Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Reviewed student AR's computer—problems starting Windows and the cdrom drive was not functioning either. Today we did the office secret santa gift exchange. Cindy brought her (in?)famous coffee cake and Martinelli's. James made banana bread. We also had fresh fruit: banana, melon, satsuma oranges. Candy canes, chocolates. Before it ended, Lucia, James, Joel, and Scott got into a crazy stealing match over fleece blankets, a bamboo cutting board, and a Crate and Barrel decanter. Here's how it ended up: Carol received the photo frames and christmas stocking with chocolates and snowman ornament brought by Lucia, Alyssa received the Food for Thought book brought by Carol, Cindy received Cranium brought by Alyssa, James received a pair of black and white plaid fleece blankets brought by Joel, Scott received a silver and platinum Crate and Barrel wine decanter brought by James, Joel received a bambu bamboo cutting board brought by me, and Lucia received an iFlop stuffed animal (you put your iPod in the pocket and the music comes out of speakers) brought by Scott. Met with Susie. Finished burning copies of Office Pro Plus 2007. Lunch with Joel at NKRB. Helped James resolve a problem with the "delayed write failed" error message he got with a PharmAdMIT 2007 file. Fortunately we were able to recover from it with little trouble. I adjusted his network settings in attempt to prevent the same problem in the future. Attempted to remove an old battery from a Tripp-Lite SmartPro (SMART500USB) but it was stuck and could not be removed at all. I kept wondering why Tripp-Lite would design a UPS that would not permit an easy user-serviceable battery exchange. Even worse was that there were no instructions other than the obvious: open the battery compartment door, exchange the battery, close the battery compartment door. Not helpful at all. For example, it's not obvious how the battery compartment door opens. There's a single screw, but after I removed it I still couldn't open the door. I tried pressing and sliding, just sliding, nothing worked. The instructions didn't provide an illustration to show how the door opened. I tried using a flat head screwdriver and still it would not open. We also have APC BackUPS Office units and by comparison they are extremely easy to service—once you know how it takes less than a minute. Eventually I got the battery compartment door open after using significant effort with the flat head screwdriver—working it in the seams in a number of places. However, after I got the door open I found I could not remove the battery! It seemed to be stuck inside. The design leaves very little room to grasp the battery, and you have to be careful to not touch the battery leads. After about 20 minutes (!) of trying, I gave up. The new battery will be returned to our vendor, and the old UPS and old battery will go to surplus. I've had really good and really bad experiences with both APC and Tripp-Lite now. Notified the office about Office 2007 and Vista forthcoming. Registered for Macworld, got a free pass to the exhibit hall using priority code PC0619. Reposted P1 schedule for Lucia. Met Alyssa's husband Anthony. Installed Netscape 8.1.2 for Alyssa. Performed manual backups for PharmAdMIT. Home. Dinner at home with Patrick: homemade fried chicken. Recently I had very good customer service experiences from Ambassador Toys (186 West Portal Avenue), WineStyles (415-242-9463, 9 West Portal Avenue), and a stationery and greeting cards store in the middle of West Portal Avenue. A WineStyles franchise (winestyles.net) opened in West Portal 10 days ago, and I found James, one of the managing partners, to be very friendly, knowlegeable, and helpful. Patrick and I moved the Christmas tree to make a little more room for Tina. Backup research.