Thursday, October 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.