October 2006
Summary: Camping at Pinnacles; Helped the Honmas move; Patrick stops working at Books, Inc.; Halloween Masquerade Cocktail Party at Danny, Phil, and Drew's.
Dates on this page
Sun Oct 1, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Morning run: 10 minutes. I've been going easy on the running lately because my knee has been hurting again a tad and I must avoid making it worse because Remi's camping trip is next weekend. House chores. Discover that the Mac Mini does not print to the new printer now even though it successfully did yesterday. Neither Windows computers are on, but that shouldn't make a difference because the printer is on a wireless print server. No time to check this out now. Drove to the Castro, not realizing that today is the Castro Street Fair. The streets are closed off, and there's no parking anywhere nearby, so I park the car at Alvarado and Castro and wait for a bus. I wait about 10 or 15 minutes and no bus. The route might have been altered. I grab the first cab I can, it gets me down there around 1:15 PM. I meet Patrick at Books, Inc. and we go to lunch at the Thai restaurant on Market and Sanchez. I catch a cab back to the car, then drive to REI where I use my dividend to purchase a Pelican 2270 VersaBrite II—a flashlight which previously had been hard to find. Stopped at Walgreens on the way home for soap. Home. Dinner at home with Patrick: bow ties with marinara and pig (Italian sausage), salad, chocolate chip cookies.
Mon Oct 2, 2006
Breakfast: a banana. New subsite work. Completed Update from the Dean, sent it to Susie for review. Updated class officers photos document for Cindy. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: Good opportunities ahead—set your mind to grasp the next. More new subsite work, then made it live. Helped student WL with updating a student organization website. Worked on the entering students computing services document. Backups work. Reverted to iTunes 6.0.5 for Ena—iTunes 7 was causing her computer to function very slowly. Home. Tried getting the print server to work, did not finish. However, the 24-pound paper did seem to remain flat after printing some test pages. One other thing about the Brother HL-5250DN—we did notice our lights flicker somewhat when a job was sent to the printer but I guess the power in our apartment is sufficient enough to handle the load. There seems to be a significant number of people complaining in reviews that the printer won't work for them because it draws too much power. Dinner at home with Patrick: bell pepper and cow stir fry with basmati. Weight training: barbell fly, crunch, leg lift. Late snack: yogurt.
Tue Oct 3, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast, pear banana smoothie. Student computing committee meeting. Preferred e-mail address followup. Barracuda followup. Distributed final list of students to staff. Listserv updates for Claire. Today Joel brought in some snack platters he made himself for Pollyanna's last day this Friday. A variety of vegetables, green apple slices, fig-wrapped proscuitto, crackers, hummus, pita bread, goat cheese. He's good like that. Helped student MKS with connecting an iPaq to our wireless network. Lunch with Joel at You See Sushi. Purchased additional licenses for network scanning to the Brother MFC-5440CN. Installed network scanning software for two workstations. Dinner at home with Patrick: flank steak strips over salad, bread and margarine. Troubleshot problems with the SMC SMCWPS-G print server and the Brother HL-5250DN laser printer. Here's what I discovered. When I called technical support for Brother a man with an Indian accent answered the phone. We spent about 15 or 20 minutes together trying to resolve my problem: the default password did not work when attempting to access the embedded web server after having successfully set up the device using the Windows-only PSAdmin application that SMC includes on the CD-ROM. He eventually said that if I could not get it to work when connecting the print server directly to my computer with an ethernet cable and going to http://192.168.0.10 then I should return it to the store. I said it's been more than 30 days and the store was not likely to take it back but he insisted they would and he also said if that happened I should call him back. Turns out if I did a factory reset and did not use PSAdmin for setup then going to the embedded web interface worked as expected. I simply didn't bother setting a password on the embedded web server to prevent access problems, and it's inside my local network so I'm not worried. If anything did happen, I can simply factory reset it again. And the WPA2 encryption does work as expected—this was the main reason I bought this device. The embedded web interface duplicates the functionality of PSAdmin. And the embedded web interface seems to work better than PSAdmin except that every changed setting requires a restart of the print server—very tedious and time-consuming when you're setting things up initially and changing a lot of settings. They didn't provide a way for it to save all your changes amongst the different tabs and then restart the print server when you're done changing settings. However, everything is now working again—I can print successfully and wirelessly (remotely) from all 4 computers. I'll wait another day or two before deeming this setup completely fixed since last time I encountered printing problems after one night without changing anything. Another interesting thing I discovered was that we tried 24-pound paper this time around—OfficeMax OM44008. 24-pound paper is harder to find, and 20-pound is much more common. When printing simplex pages, this 24-pound paper does not curl like the other office paper we tried before. However, when I tested duplex printing, it did curl, but in the opposite manner of the previous paper—instead of curling lengthwise, it curls widthwise. It doesn't curl as much as the 20-pound paper did when printing only simplex, so I'm a little disappointed to say that I'm going to keep this printer as long as the SMC wireless printer server also works out. (If the 24-pound paper curled as bad as the 20-pound paper, I had vowed to return the printer.) I realized for the first time tonight that my journal entries are showing up on sneeper's livejournal friends page—neat and creepy! Well, not creepy really. But you know what I mean. Late meal: leftovers.
