February 2008
Summary: Chris and Andy's Birthday Party
Dates on this page
Fri Feb 1, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast except that today I am trying out double my normal portion just to see if I can get more fiber into my diet. Previously, the usual oatmeal breakfast has been 1/3 dry cup of slow oats, 2/3 dry cup of water, 1 slightly heaping tablespoon of brown sugar, and some kind of fruit such as one sliced banana or 1.5 ounces of raisins. Doubling everything mostly works except I have to figure out the best timing in the microwave for the cooking and I need to use less sugar than 2 slightly heaping tablespoons. House chores and organizing. At home we have a light over the kitchen sink that I installed but it's tedious to reach up to turn it off and on for such a frequently used location, so I recently installed a device called Sensor Plug (cyberguys #1410864, $14) which turns the light on whenever it detects motion and turns it off automatically after a few minutes. To restrict the range of detection, I taped a piece of index card to one side. So far it's working out well. Organized batteries and labeled boxes in one of our cabinets and one of our closets. Recently a battery exploded when it was inside an Inova flashlight that I use. I thought I would need a special Dremel tip to clean out all the yucky, dried-up battery acid, but after closer examination I decided it would be overkill and just used a Q-tip and running hot water and a small flathead screwdriver to clean it out. Swept and pulled weeds in the back yard. Lunch: leftovers. I notice today that Flickr Uploadr is up to version 3.0.5. I am afraid of installing it because of the problems I had earlier with 3.0.2 and 3.0.3. Weight training: dumbbell bench press, lateral raise, dumbbell shrug, advanced plank. Cut my hair, vacuumed, showered. Dinner at home with Patrick: lemon-lime mahi mahi with red bell pepper, bread and Smart Balance Light, steamed broccoli. Watched the remainder of Xanadu (1980) from last night.
Sat Feb 2, 2008
Worked admissions interviews at school with Scott, Joel, Alyssa, and Cindy. It was a very busy day, but most everything went very smoothly. Dinner at home with Patrick: frozen pizza. I was exhausted and went to sleep very early. Patrick stayed up and watched something on Netflix. I woke up around 10:30 PM after he had come to bed and stayed up until around 3:00 AM.
Sun Feb 3, 2008
Breakfast at home with Patrick: veggie egg scramble, mini sausages, hash browns. Saw Cloverfield (2007) at Century 20 Daly City, which is now owned by Cinemark and plays film commercials before the movie. They weren't the worst film commercials ever, but I thought that nowadays people paid money to get rid of commercials rather than be forced to watch them, and this Daly City theatre used to be one of the few places you could go to watch a film without seeing film commercials before the trailers and I do not like this change. This is the first time I've been since the changeover and it makes me want to not come back. 1 medium popcorn cost $5.25, and 1 medium Coke cost $4.00. Matinee tickets were $17.50 for 2 via Fandango ($7.75 each + $1 Fandango fee each). I really liked Cloverfield because it told an old story from a new viewpoint. The shaky camera work did not bother me at all, but Patrick said it took him about 40 minutes to get used to it. For me, seeing the story from this particular perspective brings a kind of realism that you can't get with a steadycam, dolly, or crane. You wouldn't guess this was a Hollywood film if it weren't for 4 things: the excellent and seamlessly integrated special effects, the obviousness of a story being told, the occasionally cheesy dialogue, and the occasionally laughable implausibility of the plot. The film is part Blair Witch Project (1999), part Signs (2002), and part War of the Worlds (2005). In the evening, we had dinner with Chris and Nate: apples, grapes, crackers, and cheeses; Julia Child's beef stew. Dessert: Rubicon tiramisu, which Patrick and I picked up at Mollie Stone's. Afterwards we talked about the needs (or lack thereof) of humanists in virtual environments and about questions regarding the creative process and what would it mean for a machine to have the ability to create an original or derivative work that is indistinguishable from one created by a human.
Mon Feb 4, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Associate P65 files with InDesign on Alyssa's computer while logged in as her; it didn't quite do it correctly when I was logged in as admin. Helped Cindy with resetting rules that broke after the listserv server upgrade on Saturday. Sent a notice to everyone about the listserv server upgrade. Troubleshot a Sophos installation problem for student DU. Helped student SI connect her PDA to campus wireless. Student DN stopped by with a thank you note and a bottle of wine for me. Responded to a lot of e-mail I received over the weekend. Prepared a message for the dean and associate dean of administration about near-term web server issues. Dinner at home with Patrick: shrimp and vegetables noodle stir fry. Dessert: melon and strawberry sorbets. Downloaded photos from the camera. A weird thing happened today when I was using VMWare Fusion 1.1 (62573)—I accidentally locked Windows XP and the login screen came up but when I clicked on my icon to log back in it asked me for a password. I have no password set on my Windows account, but it kept asking for a password. I ended up shutting down Windows XP and restarting Fusion and then it worked as I expected again.
Tue Feb 5, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Training all day at Laurel Heights: Juggling Priorities and Projects by Linda Watkins. I didn't realize that I didn't need to take the class until 5 minutes in—the first page was a self-evaluation on which I scored very highly. However, I stuck it through, confirmed a lot of techniques that I'm already using, and still got some great ideas and tips to make me even more efficient and productive. I wrote Linda a long, rave review on the end-of-class evaluation, but I could have written even more. The class was well-designed, having different kinds of activities. Some were group and some were individual. Some required concentration and some were just fun. The multitude of different ways to engage the class material worked well for me—my worst way of learning is the lecture. (I've even fallen asleep in classes that go back and forth between lecture and hands-on.) She handled essentially every part of the teaching process—controlling side conversations gracefully, stopping for a quick stretch when the class is sleepy from lunch, asking everyone to synchronize watches with the clock on the wall so that the class starts from break on time, encouraging quiet people to talk more, gracefully asking frequent contributors to give others a chance to talk. On top of all this, her energy remained high throughout the entire day, and I kept thinking that if forced to I could do what she does but certainly not with as much energy. Lunch: takeout from Rigolo (415-876-7777, 3465 California Street) by myself: turkey sandwich, thin onion rings, Orangina: $11. The food here is a little on the pricey side, but it's worth it. I don't normally have mustard, but on a hunch I agreed to the default configuration and was pleasantly surprised to find gourmet mustard. The turkey meat was particularly juicy and delicious. The onion rings were sinfully tasty—I could not finish them all. This was my first time at Rigolo. If you order takeout, remember to grab your own fork and napkin—they didn't put these items in my bag and I didn't find out until too late. Back to Parnassus, did some catching up on e-mail. Muni going home was awful. I missed one bus by a minute, and it had left 3 minutes early. The next bus didn't come at all. It took me an hour to get home. Dinner at home with Patrick: roast cow, steamed asparagus, herb slab bread.
