Thursday, 4/9/2020

Somehow today I felt busy all the time. But I hardly left my unit.

Ran that 20 minute exercise video in the morning. Tomorrow I think i will try the in-house “strength and balance” stream at 9:15.

Worked through a couple more sections of  Crafting Interpreters. This is being a great and enjoyable exercise in refreshing my knowledge of Python.

The exciting activity was that today my 6th floor InstaCart order was shopped and delivered. A few substitutions, but not too bad. I was on the app exchanging texts with the shopper as he worked. He rolled up outside about 2pm and I had everything wiped down with bleach and delivered by 3pm.

My bag of fresh linens wasn’t quite right. I guess Wanda, my usual housekeeper, is off being a nurse’s assistant. The bottom sheet was for a twin bed, so didn’t fit, and the top sheet was also a twin I think, but worked. And no pillowcase. I am not going to complain. I just reversed the old bottom sheet and made do.

With a fresh 9V battery I could check and indeed the bulb in the metronome was toast, but not because it was a burned-out incandescent. It was a neon bulb that had been smashed. And the little plastic dome that had been over it. Pretty clearly the thing had been dropped on its head. I couldn’t see the broken bulb because it was under the cracked and crushed plastic dome. Now they are both off and I am wondering what to do.

I could get a neon bulb, but a bare neon bulb wouldn’t look good. How to get a neon with a finished-looking dome over it? I spent some time on electronics websites like Jameco and Digikey. There are plenty of attractive panel lights but they are all at least an inch deep behind the panel. Unfortunately this light is right on top of the little motor, with less than a quarter inch of clearance. The old one had a couple of wires snaking through a hole and the neon bulb lay sideways on the top of the wood under its little dome.

There are nice looking orange LEDs that have no depth, the leads come right out of the bulb. But the available power is 120VAC. LEDs want low voltage DC. OK, google some more. In fact you can drive an LED from 120VAC, if you provide in effect a voltage divider and a diode. So I ordered a handful of parts and I will see if I can make that work. Been a while since I had to solder resistors and diodes and shit.

Helped another person, Judy, whose Mac had suddenly said, you are not connected to the internet. In fact, she wasn’t. Somehow she had managed to turn the wi-fi off. Telephone technical help is not fun. You try to talk somebody through finding the wi-fi icon in the upper left corner of their mac screen, and open its menu, and select “turn wi-fi on”, when you can’t just point and say, there, click that.

 

Wednesday, 4/8/2020

Went for a run. Felt good.

At two points today, other residents called me up for assistance using Zoom on a Mac. I spent an hour on the phone with Connie walking her through the process of creating and hosting a meeting. Later in the day she told me that it was working and she felt ready to host the Floor Reps meeting tomorrow, which I guess she had been asked to do.

Another resident, Kiki, has a lot of trouble using her iPad, in part because her hands are very shaky so it is hard to tap on things accurately. Anyway I managed to talk her through joining a meeting.

I really wish people would put in proper tech help requests. They’d probably end up referred to me anyway, though, being Mac users. When we get back to normal I will have to try to fix that.

I did a little more with Crafting Interpreters. Then it was suppertime and the evening’s meal was a dud, almost inedible. Well, salad and dessert were acceptable. With it, I drank my last Pepsi. Hopefully I will get more with the grocery order promised for tomorrow.

The evening’s communication from Channing House had two new restrictions based on advice from the County health department. One, all residents of senior facilities are to have their temperature taken daily and be surveyed for symptoms. CH is allowing us to self-report if we have the means for taking our own temps, and I do. They didn’t specify any particular time of day.

Then there is this, which rules out attendance at church for any reason, among other meetings.

Residents are not to leave the facility to celebrate holidays. The order states: “Gathering with people who do not live in your residence, even to celebrate a religious holiday, poses severe risk of COVID-19 transmission. The risk is especially high for those who live in congregate settings such as long-term care facilities. Additionally, under the Public Health Officer’s Order of March 31, 2020, any non-essential gathering between people who do not live in the same household is legally prohibited.”

A Channing House apartment is a household/residence. So, gatherings of people who do not live in your apartment is also prohibited.

If you attend gatherings, we have been directed to either prohibit your entry back into the building or have you isolated for 14 days. To have the Public Health Department authorize us to prohibit your return is shocking and speaks to how important they see this issue. We would opt to have you isolated. But, we hope you will just stay home this holiday season.

Note the management’s use of “shocking”. Kind of agree. Not being able to go to church is no issue for me. And I already wasn’t attending any other sort of “gathering”. But this also formalizes what we all were pretty much observing before, not going to someone else’s apartment.

