July 2009
Summary: Fourth of July bbq at psychobauble and Nate's. Quyen's party. Dinner with Thong and Thomas. Ted and Emery's Up Your Alley party.
Dates on this page
Wed Jul 1, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Backed up data to portable hard drive. I brought a lunch today but accidentally dropped it in front of the microwave and it was unsalvageable. I got the vacuum cleaner out and cleaned up the mess and also cleaned in the trash can area since it has gotten pretty yucky-looking. Lost my appetite. Waited about half an hour then got Panda Express. My fortune: Now is a good time to try something new. Sent Outlook tip #19 to Shirin. Rotated the listservs. Supp app workshop form and preview session form improvements. Updated the events page to include URLs now that pubaff has fixed their feed. Helped student KY with a question about formulas in Excel. 25 items in my inbox. Dinner at home with Patrick: angel hair pasta with arrabiata sauce from Trader Joe's that didn't say it was spicy but it was really spicy. Bad Trader Joe's! This has happened to us so many times that Patrick is now thinking we don't need to shop at Trader Joe's anymore. TJ's—so disappointing. Watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Troubleshot a problem with Patrick's iMac not shutting down gracefully. Cold restart, now it's fine. While watching the movie with Apple DVD Player we again encountered the problem in which DVD Player exits full screen mode. I reenter full screen mode and it immediately exits full screen mode again. Very frustrating. Worked around it by using VLC, but VLC did not display the closed captioning correctly. Another example of Macs just working, I guess. Searched Google on [apple "dvd player" exit "full screen"] and the 2nd page I looked at had a solution that was posted by me on 2009.0509—my posted solution: use VLC. I forgot all about this problem, but it appears that Apple has not yet fixed it. Technology review: I recently ordered a Danglet, which is a connector that plugs into the bottom of an iPhone so that you can attach a wrist strap or lanyard to it. It's manufactured by Collins Machine and Tool Company in Madison, Tennessee and Henderson, Nevada. The Danglet arrived quickly after ordering. It came in a landfill-destined blister pack, and I hate blister packaging because they are dangerous and tedious to open, but this one was not heat-sealed so it was simple and safe to open. Inside is the connector, a wrist strap, and a lanyard. Both the wrist strap and lanyard are rolled up for tidy packaging and shipping, but it's not obvious that they are secured by large straight pins which could cause injury to unwitting Danglet package openers. The Danglet performs as advertised. The only potential problem I foresee is that if the connector is bent while still attached to the iPhone it looks like it could conceivably break off leaving a piece of plastic stuck inside the iPhone and which could be very difficult or impossible to remove. Consequently, I plan to remove the Danglet before storing my iPhone in, say, a hip pocket, since a sitting motion might easily create the potentially bad scenario. I also prefer a wrist strap that, like my digital camera, has a sliding loop along the strap so that I can more tightly secure the wrist strap. I can't see an easy way to add a sliding loop, so I'll probably just find a new wrist strap that I like and replace the old one. The wrist strap and lanyard they provide are optional—you can use pretty much whatever you like as long as it will fit the hole on the connector. The Danglet includes a 30-day money back guarantee and a 1-year limited warranty, but the product packaging doesn't mention this—it's mentioned only on the website. Collins America could improve the Danglet by using earth-friendlier packaging, finding a safer way to roll the wrist strap and lanyard, and by including guarantee and warranty information on the product packaging. Stretches. Weight training: reverse leg lift, sidelying leg lift, leg lift—all right leg only. Late meal: hot nonfat milk, chunky soup.