Wed Feb 6, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Telecommute day. Listserv management. Diversity project: added student MB. Downloaded and installed Office 2008 for Mac. Upgraded Fusion to 1.1.1 (72241). Helped various students with various computer issues. Minor web edits: list of accounts and other pages. After upgrading to Fusion 1.1.1 (72241), sound started working again in my Windows XP VM. The problem was inconsistent so I don't know for certain that this version of Fusion fixes the problem, but so far so good. Science vision web edits for Susie. Pathway web page edits for Carol. Lunch: leftovers. Dinner at home with Patrick, Chris, and Nate: marinated mushrooms, olives, pocket bread, hummus, tzatziki, tomato fritters (domatokeftedes), sweetened sage iced tea (faskomilo), baked chicken with yogurt and spinach. Dessert: The recipe that Patrick tried for semolina pudding (halvas) didn't turn out correctly, so we instead served assorted sorbets. It was Chris and Nate's first time at our place after I had set up the new iMac, and they marvelled at the size and quality of the screen and the overall elegance of the hardware (except for the Apple Remote which didn't match the silver-and-black color of the computer and also lacked the magnet which previous iMacs had to hold the remote on the side of the computer). We explored the built-in Apple mosaic screensaver until it crashed. Nate borrowed William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.
Thu Feb 7, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Installed Office 2008 for Mac and VMWare Fusion 1.1.1 (72241) at work. Coded new html e-mail for the dean, set up Sue to send it from her computer. Lunch: prawn burrito and tortilla chips from Carmelina's. Met with student MH—computer doesn't connect to certain websites in IE only. She left me with the computer and in a few hours I determined that the problem was caused by a combination of Norton Security Suite not working properly, a trojan, and too many add-ons in IE. Posted draft spring schedules for Lucia. Updated a grad licensing page for Cindy. Helped drop-in student EG with troubleshooting a RAM Cleared error message with a TI-83 calculator—answer was on the TI website, printed it and EG said would give it a try.
Fri Feb 8, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Lots of weird problems today when using my computer: Today only, OS X or VMWare Fusion wasn't keeping track of my Caps Lock key correctly. When the Caps Lock light was on, I would be typing lowercase. Or when the Caps Lock light was off, I would be typing uppercase. Another weird problem is that the Spaces feature in OS X doesn't respond to the keyboard shortcut I set to activate Spaces. I had it set to F13, but F13 doesn't do anything. I set it to other function keys but that also didn't work. The mouse also did not activate Spaces when I set mouse button 5 to activate it. Another weird problem: I discovered that I now have duplicate items all over my calendar after I began using Entourage 2008. The weird thing is that I don't see the dupes in Entourage 2008—I only see them in Outlook 2007. Did a number of small but important web edits and updates: graduation e-mail, set or remove a vacation notice, posters. Lunch: leftover cow stew from Chris and Nate, leftover tortilla chips from yesterday. Worked through lunch: more computer maintenance for student MH. Followed up on orders which never came in. Prepared and sent a message to forthcoming grads about when accounts like e-mail will close. Laptop maintenance for our 2 shared office laptops. "Error 1606: could not access network location" when attempting to install latest Quicktime + iTunes in Windows XP SP2. Resolved it by editing the registry using instructions on installshield.com (id=Q110724) except that I had to change one of the keys from REG_SZ to REG_EXPAND_SZ before it would work. Disk cleanup and defrag for our older shared office laptop. Reinstalled and then uninstalled Parallels from the newer shared office laptop. "The system is unable to log you in at this time. Contact your system administrator for more information." error message when attempting to log in to OS X. (Note to Apple: This message is not very helpful when I am the system administrator.) Restarted. Tried to log in. After accepting the password, it sat doing nothing for about 10 seconds and then gave me the head shake (no). The computer is joined to our Active Directory domain. I successfully logged in as local admin. Installed Office 2008 for Mac and repaired disk permissions on the newer shared office laptop. Many Quicktime + iTunes updates. Uninstalled Apple Software Update after this for every computer since Apple Software Update in Windows is stupid and prompts a user without administrator rights to install software that they don't have administrative rights to install. Why is it that you can set OS X to request a password when it wakes from screen saver but you cannot set it to request a password when it wakes from a sleeping display? For example, I want my computer to continue running so that Mozy will back up a large data set, but I want the display to sleep so that the screen doesn't suffer burn-in, but I also want OS X to request a password when it is awoken. Currently with OS X, you must force it to activate the screen saver in order for it to request a password upon wake—if you force the screen to sleep, it won't request a password upon wake. Another weird problem: today is the first day that I found that activating my screen saver in OS X causes the screen to flash white repeatedly. In System Preferences > Universal Access > Hearing, I unchecked "Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs" and now when I activate the screen saver I can hear a continuous beep-beep-beep-beep that wasn't there before. I am restarting OS X to see if that fixes it. I later figured out what the beep-beep-beep-beep was: I had forgotten that a while ago I had plugged the KVM into the Mac Pro in an attempt to control everything from the Mac keyboard. Once I had unplugged it the problem stopped. The beep-beep would happen only sometimes when the KVM switched to another computer. Apple's current Active Directory implementation is a headache generator. Today the shared MacBook laptop and my Mac Pro both stopped letting me log in using either my regular or admin domain accounts. After unjoining and rejoining the domain my domain admin account works but when I try logging in to my regular domain account it lets me enter my login and password and then appears to hang during login. No beach ball, and the cursor changes to an I-bar when I hover over an inputfield, but otherwise nothing. I let it sit for 20 minutes and still nothing. I fix permissions and check the volume in Disk Utility (no problems), restart, and still the problem occurs. I think something has screwed up my local account, possibly unrecoverably. I no longer trust Active Directory in OS X—it has been far more trouble than beneficial since I don't think we get a lot of benefits from being joined to the domain. If I ever get out of this, I'm unjoining from the domain and leaving it like that. In my experience, Active Directory joins FileVault in the list of OS X technologies that are far more trouble than Apple advertises—untrustworthy. Firefox 2.0.0.12 installs. KVM reconfiguration. Stayed at work late to reinstall Mozy and restart the server gracefully after Joel and Scott returned from interviews and everyone had left. Also helped Joel learn some new tricks in OS X. Dinner at home with Patrick: linguine with prawns in red sauce, herb slab bread, Smart Balance Light. Watched disc 2 of Tales of the City (episodes 3 and 4) at home with Patrick on Netflix DVD.
