April 2009

Summary: Aunt Carol visits the Bay Area; Easter dinner at Danny, Drew, and Phil's

Dates on this page

Wed Apr 1, 2009

Woke early. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Signed up with hunch.com, started teaching it about me. It feels kind of Skynet. Continued online sexual harrassment training, which is required every 2 years of all supervisors at UCSF. Began watching Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero presentation video. Web edits related to email after graduation for Devi V and Marie P. Helped student KT with mailbox too full. Reviewed student AP's photos from India. Backed up web data to portable hard disk drive. Potstickers lunch at home with Patrick. Prepped the rebuild of the student directory on the web. Created new bts subsite accounts for cdds and acdrs. Troubleshot broken web disk (webdav) with help from ServInt, found a solution. Continued prepping the rebuild of the student directory on the web. Snack: tortilla chips, mild salsa. Today I found this data on my hard drive in a file called "windows nt stuff that i forget.txt":

To access an IPC$ volume on NT from win 95 or win 98:

  1. on the NT machine, find the drive or folder you want to share, then right-click it and choose Properties.
  2. choose the Sharing tab.
  3. click New Share.
  4. name the share anything (like the name of the drive letter).
  5. click Permissions.
  6. remove Everyone.
  7. add Users.
  8. now try accessing the NT volume from windows 95 or windows 98 and it should work.

Dinner at home with Patrick: grilled salmon, boiled beets, three-seed bread, Smart Balance Light. Watched Slumdog Millionaire (2008) on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Before the film I looked it up on imdb—yes, Slumdog Millionaire was released on DVD only yesterday. How does Netflix do that? Go Netflix!

Thu Apr 2, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Sent Outlook tip #8 to Shirin. Confirmed sticky pads installation for Eric D's new network box—it looks good, so he'll start moving today. Helped Shiring with a question about Microsoft Word. Minor web updates: graduation email, computer requirements. Snack: leftover sandwich from a meeting. Swept the BTS website for validation errors, cleaned a few up, left the home page for Eric D. Minor web edit for Carol: pharm sci resources. Lunch: junior cheddar burger from the cafeteria. Web edits: school of medicine electives. Listserv management. BTS website: coded lab links, sent to Susie for review. Helped student KY with a computer question about copying and pasting from a terminal-based application. Revised the map we'll hand out at graduation. Late afternoon meal: leftover sandwich from a meeting. Skipped dinner since I had a sandwich late at work. Researched hard drive enclosures.

Fri Apr 3, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Calendar management. BTS website: small edits for Susie. Created website backup data (external). Backed up website data to 2.5-inch hard drive. Helped student AS: laptop troubles consultation. Chatted with Susie about the BTS website—we need to redo the faculty and research pages to accommodate new information. Listserv management. Shared our html email template and process with David K at the request of Mike H in the school of nursing. ICRD work for Rodney. Prepared migrations for ACDRS and CDDS: set up new accounts, set up linkchecking, migrated files, resolved migration problems, launched linkchecking, prepared and delivered account handoff documents for ACDRS. Prepared, submitted for Susie's review, and announced forthcoming BTS website heads up to web workers. Calendar management. Followup for new rxforchange migration. Helped student PN with mailbox too full. Prepared handoff documents for CDDS. Calendar management. Dinner at home with Patrick: rigatoni stuffed with spinach, feta, and artichoke in marinara sauce, 2 kinds of bread, Smart Balance Light, hot water. Worked on Danny's website: edited the mailing list signature, reviewed sfgate's BayWatch—I mean BayList. Watched on Netflix instant watch a cooking show—Made in Spain, season 1, "Basque Country: Earth, Wine and Fire" which at times we laughed at and thought overall was just okay.

Sat Apr 4, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Uploaded an old party invitation to Flickr. Cut my hair. Brunch with Patrick, psychobauble, and Nate at Park Chow. As I arrived, I recognized someone familiar sitting out in front, and Patrick reminded me who it was but he couldn't remember his name. The guy later posted a missed connection on craigslist which Patrick saw and to which I responded. His name turned out to be Ben W. Patrick took a nap. I picked up a chocolate and mocha custard cake at Ambrosia Bakery. I visited the Honmas, Dex and Aunt Carol joined us for dinner.

Sun Apr 5, 2009

Stretches. Patrick got home from martial arts practice. Weight training: shrug, superslow concentration curl. Stretches. Patrick bought groceries for dinner tonight. Brunch at home by myself: deli sandwich. Recently psychobauble and I got CrashPlan working. The initial experience was not very good. Here are the messages I left in their support wiki:

