May 2009 in the Journal of Frank Farm

May 2009

Summary: Ashish P's graduation dinner at Maharani, KaBoom fireworks with Bill M and Kevin E, Ask a Scientist: The Science of Computer Graphics Animation with speakers from PDI/DreamWorks Animation, Carnaval, NightLife at California Academy of Sciences.

Dates on this page

Fri May 1, 2009

Stretches. Weight training: various lower body. Usual oatmeal breakfast. SSL cert installation followup. Announced forthcoming email closure to graduating students. Created new web space for Desai. Swept pharmacy for last occurrences of BPS to resolve following Eric D's sweep. Linkchecking. Filed a reimbursement request with Lucia for computer supplies. Followup on access rights for Desai Lab website. Noticed today that xdrive.com is closed. Resolved a problem with linkcheck results. Archived website data to portable hard drive. Prepped new current student news. Lunch from the cafeteria: roast beef and cheddar sandwich and cottage cheese and fruit. Restored a non-production database that I accidentally deleted while cleaning up databases yesterday. Followup with David K and Tony T about missing content on PubAff sites. Dinner at Naan and Chutney with Patrick: garlic naan, ground beef kabob, tandoori chicken, vegetable biryani.

Sat May 2, 2009

Picked up Scott E. Drove to Walgreen's. Drove to Palace of Fine Arts. Began graduation setup. Scott realized he was given the wrong batteries. Drove Scott to Walgreen's. Drove back to Palace of Fine Arts. Graduation. Eric D and Scott E's radios were a big help. Afterwards there was a lot of food and drink left over from breakfast. Nap. Dinner at Maharani with Ashish P. Shared a table with Kim T, Raj, Ryan, Amish, M...?, (the other) Ashish. The menu: Appetizers: mixed vegetable pakora (onion, potato, spinach and cauliflower fritters), chicken malai kebab (chicken breast in yogurt, garlic, and coriander marinade, roasted in the clay oven). Entrees: kharhi bhindi (spiced okra with onions, ginger, and fennel), malai kofia (potato dumplings in a creamy curry with cashews and turmeric), dal maharani (lentil curry), lamb tikka masala (cubes of lamb in creamed tomato curry with garlic, ginger, and fenugreek), tandoori salmon (wild alaskan salmon with ginger, garlic, coriander, and turmeric), rice pilaf (basmati rice), garlic naan (naan baked with minced garlic). Dessert: gulab jamun (warm bread dumplings in cardamom syrup). Celebratory house drinks: at the bar: mango mojito, pomegranate twist; served: rodney strong cabernet sauvignon '06, nobilo sauvignon blanc '07. During part of the dinner, some watched a popular, live basketball game on a nearby laptop, another watched it on a Blackberry via Slingbox—I had never seen live video on a handheld device before and thought that it's pretty amazing.

Sun May 3, 2009

Woke, showered, napped. Late lunch at home with Patrick: steamed chicken dumplings, Aunt Carol's steamed pork buns. Shopping at Stonestown Galleria with Patrick. Started using Thunderbird again. This time it's version 2.0.0.21. It had saved my account settings from a long time ago when I tried an earlier version of Thunderbird. I have been using Apple Mail, but I am trying something different because I don't like how Apple Mail handles junk mail and it doesn't let me configure it to behave the way I want. Dinner at home with Patrick: panko-encrusted cod, steamed baby bok choy, rice pilaf with almonds. Made graduation news ready on the staging server, sent it to Cindy for review.

Mon May 4, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Training downtown at academyx on Adobe Flash (CS4), day 1 of 2. I laughed again at Apple today because the instructor seemed to think that Apple users could not do a right-click on an Apple mouse. (I think that I've mentioned this before.) Essentially, it was stupid for Apple to create a two-button mouse that looks like a one-button mouse because people new to it look at it, see that it doesn't have 2 buttons, and then never think or believe that it has 2 buttons or that you can right-click. A visual design beauty, but also a faux pas in a marketing and/or usability sense depending on your interpretation. Lunch at R&G Lounge: cashew nut chicken with steamed rice. Dinner at home with Patrick: rotelle in marinara sauce with green bell peppers, hot water. Watched Prince - Live At The Aladdin Las Vegas on Netflix DVD with Patrick (Live from the Aladdin Casino, Las Vegas, December 15, 2002). This video was both fantastic and awful—awful because the video and sound production are very poor quality and fantastic because despite that you can still get a pretty good idea of the mastery of Prince's musicianship. Sound volume and clarity both fade in and out regularly (Prince says something like, "they can't hear me!" at least twice), the video is very often pixelated, worse than NTSC quality, many cheesy video filters and effects are used, the camera angles are poor, the camera occasionally zooms in and out or shakes crazily as though a small child is filming it. Some portions of the video are not live performance at all—it cuts to pans of still imagery while—seemingly—the live sound remains, and so you have to wonder if they did that because none of their amateur camera crew had decent coverage of what was happening at the moment. For several minutes in the second half the lighting goes crazy with a strobe light, and we entered epileptic fits, but other than this the lighting is very good. This film would be perfect for a class about how not to film a concert. All the musicians in the New Power Generation as well as special guests Nikki Costa and Sheila E. perform seemingly to perfection (what you can hear clearly). Overall, this film is disappointing because all these musicians deserved so much better a capture than this, but we still enjoyed it. Prince seems to be in a really good mood in at least the first half, and it's infectious. That alone makes it worth it. Prince's rendition of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" is particularly delicious, and the lighting and post-production effects used during this part really makes it feel like the acid is finally kicking in. A fun 80 minutes, but not worth owning. Installed IE8 at home in Vista.

Tue May 5, 2009

Stretches. Weight training: various lower body. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Computer training downtown at academyx on Adobe Flash (CS4), day 2 of 2. Lunch: Quizno's. Errands in Chinatown. Bought almond cookies for the office from Golden Gate Bakery. No custard tarts: "Come back in 30 minutes." Back to class. After class I returned to Golden Gate Bakery and purchased one custard tart and ate it on the way to the Powell Muni station. Cut my hair. Dinner at home by myself: shrimp and fake crab salad.

