September 2008
Summary: iMac crashes, Ted and Emery's Folsom Street Fair Party.
Dates on this page
Mon Sep 1, 2008
Stretches. Running machine. Weight training: chest press, shoulder press. Brunch with Mikey, psychobauble, Nate, and Patrick at Broadway Grill. Saw Mikey's place. Drove to U-District, then to Olympic Sculpture Park, then to Madison Park and Madison Beach. Meal at Ivar's SeaTac: crab caesar, mixed fruit, about $17. Bought gifts at SeaTac: Dilettante chocolates, a floaty pen for JWG. Flew from Seattle to San Francisco. BART/Muni. Home. Computer troubles first manifested as a corrupt Entourage database then later just weird behavior and slowness in OS X.
Tue Sep 2, 2008
Back to work. SCWG meeting. BTS meeting. Reported cigarette smoke coming through the vent in my office. Lunch with Joel at Lime Tree. Helped students JE and QT with password change. Sent psychobauble this message today: "my mac crashed and won't get up. was really slow when i got home yesterday, then Apple Mail said mail was corrupted and it can rebuild if I quit Mail so I did but it hung on the rebuild. now the mac get past the gray screen with apple logo and spinning icon. it sits for 30+ minutes and won't start up. doesn't recognize techtools disc. doesn't recognize os x startup disc. is it time to call apple, or is there anything else you or i can try?" Helped student KL with email archiving and gmail. Terry McC confirmed our student lounge wap got upgraded the week of 8/25. Followup with Albert H on cdrom duplication. Checked in with Michelle P about alumni email. Small web updates. Helped student PY with cardkey problems. Dinner at home with Patrick: filet mignon, bread, Smart Balance Light, carrots with cumin.
Wed Sep 3, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Telecommute day. Followup with student KL about archiving messages, gmail. Helped student BB with antivirus. Reviewed a College Town Profile that was sent to me—did not like it at all. Asked Laurie W to add my name to the GLBT staff and postdocs wiki at UCSF. Followup with Kraig K about how student's don't know what to put for domain and account in the OWA change password dialog. Followup with Terence about handling preferred names on ID cards. Announced new cardkey door locks. Followup with Debbie A and Jim S about a problem with their website—our web host misinterpreted a request I made and messed things up. Followup tracking down the owner of the PharmD/PhD program web page. Followup with Ed F about Mozy. Followup with Jilian P about problems with the IRTS website. Followup with Michelle P and grad CG about email after graduation. Resolved cardkey issues. Joel is thinking about starting a blog about admissions. Followup with Debbie A and James S—their web problems have been resolved by the web host. Dinner at home with Patrick: ravioli in cream sauce with sausage. Dropped off the iMac at the Apple store. Shopped, bought nothing. Declared I would never shop at Stonestown for clothes again because it was so disappointing. Mailing list work for PDD. Reconfigured Patrick's computer with a Belkin USB hub that I wasn't using.
Thu Sep 4, 2008
Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly, superslow shrug, wrist curl, reverse wrist curl. Stretches. Shower. Yogurt, granola, raisins, sliced banana for breakfast with nonfat milk and mango juice. The web team at Public Affairs removed some old stylesheets and this broke a number of placeholder templates I had for various websites. Essentially, web.ucsf.edu no longer seems to resolve properly, so if you referenced anything on web.ucsf.edu your page would appear to take a long time to load and you would think your server is having problems but it's not. Mail migration for resident SR (AS). Helped student QT with password lockout. Met with Scott to create a postcard for outreach events. Posted bug report #19877 to mozdev.org regarding Sage (the RSS feed reader for Firefox)—it seems Sage no longer works properly with feeds that require authentication, but I can't figure out whether the problem is with Sage 1.4.2, Firefox 3, or our LISTSERV 15 software. Web edits: orientation. Web analytics discussion with Susie—people are asking the wrong questions. Cardkey problem report for student MK. Listserv management. Confirmed ability to access new version of PaperCut for Rodney. Initiated request with DLS to migrate Outlook data to the SAN. Prepared files for archiving to DVD. Double-checked my tarball script because the tarball it generated automatically seemed too large but it is correct. Realized I missed a meeting yesterday because Entourage 2008 or Exchange failed to update my calendar as expected. Dinner at home with Patrick: pig chops, broccoli. Took a bath. Watched Helvetica on Netflix DVD with Patrick.
Fri Sep 5, 2008
More followup on current issues: IMW training, PharmD admissions blog, missing PharmD/PhD page, software cdrom, full inboxes. Learned from Sarah M that our site license version of Spy Sweeper is still not compatible with Vista, so I told the committee that I recommended we drop support for it for next year and just recommend Windows Defender instead, which is what I have been using for work and for home for over a year now and it has been working fine for me. Small web edits: associate dean, administration, faculty, career, OSACA staff, career services. Lunch: tostada from Carmelina's. Ordered a Stop Theft security plate for Chris's new computer. Prepared an RFO (request for order) for 2 portable hard drives so that I can stop dealing with unreliable dvdrw media and processes. Updated the OSACA introductions presentation for Cindy. ID card work. More PharmD/PhD page followup. Chatted with Mom. Dinner at Truck with Patrick. We ordered frings and although the menu did not say they were spicy they turned out spicy, so I sent them back. The second frings that we received had some spicy parts and some not. Chicken salad sandwich. Danny, Drew, and Vinh met us at Truck. We all went to Miss Saigon. Home. Bath. Stretches. Weight training: advanced side plank, advanced plank, superslow dumbbell row, superslow modified dumbbell overhead press. Stretches. Late meal: chunky soup, hot nonfat milk, lowfat lemon yogurt.
