Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Telecommute day. Installed Office 2008 12.1.9 update at home. Time Machine backup completed its initial backup on my computer—it took 2 or 3 days, I can't remember exactly how long now it's been. How exciting! Added a new group to Flickr for APhA-ASP and updated the OPML file then undid my changes after realizing that the desired group already existed under a slightly different name. Other Flickr group maintenance. Posted updated schedules for Lucia. Spent most of the day building pipes in Yahoo! Pipes. It's a lot of fun and a lot of aggravation at the same time. It has a lot of power to do really neat things, but you have to have clean RSS sources or other sources, and it helps if you know your regex. Sometimes it's really slow when saving. The documentation is not bad, but it could be better. By the end of the day I was creating surprisingly complicated pipes to achieve specific results I wanted. For example, to get info about the budget situation, I took a general news feed from UCOP, filtered it for the word budget, then combined that with searches from Yahoo! Search of "ucsf budget" and "uc budget". The date fields weren't all named the same, so I had to resolve that with more pipe pieces, then I sorted it most recent first and trimmed the result to 7 items. It's still not working exactly the way I want—one of the fields I created shows in the final pipe output but doesn't show in the resulting RSS feed. Lunch at home with Patrick: stir-fries, hot water. My fortune: Your smile brings happiness to others. Snack: cherries, cheesy square crackers. Dinner at home with Patrick: parmesan-crusted tilapia, rice pilaf, steamed asparagus, hot water. Watched Young Sherlock Holmes on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Set up Time Machine configuration anew for the other computer. Late meal: tomato soup, cheesy square crackers, applesauce. Time Machine hung while Preparing... again. Cold restart. Console reports "Backup failed with error: 18" and just before that: "Cookies do not match." I reselected the disk in Time Machine preferences. Now my last backup says—and my oldest backup says—when before it had June 10. I entered Time Machine and it appeared to still show the June 10 backups throughout the day. To bed.