Wed May 6, 2009

Cardio warmup: 20 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Investigated details about the clin pharm website being intermittently down for the past month or so. (Not our responsibility.) Early lunch at a Hunan restaurant on Divisadero Street: mushroom beef (cow) lunch special. I don't remember the name of the place, but the portions are larger than what I remember getting at nearby Eliza's, service was pleasant and efficient. On the television was CNBC—they have way too much going on on their news screens: multiple ticker tapes and live stock numbers and text boxes. (What happened to MSNBC? I have not watched TV for such a long time.) My fortunes: You will have many friends when you need them. Avoid unchallenging occupations—they will waste your great talents. You will soon have the opportunity to improve your finances. Doctor appointment. I had about an hour to kill waiting at Laurel Heights, and I brought the office laptop along so that I could possibly be productive, but I knew that getting connected to wireless at Laurel Heights was probably going to be a problem. The 2nd floor courtyard was cool and inviting, but I know my ID card doesn't let me back in, and I didn't even know if there was wireless in that area. I sat outside in the main entrance near the fountain but there was no wireless to which I could connect. An hour wasted. 1-on-1 meeting with Susie. Web team meeting. Showed Eric D how to submit a ticket to OAAIS for DNS changes, talked about "digital signatures." Linkchecking. Dinner at home with Patrick: oven-baked lemon chicken, steamed broccoli, mango couscous. Installed BlunderDelay 0.5.2 for Thunderbird by Andrew C. Brown.

Thu May 7, 2009

Cardio warmup: 18 minutes. Weight training: kneeling kickback variation, side-lying leg lift variation. Cardio cooldown: 5 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. In Thunderbird 2.0.0.21, the icon to create a new message is a sheet of paper with a pencil over it and the label underneath it is "Write" but I think this is a poorly designed icon because a pencil is not involved in the process. When I think about creating a new email message, I don't think about pencils and paper. I'm also looking for a label such as "New Message" or simply "New". Now that I've switched from Apple Mail to Thunderbird, it seems like I have a lot more memory (RAM) available, but I could not find very many complaints that Apple Mail is a memory hog. To work. Taxo conference call. Helped student CP with email problems. Answered questions for student AD about video. Updated current students news and the bowl of hygeia page with a photo provided by graduate Helen W. Followup with servint about redirects and previewing sites before DNS switchover, sent the solution to Eric D. Followup with OAAIS—they did not complete our SSL/DNS ticket like they said they did. Published the commencement speech from last Saturday's graduation ceremony. Fixed a broken link to a UCTV video—they have been moving their videos to YouTube, so now it's a snap to embed. Reconfigured our website monitoring service to split up my home and work websites and to include Eric D on the weekly reports. Responded to Sue A's request for a "digital signature" for Steve K. Sent Laura M a copy of a job description. Followup with Susie on a management activity. Calendar management. Eric D and I had our first Drupal meeting which turned out to be extremely productive. We are most likely going to reimplement pharmacy.ucsf.edu in Drupal, but while waiting for homepage redesign specifications from Susie we are seeing how far we can get just exploring Drupal functionality and possibly rebuilding the site as it exists now. We manually updated to version 6.11 because Fantastico did not have the update yet (it's been out for a week). We examined the wide array of configuration settings, entered site info, configured cron, installed a bunch of modules that we'll eventually be using, set up users, did some testing, examined themes, installed Zen. Eric's experience with Drupal in the Partners in D side of his job and his prior experience with Joomla at UCSB has proven very helpful. Dinner at El Toreador (415-566-8104, 50 West Portal Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA) with Patrick: $37.76 after a $6 tip.

Fri May 8, 2009

Stretches. Cardio warmup: 20 minutes. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly, superslow shrug. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Helped student CP with a computer issue. Coded PACCTR award winners list for Carol, made it live following her and Cindy's review. Chatted with Susie on the phone. Created a digital signature for Sue A. Found spelling errors on our homepage news, alerted Susie and Eric D. Confirmed that PubAff restored UCSF Magazine data they had removed without notice. Chatted with Charles K about DNS and SSL certificates. Coded new news: the blog of student AP. Joel asked me for an estimate of the number of pages on pharmacy.ucsf.edu, and in about 15 seconds I told him my answer: 1,313. Reviewed the numerous and wonderful photos taken by student JU. I did other productive things today but did not record them. To home. Watched about 66% of Chandni Chowk Goes to China on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Weeded Twitter followers. Cardio warmup: 5 minutes. Weight training: superslow front raise, wrist curl, reverse wrist curl, ankle weight knee lift. Late meal: chunky soup, hot nonfat milk.

Sat May 9, 2009

Realized today that Apple iCal does not honor the systemwide default setting for mail and will by default use only Apple Mail to send invitations—very annoying. Breakfast: granola with lowfat vanilla yogurt and fresh diced apple, one boiled egg with salt and pepper, high fiber V8 juice. House chores. Lunch: leftovers. Prepared old computer equipment to sell. Finished watching Chandni Chowk Goes to China on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Nap. Cardio warmup: 5 minutes. Shower. Dinner at home with Patrick: pork ragu with tubular pasta. Patrick and I drove to Bill and Kevin's. They have a luxurious condo that overlooks the piers where KFOG has their KaBoom music festival and fireworks show. We arrived just before the show was to start. Also attending: Juney, Vi, Sean (or maybe Shawn), Joy. The night was clear and calm, the fireworks induced heady pleasure, and we laughed at hearing all the car alarms triggered by the loud booms. Afterwards we enjoyed a chocolate mousse cake. To home. Stretches. Weight training: superslow one-arm dumbbell row, superslow hammer curl, face outline, crunch. Late meal: hot nonfat milk, leftover pasta.

Sun May 10, 2009

Dim sum mother's day brunch at Ton Kiang (5821 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco, California, USA) with Mom Ryan, Sam, and Patrick. Afterwards Mom Ryan, Patrick, and I went to Westfield and Patrick got her a book that she had been wanting. Then we visited the Contemporary Jewish Museum—many museums had free admission today. At Westlake Shopping Center in Daly City, Patrick did grocery shopping at Trader Joe's, I bought some sewing machine needles at Beverly's, and Mom Ryan bought some socks at Walgreen's. Home. Mom Ryan read her book on the couch while Patrick and I napped. Patrick cooks dinner at Danny, Drew, and Phil's: chicken cordon bleu, beet salad, bread, butter. Dessert from Tartine: chocolate cake.

Mon May 11, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Forwarded a listserv request to John K. Followup with ServInt on SSL certificate installation. Listserv management. Sent Cindy notes on WeID process from last year and recommendations for this year. Forwarded a WeID issue to Jon J. Helped student CR with VPN login and password. Small web update for our health insurance page. Reviewed DLS offerings from Kurt G. Lunch at Bistro 9 by myself, read from Using Drupal. Bistro 9 now has $7 lunch specials. The place was nearly empty, and I don't understand why they don't get more business. Ebisu (415-111-2222, 1283 9th Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA) reopens tomorrow following their remodel. Followup with Debbie AI about listservs. BTS website transition followup: old accounts shall close on Monday, May 25. Followup with Danica B, Rebecca N, and John K about more widely implementing RSS for all listservs. Handed off wildcard SSL cert data to Eric D. Troubleshot reCAPTCHA issues caused by the BPS-to-BTS transition for James S. To home. On the bus ride home I wore my earplugs to gain a little peace from tweenagers talking loudly and a very small child with a whistle (separate parties). Read from Using Drupal. Saw Star Trek (2009) at Century 20 Daly City with Patrick. Caught up on the journal.

