Sunday, 4/19/2020

Yesterday I watered the air plants and today, one bloomed!

Back story: in 2015 Marian and I drove to Oregon for the SWBB games at Oregon and OSU. These basketball weekends always have a free day between games. For this open Saturday we decided to drive from Corvallis toward the coast, probably aiming for Newport. I can’t recall which of three possible routes we took; all involve narrow roads through forests, with occasional small towns.

Somewhere, Newport or one of the other small towns, we stumbled upon an arts and crafts fair, and among the vendors was a guy selling air plants. We bought one, a little ball of spiky curved leaves, and brought it home.

We set it on a windowsill, on a small green saucer that we had lying around. Every other time we watered the house-plants, we would dunk the air plant in a bowl of water to soak for 15 minutes; then put it back on its saucer for another two weeks. Over the years it has gotten slightly larger, so it now hangs over the edge of that saucer.

Once, probably in 2017, while I was watering the plant, I mis-handled it and one of its branches broke off. Rather than tossing it, I set the branch in its own little glass saucer next to the main plant.

Yesterday it was again time to water the air plants, and while dunking them, I noticed that the top leaves of the smaller one had turned a nice pink color. Oh dear, was it dying? It looked the same as always except for the color. This morning, only 24 hours later, the two-inch-tall plant has bloomed!

Sister in law Jean responded to my email celebrating the blossom, saying that there is a separation between the pollen and the stamen, so clearly it is not meant to be self-fertilizing. But it’s unlikely that the right insect will come by, so perhaps I should take a toothpick and move some pollen from the anther to the stamen, and then I might get some kind of fruit. I will do that!

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On Thursday I turned in my menu for the week and I carefully and obviously marked a big X through the breakfast choices and wrote “NO BREAKFAST”. I thought that menu started today. In fact, I’m sure; last week’s menu finished on Saturday, I remember that.

Nevertheless this morning a server rang my doorbell at the usual time and handed me the full default breakfast including oatmeal and coffee. Whuuut? I was momentarily unsure about the starting date so I took it. But we gonna have a problem if they come tomorrow. Problem was, I had already made for myself and eaten a delicious breakfast involving green grapes, bread, and peanut butter. So I had to toss most of this one.

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Then for two hours I got domestic again. Watered the plants, and fussed over them a little. Got out the spray cleaner and rags I was given, and Cleaned The Bathroom. All the mirrors and counters, the shower doors (both sides) and all the walls and floor of the shower, and the toilet, and wiped down all the stuff that sits on the counter. Done. If I only had my DIY vacuum… I looked on Amazon and there are decent looking cordless vacuums around $120. I sent off a cheerful email to Kim asking if she could ballpark the arrival time of the vacuum. If she can’t, or if it’s weeks, I may just buy my own.

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Lenny, who wants to help the tech squad, emailed that she’d like to try TeamViewer, so after lunch we coordinated on that. Her hangup was the extra part of the T.V. install where you have to go into System Settings and authorize it for two permissions. That was a problem with Maggie yesterday, too. I talked her through that and then I could control her computer, and then ended that session and she was able to set up and control my computer.

Later Craig forwarded a tech call from Randy, a 4th floor resident I met while living down there. He “can’t get any mail” on his Macbook. Craig says he is hopeless with tech stuff; Craig couldn’t help him; he has probably lost his PacBell password; and “his wife has given up on him”, technically only, I hope. Anyway I should feel free to pass on this help call. Without actually talking to Randy I can guess that somehow his Macbook has forgotten the login for the POP/IMAP server at PacBell. I was helping someone work through those settings the other day, too. On the Mac it is partly in System Settings: Internet Accounts, and partly in the Mail app’s preferences, and… not something I would want to try to talk someone through on the phone. But he’s not going to be able to manage the TeamViewer install, either.

So I called Craig back and asked if it was legit to have somebody hand over their machine, in a bag, and I could disinfect it and probably fix the problem. Craig thinks that’s not allowed for us residents. However, the staff can do it. We have a new IT person, Vanessa, just come on board, and he will talk to her. So I’m off the hook for that Mac problem.

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I mentioned I’d written to Kim (communications/marketing) about the vacuums. She asked Victoria (housekeeping) who wrote to me this afternoon that they have the vacuums and will be delivering them starting tomorrow! Yay!