Sat Sep 6, 2008
House chores and organization. Lunch with Patrick at Ono Hawaiian BBQ. Groceries. Home. Ice cream. Napped in the sun. Shower. Watched the remainder of Helvetica on Netflix DVD with Patrick. The best thing about that film was learning how to pronounce neue—it's kind of like "noiya." Nap. Dinner at home with Patrick: pesto tortellini with peas and portobella mushrooms and sausage in marinara, dinner roll, Smart Balance Light. Nap.
Sun Sep 7, 2008
Had planned to nap last night and then go out but overslept and didn't. Woke around 1:30 AM. Stretches. Weight training: advanced bridge, superslow hammer curl, superslow lateral raise, advanced plank, advanced side plank. Night meal: white rice and leftovers. Sleep. Lunch: biryani, ice cream. Stretches. Weight training: advanced bench dip. Network troubleshooting. Dinner with PDD, psychobauble, Nate, and more: noodles with BBQ beef. Nate made a delicious cheesecake. I think today was the day our Linksys WRT54GC stopped working after I attempted to update the firmware on it. Patrick's computer wasn't connecting to the internet wirelessly, so in troubleshooting I updated the firmware and the update process failed, rendering the wap useless.
Mon Sep 8, 2008
Breakfast: granola and cherry yogurt. Helped Patrick set up his music keyboard temporarily in the living room. Work. Posted new drafts of the fall schedules. Cardkey lock access for custodial service workers. Began installing Vista into a new Fusion VM. Helped faculty member Joanne W with spam issues. Helped student IG with email account lockout. I've used Microsoft Windows Vista in the past when students came to my office for assistance with their laptops, but today is the first time I am installing it and using it for myself for either work or home. Considering that it was released worldwide on January 30, 2007, I think my adoption of Vista differs from the general public only in that I probably avoided it longer than most people could because my experience with computers enabled me to. While installing security updates for Vista, I tried starting my XP VM but some things would not work properly because of IP address conflict. I could not see an easy way to resolve this, so I quit XP. It seems I can only run either Vista or XP but not both at the same time? Also after installing Vista I realized that Windows Defender is a default application—you don't need to download and install it like you do for XP, so when I can run XP again I need to adjust the instructions I put on the web recently about that. Realized I can connect from Terminal in OS X instead, so I did that. Helped an entering student with questions about wireless. Updated presentation slides for OSACA introductions during orientation. Went to the post office and mailed the broken Linksys router/wap. Lunch by myself at Ten. Chatted with Joel about ActiveSync and Blackberry security at UCSF. Prepared orientation documents for duplication. Class officers photos document for Cindy. Home. Chatted with Zach on the way in (Cameron). Dinner at home with Patrick: cow stir fry with mushrooms and red bell peppers, brown rice. Dessert: one scoop of peach sorbet. Picked up the iMac from the Apple store. Watched Tron extras on DVD borrowed from psychobauble and Nate.
Tue Sep 9, 2008
Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, advanced plank. Stretches. Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Checked in with WeID, talked to Tyler who says they're short on staff and will get to my requests as soon as possible. Thought I had a meeting at 9:30 AM but it had been canceled and somehow I never got the original Exchange invitation so no one was there and I left. Web edits: orientation agenda. Very slow behavior in multiple apps in Win XP—feels like bad network settings. Logged out then logged in as admin, reset network settings to DHCP but that didn't fix it. Reinstalled VMware Tools, restarted XP, still same problem. Ran Disk Cleanup (nearly already clean). Defrag said not needed. Ran chkdsk. While waiting, I archived files to DVD using our spare office and computer. I've just about entirely given up on optical media—such a waste of time—and put in a purchase request for 2 portable hard drives. Win XP still not behaving, so I am prepared to abandon it. I will try working with Vista, but if that doesn't work I'll reinstall Win XP into a non-Boot-Camp VM and if that's successful I'll just get rid of the Boot Camp partition. Installed OLPPS in Vista. Vista was extraordinarily slow running in a VM in Fusion 1.1.3—I was simply browsing the filesystem and experiencing pauses of several seconds, so I disabled the sidebar and all performance options except for smooth screen fonts. Quit Vista. Adjusted settings on the VM to give Vista more RAM and use 2 processors. Restarted Vista. Much better now. Installed Firefox 3.0.1. "not enough storage is available" error when attempting to install mmc 3.0. addons.mozilla.org is really slow today. Realized that 20 GB—the default Fusion gave me when installing Vista—is not enough, and Fusion really won't grow the virtual hard disk like I was led to believe during the installation. Must trash the existing Vista install and start over. No obvious way to stop using Boot Camp, so I ran Disk Utility and simply formatted the 2nd hard drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) which seemed to do the trick. Installed Vista into a new VM created on the newly erased 2nd hard drive. Operating system not found message during install. (This happened to me the last time but I didn't mention it.) Selected Virtual Machine > Restart Guest. Same problem: no bootable device was detected. I have 2 dvdrw drives, so the way I fixed this was to change the VM settings to manually specify one dvdrw drive—try it—let it fail—then manuall specify the other dvd-rw drive which worked. Successfully activated Windows Vista after some trouble—I must have mistyped a character. Installed Win XP into a new VM. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: Try something new and different - you will like the results. Chatted with Cesar: Vista and XP setup. JH on the bus. Home. Snack: crackers and green tea. iMac setup. Dinner at home with Patrick: roasted lemon chicken, corn on the cob, dinner roll, Smart Balance Light. Watched House of Flying Daggers on owned DVD with Patrick.