Thu Jul 2, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Linkcheck. Calendar management. Filled out my change form for parking and transportation's reimbursement program. Supp app meeting with JCB, Cindy, JWG, and Scott E. Lunch at desk: turkey sandwich, graham crackers. Chatted with Sarah P about Flickr. Mail management. Organized work for the new communications section and brought forward a lot of things that have been on back burners for a long time. Dinner at home with Patrick: baked chicken drumsticks, mac and cheese, side salad. Editing for Drew. Extracted the miniStack from the rack, cleaned it out from the inside. It was already pretty clean when I first opened it, but I cleaned it some more and it's quiet now—no more noise, even after 5 minutes of being turned on. If it's still quiet after 2 days I will abort the return to OWC. It appears that the miniStack v2 is consistently very sensitive to dust. Or, possibly my unit has a problem with the on-board electronics which controls the fan. It seems to otherwise be a very well-designed product. [time passes] After a few hours, the miniStack v2 is noisy again, so I guess I will be sending it in. Printed photos. Zeroed the drive. Late meal: cold nonfat milk, leftovers.
Fri Jul 3, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Vacation day. It's so quiet now that the noisy miniStack v2 is unplugged and being prepped for shipment. Followup prep with miniStack return. Followup with contact lens ordering. "Cookies do not match" and "Backup failed with error: 18" errors in Time Machine today. I resolved this by powering down and powering up the drive in question and restarting the Airport Extreme using Airport Utility (since the drive was connected through that). Lunch at home by myself: roast turkey sandwich. Archived documents. Packed the miniStack. Grocery shopping at Safeway on Taraval. Post office: mailed photos to the parents, mailed the noisy miniStack v2 for return/repair. Defrosted ground beef. Watched friends' photo slideshows. Dinner at home with Patrick: tacos, hot water. Unloaded Pride photos from the digicam. Weeded photos. Prepared dough for fourth of july sandwich cookies. When I started iPhoto today, I received an error message: "Your photo library was not found." Looked in Time Machine for [iphoto library] but found nothing. Looked in CrashPlan but found nothing. Created a new iPhoto library.
Sat Jul 4, 2009
Fourth of July bbq at psychobauble and Nate's. Pretty much everyone ate and then took a nap, including me. We had planned to go to Dolores Park to watch fireworks, but only Quyen and Dave made it as far as we know—we were too tired. Late meal: salad. Stretches. Weight training: reverse leg lift, sidelying leg lift, leg lift—all left leg only. Both legs: sidelying 90-degree leg lift. Shrug.
Sun Jul 5, 2009
When I woke up, Patrick told me the computers weren't working. Indeed, very strange behavior: I launched Activity Monitor on Patrick's computer and the Activity Monitor icon appeared in the dock bouncing with the blinking dot as expected but nothing showed up in the animated icon at all (normally I would see the animated CPU chart). After about a minute the bouncing and blinking stopped and the icon remained but the CPU chart was empty and Activity Monitor did not load. The computer was restarted cold, so I knew something else was wrong. My computer exhibited similar strange behavior, and I knew then it was something related to the network. I touched one of the external hard drives and knew it was the problem. I turned it off and immediately my computer started responding as expected. The problematic drive was the one holding our CrashPlan backups, and somehow both computers had gotten hung up on a process requiring activity from the drive. Powered off my computer (Patrick's was already off), powered off all external drives, turned external drives on one by one, restarted both computers, now all is well. Spent all day working on Patrick's website. I updated Drupal core and third-party modules. I hadn't been happy with the Drupal template I had customized, so I dropped in the fluid 16 version of 960 grid system. Dropping it in was pretty easy, but getting the CSS to do what I wanted was really hard. I don't understand why they coded some elements like accordions as ids rather than classes. Lunch at home by myself: roast turkey sandwiches, tortilla chips, cherries. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, superslow dumbbell fly. Cut my hair. Dinner at home with Patrick: noodle soup. Installed Loopt.
Mon Jul 6, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Cdrom editing, testing, and mastering. Lunch by myself at Soi Gow, a new Thai restaurant near 9th and Irving: fried rice with bbq chicken lunch special, thai iced coffee. Drupal meeting with Eric D. Curriculum web page edits for Cindy. Worked on the communications section—wrote and edited pages to communicate University policy about using the UCSF logo and the UC seal and other identity elements. Dinner at home with Patrick: baked breaded pollack, sweet potato fries, asparagus, hot water. Watched 84 minutes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Dessert: one homemade peppermint-creme sugar sandwich cookie.