Tue May 12, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Archived web data to portable hard drive. Graduation ceremony page updates. Flickr maintenance. SCWG meeting. More graduation ceremony page updates. Troubleshot problems with Entourage 2008. Updated current students news. Many small web updates: mailbox too full, current students news, vpn. Followup with ServInt on SSL cert install. Lunch: bento box #1 at Ebisu (415-111-2222, 1283 9th Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA) on their reopening day—I tasted delicious quality in every bite. Pricey but worth it, especially with the new pleasant surroundings. The lighting is a bit too dark in places and a bit too harsh in places, and there's too much wood or too much brown and tan in the decor—I think they need more splashes of bright color here and there. Read from Using Drupal. More small web updates: email setup for Entourage and Outlook, prospective students calendar. Linkcheck maintenance. Met Patrick, psychobauble, and Nate at UCSF Mission Bay. We drove to Axis Cafe for tonight's Ask a Scientist: The Science of Computer Graphics Animation with speakers from PDI/DreamWorks Animation: Andrew Pearce (Director of R&D), David Eberle (R&D Software Engineer), and Eric Tabellion (R&D Software Engineer). It was our first time to Axis Cafe, and my experience with the cafe was very favorable. Excellent food, great decor, friendly staff. All the speakers were pretty good at speaking and presenting and had interesting slides to share. Pearce gave a superfast introduction to computer graphics; Eberle talked about rigging, textures, cloth; and Tabellion talked about rendering and lighting. They all talked about mathematical formulas that looked pretty complicated to me. Dinner: fish tacos, golden beets.

Wed May 13, 2009

Installed Apple updates for 2 computers at home. Cardio warmup: 32 minutes. Weight training: superslow kneeling kickback, superslow leg raise. Usual oatmeal breakfast. The UCSF Library website was offline for a bunch of hours this morning—weird. Telecommute day. Followup with student SY about UCSF email folder names appear as question marks or Chinese characters. SSL cert install followup with ServInt. Installed Apple updates at work. Prepared information about the OWA post-logout page. Lunch at home with Patrick: pork chops, mushroom risotto, hot water. Coordinated with Eric D regarding IP addresses for websites. Website monitoring review and followup with Susie. More followup with student SY about UCSF email folder names appear as question marks or Chinese characters. Prepared supp app files and created a new database account. Communicators followup. SCWG work. Today while deciding whether to purchase tickets for the forthcoming Tutankhamun exhibit at the de Young Museum I came across a link to the Muni CultureBus. I've seen this bus around town now and then, and I've always seen it empty. Now I know why. Muni is charging $7 for a bus that travels between the de Young and SF MOMA with a stop at the Asian Art Museum in between. Anyone who can walk for 10 minutes will get to where they're going faster using the normal Muni options. And probably cheaper, too—if you're visiting more than one museum, the all-day privileges doesn't mean a whole lot unless you're trying to visit, say, 4 or 5 museums in one day. Good luck with that. Dinner at home with Patrick: stir-fried flank steak with red bell pepper, steamed rice, hot water. Began design work for Patrick. Selected a color palette with a lot of help from COLOURlovers. It was my first time using COLOURlovers—it's really fantastic. Helped Patrick select typefaces. I finished 3 proposed designs for business cards. It all took about 3 hours.

Thu May 14, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Taxo conference call. Eric D and I troubleshot a freeze problem with our DAL server and isolated it to old firmware on Western Digital MyBook external hard drives. We found a firmware update that should resolve the problem, and Eric applied them quickly to all 3 of our drives. More SSL cert install followup with OAAIS and ServInt—we're almost there. Moved supp app code into place and began troubleshooting why it's not displaying correctly. Realized there is no install file in the package of code that Jon J sent me even though he said there would be, so I sent him a message asking about it. There's still something wrong with .htaccess—must continue troubleshooting it later. Web steering lunch with John K, Kirk F, and Eric D at Nan King Road Bistro. IT services meeting. Sean S announced that our Sygate license for Windows XP will stop working on November 1. It will continue protecting, but it won't download any new updates because the vendor is no longer supporting it and we have no clear upgrade path. Mark B reported that email account upgrades for faculty and staff are in progress and should be completed around mid-June. Reconfigured listserv to begin sending me messages in email again since I can't view its authenticated RSS feeds properly in anything I try. Caught up reading listserv messages from the past few weeks—there were a few things I missed. Wrote a draft response to Susie's web efficiency survey and sent it to Cindy for review. Dinner at home with Patrick: pizza, salad, hot water. Chai tea over content review, IA, and layout work for Patrick's forthcoming website. Learned how to shrink a guest OS volume in VMware Fusion. Stretches. Cardio warmup: 10 minutes. Weight training: various. Late meal: hot nonfat milk, chunky soup. To bed late.

Fri May 15, 2009

Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast. My iMac crashed last night while running a Time Machine backup and also completing a large copy operation from my computer to an external hard drive. Cold restart. No clues in Console as to the cause, deleted the incomplete file and restarted the copy operation. To work. Hunted for photos for Devi and Marie. Handled an IDAF request from Claire L. Prepared a ticket for DLS to install required RSI prevention software for all our office computers. Legal name change work. Lunch: leftovers. Coded a symposium notice for the home page, sent it to Susie for review. Eric D and I did Drupal work: installed Views and began prepping a secondary page template. I spent a lot of time trying to get the CSS to behave as I expected especially regarding a vertical line between a first column and a second column that needed to run the entire length of the div and I finally got it working but it's not perfect and I really did want to just give up and use tables. But YAML seems to have a template that might work, so I will try that out next week. Web efficiency survey for Susie. Snack: chewy granola bar. Dinner at home with Patrick: pankoconut fish, asparagus risotto, leftover pizza. Watched From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Here's the note I left for my Netflix buddies: "This satirical homage to vampire horror films was surprisingly funny. You'll be in suspense, then say 'Ewww!' then laugh your head off. A masterful screenplay, with mostly excellent performances."