  1. Frank Farm, 2009/04/04 17:50: I am trying to back up from my computer (Mac OS 10.5.6) to my friend's computer. The connection status says "connected for 4 hours" but the last backup line says "Initial backup not complete"—what do I do now? Thanks!
  2. Frank Farm, 2009/04/04 17:52: I forgot to mention that the Backup tab says "destination unavailable—not scheduled to run, to do: 1,294 files (33.2 MB), completed: 0 files (0 MB)" and my friend says he opened port 4242 already.
  3. Frank Farm, 2009/04/05 02:18: My friend changed some settings (backup time was 00:00 to 06:00 and he changed it to anytime, also changed location from a NAS drive to his primary hard drive) and we eventually got it working, but I'd like to mention that it was not a very good first experience for us. The user interface is not very friendly and not easy to figure out. I kept looking for a button that would enable me to manually restart or reattempt the backup but I think it's supposed to be automatic so that's why one doesn't exist, but it's very annoying to want to make it start explicitly and you can't. I think it would be helpful for me to be able to see more feedback about what's happening on my friend's side. e.g., "Your friend has accepted your invitation but has not yet specified a location for your backup." or "Your friend has accepted your invitation and has specified a location for your backup but has restricted backups to occur between midnight and 6:00 AM—the next backup attempt will occur automatically at midnight tonight." or "Your friend needs to open port 4242—see [URL] for instructions on how to do this for his or her platform." This feedback doesn't have to be in sentence structure, but any more information than you are providing now would be very helpful.

Also, JCB received 2 error messages from CrashPlan that he could not figure out: "Not ready for backup from [computername]. Reason: The destination is not available." and "Not ready for backup from [computername]. Reason: The backup location is not accessible." He was backing up his computer to a local external hard drive which is always on and always attached, so these error messages didn't make sense to us. However, the CrashPlan history later indicated that backups were indeed taking place, and the error messages did not recur, so I told him it sounded like it was working and that he just needed to check by attempting to restore a few files to a new folder. CrashPlan's user interface is really way more complicated than it needs to be. I'm thinking of mocking up a new proposed design in Photoshop and posting it to my website. So far, CrashPlan is not as easy to use as I had hoped, but it's still my current recommendation for offsite backup. Hopefully this quirkiness can be ironed out so that it's easier for computer novices to use. More weight training: superslow lateral raise, superslow dumbbell fly. Sunbathed in the backyard. Dinner at home with Danny, Drew, Phil, psychobauble, Nate, Thong B, Thomas G, JCB, Patrick. Patrick cooked shrimp and artichoke bisque, nonspicy jambalaya. Dessert: banana cream pie. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press.

Mon Apr 6, 2009

Woke late. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Bought a baguette on the way to work. Prepared and completed rxforchange site handoff info to Scott N (which is different than our former temp Scott N). Lunch: leftover shrimp and artichoke bisque, leftover jambalaya. Shuttle to Laurel Heights. 1-on-1 with Susie. Web team meeting. Shuttle to Parnassus. Helped JWG swap out a bad hard drive from his MacBook. Did some catching up with email. Patrick picked me up from work. Installed an old 120 GB hard drive into a red NexStar 3 enclosure. The process was mostly straightforward except that how you were supposed to plug in the LED connector and cable was completely ambiguous. I guessed correctly, it seems. Stretches. Weight training: crunch.

Tue Apr 7, 2009

Stretches. Weight training: various lower body. Stretches. Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Why did Apple decide to make the keyboard shortcut for closing a window (Command+W) in such close proximity to the keyboard shortcut for closing an application (Command+Q)? That seems like a rather unwise decision to me. To work. JWG's laptop. First symptoms: blinking folder with question mark, MacBook purchased January 2007. Apple told him his hard drive was bad. I told him what to buy from Central Computer. He brought it into the office. I removed the old hard drive, inserted the new one. Upon startup using OS 10.4.10 install disc, the new hard drive was not detected but the dvd in the dvd drive was. Using FireWire target disk mode, same thing—the DVD will mount, but the hard drive does not appear. I used a SATA-to-USB adapter to confirm that the old hard drive was bad—not only would it not mount, but it physically made clicking and whirring sounds to indicate that it was damaged. I removed the new hard drive and attached it to the SATA-to-USB adapter then mounted it to my Mac Pro—it mounts successfully. I formatted it as Mac OS (Journaled), reinstalled it. Same problem—OS X install runs, but Disk Utility does not see the new drive (and does see the dvd). Probably needs a new motherboard. Staff meeting: I got a $25 Macy's gift card from Sharon S and Mike W as a thank you for helping out clin pharm in a tight spot with ICRD work. Did some catching up on email—40 messages in my inbox. More troubleshooting JWG's laptop hard drive problem. With Eric D's computer philosophy help, I discovered that the problem was caused by some rubbery-looking thing which had come loose from the sidewall of the drive bay and was scrunched at the back end of the bay. To fix it, I'll have to take the laptop case apart, but once that's done it should be smooth sailing. For a few minutes there Joel was all set to throw this laptop in the trash and buy a brand new one. BTS website: recoded the research pages to include pretty tables generated from a pseudodatabase. Prepared a final BTS website to do list. To home. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers. Went shopping.

Wed Apr 8, 2009

Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell row, shrug, superslow dumbbell press (left side only). rxforchange followup with Scott N. Reallocated space in Mozy Pro for Chris C. Printed Eric D's timesheet because his printer wasn't set up yet in his new space. I thought I was going to have to take JWG's laptop apart in order to fix it, but Eric D fixed it by removing the rubber strip with a plastic butter knife and then somehow reinserting it. I didn't watch—I was too busy. Prepared and submitted the RFO for the wildcard SSL certificate for our host. Continued coding faculty and research tables for the BTS website. Quick web fix for Cindy. Helped student MM with emailing all students. Helped Carol with error message "Your message has been delayed." Helped Devi with a question about photo sharing and blogging. Notified Valerie S about our MCCA renewal request. UCSF Communicators Network online discussion. Calendar management. More BTS work. Facebook followup with Devi. Exported an image from Photoshop for Susie. Web hosting management. Followup with student AP about proposed blog and photos. Met 1-on-1 with Susie: BTS meeting prep, BTS work. Calendar management: deleted and recreated the web team meeting appointments because they weren't showing up properly on Eric D's calendar. Left work very late—8:00 PM. Dinner at New Sandy's. Home.