 

Saturday, 4/18/2020

Oh, I forgot to write up on Friday, how I tried another game from my bundle. It was called Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered. This is another one where I failed the tutorial. It appears to be beautifully rendered. (The programming skill behind some of these games is really impressive. Well, except for Everything which was slightly more crude than Lego World.) You use the keyboard to control a human figure to walk, run, jump, through a dark world of troubles and evil. The classic WASD keys for motion, the arrow keys in the other hand to control the camera. But I couldn’t get through the tutorial, controlling a figure that looked like a crash test dummy (cute touch) to do simple things like jump up onto a ladder and climb it. Or jump aside fast enough to avoid being run over by a speeding police car.

Usually after I’ve had a naive try at one of these, I go and watch a run-through video, of which there are many for every game in existence. I will watch one for Fahrenheit and maybe reconsider. The story is supposed to be deep. (Later: nope. Too noir for moi.)

Today I took another peep at a game I played extensively a couple of years ago. Vendetta Online is an old-timer, a spaceflight simulation that has been available as a MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role playing game, meaning everybody is in the same universe and their avatars can interact within the game) since 2002. I played it for maybe 20 hours back in the late ‘oughts, using the keyboard. (Probably on my old blue and white Power Mac and 21″ display, hah!)

Then in 2016-17 I purchased a good quality USB gaming joystick and bought a month’s subscription, and put in maybe 100 or so hours over several weeks inhabiting the Vendetta universe. Initially it is a lot of fun learning to fly your spacecraft; they do a great job of creating a realistic, rather pretty, 3-D space with various asteroids and stations and of course, other people’s ships. It looked super on my 29″ iMac. (These days I believe they support VR headsets; that might be spectacular!)

What finally made it boring was there was only one way to interact with others: combat. You practice combat by flying around finding the robot drones that infest the asteroid belts, some of which are pretty good at fighting back. But that gets old. Then either you fight other people one-on-one and get killed (well, I usually did) or you could join a faction or a fleet and all fly your ships together to go have a battle with another fleet. That makes for awesome video, if you can avoid being shot while admiring it.

The game makes gestures at having a trading economy; you can fly around from system to system, buying and selling stuff, and in that way make credits you can trade for improvements to your ship and so forth. But that aspect is really shallow. It’s all interacting with, basically, price spreadsheets. Grinding for credits got boring pretty quickly, so finally I gave it up.

Today, thinking about it, I wondered, how’s ol’ V.O. getting on? And checked in at its website to find that they have made themselves free to play until June 1st. I signed in with my old ID but darn, they’ve forgotten even the puny achievements I once had earned, so I’m be back to zero experience points and the basic ship. And no joystick. You can do everything using the keyboard, but I remember the joystick made it more fun. I probably won’t play it again, but I would actually recommend it to anybody with a good monitor and time on their hands.

First thing in the morning I took a tech support call. Actually the client, Maggie, had put in the call yesterday. I’ve dealt with her before, she’s smart and patient, so I thought, this is the perfect time to try what the tech group has been talking about for weeks: using remote control of the client’s machine via TeamViewer. We could see the obvious advantage of being able to see and control the client’s screen and mouse remotely, especially today when we aren’t allowed to enter anybody else’s unit. The sticking point has been that the client has to install TeamViewer first. Given the problems we’ve had walking people through the ridiculously easy Zoom install, so they could join meetings or exercise classes, the idea of getting some of our, um… less computer-savvy shall we say? clients to install TeamViewer seemed a barrier. But I thought Maggie would be up to it, and she was.

And boy did it make a difference! It was even better than leaning over the client’s shoulder. You could see exactly what they were doing, and then you could just start clicking things yourself and show them how, etc. It took ten minutes to walk through the install process: besides downloading the app and running the installer, then you have to make two changes to settings in the Mac System Settings panel. And a couple minutes for her to get the client app running and tell me the generated password. Then I had her screen in a window on my screen, and in five minutes we had worked out what her problem was, boom, done.