Tue Jul 7, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Sent JCB his login and password to the supp app staging server. Supp app followup with JWG and Scott E. Posted updated schedules for Lucia. Followup with JWG about the catalogs page. Followup with Chris C about the drug databases page. Calendar management. Email management. Sent Shirin Outlook Tip #20. Dinner at home with Patrick: spinach salad with grilled red onion and boiled egg, chicken noodle soup. Patrick baked his first loaf of bread this morning—a whole wheat and sesame seeds and flax seeds recipe from Patricia Wells' Provence cookbook. Watched the remainder of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Dessert: fresh chocolate chip cookies.
Wed Jul 8, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Stretches. Weight training: leg lifts and kickbacks. Telecommute day. Patrick is at home today too, taking this week off from part of his work to concentrate on writing his martial arts philosophy book. Installed Bitvise Tunnelier 4.29 into Windows Vista. Uninstalled and deleted Tunnelier. Couldn't get it to do what I needed. Installed AppGate mindTerm. Couldn't figure out how to run the mindterm.jar file. Deleted mindTerm. Downloaded Putty. Realized that I had never installed Java in this Windows Vista VM. Installed Java. Pulled mindTerm out of the trash. It works! Did a lot of stylesheet work today which needed to be done to enable proper print stylesheets which never got done and which I needed to implement elegant changes to a page for JWG (academic prereqs). Got all that work done, sent it to JWG for review. Edits to the new page on using drug databases, pushed it live. Dinner at home with Patrick: pasta with pig in tomato sauce. Nap. Woke up late, worked on Patrick's website.
Thu Jul 9, 2009
Late night meal: leftovers, hot nonfat milk. To bed again, sleep. Usual oatmeal breakfast. IRC setup followup. Minor web edits. Cdrom followup. Websteering lunch with Ed C and Helen C. IT Services meeting. IRC setup followup with resident Michelle D. Updated preview session page for Shirin. Dinner at home with Patrick: chinese food ordered in. Chatted with Danny on the phone. Worked on Patrick's website. Yesterday Patrick pitted some cherries and reduced them with some Yalumba muscat, and today we enjoyed that over Breyer's vanilla ice cream—delicious! Installed VLC 1.0.0 for OS X. Stretches. Weight training: sissy squat, superslow dumbbell fly.
Fri Jul 10, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped resident Michelle D with a conference call setup in the IRC. Did a sweep with JWG on the supp app web changes. Lunch at desk: leftovers. Chatted with Eric D about the supp app project. Emailed Albert H the cdrom order paperwork. Prepared a notice to students about ActiveSync and BlackBerry connections requiring a password. Dinner at home with Patrick.
Sat Jul 11, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Lunch and clothes shopping downtown—very disappointing, but I did find a $10 pair of pants that fit me at Zara in the boys department. Lunch special at Bistro Burger: cow burger and small fries, iced tea. Went to DDP's place, waited for Phil and Danny to finish work, chatted with Drew and Romy. We all went to Quyen's birthday party, which is, as always, a delightful feast and good times.
Sun Jul 12, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: sidelying 90-degree leg lift. Brunch: french toast with cherry-muscat sauce. Repaired 2 pieces of clothing with the sewing machine. Spent way too much time trying to get the Brother HL5250DN laser printer to print wirelessly either with the SMCWPS-G print server and failed. This used to work before we got the 802.11n Apple Airport Extreme and I think somehow the SMCWPS-G is using wireless encryption protocols that are somehow incompatible with the Airport Extreme, but I can't be certain. Midday snack: fruit smoothie. Worked on Patrick's website. Early dinner: leftover pizza, fruit smoothie.
Mon Jul 13, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Yahoo! Pipes and SimplePie work. Lunch in the work room: leftovers. Web team meeting. Dinner at home with Patrick: chicken cacciatore, hot water. Dessert: Jelly Belly jelly beans.