Sat May 16, 2009

Cardio warmup: 40 minutes while watching the Palm Pre CES announcement. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Web work for Recharge Spa. Attempted to polish a silver metal picture frame and failed. The polish just didn't seem to work. Successfully polished a silver metal bowl using the same polishing cream. Successfully repaired a wallet with a loose wallet clip using museum putty. Chai tea. My iMac hung again, had to do a cold restart. In reviewing Console, the culprit seems to be Time Machine seemingly ever since 10.5.7 but I'm not certain that 10.5.7 is the cause, and I'm not certain that Time Machine is the cause. Prepared old computer equipment to sell or donate. Edited and uploaded photos. Lunch at home with Patrick: leftovers for me, Joe's Os for Patrick. Cut my hair, showered. Nap for me. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, superslow dumbbell fly, superslow front raise, wrist curl, reverse wrist curl. Dinner at El Burrito Express with Patrick: nachos grande, shredded chicken enchiladas dinner, beef taquito, carnitas taquito, Negro Modelo for Patrick, plain water for me, about $23. Patrick decided to lay down for a few minutes and ended up falling asleep for the night. Reviewed YAML framework and templates. Photo work. Searched for possible artwork to use for Patrick's forthcoming website. Archived documents. Weight training: superslow lying down kickback.

Sun May 17, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Downloaded MAMP. Snack: Joe's Os, beef tamale. Nap. Cousins Reunion and Pool Party at Honma House with Rob, Lani, Jeremy, Matthew, Kiana, Akemi, Dex, Johnson, Chika, Samantha, Allison, Alyssa, T...?, Ken, Carol, Alex, Jeanne, Stan, Jennie, Fletcher. Patrick didn't attend but he made a fantastic cake: round, 2 cherry-syrup-infused chocolate layers with a layer of cherry preserves in between, blackberries on top with a small circle of sliced, toasted almonds in the center. Chatted with Joseph. Uploaded a few photos.

Mon May 18, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Had trouble getting to work. Submitted a request to DLS to have them install required RSIGuard software for nearly all our office computers. Made live symposium homepage changes for Susie. Helped student KH with a question about uploading a slideshow video to the web. Web survey followup with Susie. Confirmed SSL installation for Eric D's Partners in D survey project. Asked Susie a clarifying question about recent board roster updates. Helped student JY with a problem on an iPod touch—connected to a UCSF email account the device could receive messages but not send. It had been configured for IMAP. We entered account information for the outgoing server but the problem still happened. We deleted the account and added it using the Exchange protocol, but the problem still happened. Unresolved and the student had to go to class so I handed off the phone number for OAAIS and said to also check that the student's already-configured Yahoo! account could send and to call OAAIS if the problem remained unresolved. Helped student SC with laptop maintenance. Lunch: panda express. My fortune: Your perspective will shift. Web team meeting with Eric D and Susie. Installed a new UPS for Shirin. Patrick picked me up in the car because the weather report said it was going to be 69 degrees and sunny and it turned out to be 50 and overcast so I was not dressed properly even for the bus ride home. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers, accidentally spicy baked chicken, bread, Smart Balance Light, hot water. Voted; Patrick will hand deliver them to the polling station in the morning. Uploaded photos to Flickr.

Tue May 19, 2009

Usual oatmeal breakfast. Listserv management. Tried to help student JY set up UCSF email on iPod Touch, failed. Student must call OAAIS for resolution. Followup with grad Kristin H about blip.tv. Followup with Lucia on new schedules for fall. Got Eric D's survey tool running on forced SSL. Troubleshot supp app code. Installed Coda, Espresso, Smultron, and a few other HTML editors. I'm trying to get away from needing Windows and HTML-Kit. I didn't upgrade to HTML-Kit Tools because there's no trial version and it didn't seem to have the 2 main things I wanted: antialiased fonts in the dialogs and SFTP.

Wed May 20, 2009

Web survey meeting. Sent Outlook tip #14 to Shirin. 1-on-1 with Cindy: nothing to cover. Helped student MAM set up UCSF email on Windows Mobile (must use ActiveSync procedure then wait 20 minutes). Helped student LH set up UCSF email on Blackberry (must use IMAP). Helped grad Kristin H distribute a video on blip.tv—we privately shared a 712-MB video and permitted original source downloading in about 20 minutes—amazing! 8 minutes of that was the upload time over our superfast campus network connection. Cost: $8/month. Lunch: leftover burrito and tortilla chips from yesterday. During lunch we helped Shirin with a crossword puzzle, and I thought that was fun. Followup with Claire L about STOR. Posted fall draft schedules for Lucia. Asked OSACA staff to document requirements for web content changes. Calendar management. Chatted with Steve W on Muni. Saw Karl S in Jumpin Java and chatted him briefly. Eye doctor appointment—regular checkup, no problems. Bought pretty tasty cherries from Rodin Farms (209-551-6701, The Fruit Stand, Modesto, California, USA) at the Farmer's Market in the Castro at Noe and Market. Home. Chatted with Mom on the phone. Dinner at home by myself: leftovers. Dessert: cherries. Researched non-motorized, user-propelled vehicles. Xootr Mg is the favored scooter so far. I learned 2 interesting things from wikipedia today: Mocha is a port city on the coast of Yemen. Before JavaScript it was called LiveScript and before LiveScript it had another name that I never knew about. Interesting! Chatted with quantum13 online and helped him with transparent colors in images in PowerPoint. Stretches. Weight training: superslow one-arm dumbbell row, superslow hammer curl, superslow wrist curl, superslow reverse wrist curl.

