Thursday, June 21, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. OAAIS feedback preparation for Heidi. Active Directory OU maintenance. Helped Carol with a problem I created with AD maintenance. Pre-lunch: salad with grilled chicken and ranch dressing. CSC steering committee meeting. 1-question survey prep for July. Learned how to use the feature called transpose in Excel—I've been wanting to know how to do that for years! Made live the new admissions calendar. Post-lunch: roast cow and cheddar sandwich from Subway, raspberry iced tea, sun chips. Dinner at home with Patrick: garden vegetable linguine, garlic bread. Chatted on the phone with Nate, Tina, and Danny. Helped Patrick figure out that the USB audio adapter (ASIN B000N35A0Y) we purchased recently from emtcompany.com (aka EMTC) does not fully work in Windows XP SP2. The playback works, but recording does not—a playback device appears but no corresponding recording device appears. It had cost only $10, so I'm not surprised that it didn't work, but it would have been very nice if it did. Here's the description, in case anyone is wondering: "USB 2.0 to Audio/Microphone Jack Adapter - Eliminate the need for a traditional sound card with this USB to Audio adapter. Real USB plug & play to upgrade any on-board soundcard to 5.1 Digital Surround Sound without any hardware installation. Connect a speaker or headphone directly to the adapter and enjoy 3D positional sound and virtual 5.1ch sound track. Use the USB port power directly. Features:
- Plug and Play
- USB 2.0
- Stereo 5.1-channel sound effects
- Virtual speaker shifter
- Speaker/headphone jack
- Microphone jack
- Transform analog sound signals to digital
- USB 2.0 to Audio/Microphone Jack Adapter
- Our Price: $12.95 On Sale! $9.95 (Free Shipping)"
Helped Nate find a place to send a fax near California and Montgomery. (Answer: the 24-hour FedEx at 100 California.) Performed an archive and install reinstallation of OS X on Tina's laptop. I noticed only today that the Apple Remote that comes with Tina's black MacBook is white instead of black! Call me racist, but I think that's aesthetically just plain wrong (just like the white power adapter and cable that I complained about earlier). If this were my laptop, I think I'd have to return it—no joke! How disappointing! Archived documents. Tina's MacBook has a really noisy optical drive. It reminds me of a Sonicare toothbrush. It's not always that noisy, though. It's that noisy while I'm doing the Archive and Install procedure. Very annoying, since this reinstall is taking a couple of hours now. The Archive and Install procedure did not fix the problem with the MacBook. So disappointing! Tina comes back tomorrow and leaves on Saturday. I don't know what I'm going to do!