Wednesday, 10/23/2019
Went for a run, sans sweatshirt as the weather has warmed up again. After that I wrote another long detailed note to the CHBB for MacOS users. Yesterday’s email had made the point about “your old 32-bit apps won’t run under the next release,” but that just raised the question, “which of my apps are 32-bit ones?”
Turns out it is quite simple to find out, but not obvious. So I wrote up how to do that: how to get your mac to list the 32-bit apps, so you could go down the list and decide which ones you actually use, so you can start trying to get upgraded 64-bit versions of them.
The big issue here is Adobe software. When Adobe went to the highway robbery excuse me, subscription model, a lot of people didn’t bother to subscribe. They just kept using the last version of Photoshop, InDesign, LightRoom that they had actually purchased on CD, which is the “CS5” edition. They work perfectly well. Unfortunately they are all 32-bit apps and will quit working when you next upgrade your OS. So you have the choice of paying Adobe an annual subscription, after which you can download the latest versions (and learn their modified UIs); or you can look for alternative products and learn a whole new app. I didn’t cover all that in the email; just how to find out what your 32-bit apps are.
About 10 I went to FOPAL. Well, first to the grocery store next door, where I bought about $15 worth, including some grapes and the sugar-free drinks I like to stock. I put them in the fancy canvas shopping bag that I had brought back as a souvenir from Mykonos, on the front seat of the car. And left the windows open.
I worked the computer section and then sorted until about 12, when I went back out to the car to have some lunch and chill out for a while. And guess what? My bag of groceries was gone. Some creep had reached in and taken my bag. I hope they were disappointed with what they got. I hope they choke on a grape. I really miss that bag, it was well-made and had a trendy hotel name on it.
After a while I went back in and did sorting during the 2-4pm open hours. Then back to CH to relax for an hour before dinner. I finished eating at 6:15 and left for the theater. I had tickets to TheaterWorks’ Mark Twain’s River of Song at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. It’s basically a concert of early American music, around the theme of a trip down the Mississipi, conducted by Mark Twain remembering his riverboat days.
This was not very good, and I left at intermission. There were several problems. The first was that the performers really weren’t very good, either as singers or musicians; just average living room performers, mostly. They played banjo, guitar and fiddle, but at no point did anybody try to solo on an instrument; the kind of musicianship you get in any bluegrass group was absent. With one exception their voices were average to weak; the exception being Valisia LeKae, who has an excellent alto voice and can really act.
Second problem was the staging. This was a small show, just six people sitting or standing around, no dancing, little movement. If it were presented in a small theater like the Pear or even Lucy Stern in Palo Alto, it might come across better. But the MVCPA stage is enormous, it’s a huge room, and this little group was kind of huddled in the middle. The big stage emphasized how average (and also static) the performances were.
Codgerville 