Thu May 21, 2009

Stretches. Weight training: various lower body. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Calendar management. Investigated Wolfram|Alpha. Since its release on Friday last week there has been a lot of hype about it—perhaps too much. It's not a replacement for Google (yet), and it does some things that Google already does (but you could argue that Wolfram|Alpha does it better). It clearly does a lot of things that Google cannot do now, and although both Google and Wolfram|Alpha respond with data following a query they really can't be compared directly because they don't yet claim to solve exactly the same kinds of problems. There are other smaller sites that are doing work similar to portions of Wolfram|Alpha, but Wolfram|Alpha does lots of different things seemingly very well and ties it all together in a very tidy interface. I am certain that Wolfram|Alpha will encounter implementation problems in its future (e.g., privacy, accuracy, API), but I am optimistic about its usefulness. Things will get particularly interesting for Wolfram|Alpha as input and output hardware advances. For example, Wolfram|Alpha is ideally positioned for interfaces such as voice-only query, giant multitouch screen, data glove, any kind of 3-axis input device, or some combination of these. The beauty of Wolfram|Alpha lies in its ability to quickly and effortlessly find answers to certain questions and to present complex data in visually and informationally rich ways which we have not seen before at these speeds. Google did the same kind of thing, but for web search. Wolfram|Alpha is probably never going to supplant Google, but I think it will become an important player in the future of technology. Updated current students news. Admin work. Lunch: black forest ham and provolone sandwich from Subway. Added a new admissions calendar for JWG. Eric D and I did more work in Drupal. I wasn't satisfied with the template work that I done in our last session, so this time we tried some more edits that didn't work. I then tried using a YAML template that I had found which seemed like it would work but YAML had multiple layers of css files and required a specific directory structure which I couldn't figure out how to make with Drupal, so we abandoned the YAML template. Next we found a Drupal template called analytic that seemed to do what we wanted. Home. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly. Dinner at home with Patrick: roast duck, steamed rice, corn on the cob. Business card work for Patrick: spent most of our time trying to figure out how to enter pinyin to get traditional Chinese characters. Trashed my Time Machine sparsebundle because when attempting a restore I saw that it could not properly see back in time as far as it was supposed to. Recently I realized that having no television insulates me from certain things in the world. While others were watching TV at my sister's house I noticed a commercial selling a machine that automatically dispenses toothpaste when you hold a toothbrush under it. Another example is that when a recent office conversation turned to Snuggies I had to ask what it was. I don't feel like I'm missing out on these culturally important inventions, but I am a little surprised because these things catch me off guard in a way that doesn't happen frequently. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly. Late meal: cherries, Joe's Os. Wow, it takes a really long time to delete a sparsebundle from Time Machine. It's been going for a bunch of hours now.

Fri May 22, 2009

Sparsebundle deletion still taking place after I woke up, so I restarted Finder and delete-immediatelyed it. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Eric V celebration. Chatted briefly with Kirk H. Met with Eric V about identity worker tasks. JWG and I attended the Filipino Cultural Show and ate Filipino food for a $2 donation. Followup with student MK about STOR access. Followup with Claire L about STOR. Helped student AP with VPN. Helped student RR with an email question. Web edit followup with Carol and Cindy. Student name change followup with Lucia. Followup with John R and SCWG about WarnMe. Followup with OAAIS for student EB about Sygate and either Samsung Epix or Windows Mobile 6.1 or ActiveSync 4.5. Student account management activities. Pharm sci web edits for Carol. Reported email problems to OAAIS for student AP. Drupal styling. Created new letterhead for Chris C. Calendar management. Met psychobauble and Nate and Patrick at Harvey's for drinks and nibbles.

Sat May 23, 2009

Still troubleshooting sparsebundle deletion from Time Machine. Gave up trying to delete the sparsebundle—it would never delete even if I let it sit for over 8 hours. Reformatted the Time Machine hard drive, losing months of backups for both our computers. Set up Time Machine anew for my computer. House chores with Patrick. Successfully hemmed some new jeans. It was my first time doing an original hem and using overcasting. Worked on Patrick's business cards, set up his domain and email address. Lunch: leftovers. Snack: cherries. Snack: popcorn. Uploaded photos and video. Flickr Uploadr hung during upload, so I force quit it and ended up losing some data I had entered. Dinner at home with Patrick: baked chicken, saffron risotto, quartered tomato, quartered avocado. Watched extras from From Dusk Till Dawn on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Watched Planet Terror (2007) on Netflix instant watch with Patrick. My Netflix note for this film: "OMG LOL! LOL! LOL! OMG LOL! LOL! LOL! OMG LOL! LOL! LOL! How'd they do that?! OMG LOL! LOL! LOL! Awkward, slow love scene. OMG LOL! LOL! LOL! OMG LOL! LOL! LOL! How'd they do that?! OMG LOL! LOL! LOL!"

Sun May 24, 2009

Weight training: various lower body. Uploaded and edited photos and video. Installed XiphQT. Set up Time Machine anew for Patrick's computer. Breakfast at psychobauble and Nate's. Met Chris G. Also present: Dave, Quyen, Drew, Romy. Afterwards psychobauble, Nate, Patrick, Chris G, Dave, Quyen, and I went to the Carnevale parade and festival. Home. Nap. Edited and uploaded movies. Discovered that on both Flickr and YouTube you cannot replace a movie after having uploaded it. You can delete a movie and then upload it anew, but this loses the existing associated information such as title, description, tags, and comments. Reconfigured Time Machine, began reexamining my CrashPlan setup. Weight training: various upper body.

Mon May 25, 2009

Grocery shopping and errands and frozen yogurt at Westlake Center, Daly City with Patrick. Nap. Picked up dessert at Mollie Stone's Tower Market. Dinner at Danny, Drew, and Phil's with Mike, Francis, Scott, Drew, Phil, Patrick. Phil made turkey patties and breaded tilapia with your choice of burger bun or wrap. Patrick and I brought a chocolate bundt cake, and Francis and Scott also brought a chocolate bundt cake. Home. Installed and configured CrashPlan for Patrick's computer, checked on CrashPlan configuration for my computer. Mailing list work for Drew.

Tue May 26, 2009

Breakfast at home with Patrick: warm apple galette, tea. To work. Pharm sci web edits for Carol. ICRD followup with Cindy. Followup with Luis T about Drupal. Org chart and other web updates for Susie. Followup with student AF about email. Completed licensing agreements and downloaded software installers to build the cdrom our students entering in fall will use to quickly get everything we want them to have. Told staff how in Outlook 2007 to easily share calendar availability—there's a new and very useful feature that didn't exist in Outlook 2003: In a new message, position your cursor in the message body where you want your availability to appear. Select the Insert tab, then the Calendar icon. Follow the instructions that appear to insert your availability. Followup with Claire L about CLE. Updated the list of accounts after discovering that our students have accounts in a system I had never heard about. Minor web updates for Susie and Maria F. Notified Scott N about some php errors related to his site. Supp app installation troubleshooting. Resolved a problem with our RSS feed. Drupal styling. To home. Dinner at home with Patrick: pork chops. Uploaded photos and a video from Carnavale. Organized photos: regrouped my main collection of photos from a temporary location on an external hard drive to my iMac's hard drive. Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB hard drive unmounts from Airport Exchange unexpectedly. Possibly related errors:

kernel[0]: ASP_TCP CancelOneRequest: cancelling slot 17 error 89 reqID 17639 flags 0x9 afpCmd 0xF0000002 so 0xd7c9b28
kernel AFP_VFS afpfs_CheckForVolumeChange: GetVolParms failed 2, unmounting vol
kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_CheckForVolumeChange: GetVolParms failed 2, unmounting vol

Turning the external hard drive power off and then on again temporarily resolved the problem. Successfully installed and configured MAMP PRO. I thought at first I could get by without MAMP PRO but it really is a timesaver and well worth its price of 60 USD.

