Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Followup of web server outage due to a PG and E power outage at Mission Bay. Resume filtering. Chatted with student HW about the student of the year voting. Answered a question about Apple Mail from student SL. Helped Lucia resolve problems with network and sound (loose cables). Lunch in Saunders Court by myself: Panda Express. My fortune: You have a yearning for perfection. Initialized P2 site listservs for Claire and Carol. HTML e-mail work: employment opportunity. Lessons learned: single-pixel GIF is now useful and required again for creating HTML e-mail that views nearly identically on Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 because width attributes are not always honored when viewing messages in Outlook 2007. Always avoid padding and use margins or single-pixel GIFs instead (or vice versa). Simple is better. Some styling must be placed inline to avoid problems when, for example, creating the message in Outlook 2003 as Rich Text and sent to a Gmail account. It seems impossible to get Outlook 2007 to view a message and also honor margin:0 and padding:0 on the body of the message. You can, however, set a background color on the body to mitigate the visual ugliness this creates. Cleared registry entries of Brother and PaperPort to set up a clean install for Alyssa's computer. Ooh ahh - Flickr finally improved its slideshow feature - very nice so far. I have long lamented its lack of full screen mode. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers from last night. We ate the leftover tiramisu with a cup each of hot chocolate with hazelnut kahlua—yum! Worked on a services order form for Danny. Mass e-mail to friends asking about possible job openings for Geordie.