Thursday, January 29, 2009
Breakfast: English muffin, Smart Balance Light, Lipton tea. Cardkey followup with Terence BS. Updated Google document: web to do list. Conference call meeting with Susie and a vendor. Midmorning breakfast in the cafeteria. Clinical Pharmacy faculty meeting. Midafternoon snack: toasted raisin bagel and cream cheese from the cafeteria. School of Pharmacy faculty meeting. Pulled the last of our archived data off of Public Affairs' servers, then deleted everything. Dinner at home with Patrick: lasagne, steamed broccoli, starfish roll, hot water. Paid bills. Troubleshot 2 difficult computer problems. The first was that sound stopped working in Windows Vista in VMware Fusion. After trying many things and failing, restarting the VM fixed it. The second difficult problem was that on Patrick's Windows XP computer when he visited his MySpace page the music player that normally appears on his profile page was replaced by a button that said Get Adobe Flash Player. Problem happened even if he reinstalled the latest Flash Player. Problem happened even if AdBlock was disabled. Problem did not happen in IE. Problem happened in Firefox even when logged in as another user. I checked the iMac—it did not exhibit the problem, and the music player appeared as expected. Then I checked VMware Fusion on the iMac. It was running Vista and to my surprise I saw the problem there as well! Reinstalling with the latest Flash Player fixed it for that case. After another hour or so troubleshooting on Patrick's computer I realized that he was using AdBlock and my other computers were using AdBlock Plus. Once I uninstalled AdBlock and installed AdBlock Plus the problem was solved. Weird that simply disabling AdBlock did not make the problem go away—you have to uninstall it completely. So to recap: to resolve this problem, you need to uninstall Adblock, install Adblock Plus instead, and possibly reinstall Flash. Shower. Late snack: leftovers, hot water. Shared my OPML file of Sage feeds with Patrick. He's slowly getting up to speed with RSS.