November 2009
Summary: JY's white birthday party, Shangri La at Endup, started using Google Wave
Dates on this page
Sun Nov 1, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Used the sewing machine to create a skirt for the microwave oven cart. I underestimated some measurements so it's not perfect, but it still turned out well enough. Housecleaning. Rested. Stretches. Weight training: various leg exercises. Dinner at home with Patrick. I made diced oven-roasted potatos. Patrick prepared a salad with grilled asparagus. Continued setting up Windows 7 in VirtualBox. Had trouble setting up a shared folder, but there's a workaround—you just have to know what name to use for the UNC path for the mapped drive—vboxsvr—e.g., \\vboxsvr\myshare.
Mon Nov 2, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Calendar management. Chatted briefly with Susie. 1-on-1 with Rodney. Post office then lunch at NKRB with Shirin. Kung pao chicken, hot tea for Shirin; vegetarian hong kong noodles, cold water for me. Got my influenza vaccination, aka flu shot. Facelift work with Eric D. Facelift work alone: put in the footer and background, made some tweaks to the other existing code. Dinner at work by myself: leftovers from lunch. Continued setting up Windows 7: remapped drive letters, installed Safari, QuickTime, Opera, prepared resetting up Briefcase. Stretches. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, superslow crunch.
Wed Nov 4, 2009
Mobile broadband shopping for Don K. Lunch: salad with leftover salmon, triscuit crackers, water. More mobile broadband shopping. Minor web update for Cindy: OSACA staff what we do, holiday hours. Web standards meeting prep with Eric D. Followup with Fran A and Liusheng H about WinNonlin. Investigated a problem with Stickies for Cindy. Dinner at home with Patrick: spaghetti noodles with green bell peppers, mushrooms, and fermented black bean sauce, hot water. Dessert: cherry vanilla ice cream. Watched 53 minutes of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) on library DVD with Patrick.
Thu Nov 5, 2009
Web team meeting with Eric D and Susie L: created a new initialism (WCWG), planned the first WCWG meeting, made plans for our forthcoming pharmchem redesign, reviewed typefaces for our facelift project—another wonderfully productive and fulfilling meeting with these two. I did some quick maintenance on Susie's computer which she reports has been working unusually slowly. I ran Disk Cleanup, disabled a bunch of startup items, disabled unneeded addons in Firefox and IE, instructed her to restart her computer in the morning after Disk Cleanup finished. Still to do: defrag, disable unneeded fonts, turn off indexing. Lunch at Rigolo with Eric D: cow burger and fries for Eric, tuna salad sandwich and mixed greens side salad for me. Shuttle back to Parnassus. Resolved a permissions problem and followed up on other setup issues with Stephen F. Reported an ICRD problem to Terence BS: error message "SF088 User not authorized for Perimeter Code" when attempting to add a code for which I am supposed to be authorized. Submitted a request to OAAIS to resolve some problems with the setup of Stephen's AD and email accounts. Sent the monthly websteering lunch reminder. Submitted a request to OAAIS to remove all itsa.ucsf.edu aliases for people in my unit. These aliases aren't in use anymore, haven't been for years, and all they are good for now is for feeding spam into our accounts. I think OAAIS should have automatically gotten rid of them a long time ago, and I'm only now getting around to requesting this for us. Calendar management. SCWG followup. Followed up with Matthew T and Cesar G and Mozy Pro about an account migration for Chris C. Updated our web page that talks about firewalls to reflect the fact that Sygate is no longer available for download from OAAIS, notified SCWG. Troubleshot a report of grinding noises followed by a freeze/crash on the white shared office laptop: ran Disk Check, which found some problems; ran Disk Cleanup; manually emptied temp folders that Disk Cleanup failed to clean, scanned for viruses and spyware—all clean. Updated Java. Checked Apple updates—nothing critical to install. Still to do: check Microsoft Update, defrag, run an external disk check utility. Tested Mark B's resolution to a problem report I submitted to OAAIS on Tue Sep 15. Prepared a long email to the customer support manager at OAAIS regarding a problem that took 6 business weeks to resolve. Dinner at home with Patrick: vegetables pizza, side salad, hot water. Dessert: Patrick baked a sweet potato ginger pie and a pumpkin pie, so we each had a slice, and I'll be taking half of each in to work tomorrow. Watched about another 50 minutes of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) on library DVD with Patrick. Haven't had much time lately to continue setting up Windows 7. I realized yesterday, though, that in order to install HTML-Kit 292 I need to download the latest installer which has been revised to be more compatible with Windows 7. Resolved a small problem with the journal: October 2009 was not displaying properly. Shopped online.
