Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Went to bed at 10 last night, woke at 4 this morning; couldn't sleep so I got up. Stretches. Weight training: concentration curl, superslow concentration curl, superslow tricep kickback, superslow dumbbell fly, face outline. Cleaned the floor in the bathroom. Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast plus lowfat vanilla yogurt and hot milk. To work. cdrom building. Tried to install DemoShield 8 but it would not let me activate because it was activated too many times in the past. We have a legitimate license, but I've probably gone through 3 computers since we first purchased it, and it does what we need so there's no reason for us to upgrade. I called InstallShield and someone who was very difficult to understand because of enunciation problems said there was a URL I could go to to download a hotfix to deactivate the activation requirement and thereby resolve the problem. He looked for the URL and found it to be rather unfriendly, so he took my e-mail address and said he would mail it to me. Called InstallShield support back since I hadn't received the promised e-mail message over an hour later. From the accents, it sounds like they outsourced their support to Dublin or London. They resent the email while I waited on the line, and it took 3 tries to and from various accounts before it worked. The e-mail message pointed to http://kb.acresso.com/ selfservice/ microsites/ search.do? cmd=displayKC& docType=kc& externalId=Q200184& sliceId=1& docTypeID=DT_PROBLEM_1_1& dialogID=11947986& stateId=1%200%208406697 [link defunct]—which pointed to http://www.macrovision.com/demoshield—which pointed to a list of steps which pointed to http://www.macrovision.com /webdocuments /Downloads /Designer.zip [link defunct] which contains a replacement for designer.exe which resolves the problem. The cost of InstallShield product activation in this case: a 100-minute delay and 2 phone calls to humans. At the end of the 2nd call, I almost told them about tinyurl, but figured it's probably better to just let them be, so I didn't. After applying for a license to distribute Windows Media Player 11, I received an automated e-mail message which included the following paragraph: "Important Note: Our licensing email is provisioned using a web based application which adheres to RFC 2821 and uses 'bare line feeds embedded within an HTML stream'. Recipient email systems that are not fully compliant with RFC 2821, may experience unexpected handling of inbound emails." I think it's hilarious that they believe that their correspondents know whether their email systems and applications are fully compliant with RFC 2821—and—that once learning that their systems and applications are not compatible with the licensing e-mails Microsoft sends they should be willing to migrate in the direction of compliance just to read their one email message. "Ah, well, I see we are not fully compliant with RFC 2821, so in order to read this single message from Microsoft regarding our desire to legally distribute Windows Media Player 11, I guess we'll have to upgrade our backend email system and frontend email applications—yes, I agree let's go forth with that plan and implement it before they send us their message which could be the next business day or two." Helped Lucia with a problem with Netscape Security Center popups—turned them off (I think). Helped Lucia with how to recall a sent message in Outlook. Prepared the shared office laptop for Cindy's trip to Davis. Web host migration work for student organizations. Cardkey door lock followup. Updated projects list. Listserv management: MW, M(L)A. Answered questions from Karin A about Flickr. Realized that a mailing list rule I created in Entourage yesterday was filtering nearly all my incoming mail incorrectly so I thought I wasn't getting any mail but I was. Deleted the rule. I don't understand how this feature of Entourage works—it's not very intuitive. Helped Joel with the WordArt feature in Word 2007. If I were to design a social networking website its goal would be to create an environment in which every possible detail of a person's life is recorded and the site would be called mynoosha.com (currently unregistered!). (Thanks to sneeper for giving me this idea.) Joel and I tried to get frozen yogurt from the cafeteria, but the machine was out of order. Lunch: chicken enchiladas from Carmelina's. Dinner at home with Patrick.