Then I got all domestic and shit. I still don’t have my vacuum cleaner and it has been like 6 weeks since my carpets were vacuumed but I do own a broom, so today I started cleaning anyway. Swept my balcony, amazing how much dust it accumulates; then swept my hard floor around the kitchen. Cleaned the kitchenette, the microwave, my café table. Then went to lie on my fainting couch for a while, to gather strength for tomorrow’s attack on the bathroom.

 

 

 

 

Friday, 4/17/2020

Went for a run, the first one wearing my handmade furnace-filter mask. That worked fine. I’ve noticed that wearing a mask, my nose runs much less than usual. All winter I’ve used up a couple of kleenexes on any run, blowing my nose several times. With the mask, hardly at all. So the mucus is a product of moist air condensing, I guess, and behind any mask, my nostrils stay warmer, so less condensation.

On the other hand, I had to breath deeper. So maybe the mask doesn’t pass air as freely as the simple paper mask.

I wrote and coded most of the day. To review, I’m studying what the author wrote and understanding his code, which is in Java, then reproducing the same logic in a different language, Python. (Programmers only: github repo) Twice I ran into places where he takes advantage of Java features that aren’t supported the same way in Python, so I have to study up the Python documentation and google Java tutorials to figure out how to do it. The actual logic I’m reproducing is not that hard to understand; the difficulties are in finding ways to do the same thing in another language. Like trying to translate a joke in English into French; you need to know not just the grammar, but the idioms of both.

In the afternoon we had CEO Rhonda’s phone conference. Not a lot of news. The DIY cleaning kits are not ready due to shipping delays. Damn it, I want my vacuum! Big disappointment. Four people from Housekeeping, plus one other staff, have volunteered to apprentice as nurses’ aids in the wellness wing. Front desk staff are also depleted due to people staying home due to symptoms or to “fear”. That’s the word she used, but didn’t elaborate. The Sodexo dining staff are also depleted by people staying home.

Asked about what would allow the construction to resume on the fifth floor upgrade, she said it was controlled by the Santa Clara County shelter orders. If that relaxes, she’s sure the contractor (Vance Brown) is eager to come back.

 

Thursday, 4/16/2020

Exercise today was a three-mile walk in the afternoon. In the morning I did some programming, first testing, then documenting, the code I wrote yesterday. Love programming.

In mid-morning the front desk called to say I had a package. It was a small squishy one, the 5 yards of quarter-inch elastic I had ordered. Now I could complete my breathing mask made from furnace filter material. Just in time, too, the one little paper mask the door person gave me a week ago is getting pretty ratty. My new mask works, it’s fairly comfortable and I’m pretty sure it filters even better than the professional kind.

Also in the morning, after a shower, I got peeved at my hair, which is two months from its last haircut, and not looking like getting another one soon. Draw a line over my scalp from ear to ear: I am pretty much bald in front of that line, bar some scattered survivors, but back of it I have hair, and it is getting mullet-shaped. So I did what I told Chris I might do, when she called to postpone my last haircut appointment. I put the longest comb on my beard trimmer, about a 3/4 inch one, and ran it over my hair.

It took off about gobs of hair about 1/2-3/4 inch long. I was surprised to find that the hair from the back side of my head (where obviously I almost never look) is still fairly dark, unlike the hair that I see in the mirror, on the top and sides, which is gray-blonde. Had no idea. Anyway, I don’t have an incipient mullet any more.

I tried to log into Road Scholar. I suspect they are being slammed, because the sign-on process never completes. Enter name and password, click Login, and it just spins and spins. While watching their little busy-spinner icon, I looked at the top of the page and saw “click here for a message from the CEO”. Message, stripped of a lot of politeness about being with me in this difficult time blah blah, was that they have canceled all tours through the end of May. And they are considering June, and will inform us if we are affected.

I don’t see how they can not cancel at least my Switzerland tour. I found a Swiss news site telling about the Swiss government plan for lifting their lockdown. Per that plan, they would re-open lower schools starting May 8, and public buildings starting June 8, but that “depends on there being no significant increase in Covid-19 cases.”

Lots of luck there, guys. It’s kind of basic. There, as here and anywhere, barely 2% of the population has been infected. Maybe 5% at the very outside, if there is a huge number of non-symptomatic cases. Slice it how you like, there are contagious people in the community, and 95% of the people that those people meet, are vulnerable to infection. You take the lid off the lockdown, and it’s match, meet gasoline.