Tue Jul 14, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Today Cindy took the entire office staff to lunch at Buckeye Roadhouse, a fine dining establishment in Mill Valley. Eric V, Eric D, Shirin, Lucia, Scott, JWG. (Unfortunately Carol couldn't make it.) I had a delicious heirloom tomato salad. Food and service were both excellent—a very pleasant experience. Afterwards we stopped briefly at Walgreen's then did a short loop walk/hike in Muir Woods. I believe Eric D got half of us in for free. JWG got a new camera recently and has been learning how to use it. I successfully posted a photo via Loopt from the Roadhouse, but within Muir Woods there wasn't a strong enough signal and my Loopt update from there failed. We all wore lots of sun protection (hat, sunscreen) and at the end realized we didn't need it—you don't need sun protection for a walk in a forest. After the woods, we were supposed to go to Muir Beach to share dessert that Cindy had brought, but somehow we missed the turn and ended up at a rocky parking lot not far from the Roadhouse, but it was still enjoyable to share some sweets and watermelon slices. Luckily we didn't have to pay a toll coming back since it had just turned 4:00 PM. (Carpoolers between 4 and 6 are free, or something like that.) Drove Scott E and Eric D to Safeway at Church and Market. After messaging Patrick, I decided to pick up some groceries before heading home. Dinner at home with Patrick: breaded pan-fried chicken, baked potato, side salad. Attempted to watch El Mariachi (1992) on Netflix DVD but it was damaged in a way as to be unplayable so we flipped over the disc and watched Desperado (1995) instead, which we both enjoyed. Weight training: superslow dumbbell fly. Stretches. Late meal: lowfat yogurt, hot nonfat milk, leftover pasta with chicken cacciatore.
Wed Jul 15, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Management activities. Posted updated class schedules for Lucia. Supp app followup and edits with JWG. Made live the supp app for JWG, and this push included other changes such as the name change for the registrar's office and the new printer friendly CSS I recently spent a day to code. Minor web updates (tour, ccd, cpg). Some linkchecking. Management activities. Met with Eric D briefly to review thumbnail dimensions issues in the DAL. Management activities. Followup with OAAIS regarding my questions about ActiveSync—what must people do when they stop using ActiveSync for UCSF email? Management activities. Dinner at home with Patrick: grilled lemon-pepper salmon, cheese risotto with tomatoes and herbs de provence, steamed broccoli.
Thu Jul 16, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped grad CL with a question about email. Investigated a solution for the "video poster" that Chris C and Rodney Y are installing in the elevator lobby. It's a large flat panel display that enables us to share announcements. This installation has a number of requirements: It must allow moderation, it must loop forever, it must allow us to control the amount of time between slides, it must fill the whole screen without showing scrollbars, it must display a title and description if available, it must cache the data so that Flickr's servers are not unduly burdened with running our slideshow all day long, it must provide at least a fade-in, fade-out transition between slides. I want to use a Flickr solution, but Flickr's slideshow at https://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne does not allow looping, doesn't let you control the timing, and I couldn't get it to fill the screen without showing scrollbars no matter what I tried. Lunch by myself at Marnee Thai: pad thai, thai iced coffee. After more hunting, the announcements display solution I found was Slickr, a Windows screen saver for Flickr data which I had actually used as early as June 24, 2006. It has since been moved to Google Code and although there is no further development the author released the code as open source. We won't need to modify it for our purposes. Submitters will need to have pro accounts in Flickr or else the images will be too small to look good on our large display. We'll use Flickr's built-in moderation, and items will need to manually removed from the group when they expire. Slickr was created before Flickr began accepting video, so unfortunately we won't be able to include video items in our solution. This seems like an ideal solution to me. Staff all over campus can theoretically create announcements once and then easily submit them to all the audiences they want to reach using Flickr groups that are fed to flat panel displays wherever we can put them. Anyone can follow the feed via RSS as well as from mobile devices, though maybe mobile screens are still too low-res for them to work well with this. Eric D and Susie L stopped by to do some DAL testing with me. Worked in Yahoo! Pipes, creating feeds that combine faculty, student, and staff blogs in different ways. Dinner at home with Patrick: cabernet marinara with spinach and baby tomatoes with angel hair pasta, french dinner rolls, Smart Balance Light. The repaired miniStack v2 arrived today, so I began setting that back up: plugged it in, partitioned and formatted it, ran a disk verify, and began an rsync to restore all our music files. Archived lots of documents, mostly receipts, but also a letter from my mom. The repaired heater also arrived today, so I set that up, too. Late meal: hot nonfat milk, english muffin with Smart Balance Light, lowfat cherry yogurt. Stretches. Weight training: various leg lifts and kickbacks. Worked on Danny's website: Cook! SF. Installed Firefox 3.5.1 for OS X. Stretches. Cardio cool-down: 14 minutes. Stretches.
