Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Weight training: reverse wrist curl. Outlook mailbox problems for me, troubleshooting, resolved. My computer at work, a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM running Windows XP SP2 has gotten super slow within the past 2 months. Time for a new computer for me. PharmCAS web conference in the IRC with Joel, Cindy, and Scott; Rodney assisting. Lunch: salad from the cafeteria. Today I signed up for a prepaid purchase card good at most eating places on campus. In the cafeteria, there's also a discount of 10% when you use the card. I hadn't known about the card until a few days ago when a cashier in the cafeteria recommended it to me. Met with Cindy one-on-one. Archived documents. New computers recently arrived for 3 of our office staff. I began setup. The new Dell works very well, and setup and customization took only about 2 hours. Recently, Tina reported that she had problems with her MacBook after she had left and she visited the Apple Store and they told her the problem was File Vault (aka FileVault) and that she shouldn't use it. Again, the problem was that all her preferences got erased when she logged out and (when I observed the problem) a new user account would be created. For example, she started with one user account called tina and then she'd log out and then log back in and then the Users folder would have tina and tina 2. Log out again, then log back in, and the Users folder would have tina, tina 2, and tina 3, and so on. This experience with Apple's File Vault has wasted hours of our time, caused confusion and frustration, and reduced my confidence in Apple. Does Tina get some money back from Apple in exchange for accepting that this claimed feature of OS X must go unused? No. I am thinking now that user-transparent and robust data encryption will not ever become a reality. Microsoft and Apple and others have been at this for years—why is this so impossible? TrueCrypt seems to work fine for me in Windows, and encrypted disk images seem to work fine for me in OS X. At least for now. Dessert: coffee frozen yogurt. Cut my hair. Patrick made a video today for one of his songs. It's him dancing in our kitchen. Today I started reading the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon. I'm enjoying it so far.