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.

Monday 08/10/2026

First thing off to FOPAL. Did the post-sale triage, looking at every book on my shelves, and sending the ones that had been exposed in 3 sales, to the bargain room. And rather aggressively marking down the prices of those that had been up for one sale. Got back in time for lunch.

After lunch I did some more work with automatic titling of music videos. I had complained to one site about how it cut off after the first two lines of a song. They politely pointed out that I missed a setting. I can set the app to look for specifically “English (Sung lyrics)”. When I did that, it worked pretty well, capturing all the lyrics and getting about 90% accuracy on the words.

I had it save the result in an SRT file. Then I opened the video in Davinci Resolve, and imported the SRT file and like magic, my timeline was populated with subtitles. I still had to read them, correct a handful of errors, and split some long titles into two shorter titles. But it was at least somewhat faster than entering the titles manually.

Then I met with our Channing House new Fitness Director, Kris. Kris is a very nice, affable, helpful guy, something of a giant physically, ex-marine but with a great manner dealing with us old folks. This was to get me set with a fitness routine using the machines in our gym, one I can work on my own time. He walked me through a set of exercises and promised to send me an email with pictures and numbers.

Then went out for a mile walk around downtown.

Sunday 08/09/2026

Pretty boring day. Did my usual Sunday morning, although I flubbed the Sunday crossword, didn’t finish.

Explored the automatic creation of SRT files. There are numerous web sites and App Store apps that promise to scan a video, extract the spoken text, and write an SRT file which defines each subtitle with a time code for where it should appear on the screen. The two I tried might work for spoken dialog but they certainly failed at detecting sung lyrics.

Mostly I read and napped. Took like, three naps.

Finally it was 5:30 and time to meet Joanne coming back from her book club, and we headed out as planned to eat at Buck’s in Woodside. Funky place with a museum of random stuff hanging off the ceiling. Next to our table, a display of bronzed baby shoes and some currency from Zimbabwe. That kind of a place. Comfort food, well prepared.

Joanne is off for the great Pacific Northwest tomorrow, so I look forward to a boring week.

Saturday 08/08/2026

Started with a slightly shortened standard walk. Then took a tech squad dispatch again to Susan who had some password problems.

Later I settled down to address this issue of Beatles videos. We will want 15 or so of them. The exact list and order is TBS but I know some numbers that will definitely be included. In the past I have assembled videos for showing at Good Times events by downloading YouTube videos and splicing them up with the iMovie app. But this time the committee definitely wants subtitles, so people can sing along if they don’t remember the lyrics.

And not just subtitles. This year the Channing House movie committee has been showing movies with supertitles, that is, dialog text at the top of the image, not on the bottom margin of the screen. This has been very, very popular, because in our auditorium, if you aren’t in the front 2 rows, peoples’ heads block your view of the bottom of the screen, where the usual closed captions run.

Jerry has worked out a way to move the subtitles to the top of the screen, so this how the Good Times committee wants song lyrics to appear on a music video, top of the screen. Jerry uses the Final Cut Pro app in a fairly complicated way. I don’t want to do that because (a) it’s an Adobe app and I refuse to get into paying Adobe subscription fees, and (b) it’s a complicated app. So I looked around and there is DaVinci Resolve, an equally capable video editing app which has a free version that can do what I want.

So this afternoon I was learning DaVinci Resolve, or at least one little corner of it. I was able to pull a Beatles performance off a DVD, edit it down to just one song, and put the lyrics on the top of the screen. Check it out (that link will not be good more than a week or so).

I entered those title texts manually. But I also learned that subtitles or closed captions can be prepared in a type of text file called an SRT file, with a particular format. There are multiple web sites and apps that claim they can scan a video, convert the dialog to text, and write an SRT file. Which I could then import into DaVinci Resolve and it would generate the actual titles automatically. I need to investigate this further. Whether one of the scanning apps can handle sung lyrics as opposed to speech. But that was the day’s work, anyway.

Friday 08/07/2026

Took a walk with Joanne in the morning. Did a little desk work in the mid day. At 2pm I met with Lou, Stew, and DG to plan the next Good Times show, now 6 weeks off. It will be a Beatles sing-along, with original videos. DG provided from his immense collection of DVDs, discs with original videos, like all four Ed Sullivan appearances. I am tasked with collecting and editing videos for the 15 or so songs that Stew and Lou put in the program, and for adding lyric captions to them. It will take a few hours.

I got a bit of a start on it later, playing some of the DVD from the “Get Back” documentary that ends with the famous Rooftop Concert.

After supper I attended a concert in the auditorium: jazz singer Thu Ho, with a guest star, pianist Aimee Nolte, who is apparently a YouTube phenom. She did play some excellent piano during this.

Thursday 08/06/2026

Walked out to Zoe’s in the morning. On return, called the SJ Mercury customer service line. Spoke to a lady with a distinct Hindi accent about how I was unhappy with their bill (see 7.245 for details). She offered to reduce it to $730 (the price it was the previous quarter) and then to $630 (price of the quarter before) but I refused. Finally we agreed that I would go to Sunday delivery only, with an electronic subscription for the other days, $80 per quarter. This will mean having to change some of my oldest routines, which does not please me, but so it goes.

I spent a lot of the rest of the day with those donated gadgets and finally finished it all off. This was stuff from the turn of the century, for example an Apple Newton that thought the date was 1/4/1994, and an external hard drive from 2002, several still in the original factory packaging, mint condition, never used. Figure out what they are, when they were made, what is the model number; find it on eBay to get an idea what they might bring. It was all time-consuming but I got it done.