Fri Jul 17, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: superslow one-arm dumbbell row, superslow shrug, wrist curl, reverse wrist curl. Shower. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Doctor appointment. Quick meal: taco from Carmelina's. Management activities. Asked Susie if Eric D and I can go to Drupal Camp LA. Helped Karl M with a question about Drupal memory requirements and our web hosting services. Web updates for Cindy: career fair and grad interviews. Quick meal: Panda Express. Helped student AJ with a question about scams. Communications section work. Dinner at home with Patrick: shrimp biryani, hot water. Set up the laser printer again, this time without the SMCWPS-G. I just ran a USB cable under the rug, then shared it to the other computer via OS X printer sharing. Works. We can now print to the laser printer from both computers. I set the music sharing back to the old way we had it with the miniStack v2. Everything is fine with that now except that I still can't get Patrick's computer to search the music volume with Spotlight. My computer can Spotlight it, but his cannot. Tried a few things at the command line, but nothing worked. I even tried SMB, but that didn't work, either. I even tried multi! Spotlight sucks! Stretches. Weight training: crunch, sidelying 90-degree leg lift. Late meal: sweet potato bisque, nonfat black cherry yogurt, lemon sparkling mineral water. (I was just kidding about trying multi—does anyone use Lotus products anymore?)
Sat Jul 18, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. House chores. A very pleasant dinner with Thong and Thomas and Patrick at Thomas' place: caprese salad without the mozzarella, proscuitto-wrapped asparagus, cheese and crackers, baked salmon, side salad with vinaigrette, steamed white rice. Patrick made dessert: chocolate pot de creme with whipped cream and Jules Destrooper butter crisp cookies.
Sun Jul 19, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. House chores. Nap. Lunch at Won Ton House: won ton noodle soup with beef brisket. After leaving the restaurant I saw that a crowd was gathered a block away observing a car which had crashed into a bookstore, damaging the doorway and shattering some glass. I took a few photos. Nap with Patrick. Dinner at home with Patrick: tuscan-garlic Pacific cod, mac and cheese, grilled zucchini. When I search wikipedia on Jules Destrooper, it suggests July Destroyer instead. Worked on Patrick's website: installed Cufon (Cufón), which is almost harder to type correctly with the accent or to pronounce correctly than it is to set up and install and use. It's not a perfect image replacement technique—all of them have disadvantages—but I think this one comes closer to being perfect than the others. Instant love.
Mon Jul 20, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: superslow tricep kickback (left arm only). Usual oatmeal breakfast. Something on my iMac is hogging memory more than it did before. I suspect VMware Fusion 2.0.5, but I'm not certain about that in any way. To work. Management activities. Lunch: subway sandwich. Management activities. Dinner at home with Patrick: grilled chicken breast, boiled asparagus, side of risotto, dinner roll, Smart Balance Light. Worked on Patrick's website: installed lytebox for the phone number in the header, some other small text edits. lytebox doesn't work properly with IE8, but search Google and you will find a workaround that worked for me. Stretches. Weight training: arms, various. Stretches. Late meal: hot nonfat milk, lowfat boysenberry yogurt, chunky soup. Small edits to the journal code.