Thu Apr 9, 2009

While reading sfgate.com today in an article called Pull Out And Pray (Bristol Palin still practices abstinence, while the rest of us softly weep) by Violet Blue, I found an error—the spelling of a talk show host named "Jerry Spinger." Spelling errors are common in sfgate.com, aka The San Francisco Chronicle, sometimes even on the home page. (Patrick and I noticed one on the sfgate.com home page the other day, and I didn't bother to record it.) Cardio warm-up: 6 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. DAL phone meeting. Chatted with Jeffery L. Granted David H permission to use one of my photos for a neighborhood newsletter. Checked in with JWG regarding the entering students mailing list. Checked in with DLS to confirm that Shirin was on our billing. Helped student GL with a question about data recovery. (We don't provide that service.) SSL certificate ordering trouble. Will resolve tomorrow. Followup with JWG about "your message has been delayed" errors. Sent Shirin Outlook Tip #9. Helped 2 drop-in students today. One needed help with using VPN over UCSFnet wireless on a cellphone, and the problem was easily solved (use the VPN address bar to enter URLs, not the browser address bar). The other needed help activating ActiveSync and had everything configured correctly but neglected to submit the ActiveSync activation request. We did that and the student's email address was not found in the system. I called it in to OAAIS and talked with Jonny who found a spelling error in the address in Remedy. Once he fixed that, the request submitted successfully—problem solved. To home. BTS web edits and followup. Dinner at home with Patrick: hoisin cashew chicken. Ran out of disk space on the iMac, so I deleted a bunch of software installers—I can probably always download the latest versions when I want. Watched Wallace & Gromit in Three Amazing Adventures "A Grand Day Out" and "A Close Shave" on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Worked more of a solution for being out of disk space on the iMac. Cardio warm-up: 15 minutes. Late snack: leftovers. Hid presents for Patrick to find in the morning.

Fri Apr 10, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. SSL certificate ordering followup with TrustWave. Lots of BTS website work. Took photos of faculty member Tony H for Lisa C. Helped student PE with ID card problems. Lots of BTS website work. Agreed that Rodney and I would pilot Mark B's phase 2 of the Exchange 2007 migration. Helped student ML with Outlook settings problem of March 17. Followup with SFS about computer requirements. Lots of entering students and orientation pages changes for Cindy, Shirin, and JWG. Followup with Sue M about Moodle/CLE. More BTS website work. Lunch: leftovers. More BTS website work. More entering students and orientation pages work. Helped Eric V with the list of listservs. Lots of SSL certificate ordering followup with TrustWave. Facebook group page and fan page work for Devi. Followup with student SY about UCSF email folder names appearing as question marks or Chinese characters. Followup with Jann F about MyAccess application integration. Chatted online with quantum13. Made live the final computer requirements for fall 2009, notified SCWG. Met with Susie, then both of us impromptuly with Eric D: BTS site review. More BTS website work. More SSL certificate ordering followup with TrustWave. Dinner at home with Patrick: indian delivery. Watched Wallace & Gromit in Three Amazing Adventures "The Wrong Trousers" on Netflix DVD with Patrick. I know impromptuly is not a word, but I am encouraging its use. Currently there are only 270 results when searching on impromptuly. In contrast, there is only one result for impromptuarily, which actually was my initial choice instead of impromptuly: a book published in 1876 by James Torrington S. Lidstone. At Patrick's request, we didn't do anything terribly special tonight, but he did receive and open a lot of presents.

Sat Apr 11, 2009

To resolve the problem of running out of disk space on the iMac, I temporarily moved all my locally stored photos from my Pictures folder to an external hard drive that isn't on or connected all the time. As photos are something that I take, process, and then, for the most part, never modify again, it's probably sufficient to do this on a permanent basis, but the only question is how to integrate that into an offsite backup. Not all the photos in my Pictures folder are stored in the cloud (i.e., with Flickr), and I definitely want an offsite backup for this. Storage space issues will be resolved when Patrick gets his new iMac, I guess, and I'll probably just move them back and let CrashPlan back them up. There will be quite a bit of shifting around of data and processes as we'll be getting essentially an overhaul to all our local computing. Our several recent computer hardware purchases have actually triggered my credit card's fraud warning, which subsequently blocked the purchase of the iMac. I called on Thursday and thought I got it resolved, but when I asked Apple to resubmit the charge they said it was again denied. I called the credit card company again last night and they said (again) in an Indian accent that they were so sorry the block is cleared now. Part of the problem with a folksonomy is that it is, for example, really hard to find a photo of a sandy eggo on Flickr. (Try it!) Google Image Search succeeded—it was result #1, which appears to be a sandcastle built to look like a waffle. Usual oatmeal breakfast. House chores. Computer equipment setup. Began setting up shelves for speakers in Patrick's home office. Patrick took a nap. Late afternoon meal: leftovers. Watched Let the Right One In (2008) on DVD borrowed from Sam. This film has a pacing that is probably difficult for American viewers, but we found it to be a worthwhile investment of our time. It has elements of horror, suspense, gore, and mystery, but none of them dominate the story. It's mostly a drama, but this film's beauty lies in the quiet confidence of the story, something that is missing from many Hollywood films. My ad quote: Hauntingly beautiful.