Wed Oct 4, 2006
I think I forgot to mention a couple of days ago I had lots of trouble trying to access a Windows 2003 server shared folder from OS X. It would work when I logged in as me (with admin rights), but it failed when I logged in as a non-admin user who still had rights to access the shared folder. After lots of digging, I downloaded something called Microsoft Windows 2000 Services for Macintosh (SFM) which included something called User Authentication Module (UAM). After installing that on the OS X computer and then restarting, everything worked as expected. It's misleading that it's called "Windows 2000 SFM"—it still worked for me with a Windows 2003 Server shared folder. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Telecommute day. Worked. Figured out how to use SSL VPN to connect to Samba shares on an OS X server via mapped drives in Windows Explorer. Troubleshot Barracuda anti-spam problems with Joel and Kraig. Coded 2 new news stories for Susie, sent them to her for review. Made live the new update from the dean for Susie. Drove to PhilDrewDanny's to check up on their fish tank and house plants while they are on vacation in Vietnam. Bought a few groceries at Safeway. Dinner at home by myself: roast chicken, mashed potatoes. Worked on Corinna's website, got the about page almost finished, got the automated nav code working.
Thu Oct 5, 2006
Morning run: 15 minutes. My favorite breakfast at the cafeteria. Distributed photos for Cindy. News edits for Susie, made the story live. Barracuda followup with Kraig. Sent Kirk a summary of the preferred e-mail address changes. Attempted to check in with Danica about a listserv problem. Quick edit for Kevin's draft syllabus. Lunch with Joel. It was our first time eating at Lime Tree (415-665-1415, 450A Irving Street at 6th Avenue). The cuisine is southeast asian. We started with roti flatbread. I had baked chicken, Joel had chicken satay and a side of rice. The food is delicious. Although the restaurant had been open for months, I was always scared to go in because of the fluorescent lighting (food always looks bad under it, I think) and because the decor wasn't very inviting. Joel rather loudly mentioned that they should go to Ikea to pick up some real vases instead of using old SoBe bottles to hold the flowers on each table. The set of wave mirrors and other ultra modern wall items wasn't designed to go well with brown fake wood tabletops and dark blue velour looped back chairs (I forget what you call these kinds of chairs tho I know they have a name). Still, the service is friendly, the food is delicious, and since there was hardly anyone else in the restaurant, service is also pretty quick. E-mail housecleaning. More Barracuda followup with Kraig. Troubleshot a jam with our Xerox 6200DP—could not resolve, asked Ena to call backup in the morning. Flickr work—created new groups, started discussions in the 2010 group, prepped Susie for more work to come. Backups work. Attempted to install network scanning software for Cindy's computer, but it failed. Defragged. Ate a quick dinner of leftovers. Went to the grocery for some items. Rinsed the car of bird poop, cleaned all windows and wipers with vinegar, rinsed again. Shredded cdroms. House chores. Mixed, poured, then threw dessert for the camping potluck into the oven. Cut my hair. Showered. Checked out the $20 tripod that Sam gave us—it's actually quite nice and more modern than the one I have. Washed dishes, tidied rooms. Patrick got back from work. His mom returned from Boston today. She was visiting family she has over there. Felice Picano's reading was today. Patrick said not very many people turned out, but Felice doesn't have a new book out, and sometimes that happens. Ironed my suit, prepped my outfit for tomorrow. We have to dress up because of the White Coat Ceremony. Continued packing. Made Lodestar Quarterly Issue 19 live, then troubleshot problems with the RSS feed due to the "mysteriously missing issue," got it working after about 45 minutes; database tables needed updating. Recently I discovered that one of my PowerEx 2500 AA rechargeable batteries refused to accept a charge, so I reported the problem to the place I bought it from and they left me a message soon afterwards saying that they were already sending me a new one in the mail—no need to return the defective one; she said I can just throw it in the trash! When I heard that on my voicemail, my eyes kind of bugged out and my jaw dropped. This retailer specializes in batteries, and they tell customers to throw them in the trash? Very nice of them to ship me a new battery, too, but they didn't bother to check if I had moved. Turns out I did, but they had my work address for the shipping address, so it wasn't a problem, but it easily could've been. Lately I've been reading the California voter information guide.
Fri Oct 6, 2006
Morning run: 10 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast plus one red plum. Spent most of the day helping Joel set up for the White Coat Ceremony. Lunch: sandwiches from Subway. Home. Showered. Finished packing. Dinner at home: a bowl of oatmeal, yogurt, red plum, leftover cow strips with basmati rice. Packed the car. Left at 6:38 PM. I'll be camping with friends at Pinnacles this weekend. Patrick has to stay home because he works Saturday and Sunday. I'll be posting again in a few days. Oh yeah—Ena, the student affairs assistant in our office said she found another job working for the department of surgery and breast care at Mount Zion and her last day would be the 20th (I think). She's been with us for (8?) years, and we'll miss her very much. The drive to Pinnacles was perhaps the best long drive I've ever taken. I eventually left San Francisco around 7 PM after eating leftovers and fruit and yogurt. Traffic getting to the edge of town was (as always) the worst part of the trip. The night was partly cloudy with a full moon. During the drive, I listened to the radio which kept me awake until all the presets died out from lack of signal somewhere along Highway 25. I stopped for a bathroom break and gasoline near Hollister. The night seemed warm, so I drove part of the way with the sunroof open. Near the campground I nearly ran over an owl which was sitting in the middle of the road facing away from me. I slowed down because I wasn't sure if it was aware of my arrival, and it flew up and away at the last moment. I got in to camp around 9:15 PM. I had arranged to share a tent with Steve and Travis who had arrived earlier in the day. When I arrived some were chatting and some were playing a truth-or-dare game of wooden blocks called Janga and I joined in but I had disappointed Marck by successfully removing only beige blocks which meant I didn't have to do either a truth or a dare. Set up my sleeping bag and yoga mat in the tent and bundled up for bed wearing my ear flaps hat which kept me pretty warm.