Kevin Drum is a reporter who has been charting COVID-19 deaths, country by country, for Mother Jones. In his latest post look at the graph for Switzerland. They are doing better than some, at 145 deaths per million population, but that’s not insignificant, and higher than in the US at this point. I betcha that between May 8, when they open the schools, and June 8, they will see a spike and delay the relaxation, if not return to full lockdown. I mean, every teacher and parent knows that an elementary school is an ideal distribution center for viruses. Kids bring viruses from home, swap them, and send them home with other kids. Give it one week for mixing and swapping, two weeks for incubation, around May 29 Switzerland is going to see a major spike in hospitalizations.

In nicer virus news, our daily report email from CH staff always lists the number of people in isolation with tests pending, and tests completed. As of today we have zero tests pending, nobody in isolation, and all six tests (5 of residents, one of staff) have come back negative.

This afternoon they held a staff appreciation ceremony. We residents watched from our balconies as the staff — spaced out at least 6 feet apart and wearing masks — formed up on the parking lot and had their names called out and got a goody bag of some sort, while everyone applauded. It was a very well-deserved thank you; over the past two months the staff have had their jobs realigned and responsibilities shifted two or three times, constantly adjusting to new rules and procedures, and always doing it with a smile. And with good results, see above about tests.

 

Wednesday, 4/15/2020

The CV2 rate is definitely softening. The worldwide count doubled between 3/22 and 3/29 (7 days), then to 1.4M on 4/6 (8 days), and now after 9 days it is stuck at 2M, not the 2.4M I predicted. The softening of the curve is visible even in a very compressed graph.

I’m looking at [SwissInfo.ch](https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng) for an idea of what’s happening in Switzerland, with regard to my booked tour in mid-June (and when Road Scholar will cancel it). It appears they will re-open schools on June 8. But will they allow foreign tourists to gather in a tour group and stay in hotels?

I started with a run, which was fine. Then I had an hour to do the grocery order task, before time to move the car. I go to gather up the grocery order forms that my neighbors should have left on the clipboard in the lounge. Except… there was only one form. I asked a couple of people, “Yeah, I left mine and there were 2-3 there at that time…” Where have my forms gone?!? Then I notice that next to my clipboard in the lounge, is the manila folder for shopping orders for the Channing House shopping system that was recently set up. Staff person James takes orders for pharmacy and such items and shops them once a week. But my order form looks completely, drastically different from his. Still… I go downstairs and find James, who happens to be on the front desk. I persuade him to check his in-box. He goes away and comes back laughing, with four of my filled-out forms. Somebody, probably a cleaning lady, gathered up my forms along with his.

Now I’ve used up a bunch of time but I still manage to assemble my order and put it in via the Edgewood Market online form, requesting delivery, not pick-up as we did before. I just don’t want the exposure of sitting around outside a store, people coming and going, waiting for my order. Even though they do charge $15 for delivery.

Then it’s time to release the Prius! Downstairs and out the door at 10:45. It’s just pure pleasure to drive freely down Middlefield to the gas station. I top up the tank–and completely forget to put on the latex glove I brought for handling the pump nozzle! So I put on the glove before getting back in the car, to protect the steering wheel from my now-contaminated hand. One more errand, stop at the credit union to deposit a couple of checks, and then back to the garage. They make us walk around to the front, the single entry, where I can wash that contaminated hand (and the other one) before going in. I will have this wild and crazy hour of auto freedom every Wednesday from now on.

About 2pm I get a phone call from the desk: my grocery order is here! I look at the phone: two missed calls. Why? I didn’t have the ringer disabled. What up, phone? Anyway, I bring the stuff up, do the now-routine process of wiping everything down with bleach solution and deliver to five neighbors.

The only things not available? Tissues and paper towels. Everything else was included.

In the afternoon I do some coding on the Crafting Interpreters project. Writing code is just the most satisfying hobby of all. I never tire of it.

