What an irritating day! This morning, I found that the printer in the BCRC had failed sometime over the weeekend. It had been saying "perform printer maintenance" for a couple of weeks, but I had been unable to figure out how to order the "printer maintenance kit". I tried ordering it from HP's website, but I couldn't find anyway to get it to do the "tax exempt" thing. The parts aren't available in the "Higher Ed" site. So I went ahead and tried ordering them anyway, but their website crapped out when I clicked the "confirm your order" button -- some Microsoft ASP SQL error. So I tried calling the 800 number. After a long time on hold, some person guessed that the web order probably hadn't gone through. They tried to transfer me to the higher ed order taking people, but my call got dropped. So I called again only to be (eventually) told that they couldn't sell me the parts and that I should use their website. "Is there anything else I can help you with today?" the fellow asked in an artificially and unnecessarily perky tone. It was a frustrating day.
Alisa rescued me and took me out for lunch. We were bad and went to the pizza buffet. I miss pizza a lot, but just once in a while is plenty. For dinner Lucy fixed a delicious pork roast. That was a treat! I ate too much today, but overall the downward trend is clear. Unfortunately the weather is too chilly today (for me) to get out for a bike ride. The forecast is for slightly warmer weather over the next few days, though, so maybe it will warm up enough to take a ride on Tuesday or Wednesday.
At the end up the day, a consultant told me he'd found a workstation that wouldn't boot. I had been pleasantly surprised that I had modified the master image for the lab and it had seemingly updated everything perfectly. I booted into single-user mode and fscked the disk. I found that the filesize for Extensions.kextcache was wrong (should be 0). So I mounted the drive and deleted Extensions.kextcache and Extensions.mkext. Then the machine seemed to boot and run fine. It was nice to be able to fix something.