View 511 March 24 - 30, 2008 (original) (raw)
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
0130: It wasn't a good walk tonight. I managed to fall in the street and remove some skin from the backs of my hands, nothing serious but it will take a long time to heal. And some madman almost hit me while I was crossing a street on a green light. He was probably drunk. He was certainly speeding. Ungood. Double plus ungood.
I need a way to know when a Mac has made a real copy of a file, and when it has only done so virtually by playing with pointers. I thought I had copied the ISO of Vista Ultimate to the Mac, but I can't find it now. So before my walk I started the transfer again. It said it would take about and hour, which seems beastly slow on a gigabit Ethernet. But when I got back from my walk it said 41 minutes to go. Of course the machine went to sleep while I was out. I am wondering if that's what happens: the machine goes to sleep and file transfers stop? Surely that's a bug, not a feature?
I now have 13 minutes to go to transfer that file. I'll then burn an image. I already did that, but the Mac didn't want to close the burn, I never saw a verification, and I suspect it was trying to operate with a virtual not a real file. In any event the disk didn't work, or I don't think it did. So I am starting over.
I sure wish I knew something about the OLMAPI32.dll file. Hmm. I have Office 2007 working on at least two ThinkPad laptops. Perhaps I ought to go search for that file on one of those machines.
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Well, I can't open Outlook on Titan, a Titanium ThinkPad. It used to work. I have not installed anything on it, so clearly a Microsoft update broke it. This is ghastly.
Fortunately I am operating on Alexis with Outlook 2003; all machine with Outlook 2007 seem to have been crippled. The message on Titan said OLMAPI32, and mentioned a messaging program that might have been what broke Outlook. Since I don't use messaging and have never asked for any such program, this too must have come from an automatic update.
This is ghastly. Microsoft seems to have deliberately broken the system. I'll have to look into this. If it happens to me it must happen to others.
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1105 Our morning walk went well. Time to go get zapped. I think I have a handle on the OLMAPI disaster. I will also install on the VMware XP on the iMac 20. If that goes well I will put in XP on the Air under either VMware or Parallels and put Office 2007 on that as well. Not that the Air really needs it: Office 2008 for the Mac works and it's all I really use. Word 2008 to be exact.
But now it's time to go.
I'll do a full symptoms report this afternoon. And I have in my head most of what I need to do an essay on education and what has to happen.
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1401: After morning walk, Zapping, and lunch. I bought a Burgher King Whopper with bacon and cheese, fries, and a milk shake. If that gut bomb doesn't stop my pound a day weight loss, nothing will. It was delicious, too. But more to eat than I have had for lunch in a year. Sure was good...
I wrote up a symptom description in the Kaiser waiting room. It was intended in part to be sent to my physician and physician advisors. I'll get that in here shortly. Meanwhile:
Here is the new subscription button.
Never mind. I can't transfer the image. For some reason I am told that permission to transfer the image it denied. Makes no sense, but why not? Everything else is going wrong. I really hate this. Why would a button image be forbidden to me to send by ftp? But that's what is happening. And of course everything on this machine is working like molasses has been poured into it. Anyway I have wasted enough time on this. I will have to make a button.
Let us try one more time:
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I wrote this at 1130 in the Kaiser Atrium waiting room.
Symptoms Tuesday 25 March 2008
Not disoriented but a bit in that direction: things are a bit strange. I drive carefully. Near vision is not good, but by near we mean 3 feet or less, not driving distance. I see all right to drive. And I think all right.
I ate like a mule yesterday including a burger with fries, yet lost a pound. Blood sugar is all right. I hike 1.8 miles in the morning and about 3 miles at midnight, and that helps me sleep; I get a lot of thinking done on the midnight hikes and I like them a lot.
Tinnitus is bad in right ear just now. It comes and goes, sometimes very bad, sometimes almost negligible. Pulse pounding is rare and almost never severe; it used to be frequent and frightening. Sometimes right ear �pops� and I can hear in it. Usually I hear almost nothing in that ear. The fact that I can sometimes is encouraging.
Should I be taking Atenol? I have the prescription, but I have taken none lately since my blood pressure is very good, and last lab test showed mild anemia. It seems unreasonable to lower already low blood pressure. I have neglected my statins and should resume taking them. My theory has been that my liver is working pretty hard already and adding more stuff may not be wise. On the other hand, cholesterol can kill too.
I am wondering about fish oils and other beneficial oils, which I used to take regularly. Then there are the anti-oxidants, particularly SAMe and CoQ10; I have studied the literature and I am pretty sure they are beneficial, but whether they are getting in the way of recovery from radiation therapy is another story. I need to think on this and get advice from physicians.