That was about the day.

Wednesday 08/05/2026

First thing up this morning was a visit to my cardiologist, Dr. Dibiase, for a routine checkup. I had no complaints to report; the machinery has been working pretty well lately. She agreed I looked good, but she emphasized that besides walking, I should be doing strength training. “If you don’t stress the main muscle groups, you will start to lose lean body mass.” So I have that project to take on now.

Since we planned a hike after, Joanne and I drove up to the doctor’s office. She had coffee while had my appointment, then we went up Page Mill road looking for a trailhead. Supposedly there was a hike in the Los Trancos Open Space preserve, but we couldn’t find it. That is, couldn’t find a signed trail-head and parking. So we backtracked to Palo Alto Foothills park and hiked there. This was an unfamiliar trail, also called Los Trancos, which looked about the right length on the park map.

This turned out to be a 3.5 mile loop with over 600 feet of elevation gain, some steep, all narrow. It was a tiring walk for both of us. We got back to the car about 1pm, hot and sweaty and too late for lunch at CH. We ended up eating a late lunch at the Peninsula Creamery, which was nice.

After a nap, I fiddled with more of the donated gadgets, and handled one very easy tech squad dispatch.

Tuesday 08/04/2026

Headed out at 7:30, drove to FOPAL, spent 2 hours finishing up my section. Made it look all cute for the sale. Stopped for coffee and still got back in time for the writers meeting at 10:30.

The same donor who had given the Osborne computer that we sold off during the VCF, had also donated a box and a half of other gadgets. Old gadgets. I don’t know who the person was, if they died or were just downsizing, but they were a gadget freak, bought stuff and held on to it. So I brought this box of miscellaneous stuff home to start checking it out, see what works, what might be worth selling, etc.

Between 2 and 4:30 I got through five items. A Casio “personal digital assistant Z-7000” which didn’t work. A Casio “pocket color TV” that didn’t work, although the screen lit up. An Apple Newton MessagePad from 1994 which did work.

There’s more in the box but I ran out of time. I changed pants and met Joanne to walk out to supper at a local favorite, Vino Locale. Over supper we brought our accounts up to date, all the entertainment tickets I had bought against her paying for car insurance, and so on. So we are financially square as of August 1.

Then back to CH to catch the Tuesday Night movie, this time When Harry Met Sally. So that’s been a full day.

Monday 08/03/2026

Took a standard walk. Ended up with 10K steps, 4 miles for the day. Then set up for an auditorium event, a First Monday Book Talk where the author that was presenting, is a teacher at the the U. of Manchester in the UK. I set up a zoom meeting as scheduled, then had a panic when the zoomroom that is supposed to put the zoom meeting on our projector screen, wasn’t working. Dashed to the basement to get one of the IT guys to come up and reboot the zoomroom PC.

Soon the professor joined the zoom and it was all OK. As soon as the talk was over, I picked up my carry-out lunch and my other computer bag, and headed for FOPAL. This is the week before the sale and I hoped to get my section ready for the sale. I failed. It was 3pm and there were still 3 boxes of books to go, plus the usual tidying of shelves and taking pictures. I will have to go back tomorrow.

Back to CH in time for the monthly 4pm Poetry Out Loud meeting. Very pleasant little gathering, about 9 people, each reading a poem they like. I read James Fenton’s “In Paris with You”. Down for the dinner mixer at 5, and that’s it for the day.

Almost.

On the way back to my room, I picked up my mail, and here is the quarterly bill from the Mercury News. They have raised it again, and now want $857 for 13 weeks of The Merc. This has been giving me fits for over a year now, each quarter it goes up and I say “too much”. It is now (does some arithmetic) over $9 a day for a daily paper. For a ten-minute read, a crossword and a sudoku. And it is more than the New York Times costs for a year.

I played around with the SF Chronicle but didn’t really like its news coverage. It wasn’t pleasant to read. Maybe I’ll try to get used to it. Problem is, I’m looking at changing a habit of more than 50 years standing! I started reading the daily Merc in 1972.

Sunday 08/02/2026

Out at 8am to pick up Frank. Then we did the long day of standing behind the table and take people’s money as they bought books. Besides Frank we had FOPAL volunteers Irina, Allen, Steve and Joan.

Also, a little adventure. About 2pm we realized that nobody had been tasked with bringing the hand-truck from FOPAL, and we would need it for load-out. So I drove back to FOPAL and picked up the hand-truck from the bargain room. Then, I had something to drop off in the Main room. When I went in there, over by my section, on top of a box of computer books, was: a computer! An Osborne 1 at that.

Somebody had donated this relic of 1981, just yesterday. And I am about to drive back to a vintage computer show. I grabbed that sucker. Texted Frank to clear off space for it on our table. When I got there we set it on the table, plugged it in. The screen lit up with a message, “Insert disk in drive A and press return.” Unfortunately we had no Osborne 1 CP/M boot disk to try. But it looked good.

Some festival patrons were standing around curious to see what we were doing. I quickly looked up “Osborne 1” on EBay. The cheapest one, which it said did not run, was asking $350. OK, we are selling this. One guy in the group says, what do you want for it? I say, “Two Hundred” and he says, “Fine” and holds out his credit card. Boom, gone.

At 5 we could shut down and pack up the remaining unsold books, transport them to our cars, haul them back to FOPAL, and unload them. I finally got in about 6:30. Had a nice supper of PBJ and bouillon in my room.

In whole, the sale was a great success. We took down 42 boxes of stuff, and we brought back 17, so nearly 2-thirds sold. Total receipts over $3000. And a couple hundred or so old books re-homed.