Tue Jul 21, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Installed Office 2008 12.2.0 at home. To work. SCWG meeting. DAL work. Lunch with Eric D at You See Sushi. SCWG work: login screens comparison chart. Management activities. Dinner at home with Patrick: butterflied pig chops, couscous, corn off the cob. Worked on Patrick's website.
Wed Jul 22, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: superslow kneeling kickback, superslow sidelying 90-degree leg lift. Stretches. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Management activities. Lunch: sandwich in the work room with Shirin and JWG. I helped out with the crossword puzzle that Shirin now fairly regularly does during lunch. DAL work with Eric D and Susie L and Shannon W. Dinner at home by myself: leftovers. New shorts arrived by mail from Gap Kids. I altered them to fit me. Archived documents. Completed the somewhat onerous requirements for a $100 Acuvue rebate.
Thu Jul 23, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Spent the whole work day in the Dean's conference room with Susie L and Eric D planning our new web strategy. Lunch in the conference room: sandwich from home. Dinner at Gordo by myself: burrito, mandarin soda. To home. Yesterday my iMac was behaving strangely. The iMac would refuse to gracefully log out or shut down. After much troubleshooting I now know that in Activity Monitor manually quitting the process called loginwindow sometimes can resolve that problem. In my case, I had to do that and also restart the Airport Express by unplugging it and plugging it back in. Something had gotten stuck looking for the network drives which were no longer mounting, and I had them in my startup items so I had to remove them from that to decomplicate the issues. All of this took several hours of my time—perhaps 3 or 4 hours, some of which was last night and some of which was tonight. Tonight I also installed DenyHosts using Kyle Taylor's tutorial for OS 10.5. Thanks, Kyle!
Fri Jul 24, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Chatted with Eric D. Sent Eric D examples of how a message he recently sent me from Entourage 2008 contained a URL that got chopped or broken at 76 characters when I viewed it in Outlook 2007. If he sends the same URL from his gmail account, it works fine (is not broken) when received in Outlook 2007. Entourage team: words cannot express this disappointment (one of many). Sent Eric D some info about login screens. Sent SCWG some info about login screens best practices and improvement tips. Made hotel reservations for me and Eric D for Drupal Camp LA in Irvine on August 8 and 9. Fixed a broken link for Shirin and JWG. Today there was a very unusual commotion in the hallway as people from the office across the hall ran out of their office and ran down the hall chasing a woman who had stolen a cellphone from a purse after entering the office. In the excitement, the perpetrator got away but dropped her backpack, and afterwards they found that the backpack contained a crack pipe (!) and some information that could possibly identify her. Chatted with Sue about printers. Chatted with Eric D about the RFP. Management activities. Dinner at home with Patrick: ravioli and sausage in marinara sauce with fresh vegetables. Still troubleshooting iMac problems from yesterday and the day before. I noticed in the menu bar and in Console that when my computer got stuck Sophos was always updating and Time Machine was always running, so I uninstalled Sophos for OS X, restarted, then restarted Time Machine in an attempt to isolate the problem. Time Machine backup completed successfully with no Sophos. Will probably let it stay this way for the next day or two just to be sure. A Panda Express fortune from a while ago that I never entered: Friends long absent are coming back to you. I forgot to use my Google Voice number today in a situation where it would have helped. I decided my Google Voice number can be used for any company since I believe in theory I can block specific callers with Google Voice if a company decides to sell my phone number with or without my permission. Next time I'll remember. Worked on Danny's website and mailing list for Drew. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, wrist curl, reverse wrist curl. Late meal: watermelon juice, hot water, hot nonfat milk, lowfat boysenberry yogurt, leftover couscous and chicken breast.