Sat Oct 7, 2006
In the morning, the chefs (Galen, Remi, and helpers) prepared egg scrambles with sausage, ham, mushrooms, and tomatoes. We also had Costco muffins, fresh grapes, orange juice, coffee, and other assorted breakfast items. We saw a deer wander close by to our campsite and then wander off again. We prepared for the day's hike, packing sandwiches for lunch as well as lots of water. We applied suntan lotion. The hike was a strenuous climb up a mountainside. We saw a dead tarantula along the way as well as lots of big, unusual rock formations. We stopped for lunch around the top at a lookout before hiking down the other side. Around this time Tony Q sprained his ankle. Some of our group ran ahead to get back to camp so that they could drive around to pick him up when he reached the ranger's station. Most of the group continued on at a normal pace to finish the caves portion before sundown. Tuan and I stayed with Tony while he made his way as best he could. We actually stopped for about 15 or 20 minutes to let him rest after the descent. We reached the ranger's station, and Tuan and Tony stayed behind and awaited a car ride back to camp. Remi, Jesse, John, Kurt, and I finished the caves portion of the trail which led back to camp. The caves were a lot of fun. We had to crawl through gigantic rocks, and the tunnel led deep into completely dark portions—flashlights were required. Just before we entered the caves we saw a couple carrying a newborn baby. They were just sort of waiting near the entrance, and it amazed me that they thought they could navigate the caves with the baby. It would have been extremely irresponsible to do so; you really need all the agility you can muster to get through—with a flashlight—and dealing with a baby at the same time would likely have meant dropping it by accident. After the caves, the rest of the trail was pretty flat and easy going and we were soon back at camp. Everyone hit the showers, and it helped that our group arrived back at camp in staggered subgroups because there were only 2 showers (50 cents for 3 minutes). Saturday night was potluck night, and we had a campfire going with someone's prestolog and some approved firewood bought from the campground store. David cooked a fantastic pot of non-spicy homemade chili, someone made quesadillas, someone made farfalle with chicken, and the courses kept coming—I can't remember them all now. I know I stopped counting after the 8th course. For dessert, we had 2 kinds of brownies (caramel walnut swirl from me, and more brownies from Ted) as well as birthday cake for Steve (Travis). Campfire discussion centered around personal truths and was very enlightening. Oh, attendees: me, Yhow-Wei, Tony A, Galen, Tony Q, Jonathan, David, Kurt, Remi, Jesse, John, Ted, Marck, Tuan, Andy, Scott, Steven, Travis.
Sun Oct 8, 2006
Morning campfire. Breakfast: pancakes, Costco muffins, leftover brownies. Lots of yellowjackets pestered us while we were cooking—there was nothing stopping them. Packed up camp and said goodbyes. While I hugged Marck goodbye, a yellowjacket happened to fly between us and its stinger got mushed into my chest. Youch! It hurt a fair amount, and it took a while to remove the stinger with tweezers from my pocketknife, but I put Bactine on it and Tony Q gave me some antibiotic ointment for it as well. Drove to the new Honma home in Sunnyvale. My sister's family had just moved in to their new home. Rob and Jim were in the garage working on electrical wiring and other things. Susie was inside watching the kids. Lani was at the old house cleaning up. I did a self-guided tour and realized within minutes that they had found the perfect house for their family. They had plenty of room, even room to grow, as well as plenty of amenities to make life a lot more pleasant. I was jealous! I helped set up the entertainment center while simultaneously helping my brother watch over the kids while their mom got other stuff done (like some shopping for needed housewares). Ken and Kalina stopped by for a brief visit. I met Trakker (sp?), Jim and Susie's pet dog. I washed dishes, put away boxes of food, helped Susie clean up Jonathan's vomit, set the kids up with videos about Disney and airplanes. My sister bought dinner back from Panda Express. A productive day at the Honma household. Home.
Mon Oct 9, 2006
Polly had left a super nice thank you card, some Haribo Frogs, and some metal tokens of appreciation for me in my mailbox from Friday. Met with Susie. Updated a listserv for Claire. Set up an account for our temporary employee EF who started today. Lunch with Joel at CyBelle's Front Room. I figured out by happenstance today how to make Retrospect 6.5 show values for the Elapsed Days column in the Backup Report. In the previous version that someone else had set up before I took this job, I could see Elapsed Day values, which indicate how many days since the specified backup took place, which is very helpful for seeing at a glance how current all your backups are. When I installed 6.5 anew on Windows 2003 server, none of the Elapsed Day values would appear even though a column for it existed and since I could find no information about this on the web, I figured it was broken and I didn't want to deal with Retrospect support. (The last time I did, they kept nagging me about upgrading to a version with more features when we didn't need it. I can't remember how many times their salesperson called me back, and I didn't even have time to call him and say please stop calling me and leaving messages—it was so annoying!) Anyhow, to show the Elapsed Day values, open Reports > Backup Report. Select the Report Options button (Ctrl+E). Change Report Layout from Standard Format to Performance Data Format. Select OK. You should now see values in the Elapsed Days column. If you still don't, talk to Dantz or EMC or whoever owns Retrospect now, not me. Today, about 3 months after I passed my 5-year anniversary of working at UCSF, I received an e-mail message from Mike T in UCSF Human Resources saying: "Congratulations on reaching your five year service milestone with University of California San Francisco. This service award recognizes the time you have given to support the UCSF mission and our reputation for excellence. You will be receiving a five year service pin within four to six weeks via UPS to your home address from our vendor Herndon Recognition." The first thing that came to my mind was, "What, no sabbatical?" After working at Adobe for 5 years, instead of a pin, I got 3 weeks of paid sabbatical and an extra fancy gold and green roman numeral five paperweight with a personalized inscription. I miss those days. And it came as no surprise to me that the university takes over 4 months to have an outside agency send a pin which was probably created in a manufacturing plant in China which probably cost Herndon Recognition 15 cents to buy and they're probably charging the university something like US$14.00 for the pin and shipping and handling. Still, it's a paycheck. And I get to look forward to my 10-year mark service award which I believe is a ballpoint pen that has the UCSF logo stamped on it. Home. Processed photos, reviewed them with Patrick then uploaded to Flickr. Removed viruses. Night run: 45 minutes. Weight training: tricep kickback.