Sun Apr 12, 2009

CrashPlan backup to 1.5-TB hard drive succeeded, so I unplugged it. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Uploaded photos to Flickr. Worked on Tina's website. Lunch at home with Patrick. Patrick had Joe's Os, leftover pizza. I had small sandwiches, tortilla chips, cow tamale. Shower. Nap. Walked with Patrick around Dolores Park and the Castro. Chatted briefly in line with Kenny at Starbucks. Got sleepy, took a nap at his mom's. The three of us went to Danny, Drew, and Phil's. Phil prepared a delicious Easter dinner. Also attending: psychobauble, Nate, Ludwig, Kevin B, Romy, Nam, Mark, Sandip. Home. Signed up with web hosting at Bluehost. I intend to migrate frankfarm.org from the old Mac Mini I have to Bluehost, so there might be downtime in a day or so for about a day or so. Theoretically, I should be able to save money by moving all my websites and domain registrations to Bluehost. Currently everything is with 5dollarhosting and dotster. More talking on the phone with the credit card company—more problems with early fraud warning blocks. Realized today that Mike Skallas' ad blocking hosts file is officially kaput—the everythingisnt.com domain is no longer registered. The last update of his hosts file was February 13, 2007. I found something similar called the MVPS hosts file on a page called Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File, and it says the last update was March 15, 2009, so it looks like it's current. Installed the hosts file into my Windows Vista VM in Fusion, disabled DNS Client as instructed, all seems well. Late snack: cow tamale.

Mon Apr 13, 2009

Warmup cardio: 15 minutes. Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Chatted briefly with Rebecca W on the way to work. Helped student CY with suspicious email messages. Helped student CT with a question about VPN. Answered student EG's question about whether a job posting she received was legitimately from us (answer: yes). Facebook fan page and group page work for Devi V and Marie P. Checked in with Jamie K about access to her website. Web edits for SCWG: updated list of accounts and VPN pages. More Facebook work. Resolved disk quota and permissions problems on the bts account and new Ahituv website for Karl M, propagated solution to all other accounts on bts. Submitted redirect request to PubAff for acdrs for Jaime K. More BTS website work. Checked in with Cindy—we agree to join the computer energy savings program that DLS is deploying. Edited a portion of a map provided to us by the Golden Gate Club. It showed areas that you can park in green and areas that you cannot park in red, but this seemed to me an obvious problem for people who are red-green colorblind. Also, it was probably ambiguous if you printed to a black-and-white printer. I edited the map in Adobe Illustrator to use patterns made of black and white only: checkers for where you can park, horizontal stripes for where you cannot park, and vertical stripes for disabled parking. Created a legend, updated the link in InDesign, printed a draft for Cindy to review. Followup with student SY: OAAIS (Mark B) had not yet contact the student regarding Outlook Web Access folder names appearing as question marks or as Chinese characters. Lunch: junior burger, onion rings, POG juice from the cafeteria. Listserv management. I learned today that in Facebook groups officers have no special powers or responsibilities—their name appears prominently, that's all. More Facebook work. More BTS website work. Agreed to help Sue A and Barbara S with another ACPE project coming up soon. Added image credits for a certain photo of Mary Anne. Weeded old, unneeded files. More BTS website work. More Facebook work. Followup with PubAff on our ACDRS redirect request, asking when we can expect it to be in place. Answered a question for student RC about Lexi-Comp compatibility with iPhone. (Answer: not. Try Epocrates instead.) More BTS website work. More Facebook work. Patrick picked me up in the car. Dinner at Assab with psychobauble, Nate, and Patrick. Food is delicious, served beautifully on a giant platter. Service is a little slow, but not like in Paris. Home. Installed some shelfettes in Patrick's office. Troubleshooting SSH access with Bluehost. They say today that they cannot find the request I submitted yesterday. We determine that their upload form is broken somehow and find an alternate route. After 36 minutes of online chat, they grant me SSH access. I rsync the files, give it a once-over, change DNS. Now we wait. Okay, it's done. I ran into the same problem that (I think) psychobauble did when he migrated his site: the folder called public_html in my home folder got changed to 775 but it needs to be 755 or else you get Error 500: Internal Server Error. All done migrating frankfarm.org. Woo!

Tue Apr 14, 2009

Cardio warmup: 17 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Followup with Jaime K about the redirect for ACDRS. CDDS followup. BTS followup. UCSF comm followup. BTS work: new image for cellular and molecular engineering section. TrustWave followup. Redirected a message to JWG. A/V setup inquiry with Margaret A. Unable to reset password for Eric D, submitted a ticket to OAAIS. BTS work. SCWG: Re-reviewed Mark B's migration pilot message. 1-on-1 with Eric D. Writing this 3 days later, I can't remember what I had for lunch this day. After-work snack: 2 veggie spring rolls from Panda Express. My fortune: Stick to the basics. Be weary of novelties. To home. Dinner at home with Patrick: breaded fish fillets, mushroom risotto, peas. Finished watching Wallace & Gromit in Three Amazing Adventures "Cracking Contraptions" on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Stretches.