Tuesday, 4/7/2020

(I’m actually writing this on Wednesday afternoon, because I was sure I had done a blog post yesterday. But I hadn’t. I was remembering the blog post of Monday. The days are all alike in Sequesterville.)

In the morning I did 20 minutes of exercise, using a video that one of my neighbors had passed around weeks ago, when fitness classes were canceled here. It was pretty good, 20 minutes had me sweating anyway.

An email went out today from Angela, saying that due to problems people had experienced holding the door to get their meal distribution, they would be sending someone from facilities to every upgraded unit (floors 6-10) to “adjust” the door closer. That would be the hydraulic door closer that I was fiddling with on Saturday, because it pushed too hard. I can well imagine that some of the feebler people might have had trouble holding against it while reaching for their meal box.

I spent a couple of hours getting started on the Crafting Interpreters project. It looks to be quite fun, basically re-doing in Python what the author displays in the book, written in Java. Java’s an ugly language; I’m glad I never had to use it. But now I have to learn something about it, because I have to figure out what he’s doing and reproduce it. Then I can critique his code, heh heh.

In the evening I put in our 6th floor grocery order, via Instacart to be shopped at Molly Stone. Only three others participated. Maybe we don’t need to do it weekly. Anyway I have to say I am pleased with the Instacart web UI. It is quite easy to find products, to know if they are in stock, to put them in my virtual cart, etc. The order is to be shopped and delivered on Thursday. I installed the Instacart app on my phone so I’ll get timely updates from the shopper.

Late in the day, Mary R. offered an old metronome on the bulletin board. “Sound works, light doesn’t.” I wrote back, if a real musician wants it fine, otherwise, I’d like to try fixing it. Later in the day it appeared outside my door. I went and got my tool box and opened it up. I expected to find a circuit board, maybe discrete transistors. Nope: it’s all analog, based on a nice little spinning A/C motor that rotates a conical drive wheel. Adjusting the rate dial on the front moves a driven wheel along the cone to change its speed. The driven wheel has a lever that tightens and releases a little spring, so every revolution a little metal hammer goes whock against the back of the box. The wheel also has a janky little contact that bridges two copper springs to light a little incandescent bulb on the top.

First job after I got it disassembled was to check continuity through the little bulb. I got out my VOM, which Scott gave me last year and… it was dead. I opened it up, it needs a 9V battery. Of course I don’t have one. So I hustled back to Instacart and added a package of 9V batteries to my grocery order!

 

Monday 4/6/2020

Well, CV may be slowing down. Back on Day 1.118, Sunday 3/29, the world count was 700K, having doubled in 7 days. I predicted 1.4M on Saturday, but it only reached 1.37M today, so doubling in a shade over 8 days. Next double, 2.8M, would be expected on a week from Tuesday, 4/14. We’ll see.

Today I went for a run after breakfast, between rain showers. It felt good. Spent the morning in an old occupation: cleaning up and upgrading my Python programming environment. It’s been more than a year, maybe two, since I had to fiddle with environment variables and versions of stuff. I had to google some things to remember how to accomplish stuff in the terminal command line.

The point here is that I’ve decided to go through the new online textbook, Crafting Interpreters. I read a blog post by the author, describing the four-year saga of writing it. He walks through writing an interpreter, coding it first in Java and then in C. Now one might think that interpreters are old hat to me, since I worked on a team building one, APL\360, more than forty years ago (1975-7, about). However the challenge here is to repeat his Java code, approximately line by line, in Python instead. It could be of interest to others; anyway it will be fun to do.

Does this mean I’ve given up studying Lisp, as I mentioned several times last year? Yeah, Lisp just isn’t fun.

After supper I tried another game from the bundle, Europa Universalis IV. It turns out to be one of those games in which are you are a ruler trying to grow your province in a medieval Europe, to quote from Wikipedia,

The gameplay requires the player to lead a nation by finding a balance of military, diplomacy and economy. The player does so through their choices as sovereign of their nation, and through the spending of resources available to them: Prestige, Stability, Gold (Ducats), Manpower, Legitimacy for Monarchies, Republican Tradition for Republics, Devotion for Theocracies, Horde Unity for Hordes and Monarch Power (Administrative, Diplomatic, Military).

Very complicated. I started through the tutorial. The Pale province of Ireland has risen in rebellion. Select your army in London, make them hike over to Wales, get them to board your fleet, direct the fleet across the Irish sea, direct the army to attach the peasants. Watch as little toy soldiers exchange blows. I can see where this is going. Meanwhile there will be some other disaster in Essex or Yorkshire, and you’ve got to build forts and farms, and it will get more and more complicated. The graphics are fairly cute, the gameplay UI is usable, but it’s too thinky. I have another game, Galactica, that is similar in overall concept except it’s about planets, not provinces. I’ve played that a couple of hours and could play more. This one I don’t want to continue in.

