Friday, May 23, 2008

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Finished reading Garth Nix's Abhorsen yesterday (borrowed from sneeper). I thought it was a little over the top at the very end, and I couldn't understand the motivation of the antagonist (what does he do after achieving his ultimate goal? with whom does he share his success?), but I enjoyed the trilogy nonetheless and think they would make great films. Learned today that VMware Fusion 1.1.2 has Windows and Office activation problems when users switch between Boot Camp and using the Boot Camp partition under Fusion—both Windows and Office keep asking for you to activate the software even if you had successfully activated it in the past. The problem only occurs with OEM and retail editions of Windows and Office and not with volume and enterprise editions. With Windows, it says it "detected changes." Messages in VMware's community forum say that if you activate Windows under Boot Camp, then install and start Fusion, then install VMWare Tools, then reactivate Windows under Fusion (possibly requiring a phone call to Microsoft), then reactivate Windows under Boot Camp, everything would then be fine, but we did all these steps and still the problem remained. People in the VMware communities forum sometimes recommend that they purchase their copies of Windows and Office from students in school, but they don't realize that not all students have access to volume editions that are immune to the activation problems. For example, UCSF does not purchase volume licenses to cover students because Microsoft doesn't make it easy or inexpensive enough for us to do so. So when our students buy Windows and Office from our campus computer store, they receive academic pricing, but their editions of Windows and Office still require activation. I never encountered these problems before because volume licensing is available to faculty and staff but not to students. Today I sent our student the following information:

So for now you have 2 choices:

  1. Use one Windows environment consistently—don't switch between them. This is the easy thing to do, but it affords you less flexibility than with volume-licensed copies of Windows and Office.
  2. Call Microsoft via their activation telephone number, explain—very slowly—that you paid for genuine academic versions of Windows and Office and can fax them your receipt and that you're using VMware Fusion, and tell them that you're retired and/or your vision and hearing aren't that good and so you have been getting the activation numbers wrong and so you have to call them each time the activation request occurs to speak to a human to fix the problem. (When you speak to a human, each of these calls costs Microsoft somewhere between $3 and $25. This is essentially a monetary battle between what your time is worth versus what their time is worth, so when you speak to a human at a software company from the company's perspective it's like putting the dagger in to the hilt and twisting. If you tell them you're retired or that you have vision and hearing impediments [they have no way to know, really] they will hopefully believe that you do have the time to call them to speak to a human and that every call will take a long time, costing them money.) Ask if they will give you a volume-licensed version of Windows and Office (as some people in VMware's forums have suggested Microsoft will do [but don't mention that]) and if they refuse tell them you could probably find and use someone else's copy of a volume-licensed version—without reselling your legal copies—but you'd rather remain legitimate (as you have already demonstrated by purchasing legal copies)—it's their choice. (I think the longer you keep them on the phone the more likely they will give you a volume-licensed version. e.g., a single 20- or 30-minute phone call could result in the desired licenses.) If you do get the volume licenses and cdroms, you still need to reinstall Windows and Office for those new license codes to be in effect—you can try dirty reinstalls first, but it's possible that you might need to do full wipes followed by clean installs, which would be painful but would resolve the problem once and for all.

Campus calendar item update for student IG. Traded e-mails with Michelle K about Flickr. Lunch: tostada from Carmelina's, ate in the back room with Joel and Eric V, we talked about movies and the two of them gave me a bunch of movies to add to our Netflix queue. Helped Joel with more problems with PharmAdMIT 2008 and KB950113, followed up with PharmAdMIT. Printer ordering followup - finally resolved the open questions. Listserv maintenance. ID card help for a student. Eleven items in my inbox. Went home early. Fixed more parse errors with the journal code. Napped. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press. Quick dinner at home by myself: leftover pasta with red sauce, hot nonfat milk. Dessert with Chris and Nate at Sweet Inspirations: tiramisu for me, cherry pie for Chris, lemon poppyseed cake for Nate, tea all around. Home. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, wrist curl, superslow lateral raise, superslow dumbbell fly. I also tried a few squats just to see how my knees would handle them, but they weren't a good idea so I stopped doing them. Stretches. Late meal: chunky soup, hot nonfat milk.