Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Weight training: yes no maybes. Breakfast: yogurt with toffee nut granola, 2 small organic green apples, cinnamon, red currant preserves. Rode the bus to work. Lots of scheduling for web redesign exploration meetings. Linkchecking. Lunch #1: butter leaf lettuce salad with grated carrots, homemade sour cream dressing, grated parmesan. Followup with Sarah M about PGP installation, getting ready to do the Mac Pro at work and the iMac at home. A summary of Sarah's answers to my questions: (1) it's safe to encrypt a Time Machine drive, (2) you must explicitly encrypt external drives—it will not ask you and will not encrypt them by default, (3) the latest version of PGP—PGP Desktop 10.1.1 is compatible with OS 10.6.6. More calendar management and scheduling. So recently Joel told me about a need he has. There's an applicant who submitted medical verification from a doctor to say that she could not participate in our writing essay exercise with pen and paper as we normally administer it. (We have not yet made this process electronic.) So Joel needed a way for us to administer the essay portion of our interview process on a computer with certain restrictions. No spell check or grammar check. Must be able to get a word count or character count. No access to Internet. No other aids. My solution: I created a new account in OS X. I logged in as that account user. I removed all icons from the Dock and set the TextEdit icon to remain in the Dock. I created a new TextEdit document called "my essay" and left it on the desktop. I implemented mprussell's solution "Simple word and character count for TextEdit" then logged out and logged back in as admin. (Or you could use Fast User Switching, too.) As admin, I implemented Mark Nanut's solution "Disable spell check in Mac OSX system-wide." I installed gweston's DenyThumbDrives, then configured it with a very large number to reject essentially any USB drive. In System Preferences, I turned off Airport wireless and Bluetooth. I turned on Parental Controls for the new account, permitting only TextEdit to run and removing all websites from the permitted websites list. Here you could use Simple Finder if you wanted, but I did not feel it was necessary. I tested the whole setup from start to finish—it works. I repeated the configuration on our 2nd shared office laptop just to have a backup. Notified student AB about a problem with that student's email settings on Blackberry. Lunch #2: leftover stir-fry. Followup with Lisa about Adobe serial numbers. Followup with Rodney about IRC maintenance. Snack: one orange, one organic minneola. Rode the bus home. Dinner at home: 2 "turkey" sandwiches, one with miso mayo, onions, Tillamook sharp cheddar, iceberg lettuce; the other with artichoke antipesto, onions, Tillamook sharp cheddar, iceberg lettuce. Drink: Dirty Girl Scout. Watched Harry Connick, Jr. Only You on Netflix DVD again. This is such a great performance. My favorite number is "Sweet Georgia Brown" which he plays quite sloppily but it's still so good. The lighting is artful and pleasing. The camera superzooms are a bit not to my liking but otherwise this is great entertainment. Prepared rainbow orzo salad then ate a small bowl of it.