 

 

 

Sunday, 4/5/2020

Had coffee and read the paper. Then doing email, I followed up with Bert on a tech call from Grace. Grace was my next-door neighbor while I was on the 4th floor. She was having trouble changing her Amazon password. She had written up a nice sheet of notes with all her passwords and PINs, and put that and her iPad in a bag and hung it on Bert’s doorknob.

Well, we should not be passing germs between units (why we will get individual vacuums soon). So what to do? I put on gloves and got the bag from Bert’s door. I discarded the bag as too hard to clean. I wiped down the iPad carefully with my “Virus Death” solution. I made up a bottle of this a couple of weeks back, the last time I went by myself to the grocery. Water, bleach, a couple drops of detergent, a dash of isopropyl alcohol. Wiped thoroughly with the solution on a paper towel, dried with another.

Now I used the iPad to change her password, which worked as it should. Gloved up, wiped the iPad again, returned it to Grace. Hopefully no contamination from her to me or vice versa.

Channing House custom is that Sunday lunch is the main meal of the day. Back when we could eat in the dining room (sniff) people often had relatives in for that meal. These days we get the packaged meals to our doors and, frankly, the fare has been, um, less than inspiring? But today’s lunch was actually pretty good.

A decent chef’s salad, pea soup, jalapeno corn bread, berry shortcake. I’d have had wine, except I finished my bottle of wine yesterday. I shall try to get a bottle with next week’s grocery order.

Later I tried the next game in my big bundle, Brütal Legend. It turns out to be one of those fighting games, where you control your hero as he slashes and chops and punches an endless series of enemies. I used to watch people playing these on game consoles at the pizza place back in the 90s. This one has a heavy-metal theme; besides his axe, your hero also carries an electric guitar and can hit power chords that slay. Again, well made, amusing graphics, a nice intro video featuring Jack Black; but not the kind of thing I want to spend any time with.

 

 

 

Saturday 4/4/2020

A quiet day in Sequester City. I took a walk after breakfast. Then I got on a chair and fiddled with the door closer on my apartment door. They install a hydraulic closer as part of the upgrade. I’d just as lief do without it, but I couldn’t see any practical way to remove it. I figured out how to adjust its resistance, however, and set it to minimum. So at least I don’t have to brace my shoulder and lean into it, to hold it back, as I accept my meal package from the server.

Later I looked at part of a walk-through of Broken Age and decided it is really a young kid’s game, with a lot of silly and nonsensical puzzles. So uninstalled that.

That was about it. Reading. A nap. Phone call from Dennis.

I do try to be consciously grateful. I watched Top Chef in the evening, and it made me want to go out to a restaurant. And I can’t. Yeah, I have it tough. I am safe, comfortable, in good health, have my food brought to me, and have money to weather the post-corona recession. So: grateful.

 

 

Friday 4/3/2020

Started with a run, which felt fine. Since earlier in the week we have had a three-basin hand-washing station outside the front door. Everyone who enters the building has to be seen washing their hands before the door will open for them. The staff people who stick a probe in my ear to take my temperature are getting to know me, and ask how the run went.

By the way, UPS and etc. delivery people don’t have to wash their hands, because they don’t go in. They put the boxes on the ground and our door person sprays the boxes with disinfectant from a pump bottle, then moves the boxes in himself.

Killed time until lunch. After lunch, I ordered what I’ve been thinking about for a few days. MERV-11 quality furnace filters, and some 1/4-inch elastic. Actually, 5mm elastic because the 1/4-inch width was “only two left, order soon”. So OK, 1/5 of an inch will do, and it was in stock. Can you guess what I’m gonna do when these arrive? Hint: I will be using my kitchen shears and my office stapler.

Later I thought to try out another of my new games. Next in alphabetic order was The Alpha Device. Another big disappointment, and without even a cute big-eyed spider for company. The game screen came up, and then did nothing. No keystrokes or mouse actions caused any reaction whatever, not even the ESC key which is the one constant in every game I’ve played. Hit ESC to bring up a menu to pause, save, or quit. Look for a YT tutorial; no help there, that player somehow smoothly glides into the game world. On the Steam user forum I learn the reason: this game requires a gamepad. It just doesn’t use keyboard or mouse. At all. Hmmm, I wonder what they go for? Quick look at Amazon, around $40. Nope.

