During the night I turned over in bed to my left, and immediately had a moment of vertigo. When I got up to pee, I had to reach for the walls for stability. I spent the rest of the night sleeping on my back with my head propped up, and in the morning was pretty much ok again.
Thursday, 12/12/2019
Spent the day at the Yosemite warehouse, including a couple hours scraping degraded foam out of the inside of a Cray 1.
The Cray was recently ousted from the museum’s lobby and sent to Yosemite for long term storage. It has six, pie-slice-shaped, power supply boxes that surrounded its base. These had been detached for shipment. Aurora wanted them opened and vacuumed out; she could see dust and crud inside.
The machine has been badly treated over the years. I believe it was actually used as Los Alamos, but it has been an inoperative exhibit for a long time, and not handled nicely. The covers of the power supplies, for example, are held on with eight flat-head philips screws, and none of the six boxes had more than three screws remaining, others being broken off or just lost. Anyway, I opened the first and groaned. The top and front panel were lined with that abominable black foam that we’ve had to scrape out of so many old machines. It gets soft, then brittle, and rains down into the machine as a toxic, acidic black snow. The stuff in the Cray had just reached the squishy state and had started to drop crumbs down; that’s what the boss saw, black crumbs of foam. I wore gloves and a breathing mask for this. Alan, who did more of it after lunch, disdained the mask. OK, your lungs.
We also played “museum tetris” moving the 1401 “study collection” (two 1403 printers and a 1402 reader/punch all partly cannibalized for parts, plus many cartons of SMS cards and cables, all from the 1401 restoration project) into a more compact arrangement to help make room for the Cray.
Back home, I had to prepare for my second A/V committee assignment of the month. This was a concert by the Silicon Valley Boy Choir. I fussed with the position of the Steinway on the stage, and the lighting. Then I contacted Florrie, who was in charge of the event, and she had me change some things. Then we waited for the performers to arrive. They were supposed to come at 6:30 and of course didn’t actually arrive until 6:50. Then they wanted the piano moved and could the mic be on a stand instead of hand-held? Well, no, mainly because I didn’t know where the mic stand was and it was time to start. Had they come on time there would have been time to find the mic stand (I know where it is now, I looked after the concert). Feh. Talent. What’r’ya gonna do.
Codgerville 