Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Day 2 of orientation. I had just missed a bus by one minute, so instead of waiting for the next one I drove part way to work and parked on 12th Avenue. A Muni train came in just a few minutes, but it was so packed with people that no one at the stop before mine was able to board. I walked up to campus from 12th, eating a banana and raisins for breakfast on the way. Helped Joel check in students for the student faculty orientation breakfast. The food had been gentrified over previous years when they served the same food as in the cafeteria. This year the scrambled eggs had herbs and cream cheese mixed in, the sausage was chicken apple instead of standard pig, and so forth. Only a few students failed to show up. Orientation is continuing to run like the well-greased machine Joel built it to be. One session will end up running over 20 minutes and within the next hour Joel has found the right place to trim and put everything back on track. I did my computer services presentation with Chris, and it went well. Some big surprises this year during the show-of-hands portion. Almost nobody took advantage of our Dell and Apple computer offers, so I might not offer them anymore in future years. (Maybe we'll try to gather more data.) This is the first class year where no students were planning to use dialup. Our number of Mac users continues to increase—it's now 13 out of 122. (10% is really a favorable percentage for Apple right now.) About 90% of the class is using a laptop instead of a desktop—this percentage is way up over last year even. This year nearly every student said they knew what a firewall was. This in previous years got a very poor showing of hands, and often they were hesitant hands to boot. An easy majority of students raised their hands when I asked who was using Firefox on a daily basis as their default browser. Right then my heart melted, and I wanted to hug them all. Ena later guessed that I had a soft spot for this entering class, and I denied it, but later I realized that you gotta love students who are that smart. We even have one student who uses Opera. These kids are tech savvy, I tell you. One thing I did new this year was create an all-new, 8-page handout which covers all the computer services they need to know, and it includes lots of hyperlinks to our website where they can get more information. Another new thing I did was record a movie of the show-of-hands portion. I had started out taking still photos, but it was far slower than just filming. Now we can review these student responses at our leisure later to more carefully count the show of hands, if necessary. After my presentation, the students lined up for Mexican food outside of N225 and then filed in for student skits. I helped out getting the laptop running properly on the projector. (Decrease screen resolution to 800 x 600 then recycle video output options. At higher rezs it won't synch properly with the projector.) Back upstairs. Continued work on the subsite redesign and worked through a handful of student problems which came in to my inbox. Discovered the student lounge door code wasn't working yet. Checked in with Ena who submitted the request and found out that facilities management had our request over 2 weeks ago (9 business days) and had still not responded even though Ena tried reaching them multiple times. I sent an e-mail over to facman, ccd a supervisor, and also ccd the customer service quality assurance person. Our door code problem was resolved in about 2 hours, and the lock person they sent over, Brian, did an outstanding job because he suggested a brilliant solution to a problem we've had with the door for years. I sent a thank you message back to facman and the two people I ccd. Chatted with Chris about IRC design and laptop lockers. Processed photos and the movie. Uploaded the movie to Xythos, notified the committee about the movie. Chatted briefly with Polly, met her boyfriend Darren (sp?). Left work. Ran in to two pharmacy students on 9th Avenue just coming back from Milano's pizzeria. It appears Milano's is a favorite of the students. Joel and I had never been back after we had visited one time and I found a hair in my salad (I think it was). Maybe it's time to go back? Stopped at NKRB for some takeout: double happiness, cow with broccoli, brown rice. Walked back to the car. Drove home. Washed, got comfy. Ate dinner. (Patrick is at work this evening.) Read HP's response to my problem report. The problem was that upon startup the printer lights would indicate Fatal Error. The HP support rep (George) appeared to be sympathetic, but his suggestions (use a wall outlet instead of a power strip, do a cold reset) did not work, and when I called the 800 number they said to call in that case, I got a recording that said HP was closed (9:00 PM Pacific). After having found many reports on the internet of the Fatal Error problem with no resolutions described, I decided this isn't worth my time, and I have several days still to return it to Best Buy. Back in the box it goes. I never got a single page to print. Not even a test page from Windows or OS X. Not even a default test page included in the printer. On top of that, it appeared that the printer was used even though it was sold to me by Best Buy as a new item. I didn't have to install a toner cart or paper, I didn't have to break tabs or pull a ribbon on the toner cart, there was no red-orange tape on the printer door holding it shut, and so forth—all of these things were indicated in the HP quick start guide but I didn't have to do because they were done for me right out of the box. HP suggested that I contact them further about this, but they just didn't make it easy enough or worthwhile enough for me, so I'll let them figure out how to investigate this apparent Best Buy scamming of their products on their own. Evening run: 18 minutes. Folded laundry. Lodestar edits. Lodestar subscription handling. Began creating a model release form for Steve G. Wrote in my journal. Installed Quicktime 7.1.3 and iTunes 7 for OS X. I notice very briefly Apple really cleaned up the iTunes interface. Bravo to that—the old interface was so much of a mess that I felt it was really incongruent with Apple's philosophy of simple yet powerful design. The scroller on my mouse stopped working in OS X a day or two ago and I don't know why. Even after today's restart, it still doesn't work. Still works in Windows, though. Boo hoo! Bed.