Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Morning run: 10 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. G.E. lock return followup. Online backup research. Survey Monkey work and troubleshooting. Physical security work. Lunch with Joel: L'Avenida. Joel had a chicken salad. I had dos enchiladas. Submitted my order for 3 new Dell computers. (Apple's next chance: 2011-2012.) OAAIS feedback preparation for Heidi. Dinner at home with Patrick: brie and ricotta with roasted garlic borsetti. Patrick told me today that he ran into Melissa H at the opera I think it was last Saturday. Picked up psychobauble and Nate at the airport, fresh off their one-way Hawaiian Airlines flight. They're permanently moving to San Francisco after living in Honolulu for (roughly) 5 years, 8 months, and 20 days. (Thanks, timeanddate.com, for Calculate duration between two dates.) As I had mildly suspected, they had upgraded to first class. Their salt and pepper packets came in a cardboard sleeve. They drank champagne. They ate satay, scallops, and other fine foods. We collected their 4 pieces of luggage plus a backpack and checked them in to Nob Hill Chateau—their furnished, temporary home for the next month. Luckily we found a parking spot a stone's throw away. The chateau had changed since Patrick and I had stayed there in September, October, and November of 2000. There's no more computer—just an ethernet cable. The rooms look a tad less fancy than they did in 2000. Room cleaning service is weekly but I recall it being daily in 2000. The TV is a large flat screen Dell instead of a CRT. Chris and Nate received no gift basket whereas I recall there being a bottle of wine and wine glasses when we had first arrived. The laundry room in the basement no longer exists—now there are laundry lockers where you leave your clothes and pick it up after it has been cleaned and returned. (We found out later there really still is a laundry room—we just hadn't found it earlier.) Two lamps in Chris and Nate's room (51) were missing light bulbs. One phone has no dial tone. And the fax machine was not plugged in to the phone jack. The carpet is noticeably stained and ought to be replaced. We got a combo pizza at Vito's just down the block, and afterwards I showed them around their immediate neighborhood. We looked to see who was playing at Nob Hill Theatre (Ricky from Florida headlining), they found a nice spot for breakfast in the morning (Roxanne's), I showed them where Tempura Mouse and Double Rainbow were, we peeked in at Cafe Mozart. Chris and Nate seem to be a bit confused timewise and lightwise, but that's to be expected. Just found out from Ted's Twitter feed that Safari 3 is in beta for the Windows platform. Even in OS X Firefox is still my preferred browser, but I don't mind another browser in the Windows mix as long as I don't have to write crappy web code in order to support it. Weight training: reverse wrist curl.