Fri Nov 6, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Brought to work half of a pumpkin pie and half of a sweet potato ginger pie that Patrick baked yesterday. Helped a student with a listserv problem. Sent the web steering lunch reminder. Followup on Mozy Pro transition. Helped Stephen F with email and voicemail setup problems. Chatted with Carol about a recent freeze on the white laptop. More maintenance for the white laptop. Confirmed resolution of an ICRD problem for Terence B. Packaged some InDesign documents for Cindy. Completed mobile broadband shopping for Don K, decided on Sprint. Lunch: brought salad from home. Coded next year's PharmD calendars. Chatted with Eric D about VirtualBox and screen resolution. We accidentally crashed my Mac Pro because I started VirtualBox while VMware Fusion was already running. I immediately got the translucent gray curtain of death and had to shut down and restart the Mac. Worked on the communications section. Dinner at home with Patrick: vegetable curry with brown rice, hot water. Dessert: Patrick made chocolate bread pudding. Watched the remainder of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) on library DVD with Patrick. I did not like this film at all because both of the main characters failed to act intelligently when intelligent actions were required to support their interests and because the denouement seemed extraordinarily unlikely. We will watch the commentary by Charles Busch and John Epperson, and that might help me understand what everyone thinks is so great about this film, but thus far I am not impressed.
Sat Nov 7, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Cleaned in the bathroom. Cut my hair, showered. Patrick did laundry. Purchased, set up, and configured MAMP PRO, used rsync to pull copies of all home websites to my computer for staging. Some MySQL issues to work out, need to check rsync mirroring back up. Installed VirtualBox 3.0.10. Installed Office 2007 and Creative Suite CS3 in Windows 7 in VirtualBox, completed all updates. Installed Google Chrome. Watched 25 minutes of the commentary of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) on library DVD with Patrick.
Sun Nov 8, 2009
Time Machine has stopped giving me problems ever since I moved the drive from Airport Express to my own computer, so I decided that I no longer need to keep Console open all the time. Breakfast: banana pancakes, mango smoothie. Edited and uploaded photos. Videochat with Tina. Repotted some house plants, taught Patrick how to do it. Began geotagging in Flickr; I had never bothered to do it before. Errands with Patrick. Late afternoon meal at a taqueria: regular nachos, vegetarian quesadilla, root beer for Patrick, V8 juice for me. Napped in Dolores Park. Watched Deliverance on library DVD with Patrick.
Mon Nov 9, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. A new temp worker in the office helping with admissions: Alan. Got a request today from a student wanting to connect a Motorola Droid to UCSF email. Told them to try an Exchange connection if it existed and if that doesn't exist or doesn't work to try our IMAP settings. After that I found a forum discussion which says the Exchange connection doesn't download mail. Eric thinks the Exchange connection is (or might be?) a third-party product. Don's mobile broadband solution: prepared RFO for Cindy's signature. Listserv management. Confirmed that itsa.ucsf.edu aliases were removed for me, Cindy, and JWG. Resolved GAL display problems with help from Cesar by deleting .oab files from the Outlook folder. Chatted with Sue A about laptops. Worked on the communications section. More listserv management. Lunch: brought salad with tomato and cucumber from home. Made lots of great progress on the facelift project with Eric D: inserted 960gs, did a lot of stylesheet tweaking, Eric wrote some fresh JQuery code to provide some special behaviors for our new footer. I really enjoy pair-coding with him; we make a very productive team. A post today by Jason S of a VMware web page that was heavy on navigation and light on content cemented my feelings that we're moving in the right direction with the new interface we're designing for our site. Our pages aren't as navheavy as VMware's, but the techniques we're building can be used with any site, and I've never seen them put together quite like we plan to. Just a few hours of work today, and we're really starting to see all of the awesome coming together—exciting! Sent reminders and new procedures for laptop reservation to staff. Dinner at home by myself: leftover curry and vegetables with brown rice, Grace Bakery bread, honey butter. My Apple Mouse trackball is acting up—scrolling fails to work, even after I do the cleaning that resolved this problem in the past (flip the mouse over, press hard, then drag back and forth). Am interested in the new Magic Mouse, but our computer store on campus does not yet have a demo to try out. I also learned today that Magic Mouse when used in Boot Camp does not have the scrolling or swiping features, so I am unable to purchase them for my office which uses Apple laptops but always in Boot Camp. Today when I started CrashPlan to check on my backup status it got stuck on the splash screen saying "Upgrading CrashPlan...". I let it sit and 30 minutes later I quit it then manually downloaded 11.5.2009 and installed it. Now, the splash screen says "11.5.2009" along with "Upgrading CrashPlan...". Submitted a support request.