Tue Oct 10, 2006
E-mail address request followup. Staff meeting. Met with Rob D about the staff satisfaction survey. Lunch with Joel at Pomelo. I had iced ginger lemongrass tea and manila. Joel had the salad split koh samui. Yogurt from the cafeteria. Doctor appointment. IE7 announcements. Logo work for Paula J. Barracuda followup with Joel and Heidi. Broken link response. Legal name change work. Reviewed Ogilvy website proposal for Susie. Archived data to DVD. Archived paper to PDF. Reviewed friends' photo slideshows from Pinnacles with Patrick. I was kidding about the ballpoint pen yesterday.
Wed Oct 11, 2006
Chatted with Kathy J about a broken link she had found (turns out on the PSPG site, not ours). Assisted an applicant having trouble printing Form E. Created a help page for applicants having trouble printing Form E, sent it to James for review. Barracuda followup with Kraig. Lunch with Joel at Dragonfly: we both had BBQ pork with egg roll over noodles. Made the new Form E printing help page live. Helped Ena with network files needed. Chatted with Susie about the Ogilvy project proposal. Worked with Esther, our pathway assistant temp who started on Monday on various things. Installed network scanning software for Joel and Cindy. Windows updates for some workstations. Dinner at home by myself: small sandwich. Weight training: crunch, barbell fly. Late night meal: small sandwich, baked cheetos.
Thu Oct 12, 2006
Breakfast: yogurt. Chatted with Eamon about how to change Windows passwords. Helped Lisa A with listservs. OU cleaning. Followup on new e-mail address request. Chatted briefly with Susie about the Ogilvy project. Helped an applicant resolve a problem printing Form E. Updated the Form E printing help page. Preferred e-mail address followup. IRC OU approval for Rodney/Lou. Lunch at Nan King Road Bistro with Julie B, John K, Sadie H, Alex K, Thom W. Computer support coordinator meeting. Installed network scanning and printing for Ena. Coded new news for Susie—more Chinese language pages, and I had difficulty with my pseudodatabase templates and mod_rewrite but eventually figured it out. Late afternoon meal: a leftover lunch box from Joel's career fair event today. Weight training: lateral raise, tricep kickback.
Fri Oct 13, 2006
Breakfast: banana, yogurt. Class of 2010 website and e-mail account setup. New news story for Susie. Met with Susie to discuss Ogilvy project. Pharm sci alumni profile update. Late lunch: double cheddar cheeseburger with fries. Chatted with student WO about file storage space. New news story for Susie. Backups followup. Windows updates. Home. Dinner at home with Patrick: fish in wine sauce over steamed rice. I banged my knee on the bus today, skinned it a little, so I won't be running much for a while.
Sat Oct 14, 2006
Brunch at Flipper's Gourmet Burger, 415-552-8880, 482 Hayes Street. (They also serve breakfast.) We thought we would get mask making supplies at Flax, but they didn't have much of that and suggested Pearl instead. We bought wrapping paper and glue from Flax. We stopped at Scuderia West (69 Duboce Avenue) and I bought a Dainese Intruder tex black 46 motorcycle jacket on sale for $99. The salespeople at Scuderia West are very friendly and helpful. Got masks and posterboard at Pearl. Saw the new shopping center. Patrick convinced me to stop in at H and M even though my previous experiences at the first downtown store were horrible. I found lots of clothes in the kids department that fit me well including polo shirts for $8 each. Home. Snack: a banana, fig newtons. Washed dishes. More fig newtons. Backfilled camping trip journal entries. Dinner at home with Patrick: pizza, salad, root beer. Watched Jet Li's Twin Warriors on DVD. The only spoken language on the DVD was dubbed English which was rather odd since we're used to watching martial arts films with spoken Chinese and reading English subtitles. A handful of moments were awkwardly compiled (though this could well have been the dubbing). We were able to follow the story well enough, and the action sequences are really intricate and clever.
Sun Oct 15, 2006
Stopped in at PDD's (housesitting)—all is well. Exchanged a shirt I bought yesterday at H and M. I must say the manufacturing quality of H and M clothing is much shoddier than The Gap. I have to do a lot more work when I get the H and M clothes home. Loose threads are hanging out all over, in several cases colored thread has been pulled through the fabric where it isn't supposed to be, and there are many places where erroneous thread loops exist—do I cut them off for better aesthetics or will the garment fall apart if I do? (I cut them and take my chances.) Still, the clothes fit me, which is more than I can say for Gap Kids (or Gap, for that matter, who, last I checked, no longer stocked extra small [XS] sizes in their physical stores so I stopped shopping there). Just to give you an idea of how crazy the sizings are, at H and M I wear a youth 11-12 for polo shirts, youth 12-13 for sweaters, youth 13-14 for dress shirts, and youth 13-14 for jackets. All the items I ended up with fit pretty much perfectly, and lines in the kids department aren't nearly as long as those for men and women. The item I had to return was a polo shirt. I hadn't noticed when I tried it on in the store, but when I got it home I found that one of the sleeves was noticeably bigger than the other. I removed the shirt and lined it up with the other sleeve and when laid flat one sleeve was 1 full inch wider than the other—oops! I got a jacket, a sweater, a dress shirt, and two polo shirts for just under $100. It's my favorite new store. Stopped at the eyeglasses shop to see if my lenses needed to be updated (no). Was going to the car wash, but it was starting to sprinkle so I didn't. Went to the Tower Records going out of business sale—didn't buy anything. Bought a birthday card. Lunch with Patrick at La Med on his lunch break. Home. Washed the car. Weight training: push up, modified barbell curl, front raise. Cut my hair. Showered. Dinner at home by myself: yogurt, salad and pizza from yesterday. Archived documents. Ordered photos. Set up (but did not begin work on) the America's Top Model project. (I'm inserting the faces of my friends over a photo of an ad for America's Top Model. Search my Flickr photos for America's Top Model if you want to participate.) Prepared the new laser printer box for garage storage. Worked on Corinna's website. Late meal: leftover pizza.