Wed May 27, 2009

Breakfast at home by myself: warm apple galette, nonfat black cherry yogurt, high fiber V8 juice, double spice chai tea with honey and nonfat milk. Had a lot of trouble with 2 Maxtor (DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y120P0) and 2 Seagate (Barracuda 7000.11 ST31500341AS) USB drives plugged into a Belkin USB hub plugged into an Apple Airport Extreme (April 2009) not being recognized (i.e., not mounting). I resolved this yesterday using the Anakin Skywalker method (but that method doesn't always work). This time I resolved it by restarting my iMac and also restarting the Airport Extreme. (Open Airport Utility, select Restart from the Base Station menu.) Telecommute day. Wrote code to automate the display of a hyperlink to the School of Medicine non-block electives on our current students page and our schedules page. I set a wget piped to grep in cron (every 30 minutes between 5:00 AM and 5:00 PM, in Sep, Dec, Jan, Mar and only on weekdays = */30 5-17 * Sep,Dec,Jan,Mar Mon-Fri), then used PHP to parse the resulting text file. Noticed that calendar.ucsf.edu seems really slow just serving pages. Also noticed that the hyperlinks in the UCSF Calendar RSS feed are now working—cool. Lunch at home by myself: roast turkey sandwich with lowfat white cheddar cheese, bowl of cherries. Recoded the list of accounts page to use 2-dimensional array data structures to ease future page maintenance. Supp app installation troubleshooting. Text editor research. Dinner at home with Patrick: thin-crust pizza, tomato soup with a dollop of lowfat sour cream and 4-mm-diced lowfat white cheddar. Double spice chai tea with honey and nonfat milk. Dbanned Patrick's old Dell Inspiron 700m. Downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). Troubleshot a problem trying to invite JCB to CrashPlan Home—it won't let me specify any of the usb hard drives I have plugged into a hub plugged into the Airport Extreme. My computer can see them, but it seems that CrashPlan home cannot. Sent a message to CrashPlan support asking if it was possible. The Inspiron 700m was powered off the next time I looked at it, so I restarted dban just to be safe. Burned Jaunty Jackalope to cdr. Searched Google on webloc preview but found nothing good. Laundry. Repaired a t-shirt armpit for Patrick. Dban completed successfully. Edited a PDF in Illustrator for Drew. Today I sold on craigslist a pre-Intel Mac Mini for about 25% of what I paid for it new 4 years ago, and that was a lot more than I was expecting to get. Late meal: Joe's Os, hot nonfat milk.

Thu May 28, 2009

Updated CrashPlan settings so that "Virtual Machines*" is now excluded as a regex rather than "Virtual Machines" (nonregex). It was backing up a hidden folder called "Virtual Machines.localized" which I didn't expect and that was making my current backup take a long time. Weight training: superslow kneeling kickback, superslow side-lying leg lift, superslow dumbbell press, wrist curl, reverse wrist curl. Cardio cool-down: 10 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Decided to abandon my Windows Vista VM in VMware Fusion primarily because the problem in which I received the error "This virtual machine has more than 100 snapshots in a single branch of its snapshot tree" was too difficult to resolve. I never had 100 snapshots, but it thought I did, and even if I deleted all the snapshots the error message persisted. Advice in fora said to clone the disk from within Windows or possibly to use some other VMware tools but it was just more trouble than it was worth. Began setting up my Windows XP VM in VMware Fusion. In OS X, set up webdav shortcuts to commonly used web servers. Started using the AutoClick feature in RSIGuard. This AutoClick feature intends to prevent RSI, and it takes getting used to but I believe it is something that is worthwhile so I'm going to try it out for a bit. The idea is that software (RSIGuard) performs mouse clicks for you automatically so that you don't incur repetitive strain injury from mouse clicks. You have to learn new ways of using the mouse for it to work properly and for you to not get annoyed. Extra keys such as those in the numeric keypad enable you to single-click, double-click, triple-click, and click-and-drag. I was dubious at first, thinking that things like graphic design work couldn't possibly be used with AutoClick, but after trying it out I think it might be possible. I currently don't have any RSI problems, but I have in the past, so I know that when the makers of RSIGuard say that the investment in learning and using AutoClick is worthwhile I believe it. In XP, set up webdav shortcuts to commonly used web servers. Discovered that webdav is sometimes too slow to be useful. Switched to Cyberduck with Smultron. I've been trying different applications and workflows so that I can stop relying on Windows. I also briefly worked with Coda today. My favorite HTML editor is HTML-Kit by Chami, but I never upgraded to HTML-Kit Tools because there is no trial version and it's not clear if it has the features I want (SFTP, anti-aliased fonts in dialogs such as Preferences). And there's no Mac version. I've installed a lot of HTML editors and IDEs for Mac but none of them really stood out for me in terms of things I'm looking for. A lot of them seem to require a concept of projects but I don't work that way—I just work directly on the server. I just want to configure connections for all the servers I need and then be able to open them and see their filesystems as a tree in a pane just like in HTML-Kit. Mac doesn't seem to have anything like that. I also briefly investigated replacements for Apple Finder. Finder does some neat things, but I'm used to Windows Explorer, and I'm used to full keyboard navigation and being able to see whatever columns I want, particularly in search results after doing a find. There are many Finder replacements available, and they all cost money, I think. Further investigation is required. If I can't find an HTML editor and workflow on Mac that I like, then I'll either begrudgingly stick with HTML-Kit or possibly figure out a way to use vim and write my own vim macros to duplicate HTML-Kit behaviors. For example, HTML-Kit has a really powerful feature that enables you to map a keyboard shortcut of your choice to actions of your choice. It's really easy to build macros to insert common snippets of text or perform repetitive tasks. I could do this in vim, but so far I haven't found anything else on Mac that comes close to that functionality. CP faculty meeting. School all faculty meeting and reception, chatted briefly with Ingrid. Chatted with Susie afterwards. Dinner at Bistro 9 with psychobauble, Nate, Melissa, Chris G, Patrick. Visited NightLife at California Academy of Sciences. Melissa walked with us to the museum but didn't join us inside. From 6 PM to 10 PM the museum is open to only adults 21 and over (no kids!) and they have DJs and live musicians in addition to the open exhibits. Admission is $10 (non-members) or $8 (members). We got there a little before 8 PM. There was a short line, but it moved quickly. Inside we found the museum was pretty full, and the crowd was mostly 20s and 30s. We didn't bother with the coat check—there was a really long line when we arrived. Near the pendulum a DJ spun really great music and was accompanied by a live conga player. In the diorama hall some musicians were breaking down their setup—we had missed their performance. We missed our chance to enter the butterflies and the rainforest exhibit by 3 minutes—it closes at 8 PM. We encountered neighbor Zach who was accompanied by Gina and Mariana. It's a very entertaining way to see the museum. Kids and tour groups don't get in the way, and there's a variety of options that aren't there during a day visit. Home. Although it was late and dark I spent about 15 minutes removing some sticky substance from the car with Goo Gone. It had been there for a long time but I managed to remove it completely. I also tried but did not succeed at fixing the sticky driver's door handle with a bar of paraffin. Here are some journal notes from a recent day but I neglected to record which day it was exactly: [Usual oatmeal breakfast. Walked essentially all the way to work. Troubleshot VMware Fusion error: "This virtual machine has more than 100 snapshots in a single branch of its snapshot tree" and "The specified virtual disk needs repair."] Received 3 emails from CrashPlan in response to my inquiry about how to make a network usb hard drive available to backup buddies. The 1st one at 8:07 AM said, "Welcome to CrashPlan Support. Please follow the link below to choose a password, and we will log you in right away." The 2nd one at 8:08 AM said, "Thank you for contacting CrashPlan Support. CrashPlan PRO / CrashPlan+ / CrashPlan Central customers: Our support team will process your request as soon as possible. FREE CrashPlan users: Visit our support wiki and forums. Please include the following information in your request: Operating system and version, Software version, Detailed description of the question or problem, CrashPlan Central / CrashPlan+: relevant computer name(s)." The 3rd one at 9:17 AM said, "Ticket status: Closed. **You received this automated response because you are part of the free user community or you have emailed us from an address other than your registered account email.** If you are a CrashPlan Central or CrashPlan+ customer and have questions or have run into an issue, please submit a new ticket via your account address so we can make sure you're in the proper support queue. Free users, please check out the information in our Support Wiki or post a topic in our User Forums. Support Wiki: http://support.crashplan.com . User Forums: https://crashplan.zendesk.com/forums . We have a special forum dedicated to feature requests, so if you have an a feature suggestion, please let us know! Thank you, The CrashPlan Support Team." This user experience really soured me on CrashPlan because the support web page on which I clicked the support e-mail address to begin this interaction did not make it very clear that free CrashPlan users cannot get email support. I understand the need to provide different levels of support—that's not what bothers me. I'm annoyed because it doesn't cost them anything to set that expectation correctly, say, on the page at http://www1.crashplan.com/consumer/support.html—but they didn't: "Email Support - If our online resources haven't answered your question, drop us a line at support@crashplan.com!" Another way to set this expectation could be during the product installation, but I don't recall that happening when I installed it, and anyhow sometimes there's a lot of time between when you install and when you need help. Installed RSIGuard at home. After some experimentation on my own, I think I figured out the answer to my CrashPlan question. You can do it, but the user interface doesn't make it very obvious that you can until you perform certain actions. Set up AutoClick in RSIGuard at home. Stretches. Weight training: superslow hammer curl, various other upper body. Late meal: Joe's Os, hot nonfat milk.

