Friday, January 4, 2013
Weight training: one-arm dumbbell row. Breakfast at home: 2 eggs scrambled with parsley, green onions, grilled zucchini; 2 hash browns; 8 ounces of vegetable juice, hot water. Rode my bike to work. Watched part of a SASS intro video. Hardware purchasing research. Conf call with Eric, Greg, and John K: settings.php files, organization. Ordered a carrying case for my work MacBook Air. Hardware purchasing research. Today I needed to purchase a flatbed scanner that can scan slides and negatives. Resolution was important but did not need to be extremely high. I preferred models that had the slide/negative attachments built into the lid. It needed to work with OS 10.8. I eliminated all brands other than Canon, Epson, HP, and Brother since too small of a brand is more support risk than I'd prefer. I eliminated Brother because they seemed focused on scanning for business documents and, occasionally, photos rather than mostly photo, slide, or negative scanning. I eliminated Canon because I couldn't find or open the user manual for the CanoScan 9000F. Their website took me to a DMG which took me to an installer which I ran but then I found no user manual. I found 2 other installers inside the DMG and installed both of those, still no user manual. I found an app installed on my Mac called Canon IJ On-Screen Manual and opened it and chose File then Open and all menu items were grayed out. Canon's website still uses Adobe Flash to permit comparisons among scanners. I was using Chrome, so Flash should have just worked, but when I opened my comparison page the table was blank. I launched Safari and opened the same page but then realized that I don't have Flash installed separately (having uninstalled it a long time ago because Firefox would annoyingly remind me to manually update it every couple of weeks). Not worth installing Flash just for this. Canon might have great scanners, but I was left with a really awful experience just trying to find information about them, and not being able to easily access the user manual left me feeling like I would not have a fun time supporting it. HP had only two scanners that could do slides and negatives: Scanjet G3110 and Scanjet G4050. I eliminated the G3110 because it didn't support OS 10.8. The G4050 did support OS 10.8, but I decided against it since the hardware design was from 2006. In the end, I chose Epson Perfection V370. It met all my requirements and preferences, and it's brand new. This model was not available in BearBuy, so I made the purchase with my pcard at Amazon. One unfortunate thing was that the user manual was not available in PDF but was available in HTML. I archived this website using WinHTTrack then stored the archive on our network. Web updates for Joel: reply to an interview invitation, others. Lunch at Reverie Cafe: veggie breakfast burrito, water from my klean kanteen. Errands: Cole Hardware, Walgreens. More interview reply ack work with Joel, pushed it live. SOP IT wiki: documented how to initiate a three-party conference call. New iMac for work arrives, but I do not unpack it immediately. SOP IT wiki work: lots of online presence documentation. Rode my bike home. Charged my bike taillight via USB. Dinner at home with Patrick: Chinese food delivery from Tsing's via Eat24: appetizer combo (small), shrimp and scallop soup, chow fun, sweet and sour fish fillets. Patrick's fortune: All the darkness in the world cannot put out a single candle. My fortunes: Courage is the hallmark of the warrior. Action speaks nothing, without the Motive. Spent a bit of time setting up a collaborative grocery list with Patrick in Asana.