After having verified over the phone from IBM's Service Hotline that there was nothing more I could do to get our IBM ThinkPad T23 to boot (thing would not even flash the IBM logo on the screen or do its memory test although light indicators for the battery and drive bay came on), I took the T23 to IBM's Service Center (thankfully, only a 5-minute walk from our office). They said they'd call within 2 hours to let me know the status and sure enough within 2 hours they called to say that they had fixed the machine and I could pick it up any time — amazing! The problem turned out to be a defective "combo card" (802.11b wireless LAN and something else) which they replaced — swiftly! I figure most other computer companies would take 3 days to a week to do the same thing. The T23 also comes with a 3-year warranty — nice!
When I got the T23 back in our office, I got stuck trying to hook it back up to our wireless LAN. Foolishly, these were the reasons why I could not get the T23 to access our wirless LAN:
Thanks to my brother, Dwight, and Annessa (currently, the only reader of my blog!) for the well wishes. I'm feeling much better today. Doctor Kwok was also nice enough to phone to check on me today too. How many doctors these days do that?! When I woke up at 8am, I was debating whether I should go in to work since I had a slight headache and figured I could work and rest at home. I went in anyway and, well, I'm glad I did. Was fairly productive... I finished encoding all the video clips I could and made some key decisions on what video formats we'll use on our intranet — progressive-QuickTime (MOV) and Windows Media Video (WMV) formats at 320x240 pixels. I'm looking forward to the last day of the work week!
I've got a "viral infection" so I took 3/4 of the day off from work today. I basically have a cold but without the usual fever, sore throat, runny nose, and coughing symptoms. Instead, I have a constant headache and a bit of aching muscles and nausea. It's the headache that's the kicker! Saw Doctor Michael Kwok who gave me some anti-nausea medicine (Metoclopramide), anti-acid medicine (Famotidine), and anti-headache medicine (Ibuprofen). When the headache starts to come back I feel miserable and only want to sleep. Not sure I'm going in to work tomorrow. May just stay home and rest and work. We'll see tomorrow morning.
Just as soon as I got into the office this morning, our Mac-based mail server beeped with an alert that stating that something was wrong with one of the hard disks and that I'd better check it. The problem disk turned out to be an external SCSI drive that I had all my server programs running off of. At that point the disk was already making clicking sounds every few seconds (not a good sign!). I unmounted the disk, powered the drive down, powered it back up, but it never came back, even after a server restart. I even hooked it up to another Mac but no go. I ended up using an old backup of all the server programs that was already on the server's internal hard disk. I had a newer backup of just the accounts database on my PowerBook so using Timbuktu I transferred the data to the server, deleted all old accounts, disconnected server from the network, and imported the newer accounts data. We have backups of all recent incoming and outgoing emails so I had the server reprocess all messages from like 5pm yesterday onwards. I then updated serveral pieces of software (EIMS 3.1->3.1.2 and SimpleText Filter 1.2->1.2.4), tried to fix all aliases and file/folder references I could recall, then put the server back online. PHEW! Then I deleted old accounts, recreated a few group accounts that had been wiped out, and backed up the accounts database and all server programs. Will need to follow-up tomorrow or in the next few days to replace the SCSI drive and ensure that the server is running smoothly. Spent most of the rest of the day converting our digital video clips to progressive-QuickTime format. This involved learning a lot more about digital video encoding (by reading the Cleaner manual!) and doing dozens of encoding "experiments".
Just finished upgrading my Web-based photo-gallery application, Gallery, to version 1.3. For me, the nicest improvement is the addition of a slideshow function. Here's a list of all the improvements:
Oh, I have also added a new photo album titled, "justin's friends", and containing 39 photos. Please check it out!
At work the past few days, I've been busy helping to sort out issues with our intranet. Will be converting a bunch of MPEG-1 video clips to streaming-QuickTime format using Cleaner as part of the solution.
Past 3 days in a row, I've been having headaches too. Thank God for Excedrin! I think part of the reason for these headaches has been lack of sleep and perhaps a bit of work stress.
Tonight, Vernon and Conwell came over for nice dinner. Pina cooked her signature stuffed-lettuce dish, steamed tofu stuffed with minced shrimp, steamed mud crabs, sauteed mushrooms, sauteed won bok, and Cantonese lotus-root soup — YUMMY! Vern and Conwell brought over a nice bottle of 1996 Torreon De Paredes Cabernet Sauvignon wine, and a Lamaze Traveling Mobile and baby Nike shoes for baby Justin. Baby shoes are just sooo cute, huh?! Will be putting up photos of Vern and Conwell's visit soon.
Looking for a great Web-based photo gallery app? We may be using this for our intranet as well...
Check out Gallery (written in PHP and works with Apache). It's FREE and extremely well done (just like Ikonboard)! I am totally amazed at the quality of these free Web-based apps — many are better than the commercial software! NOTE: This is installed on a Linux-based Web server (Windows running Apache and PHP might work too).
http://gallery.sourceforge.net
Check out the Screen Shots link on the left.
If any of you need help installing and configuring it, just drop me a private email.
I'm using Gallery to share our photos and videos... Click that Photo Gallery link on the right or go here:
We had a nice dinner at our place with Sarah and Rainy. Pina cooked up some excellent "yong tau fu" (Singaporean-style soup with fish balls, tofu, cuttlefish, ocra, "tung choy" veggies, and more) and her "signature" Chinese stuffed-lettuce dish. We also enjoyed some scrumptious American cheesecake that Rainy brought from The Penninsula hotel (yummy!). Baby Justin just loved playing with Sarah and Rainy — he smiled, laughed, and "talked" with them so much! I'm sure Justin hopes they'll visit again soon! Sarah stayed to watch Shallow Hal with us (I just bought the VCD). The Farrelly Brothers have done it again... Shallow Hal was extremely hilarious (touching too)! I also enjoyed watching the...er, "hotties" and got a kick out of the big Hawaiian guy (made me think of home!). Sooo... I'll have to work on fixing this site tomorrow! Will also try to put up some photos of tonight.
Erase this message and you'll never see it again. ( - Phentermine) http://www.fda-phentermine.com 46.4070911825733
In Photoshop, I've come up with a new banner (click pic for full size):
Modifying my stylesheet (yes, I'm gonna use "style sheet" as one word from now on!) and index template to get it to match that exactly is proving difficult though. I'm stuck actually! With a lot of modifications and trial and error over many hours, this is the best I've got so far (click pic for full size and see that the border doesn't line up):
I have thought about doing this using a table with, perhaps, 2 separate pictures but if possible I'd like to keep the text as text and use only CSS but... we'll see. Perhaps I'll just modify my layout!
BTW, I just discovered that only Internet Explorer (IE) for Mac properly renders my CSS code. If you're using anything else, compare what you see with this screen capture of this page in IE for Mac (click pic for full size and see the headings on the right column):
Oh, well, it's late and I'm tired so I'm going to sleep soon and will tackle this again tomorrow. I think I might actually buy a book on CSS tomorrow. Good night! BTW, TGIF!