Thursday 08/20/2026

Took a standard walk. Then settled down to finishing up the Beatles videos. I did a QC check on them all, found a couple where the captions weren’t right and fixed them. Then put all the videos in a dropbox folder for the committee to look at. Stew wants them available as single videos, so he can pass them around to the people who have signed on to be “song leaders” introducing and leading the crowd for specific songs.

Wasted a lot of time the rest of the day. Little guitar, little messing with code. I cannot keep my attention on writing software the way I used to. An hour, hour and a half, and my brain glazes over. Sad.

Later in the day I remembered that I have committed to giving a 10 minute talk on the history of Silicon Valley. That’s what I should have been working on all afternoon. So, to make up time, I cheated: I asked Claude.ai to give me an outline and some references. Which it did. So I have some guidelines for what to read up on. No, the AI will not write my talk. I will. But it was a help in getting focused.

Wednesday 08/19/2026

Oh I am getting so sloppy… I started this post and never clicked “Publish”.

Went for an easy hike in the Baylands. Just me and Joanne, the other hikers all begged off for medical appointments and other conflicts. Then we had the idea to eat lunch at Michaels at Shoreline. On the way, Joanne said, how about the Google visitor center instead? But the signage is really bad to nonexistent, and we were never able to find where they wanted visitors to park, so after 20 minutes of driving around the Google campus we gave up and went to Michaels anyway.

In the afternoon I worked and finished the Beatles videos.

Tuesday 08/18/2026

Late post — went to bed without posting anything. Text from Dennis this morning: you ok? Ooops.

Tidied for the housekeeper then went for a walk, then joined the writers meeting. Dr. Margaret had asked me to play music to accompany her piece. She wrote about the music she chose for her wedding march. She zooms in from her summer home on Lake Tahoe, with a crappy internet connection that wouldn’t allow playing music. So I did that. I didn’t have any contribution to make for about the third consecutive week. I must write something for next week.

Anyway, lunch then I went to the gym and ran the routine that Fitness Director Kris had given me. It takes about 45 minutes. After which I took a nap, thus completely forgetting the Line Dance class. Worked on Beatles videos.

After supper, Joanne came to my room and we watched Enchanted April, the movie I didn’t finish watching last week because she was away and I thought she would enjoy it. Which she did.

And then it was late and I went to bed without posting here.

Monday 08/17/2026

Took a standard walk. Then at 10:30 was time for the monthly Event Coordinators meeting (EvCo) which was mostly about the upcoming Activity Showcase, when all the many (many!) resident committees and interest groups have tables in the auditorium so residents and some prospects or waitlist people too, can mingle and think about joining yet another committee.

Spent most of the afternoon editing videos. And that was the day.

Sunday 8/16/2026

Sunday morning stuff per usual. Then I called the SF Chronicle customer service line. For a couple of months I’ve been getting their e-paper 6 days and the delivered Sunday edition, which I don’t really look at. But I do get some use out of their daily email. I can scroll through that in about 2 minutes, control-clicking on the one or two headlines that interest me. Those articles sit as tabs in a window, along with other tabs of stuff-to-read for later in the day.

So I changed the sub from Sunday-only to electronic-only. Soon my Mercury sub will also switch to 6-day electronic and Sunday delivery. So I will be developing some new morning habits.

At 11 Stew stopped by and we reviewed the Beatles clips, and agreed on a couple of changes. I will work on those the rest of the week. Should get finished by Thursday afternoon.

After lunch I was facing an open afternoon and I thought, why not go do my Monday FOPAL stint today, freeing up time on Monday? So I did. Put in about 3 hours processing 9 boxes of books. Left everything tidy.

Came home and watched some more of the training video for DaVinci Resolve. It’s an extraordinarily complicated app, but I have already used it in a simple way to prepare two Beatles clips, and I will use it for the 14 more I have to do.

Ate a simple sandwich in my room for supper, didn’t feel sociable.

Saturday 08/15/2026

Took a modest walk in the morning. Then settled down to capturing the remaining Beatles videos off the committee’s want-list. I now have them all, plus a couple of extras, 19 in total. Emailed the committee saying when do you want to meet to review these? Concensus seems to be tomorrow at 10.