 

Tuesday, 4/14/2020

Somehow, I never got out of the building today. Just busy busy. Quite a bit of time I put into trying to repair the little metronome. My aim was to replace the neon light it used to flash on the beat, which had been crushed, with a jumbo yellow LED. The device had only raw 120VAC power, no chips or transistors to supply low voltage DC that LEDs need. But, the internet to the rescue, and I found a circuit to power an LED off line voltage. I’d ordered the components a few days ago and they came yesterday. So I put together a little circuit, soldered it up, and mounted it inside the box.

And it worked.

Which was pleasing but then I realized it wasn’t working very well. Most speeds didn’t run at all. I had done something wrong in assembling it, perhaps, or maladjusted the tricky little drive train. I fiddled with the mechanical parts for a couple of hours. Then I thought, maybe I can find some hints online, although that seemed a faint hope.

Well, you can find the Franz Metronome model LM-FB5 online. There are quite a few of them for sale on eBay, clean, original, claimed to be working 100%, starting at $13 and going up to $40. So, not a highly valuable item, and if a person wanted one, easy to come by. I almost bought one, just to have a look inside one that worked, but decided not to.

Later, one of my neighbors asked if I was doing a grocery order this week. Since I don’t need anything, I had hoped nobody else would. But no. So I put out order forms and tomorrow will put in an order. Back to Edgewood market because Molly Stone’s fruit didn’t please.

At 5pm we had our first 6th floor meeting since… January? A while. No real news. Evening I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’ The Gene.

 

 

 

 

Monday, 4/13/2020

Went for a run. The outside temp was over 60, so for the first time this year I didn’t wear any kind of jacket or my hoodie, just t-shirt and shorts. Later in the day, with the temp still 65 or so, I put on my hoodie and sat out in my recliner on the deck for an hour. So, spring is here.

Last night instead of watching TV I wrote up how I understood the Visitor Pattern. Today I edited it and put it into my growing Crafting Interpreters code base here. I also adapted an example from the wikipedia entry on the Visitor Pattern into a test program and ran it. Now I feel ready to return to the book and start reproducing some of Nystrom’s code.

In the afternoon, the daily status email from the management contains this paragraph:

The Tower and Lee Center garages will open for residents to take their cars out for a drive to keep them charged and “exercised” every Wednesday from 11-11:30 AM. Please note that the garage will open only for 30 minutes, so if you are not back by 11:30 AM, you will need to park in the Webster lot or on the street.

A staff person will be assigned to monitor garage gates during this time. Please note that Channing House staff will not be jump-starting cars or providing any other mechanic services. If you need to jump-start your vehicle, you would need to call your roadside service provider. Social distancing protocol still applies, so plan accordingly. No more than 1 in an elevator and keep your 6-feet distance.

The restriction that if you take your car from the garage, you will have to leave it on the street, is the one feature of our sequestration that has caused steady complaints. People really want to come and go in their cars, and kvetched loudly when they no longer could (Day 110 was the announcement, so just 3 weeks now). So this concession, that we’ll man the gates for one half-hour so you can charge your battery, is a big deal. I certainly put it in my schedule. 10:45 Wednesday I head for the garage and out the door at 11. I probably won’t stay out more than 15 minutes, just long enough to get the engine warm.

Notice the warning that if you need a jump-start, you’re on your own? I’m glad I went down on Day 1.120 and ran the engine. Soon after that, the rule came down that running the engine inside the garage couldn’t be allowed any more; fumes got into the building somehow.

In the evening I picked up a package, my electronics parts from Jameco. So tomorrow I can try to make an LED flasher for the little metronome. That will be stressful. I just known I am going to reverse-bias the LED and blow it up.

 

 

Sunday, 4/12/2020

…and Friday and Thursday… Actually I’m very comfortable and under no stress at all. (The CH Writers’ Group “writing prompt” for the next meeting is, “what are you afraid of?” and I have to think a while. Aside from obvious things like “getting cancer” I don’t think I have any on-going fears. For which I try to remember to be grateful.) I do miss all sorts of ordinary things, like going for drives, my volunteer gigs, and eating at restaurants. But as solitary confinements go, this is pretty plush.

So by 10am I had read the paper, done the big puzzle, watered the plants and tidied the room. There was a new video from one of the youtubers I follow. I did some programming and really got on top of the Visitor Pattern. I went for a 3-mile walk, up into the Stanford campus.

