Saturday started with a meeting of section managers at FOPAL. Sven, the volunteer manager, wanted to get everyone on the same page re pricing and other things. He says that over half of the people who come to our sales are regulars, repeaters. And a good fraction of them are resellers, people buying books to resell (where? I don’t know). On that account he wants the books on the shelves to turn over, not stay around waiting for the one buyer who would want that book. A book that has lasted through three sale weekends should go to the bargain room. And a book that is initially priced higher than our base price ($2 paper, $3 hardback) should be marked down for its second and third sales. OK. Not a big change for me. Some managers pushed back. Classic fiction lady said she would never oust Charles Dickens.
From there I picked up a couple of power bars for lunch and drove on to the Museum where I led a tour at 1pm. Private group, nice folks, seemed to enjoy themselves.
Back home for a nap and then at 5:30 met with Joanne to walk to the restaurant Ettan for some Indian food. It was good, but not sensational. Got ice creams at Salt&Straw and walked home eating them.
Friday morning muffin walk with Joanne. Then back to watch a video about Cubigo in preparation for the 11am meeting of the new ResTech group, same as the old AI group. We had a long inconclusive conversation with IT czar Jean about how we can help with the installation of the Cubigo platform.
After lunch and a nap, I spent an hour with the guitar.
Later the wrist brace I ordered yesterday arrived (say what you like about Amazon, it is remarkable). Let’s see, have I talked about this? For some time I’ve had the problem that under certain conditions, the thumb, first and second fingers of my left hand go numb. One annoying time is when playing the guitar. Hard to finger chords with numb fingers. Lately I have found that if I just hold the neck somewhat forward of the usual position, so my elbow is less bent, I could avoid or at least delay the onset. But I also sometimes wake in the night and find those fingers numb, because I’ve been sleeping on my left with my hand up by my chin. And there are other times. like sometimes when driving. All seem to relate to a bent elbow and a closed hand.
My doctor says this is almost always a symptom of carpal tunnel syndrome, with the median nerve compressed by the muscles at the base of the hand. I was dubious about that (I suspected the compression was in the elbow) but I ordered a wrist brace.
Tonight I put it on and went down to the sing-along in the lobby. Sitting in a chair there, with my hand in my lap, I noticed that those three fingers were going numb. I took the brace off. The numbness went away. I put it on and after a few minutes, numb again. The brace, with its stiff plate against the inner wrist and palm, was causing the numbness.
Now what have I learned? Is the doctor right, and all my numbness is from compression of the carpal tunnel? Or is this showing that pressure on the carpal tunnel can cause numbness, but is not necessarily the same cause as other times?
On Tuesday Frank sent me a text with a picture of the eight boxes of donations waiting at my section at fopal. Thinking about that was oppressing my mind, so this morning at 8 I got in the car and drove down there. Cleaned it all up. Got back in time for lunch at 12.
Had a bit of a nap then started walking to the doctor’s office. I’m not going to PAMF any more but his office is practically next door, so it’s the same 20 minute walk. Talked to him about two issues and decided how to proceed.
Treating myself to a chai latte at Peet’s, I remembered that about the same time, Joanne was supposed to be getting an eye treatment at PAMF. So I texted her and she was just finishing up and walked over to join me and we walked home together.
Quiet evening checking out the courses at TheGreatCourses.com. The subject of the Great Courses series had come up during our hike Wednesday, when Martha mentioned that our CH library has a collection of them. I’d looked the collection over and didn’t see anything that attracted me. Joanne had said, well, look online, it might be fun to take one of those together. So tonight I made a list of the ones I saw that might be interesting to share with her.
Hike in the Baylands with Joanne and Martha. After lunch I had a good guitar/singing practice session.
Early in the day Rhonda had announced an special meeting for 4pm. The reason was that our US Rep, Sam Liccardo, had held a press conference about the issue of the slow processing of work permits and residence permits for immigrants. Pretty obviously the current administration is deliberately slow-footing all that paperwork as a tactic to force immigrants to leave.
The human and economic costs are great. Rhonda had been asked to participate in this press event, speaking as an employer who has been losing staff. It seems we’ve had to let 9 people go, out of our employee roster of just over 100, when their work permits were not renewed. Not denied or canceled, just never renewed after they had applied.