Tue Nov 10, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. SCWG meeting. Office party. More communications web page work. Lots of email followup. Emergency computer maintenance for the student lounge computer. Helped a student try to set up UCSF email on a brand new Motorola Droid smartphone. Reworked the folder job for Shirin. Dinner at Harvey's with Patrick. Sam got me a funny book called Signspotting—funny signs from around the world. Thanks, everyone, for the birthday wishes!
Wed Nov 11, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Holiday. Bought an AeroPress for a friend's birthday. Dinner at home with Patrick: noodle soup with tofu and vegetables, hot water. Vacation research. Decided Thailand would be too expensive and we're now thinking Las Vegas instead.
Thu Nov 12, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Checked on the student lounge computer. Supp app work. Calendar management. More communications web page work. Lunch at The Pub with Ed C, Erik W, Lucas R, John K, Eric D, Helen C. I had a vegetarian quesadilla and a latte. IT Services meeting. Took a few photos at Mission Bay. Lots of email followup. Turns out the brand new Motorola Droid smartphone cannot be set up with UCSF Exchange but it will connect with IMAP settings. Unfortunately I don't know how but I was told by one of our students that they got it to work with IMAP. Patrick picked me up in the car. Dinner at home with Patrick: ravioli and mushrooms in marinara sauce, Grace Bakery bread, Smart Balance Light, hot water. Received John and Kira's Chocolates in the mail from Tina. I've recently been using Genius Mixes in iTunes and liking it.
Fri Nov 13, 2009
Stretches. Weight training: various superslow leg exercises, superslow dumbbell press. To work. Attempted to open a Google spreadsheet today and instead got an error: "Not Found - Error 404". Tried to sign up for the Google Help forum and got another error: "An unknown error has occurred. Please try again." Gave up for now. Supp app meeting with Jon J, Stephen F, Doug C, and Jina S. Posted next year's academic and block calendars, then announced them. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: Seize from every moment its uniqueness. Management activities. Updated website to include link to new local NCPA website. More communications web page work.
Sat Nov 14, 2009
Wrapped gifts. Late lunch: leftover falafel in english muffin with mixed greens and tomato, chai tea. Small edits for Danny's website. Prepared electronics to get rid of. Dinner at DDP's with Quyen cooking gumbo and curry with jasmine rice, Drew, Romy, psychobauble, Nate, Danny, and (I can't remember his name). (Phil's away in New Orleans.) Watched Wedding Daze on Comedy Central.