Sat Feb 9, 2008
Swept the backyard, dropped last night's Netflix in the mail. Breakfast at home with Patrick: 10-grain pancakes, Smart Balance Light, maple syrup, Greenwell Farms kona coffee from Chris and Nate. I discovered a great new trick in OS X today: In the Finder, select a bunch of photos, then to view them as a slideshow press Command+Option+Y. This slideshow runs in the Finder's Quick Look feature rather than in a separate application. If you have the Quick Look button in your Finder toolbar you can also hold the Option key while you click the Quick Look button. The icon on the Quick Look button momentarily changes to Play when the Option key is held—this is what drew me into learning about this feature. Speed is the huge benefit of this slideshow feature. Quick Look is part of the Finder, and the Finder is always running, so it's instantly available all the time. If you launched Preview or iPhoto to use Preview's slideshow feature, then you have to wait a second or more for Preview or iPhoto to load before your slideshow begins. Installed Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Perian 1.1 on the iMac. Optimized the iMac—2 GB of RAM is almost not enough to do the things we need. Decided that I'm not going to archive some documents I might have archived before—I just don't have the time. Lunch at Burgermeister Cole Valley with Patrick. On the way we saw Joel waiting for the N-Judah and said hello. Cole Valley Hardware. The overall progress indicator in Flickr Uploadr for OS X is not well designed. When I'm uploading just one photo, right after I begin the upload, the overall progress indicator says it is 50% complete. It sits at 50% complete while the per-image progress indicator underneath it progresses steadily to 100%, when, I believe, it fills to 100% instantly and then the dialog disappears. That's a poor design, if you ask me. There's a new version of Uploadr (3.0.5, I think), but it has been causing me problems (Houston) so I haven't been using it. Edited photos, uploaded photos to Flickr. Dinner at home with Patrick: lemon chicken, basmati rice, steamed asparagus. Finished reading Vernor Vinge's The Peace War, which sneeper let me borrow—thanks, sneep! Found Vinge's "The Ungoverned" online, bookmarked it. Stretches.
Sun Feb 10, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Began reading from Sakyong Mipham's Ruling Your World. Napped. Recently I received a package from my mom which contained a box of pineapple short cakes from Choi Heong Yueu Bakery and malt milk chews from J.J. Bakery. From yesterday, one thing that Apple's Quick Look feature cannot do that Windows Picture and Fax Viewer in Windows XP can is delete the current image while holding your place in the multi-image preview sequence, which is a very convenient action when reviewing photos you have just taken. You can press Command+Delete, but then Quick Look moves the focus to the parent folder instead of on the next image in the sequence of images. Cut my hair, showered. Lunch at home with Patrick: carrot ginger soup, warm dinner rolls, Smart Balance Light. Took a walk with Patrick and ran errands. Snack: hot chai tea, spring rolls and peanut sauce. Downloaded and uploaded more photos. Stretches. Weight training: dumbbell bench press, front raise, woodchopper, advanced plank, crunch, arch.
Mon Feb 11, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. After 40 minutes of troubleshooting, I was unable to resolve my Apple Active Directory problem, so I unjoined from the domain. Fortunately when I set up my new local-only account OS X asked me if I wanted to use the same home folder and I said yes and everything now is essentially back to normal except my computer is no longer part of the domain, which is okay. Did some research on Office 2008 for Mac. Confirmed that Tasks has no interaction with the server, so it would be a lot more trouble than it's worth for me to exclusively use Entourage 2008 instead of Outlook 2007. This (continued) lack of parity makes me want to stop using Microsoft software, but as our university campus is committed to using Exchange with no sign of seeking alternate solutions, I am powerless. The kind of thing that needs to happen is a directive from UCOP that says something like all software procured in 2011 and later must have feature parity for users on at least 2 leading operating systems and on at least 2 leading web browsers. This action would force Microsoft (and any other software vendor) to promote a competitive environment for operating systems and web browsers, and it would ensure that the university were not tied to a particular vendor. Helped student CHK with a problematic CDRW/DVD drive. Hardware problem, still under warranty—she can likely call Dell and have a replacement unit sent overnight. Helped student LC with mailbox too full problems. Lunch at Ten with Eric and Joel. Received word from OAAIS that a mailbox was enabled, notified student TD that the account was active. Web edits: Board of Advisors, the final of Big Bird - still some questions, which I sent Lorie in e-mail. Mark B called me to let me know that RESOURCE accounts should not require a new password but "password never expires" needs to be set in AD, so I set that for all my resource accounts. Helped a staff research assistant (not PharmD) understand new strong password requirements. Web hosting followup work. Helped Joel with spam filtering issues (prereqs). Web edits: handling spam. Installed OS 10.5.2 at work. Dinner at home with Patrick: Indian food delivery. Installed Mozy 0.9.2 (RC2) for Mac. Mozy has not been operating properly since I think Sunday—it said it had 3 days to go to finish backing up the current data set and then the next minute it said it was done. Subsequent manual starts of the backup finish successfully saying that nothing new was uploaded. Sent a problem report to Mozy. Sent a problem report to monitorus—a domain I removed is still appearing in my reports. Paid bills. I received a jury summons today. Installed Apple Software Updates including OS 10.5.2. Did some more offline thinking and writing about the problems with URLs in electronic communications. I don't like IMAP because it's too slow or doesn't behave properly. If I'm composing a message offline and then save it, Outlook 2007 gives me an error message instead of connecting to the server and saving the message. I don't understand why IMAP works that way. Or maybe it's Outlook—I don't know and can't tell. Stretches.