Mon Oct 16, 2006
Joel brought in scones, fresh fruit, and a quiche to kick off Ena's weeklong going away celebration. Chatted with Esther about Flickr and photography. Troubleshot listserv problems for student AW. Esther e-mail setup followup. Followup with student SY about how long accounts will remain open. Answered questions from student JY about e-mail. Asked Susie clarifying questions about the org chart. Made reservations for Ena's going away lunch. Computer maintenance for Chris. Lunch with Joel in Cole Valley. We got turkey and cranberry sandwiches and salt and pepper chips at a friendly wine and cheese and gourmet foods shop called Say Cheese (856 Cole St), then coffee drinks at Tully's and sat at a table on the sidewalk. Reported SD memory card problem to Kingston: "Camera error message 'Memory card error - Card locked!' appears after recording some photos and a short movie. Unable to play back photos, unable to record new photos. Taking the card to a different camera (PowerShot A610) gives the same problem. Resetting camera to factory defaults does not solve the problem. I don't know how to determine the camera firmware version." They told me to send it in for replacement. Reported to ENS a problem with one of our network ports which had accidentally been deactivated. They came to fix it on the same day which is unusual, and I was thankful. However, after the guy left (he didn't even talk to me) I discovered another port that had been deactivated accidentally, so I'll have to submit another request tomorrow (no more time today). Sent the new first-year class president PT info about how to connect to the class website and e-mail accounts. Updated our staff listing web page. E-mail setup for Esther, provided her training on e-mail and Firefox. Installed network scanning for Esther. Began KeePass updates (1.06). Various other updates. Dinner at home with Patrick: Yan-Kit's pig chow mein. Worked on Corinna's website.
Tue Oct 17, 2006
Teleconference with Susie, Helene, and Marilyn about the Ogilvy project. Student computing committee meeting. (Kevin lost all his notes because the wireless connection died near the end of the meeting.) Admissions assistant interview. Assisted student KP with computer problems. Submitted problem report of James's network port going dead. Teleconference with Tara and Brent from KFH (Ogilvy) and with Susie. Teleconference with Susie, Helene, and Marilyn again. Updated listservs in attempt to resolve delivery error message "5.6.1 554 5.6.1 Body type not supported by Remote Host." Sent old hardware for secure destruction to GreenDisk. Helped PSPG student K with who to contact to set up an e-mail account. Laptop setup help for Esther. Squoze in a quick lunch: sandwich from the cafeteria. Troubleshot a problem with Chris's computer when opening Word and Excel. Set up and played with the Confluence account that Kathleen C from the Library arranged for me.
Wed Oct 18, 2006
Pre-breakfast: yogurt. Breakfast to go from the cafeteria: cream of wheat with brown sugar and raisins. Met with student SH about computer problems. Admissions assistant interview. Responded to student AN's questions about installing Perl scripts on the class website. Listserv errors followup. Updated class list. Canceled an order with The Technology Store for an Apple mini DVI to VGA adapter because I found one on Amazon. I had been waiting weeks for them to get some in but they would tell me it would be in on Tuesday and then Tuesday would go by and they still wouldn't have them and then the same kind of thing happened a week later. Computer problems followup with student BY. Confluence followup with Will. Cindy drove me, Joel, Ena, and Lucia to Ena's going away lunch at The Cheesecake Factory in Union Square. Appetizers: hot spinach and cheese dip, thai lettuce wraps. Cindy had sweet corn tamale cakes, Ena had a club sandwich and fries, Lucia had farfalle with chicken and roasted garlic, I had fresh fish tacos, and Joel had chinese chicken salad. Desserts to go: a slice of tiramisu (not tiramisu cheesecake), a slice of pumpkin cheesecake, a slice of chocolate oreo cheesecake. Lucia said today at lunch that the best tiramisu she's ever had was the chocolate tiramisu at Palomino. Admissions assistant interview. Prepared and sent Kingston SD card for return to Kingston for repair or replacement due to error message "Memory card error - Card locked!" Helped Chris troubleshoot a problem with a CD-ROM he received. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers. Weight training: tricep kickback, wrist curl, reverse wrist curl. IE7 was released today. I've been testing very minimally with my own sites, mostly with an early beta.
Thu Oct 19, 2006
Morning run: 15 minutes. Breakfast: usual oatmeal, yogurt. Listserv problems followup. Created a computer account for the temp for Ena's position. Scheduled time to meet with 2 students about different issues. Jobs listserv update for Joel. Met with Lucia and Cindy. During our meeting we heard a baby squeal, and when we finished we emerged to find Kristina and Myles in the office for a visit with everyone and a lunch with Ena. Takeout lunch from the cafeteria: roast turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, dinner roll, butter, orange juice ($7.97). Called back student ND who had trouble with an account. More listserv followup. Chatted with Helene. More student computer or account problems followup. Installed the free version of SQLyog, couldn't get it working. Uninstalled free SQLyog. Installed SQLyog Enterprise Trial, couldn't get it working. Uninstalled SQLyog Enterprise Trial. Installed the free version of SQLyog, couldn't get it working. Uninstalled free SQLyog. Installed SQLyog Enterprise Trial, got it working with a different account. Very frustrating, and the help pages were no help and sometimes written in poor English. Home. Chatted with the neighbors about garbage collection, across-the-street drama, tile mosaics, and housemates. Washed out one of the compost collection bins because it had something leftover in it and was really stinky. Dinner at home by myself: leftover noodles. Baked two large loaves of quick bread: one pumpkin bread, one pumpkin bread with candied ginger sprinkled on top. Printed AJ a template sheet of Lodestar business cards. He wants to print his own since we can't do it for him because we are without a color printer for now. E-mail and bookmark maintenance. Added a variety of discoverable RSS feeds related to me to every page of frankfarm.org: my Flickr photos feed, my Amazon wish list feed, my delicious bookmarks feed, my journal feed. Also added Patrick's Amazon wish list feed. Late meal: leftover noodles.