The resident meeting was to describe what she had said, and then to let three of our staff — Yadira (brought to the US by her parents at age 3; has a masters degree in senior care administration), Izveth, our director of nursing (another dreamer, waiting for her DACA renewal), and Priya, our director of HR, another immigrant who has to counsel employees on these issues. They described the emotional pressure of waiting for the bureaucrats to respond to their application for extension. How they can never make long-term plans; don’t dare buy a house, etc. It’s really a cruel system made more so by current policies.
After supper I helped David G set up for an event. I won’t try to explain but the AV was unusual and we both messed it up. Fortunately the speaker was tolerant. That lecture event dragged on because my neighbors asked a bunch of dumb questions in the Q&A. Oh well.
In the morning I paid my estimated tax, and did some paperwork re a tour we are planning, and tidied the apartment for the housekeeper. And then wrote a short essay for the writers group. After lunch I had a good long session with the guitar.
Then at 4pm I attended the meeting of the Common Areas Advisory Group, residents reacting to Rhonda’s plan for the building upgrade. Today we talked mostly about the plans to add both a bistro/coffee shop and a bar, where they would be in the building, what they would serve and how that would affect dining services in general.
I left the meeting while it was still in progress at 5, to meet with Joanne. We went straight in to dinner and managed to get served and finish eating by 5:30. Then we headed for the car and drove down to the museum for an event. That started with a reception, a couple hundred people not one of whom did I know, milling around in the big meeting space. As I had sort of supposed they had food, a sushi bar and a slider bar, we could have skipped supper at CH and eaten here. But actually it was less awkward the way we did it. Walking around with a plate of sushi looking for a table with open seats among strangers? Nah.
We heard some congratulatory talk by the museum CEO — they passed $100M of donations this year — and then went into the big auditorium for the evening’s event. This was the author of the book Steve Jobs in Exile: the Untold Story of NeXT, Geoffrey Cain, moderating a panel of three people who worked with Jobs at NeXT. Those were,
Dan’l Lewis, most recently the CEO of the Computer History Museum, but in the 80s, the head of marketing for NeXT,
Avie Tevanian, head of software at NeXT and then at Apple where he helped create both MacOS and iOS,
Bud Tribble, part of the original Mac design team, software lead at NeXT and later at Apple.
That’s three heavyweight computer people, all of whom worked along with, or reported to, Steve Jobs for many years. So it was a fun presentation hearing the inside stories of the rise and fall of NeXT and its reincarnation as MacOS.
One story: the NeXT cube (see above) was made out of magnesium for lightness. It was difficult to cast and technically, magnesium metal is flammable, although there was never a problem with a NeXT burning up. The contractor who made the cubes had to sand them to remove mold marks, and the magnesium sanding dust is definitely and easily flammable and they had problems with fires. Also magnesium is hard to paint, and it was difficult to get a good coating of that nice black color. The original budget was that the case would be a $50 part, but it ended up costing more than $50 just to paint it.
I knew the general outline of the story. One item that I had never heard, was that when Tim Berners-Lee was developing what became HTML, he did the programming work on a NeXT cube.
My own story of the NeXT is this: When I was working as a tech writer at Informix, Steve Jobs cane and did a personal sales job on the VP in charge of documentation, and sold him on the idea that his writers and editors should use NeXTs. I remember vehemently telling him, “No, it’s the wrong decision!!” He ignored me, and our department of maybe 8 people got NeXTs to make manuals with. Of course, all the development engineers and everyone else in the organization was using Sun workstations. So we couldn’t run or test the software they were making. Not to mention the NeXT was slow.
It’s a holiday so dining services is off tonight, and giving out sack suppers in the morning. At 8:30 I went to the dining room and picked up a salad and a cookie for supper. The plan is for the 6th floor to share pizza, but if you want a salad or a drink or whatever, pick it up from the kitchen in the morning.
With that done I went back down and met Joanne and we went for a walk. Bought a couple of things at Trader Joe’s, then had a coffee and a chat. We needed to plan tomorrow night: we are signed up for a reception at the Computer History Museum at 6, so we needed to figure out how to work in supper ahead of that.
