Friday, February 1, 2013
Breakfast at home: oatmeal with dried blueberries, dried cranberries, cinnamon, soy milk; cappuccino beverage from a powder mix. Finished cleaning the stove vent filter cleaning that Patrick had started yesterday. Rode my bike to work. Linkchecking, kiosk work. Web content meeting with Cindy, Frances, and James F: experiential education. 1-on-1 with Rodney. Followup with Susie about the Drupal Web Starter Kit project. Followup with a student about a legal name change. Calendar management, including content migration training. Moved the staging checklist from Google Drive to the SOP IT wiki. Tried archiving website backups to external hard drives, but this is the first time I'm plugging these drives into my new iMac and it won't recognize them in OS X. It will recognize them in my Windows XP VM, but copying files from Win XP to the external hard drive is now much slower than before. Initial searching for solutions led me to discussions about recovering partition tables, and this sounded way more complex than I thought it needed to be. Both external drives behaved the same way, so this is not a damaged drive problem. Walked to my dentist's office intending to drop off my mouth guard for cleaning, was disappointed to find the office closed. I hadn't bothered to check their hours beforehand. Lunch at Paxti's Inner Sunset. Today was strangely hot. I sat at a sidewalk table in the sun, and it felt like 85 degrees F. I removed my jacket and a long-sleeved shirt, was down to a short-sleeved t-shirt, and it was still too warm. Somewhere nearby smelled faintly of dog shit, and I looked everywhere but couldn't find the source. Also nearby two women were dealing with a simple car accident. Cherry Coke with a free refill, butter lettuce salad, veggie deep dish pizza slice: $14 after a generous tip for excellent service. On the way to the hardware store I saw a double-decker bicycle locked at a parking meter, and this brought a smile to my face. Bought with some excitement Scotch extreme mounting tape—one square inch holds a half pound. Walked back to the office. Used some of the extreme mounting tape to repair cable management solutions that were previously and unsuccessfully held with non-extreme mounting tape. Chatted for a fairly long time with Stephane and Lisa about printers, scanners, and fax machines. Apparently Cindy recently said to Lucia and Lisa that we should purchase a new color laser printer. We were still talking when Cindy walked up and in about 5 seconds Lisa got approval to buy a new fax machine as well. Whaaat? More talking. Stephane will research color lasers and send me his top picks, Lisa will obtain demos of nearby scanners and research scanners on her own and let me know what she prefers. BOMGAR session with Tran: FileVault and DLS admin account setup. After restarting, my Win XP VM in VMWare Fusion failed to start. I resolved it by repairing disk permissions and restarting the iMac. Submitted a ticket to ITS to resolve the network junction box under my desk coming loose from the wall because the people ITS hired to install it in 2004 installed it with double-stick tape that eventually failed to hold. Followup with Doug C about same name issues in the GAL. Followup with Eric about the staging checklist. Followup with Jaime and Susie about the UCSF web banner. Submitted to ITS a DNS request for Jaime K. Finally found time to address a request from Shirin from several weeks ago to update the preview session pages with a new date. Because the new date created a reg window that overlapped with another date's event, I had to modify the code, then test it thoroughly to make sure it will behave the way we want. Listserv management for Cindy. Followup with Frances, James, and Cindy: IPPE page URL, APPE page edit. Check-in with Eric about people syndication. Followup with Nancy W and Ellen C about CLS and people data and schedule. Nearly completed monthly pcard paperwork; still waiting on documentation from Michael N. Posted a PDF for Cindy. Removed our Inside UCSF page for Shirin. Management activities. Followup with Eric about transcription services. Followup with student RB about a podcast idea. Rode my bike home with a particularly heavy load that included a half-gallon of milk and several pieces of fruit remaining from today's interviews. Dinner: leftover Chinese food. Lately I've been trying unsuccessfully to reach CrashPlan support. The problem I've had is that CrashPlan fails to back up to my external hard drive even though I have the green light and the drive mounts on my iMac desktop and I can successfully browse it. I tried restarting the iMac, turning the CrashPlan engine off then on, and checking that there was no extra volume name. I submitted ticket 254127 reporting the problem (backup to external hard drive stuck on "connecting to backup destination"), but later when I tried to find the ticket I received an error message: "You do not have access to request #254127. It may have been solved or deleted." When I selected CHECK YOUR EXISTING REQUESTS the message "You have no open requests" appeared. Repeated attempts to contact CrashPlan over the next two days failed—no response. Today, on a whim, and with my latest backup over 6.8 days old, I decided to run Repair Disk on the external hard drive using Disk Utility, and hooray, that was the solution. I magically fixed my problem with no help at all from CrashPlan. In the past I have found their support to be very hot and cold. Sometimes I get great support, and sometimes, like this time, it's like no one is there. I sent them a note in the ticket that I'm not even sure if they will see: "So I fixed the problem on my own, and I'm not telling you how I did it because I'm mad at you for failing to provide excellent support. This isn't even bad support. This is no support. Stupidly, since I have it working again it's still not yet so bad I'll leave, but you have many competitors, and I'm letting you know that you need to do better. I've been a believer and supporter of CrashPlan since October 9, 2009, and I am appalled by how I was treated in this ticket." Checked in by email with the person who wants to buy my old receiver/amplifier. Did some catching up in my journal. Did a little more work on the staging checklist in the SOP IT wiki. Prepared a message for the upstairs neighbors. Lately Patrick and I have been finding that the Find Friends feature on our iPhones does not always work as expected lately. I don't know how to resolve this. Documented upstairs neighbors noise events. Late meal: leftover Chinese food, water. Installed Office 2011 updates 14.3.0. Began another editing pass for the first 100 pages of Patrick's new book.