Sat Jul 25, 2009
So far so good—both Time Machine and CrashPlan are backing up successfully and the iMac is no longer hanging. Perhaps the problem was indeed Sophos? Prepared the Sherpaq Oyster docking station for sale. I purchased the Oyster from Amazon on March 18, 2005 for 129 USD, and it served us well for 4 years, though it seems like it has been longer. In dusting it off and wiping it down, I was reminded of how unique a design it is: a visual beauty, configurable and adjustable in many ways, internal metal construction, sturdy and reliable, and a pleasure to use when everything fell into place exactly right. Its few flaws: not all laptops open wide enough for it to work, the back cover was a little tricky to remove and replace, it required a phillips screwdriver to set up, it wasn't ideal for laptops that had ports along the front edge (like our Dell Inspiron 700m but I rigged a workaround out of cardboard), and the website that described it really wasn't very good. (I remember complaining about super tiny fonts.) Upon finding that it's no longer easily available for sale, I quadrupled my anticipated sale price—we'll see if anyone bites. Goodbye, Oyster! Off with you to the home of some aesthetics freak who loves good design so much that he or she is willing to pay my outrageous price. You will be missed. Stretches. Weight training: superslow sidelying inner thigh leg lift, superslow sidelying 90-degree inner thigh leg lift, superslow leg lift, superslow kneeling kickback. Usual oatmeal breakfast. In the Bluehost control panel I think I have finally gotten the spam under control. Ever since I switched away from 5dollarhosting to Bluehost I have been receiving more spam in my inbox. Bluehost offers Postini, which would probably fix the problem, but at a cost of $1 more per month. Instead, I set SpamAssassin's AutoDelete setting to 1 (the most stringent setting), added a lot of whitelisted domains, added a few blacklisted domains, and turned on SpamBox. In Thunderbird, in Tools > Accounts > Junk Settings, I enabled adaptive junk email controls, checked "do not mark mail as junk if sender is in personal address book," checked "trust junk mail headers from SpamAssassin," and moved new junk messages to a folder called spam. Worked on Patrick's website: installed clueTip for jQuery, got it working after some conflict with MooTools—all my variables were showing up as null. Patrick took a nap. Disabled the RSS feed in this Drupal site by adding this code before $head prints in page.tpl.php:
$head = str_replace('<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Front page feed" href="/rss.xml" />', '', $head);
This probably isn't the best way to do it, but it worked for me. Lunch: Joe's Os, ham and provolone sandwich, hot water. Nap. Dinner at home with Patrick: thin-crust pizza, hot water. Watched El Mariachi on Netflix DVD with Patrick.
Sun Jul 26, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Edited photos and uploaded photos to Flickr. Made some minor adjustments to the journal code. Ted and Emery's Up Your Alley party. Dinner with Danny, Drew, and Phil and their place with Romy, psychobauble, and Nate. Danny drove me home.
Mon Jul 27, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Physical security work. Management work. Calendar management. Chatted with Lucia about the risk of putting long-term backups on cdrom, recommended that instead of or in addition to that she store the files on the network. Lunch from the cafeteria: pizza, side salad, side Asian noodle salad, POG juice. Dinner at home with Patrick: teriyaki salmon, Japanese-style steamed rice, mixed vegetables. Downloaded yesterday's photos from the camera to the computer. Worked on Patrick's website. Console reports lots of "Waiting for index to be ready (915 > 0)". Opened the sparsebundle and ran Disk Repair on it. Disk Repair seemed to get stuck on "Repairing volume. Estimated time: 8 minutes."
Tue Jul 28, 2009
Troubleshot Time Machine problems on my iMac, details to follow. Weight training: shrug, kneeling kickback. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Security check for my iMac. To work. Linkchecking. Updated website monitoring list. Invited photos to our Flickr groups. Reviewed catalogs page, let JWG know it was live. Management activities. Early lunch: ham and provolone sandwich from home. Met with Chris C and Rodney Y about scheduling and the video poster computer. Submitted a ticket to OAAIS to investigate a sticky key problem with a telephone. Communications work for Susie. Chatted on the shuttle with Tim. Doctor appointment. Snack: nachos with mild salsa from Carmelina's. Their FastPay machine was broken, the cheese sauce is secretly spicy. Management activities. Communications work. To home. Stopped at Roxie Grocery at 9th and Kirkham and had a terrible experience trying to buy Muni fastpasses. Worked on Patrick's website. Dinner at home with Patrick: nonspicy jambalaya with chicken, sausage, shrimp; hot water. Worked on Patrick's website. Troubleshot sticky scroller on Mighty Mouse problem again. The last time I fixed it by pressing hard on the scroller while scrolling. This time it took a little compressed air and also turning the mouse upside down and pressing-and-rolling the scroller against a clean, tightly woven cloth. Stretches. Weight training: superslow sidelying leg lift, superslow modified kneeling kickback, superslow sidelying 90-degree leg lift, superslow leg lift. Stretches. Late meal: leftovers, lowfat cherry yogurt, hot water.