Wed Sep 10, 2008
Woke up too early and couldn't get back to bed. Breakfast: granola and sliced banana. Missed the bus by one minute, just waited 20 minutes for the next one. Boarded a bus 6 at 9th and Judah walked past the smelly presumably homeless person in the front of the bus, got to the back of the bus, noticed that all the windows were closed, opened one window, and when I started to open another a woman next to me immediately complained, so I shut the window I opened and walked off to the front of the bus while she said behind me that I could leave the one window open. But the bus was still too stinky for me to bear even the short ride to work, so I exited the bus at the next stop and walked up the hill the rest of the way. Listserv work. 1st Year Presentation work in PowerPoint for Cindy. Assigned Eric D the replacement formmail project. Lunch: got sandwich fixins from the cafeteria and made a bagel sandwich with one of the bagels that Cindy and Eric V brought yesterday. Briefly visited the safety fair. 1-on-1 with Cindy. Tracked down the UC policy which says admins are not supposed to use administrator accounts for non-admin tasks for Quinn H. Dinner at home with Patrick: delivery from Zante. Put Patrick to bed—his allergies have made him miserable nearly the whole day. Installed Vista at home into a 200 GB virtual disk in VMware Fusion. More iMac and Vista setup. Tried to set up ad hoc wireless but failed.
Thu Sep 11, 2008
Woke up too early and couldn't get back to bed. More iMac configuration and Vista installs and updates. Stretches. Weight training: advanced plank, advanced side plank. Pre-breakfast: nectarine-pear smoothie. Breakfast: granola with yogurt and sliced Granny Smith apple. Work. Followup with student EK and Brian H and the other Frank F about cardkey access. Followup with student MM about mailbox too full. Followup with Shannon W about high-res photos needed. Installed Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). Let Dick S borrow a laptop so that he can try some 3-D molecular visualization hardware and software. Sounds cool! He has a test demo in HSW300 tomorrow that I'll try to go to. Continued installing apps into Vista. Web edits: updated computer security section with some notes about Vista. Forgot my USB drive at home today, which has a screen snapshot that I needed—oh well. Tomorrow. Websteering lunch: Eric D, Erik W, Abby C, Joe P. IT Services Meeting. Chatted briefly with Kristan B afterwards. Chatted with Tiki M to get info security brochures. Reviewed MyAccess update from Jann F. Met with Eric D to discuss formmail. Wrangled data to create a new spreadsheet of current students and create the first-year mailing list. Dinner at home with Patrick: spinach wide noodles with jumbo shrimp and asparagus, dinner roll, Smart Balance Light. Rewatched episodes 1 and 2 of Heroes on Netflix DVD Season 1 with Patrick, popcorn, and a Dad's Root Beer ice cream bar. More software installations into Vista at home. Stretches. Weight training: superslow front raise. Late meal: yogurt, leftovers, hot water.
Fri Sep 12, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Web edit for orientation. Updated presentation slides. Removed and reinstalled Acrobat in Vista. Reported cigarette smoke coming through my vent to facilities. I asked to speak to a manager last time about cigarette smoke and no one called me back. Lunch with Joel at Nan King Road Bistro. Uninstalled Acrobat, restarted, uninstalled all CS3 suite applications, restarted, reinstalled all CS3 suite applications. Updated class officers photo document for Cindy. Small web edits. Met 1-on-1 with Eric D. Added new students to intern jobs listserv. Created student leadership listserv. Delivered current class spreadsheet to staff. Updated current students news. Orientation starts on Monday, and we're all excited in the office. We're bringing 122 new and very qualified students in to our PharmD program. Joel asked me if I was excited, and I told him, "Yeah! It means we get free food all week!" which is not too much of an exaggeration. Welcome—now eat! is a message that comes across rather well, and our office often gets leftovers after the new students have had their fill. Chatted with Eric V who stayed over 2 hours late to get work done—yikes! Updated the leadership photos document for Cindy. Helped student JU with Flickr. Notified Jann and Heidi about our desired MyAccess migration window—December 9 to 22. Listserv work. Updated the current students spreadsheet. Dinner at home with Patrick: organic new york strip steak courtesy of Aaron, sauteed zucchini, and some multigrain pilaf from Trader Joe's that was too spicy for me. Dessert for me: organic key lime yogurt. Downloaded Seattle photos from the camera to the computer. I have some annoying water spots (or something) showing up on all my photos—gotta get that fixed. We watched 3 short clips on the NBC Heroes website. They weren't very good—Patrick was laughing during some parts like when the woman grabbed the cat before she left. Acting was rather uneven and the production lacked the polish of the real show—we can tell even when watching on the web. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell overhead tricep extension, superslow front raise, superslow lateral raise, superslow shrug, advanced plank. Shower. Late meal: leftovers.
