Friday, February 16, 2007
Today is James's last day in the OSACA, and I was surprised to find a bottle of Storrs 2004 Santa Cruz Mountains petite sirah on my desk along with a very nice thank you card from James. Cindy had ordered coffee, Odwalla juices, pastries and bagels and cream cheese from catering and James held court for a few hours while people dropped by to say goodbye and wish him well. Troubleshot problem in which Joel is unable to paste images into new mail messages in Outlook 2003—he gets a white-X-on-red-background icon over a broken image placeholder. I turned back time with System Restore to the day he thinks the problem didn't happen, but it did not resolve the problem. (We suspected this month's Patch Tuesday broke something.) Undid the restore. Discovered through experimenting that changing Tools > Options > Mail Format > Compose messages in this format from HTML to Rich Text worked around the problem better than the previous workaround (open Word, paste into Word, copy from Word, paste into new mail message). This isn't perfect, but he's at least satisfied with this. James's going away lunch at LuLu (415-495-5775, 816 Folsom Street) with Scott, Alyssa, Lucia, James, Steaven, Cindy, Carol, and Joel. Joel and Steaven took MUNI, while Cindy drove the rest of us in her car. All the food was very delicious, and although I found a hair in my entree about two thirds of the way through I didn't say anything about it—I didn't want to ruin the festive mood. Helped James with migrating e-mail and backing up Firefox settings and bookmarks. Minor website updates for James and Cindy. Job description work for Susie. Backup solution research. So far I think I'm planning to go with mozypro for offsite. For onsite, I'm planning to buy as large a hard drive as I can get away with, and sticking with Retrospect until I get tired of it or it fails me. (Box Backup is the solution I would try in place of Retrospect.) I no longer trust any single backup solution because I believe no single solution is perfectly reliable under all conceivable conditions. Neither is having two solutions, but the likelihood of full recovery if one fails then becomes much greater. Helped student JP with a question about mailbox quotas. Dinner at home with Patrick: rotelle in alfredo sauce with turkey meatballs. Watched Heroes episode 15 with Patrick. Patrick went to bed—martial arts practice with Simmone tomorrow morning—he must wake at 4:30 AM. I updated hosts files on all computers using Mike's Adblocking hosts file. Archived documents. A few days ago I was chatting online with Don Don and he said he came up with a new word which he wanted to give to me. The word is requestion, noun, a request that is phrased in the form of a question. Only today did I look it up in Google. Google shows 48,300 results for requestion. And it's already in urbandictionary—pretty much exactly as Don described, but Don Don still gets credit in my book. Weight training: plank, bench dip.