Joanne had the car for a lunch date with her friends, so after lunch I hopped the #21 bus down to FOPAL. The #21 runs direct from Channing House to a block from FOPAL. And with my senior Clipper Card, the ride is only $1.
I found a mass of boxes, at least 10. I processed 6 of them, then caught the #21 back home.
At 5:30 I met the pizza guy at the front door and carried them up to 6 where 10 or 11 of us crowded around the table in our floor dining room and gossiped and had pizza. Everybody paid $15 which ended up about $40 more than I had spent, so the excess went into the 6th floor petty cash fund. That still left $120 for me which I stashed in my desk, along with the wad of cash remaining from the last time I bought pizza. Problem is, I almost never spend cash for anything, I always pay with my phone.
Usual Sunday morning. Largely a quiet day, nothing scheduled. I do not deal well with leisure. Joanne says I am “task oriented”. Sounds right. I get upset and depressed at the end of a day when I realize I didn’t do anything I would call worthwhile. OK, I did practice guitar.
And I killed my Kindle. This was a Kindle Fire tablet, the original 9-inch tablet from about 2012. It was bought new by my late brother-in-law, and his wife gave it to me. I’ve kept it by my bed for bedtime reading for at least a decade.
But the battery was starting to fail, and Amazon has announced the end of support for it. I had started to read up on how to jail-break it, so I could read non-Amazon ebooks. But first I wanted to replace the battery. I bought a new battery install kit for it. Watched the video on how to do the replacement.
I did the replacement and it seemed to go well. When I hit the power button, it booted up, the screen lit up, all looked good. Then I discovered that the touch screen was not responding. However I tapped or swiped, no reaction. Unfortunately the touch screen is the only input it accepts. If you can’t tap or swipe, you can’t do anything. I took it apart again and reassembled it twice, checking carefully that I had reattached all the cables. No dice. “It’s dead, Jim.” I took it to the basement where Facilities has a closet for collecting e-waste. RIP Kindle.
Main activity today was to lead a tour at the museum at 2pm. Don’t remember what I did in the morning, but I’m sure it was terribly constructive. Oh, I remember. Actually this was yesterday: the pot containing one of my favorite plants just split, half of the side of the pot falling off. I didn’t actually notice that, what I noticed was that the plant was obviously water-stressed, leaves all limp. Poor baby, what’s wrong? Oh–half of your root ball is exposed. So I had to repot the plant in a hurry, and made a mess of potting soil and stuff on the balcony. So part of this morning was to sweep up the mess and generally tidy up.
Anyway, after lunch I hopped in Fred and off to the museum. Good tour, had a couple of people who were absolutely riveted by my spiel, watching and nodding at every word. Very flattering.
After supper I was looking through some of the old pictures on my Smugmug page, and casually asked Joanne if she would be bored by somebody’s 20-year-old vacation pics. She very generously came down and spent an hour looking at my old pics of New Zealand. So that was nice.
Joined Joanne for our customary Friday “muffin mosey”. We sat at Starbucks and planned out a trip we may take next year.
At 11 I joined what was until now the AI interest group. As of today we have a new focus. We recently learned that the new Channing House IT director, the jolly and likeable Jean (French zhan that is) means to replace our old in-house resident website, fondly known as Resweb, with a completely new site based on the Cubigo platform. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to replace Resweb which has a rather endearing turn of the century look to it, but there are a lot of immediate concerns about the details. The AI interest group has spent a lot of time talking about the shortcomings of Resweb lately so our collective ears perked up.
Jean made that switch at his previous employer, The Forum, a much larger senior residence a few miles away. He replied to a query that there, they had a Resident Tech Committee that was, he says instrumental in testing and refining that system. Channing House has no such general committee as yet, so we have appointed ourselves the ad hoc resident tech committee and we will work with the Resident Association exec committee to get that made official.
Frittered the rest of the day away.
This post is created using my iPad. Looking ahead to possible travel, wondering if I could make do with just the iPad, or should I carry a real laptop. Answer: either get a real keyboard for this, or the laptop.
Codgerville 