Sat Sep 13, 2008
Cut my hair. Shower. Brunch at La Mediterranee with Patrick. Shopped for clothes in the Castro, bought nothing. Golden Produce. Home. Napped. Dinner at home with Patrick: oven roasted chicken, boiled zucchini, Annie's rotelle and cheese. Organized photos. Patrick watched EdTV on DVD borrowed from Sam, and I watched bits of it, too. He went to bed early. I went to wzrdofaus's housewarming party. Met or remet Trish and Dave, Miguel, Pablo, Mark, Howard, Gabriel, Chad, Ninah (sp?), Dave, Norm, Arthur, Bryce, Kenneth, Comet, and more.
Sun Sep 14, 2008
Breakfast: granola with yogurt and sliced banana. Worked on Corinna's website. Brunch at Ludwig's: Ludwig, Nate, Phil, Drew, Danny, Nadia, Jocelyn, Jason, Karl, Chris, Joel, Terry, Steven, Dave, Jay, Gary, and more. More web work for Corinna's website. Dinner at home with Patrick: rotini with vegetables in pig ragout, dinner roll, Smart Balance Light. Watched The Simpsons Movie on DVD borrowed from Sam. Web work for Danny's website. Uploaded one photo from Seattle.
Mon Sep 15, 2008
Breakfast: granola with yogurt and sliced banana. To work. First day of orientation. Most everything seems to be going smoothly. I got a free t-shirt—an extra from the orientation committee. It's light blue and says I (heart) SF on the front and some orientation artwork on the back. Cardkey followup for student JE. Submitted an RFO for Partners in D web hosting. Mail troubleshooting for Glenn Y, Claire L. Listserv work. Snack: an apple. Lunch: leftover orzo-cucumber-feta salad. Web edits: infoday. Posted final schedules for Lucia. Home. Set up the replacement router. I had a WRT54GC and they replaced it with a WRT54G instead which is a much larger unit, but I'm not complaining. Got wireless, then printing restored, then restored access to frankfarm.org by resetting my dynamic DNS with Zone Edit but it took a little over an hour for me to see the changes (almost exactly like they said in their FAQ). Tried to configure Outlook 2007 to work with UCSF Exchange and failed. No one at UCSF has instructions available for this, so I was trying to create my own, but I could not figure out how the settings from Outlook 2003 dialogs translate to Outlook 2007 dialogs. I even tried starting VPN and using Network Connect but I think that would have worked only with a computer that was joined to the domain. Will need to check with Mark B tomorrow. Also realized that I seemed to have lost journal data for part of August 27 and all of August 28. Time Machine was no help I guess since I just restored from it. And Mozy didn't have backup copies—don't know why not. Will troubleshoot later. Paid a bill.
Tue Sep 16, 2008
Awoke around 3:00 AM, successfully returned to sleep within an hour. Usual granola breakfast. Restored Patrick's network backup script. I don't recall ever before having rendered someone speechless with my entrance to a room, but it happened today at the SCWG meeting I think because this committee normally doesn't see me in a suit. A very nice compliment. SCWG meeting - wireless. Installed Apple OS 10.5.5 at work. Web edits: pathway declaration calendar for Carol. Linkchecking. Gave my computer services presentation. Skits with the orientation counselors. Lunch with Joel at Pasquale's: we shared a small salad and a house special pizza. Linkchecking. Updated my project list. More archiving data to DVD. Snack: an orange. Followup with student MM about mailbox too full. Email migration for ST. Email forwarding question from student JY. Listserv maintenance. Public affairs Quicktime movies are no longer available, so I stopped linking to them. Cardkey followup for student MK. Still waiting to hear from OAAIS (JK, KB) about a replacement for ph.ucsf.edu. Small web edit for Joel: admissions catalogs. Reported a problem to the community forum of YouTube in which a video plays as expected in certain browser-platform combinations but not in others. The error message in the problem browsers is "We're sorry, this video is no longer available." ID card legal name change issues. 13 items in my inbox! Updated the PharmD calendar with pathway deadlines. 11 items in my inbox! To home. Dinner at home with Patrick: pig meatloaf, steamed green beans, garlic bread. Rewatched Episode 3 of Heroes on Netflix DVD. In the past few days I've been piecing my journal together from the many bits of paper where I wrote down entries by hand while my computer was in the repair shop. Some got written on the back of my Seattle itinerary, some got written in my paper journal that I use to record meetings and other notes for work, and some got written on random scraps of paper that were lying around. Installed Apple OS 10.5.5 at home.