Tue Feb 12, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Chatted with student JS who had questions about some laptop issues. Listserv maintenance. WebCT followup with Tim F. Lately when I have been shutting down Win XP inside of Fusion a dialog appears asking if I want to force outlook.exe to close even if Outlook has already appeared to close successfully. I force quit and then Win XP continues successfully to shut down. When I next start Win XP and Outlook, there is no apparent problem with Outlook. I ran Outlook /cleanprofile in an attempt to resolve this, but I don't think that that switch is appropriate for this behavior. I'm writing new web pages for our site that discuss how spam is handled. UCSF uses Barracuda spam filtering and it took a long time for me to fully understand the details of what happens largely because the user interface for the spam settings is poorly designed and poorly communicated. Barracuda works really well, I think—you just have to have the right settings. I asked Kraig what our default settings are and he said tag = 3, quarantine = 5, block = 7, and these sounded perfect to me. Helping people understand how to adjust the settings, however, is going to be a bit more complicated. Helped a student with a password lockout. Mission Bay access question from a student. Chatted with Melissa H on the phone. Helped another student with password lockout. Lunch: leftovers from last night. The office celebrated Lucia's birthday with cake and sparkling juice. Chatted with Jonny about an ICRD error message. Tested a Dell 1100 printer that wasn't working properly. Laptop maintenance for Chris: Microsoft updates, Quicktime and iTunes, Acrobat 8.1.2, repaired Mozy installation. psychobauble sent me a message today saying he got the job he interviewed for at Golden Gate University—hooray! BSOD on Chris's laptop—details later. Patrick picked me up in the car. We drove the Castro where we stumbled upon the filming of Milk but still, amazingly, found a parking space. Went to DeLano's IGA #2 where we stumbled upon Jen. We both bought flowers. We split up afterwards. Jen left for the restaurant, Patrick and I went to Cliff's where we got the only remaining mylar balloon which said Congrats! in stock. Got it filled with helium. Walked up to Thai Express where we ran in to Chris and Nate on the way and met Drew and Danny and Jen inside. Dinner was delicious. It was perhaps my first time eating there. Home. Stretches. Weight training: dumbbell bench press, front raise, wrist curl, advanced plank. Chatted briefly with Joel's friend Paul A.
Wed Feb 13, 2008
Weight training: hammer curl. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Submitted the following printer problem report to Dell: "Dell 1100 printer no longer functions. When it is plugged into power and the power switch is turned on, the printer almost immediately starts making an unusually loud noise as it starts up. The noise continues until the power switch is turned off or the power cable is unplugged from power. The printer has not suffered any damage, nor has it been treated in a manner not covered by the warranty. As this printer is still under warranty, may it be repaired or replaced at no charge? Or, if there are further troubleshooting steps I can try, please let me know. Thank you!" The BSOD I encountered yesterday was TERMINAL SERVER DRIVER MADE INCORRECT MEMORY REFERENCE, STOP: 0x000000CF in ati2dvag.dll. The problem occurred after shutting down the computer via Remote Desktop using MMC 3.0. Met 1-on-1 with Cindy. Met with student ML: computer problems. Met with student JL: computer problems. Student computer troubleshooting. Lunch: fruit salad, cow tri-tip sandwich from the cafeteria. One student computer had only 240 MB of RAM (!), gave advice about purchasing more memory. Chatted with a Dell representative who was obviously new to her job and obviously in a very loud and busy call center in India. After some troubleshooting we did on the phone, they're replacing the printer. Finished coding Board of Advisors which took a long time because of a large number of abbreviations. Snack with Joel at the cafeteria: they were out of fat-free peach frozen yogurt so we got soft serve ice cream instead. More password lockouts today. Patrick is working with Sam on a project tonight, so I'm on my own for dinner. Waited for an N-Judah train to go to the Castro for dinner and shopping by myself, but the train never came. When I arrived at the stop the Nextbus sign said 12 minutes and several minutes later it still said 12 minutes and then maybe 5 minutes later it said 11 minutes and then maybe 5 minutes later it said 9 minutes and then maybe 5 minutes later it said 7 minutes and then I just gave up and went upstairs to Panda Express and had dinner there (My fortune: Soon, someone will make you very proud.) and then caught a bus home. Started investigating OpenID. More Apple Software Updates. Accidentally discovered in Spaces in OS X Leopard that when you activate Spaces to see all your spaces at once you can pick up an entire space and swap it with another space. I probably won't use that feature, but it's really cool that they put that in. Stretches. Advanced plank. Mozy is working again—problem on their end which they resolved.
Thu Feb 14, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Valentine's day snacks in the office commons: red velvet cupcakes, cookies, Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Password lockout followups. Listserv management. itssrv1 sunset followup with Barbara S. Lunch at NKRB with Ed, Sadie, Julie, Erik, Kristen, Eric. CSC meeting. Listserv management. Home. Stretches. Weight training: advanced plank, crunch. Dinner at home with Patrick: boneless herbed chicken boobs, risotto with vegetables, naan. Watched disc 3 of Tales of the City (episodes 5 and 6). The blog called Stuff White People Like has some seriously funny stuff. (Thanks, BK!) Stretches. Weight training: one-arm dumbbell row, dumbbell shrug, advanced bench dip. Late meal: Chunky soup, strawberry kiwi juice, nonfat milk.
Fri Feb 15, 2008
"Sound will not be available. (OK)" error message when starting VMWare Fusion at home. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped student LN install and configure Outlook 2003. Security updates for Student Affairs Coordinator computer. Continued troubleshooting student JL's computer. This laptop is an HP Pavilion ze5570us and it is unusually loud just from the fans which seem to run even when the computer is idle. Blackberry support for students followup. Tested ICRD delete - it works - you must put an asterisk as the first character of the code and then F5 to refresh. Reconfigured KVM. Manually resolved duplicate calendar items problem from a few days ago. Created a draft survey to determine if we should offer Blackberry services to students. Lunch: leftover Indian food. Met 1-on-1 with Eric. Sygate for Vista followup. Kevin's survey announcement. Coded updates for graduation ceremony, current student news, visitors. Dinner at home with Patrick: sausage with pasta in red sauce, bread and Smart Balance Light. Watched some but not all of the commentary from disc 3 of Tales of the City on Netflix DVD.
