Thursday, November 8, 2007
Class website followup with student DS. Self study followup with Barbara. Hooked Eric up with an account to the student directory. Surplus pickup prep. Lunch at Nan King Road Bistro with Julie, Ed, Eric, Ricki, John K, Rob. Computer support coordinator meeting. Computer maintenance: QuickTime 7.3. Just before leaving, Joel tells me that after synching his Blackberry to his computer calendar it somehow one-wayed instead of synching and now all his calendar items are gone. Just between you and me, this is the reason I don't own a PDA and you couldn't pay me to have or carry one. I know stuff like this happens, it always can happen, and I believe it to be frequently unfixable when it does. I am willing to forego any possibility of added "productivity" to ensure this never happens to me, and my solution is to never carry a PDA. Resolved a weird problem in which Parallels would not start by reinstalling Parallels. Resolved a weird problem in which my network connection would not be seen properly in Boot Camp by using the Anakin Skywalker solution. Dinner at home by myself. I followed instructions I had written for lemon chicken with diced mushrooms, green bell pepper, and fingerling potatoes, but it took forever (90 minutes) to cook and I don't know exactly why. Every time I cut into it at 30, 45, 60 minutes the juices still ran red. It was a timing disaster somehow, and when I finally ate it I had it with leftover harvest grains. For dessert a Breyers blueberry lemon ice cream bar. Recently my mom sent me a small box 7 inches square. I thought it was a bomb inside, but instead I found: one 4.23-ounce package of arare rice cracker mix, one 7.7-ounce container of peanut crunch, one chinese-labeled 150-gram container of ginseng peanut candy, one 5.3-ounce package of Bali's Best Espresso Candy (center-filled coffee candy made with real coffee), and one 15.4-ounce container of Brown and Haley's Almond Roca. Of these, the Almond Roca is my most treasured, as I remember eating them when I was a kid and they are delicious. However, this container is probably enough to last me the rest of my life, as I don't have much of a sweet tooth. One Almond Roca every couple of years or so is enough for me. My birthday is coming up and people are wondering what to give me. They don't believe me when I say I don't want or need gifts, and I understand that need to give anyhow. Nate says he and Drew have been planning to take me to dinner somewhere, and that sounds like a nice plan to me. Today I switched my modifier keys in OS X on the Mac Mini at home back to default because using Parallels at work has trained me to use the default OS X modifier keys for OS X, so I might as well be consistent, especially since I anticipate having Parallels and an Intel Mac at home within the next few months. Now that I've switched modifier keys back to default, it's really hard to navigate in TextWrangler; I expect it will take a few weeks to retrain myself. I can do it; it will just be frustrating for a while. Chatted briefly with Patrick online. He's leaving Handan today and off to Beijing until Wednesday when he returns to San Francisco. He's not sure if he'll have Internet access, but you can still leave him messages as his Skype number or send him e-mail. I'm looking forward to having him home particularly so that he can prepare the lemon chicken instead of me.