Wed Sep 17, 2008
MyAccess review for Jann and pointed out the lack of user education on our campus regarding phishing and the risk we run with putting all our authentication and authorization points into a single solution which is clearly vulnerable to social engineering. Expanded permissions and relaxed requirements for usage by UCSF faculty and staff for official communications—see my Flickr profile for details. tinyurl.com seems to be down as of 10:40 AM Pacific—the page simply doesn't load. I learned through a Google search that b.tinyurl.com is their backup site when tinyurl.com is down, and that took longer but at least it generated the tinyurl I requested. Helped student TH with account lockout. TH had already set up pwmanage, but the process still took about 10 minutes because of password complexity requirements. Laptop setup. Lunch from the cafeteria, chatted in the work room with Lucia. Laptop pickup. Email migration followup for SR. Calendar maintenance. CTS followup. Listserv maintenance. Reported to Public Affairs that logging in to the A-Z list hangs and never finishes loading. Responded to Peter L's request of how to promote a lab website. Began troubleshooting email migration issue for student GL. Answered computer security questions for student YC. Responded to Marie and Kate about image requests—doesn't hurt to ask, but most likely we won't have the image you want yet—maybe 6 months from now. Password lockout for CJ. FTP connection help for Karen A. Handled a request in which an entering student imminently was awaiting a legal name change—should I wait to get my ID card?—a unique case. Answer: okay yes, you can wait and the Registrar can expedite the process—ask them for details. More listserv maintenance. Investigated University policy for Chris C—30.40 and 41.11. Dinner at home by myself (Patrick had a meal not too long before): leftovers. Watched Episode 4 of Heroes Season 1 on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Ran Disk Utility First Aid verify on both hard drives and Repair Disk Permissions on the primary hard drive. Stretches. Weight training: advanced plank (3:30), advanced one-legged plank (0:30 each leg). Stretches. To bed early (9:30).
Thu Sep 18, 2008
Received a suspicious phone message on our answering machine claiming to be from Kaiser Permanente and asking us to call 866-484-9744. I ignored it and deleted the message after doing a Google search on the number. Troubleshot problems with Exchange not displaying some calendar items correctly. Here's the problem report I submitted to OAAIS: "Hi, Exchange is not displaying some calendar items correctly. On Wed Aug 20, 2008 at 6:25 PM I created 2 calendar items: (1) SL-FF: Every 4 weeks starting Mon Sep 8 from 3 to 4 PM, and (2) SL-FF-ED: Every 2 weeks starting Mon Sep 8 from 4 to 5 PM. Item 1 is me and Susie Levings. Item 2 is me, Susie Levings, and Eric Davila. The Mon Nov 3 meetings are the only ones that got manually bumped (to Tue Nov 4). These items appear correctly on my calendar. However, on their calendars they see these meetings on Thu Sep 18—why? The meetings recur only on Mondays—why is this showing up for them on a Thursday? Also, item 1 failed to appear for both me and Susie and neither of us remember deleting that meeting. I would only have deleted a meeting if I had to attend another event, but there is no other event in that 3 to 4 time slot. Neither item 1 nor item 2 appear on Susie's calendar for Mon Oct 6. To work around the problem of the missing meeting for Mon Sep 22 for SL-FF (item 1), she and I manually created new appointments with no invitations. Could you please investigate these anomalies and, if possible, resolve them on your end? Or, please let me know what I, Susie, or Eric might have done wrong to create this situation. Thanks!" Laptop setup followup with Dick S. MyAccess HTML email followup with Jann F. Answered a question about listservs for student LE. Cardkey followup with student JE. Learned about one of the school's lab websites that I had never known about (Sali). Small web update for Cindy: graduation accommodations email. Web updates: pathway declaration. Listserv maintenance. Put up a bare bones page for our PharmD/PhD program. Met 1-on-1 with Eric D—projects review. Sent Eric D our recaptcha keys. Submitted a new invoice and RFO for Partners in D web hosting. It's unlikely we'll be able to pay it in time. Gave Jim S and Debbie A an update on their formmail request. More email migration followup for student GL. Dinner at home with Patrick, Danny, Drew, Phil: curried rice with shrimp, pacific cod with yellow squash and tomatoes. We talked about silicone ice cube trays, foot weight loss, Seattle, Halloween costumes, more.