Fri Oct 20, 2006
Morning run: 15 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Tried to stop in on Betty-ann's class to see the student response clickers she uses but it appeared everyone was taking exams so maybe the schedule was different today. Virus cleaning for a student laptop. Ogilvy meeting with Jeremiah H, Tara M, Helene, Marilyn, and Susie—a productive meeting. Helped Joel and Cindy set up for Ena's going away celebration in S-936. Cindy ordered (?) punch and brought cookies from Safeway. Everyone mentioned how she went crazy with the cookies—we had so many! Helped Esther set up a laptop in HSW303. Lunch with Patrick at Ten. Laptop setup for James at the fall adcomm meeting. Had trouble again with connecting to a Windows Server 2003 shared folder from OS X—got the error about deleting the alias or fixing the alias (neither of which help) from an alias which had worked in the past. I must have spent 15 or 20 minutes searching for a solution. And the most aggravating thing is that it was working in the past and nothing I know has changed except perhaps automatic security updates. I reinstalled the solution from last time (October 4, 2006), but I restarted and that did not fix it. The solution which finally worked was to type Command+K then type in CIFS://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of the server I was trying to reach. I don't know what CIFS is; I don't want to know what CIFS is. When that is entered, a dialog appeared listing all the shared folders on that server. I selected the one I needed and bam I was connected. Sometimes OS X doesn't just work the way I expect, and that really disappoints me. Reviewed dreamhost.com, the new recommended web hosting provider from the Ogilvy proposal, then suggested to the team that we probably don't need 500 GB of storage space and 5 TB of bandwidth for this project and that perhaps we can reduce our hosting costs by 87%. Archived documents. Minor Form E faq update. Said au revoir to Ena. She's going to work in a UCSF medical office at Mount Zion, I think it is the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center. Many, many students came by to say goodbye. She received a variety of flowers and small gifts, lots of well wishes and good lucks and we'll miss yous. I am sad that she's leaving, but after 8 years with the office she's doing what she feels she needs to do, and I wish her every success—she deserves it. Joel is about to take off on outreach—he'll be in and out of the office (mostly out) a lot the next couple of weeks. James is back today after 4 days of outreach. Today is Patrick's last day at Books, Inc. Although he liked some aspects of the job and he liked all but one of the people he worked with, he has decided to return to his writing and to his teaching which he liked a lot more. The Books, Inc. pay was not ideal and some of the advantages we thought he might have in the job (like making connections with other writers) turned out to not be what we thought. This evening he and Aaron (aka AJ) have a dress rehearsal for Halloween. They have both recently grown to love a television show called Little Britain. Patrick says it's not yet very popular here in the States. Patrick forced me to watch an episode, which I did not enjoy. It reminded me of Benny Hill, only cruder. At presumably great cost, Aaron rented women's costumes from the theatre (A.C.T., I believe) and he and Patrick plan to dress up for Halloween pretending (poorly) to be the two ladies from Little Britain. To ensure success, they have been watching and rewatching all the episodes, rehearsing lines from the skits they want to reenact, and so forth. We'll have photos and perhaps a movie in short order. Dinner at home by myself: leftovers from lunch. Weight training: push-up, crunch, lateral raise, bridge.
Sat Oct 21, 2006
Showered. Morning run: 5 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Worked on Corinna's website. Drove to San Jose by myself. Lunch with Melissa at Tanto: ginger pork lunch for me, ? for Melissa. Melissa told me her favorite thing about law school, which I found both surprising and amusing. Melissa gave me a large collection of figs and persimmons from her garden. Drove to the Honmas old home, where Rob and Eric were preparing to show the house to neighbors, but they never showed up. Matthew was here, too, pretending that an old baby carriage (?) plus some cardboard boxes was a Buzz Lightyear spaceship. I helped Rob remove hardware from the walls, packed up my car with some of their stuff, and drove to the new home. Lani drove up a few seconds later with Jeremy and Kiana. I unloaded the car. I brought with me my trusty Brother P-Touch PT-15 and we labeled drawers and cabinets in the kitchen. Matthew and Jeremy helped out with the labeling, and they got to exercise their spelling and typing skills, too! For dinner, Lani used a flyer coupon to buy a BBQ combination package with a free large pepperoni pizza. The BBQ included a whole chicken, 6 large ribs, a half order of baby back ribs, cow brisket, and hot sausages. Kiana made a fuss for part of the evening and we couldn't figure out what she wanted. We picked up different items on the table to see if she would give us a sign. Water? No. Steamed carrots? No. Beer? No. Pizza? No. Eventually, we discovered she just wanted to sit in Eric's lap and she was happy just like that.
