Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Prepped reimbursement filing. Troubleshot slow computer problems with the spare computer which I'm using for HTML e-mail testing. Archived receipts. Mozy Pro proposal and confirmation and review. Prepped new news for Susie. Lunch: manila at Pomelo. New hardware recommendations for Susie. A woman from Dell called me today, unsolicited, presumably from India, to ask me to pay $170 to extend the warranty of a laptop I purchased 2 years ago. At first I couldn't figure out why they were calling me. The laptop had not been serviced recently, so there was really no reason for them to call and mention that laptop specifically. The laptop was purchased with a 2-year warranty which was expiring, and they asked if I wanted to spend $170 to extend the warranty to 3 years (one additional year). I told them no, because at this price it's not worth it to me. The woman continued to try to sell me on other things—accidental damage coverage, security software, and so forth. She was really annoying because she did the sales thing that they are taught to do—to continue with a new sales pitch after the road to another one ends. She also had this unexplainably strange cadence to her speech and a way of slightly laughing between phrases that was disconcerting and mildly amusing, but it was not my place to make fun of her for that. I asked her to indicate in my account that I don't enjoy unsolicited phone calls and would you please not contact me in this manner in the future and eventually I closed the discussion. She ended by saying, "Thank you for using Dell!" and I had to wonder what the marketing people at Dell were thinking when they hired and/or trained these people to annoy existing Dell customers in this manner. Tina called me from the Apple Store on an iPhone today just to say hi. Small PHPM sample schedule change for Carol. More hardware recommendations for Susie. Archived data to DVD. Server defrag. Attempted to create a new ghost image of the server's c: drive using Ghost for REV but we no longer have the REV drive installed, so it hung up I think while looking for the REV device. I guess I'll have to buy a new copy of regular Ghost. Attempted to set up a test shared calendar in Exchange but didn't know the difference between internet calendar and published calendar and the other kinds of calendars in Exchange. Will need to do some research. Learned a new way to scan a document. Well, I had known about it before but just hadn't used it very much. The way is you open Acrobat first and then use File > Open and select your scanning device. This method is good only when you don't need to straighten or otherwise clean up the scanned image in Photoshop before turning it into a PDF. Acrobat Professional will also do OCR on the scan and turn it into searchable text within the PDF. I scanned at 400 ppi (dpi) because that's what I learned years ago when working with Acrobat Capture that you needed a resolution that high in order for the OCR to be accurate. I don't know if that has changed, but scanning at 400 seemed to do what I want. I was also surprised that the file size wasn't huge—only 57 kilobytes for a one-page receipt from The Technology Store. Mostly just words and some lines. Chatted briefly on the telephone with my mom. Patrick and I were planning to go to Rich's potluck and pool party, but he got the writing bug and really wanted to stay home to write. I didn't want to go alone because I'm not good at driving long distances, especially after working a full day at work. So we stayed home. Dinner at home with Patrick: linguine with chicken in marinara, peas, bread and Smart Balance. Caught up on blogs and photostreams. Flickred. Installed Perian for OS X at psychobauble/Chris's recommendation. It reminded me of this sentence which I heard in my technical support days at Adobe from a customer who was talking about Adobe Type Manager: "I do not know what it is, but I know that I must have it." Almost caught up with Flickr photo uploading. Today Heidi sent me a $10 Starbucks gift card inside of a beautiful and fragile greeting card from Papyrus to thank me for sending her feedback about OAAIS—a thoughtfully sweet gesture of appreciation. I found it funny that the back of the Starbucks gift card holder says, "To find your nearest Starbucks Coffee location, text your zip/postal code to MYSBUX (697289) or log on to www.starbucks.com. Standard text message rates apply." One of the smart-n-sassiest things I've read in months was posted by bosco in a comments thread on macobserver.com: "I just checked Software Update, and they have Web 2.0.1 available tonight. It claims to fix critical errors in judgement and patch up misunderstandings." More flickring.