Wednesday, August 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.