Sun Nov 15, 2009
psychobauble recently asked me what the dealbreaker was with my attempt to switch from VMware Fusion to Sun VirtualBox, and here's what I replied with: "I just kept running into too many small things that in Fusion it just works and in VirtualBox you could get it to work but only after a lot of extra work or you could spend 30 minutes seeking a solution only to find one doesn't exist. e.g., I couldn't get the resolution larger than 1600 x 1200 but my iMac supports 1920 x 1200 native. That alone wasn't a dealbreaker but then I had to figure out how to set up shared folders with OS X. That as well was not a dealbreaker by itself, but then something else didn't work like it should have (I forget exactly what that was now) and I just threw my hands up and said, "I should have just stuck with Fusion." Fortunately, I found upgrade education pricing for about $20 on VMware's website, but they don't make it very easy to find, and they don't make it easy to figure out if you qualify, especially if you're staff and not faculty. (I can provide more details if anyone is interested.) I felt that if VirtualBox had paid just a smidgen more attention to details it would have been an easy choice. VMware knew I was from a qualifying edu (based on my email address) and it knew I previously purchased a 5-pack of education licenses that were sold to a qualifying edu—they should have been able to tell me about the $20 education upgrade price. Instead, I was offered the normal $40 retail upgrade price. Unsuspecting education customers will just pay the $40 price without knowing any better. Essentially, VMware is saying, "you can receive special upgrade pricing but only if you know about it or if you can find where we have hidden it." I have encountered this kind of behavior from other vendors (e.g., sonic.net) and although it doesn't necessarily give me cause to find a new option it does cause me to view my relationship with that vendor as more tenuous than before. I realize that it's not necessarily intentional and could be a miscommunication amongst or poor judgment within internal departments or perhaps an outright lack of understanding the importance of the customer relationship. But whatever the source, the result to me is one of increasing mistrust." Usual oatmeal breakfast. Slept in. Walked in the Castro with Patrick. Chatted with Lori H and James J, encountered and said hello to Steaven C, met (partner?) Ken and dog Benny. Midafternoon meal at Thai Chef. Patrick got a gingerbread latte at Peet's, said hello to jonahsfo. Watched the sunset with Patrick at Twin Peaks. Watched Food, Inc. on Netflix DVD with Patrick. We've been eating vegetarian meals for several weeks now and seeing this new film reaffirms our decision. Sent this feedback to cleanscores today: "on the page at http://www.cleanscores.com/rest-226562-Feng-Shui-Restaurant-San-Francisco why if there are no violations does the restaurant receive only 3 stars instead of 5? also, what's up with the map? it shows Los Angeles instead of San Francisco."
Mon Nov 16, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped ComNet member Edgar M with some HTML. Notified Cesar of new hardware arrivals for Don K. Lots of calendar management. Kiosk work. Post office errand. Lunch at Soi Gow with JWG. ComNet group maintenance. Worked late on the facelift project. Dinner at New Sandy's Cafe by myself: seafood rice noodle soup, hot tea. Installed Snow Leopard on my iMac.
Tue Nov 17, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Communications project work. ComNet group maintenance. Sent Lucas R links to arguments for larger screen sizes. Assisted student SC with cardkey issues. Lunch: vegetarian taco, vegetarian nachos from Carmelinas, hot water. Installed Windows 7 into VMware Fusion 3—my second Windows 7 installation. The installation was crazy-fast—15 minutes. It took another 1.75 hours to use Windows Easy Transfer to migrate my files from Windows XP and complete most of my configuration. I still have to install the big things—Adobe Creative Suite CS3 and Microsoft Office. I also have to install a few browsers. More facelift project work. More communications project work. Answered an iPhone question for student KD. Dinner at home with Patrick: angel hair pasta with cheese and red sauce, side salad, hot water. Watched extras from Food Inc. on Netflix DVD with Patrick. Continued installing updates for Snow Leopard, uninstalled and reinstalled Sophos, installed Fusion 3, then installed Windows 7—my third Windows 7 installation. Late snack: white corn and zucchini tamale, hot water. Stretches.
Wed Nov 18, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Helped Cindy with a hidden "message size exceeds size limit" error message. Followup with student LH about listserv confirmation not received problem. Comm edits, sent 911 to Cindy for review. Answered a kiosk question for Liane W by telephone. Infrastructure committee work. Chatted with Rodney. Lunch from the cafeteria: morrocan couscous, cornbread muffin, side salad, hot water. Met with Jeff K and CBW about a photo slideshow setup for a forthcoming event. Continued setting up Windows 7. Facelift project work with Eric D: fonts preview, added the fade delay on the megadropdown hover. Dinner at home by myself: leftovers. Dessert: leftover black forest cake. Here's something I commented on in Facebook recently about Apple Magic Mouse: "At work I have 2 shared office laptops using Boot Camp almost all the time, so buying Magic Mouse for these laptops means a loss of functionality over older, less sophisticated, scroll-wheel notebook mice because people currently aren't be able to perform multi-touch scrolling in Boot Camp. So, e.g., instead of buying Magic Mice I would purchase scroll-wheel notebook mice from Kensington or Logitech instead. Our office is not yet comfortable with completely switching to OS X instead of Windows, and if it were, we could just use Magic Mouse with OS X and this wouldn't be a problem. Other people might not see mouse-wheel or multi-touch scrolling as a requirement, but I do—I have watched people who don't use mouse-wheel scrolling and cringed with pain because I know that having the capability and the knowledge to use it is so empowering and productive. I think that if Apple wanted to sell Magic Mouse to me, it should have provided drivers which support all its features in Boot Camp, which is clearly a supported feature of its current operating system. It still has that opportunity, and until then I shall wait."