Had a long call with Scott, as we tried to figure out why Gmail was misbehaving on his system. I wasn’t much help but we finally stumbled into the fix.

Spent the afternoon reading The Maniac. It’s a biography of Johnny von Neumann, who I mention during my docent tours, but about whom I knew little. This book is getting a lot of praise, and deserves it; it is very readable, but not a conventional biography at all. Instead, each chapter is written as an imagiary first person monologue, in the fictional voice of somebody who knew von Neumann: one of his wives, friends, or colleagues; just rambling on about what they thought about him and what he did.

Also played some guitar (first time in a week), took another walk, took another nap. Now I am going to go down and attend the Saturday night movie, Enchanted April.

Change of plan: the movie is clearly something that Joanne would like, and I would like to watch it with her. I checked and it is on Amazon Prime, so I bailed and will watch it another time with her.

Friday 08/14/2026

First thing, I went down to the gym and did the full workout, all reps, that Kris designed for me. Takes about 45 minutes. Not exhausting.

Then I led the noon tour at the Computer History Museum. About 30 people to start, a big crowd for a weekday.

In the afternoon I chose and downloaded some more Beatles videos. I hope to finish that up tomorrow.

Thursday 08/13/2026

Took a longish (3.5 mile) walk in the morning, just city streets. Then I spent the about 5 hours collecting Beatles videos from different sources. Very boring and frustrating. One problem I should have foreseen: a source I’ve been loaned is a Blu-Ray disc, the Beatles “1” album set. It should be a great source, except for one eentsy hitch. It’s a Blu-Ray disc and I don’t have a Blu-Ray disc reader for my computer. I could play it on my TV, I have a nice Sony Blu-Ray disc player on the TV. But that doesn’t get me a computer file that I can edit and splice and so on.

Good quality Blu-Ray disc drives are about $150 on Amazon but do I want to buy one just for this job?

That’s all the day I feel like talking about.

Wednesday 08/12/2026

Took a standard walk in the morning. After, I went to the gym and worked through two sets of my new workout regime. Not painful.

Then I edited song lyrics into a video of the Beatles “All You Need Is Love”. Three down, 14 to go.

I had lunch with Rich. Rich wants me, as a supposed expert in Silicon Valley history, to assist in an upcoming memorial for a friend of his, who ran a consulting firm in Los Altos where Rich worked for decades. So I grilled him on what the firm did and his part in it.

Exchanged emails with Rob who reminded us all that tonight, 2-4am, is supposed to be the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. I worked out that the radiant would be NNE and 40 degrees up, which happens to be just about — well if I stand on my balcony and point up and to my left, that’s it. So I set up the camera on a tripod and chair. And thought about getting up at 3am to see.

Now I’m looking at the weather forecast and it calls for cloudy skies from midnight on. So maybe not.

Ran an AV event, a talk by people from Arts Los Altos, about public art in our neighboring suburb. Nice talk, and Rob, a relatively new 6th floor neighbor, volunteered himself to shadow me and see how a zoom event is run. Nice. He’s smart and energetic, so yay.

Tuesday 08/11/2026

Today is housekeeping day, and laundry day. Which means starting the laundry then tidying the apartment in advance of the housekeeper coming at noon, then attending the writers meeting, then vacating the apartment while she cleans. So I go to start the laundry and I am down to only one sheet of the ecological detergent sheets that I was persuaded to use, by the Channing House Committee to Reduce Plastic Waste, who last year built a giant sculpture of orange Tide bottles in the lobby and shamed everybody for using big plastic jugs of detergent that don’t recycle, so I use sheets of plant-based detergent, one little square of thick papery stuff per load, and now I only have one sheet.

So I start the first load, then take a fast walk the half mile to Whole Foods to buy more. Back in time to start the second load with a newly-bought sheet of detergent. Then back to work to tidy the apartment, then back to fold the first load and start the second drying. I ended up joining the writers meeting Zoom while I was still hanging my shirts, which got me points from the other members.

After lunch and a nap I saw I had an email from Gigi wondering where the video was, for the book talk of August 3rd. Still sitting in Zoom’s cloud storage, is the answer, because I had forgotten all about it. So that was what I worked on in the afternoon, finishing up after dinner.