Wed Apr 15, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Laundry. Telecommute day. Started working. Reviewed student AP's India Eye Camps story, created a publication plan. Troubleshot mail sending problems in Entourage 2008 from off campus, spoke with Richmark who said I should submit a ticket, submitted a very long problem report to OAAIS. Lunch: Joe's Os, tortilla chips, fig newtons, Aunt Carol's granola snack bar. Posted news to the current students page about the forthcoming 1 GB mail storage space upgrade. Students currently receive 100 MB of mail storage space, and the upgrade will give them each 1 GB of storage. Initiated an A/V rental and setup inquiry with Lisa S. Added Lisa C to BTS analytics reports. SCWG work: reviewed the Exchange migration message to students for Rebecca N. Listserv work for Cindy. Added Ingrid K to BTS analytics reports. Snack: shared popcorn with Patrick. Faculty and staff graduation form work. Stopped working. Furniture maintenance. Dinner at home with Patrick: chicken and broccoli biryani, tandoori naan. Watched The Simpsons "Gone Maggie Gone" on Hulu with Patrick. Unpacked the new Airport Extreme, leashed a small speaker to the wall (earthquake safety), unpacked the new UPS for Patrick.

Thu Apr 16, 2009

Cardio warmup: 15 minutes. Weight training: various lower body. Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Patrick's new computer has arrived! Conference call. 1-on-1 special meeting with Eric D. Answered Eric V's question—is the WarnMe email message he received legitimate? Yes. UCSF announced today an emergency warning system called WarnMe. I added a link to it on the current students page. Fixed 3 broken links reported by Don K. Discovered very quickly that Entourage 2008 was no longer connecting to the server. Switched over to Outlook 2007 in Vista, but it was still very disorienting, and I felt very unproductive. BTS handoff meeting with Ingrid K, Darius M, Lisa C, Maria F. Lunch part 1 of 2 from the cafeteria: a slice of canadian bacon pizza—ate it in about 5 minutes. Cindy drove me, Carol, and JWG to the Palace of Fine Arts for a walkthrough of our site for the graduation ceremony coming up in 2 weeks. The seating in the theatre has rows of about 80 seats with no aisles—the only theatres I can think of like this are the Abe Lincoln theatre at Disneyland and (I think) the IMAX theatre in the Metreon. Fortunately the space between the rows is more generous than in our last graduation ceremony venue—the Nob Hill Masonic Center. We'll need to do a fair amount of setup work with chairs and tables which POFA is not providing. Lunch part 2 of 2 from the cafeteria: chicken burger. Helped Kim B track down the missing wireless connection instructions. Listserv work for Cindy. Helped Louis G with a mass email problem. BTS work: began adding faculty headshots. Followup with a linkcheck loop problem that occurs when visiting http://pub.ucsf.edu/cnba/Center/index.php but Kirk F says they don't maintain the site and they don't know who owns it. This problem is causing my linkcheck reports to generate really huge files. Grr. I will need to find a workaround. More internship email followup: requested a new email account from OAAIS. Analytics followup with Ingrid K—all is well. I learned today that Vista's "Run as..." command runs only as local admin unless you make a change to the registry. Once I changed that, I was able to run mmc the way I need to. More BTS faculty headshots. Dinner at home with Patrick: pig chops, steamed asparagus, rice. Began 7-pass-erasing the 2005 Mac Mini. Began new iMac setup for Patrick. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly, various other upper body. Stretches. Late meal: high fiber V8, apricot and mango lowfat yogurt, cow tamale, hot nonfat milk, hot water. More setup for Patrick's computer: migrated data, installed apps, moved it into place.

Fri Apr 17, 2009

Processed photos, uploaded them to Flickr. Published a blog for student AP. Ordered A/V for the forthcoming student awards dinner. POFA to GGC map. Picked up 2 copies of O'Reilly Drupal books from Sue A. BTS faculty photo and other work.

Sat Apr 18, 2009

Stretches. Weight training: superslow leg lift, superslow kneeling kickback, crunch. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Mom and dad visit. We have dim sum at Yet Wah, then shop along Clement Street before they dropped me off at home. I install Time Machine for Patrick using one of our 1.5-TB drives. I get the UPS recognized by OS X by installing the USB cable. APC still ships the same software that they did in 2005—their cdrom is going directly in the recycle bin—why bother? especially with Mac. Broke down and disposed of lots of cardboard boxes. Archived documents. Recorded serial numbers. Nap. Went to Anthony and Alyssa's going away party, stayed for only a short while because of the cats—by the time I got home my nose had started to run.