Thu Nov 19, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Doctor appointment. Chatted briefly with Don K about mobile broadband. Updated preview session dates for Shirin. Set up Stephen F for an ID card. Calendar management. Facelift project work. To home. Stretches. Weight training: superslow front raise, superslow lateral raise, crunch.
Fri Nov 20, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Joel baked chocolate chip walnut cookies! Chatted briefly with Lisa S, showed her how to send commands to the listserv system and pull lists of addresses. Chatted with Stephen F. Worked mostly on the facelift project today. Lunch with psychobauble at Pluto's. Facelift project work with and without Eric D—inserted one news item and other news links. Nap. JY's birthday party—everyone dressed in white except Jonathan who wore red.
Sat Nov 21, 2009
Redownloaded and reinstalled CrashPlan to resolve "unable to connect to the local crashplan engine" error which began shortly after upgrading to Snow Leopard. Fixed. Stretches. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Errands and shopping with Patrick. We had lunch at Chipotle in Westlake Shopping Center Daly City. Patrick had been here a few times before, but I can't recall having eaten here before. I wanted to go after hearing about Chipotle in conjunction with Food, Inc. I had a really great experience. The rice they use is not Spanish rice. It seems to be a really high quality jasmine long grain that has some kind of herb in it (no tomatoes). The tortilla chips also seem made fresh rather than from a bag. They have a hint of lime and an unusual kind of salt—perhaps sea salt? We were amazed at the prices—all the burritos were around $7. We still ate vegetarian, but even the meat burritos were inexpensively priced. Anyone who has a choice between traditional fast food and Chipotle should be picking Chipotle. We went to ZarcNet to recycle computer junk. We had missed a local pickup that they offered in our neighborhood a week or so ago. It took a long time—perhaps 30 minutes. Most of my time was spent waiting in line. And, they didn't even help people in the order in which they arrived, so there was some unfairness in the waiting process. It was not clear how the process worked, and there wasn't enough communication. I didn't know if they would charge me to recycle computer junk but at the end they paid me—about $2.50. I think it's nice that they paid me, but I can see why people just throw stuff in the garbage. Who wants to drive for 20 minutes and then wait in line for 30 minutes to earn $2.50 and the feeling that you're doing the planet some good? The little good done was undone by the driving, wasn't it? Also, all that waiting is done in an area that isn't very pleasant. I can't say that I would enjoy returning to ZarcNet. Then we shopped at Chef's Warehouse for the first time. They were having a really amazing pallet sale—it seems they call it a pallet sale because they're too lazy to take the items off the pallet. Thank goodness for their laziness! The prices are pretty incredible deals; we bought a few things. The salespeople seem really nice, even though there weren't that many of them and most of them seemed to be busy doing things. We drove to Westfield Shopping Center and did some clothes shopping. Dinner in the food court: roadhouse salad, french fries, unsweetend iced tea for Patrick, hot water for me. We also stopped at the Apple Store where I finally got to try the new Magic Mouse. It feels almost right—perhaps just a little too small or too low—I don't know which. I think that it's not really very ergonomic in the sense that it doesn't feel very comfortable to my hand. I don't believe it's worth the premium price of $70, but the all-tracking surface is innovative and the momentum feature of the flick-scrolling is great.
Sun Nov 22, 2009
Slept in. Breakfast: leftovers with steamed rice. House chores. Wrapped gifts. Watched Margaret Cho's I'm the One That I Want on Netflix instant watch by myself. Cut my hair. Napped. Stretches. Dinner at Bay Shabu (415-564-3364, 68 West Portal Avenue, San Francisco, California, 94127, USA) with Patrick: veggie shabu with udon and egg, veggie gyoza, steamed rice, hot tea. A very delicious meal made up for slow and inattentive service. We really enjoyed our first visit to this restaurant. We didn't know exactly how to do shabu, but it all went well. It pretty much seems to be like Chinese hotpot except they suggested to add the egg at the end. Home. Watched 33 minutes and 30 seconds of Margaret Cho's Beautiful on Netflix DVD with Patrick.