Sun Oct 22, 2006
Worked on Corinna's website. Brunch at Ton Kiang with Patrick and Mom Ryan. Visited the Legion of Honor with Patrick and Mom Ryan. My receipt says we were given our tickets by Yolla (employee # 125). The current main exhibit is Claude Lorrain. Neither Patrick nor I liked it very much. My camera ran out of juice when we arrived, and my spares would not function properly, so I have very few photos from the museum. Before we left, I bought a few gifts at the museum store. The member discount for us is 10%. Dropped off Mom Ryan at home. Changed clothes, packed gear, stopped at Safeway for a picnic lunch, and went to Dolores Park with Patrick. I sat in the sun, he sat in the shade. It was hard finding a spot because it was so crowded and because I could not sit near smokers, dog turds, or flies. I read from Kurt Vonnegut's SlaughterHouse Five. He read from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. When we decided to leave and picked up our blankets, I realized that one of our blankets was right over what appeared to be a dog turd that we both had missed spotting, but we hadn't smelled anything so it must've been old and cold, not hot, fresh, and steamy. C'est la vie! Although it was sunny and clear, the weather was actually too cold for sunbathing due to frequent cold breezes, but people did it anyway. We got back to the car and welcomed the heat it had gathered while we were away. Home. I napped. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftover BBQ from yesterday, shells and cheese, corn on the cob.
Mon Oct 23, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Patrick helped me take photos of the figs and persimmons that Melissa had given me on Saturday. Met with Susie, discussed the Ogilvy project. Updated and distributed phone number cheat sheets. Answered questions from an applicant. Set up Lucia with e-mail to the OSACA account. Minor web updates: staff pages, Mary Anne title change. Handed back virus-free laptop for student JI. Helped School of Medicine student BV with e-mail questions (Office 2007 beta—unsupported). Answered questions from Chris and Susie about .url attachment blocking. Helped student BY with a laptop problem (OS X, humming noise, old anti-virus, how to back up data). Re-ghosted the server. It took less time than I was expecting—only about an hour. Lunch: Panda Express, which now has Mongolian Cow and Mongolian Chicken. I had a Panda Bowl with steamed rice, broccoli (instead of the mixed veggies because they were out), and Mongolian Cow. I liked the new dish—it was not spicy at all. Dinner at home with Patrick. Patrick invented a new dish: penne in red sauce with shrimp, bacon, corn off the cob, and broccoli. I call it penne a la kamikaze. He also made biscuits to go along with it. Processed photos. Weight training: modified barbell curl, modified preacher curl, crunch, leg lift. Today I notice that velcro.com is the most interesting I can recall. Only a few years ago I remember finding it very difficult to get accurate information about velcro products, so I decided to look at velcro.com again later when I had more time.
Tue Oct 24, 2006
Woke up very early and worked on Corinna's website. Went to the doctor. Work. Coded a pathways worksheet reminder for Chris. Linkchecking. Helped student BY with computer problems. Coded new news for Susie, sent it to her for review. Helped student HH with spam problems. Updated career fair page for Joel. Worked on the Confluence wiki for Will. It's quirky with respect to the what-you-see-is-sometimes-what-you-get editing, but serviceable. Helped student KP with computer problems. Helped student AN with Perl scripting. Lots of Mac work today. Installed Parallels on the MacBook. It's pretty slick, no obvious performance problems with 1 GB of memory. Installed Office 2004 on the Mac Mini. If I can run our delegate account in Entourage, I'd rather have that running on the energy-efficient Mac Mini rather than a full-sized tower Dell which is where it is now. It's also essentially silent whereas the Dell is really noisy by comparison. Lunch: sandwich and pasta salad from Palio. Met Patrick and Mom Ryan at Peet's. We had $12 Tuesday dinner at 2223 (all entrees are $12 each): spring rolls, limeade for Patrick, southern fried chicken salad (chiogga beets, maytag blue cheese, seasonal mixed greens) for Patrick, rainbow trout picatta (wild rice pilaf, Sausalito Springs watercress, toasted almonds) for Mom Ryan, tempura snapper for me. We shared tiramisu and molten chocolate cake for dessert.
Wed Oct 25, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Weight training: tricep kickback. Work. It's Scott's first day. He's our new admissions assistant. (James?) brought in welcome doughnuts, and I made a welcome sign. Set him up with a temporary account, worked out some bugs on the fly for him and James. Updated the administration org chart for Susie. Reconfigured some of our accounts so that I am delegate for them. Updated listservs for Claire. Reviewed the 2nd draft of the Ogilvy proposal for Susie. Prepared an announcement for Miles. Placed a request for an e-mail account for Scott. Assisted Joel and James with questions about availability of answers to questions about retaking courses. Helped an applicant with Form E—she had left the state field blank in the high school section because her high school was outside of the United States. (I told her to just put her country name in that field instead.) Reported a problem with UCSF Today to Julie. All pages were really slow, and one page would display only part of the page. Reminded Lucia that I'm still waiting on Steaven's UC ID to order his e-mail account. More SQLyog testing and troubleshooting. Updated health insurance information for Cindy and Adele. Lunch: takeaway from Subway. Late dinner by myself at Panda Express. Home. Worked on Corinna's website. Just after dinner while waiting for the bus I realized my left index finger had a 1.2-inch long cut, not very deep, but it hurt and was bleeding just a little. I had no recollection of my finger getting cut and could not recall what sharp objects I had come into contact with recently which might have been the cause.