Fri May 29, 2009

Stretches. Weight training: side-lying leg lift variation. Shower. Troubleshot a mailing list problem for Danny. To work. Restarted Win XP VM after reinstalling Adobe CS3 yesterday because starting InDesign for the first time resulted in a crash. Installed Adobe updates. Now InDesign CS3 no longer crashes. Continued installing Adobe updates and restarting. Continued setting up Win XP VM. Created a new page helping students understand how to use drug databases on smartphones and PDAs, sent it to Chris C for review. Reposted a schedule for Lucia. Updated the vice chairs list for Susie. Spent a long time wondering why Outlook in my new XP VM showed all my calendar info offset by a bunch of hours and realized that XP did not have the correct time zone set. Drupal meeting with Eric D. We went through a whirlwind of screens while he showed me content types and view building, and we prepared the beginnings of a work plan for our new site. We realized that we cannot simply reimplement the site as it is now—to do so would not take advantage of what Drupal offers us. We also realized a bit more how much time this is really going to take, so we're stepping up our frequency and length of meetings. We are excited about the possibilities. When we're done, Drupal might have brought us farther along than we had originally hoped. Home. Cut my hair, showered. More computer setup: Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on Dell Inspiron 700m.

Sat May 30, 2009

Attempted and failed to use Remote Desktop in Ubuntu and Screen Sharing in OS X to connect to the new laptop we're setting up for Sam. The Mac couldn't see the Ubuntu machine even though they were both on the same network, even though I used the named address and the IP address specified by Ubuntu in the Remote Desktop configuration. Turned off Remote Desktop on the Ubuntu machine. Resolved yesterday's mailing list problem. Somehow the moderation flag for the spa's email address was turned on. Once I turned that off and resent the message to the mailing list it delivered successfully. In the mailing list software called Mailman I find it really hard to remember where the settings are that determine who can send a message to the list. It's in "Privacy options..." under "Sender filters." If anyone out there is designing mailing list software, the label I was looking for was "Who may send" or "Who can send" or "Sending permissions" or "Permitted to send" or something like that. Lunch by myself at Pizzeria Delfina (415-437-6800, 3611 18th Street, San Francisco, California, 94110, USA). For years while driving through the Castro on our way to the Mission we've seen over and over again crowds of people waiting outside Delfina and Pizzeria Delfina, and so finally I decided to taste what many thought was a worthwhile wait. This is classy-casual pizza suitable for date night or parents visiting from out of town or most pizza occasions that don't involve all-night studying sessions. A fresh lemonade and margherita pizza ran me about $20 after tip—pricy for pizza, but it's really a different experience than, say, Escape from New York pizza only a few blocks away, and it's worth trying at least once even if you think you can't afford it. The day wasn't especially cold, but when I decided to eat outside and being the first of the day to do so the waitron offered to turn on the heat lamp, and I never say no to that. Before my $10.50 pizza arrived, I ordered a lemonade. The lemonade arrived along with a plate of dried sage, freshly grated cheese, and chili flakes. I also received a collection of very long, very thin parmesan-dusted breadsticks—delicious. The pizza dough is thin and crisp and a little salty, all of which I liked. Portions of the bubbly crust were burnt black, but that didn't bother me. One pizza to a person is very filling; I had no room for dessert but ordering a cannoli to go was tempting. The waitron called me "love" as in "Thanks, love!" and this can be charming or mockworthy (as the table next to me found) depending on your mood. It feels out of place to me—this is San Francisco, not London, but perhaps the waitron was from someplace else and the term of endearment is genuine. One of the tines on my fork was slightly bent, but it didn't bother me; just a little weird for a place that's supposed to be classy. (At these prices, I expect strict attention to detail.) Everything else was pretty much perfect. While I ate, one car on the street rear-ended another, but I didn't see it happen, and I couldn't see much of the result from where I sat. Home. Nap. Dinner at home with Patrick: ravioli with garden vegetable marinara sauce. Watched Live Free or Die Hard (2007) on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Like all the Die Hard films, it's all about the action. It would be absurd to say that the earlier films were more believable but this one sort of stepped over that line of believability for me. A lot about the use of computers in this film is laughable, even for people who don't know what computers can and cannot do. So don't go into it thinking that Hollywood has finally made a film involving believable computer hacking scenes—that'll probably never happen. But even many of the stunts are over the top to the point of being silly and ridiculous that we're laughing at the filmmakers rather than laughing at the film itself or with the characters enjoying a humorous moment. For a lot of the stunts you have to wonder who dreamed this up and convinced others that audiences would find it plausible even for an action hero like McClane. I've had it on my to do list for weeks to sign up with Boxee and finally did it tonight. Over the past few days I've been setting up Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on a Dell Inspiron 700m. The work is all done—it was really only a few hours all together. The laptop is Patrick's old laptop and we're letting Sam have it since he needs a new computer. I thought it too tedious for anyone to deal with Windows on this old hardware, even if it would be XP (i.e., not Vista). Ubuntu 9.04 is quite impressive and I found the installation to be a mostly positive experience with a few problem areas. There are some applications that I would have expected to be installed by default but weren't. They are Adobe Flash and Sun Java. I downloaded 4 different installers from Adobe's site and one or two installers from Sun's site