Thursday, November 16, 2006
Helped Esther set up the laptop for a Mike Lu pathway presentation. A bunch of us had a going away lunch for Alex at Nan King Road Bistro. John, Beth, Julie, Thom, David, Jayson, Ricki, Tony, Mark. Alex is leaving us to join a web consultancy. Chatted with student ZK about problems accessing STOR. I've been able to reproduce the problems and I don't understand them myself. Waiting to hear from Pat for an answer. Faculty page edit for Ellie. Preview sessions web page followup with Joel. Finished up laptop setup for Scott. Made live graduation filing forms and web page changes for Cindy. Home. Leftover pad thai for dinner. Patrick got home lateish. I unjoined the Guess Where SF group on Flickr after submitting a second dupe—it's just too embarrassing and I didn't really have the time or worldliness for it anyhow. I notice today that tinyurl.com now offers a preview link instead—this is quite helpful to improve trust because when people distribute the non-preview tinyurl links they could, theoretically, lead to a spammer or hacker browser exploit. I use tinyurl.com a fair amount and will be using the preview link instead from now on. I think it should be the only option. Kevin on Tuesday said there's a way to block even Google's text-based ads on web pages. I don't have time now to look into this, but it sounds worthwhile if I start to use more Google services like Gmail. Kevin says the blocking is very effective and when he temporarily used IE for a while he couldn't use it because the ads he encountered were too painful to deal with and in Firefox everything adlike is (or can be) blocked. Wrote thank you cards.