Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. I forgot to mention that when Patrick and Mom Ryan and Barbara and I ate at Thai Chef a few days ago a really funny thing happened. I was eating a large piece of shrimp. Only the shrimp meat and the tail remained—the shell had been removed by the chef—so to eat it I grabbed the tail and pinched tightly and put everything except for the tail in my mouth. I pinched the tail while biting at the same time and—completely by accident—the force of my fingers pinching the tail and the greasiness of the sauce in the dish caused the shrimp tail to fly about 8 feet away toward the reception desk, and I watched it happen. I immediately started laughing, and Barbara had thought I was laughing at the funny part of her story, which I was because that was funny, too, but I was also laughing at the shrimp tail flying across the room. I was worried that it had hit someone, but amazingly I believe it flew to where nobody was standing or sitting and the restaurant was so dimly lit that no one seemed to notice it at all, so I kept laughing, which seemed to make Barbara happy. I have no idea where that shrimp tail ended up—I forgot to look when we got up to leave. Student computing committee meeting. Yesterday Darik's Boot and Nuke failed to successfully wipe a hard drive due to bad sectors, so today I thought I would try to lock out the bad sectors and re-DBAN it. I used SeaTools to successfully zero the drive, but DBAN still wouldn't wipe the entire drive successfully, so I removed this hard drive for secure disposal—better safe than sorry. Today Apple announced a redesigned iMac and a refreshed Mac Mini. If only the Mac Mini had come out 2 or 3 months earlier I would have bought at least 6 for the office. I couldn't wait any longer, and I couldn't justify buying old Core Duo processors in June 2007. Unfortunately for Apple, we don't plan to buy new computers again until 2011. However, the timing is just about right for me to get one of these new Mac Minis for home—I'll wait until Leopard is out to place my order. Two of our computers at home are due for replacement, and I might be able to get by replacing the 2 computers with just one Mac Mini. We'll see. No new iMac for me—I like portrait mode too much, I don't really need a webcam, and I'd rather keep my existing KVM rather than deal with Apple Remote Desktop or RealVNC—it's much simpler to deal with. Actually, wait. I just found some info on the web which says the (now older) 24-inch iMac was VESA-mountable with an adapter kit sold by Apple. Is this kit compatible with the brand-new 24-inch iMac? And, what happens to the webcam when you rotate to portrait mode? Closed a city tour for student NT. Hiring followup and organization. Helped David H by e-mail with PDF form building questions. Resolved a Software Update Failed error in Netscape for Lucia. Shopped for a new UPS. Lunch from the cafeteria: meat lasagna, corn off the cob, garlic bread, small Cherry Coke: $5.47. LGBT viz meeting. Prepped and handed off the entering students cdrom for duplication. Filed a surplus pickup request. Reminded the office that we're defrosting the fridge on Friday. Dinner at home with Patrick: frozen pizza. Logo work for Drew and Danny. Cleaned out software archive. New stop plates arrived, but I haven't opened them yet. Supposedly I'm the first customer of this new product—it's a STOP Plate from stoptheft.org but they've also engineered the plate so that you can attach and remove a lock and cable to/from it. The price is not much more than you'd pay for the lock and cable by itself, so I thought it was a great deal. Thought for the day: If someone were to create a blog that talked about the fastest way to grow marijuana plants from seedlings, you could subscribe to and read the Speed Weed From Seed feed. I just discovered that EIZO is one monitor company that makes hardware-based portrait-landscape-switching monitors. And Viewsonic might still be making those kinds of monitors—I'll have to investigate these.