Monday, October 19, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Management activities. Cindy and I went to procurement card training. Management activities. Lunch: salad from the cafeteria. Showed student JU how to upload images to our kiosk and how to use photoshop.com to add text to an image. photoshop.com is pretty snazzy—it connects to Flickr and like magic makes all your Flickr photos available to photoshop.com for editing. (If you have a lot of photos, it will take a few minutes for everything to show up, but you can continue working while it works.) Let student MM borrow a VGA-to-mini-DVI adapter. Spent the rest of the day working on the facelift megadropdown: added transparency, changed the rollover colors from black-on-light-yellow to white-on-540-blue, restored parent-title rollovers, made many small adjustments, determined that drop shadows might be too hard to implement properly. I'm using a transparent PNG pixel to do the transparency for 2 reasons: (a) for some regions I want the background to be semitransparent but the text on top of it to always be 100%, and (b) dealing with cross-browser opacity is less tidy than the PNG method. Started getting a sore throat today. Dinner at home with Patrick: salad, hot water. Our Sonic Fusion DSL got installed today. Before the install our line was purchased at 1500 Kbps down and 384 Kbps up, and we were getting 1213 Kbps down and 335 Kbps up. We had purchased 6000 Kbps down and 1000 Kbps up. Fusion is Sonic's way of saying headless or dry-loop—no voice phone line is required. Essentially it means the money we were giving to AT&T can instead be given to Sonic and we would theoretically get somewhere close to 4 times faster downloads and somewhere close to 2.5 times faster uploads. After the install we are now getting 3716 Kbps down and 889 Kbps up. I spent the evening rerouting cables and trying to see if I could get the speed any faster. (I couldn't.) Chatted with Nate on the phone. Time Machine error 18 on my iMac—restarting Airport Express and the Time Machine drive fixed it. Installed IPNetTunerX 1.6.9 but none of the basic choices matched my DSL and I couldn't figure out what else to do with it so I deleted it.