Sun Apr 19, 2009

California Academy of Sciences with psychobauble, Nate, and Patrick. The UCSF discount tickets seem to let us in before general admission—good to know. Patrick went home early due to allergy complications. The planetarium show is pretty amazing. We ate a late lunch at the elegant Moss Room. Our booth's table was a little too high. We started with pita and hummus. psychobauble and I each had roast chicken on panzanella, Nate had yellowtail. Dessert: one order of sorbets (coconut and lime). Walked to 9th and Irving. We split up—Nate to Starbuck's and psychobauble and I tried to get a cold drink at Jamba Juice, but the line at JJ was long and not moving and we were still outside the door in the sun, so we went back to Starbuck's, joined Nate in line, and got drinks there. I was going to pick up some bread at Arizmendi, but they were closed. Bus to home. No time for a nap. Patrick and I ate leftover dim sum. April T-Dance at Fresh at Ruby Skye. More crowded this time compared with last month. DJ is Joe Hickerson. He played a lot of anthems, so I didn't enjoy it as much. Still had fun, though, chatted mostly with Adrian, Bucy, and BradRic. Late meal with Patrick and Jonathan G at Katana-Ya (415-771-1280, 430 Geary Street, San Francisco, California, USA).

Mon Apr 20, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Created lighting gobo samples in InDesign for Cindy. cdrom building and production work for Barbara S. Transferred the final lighting gobo choice to Illustrator, sent it to Cindy for delivery. BTS work: faculty page. Web team meeting with Eric D and Susie L. Decided I needed to access my home clipart collection to finish some BTS work, so I went home a little early. I'm not used to traveling during rush hour—it seems like it took 4 times as long getting home. At home I did a bit of work looking through clipart but not finding what I needed and instead decided to use elements from a number of different picture fonts from my home font collection. Did some thinking about our newly set up home network—there's a smarter way to reconfigure it, but it will be an hour of work, so not today. Dinner at home with Patrick: steamed fish on a bed of baby bok choy and sliced asian pear. We had planned to watch a video, but the power went out, and after I walked out to the street we realized it was at least 2 whole blocks that had lost power. We lit candles and played UNO—Patrick won the one hand we played.

Tue Apr 21, 2009

Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. BTS website: sent out heads up notice of freeze window and launch to subsite owners, created icons in Photoshop using Adobe fonts (Warning Pi, European Pi, Commercial Pi, and Astrology Pi), put icons on faculty and research pages, did other edits and swept out unused or unnecessary files. Submitted a DNS change request to OAAIS for Scott N. Followed up on redirects with PubAff for Jamie F. Helped student KH with email issues. Helped student ML with email. Helped student MR with email. Lunch: Panda Express to go. My fortune: Treat yourself to something of quality. Finalized and burned progress report cdroms for Barbara S. More BTS followup. Home. Discovered that part of my journal website is not working correctly, investigated the problem. Reconfigured the firewall. Dinner at home with Patrick: dumplings. Home financial work. Reconfigured the home network so that our Airport Extreme acts as a Time Capsule for both computers. This feature is not advertised by Apple. Almost no one should buy the device called Apple Time Capsule—you'll get more for your money if you buy an Airport Extreme and the largest external hard drive you can afford. Plug the external hard drive into the Airport Extreme and you essentially have a Time Capsule, but a lot more space and for a lot less money. Plug a hub into the Airport Extreme, then add multiple external hard drives, and you can have multiple Time Capsules or multiple shared drives available to computers on your wired and wireless network. Cool! Stretches. Weight training: various lower body, superslow tricep kickback. Late meal: high fiber V8, hot nonfat milk, chunky soup.

Wed Apr 22, 2009

Fixed the journal display problem that I discovered yesterday. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. SSL wildcard cert ordering followup—the trail got lost so I'm having to start over. Listserv management. Redirected a SurveyMonkey request. Linkchecking. Resolved an error of mine yesterday (schedule didn't get published like I thought). Linkchecking. In Safari 4 Public Beta (528.16) for Windows, pressing Alt+Spacebar does nothing when it should instead open the menu in the top left corner of the application. (I don't know the name for this menu.) Consequently, it appears that Safari for Windows is not accessible to people who can use only the keyboard to move, resize, minimize, or maximize the browser window. Helped student MR with account logins and passwords. Chatted with Eric D about password management. Helped JCB with a quick invitation fix. Helped Julie N connect with Filezilla. Lunch: cheese pizza slice leftover from a meeting, small soup and small salad from the cafeteria ($2.42). Helped student ML with laptop speed problems (probably due to Google Desktop). Updated entering students calendar and CPJE application page (Star Photo closed). Graduation ceremony edits. Linkchecking. Dentist appointment: routine cleaning, no problems. Bought bread at Arizmendi. To home. Organized old and new software cdroms. Labeled stuff. Dinner at home with Patrick: asparagus risotto with chicken, corn on the cob, hot sourdough bread, Smart Balance Light. Submitted DMCA takedown requests for people who used photos I posted to Flickr outside of the Creative Commons license. (Thanks, Eric H!) Watched George Michael: Twenty Five: Disc 1 songs 1 through 9 on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Those videos are pretty awful. Troubleshot some printer connection issues on the home network, not completely resolved yet.