Sat Feb 16, 2008
Regarding "Sound will not be available. (OK)" error message when starting VMWare Fusion at home, sound works today—I didn't do anything to fix it except restart Fusion. Showered, usual oatmeal breakfast. House chores: dishes, laundry, dusting. Patrick bought groceries. Today Patrick is making red beans and rice with french bread and Phil and Drew are coming over. Patrick and Phil have studying to do (separate things) and Drew and I need to work on rechargespa.com. Why are blog services like WordPress are so bad at website navigation? For example, I start at the home page for Stuff White People Like, and it's funny so I want to read the whole thing starting from the beginning. 68 posts over 2 months—not insurmountable. Mouse click #1: I select January 2008 which after several Page Downs shows me "Archive for January 2008" but only lead-ins from posts 47 to 37 in descending order. Mouse click #2: I select Older Links at the bottom of the page, and I get "Archive for January 2008" with lead-ins from posts 36 to 27. Keyboard: Press End. Mouse click #3: I select Older Links at the bottom of the page, and I get "Archive for January 2008" with lead-ins from posts 26 to 17. Keyboard: Press End. Mouse click #4: I select Older Links at the bottom of the page, and I get "Archive for January 2008" with lead-ins from posts 16 to 7. Keyboard: Press End. Mouse click #5: I select Older Links at the bottom of the page, and I get "Archive for January 2008" with lead-ins from posts 6 to 1. Keyboard: Press End. Mouse click #6: These are only lead-ins, so to start reading post #1, I select Read Full Post under #1. I read post #1 and laugh. Now I want to read post #2, but there's no link that will obviously take me from post #1 to post #2. Keyboard: Press Backspace. Mouse click #7: Select Read Full Post under #2. Laugh. Keyboard: Press Backspace. Mouse click #8: Select Read Full Post under #3. And so on. Column view in Finder 10.5.3 has annoying redraw problems in certain situations involving the manual expansion of columns. Finally I work my way backwards reading Stuff White People Like and eventually get back to the home page, which to my relief shows the last (10?) entire posts instead of just lead-ins but I still need to press End, then scroll up until I find the beginning of the last post on the page, then when I'm done reading that post I again have to scroll up to find the next-to-last post on the page, then scroll down again while reading it, then scroll up again to find the third-to-last post, and so forth. Phil and Drew came over for lunch. Patrick made red beans and rice which we ate with French bread. Afterwards Drew and I worked on Danny's website (small edits and added Phil's photo to the medispa page). Phil read one page from his scuba book and then fell asleep on the couch. Patrick worked on homework. Drew and Phil took off. Patrick took a nap. I worked on my shirts project, which involves measuring 13 dimensions of all the long-sleeved shirts I own, taking notes on how the shirt fits, then documenting it all. The goal is to determine for each of the 13 measurements what range exists in order for a particular shirt to fit me in that dimension. It's slow going, and after measuring 6 shirts I realize it will be much easier to handle the data in a database. It does not exist but I want it: a device which will make any keyboard a wireless keyboard. I think there's a good reason why this device doesn't exist, but I don't know what that reason is. Spent some time trying to build a database in OpenOffice but kept running into a problem in which the database would open as read-only and I couldn't resolve it. Dinner with Patrick at Daphne's Greek Cafe: chicken kebob plate with avgolemeno soup for me, combo plate chicken with avgolemeno soup for Patrick. Errands at Walgreen's. Home. Stretches.
Sun Feb 17, 2008
Stretches. Weight training: dumbbell bench fly, reverse incline dumbbell press, front raise. Chunky soup, nonfat milk. House chores. Wrangled with migrating data from Outlook 2007 to Entourage 2008 and iCal 3.0.2 because I'm trying to reduce my reliance on Windows—I get only 2 GB of RAM on my iMac at home, and it would be very nice to not have to run Fusion. Before today I had Entourage 2008 connected to UCSF e-mail (Exchange server). Today I set up IMAP connections to my home e-mail accounts. Since nearly all my mail is on the server, there was no mail to migrate—easy. For mail archives that I wanted to keep, I created PDF archives. I discovered the feature in Entourage which syncs data between it and iCal and Address Book and Yahoo! and turned it on. I couldn't figure out how to export contacts from Outlook and import them into either Entourage or iCal—the text import did not work for me, so I just turned on Yahoo! sync and let it have the data which I had sitting in Yahoo! from a long time ago. Entourage 2008 crashes enough to make me think it's still beta software. Lunch: leftovers for Patrick, lemon pepper pappardelle with shrimp and mushrooms. House chores, cut my hair, showered. Nap. Bought a gift at Phoenix Books. Dinner at Le Zinc (415-647-9400, 4063-24th Street, San Francisco) with Patrick. Entourage 2008 crashes consistently when I try to create one particular recurring appointment. Stretches.
Mon Feb 18, 2008
Holiday. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Stretches. Discovered Gorker's solution to a problem in OS X in which folders copied from an NTFS filesystem appeared in OS X with padlocks on the folders and certain file system actions such as deletion, addition, or renaming were prevented (I think either "Operation not permitted" or "You do not have sufficient access privileges to rename the item" was the error message). Also, I saw "You can only read" right next to "Name = username (Me) | Privilege = Read & Write" which I found very confusing. Solution: Get properties on the padlocked folder, then uncheck the Locked checkbox. Close the properties window. Try your file system action again. Installed KeePassX 0.2.2 for Mac—my first time using KeePass in OS X. It appears to work—just being able to see my passwords database without having to start Fusion is like a dream come true. I think at the time I decided upon KeePass for password management there was no Mac version, but I had faith in open-source and today I feel as though it has paid off, at least in this respect. Installed RsyncX 2.1 and then realized that what I really need is Unison. Unison's website said I should install Fink, so I tried to install Fink but there's no binary for Leopard yet, so I built Fink 0.28.0 from source. I don't remember installing XCode Tools during my OS X setup, but I must have—I didn't need to install it separately. Installed Fink Commander 0.5.4. Installed Unison File Synchronizer 2.13.16-1004 (unison-nox) from source. Figured out how to make Automater scale images down to 800 pixels. It wasn't obvious to me that if I wanted to access an automator script by right-clicking a file in Finder that I needed to Save As Plug-in... within Automator. Couldn't figure out how to start the Unison GUI in Mac OS X. When I run unison -ui graphic, it simply returns the usage/syntax. Took photos of things I need to sell. For about 15 minutes today it was really sunny and hot—like 75 degrees—and then the sky became overcast and it was freezing again. Dinner at home with Patrick: pork loin, steamed broccoli, leftover risotto. Chatted with Nate on the phone. Stretches. Weight training: barbell squat, leg lift, reverse leg lift.