Channing House is trying to keep spirits up. About 4pm there was a knock on the door; it was servers from the kitchen with bottles of white wine and easter-themed chocolates. Nice. Had a phone call from Dennis, an email from Scott, and (yesterday) a text from SWBB friend Nancy. So, connected.

Games. Yesterday I tried out and eliminated Everything and Gnog. The first is just weird. You are dumped into a cartoonish landscape populated with animal figures that move in a very peculiar way. You can apparently become any other living thing you bump into, so you just keep moving from avatar to avatar. But why? The second is an attractive puzzle game, in which you manipulate crazy objects to make them do things. I don’t like puzzle games, it turns out. They make me feel stupid. After I’ve poked and clicked and dragged every which way on a thing and it doesn’t do anything, I get bored and want an answer. Oh, if you click this and drag that in the right sequence, it turns over and there’s other stuff. Don’t care.

Today I tried out A good snowman is hard to build. It’s a puzzle game. Your little avatar builds a snowman by rolling balls of snow to make them the right size, then stacks them. Problem is, the field is limited. If you get a snowball up against a wall, you can’t move it more, except sideways. So you have to figure the exact sequence of rolls that will let you get the three balls to the right size, and stack them, without getting any ball stuck. The reward is you get to move on to another puzzle. See above; it made me feel stupid.

Saturday, 4/10/2020

Sludged around until 10, when I went for a 2.5-mile walk. The route was basically south on Webster to Page Mill, and back on Waverley. This brought me within half a block of my old house on Tasso street. I considered turning in to look, and instantly vetoed it. I have strong and somewhat conflicting emotions about revisiting that old life that basically ended with Marian’s death. There was six months of tidying up loose ends (documented here about 300 posts back) and then settling in to a new life here. While walking the familiar blocks of Webster, Oregon, and Waverley circling the old home I felt the first flashes of grief I’ve had for months. Not so much grieving the lost partner so much as the lost life in general.

I’ve been reading the poems of one of my neighbors, Elizabeth. She just published a “chapbook” (I’d’a called it a pamphlet, 30 pages in 4×5 size) of poems. They comprise a  scrapbook of vignettes, flashes of her memories of a year centering on the death of her long-time partner. People grieve in different ways and about different things. I suppose I could recall a few vignettes of Marian but I couldn’t make poetry of them. Well, I never claimed to be a poet.

Back at home, I started into chapter 5 of Crafting Interpreters and immediately slammed into something new to me. In his Java code, Nystrom is making use of the “Visitor Pattern“, a fairly sophisticated software engineering technique. I’d maybe barely heard of it; here I am faced with understanding it well enough to reproduce his Java code in Python. The first time I’m having to learn something new for this project, and I welcome it. I backed off to do some reading. Later thought, maybe I should just read ahead in the book and Nystrom might talk about it.

 

Friday, 4/10/2020

In the morning rather than running I tuned in on zoom to Veronica’s balance and fitness class. It’s 45 minutes, a little slower-paced than the 20-minute video I worked out to earlier in the week. I am ridiculously uncoordinated. A lot of these exercises have you doing one thing with your feet and another with your arms. I have a lot of trouble doing them. I can walk and chew gum at the same time, but I can’t simultaneously kick forward with alternate legs while reaching out and then up with my arms.

Spent maybe 3 hours all told finishing up the code for chapter 4 of Crafting Interpreters. After picking off the usual dozen syntax errors, my code ran all the tests in the test bucket the author provided. On to chapter 4, where we’ll be parsing the tokens and building a syntax tree, I believe.

Spent half an hour on the phone with Connie trying to make her macbook air behave. It is really hard working with people over the phone. “So just click there and you will see…” and they say, “No, actually it is showing me this totally different thing.”

Missed the first part of Rhonda’s 4pm Friday phone meeting. Apparently she said that there was a delay getting the DIY vacuums. I want my vacuum so much. It has been 6 weeks, I think, since my carpets were vacuumed. I made a list of all the surfaces to be dusted, wiped down, swept or vacuumed. Cleaning day could take 3-4 hours. Fine, I’m eager to get started. My hard floor has little gritty bits I feel with my bare feet, too. Well, you know, I do have a broom. I could sweep that. Maybe I will.