Thu Apr 23, 2009

Cardio warmup: 15 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Posted updated parking instructions for the graduation ceremony for Cindy, announced. No taxo conference call today but some of us weren't notified. Lunch at Za Zang Korean Noodle (415-447-0655, 2340 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco, California, USA). I wanted to cry after this meal, and not tears of joy—tears of sorrow and regret. I had more than half an hour before a doctor appointment. I checked out the menu. No problem, I'll have chicken noodle soup. That should be really fast. The restaurant is full, but more than half of the diners already have their food. No problem. I'm seated quickly, and the menu is already on the table, but then the server forgets about me. I look over and can see that she's not that busy. She's just waiting near the kitchen window doing nothing. After 6 or 7 minutes of patient waiting, I walk over and tell her my order. Over 15 minutes pass while I read from a book, and I look over in her direction inquiringly. She sees me, sticks her head in the kitchen window (probably telling the kitchen about my order for the first time), then brings a can of Coca-Cola and a straw to me. I didn't order a Coke, I say. She says it's because the order is taking a long time. I politely but firmly refuse the Coke. (Doesn't she know that soda is evil?) She takes it away. 22 minutes after I had placed my order, it arrives. I have 7 minutes to eat, and I'm so hungry that I of course burn my tongue on the hot soup. My server never returns to check or refill my tea. The chicken is low quality—bits of gristle here and there. Ick. The noodles are a little overcooked. The edges of the cabbage where it was sliced look dark, kind of like they are moldy, but it could just be they were sliced hours or days instead of minutes ago. I pay, leaving a normal tip that I'd rather not leave, but I leave it anyway—the price of being able to leave this place early is worth it. I will never eat at this Zazang Korean Noodle again. Doctor appointment. Helped student SP with an email display name request. Collected data on names of folders to be uploaded to the DAL and their filesizes—so far about 2.2 GB. Listserv management: trimmed Kappa Psi. Calendar management. Found a laptop power adapter cable—is it a student's? Maybe... Began looking into implementing a request from Carol for news for the pharm sci pathway. Reviewed new DLS contract. Got remote desktop working again. Logo request for Susie and Kristen B. Installed SimplePie, began experimenting with some code that uses it and realized that the calendar RSS feed provided by Public Affairs has a lot of problematic links and so I reported the problem to them. Spent over half an hour with Mark B getting Entourage 2008 to connect to UCSF Exchange. We got it to receive mail by deleting the account and readding it but specifying firstname.lastname@ucsf.edu rather than canonicalname@pharmacy.ucsf.edu. Organized email. After we finished talking and hung up, I realized that I could not send messages and reported the problem to him. BTS followup with Susie. Dinner at home with Patrick: wagon wheels pasta in marinara sauce, sourdough city bread from Arizmendi, Smart Balance Light. Fixed the color printer and scanner—I had forgotten where to set its IP address. (Answer: Scanners and Cameras control panel.) Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly, superslow curl, superslow concentration curl, superslow shoulder press, crunch. Stretches. Uploaded photos to Flickr.

Fri Apr 24, 2009

On hunch.com, I have earned 1,153 banjos. Hunch is a very solidly designed application, but I still don't see that it is ever going to be very useful to me. Nearly all of the questions I can find in it are not interesting to me. The interesting ones don't have good questions or answers. I suppose it's really only good for people who have a hard time making decisions, and I suppose that's not me. Probably the hardest thing for me to decide is where or what to eat, and I don't know that Hunch is going to be able to help me out with that anytime soon. So far my assessment: disappointing. Sent lots of test emails trying to get Entourage to work again following the recent migration of my UCSF email account to Exchange Server 2007. Reminded Lisa C where our linkcheck reports are. Followup with student KP about a survey. Notified PubAff that we are now promoting the new WarnMe system on our current students page. Submitted a display name and email alias request for student SP. Made live the BTS website that Eric D and I have been working on for the past few months: bts.ucsf.edu. In this case, making a website live meant preparing people for the transition several weeks and also several days ago, setting a 10-minute freeze window where no website edits may take place, backing up the live destination just in case, copying subsite files from the old site to the new site, copying new staged files from the staging site to the new site, checking a few pages to make sure they work properly, running linkcheck scripts on the new site to generate error reports of broken links, implementing and verifying redirects from the old site to the new site, notifying other web developers of the new live site and asking them to update links and department names accordingly, asking Public Affairs and OAAIS to implement appropriate redirects or DNS changes. All went well—just took a while getting the old-site-new-site redirects confirmed—I was led astray a few minutes by browser cache. Reviewed a BTS announcement for Sarah P. Submitted SSL cert RFO (round 2) to Valerie S. Laptop setup for student PG. Listserv maintenance. Graduation page edits for Cindy. Followup with Helene LL about the forthcoming student awards dinner. Asked Valerie S to provide me with updates for the purchasing section. Dinner at Citrus Club (415-387-6366, 1790 Haight Street, San Francisco, California, USA) with Patrick. Stretches. Weight training: various lower body, crunch. Stretches.

Sat Apr 25, 2009

Slept in a bit (8:15 AM). Usual oatmeal breakfast. Cut my hair. Showered. Lunch at home by myself: leftovers from last night. Weight training: various upper body. Another meal: leftovers from last night. Archived documents. Added descriptions and notes to Flickr photos. Leashed Patrick's other speaker to the wall for earthquake safety.