Tue Feb 19, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Rainy day. Continued laptop troubleshooting for student ML: RAM installation, tune-up. Problem: When attempting to uninstall Symantec Client Security, the following error message appears: "Please enter the uninstall password." Found the following solution on mydigitallife.info: Run regedit.exe. In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ INTEL\ LANDesk\ VirusProtect6\ CurrentVersion\ Administrator Only\ Security\ change the value for useVPuninstallpassword from 1 to 0. Helped student NT set up an IMAP connection to UCSF Exchange. NT also gave me an orientation t-shirt. Backups maintenance: MozyPro is giving MozyServerError1 and the Retrospect backup drive filled up so I have to reset it. ML's laptop had a worm on it called W32/Rbot-JV. The Sophos website did not describe some of the behavior I saw: the computer would restart automatically after an hour or two of use—perhaps this was a different, overlapping problem. I observed this restarting behavior also in Safe Mode (!). When editing the body of an e-mail message, Entourage 2008 behaves like Windows when you press the Home and End keys but it does not behave like most OS X apps do when you press Command+LeftArrow and Command+RightArrow. Ctrl+Home does nothing and Ctrl+End jumps to the end of the current line. Ctrl+LeftArrow behaves exactly like LeftArrow, Ctrl+RightArrow behaves exactly like RightArrow. Option+LeftArrow and Option+RightArrow both behave like OS X. To me, this means that Entourage 2008 completely respects neither OS X nor Windows standard keyboard shortcuts for navigating text, which makes it quite painful to use. Installed KeePassX 0.2.2. Continued laptop troubleshooting for student ML. Helped Lucia with an InDesign document. Computer maintenance: Tweaked Retrospect settings for Alyssa. Quicktime 7.4.1 and uninstall Apple Software Update for Cindy. Firefox 2.0.0.12 for Cindy. Acrobat 8.1.2 for Cindy. Windows and Mac updates for my computer. Terminal Services / Remote Desktop has been consistently crashing computers with bsods after I log out remotely. These computers appear to restart successfully with no problems. I did not get a chance to record the error message—I was on my way out. The problem is not isolated—nearly all the computers I worked on remotely crashed in this manner. Another problem I've experienced lately is that Outlook in Win XP in Fusion seems to close properly but when I shut down windows a dialog appears asking if I want to force outlook.exe to quit. Home. Weight training: barbell bench press, stretches. Dinner at home with Patrick: lemon chicken, steamed potatoes, corn off the cob. At work for the past 6 consecutive workdays I've been starting my morning walking up every flight of 9 floors taking the steps 2 at a time. One of those days I happened to catch the N-Judah and walked up an additional 8 flights of stairs. I had been doing this before, but never so consistently. It leaves me winded for a few minutes when I'm done, but I enjoy starting my day knowing I've already accomplished something healthy. Sold the sticky firewire cables I didn't like for almost as much as I had paid for them. No buying from pccables.com for at least the next year. Late dessert: small scoop of sorbet—part mango and part lowfat coconut. My left hand has been hurting a bit near the base of the thumb I think because of using Windows XP inside of Fusion with the Apple keyboard which has the Alt key a further reach than on a PC keyboard. I'm aware of it, at least, and have been doing hand stretches while waiting on the computer to respond to commands. Weight training: advanced plank, stretches.
Wed Feb 20, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Diversity project: redesign analysis. Updated visitors web page. Added Google Analytics code to older static (non-PHP) HTML e-mail web pages (so the stats for these pages will not be accurate since I only thought to do this now). SCC work: system requirements for UCSF resources. Chatted with Susie on the phone. Lunch: taco salad, small taco, tortilla chips. Diversity project: redesign edits, task handoff. Entourage 2008 won't let me copy an image from a web page and paste it into a new HTML e-mail message, but Outlook 2007 will—grrr! Another delicious dinner at Chris and Nate's with Chris, Nate, Paul, Danny, Drew, Phil, and Patrick: herbed roast pork shoulder, mashed potatoes, baconed green beans. Dessert: homemade applesauce-bottomed gingerbread and fresh whipped cream. Gave Paul a ride home. Bought gas.
Thu Feb 21, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Twice lately while creating documents in a wiki called Confluence I have lost data due to a keystroke which sent the browser back one page or to my home page. Confluence attempts to intelligently recover the lost data except that I didn't notice the message which said I had a choice to recover—it's not prominent enough—and I had already started typing anew and I think because of that I ended up losing data which it might have somehow saved for me. Even when web applications have safeguards built in to prevent this, they do not work and are very frustrating. Today I believe I observed Mozilla Firefox automatically install version 2.0.0.4 over 2.0.0.12—weird! Met with student MR—password change. Computer maintenance for students DU and ML. Diversity project redesign edits. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: You may be called upon to help a friend. Web meeting with Susie and Rob. Student MAM returned a anti-static wrist strap borrowed from a few days ago. More computer maintenance for students DU and ML. Computer maintenance: Alyssa (same updates as the others), Joel (attempted to install Bluetooth hardware but I couldn't get it to work—long story which I don't want to go into). Dinner at home with Patrick: chicken with angel hair and vegetables in a light cream sauce, bread and Smart Balance Light. Dessert: leftover gingerbread with whipped cream from a can. Watched Ocean's Eleven on Netflix DVD with Patrick. I had never seen this film before and enjoyed it, despite its subtle perpetuation of negative stereotypes of Asian men. Roger Ebert's review is right on the money. (Ahem.) In OS X, some application called Conflict Resolver tells me it has conflicts to resolve, but when I select "Review Conflicts Now..." nothing happens. I think this is the synchronization between Entourage and iCal that I enabled in Entourage 2008, but I'm not sure—the about box says that Apple makes Conflict Catcher—I mean Resolver. Looked up Conflict Catcher in Google followed by wikipedia—no, I wasn't dreaming. I don't have a .mac account. Reconfigured Mozy to include Patrick's music compositions.