Fri Sep 19, 2008
Woke at 3:30 AM and couldn't go back to sleep. Got up at 4:30 AM. Downloaded and installed VMware Fusion 2.0 at home. Answered a question about a broken link on the School of Medicine website. Email migration followup for student GL. Partners in D domain registration followup—we're good through 7/31/2010. Took some great photos in Dick Shafer's physical chemistry class. He found a way to display molecular structures in 3D to a classroom using 2 projectors and ordinary PC laptops and certain inexpensive software. The paper 3D glasses are about 50 cents each and use some kind of polarization to create the 3D effect. The class oohed and aahed as the molecules were displayed on the big screen and then rotated. Helped Nate arrange dinner tonight with others. Hunted down domain reg info for Partners in D—we're good through 2010. Listserv work. Management work. FTP connection help for Karin A. Posted an announcement to students for Kimberly B. Management work. Helped JT with configuring a computer for campus wired and wireless connections. Helped student JY with setting up wired and wireless access. Fetched an old Apple keyboard for Eric from the storage room. Western Digital Passport portable hard drives arrived, so I started moving web archive files to them and tidying up the last DVDs of archives. Email account closed unexpectedly for exiting resident DS—I submitted a ticket to OAAIS and ccd a whole lot of people. Email migration followup with grad-turned-fellow RK. Web updates for graduation, sent to Cindy for review. Reviewed headshot photos Eric D took—they look great, and we'll hand off next week to Eric V for further processing. Scott showed off his brand new iPhone. Lunch: welcome picnic was a bust, so Joel and I got Carmelina's instead. Home. Short nap. Dinner at Tara (415-348-9977, 123 2nd Street, San Francisco, California 94105) with psychobauble, Nate, Danny, and Patrick. Danny went home to change and freshen. Patrick went home by Muni to sleep. I went to psychobauble and Nate's. We played on the Wii for a while and then I took a nap. Club Dragon, which I didn't like because I didn't enjoy the music and I couldn't get away from the cigarette smoke. Nate and I left, attempted to help a lost visitor from Tennessee get to the Castro, then a few minutes later drove to the Castro ourselves and found a parking spot right outside of Cliff's. We went to The Cafe, I dropped him off at home.
Sat Sep 20, 2008
Usual granola breakfast plus 10 tater tots. Vacuumed in the bedroom (the housecleaning kind of vacuuming). Tried to visit the Stereo MCs website today to join their mailing list but instead found: "Not Found - The requested URL /stereomcs/ was not found on this server. - Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Apache/2.2.9 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g DAV/2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/5.2.6 Server at www.island.co.uk Port 80". Worked on Corinna's website: cv update. Late lunch: organic jerusalem artichoke linguine with roasted garlic marinara, dinner roll, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Sun Sep 21, 2008
Golden Gate Park with psychobauble and Nate: Stow Lake, surrey ride. Late lunch at Reverie. Cole Valley Street Fair. Sat in the sun at Dolores Park. Picked up Paul. Got deli items at Whole Foods. Dinner at psychobauble and Nate's: cold cuts, bread, crackers, cheese, sesame noodle salad. Watched Pixar Short Films on owned DVD. Drove Paul home.
Mon Sep 22, 2008
Woke early, worked for 90 minutes on mailing list admin work for Danny. To work. Helped student MC with how to uninstall Webroot Spy Sweeper: "Search your hard drive for a file called ssecleanup or ssecleanup.exe. It is commonly found at either C:\Program Files \SpySweeperInstall \SSECleanup.exe or C:\Program Files \Spy Sweeper \installfiles \sseCleanup.exe. Double-click the ssecleanup file. If all goes well, the Spy Sweeper icon should disappear from your system tray within a few minutes—give it at least 5 minutes. Once it disappears, restart your computer. If it doesn't disappear, please let me know." Checked in with Sierra A about a page describing OSL's web hosting offering. Helped Carol with a question about spam and a question about web browser caches. Graduation web page update for Cindy. A nursing student reported a problem with Realplayer and wireless on Mac that I hadn't heard before. Not sure it's a big problem, tho. Sent Susie a long email about reorganization. Posted graduation page updates live for Cindy. Listserv management. Helped student DL with a problem opening PDF files in Moodle. Lunch on the run: chicken tarragon sandwich and tap water to go from Starbucks. 1-on-1 with Susie. Web team meeting with Eric D and Susie. Home. Mailing list work for Danny. Dinner at home with Patrick: apple-cranberry-stuffing-stuffed chicken boobs, butternut squash soup. Watched Pixar Short Films on borrowed DVD with Patrick. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, superslow overhead tricep kickback, advanced plank (2:30). Late meal: tap water, organic lowfat black cherry yogurt, leftover sesame noodle salad. Weight training: superslow dumbbell curl. Stretches.
Tue Sep 23, 2008
Usual granola breakfast. The office celebrated Carol's birthday with bagels, fresh fruit, donut holes, juice. Reported that the Staff Portal was down to Doug C. Email transition followup for student GL. Helped student SY with a question about why everything is displayed in Chinese characters. Notified first-year students of some things I forgot to mention during my presentation last week. Sent Susie and Eric D the link to Joel's admissions blog (still under wraps for now). Responded to a student request for survey services (we have none). Helped Eric V with a question about mailbox too full. Resent the master student list to Cindy. Email transition followup for student GL. Response pads installation followup with Carol. Shared passwords with Eric D. Scanned a document for Cindy. Reviewed photos from Eric D's photo shoot of the new students—all looks well but they need to be winnowed and renamed. Lunch: used deli items from the cafeteria to make a bagel sandwich. Lucia reported a printing problem in the master student list, so I fixed that and made a few other adjustments and sent out a new copy to everyone. Helped student RM with login problems. Updated schedules for Lucia. Followup with Sierra A about the Kappa Psi website. Answered a question about what is and isn't allowed on our listservs. Helped student PE with a question about accounts. Helped student KS with how to find how much email disk space was being used and how to use Apple Mail with UCSF email. Chatted with Cindy about the quality of paper-to-PDF scans from our Brother fax machine. Helped student CL with campus LDAP. Announced new formmail option to Jim S and Debbie A. Paul's birthday at Nihon Whiskey Lounge. Patrick and I had luxury mojitos, coke kobe, yaki onigiri, tokyo dragon roll, rocket roll, kaiso salad, nihon salad, and agedashi tofu. Paul brought a sans rival for dessert. We treated Paul to a caipirinha and to the cake cutting fee.
