Monday, January 22, 2007
Morning run: 6 minutes. Pre-breakfast at home: yogurt. My favorite breakfast at the cafeteria. Java 5 Update 10 installation for me and Joel. HTML e-mail work for Cindy. Updated listserv for student DS. Took a CDWG web survey. New news for students. Delivered laptop to Carol in a meeting. Resolved a printing problem for Shannon: form fields in Word 2003 appeared correctly on screen but did not appear upon printing. Problem happened when printing to PDF as well. Resolution: In Word, select File > Page Setup > Paper > Print Options and change certain items. (I didn't figure out exactly which checkboxes fix the problem—I kinda turned on a bunch, printed to PDF to test, turned off some, printed to PDF to test, and so forth until I got it right.) New homepage news for Susie. Enabled wireless for Chris. Met with student QT about "Windows Message: The system is not fully installed. Please run setup again. (OK)" Did a second-R repair with the Windows XP SP2 setup disc she had. UCSF logo distribution for Frank M. Computer virus removal for student JP using SAV32CLI. LGBTI visibility committee meeting with Kevin and others. I felt I wasn't very effective at this meeting, which is trying to increase visibility of LGBT and I people at UCSF. I came up with unfocused and inarticulate ideas, and I think I said transvestite when I meant transgender—oops, how embarrassing. Joel should be on this committee instead of me. Recordings policy work for the student computing committee. I didn't have much time for lunch today, and so I ate packaged sushi to go from the cafeteria which was pretty awful just like I expected. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers. Drove back to work to pick up large packages which I had shipped to work. Home. Installed Acrobat 8 Pro. Lately I've been reading a free PDF from MailChimp called Designing, Coding & Delivering HTML Email (2nd Edition) and it is easily the best how to I've ever read for creating HTML e-mail. Even when I thought I was doing everything right, after reading it I realized I was still doing many things wrong. Also lately I've been finding that if I print something out there's a much greater chance that I'll read it, either on the bus, or while in the living room chair or on the sofa, or on the can. So much for digital paper, handheld readers, mostly mythical instant-on electronic tablets and lots of other devices people predicted 1, 5, 10, 20, and 30 years ago we'd all be using today to read text. The only thing that doesn't seem right is that MailChimp's website claims that Microsoft Outlook cannot sent multipart MIME, but I believe that is incorrect—that Outlook 2003 can—and I have not yet confirmed it other than what I saw in my own testing. My testing showed that sending HTML e-mail from Outlook 2003 sends as multipart MIME and that it also automatically includes a text-only version of your HTML e-mail as the text-only portion of the multipart MIME message. I put some things for sale online. Unpacked the shipment I received today—a hamper and some after-Christmas sale items from Pottery Barn. The hamper is a little lopsided, but I think we can fix it with felt feet or something like that. It would be too troublesome to return it because it's so large. Patrick has had a nasty cough since last Thursday after drinking cheap wine with Aaron. Not sure if it's the wine that did it, but it sure is convenient to blame it on bad wine.