Wednesday, July 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.