helped entering student JR with a problem with her UCSF Dell laptop. Minor PhD page update and BMI contact page update for Susie. PharmAdMIT installation troubleshooting (more from yesterday). Sent Lucia links to the page describing what to do when your mailbox is too full. Prepared hardware for surplus. Computer security education posters work. Uploaded photos to Flickr. Dinner by myself at work: leftovers. Home. Geeked. Night run: 15 minutes. Weight training: squat, hammer curl, crunch, leg lift. Patrick recently gave a cake decorating book to Joel, and today Joel sent him a thank you card with a very delicious (and otherwise quite normal) brownie. Late meal: a nectarine, a cup of yogurt, leftover pasta. Shopped for new printers for home.
Wed Aug 30, 2006
Morning run: 15 minutes. Weight training: wrist curl. Shower. Breakfast: a nectarine. Dropped off the car at the body shop to repair the fog lamp injury from a few weeks ago. Completed the revised supp app (lockbox modification), sent it to James for review. Dell laptop problem followup—a student didn't receive Office 2003 Pro in the box like Dell said would happen. Dell is responding to the issue. Followup with evolt regarding the difficulty in telling others how to post a job listing there. Warned office staff about a potential voice and data outage coming up next month due to building construction. Showed Joel Flock, Slickr, and the Apple RSS Visualizer screen saver. Executive assistant web page listing updates for Susie. Sent Tiki SATE poster #11 for review—dispose of old electronic equipment safely. Sent Chris links to info about the UCSF Blackberry service. Updated placement interview pages for Joel. Followup with Jeff B about broken links in his subsite. Helped Chris retrieve some student data he needed. Helped Cindy with a problem with Acrobat. Updated placement interviews registration form and web pages for Joel. Updated Outlook setup instructions to include the login dialog for Outlook 2003. (We had previously had only the dialog for Outlook XP (2002). Lunch with Joel at Cybelle's. Joel had a Hawaiian monster slice of pizza and a side salad with 1000 Island dressing on the side. I had a chicken boob sandwich with fries. Joel's salad was rather unwieldy due to the very large cuts of lettuce and the relatively small plate. After lunch, we stopped at Holy Gelato! (415-681-3061, 1392-9th Avenue at Judah) which had recently opened for business. Uninstalled Reader 7 for Cindy, which did not leave Acrobat 6 functioning properly, so I had to uninstall all its updates, then uninstall Acrobat 6, then restart the computer, then reinstall Acrobat 6, then reinstall 6.0.1, then reinstall 6.0.2, 6.0.3, 6.0.4, and 6.0.5. This took over an hour. I left work at 8:50 PM. Dinner: leftover half sandwich from lunch. Home late. House chores: garbage and recycling. Archived documents. Printer shopping. So far the plan is to buy an all-in-one printer to replace our Epson Stylus CX5200 which died most likely due to the problem that appears to be widely reported in which the printer simply stops printing certain ink colors due to clogged tubes which are nontrivial to service. The story on the net is that if you spend 45 minutes to an hour on the phone with Epson, you can get a free replacement or pay a small amount to upgrade to a better printer. Too much work—I'd rather buy a new printer that's not Epson. This printer worked mostly well for 3 years, so I'm not feeling very bitter about it, but it is unfortunate that Epson didn't seem to make their printers last longer. I particularly like their scanner software over the drivers for the HP ScanJet 4470c I have a work. In addition to a new all-in-one, I think it's time to buy a grayscale laser printer as well. However, it's been very frustrating to find a reliable wireless USB-printer print server (only) that supports WPA2. I don't think one exists. Well, a few exist, but they're about $150 to $250—more than I think I need to spend.
Thu Aug 31, 2006
Morning run: 10 minutes. I stopped using Flock as my default browser. It has some nice features, but I don't blog with a service, I don't post comments on other people's blogs, and I don't use delicious very much. And I couldn't deal with the bookmarks handling, though I'm sure it will improve in the future. I stuck with it for about a week, which was what I had originally intended. Back to Firefox for now. Breakfast: a pear. Helped Cindy with an HTML e-mail template. Answered e-mail usage questions from Peter A. Helped Joel vote for Pat Summitt in some online poll about the top 20 coaches. Executive assistant for the dean pages go live along with an updated org chart. Linkchecking followup with Jeff B. Staff meeting. DMM followup on my print job. City tours followup with student orientation leader AP. Lunch with Joel at Nan King Road Bistro. Researched e-mail address obfuscation on web pages in order to prevent spam. (I believe it's not worthwhile for a huge list of reasons.) Sent UCSF logos to Jeremiah H for Susie. Check-in with Mark B about entering student e-mail addresses. Info day registration form and web pages work for Joel. Created a simple presentation in InDesign for OSACA introductions during Orientation. In the afternoon Joel and I got frozen yogurt from the cafeteria. Reinstalled Spy Sweeper for Ena. PharmAdMIT 2007 installation troubleshooting. Converted a Word document to PDF for Joel because Acrobat was not working properly on his computer. Dinner with Phil and Drew at their place: chicken casserole, side salad with ranch. Afterwards we chatted about favorite films, Myers-Briggs, and other things in the living room. Phil's favorite film is The Exorcist. Drew's favorite film is Stigmata. I said my favorite film was Citizen Kane. I helped them resolve problems with their computer. Home. Late meal: noodle soup. Weight training: tricep kickback, left arm only (it's weaker).