Fri Feb 22, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. itssrv1 diaspora preparations. Lunch at Pasta Pomodoro with Joel and James (and not Ena, unfortunately). Went to a Hurricane Katrina talk by Dr. John Lawson, CIO at Western Washington University, who talked about his experiences at Tulane University where he was CIO during Katrina. More laptop maintenance for student ML. Posted and announced updated schedules for Lucia. Backups management: wrangled with DVD-RWs. I finally recorded the BSOD I've been receiving consistently now: TERMINAL_SERVER_DRIVER_MADE_INCORRECT_MEMORY_REFERENCE, STOP: 0x000000CF in ati2dvag.dll. This blue screen of death occurs every time I connect using MMC 3.0 to another computer (remote desktop), do some work, then shut down or restart Windows on the remote machine. I don't know how to resolve this problem, and information on the web is currently inconclusive. Talked to Mozy Pro support about Mozy not working. They somehow didn't receive the e-mail I sent them 2 days ago so I had to resend it twice before they got it. They have a problem to fix on their end. DVD burning is such a headache. After erasing a disc I attempt to use it only to be told that it's full or not writeable. Or, when attempting to format a disc, the computer BSODs with IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, STOP: 0x0000000A. Oops—that was only our server. Fortunately it was after hours, and it caused no problems. I hate disc burning! Grr! I think this time I resolved the first problem by formatting the disc after erasing it. It's not clear that after you erase a disk you must format it before copying files or renaming the disc (Roxio). Gathered SSH settings for backup. Dinner at home with Patrick: Safeway Organics pizzas, leftover pasta and chicken. Dessert: heavenly hash from my sister. Today was the first in 4 days that I've used Fusion and Windows XP at home—perhaps the longest I've gone without using Windows at home since I started using Windows (and not counting computer downtime or moving or things like that). I needed to scan a PDF preferably with OCR and I only have a Windows version of Adobe Acrobat Pro. The cdrom that came with my Brother MFC-845cw printer might have something that does the same thing—maybe I can look into that. Once I finished the scan, I shut down Windows and Fusion. Unfortunately, I currently can't see a way for me to stop using Windows at work completely or even on a mostly daily basis. I need to start using more of TextWrangler's features to see if I can be as efficient in it as with HTML-Kit. Watched actors commentary on the Ocean's Eleven DVD with Patrick. I'm still getting used to Mac-only e-mail and calendering. I've stopped using Windows XP at home on a daily basis, but that doesn't mean I'm Microsoft-free. I decided I couldn't get away from Entourage—the alternatives are just not quite ready yet. However, Entourage 2008 has a nice feature which syncs with iCal. So I have my work e-mail and 2 home e-mail accounts going in to Entourage, and Entourage seems to better handle IMAP than Outlook 2007. At least I'm not bothered by messages saying it can't perform a task because it's not connected to the server—it just connects and does the task and there's a brief pause, which is acceptable to me. Entourage has a rather cluttered interface, though, when you have that many accounts—too much opening and closing of tree branches is required, and nothing makes the different accounts visually distinct (e.g., color). I'm using the Favorites bar to counter some of that, but you can't name the things on the Favorites bar what you want, and that's annoying. Entourage crashes consistently when I attempt to create certain recurring To Do items, so I've been keeping personal (non-work) To Do items in iCal, which I believe does not backwardly synch to Entourage but I'm not sure. Stretches. Weight training: one-arm dumbbell row, front raise, lateral raise shoulder shrug. Both yesterday and today while we were watching the Ocean's Eleven DVD Patrick said, regarding Julia Roberts, "Are those her real lips?" which struck me as odd because it's not like she required prosthetic lips for this film. Netscape The Browser dies in one week, I just learned. At work I think there's at least one web application (not mine) that only works in Netscape. Will have to investigate that later. Late meal: chunky soup, nonfat milk.
Sat Feb 23, 2008
In Entourage 2008, when you delete a calendar item to which someone else has been invited, a dialog appears: "You have chosen to cancel this event. Do you want to notify the invitees? ( ) Yes with comments, ( ) Yes, without comments, ( ) No. [Cancel] [OK]." If you then decide you don't want to cancel the event after all, the correct button to press is Cancel—pressing Cancel means "Don't Cancel". And OK means Cancel. Breakfast: egg sandwich on bagel, white peach juice. Worked on Danny's website: when Drew asked me to add an image of a certificate to the site, I realized this was one case in which a DHTML solution was not simply appropriate but also provided a better user experience. I used Lokesh Dhakar's Lightbox 2 solution, which worked perfectly. I had previously thought it wouldn't be good for anything, and I still think the PREV and NEXT buttons should appear briefly then fade away so that the user knows they are available, but now I'm a believer. I discovered today that when looking at a set of thumbnails in Flickr you can press Command+] to go to the next page and Command+[ to go to the previous page (presuming you haven't created a click history anywhere else already). Napped with Patrick. Cut my hair, showered. Went to Chris and Andy's birthday party at their home in Redwood City. Before the party we stopped in downtown Redwood City and ate a delicious dinner at a Turkish restaurant called New Kapadokia (650-368-5500, 2399 Broadway Street, Redwood City). Patrick and I both had salad with chicken shish kabobs, no dessert. Wine and Turkish coffee for Patrick, hot water for me. Before New Kapadokia, we stepped in to nearby Red Lantern (650-369-5483, 808 Winslow Street, Redwood City) and were interested, but they were full for the night. During the party Bruce and I got to talking about clothes shopping, and he's kind of about my size so I had him try on my shirt from H&M boys.
Sun Feb 24, 2008
Slept in. Usual oatmeal breakfast. On our drive last night, we found the car windows weren't as clean as they could be, so today during a respite from this weekend's storm I scrubbed the windows first with soapy water, then again with vinegar using synthetic steel wool (0000). Weight training: dumbbell press, wrist curl, reverse wrist curl, hammer curl, crunch. Lunch: chunky soup, nonfat milk. Chatted with my sister. Stopped at Mollie Stone's to pick up a cake. Sold a Mini-DVI to DVI adapter that I bought but didn't really need after all. Dinner at PDD's with Phil, Drew, Danny, Romy, psychobauble, and Patrick: chicken noodle soup with Vietnamese salad. For dessert: Rubicon's turtle cake. Casually watched the Oscars. On the drive home, a Muni bus nearly hit my car which was stopped behind another car which was stopped behind a different Muni bus ahead of us which had failed to pull completely out of traffic at a bus stop. The bus that nearly hit my car was making a left turn and had crossed partially into my lane. I leaned on the horn and after a few scary seconds the bus stopped. The car ahead of me worked its way around the Muni bus picking people up, and I followed shortly thereafter. Home. Worked on Danny's website: edited a photo of Phil, uploaded to Flickr, rearranged the slideshow set, tested, notified Drew. Stretches.