Note to well-wishers who see this: I am in consultation with some excellent physicians in addition to my Kaiser physicians, and while I am very grateful for your good thoughts and prayers, I am not in an experimental mood here: I know there are alternative medicine approaches to this unknown tumor in my head, but I am not minded to try them. The evidence is that this treatment is working. My symptoms are improving. I feel better. My major complaint is enervation and that is pretty clearly a result of the hard X-Rays I get daily; when those stop and the deadwood begins to clear from my head it will be time to look into what to do next. So please: I do not need long stories on alternative medical approaches, at least not now, and my apologies to those who took the trouble to send them and received no answer, or only short shrift.
I usually get here at 11:30 and I am out before noon, but today our walk started late because I got up at 0900 having awakened at 0500 and worked an hour. I am glad of extra hour sleep. Slept reasonably well in my two shifts of about 3 hours each.
Symptoms: I am sure this is the steroids, but I do not have the excruciating pains in my neck, the phony sinus pain on right side, and the hip pains, all of which were due to degenerative arthritis in neck and hip. The right hip is still a bit painful but rigid attention to stretching keeps it under control, and I have hardly any pains in my neck and shoulders at all. That�s the steroids, which cause indigestion, a small price.
At the end of the week the radiation stops and we give my system a chance to clean up the wreckage. I can hope that I will get some energy back. All told I am in pretty good shape.
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Now the Mac wants to drive me mad. It won't send mail and has some mysterious messages about unable to reach servers. I don't understand any of it so I tried to shut down. It says I can't shut down because I haven't dealt with the mysterious server message. Pulling the plug shut it down. We will see if a power reset fixes things.
Of course it means I will have to restore all the network connections. There are things to hate about Macs.
But now it is coming back up. There is the usual incomprehensible thing about stuffit and other mysterious ikea message I do not understand but which I get when the Mac comes up after I have to power cycle it. Now mail comes up and about 20 messages comes in. So it has fixed itself. Like PC's do. Just power cycle.
Feet of clay?
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The OLM problem persists. I have Office 200y on three XP and one Vista machine, and I cannot run Office 2007 on any of those. Not one.
The remedy involves uninstallations and fixes and stuff, and it is just too daunting. Why I can't just drop in a proper OLM file to the proper place is not known to me. To make it worse, Add and Uninstall Software is no longer an option on my Vista Control Panel, and I have no idea where it went. I am clearly going to have to nuke Vista and start over, but the Vista machine which replaced another main machine has become writing machine central, the network point that stores the latest and greatest of all my documents.
Now that ought to be taken over by the iMac but the problem there is that networking to and from a Mac in a PC network takes considerable time.
Worse, there is -- so far as I know -- no Mac command that corresponds to xcopy C:\source X:\destination /e/s/d/y which will copy all including subdirectories but only later files, and get them all without stopping to ask me about them. If OS X has such a command I cannot find it. Perhaps someone knows?
Windows has some conveniences including mapping drives by drive letters. I use that xcopy a lot.
I simply have not the energy to go fix Office 2007 on four separate machines taking about an hour each to do it. Perhaps another day. Atter tag, atter tag...
And I am going to have to get up the energy to calculate my taxes...
All this as they burn out my brains. It's a full life, Charlie
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Hi Jerry,
Check out: rsync
From the source directory, this command:
rsync -aruv * ../destination
...will copy files to the destination directory with:
-a Archive mode - retains file settings including dates -r Recursive - subdirectories -u Update - only copy newer files -v Verbose
I've posted this on a blog so it will be easy to find (and correct, if required): http://andrewault.blogspot.com/2008/03/something-like-xcopy-on-mac.html
Usually, in Unix, I would use a variation of a cp command with a -u parameter, but there is no -u parameter in OS/X.
Andy
I will have to try this, but comments are welcome.
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Dr. P;
Stop if you�ve gotten this already, but in Vista, Add and Uninstall is now under the Programs and Features applet in Control Panel. I too appreciate change, but for Gnu�s sake, couldn�t Microsoft leave some things alone?
Robert Grenadier
Ye flipping gods! AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!
OK, maybe I can find it now. Uninstall Everything, and then put in Office Ultimate again. Boy I hate all this.
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xcopy for the mac
Hi Jerry
The command you want to replace your xcopy is:
cp -ru * destination_dir
The -r bit is recursive and the -u is "update" if the file is newer. Your requirement for no questions is implicit in the command, unless you have permission problems of some kind - add a an "f" to the "-ru" if you have problems - the f stands for "force"
I have tested this in Ubuntu and it has been in all *nix since time immemorial - so it will be in OS X.
Regards
Kevin Crisp
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