Wed Sep 24, 2008
Stretches. Weight training: advanced side plank (1:40), advanced plank (2:00), superslow lateral raise, superslow front raise. Stretches. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Coded and posted live new update from the dean. PharmD/PhD web page followup with Steve H and Lisa C. Answered a question from student CT about Sophos and Sygate and what works with Vista (Sophos does but Sygate doesn't). Posted 3D physical chemistry to the School's Flickr account for Dick S. Performance review self-evaluation. CTSTF work: survey review. Chatted with Scott about PharmAdMIT 2009 issues—he needs to talk to Chris F. Helped student CL with setting up LDAP in Entourage. Name changes followup with Jina. Updated the master student list with a number of changes. Sent a recommendation regarding web hosting for RCOs and class websites within the School to Susie. Coded a redesign of our homepage section that lists our degree offerings and sent it to Susie. Noticed for the first time that the CCSC website has moved to clin pharm's website and that the news on its homepage is from 2006. Graduation web page edits for Cindy. Created a link to Sierra A's new page that describes the OSL web hosting offering to RCOs. Requested guidance from Susie on which photo of Mary Anne to use for the home page lead to the update from the dean. Followup with student DL about problems opening PDF files in Moodle. Dinner at home with Patrick: pesto ravioli with yellow bell peppers in marinara, dinner roll, olive oil with balsamic vinegar. Watched Episode 7 of Heroes on Netflix DVD. Troubleshot sound skipping in VMware Fusion 2.0 while running MixMeister 3.04. Possibly narrowed the problem down to the VM using 2 processors; when I switched to 1 it seemed to resolve the problem. I also turned off autoprotect. Reconfigured Mozy. Defragged Vista. Stretches. Weight training: superslow shrug, superslow dumbbell curl. Stretches. Late meal: lowfat yogurt, chunky soup, hot nonfat milk. We learned today that Patrick's uncle Tommy, Mom Ryan's brother, passed away in his nursing home in Louisiana. The funeral and memorial service is now planned for Sunday, but unfortunately Mom Ryan cannot attend due to recent surgery on both her legs.
Thu Sep 25, 2008
Woke too early, got up and troubleshot the Vista VM, which was behaving strangely. For example, when I selected Windows+E to open a new Explorer window, the Explorer window would not open and instead the Acrobat 8.1.2 installer would start. And really slow behavior in all operations. I reverted to an earlier VMware Fusion snapshot, turned off System Restore, turned off indexing for c:, took a new snapshot, scheduled a disk check. While turning off indexing for c:, I got weird error messages about not having permissions to change files such as c:\boot\memtest.exe and c:\boot\cs-cz\bootmgr.exe.mui. I immediately suspected a virus but could not find anything on the web to confirm this suspicion, so I think it's okay. Disk check completed, I took a new snapshot. Shut down Vista. Fusion settings: turned on printers, turned off 3D graphics, set 1 cpu instead of 2, left memory at 768 MB and network at bridged. Adjusted system for best performance. Vista VM now seems a lot better than before. To work. Small web updates: add preview sessions to /pharmd/events, reset orientation pages. Chatted with Susie about management stuff. Requested permission from Lisa C to switch dns for the BTS domain to our server. Created a new staging server for BTS. Lunch: shrimp louie wrap with spinach tortilla from the cafeteria. Pushed live the web page that tells faculty and staff how to make a podcast. Updated the faculty page to restore contact info links—had to do this manually since there is no API or web service to hook into. Helped several students today: bsod, Flickr. Lots of Blogger template work. Sent a reminder to myself that I need to revamp the web developer section of our website. There's lots of old content there and we need new information about how to build a website. Sent Joel a bunch of links to different admissions acceptance letters. Dinner at home with Patrick: grilled salmon with hoisin garlic glaze, steamed peas, dinner roll, herbed olive oil. Watched Heroes Episodes 8 and 9 on Netflix DVD with Patrick.