Mon Nov 23, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. Raised my monitor based on advice from Matt W. 1-on-1 meeting with Rodney. Lunch: tuna sandwich and large nonfat latte from The View Cafe. 1-on-1 meeting with Susie. Susie and Jeff gave me a lift back to Parnassus. Facelift project work: cleaned up styles, reworked the news stories layout. Dinner at home: vegetarian fried rice, non-vegetarian dim sum, hot water. Watched the remainder of Beautiful on Netflix DVD with Patrick. My mini-review: Laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing, what was that all about? Stretches.
Tue Nov 24, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. To work. SCWG meeting. Staff meeting. Lunch: grilled tofu salad lunch special, cornbread muffin, Promise spread, water. Worked with Cesar to resolve a problem sharing a calendar in Exchange. We discovered that it's easier to create a new account and share that account than it is to create a private calendar and share it because you have to muck about with permissions way more than should be necessary. Facelift project work: optimized the stylesheet some, confirmed that the hover blink problem is currently unsolvable even with a stylesheets image preloader. Dinner at home with Patrick: falafel with mini pitas, tabouli, hot water. Installed the latest alpha for Boxee. Watched one episode of The Simpsons and one episode of Family Guy on Hulu on Boxee with Patrick. Linkchecking for home websites.
Wed Nov 25, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Facelift project work most of today. Lunch: leftover tabouli and mini pita, leftover shu mai. Facelift project work: added the cycle plug-in and more news stories, added prev and next buttons, lots of styling work. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftover fried rice, hot water for me; yogurt for Patrick. Paid bills. Small web updates for Drew: added elizW special, tweaked Thanksgiving notice. Stopped using Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 as my default mail application and started using Apple Mail 4.2 after upgrading to Snow Leopard 10.6. I stopped using Apple Mail on May 3, 2009, because it would not successfully configure with Bluehost SSL IMAP and because it didn't handle junk mail like I expected. We'll give this a shot, but I'm looking forward to Thunderbird 3 which is supposed to synch with Apple Address Book. Snack: vegetable soup with rice, sesame crackers, hot water. Stretches.
Thu Nov 26, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Thanksgiving at Home Restaurant with Patrick, Mom Ryan, and Sam. We had originally planned to prepare a meal at home, but we encountered some unexpected complications and decided to eat out. Patrick and I both put our semi-vegetarianism on hold for this meal. The meal was very delicious and the service was pretty good. However, we all laughed when we saw the dessert because we were told it would be pumpkin pie or pecan pie and so we were expecting normal slices from an 8-inch pie pan but instead each person received an individual "pie" that was baked in a small (4-inch?) tart pan. There couldn't've been more than 2 ounces of pie filling for each one—laughably small. But it was just as well, since the rest of the meal was so filling and so delicious. We joked about it with the 2 gentlemen at the adjacent table; they were similarly amused. The meal was prix fixe at $40 per person, the least expensive Thanksgiving dinner out that we could find. Afterwards, Patrick and I had more dessert and enjoyed the company at psychobauble and Nate's.
Fri Nov 27, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Relaxed at home during the day, did stretches and weight training: various leg exercises, superslow dumbbell row. Lunch at home by myself: vegetarian soup. Late afternoon meal: leftover non-vegetarian stuffing from psychobauble and Nate's dinner. (I didn't realize it was not vegetarian until after I had packed it.) Friday night at the de Young with Patrick. Dinner at Little Tokyo with Patrick. Home. Went dancing in the Castro by myself. Late meal: vegetarian pad thai from King of Thai Noodle.
Sat Nov 28, 2009
Breakfast at home: a raspberry muffin. Visited the communal baths at Kabuki Springs and Spa with Patrick. Lunch at home with Patrick: leftovers. Nap. Time Machine error on my iMac: "an error occurred while creating the backup folder". Attempted Disk Utility repair disk on the drive, got "Error: could not unmount disk." Restarted the computer. Attempted Disk Utility repair disk on the drive, repair disk begins. Repair completes several hours later—no major problems found. I ran a disk verify just to check. Dinner at home by myself: moroccan couscous with plain yogurt, hot water. Shangri La at Endup. Music was great at the beginning—either DJ Drewbad or DJ Kevin Lee. I had a lot of fun dancing. Chatted with Emery, said happy birthday to Mike B, met many new people. Patrick was there with Joseph, and I met Alex. The headliner was DJ Wayne G and I think it was his set that took the house deeper and divaer than I normally dance, so I left. Home around 2 or 3 AM, Patrick got home an hour or two later. Someone asked me today if I was on Facebook, and I thought that was a rather odd question.