Wed Jul 29, 2009
Weight training: superslow front raise. Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Reviewed orientation page updates for Shirin. Web writing and editing: communications section work. Small web updates for JWG. Helped student JF with VPN login problems. Tweaked the main stylesheet for Eric D: opacity on attribution links. (Opacity seems to be broken in IE7 and IE8, and I could not resolve it.) Implemented orientation page updates for Shirin. More web writing and editing: communications section work. Home. Patrick was napping, so I made leftovers for myself for dinner. Worked on Patrick's website: print stylesheets. Stretches. Weight training: superslow concentration curl, superslow one-arm dumbbell row. Stretches.
Thu Jul 30, 2009
Here's an example of poor technical writing or editing that I ran across today on Mozy's website: "MozyHome supports Windows 2000, XP, and Vista, and Mac OS X (10.4 and 10.5)." Instead, it should be something more like "MozyHome requires Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS 10.4, or Mac OS 10.5." To say that a software application for an operating system supports that operating system is always incorrect. Another way to attempt to say what is meant is, "MozyHome is supported when used with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS 10.4, or Mac OS 10.5," but this wording implies that—or leaves unclear whether—it works with other operating systems and is not supported under them. To say that something is supported has at least 2 meanings. One meaning is that the supporting thing works properly with the supported thing while at the same time also implying that the supporting thing is required for the supported thing to work. Example: "Windows XP supports a wide variety of software applications." It would be incorrect and awkward to say, "A wide variety of software applications supports Windows XP" because the wide variety of software applications is not required for Windows XP to function. And another meaning is that the vendor of the software will help you when what they claim to work doesn't work, but it doesn't make any claim about what will work. (See above regarding "MozyHome is supported when...") Consequently, the best way to say what is meant is that [your software application] requires [specific requirements]. If you're talking about hardware and operating systems, it's a slightly different story. For example, you can correctly say "The Dell Inspiron 700m supports Windows XP" because the hardware can conceivably run—or support—other operating systems. But it's still incorrect to say "Windows XP supports the Dell Inspiron 700m" for the same reasons outline above. Windows XP is not supporting—or providing a platform for—the 700m, the 700m is providing a platform for Windows XP to run. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped entering student SN with a question about computer requirements. Met with Maynard and Allen to troubleshoot a telephone set problem. Cleaned up some spam from our Drupal Google Group. Prepared and sent a detailed response to Judy's request for feedback regarding encryption for students for SCWG. Dinner at home with Patrick: five-spice chicken with shiitake mushrooms over mashed potatoes. Worked on Patrick's website. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press. Stretches.
Fri Jul 31, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Web meeting with Susie at Palio. Meeting followup. Orientation web edits. Linkchecking. Checked in with Kurt G about configuring our computers to shut down at night to save energy. Followup with Chris C about a telephone problem he reported. Management activities. Communications section work. Late lunch: wide rice noodles with chicken and vegetables, iced coffee. Management activities. Uploaded photos to Flickr. Communications section work. Dinner with Patrick at Ebisu (415-566-1770, 1283-9th Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA): negihamachi hosomaki, poke roll, boston roll, tokyo tower roll, kappa hosomaki, king california hosomaki, tea for me, Sapporo for Patrick—$49.99 before tip. de Young Museum with Patrick, Persian music. Dessert at the museum cafe: hot tea for me, hot chocolate for Patrick, small tart, small pastry. Home. Worked on Patrick's website: prepared homepage images. Cut my hair.