Fri Sep 26, 2008
Stretches. Running in place (5:00). Weight training: advanced plank (2:30), advanced one-legged plank (1:00), superslow dumbbell fly, crunch, superslow overhead tricep kickback. Watched Heroes Season 1 Episode 10 on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Had trouble activating Windows Vista, kept getting errors 0x800705b4 and 0xc004f025 even though I was already logged in with an administrator account. Fixed it this way: Select Start > All Programs > Accessories. Right-click Command Prompt. Select Run as administrator. At the command prompt, enter slmgr.vbs -ipk [INSERT PRODUCT KEY HERE] then enter slmgr.vbs -ato. Breakfast: can't recall. Blogger template work all day. Lunch: can't recall. Dinner: can't recall. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, crunch, superslow one-arm dumbbell row, leg lift, side leg lift, reverse leg lift. Stretches. Late meal: nonfat yogurt, chunky soup, hot nonfat milk. Installed Plex, which is like Front Row but different. It's still zero-point-something, so of course it crashed within a few minutes of using it, but I had expected that. Looking forward to the stable release. I emailed the following information from home to work today: alias reindexspotlight='sudo mdutil -E /'
Sat Sep 27, 2008
Began coding a new page for Danny's website that enables people to do self-service subscribes and unsubscribes on their mailing list. I wanted to try out a sliding panels feature similar to that seen on Panic's website for Coda, and I found a good version that uses jQuery. Took just a few hours to implement and perfect—works great! Had trouble setting up tectite's formmail script, got internal server error (500) after visiting the script's url with ?testalert=1 tacked on at the end. Also, in the error log, I found "File does not exist: /home/recharge/public_html/500.shtml" and "Premature end of script headers: /home/recharge/public_html/formmail.php" and 'SoftException in Application.cpp:238: File "/home/recharge/public_html/formmail.php" is writeable by group'. It took me a long time to figure out that this was a permissions problem. I had 755 on the formmail.php file—this needed to be 644 instead. Met Nate at A Different Light bookstore, got drinks at Men's Room while waiting for psychobauble to get his haircut at the place above the Thai restaurant at 19th and Castro. The Castro was crowded with people out celebrating Folsom Street Fair weekend. Dinner in the Castro with psychobauble, Nate, Patrick. We ate at that Thai restaurant at 19th and Castro. Worked on Danny's website. Late meal: leftovers, lemon yogurt. To bed very late.
Sun Sep 28, 2008
Ted and Emery held their excellent and amazing Folsom Street Fair party. Words cannot describe it. Late meal: mung bean noodles with mushrooms, tofu, bean sprouts, basil, jumbo shrimp.
Mon Sep 29, 2008
Vacation day. Slept in. Processed photos. Did some catching up on journaling but haven't posted a lot of entries live yet. I have about a month of incomplete entries saved up. Journal entry repair. Processed photos. Lunch at home with Patrick: leftovers for me, egg scramble for Patrick. Journal entry repair. Processed photos. Dinner at home with Patrick: grilled ahi tuna, steamed zucchini, homemade organic mashed potatoes. Watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch on DVD (borrowed from psychobauble and Nate) with Patrick. Late today I noticed that the Mozy icon didn't appear in the top right of my iMac's screen, so I logged out and logged back in to OS X to see if that would fix it and an error message appeared: "Corrupt configuration file—Unfortunately, it appears that Mozy's configuration file has been corrupted. We're very sorry, but to fix the problem, you will need to reconfigure Mozy. If this happens again, please let us know by sending an email to macsupport@mozy.com and attaching Mozy's log file (/Library/Logs/Mozy.log). Thank you. (OK)" I clicked OK but Mozy did not appear to start. I removed 3 files beginning with com.mozy from my Library/Preferences folder in my home folder, then restarted Mozy—same error. Downloaded and installed Mozy 1.1.0.5. It appeared to install successfully. When I launched it, I received an error: "The application Mozy quit unexpectedly. Mac OS X and other applications are not affected. Click Relaunch to launch the application again. Click Report to see more details or send a report to Apple. (Ignore) (Report...) (Relaunch)"
Tue Sep 30, 2008
Stretches. Weight training: superslow front raise. Stretches. Usual granola breakfast. Installed Firefox 3.0.3 at work. SCWG meeting. Realized today that Entourage 2008 was not showing me any of my incoming messages since Wed Sep 24. I simply thought things were pretty quiet the past few days. It was only when I briefly checked email from home (also Entourage 2008) that I noticed I had over 100 unread messages in my inbox. I resolved this problem by right-clicking Inbox, selecting Folder Properties, then selecting Empty to empty the cache. Staff meeting. Impromptu 1-on-1 with Eric D. Email catchup. Management activities. Small web edits: restored how we use Flickr link on our homepage—my goof, grad fairs edit for Joel. Accounts provisioning followup for student GL. Gathered account transition problems data for Rob S. Delivered a sample presentation to Jilian. Lunch: chicken club wrap with spinach tortilla, no bacon from the cafeteria. Web updates for Cindy. Cardkey work. Door lock installation followup with Brian H and (the other) Frank F. Followup on email setup for student GL. More data gathering for Rob S. Password help for student JE. Followup on LDAP config in Entourage 2004 for student CL. Followup with Jim S about reCAPTCHA and tectite formmail. Learned about Banksy the graffiti artist because Joel mentioned his name at our staff meeting. 1-on-1 with Cindy. Lots of email catchup. To home. Wow, Yahoo owns Babelfish now—I hadn't heard. Dinner at home with Patrick: filei with mushroom parsley tomato sauce, bread and olive oil with balsamic vinegar. To resolve the problem when you receive this error message: "Internal Server Error. The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@[domain].com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Apache/1.3.39 Server at [domain].com Port 80" when installing tectite's formmail script, ensure that permissions on the formmail php file are set to 644. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, superslow shrug, advanced plank (2:00), advanced one-legged plank (1:00 each leg). Stretches. Processed and uploaded photos to Flickr. Sometime today we celebrated Scott's birthday, but I can't recall what time we did that.