Thu Oct 26, 2006
Breakfast: a banana. Photo handling for Susie. Helped Mikey's pal Miles G by posting a note for job help to the GLBT mailing list at UCSF. Helped Esther with Time and Place. Submitted a Remedy ticket regarding a new computer I set up which needed to be added to our OU. Sent Ian agenda items for Tuesday's meeting. SQLyog troubleshooting with Julie. Listserv troubleshooting with student LS. Confluence work. Parallels hung today. I had started using it more today and in between switching from full screen to regular screen Windows XP just hung and it brought OS X down with it. After restarting, I believe the VM was corrupted, so I just deleted it, losing hours of work. Gave Helene and Marilyn feedback on laptop purchases. Lunch: chicken enchiladas from Carmelina's. Dinner at PhilDannyDrew's: hoagie sandwiches with meatballs and mystery meat and assorted veggies. They recently returned from a long vacation in Vietnam and Thailand. They brought back small gifts for us: orange bracelets that say LONG LIVE THE KING to celebrate (the king of Thailand?) as well as a fine weaving. Drew also gave me their crashed laptop to fix (i.e., reinstall Windows XP). I installed Firefox 2.0 on my work computer yesterday. The interface is a little cleaner than before, but the difference is very subtle. I noticed Ctrl+L followed by entering keywords no longer does "I'm feeling lucky" and I don't know why and I don't know where to go looking for the answer. I also noticed my keyboard shortcuts no longer work on my bookmarks page. And each tab now has a close X—I preferred it the old way with the single close X at the far right because I like to click repeatedly in one spot to close several tabs sequentially—can't do that anymore. However, it correctly autodetected and autoupdated all the plug-ins I was using. I don't notice any immediate benefits, so thus far it's not the wondrous experience I had with 1.0.
Fri Oct 27, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. More laptops followup with Helene. Mark had set up Scott's e-mail, so I completed tasks that were pending that action. Trained Scott on Firefox and parts of e-mail. Lunch with Joel at Minh Tri followed by errands on 9th. Provided Dreamweaver training and new laptop setup to student LG. SQLyog troubleshooting. Backed up the MacBook. Tidied my office. Home. Dinner: leftovers while listening to Baraka. Worked on a gift for my sister's family. Wrapped another gift. Worked on updating my emergency phone numbers card. Chatted with Nate on the phone for 44 minutes. Tidied, prepared papers for shredding, tried to archive documents but the old Epson Stylus CX5200 scanner is not working. I learned today that UCSF is at a crossroads—who knew?!
Sat Oct 28, 2006
Another Firefox 2.0 issue: In Sage, marking all as read takes a lot longer than it did before. Refooted some dining chairs with felt pads. Processed photos. Lodestar mailing list maintenance. Breakfast at home with Patrick: hash brown and bacon omelette. Sam's birthday lunch with Patrick and Sam at Bambino's in Cole Valley. We had wanted to go to Zazie, but so did lots of other people and we didn't want to wait 30 minutes for a table. I cut my hair, then showered and napped. Halloween Masquerade Cocktail Party at Phil, Danny, and Drew's. Bought a bedside clock online today for Patrick.
Mon Oct 30, 2006
Figured out from a recent Slashdot article how to make the Firefox 2 tabs close button revert to 1.5 behavior: open about:config, then change browser.tabs.closeButtons from 0 to 3. All better now. Discovered two interesting things about Fx 2's keyboard shortcuts. When you use accesskey to provide keyboard shortcuts, previously in 1.5 you'd press Alt+(accesskey) and now in 2.0 it's Alt+Shift+(accesskey). They did this to avoid conflicts with menu and other keyboard shortcuts. However, it appears that now in Firefox 2.0 the numeric accesskey keyboard shortcuts no longer work at all—it's bug id 357101. So now I can navigate my bookmarks page again, but it requires a little more digital acrobatics than before. Installed Apple Boot Camp Beta—it works great! I realized after a while I don't think I can install Parallels and expect the office to use it without a fair amount of training. Even Boot Camp is difficult because the Apple keyboard doesn't match the Windows keyboard exactly—Parallels adds another layer of training, and I still haven't gotten over how it crashed and burned last time. I've set our MacBook to boot into Windows (Boot Camp) by default for now. Lunch: chicken marsala with brown rice and grilled vegetables. IE7 testing with media players. Dinner at home with Patrick: ginger and sage chicken boobs, salad, bread and butter. Worked on Corinna's website. Backups work.
Tue Oct 31, 2006
Backups work. Push up, modified barbell curl. Breakfast: usual oatmeal and yogurt. Student computing committee meeting: me, Ian, Kirk, and Jon. Helped Esther with e-mail. SCC meeting followup work. Lunch at Dragonfly by myself: vegetarian noodle soup, thai iced tea. Computer troubleshooting for Chris. Turned off lots of services he didn't need, removed Sophos daily scan because it was slowing him down, uninstalled unneeded apps, reconfigured BounceBack to back up only desired data rather than all 3 entire hard drives. MacBook introduction for Chris. Confluence work for Will. Kathleen had resolved the 10 MB file upload limit, and she also increased the number of uploads from (I think it was 5) to 10. Got a lot done with the Class of 2008 Confluence site. I noticed the Confluence web server was down for a few minutes today, but I didn't complain. They appear to be configuring the server on multiple ports. Not a problem. Dinner at home with Patrick: salad with leftover chicken, bread and butter. I wanted to go to Halloween in the Castro, but Patrick convinced me to stay home instead. We watched Simpsons Treehouses of Horror 1 and 2 with popcorn and homemade chocolate chip cookies. Remapped the keyboard shortcut for going to the Spotlight inputline in OS X from Up Arrow to Minus Sign On The Numeric Keypad. Since Spotlight lives in the upper right corner of the screen, it makes sense for me to remap an infrequently used key at the upper right of the keyboard for that purpose. (Keyboard at home is a Wave Keyboard 2 from about 5 years ago.) Weight training: lateral raise, modified barbell curl. I notice on Amazon that the Brother MFC-845CW is not expected to ship until November 16, 2006. Thanks, Amazon, for being so informative where others have failed. (PROVANTAGE.com says "backordered" which is incorrect, JR.com says "coming soon" with no date, and costcentral.com says "Availability as of 11:09 AM 10/31/06: After your order is placed, Allow approximately 2-3 weeks for delivery." which makes it sound like they have it in stock but they are just really slow at shipping.)