Sun Apr 26, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Yard work in the back yard. Shower. Lunch at home with Patrick: bacon-chicken half sandwich, California roll, baked potato chips, crackers, 2 salt water taffy pieces, orange juice, water. Nap. Dinner at psychobauble and Nate's with psychobauble, Nate, Danny, Drew, Phil, and special guests Kevin F and Kieran. Patrick made a salad, Nate made pizza for 20 people, psychobauble and Danny made rice krispie treats.

Mon Apr 27, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Cardio warmup: 16 minutes. Helped student JN with VPN. Updated pharmacy website with respect to the BTS launch. Online training. Troubleshot redirects (forwards) with ServInt. Handed off BTS website info. Lunch from the cafeteria: ham and swiss on rye, asian noodle salad, $5.66. Presentation animation for Cindy. Student Awards Dinner. Doug (A/V), Greg (lights), and Pablo (on call) assisted with setup. Chatted with Shawn H. To home. Cardio: 30 minutes. Followup on MixMeister purchase.

Tue Apr 28, 2009

SCWG meeting. Laptop troubleshooting for student NN. Staff meeting. 1-on-1 with Cindy. Redirects followup with ServInt and Jamie K. Confirmed MCCA renewal with Valerie S. Online training. Calendar management. Helped Bethany S determine a website owner for a site that's not ours. Dinner at home with Patrick: baked chicken marinated in mango teriyaki sauce, steamed broccoli, steamed rice, hot water. Worked on Danny's website: prep for adding massage therapists.

Wed Apr 29, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Telecommute day. Updated current students news. Helped students PG, CV, and CP with email. Sent announcements to all students about the email migration. Sent an announcement to grads asking them to share their graduation photos on Flickr. Updated the email setup page to link directly to OAAIS web pages for Entourage 2008 and 2004 and also to add links for POP and IMAP. Management activities. Lunch: taco salad from El Burrito Express—yum! Sent Shirin Outlook tip #11. Spent the afternoon with SimplePie and rebuilding /pharmd/events/ which had been broken for the past few months after Public Affairs released their new (beta) calendar application which still does not have working hyperlinks in the code. (I just stripped them out for now.) Folded laundry. Dinner at home with Patrick: meatloaf with mushrooms, mashed potatoes and gravy, steamed carrots. Watched Die Hard with a Vengeance on Netflix DVD with Patrick.

Thu Apr 30, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Taxo meeting. Online supp app meeting with JCB, JWG, Scott E, and Cindy. Installed our 3-year wildcard SSL certificate, but I discovered that it's not doing what we want—there was partly bad advice and partly user interface confusion that led to the error, must chat with TrustWave to resolve. Copied the student awards dinner presentation from the silver MacBook to the server. Lunch: leftovers. Eric D showed me his new HP Mini netbook—neat! He also showed me the Pirate language option in Facebook—hilarious!—and I showed him the language options in Google (e.g., Elmer Fudd, Klingon, Hacker). He had never seen the SNL McIntosh Post-it Notes video clip, so we watched that. Took and archived photos of product packaging: power squids, pqi usb drives. Created a "how to set the laptop up for presentations" instructions document for the white MacBook. Gathered and uploaded image originals for BTS to hand off to Darius and Ingrid. Reported cigarette smoke coming through the air vents. Chatted with TrustWave to resolve the SSL certificate problem. James at TrustWave was very nice and agreed to resolve the problem quickly and easily. Reorganized databases to set up for the supp app project. More SSL cert installation troubleshooting. Helped Joan M attempt with some information she needed. Set up recurring appointments for Eric D and I to investigate reimplementing our site in Drupal. Notified staff about projector setup instructions on both shared laptops. Organized files. Delivered a 4 GB usb drive to Shirin to use for work. Lucia, Shirin, and I rode with Cindy in Cindy's car, picked up JWG, and drove to SoMa for the graduation banquet (dinner) at Terra SF. Eric V and Scott E met us there. Everyone seemed to agree that it was a very pleasant space for our event. The dinner included buffet stations in the theme of "a taste of San Francisco". The Hayes Valley station included beef or portobellini sliders, onion rings and fries. North Beach included petite pizzas, saffron chicken, caesar salad, basil-rocket pesto penne. Inner Mission included jerk pork, island quesadilla, plaintains, chicken sopes, chicken and vegetable tamales. Dessert: petit four assortment. Got home around 10:35 PM. Successfully restored my Windows Vista VMware Fusion VM. A day or two ago I had accidentally quit or closed a window while the VM was starting up, and it corrupted something in a bad way enough that the VM no longer started. My Google searches: "failed to lock the file" and "cannot find a valid peer process to connect to". Rolling back did not fix it. I ended up restoring the VM from Time Machine, which was difficult because I ran out of disk space during the restore, which left me with no original VM for a bit, so it was a little scary for about 20 hours. I had to restart the computer and that somehow freed up disk space and then do the restore from Time Machine again. Now it's working again—hooray! Before the 1.5-TB drive, I didn't have space to back up the entire VM, but now I'm really glad I have the space for it. It's around 180 GB. I don't know why it's so large—I don't store any data files in it. Cardio warmup: 5 minutes. Stretches. Weight training: various upper body. Stretches. Late meal: leftover indian food, hot nonfat milk. To bed late.