Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Read faculty member Peter Ambrose's blog: My Olympic Journey. He's a volunteer doping control officer for the Olympic Games in Beijing, China. I was a little surprised to read this: "When urine specimens are obtained for [Doping Control], the voiding process must be directly observed." He has been assigned to National Aquatics Center (NAC) where he shall be testing swimmers and divers and will have a poolside seat at the games. His travel tales are quite interesting! Reported more cigarette smoke coming through my vent. This has been a frequently recurring problem, and it bothers me a lot because cigarette smoke gives me instant headaches—I'm more sensitive than most people. Last Friday I got fed up with it and the second I smelled new cigarette smoke coming into my office I went down to where I was told the air intake vents were located and found some men sitting in chairs nearby smoking so I took their photo. Today after submitting my problem report to facilities I attached the photo pointing out that 2 of the men in the photo can be seen partially concealing cigarettes. UCSF has had a no-smoking policy since July 1, 2005, and supervisors are expected to enforce the policy. We'll see. Today I was told by a different facilities person that the first facilities person was incorrect about where the air intake vents were for our office. He said the intake vents for us are actually in the northeast corner of Saunders Court—the same place welders are currently doing work. I never smell welding smoke in my office, but our front office staff says they sometimes smell it. Small edits to orientation web pages for Cindy. Mailbox cleanup—I reached the 100 MB limit we have on mail space for UCSF email. Yes, 100 MB! Last year at orientation when I told them how much space they have for email I added, "Google doesn't own us yet." UCSF is working on increasing it to 400 MB (I think) but the effort is not yet complete. Materials order followup with Lucia and Eric D. Participated in 2 interviews today for our student affairs assistant position. Made live web edits: the newly combined outreach and prospective students section, career services, orientation, updated schedules. Lots of linkchecking. Prepared cdrom duplication order for DMM. Redirected student HW to Eric D for help with setting up a class website. Sent a few reminders to myself of work that needs to be done. 14 items in my inbox—not bad. It was 12 earlier this week. Installed Apple Software Updates. Tried getting Spotlight to index my network drive. I thought this was working before but now it's clearly not working even in the way I thought it had—through Command+F at the Finder and manually indicating that it should search the network drive. I turned on indexing using mdutil but there's no blinking dot. I tried the add-then-remove method in Spotlight system preferences and that did not work, either. Time to post to Apple Discussions—tomorrow or Thursday, perhaps. Telecommute day tomorrow. Lunch today was a taco and enchilada special and chips at Carmelina's. Dinner: wonton soup, cashew chicken, brown rice, hot tea at House of Chen. While waiting for dinner I brainstormed ideas for new directions for the School of Pharmacy website. My fortune: From the floors of the ocean, the waves of the tide, a vacation awaits you far and wide. 04, 13, 24, 36, 40, 16. Bought some books at a bookstore. While I was in the store, I overheard an employee—a gay man—who retold over the telephone to a friend his visit to his lesbian doctor. Part of his visit included a prostate exam, and his doctor tried but failed to locate his prostate, then she proceeded to explain her embarrassment at the situation—she thought her fingers were too small. The man then told her the story of a male gynecologist who was examining a woman, her feet in stirrups. He says, "My God! You have the biggest vagina I have ever seen! My God! You have the biggest vagina I have ever seen!" And the woman said, "Okay, but you didn't have to repeat yourself!" And the gynecologist said, "I didn't! I didn't!" I don't know how his prostate exam ended, but he did say he told this joke during his prostate exam, which I thought was funny. Everything overheard is fair game for blogging, isn't it? Well, most everything. On the way to Castro Station, big and sparse drops of of rain fell from above and I feared getting caught in a downpour, but I didn't. When the train emerged at West Portal, there was no rain at all. On the way home a man got off at my stop and immediately began whirling in each hand a ball in what looked like a long sock. It was something related to juggling but I didn't know the name for it, and I thought it strange that he practiced while he walked, and he seemed to be in quite a hurry. Stretches. Weight training: concentration curl, superslow one-arm dumbbell row, superslow dumbbell press, dumbbell fly, advanced weighted crunch. Stretches. Late meal: organic blackberries, hot nonfat milk, organic raspberries with light whipped cream, leftovers from dinner with steamed white rice.