Sun Nov 29, 2009
Stopped using Carbon Copy Cloner for backups for Patrick's computer. The defer-skip screen would frequently come up because the wireless network connection to the backup drive would not always work. Most of the time it was okay, but I realized that Patrick's backup could be handled by one of our smaller external hard drives, so I moved it to his computer and set Time Machine up. Carbon Copy Cloner, like Time Machine, probably works great on a drive connected directly to the computer. The defer-skip screen is not very clear for laypersons to understand how to resolve the problem. Woke late. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Shopping at Stonestown with Patrick. Late lunch at Papalote with Patrick: breakfast burrito for me, tofu mole burrito for Patrick. This restaurant has good food, but I didn't have a great experience. The seating was confusing because it's not full table service and there's a sign that says, "Wait to be seated," but it seems you're supposed to order before you attempt to take a seat. Also, one register has a sign that says it's for takeout orders only, but we did not order takeout but were still served at that register. Essentially, the signs in this place might or might not apply—I don't know what the rules are. The woman at the register wasn't very friendly or clear in her speaking. I like the large windows in the dining area. Home. Nap with Patrick. Ice cream at Humphry Slocombe. Patrick got a single with ancho chocolate and guinness gingerbread. I got a single with Blue Bottle Vietnamese coffee and secret breakfast. The ancho chocolate was not noticably spicy upon eating even to me, but later Patrick said that it made his tongue numb! The Guinness gingerbread reminded me of Chinese five spice chicken. Secret breakfast is bourbon with cornflakes, and the bourbon flavor was not particularly strong. I received only one clump of cornflakes, and that was the best part of that flavor to me. I think they should add more cornflakes. The Blue Bottle Vietnamese coffee flavor was my favorite of the four. We couldn't finish all of the ice cream—for us 2 we should have shared one single, but it was nice to try 4 flavors at our leisure. Humphry Slocombe has 3 things going for it: (a) rich, delicious ice cream, (b) unusual and creative flavors, and (c) almost no lines probably because they chose a location in a rougher-looking part of the Mission. (I think it's mostly safe during the day; pay more attention to your surroundings after dusk.) They could improve their website a great deal by making their flavor page plain text instead of images. (They used plain text for the Products page—why couldn't they do the same for the Flavors page which is arguably more important to be discoverable by search engines because of their unique flavors?) It's also not easy to find the hours, which they put on the Contact page—the hours should also appear on the Directions page (or every page). Dinner at home: organic salad with alba clamshell and brown clamshell organic mushrooms, hot water, leftover breakfast burrito. For years I have preferred taking silverware from home to work to use for lunch. It's nicer to use silverware than plasticware, and it's easy enough to throw it in the backpack and it gets taken home and cleaned. For the past few months I have been doing the same with the plasticware I end up using at work. We have no kitchen sink at work, and it's uncomfortable to do kitchenware cleaning in the bathroom sink, so I wrap used plasticware with a paper napkin (usually the paper napkin I was using while eating) and throw it in my backpack. When I get home it gets cleaned and is ready for reuse. We have quite a collection of plasticware now, and I find it amazing how much plasticware we encounter in our daily lives. Discovered hawkstersf's photostream on Flickr—how did I not know about this until now? Looked at every one of the 399 items. Started using Google Wave today. Eric D and Travis W are my only wave buddies so far. Are you using Google Wave? Let me know. Enjoyed waving briefly with Travis W, then again with Bill K and Glenn C who added me not long after I posted updates to Twitter and Facebook.
Mon Nov 30, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Bad Muni day—bus 66 not on schedule. Student HC brought delicious, perfectly baked snickerdoodles and butterscotch cookies for the office. Facelift project work all day: added news cycle pager. Lunch with JWG and Shirin at Gordo's. Late dinner at work: salad with assorted gourmet mushrooms, poppyseed dressing, chow mein noodles. To home. Late meal: leftovers that Patrick brought home. Later meal: the same leftovers with some leftover rice. Worked on Danny's website: added a new special. Installed Snow Leopard on Patrick's computer—no major problems. Used dban 1.0.7 to erase our (Patrick's) old Dell Inspiron 700m laptop in preparation for an eBay sale—it's worth about $200. I had Ubuntu on it for a while and it was nice to try out but we just don't need this laptop and the battery no longer lasts as long as it used to.