and double-clicking each one failed in one way or another. Various blogs told of possible solutions which I tried but they also failed. I eventually got both to install successfully using command lines. The other big problem I encountered was that Ubuntu cannot be configured out of the box for a dialup connection. There isn't even anything in Network Connections that says dialup is not supported. (Ubuntu people: put an icon there for dialup and if and when someone double-clicks it a dialog should tell them what to do.) The workaround is to find in the online help or on the web the instructions for manually installing some additional software and then there you go it's fine. It took me a while to figure out, which means that normal people will probably have a hard time or not figure it out on their own. My Time Machine backup has been running continuously for over a day, and Spotlight has also been indexing for over a day. Erased my Time Machine backup. Spotlight stopped indexing immediately. Restarted the Time Machine backup anew. I originally signed up with Boxee using a generic, throwaway username and it wasn't until after I had logged in that I fully realized how much it's tied in with social networking applications and other applications. If you're on Boxee, add me. Spent several hours migrating some domains to Bluehost. Configured email accounts and forwarders. Installed Drupal for Patrick's website. Found simplescripts to work very well. After installing Drupal, to set up cron jobs you must use the Bluehost cpanel—crontab is not available at the command line in SSH. Bluehost's tools are very powerful and pretty easy to use. Very happy with them still. Tweaked CrashPlan configuration. I've been continuing to enjoy using RSIGuard and will stop using TimeOut. RSIGuard is superior in a number of ways over both TimeOut and Workrave. RSIGuard includes video of real, normal-looking office workers instead of the animations in Workrave with the woman with offensively large breasts. RSIGuard seems to have a larger number of exercises—the increased variety makes the task of exercising less monotonous. RSIGuard includes the AutoClick feature which neither TimeOut nor Workrave has. I'm still getting used to AutoClick. Sometimes double-clicks don't do anything, and sometimes you want to move the mouse to a location and right-click but AutoClick will automatically left-click, causing the undesired action to occur. Example: wanting to right-click a hyperlink in a web browser. My current workaround is to mouse very close to the link but not touching it, let AutoClick click, then move onto the link (which doesn't invoke AutoClick because of the short distance) and then press the numeric keypad period which invokes the right-click. However, this requires more precise mousing and it can be argued that that requires stricter muscle movements in the hand which can cause RSI. There is probably a different way to resolve this—I just haven't found it yet.—several minutes later...—Ah, here it is. You can assign a keyboard shortcut so that RSIGuard skips the next click when you press it. I've assigned this to numeric keypad 0. Discovered a password management problem with boxee.tv. Tweaked CrashPlan and Time Machine to both exclude the hidden folder in Documents called Microsoft User Data—this was 152 MB that I did not need backed up. Late meal: turkey sandwich, mango juice.

Sun May 31, 2009

Chatted with Tina on the phone. She wanted to know what ubuntu meant. Stretches. Weight training: side-lying leg lift variation. Downloaded and installed Smultron for home. Keyboard shortcut tip: in OS X Finder if you somehow made the list view for an entire filesystem open all branches, you can quickly and easily close them all with this keyboard shortcut sequence: Command+A (select all), Option+LeftArrow (collapse all branches). My favorite breakfast at home with Patrick. Sent the following problem report to boxee.tv today: "I think I have discovered a problem with your password management. If you create a new account using password ;6h9a[>$B=cc}K it is accepted but when you later attempt to log in using the same password, you cannot: 'login failed'. In other words, your password validation code is stricter than your password creation code in some way. I have worked around this problem by using a different password, but in the interest of making Boxee better I am letting you know what I discovered. It is consistently reproducible. It is not clearly a critical problem of any kind." Began editing m3u playlist files. We had a lot of playlists from when we used Winamp and Windows and they don't work on the Mac because Windows uses backslashes and Mac uses forward slashes in the filename paths. However, I found that if I open them in a plain text editor and change all the backslashes to forward slashes the playlist files seem to load properly in VLC. Some of our music files have been moved around or deleted and those will require manual resolution. Perhaps I can put together a script which will do the slash conversion for all the files at once. Will investigate later. Solution to "SHTML Wrapper - 500 Server Error" when using Bluehost: ensure that all your folders are chmodded to 755 and all your files are chmodded to 644. (I had 775 and 664.) Spent a few minutes wondering why rsync wasn't properly deleting an empty cgi-bin folder and realized that Bluehost is recreating the folder a few seconds after I delete it. Manually set spotlight to index the new Music hard drive: sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/Music. psychobauble came over and I helped him with some web stuff. Afterwards we tried to play Fright of the Bumblebees but it caused Vista to slow down to a crawl and eventually the game crashed. I restarted Vista, but it crashed again and we gave up trying to play it. psychobauble leaves. Later I was adding some images to a compressed folder using the Send To feature in Vista and Windows Vista failed with a BSOD. I wasn't fast enough with my camera to get a photo of it. Vista successfully restarts. I installed WinZip and successfully used that instead. Uploaded photos, processed video. Dinner at home with Patrick: saucy pork chops, rice pilaf, peas. Watched Netflix instant watch with Patrick: 10 minutes of Supercop (didn't like it), 10 minutes of Porky's (didn't like it), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (loved it). Uploaded video.