Mon Feb 25, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Met with Susie 1-on-1. Notes I had written down a while ago: "Can Google Chart be used to create an org chart?" Answer (I found out later): No. More laptop maintenance for student ML. I had a very delicious and pleasant lunch with Joel at Pacific Catch (415-504-6905, 1200 9th Avenue at Lincoln, San Francisco). It was our first time eating in this space which was last known as The Canvas Gallery and which was more of a coffee shop and art space than a restaurant. We were served unwrapped edamame and fish-shaped pretzels while we waited for our food. Joel had the sushi-grade ahi salad, I had the california salmon sandwich with sesame slaw and small salad. I especially liked the quality of the bread in the sandwich—just the right hardness and softness outside and inside to feel and taste noticeably different for a sandwich. The menu has sushi, sashimi, starters, salads, tacos, rice bowls, entrees, fish and chips, sandwiches, sides, and desserts. It's kind of like table service Asian food court with New American touches here and there. The prices are higher than average, but I think the food quality is higher than average, too. Website migration followups. itssrv1 diaspora followup with Dick S. More laptop maintenance for student ML. Small web update: research page. LGBT viz work: edited the style guide and uploaded source files to the wiki. Met with ML, who decided to buy a new laptop after learning that a new hard drive was needed—this after being told there wasn't enough RAM and more RAM was purchased. It's a good decision. I received 2 gifts today. Susie brought back a cache of chocolate bars in various flavors and let me have first pick—I chose a Lindt dark chocolate bar which had a guava-flavored syrupy filling, which Susie recommended to have with a glass of port. The other gift was from Tina—a Canon A650IS, which is the camera I've been wanting for the past 6 months or so. Thanks, Tina! Dinner at home with Patrick: New York strip steak, medium; Safeway Organics white cheddar macaroni and cheese; steamed spinach with chopped boiled egg. Dessert: a piece each of that Lindt chocolate bar—delightful! Maybe tomorrow we'll try it with some port. Watched the remainder of the actors' commentary on the Ocean's Eleven DVD from Netflix. While watching the credits roll I noticed a familiar name and then looked it up on imdb then Wikipedia. The editor of Ocean's Eleven, Stephen M, is a former housemate of mine. We worked together for the Conference Office at UCSC and shared an apartment in both College Eight and Kresge East Apartments for at least 2 summers. He was perhaps the nicest housemate I had during that work, and I found him pleasant with which to both live and work. I am glad to learn of his stunning success and hope he continues to find happiness in life. In OS X, Spaces doesn't work exactly right when it comes to returning Command+Tab focus to the window you want when, say, multiple Finder windows are open in different spaces, but I think Nate said this is true even without spaces, so I don't know what's up with that. Another OS X quirk: You're done watching a DVD but you haven't quit DVD Player and try to eject the disc from the Desktop by right-clicking and selecting Eject—this error message appears: "The disk [name of disc] is in use and could not be ejected. Try quitting applications and try again. (OK)" Expected behavior: Either (a) DVD Player quits automatically if paused or stopped, then OS X ejects the disc, or (b) a dialog appears: "The disc [name of disc] is in use by DVD Player. (Quit DVD Player) (Quit DVD Player and Eject) (Don't Quit or Eject)". I couldn't remember why I thought I needed iCal and I remembered today—Entourage 2008 does not have the ability that iCal and Outlook 2007 have where you can see more than one virtual calendar on a single calendar. Outlook 2007 calls this overlay mode. However, I haven't figured out how to make iCal recognize Outlook 2007 appointments. I'm not even sure if it's possible. e.g., if someone who uses Outlook 2007 sends me a calendar invitation, I want to be able to accept it and add it to my iCal calendar with a single click. And if I have multiple calendars, how do I tell Entourage which iCal calendar to add it to? Entourage 2008 still crashes consistently when creating certain recurring items, so I don't entirely trust it.
Tue Feb 26, 2008
Stretches. Weight training: one-arm dumbbell row, advanced bench dip. Staff meeting. Eric and I both got spot awards for special web work due to the accreditation—woo! Password change help for student CH. itssrv1 migration followup with Frank M. Web edits: /about/admin/—added Sharon Y, requested copy from Susie. Lunch: chix enchiladas and root beer from Carmelina's, sat in the sun outside since it was warm and sunny today. Coded new html e-mail for the dean. itssrv1 closure followup. OAAIS ticket followup: Login Help link for OWA—John and Mark are working on a solution. Student computing committee work: usb drive duplication and imprinting research. To purchase 750 one-gigabyte usb drives and have our data duplicated to all of them costs $9.15 per unit. Previously we used cdroms, and we're considering usb drives for this fall. Helped student ML purchase a new laptop. ML also gave me a Starbucks gift card in appreciation. Finished computer maintenance for student DU, sent pickup notice and followed up with Sarah M at OAAIS. Installed the latest Retrospect Client which seems to fix problems with Leopard and the OS X firewall. Stretches. Weight training: super slow front raise, leg lift. Dinner at home with Patrick: teriyaki salmon with steamed asparagus, TJ's thai-style lime pilaf with coconut milk and lemon grass. Dessert: Lindt guava chocolate with Warre's Otima 10-year-old tawny port. Neither Google ("define:photostream") nor urbandictionary define photostream. Investigated address book solutions. Found nothing that fit what I wanted. I determined today that the synchronization between Microsoft Entourage 2008 and Apple Address Book is indeed two-way. The synchronizer also crashed when I changed an item in Address Book. Stretches.
Wed Feb 27, 2008
Stretches. Weight training: leg lift, reverse leg lift, lateral leg lift, calf raise. Computer maintenance for Chris: various updates, checked on Mozy Pro. Created new academic calendar in InDesign, sent it to Cindy for review. HTML e-mail for the dean. Sent Outlook Tip 18 to Eric. Password change followup with Heidi and Joan. Chatted with Eric about Flash movie transitions. PHPM web update. Basic science vision updates: got pullquotes working using Roger Johansson's javascript. Doctor appointment: I'm coming down with another cold. Dinner with Patrick at a Vietnamese pho restaurant on Irving Street. Home. Took a bath, fell asleep in the bathtub. Went immediately to bed (after drying off), slept til midnight.
Thu Feb 28, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Stayed at home today with a cold. Slept. Watched part of Baraka on DVD in bed. Slept. Watched the rest of Baraka on DVD in bed. Dinner at home with Patrick: baked chicken, orzo, steamed broccoli. Watched Ocean's Twelve on Netflix DVD with Patrick.
Fri Feb 29, 2008
Had trouble sleeping last night. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Stayed at home today with a cold. Watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on DVD in bed. Snack: mini pizza. Dinner at home with Patrick: French cut pork chops, steamed asparagus, orzo. Dessert: mango and strawberry sorbet. Read Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned," which is available for free online at webscriptions.org.