Next up, Broken Age. Cute fantasy characters. Maybe. I played this 46 minutes (Steam keeps track of that). It has two different threads with two different main characters who at least at the start, are completely separated in different worlds. I ran the boy character up to a place where I couldn’t make any more progress. I will look at a YT tutorial to cheat. Tomorrow.

At 4pm Rhonda held her weekly phone call. Not a lot of new news, except that the DIY room cleaning kits will include a lightweight vacuum cleaner. They really are going to buy 80+ vacuums for residents to use. But in perspective: how does that cost compare with the cost of the nursing aid positions that they won’t have to fill, when they repurpose some number of housecleaners?

Had a zoom “cocktail party” with Jerry, Betty, and Patty. Consumed my last but one bottle of beer. Can I get more? We will see when we get to the shopping order for next week.

 

Thursday 4/2/2020

Another day of, basically, waiting around for the market to call with the grocery order. About 10am I was bored and went for a walk.

Yesterday I mailed to the CH writers’ group that I would like to find some beta readers for my novel. One person, Susan, came right back with the email of a grandson, Declan, 14. I emailed him yesterday and this morning he wrote back enthusiastically, so I sent him the link to the book. He’s just on the upper edge of the target reader ages, but hey. I will get some feedback. A few more of those and (assuming reactions are not uniformly negative, in which case I’d just pitch it) it will be time to start querying agents.

Today was the day for cleaning my apartment, but we continue to not have housekeeping staff for that, so as usual I got a big plastic bag of fresh linens on my doorknob. So I made up the bed. The carpets really need vacuuming.

Later we got an email blast from CEO Rhonda:

in normal times, it is very difficult to hire Nursing Assistants. And, now, it is next to impossible… Several housekeepers have volunteered to join the Crisis Heroes Team as Nursing Assistants…
In taking on this role, these housekeepers are expanding their skills and contributing at a critical time to Channing House…

One of the results of these reassignments will be fewer experienced housekeepers to do apartment cleaning. So, … We are requesting residents to join the resident DIY (Do It Yourself) Housekeeping Team. ,,,

we will provide a housekeeping kit which will include a vacuum cleaner that can do carpeted and hard surfaces, cleaning cloths, cleaning solution, and rubber gloves. These kits are for you to keep during this crisis. They are not to be shared with other residents

I volunteered right away. Later I heard there were 87 volunteers. I am sure CH doesn’t have 87 free vacuum cleaners… would they go out and buy them? Well, we’ll see.

In mid-afternoon I watched the National Theater production of One Man, Two Guv’ners. I put it on the big screen and it looked and sounded good. I’d seen a production of this at Palo Alto Players a couple of years ago, and in hindsight the local players were almost as good as the pros.

At 5:30 I called the market again, and it turned out my order had slipped through a crack somehow and “we’re working on it right now.” So Craig drove me down there in his red Prius and brought back three bags of stuff. I spent half an hour in the common dining room/kitchen area, wiping everything down with bleach solution and setting items out around the table with their order forms.

In the course of all this I missed the delivery of my supper. Rather than call and have it specially delivered, I treated myself to a delicious PB&J&cheese sandwich and some of the seedless grapes that came in my order.

 

Wednesday, 4/1/2020

Ordinarily I’d go for a run on Wednesday right after breakfast. But I assume I will get a call from Edgewood market asking for my credit card number to process my order. I don’t want to take that while jogging. So I hang around the apartment until lunch: no call. Then I call Marcia; oh, she got her response 24 hours later. So probably not today at all.

So I went for my run after lunch. Then I worked a while on a different remote desktop manager, Chrome remote desktop.

I didn’t even mention yesterday, that in the afternoon I tried a remote desktop manager recommended by Vanessa, our new CH IT director. That was TeamViewer. It worked well, although it required a fairly complex install procedure on the target (confused elderly user’s) system as well as the tech person’s. So today I tried the free Chrome extension.

Actually it works just fine in the Brave browser, which I’ve been using lately. That’s the Chromium technology, without the whole reporting your life back to Google part. I was able to see and control the desktop of my MacBook from my iMac, just as with TeamViewer. But like TeamViewer it required a moderately complex install process on the target machine. Also required the client to start it on the target and read a 12-digit number to the tech.

In the afternoon, I got an ad from Humble Bundle. I have bought software and books from Humble Bundle before; they are the “pay what you think is fair” software outlet. This bundle was a huge collection of games and books to benefit COVID-19. For $30 I could have over 25 games. OK, then.

So now my Steam account has like 35 games in its library, about 30 of which I haven’t tried yet. Surely one or two will be really engaging?

I finished Dear Esther. It was easy to do; just a very picturesque, beautifully rendered, walking tour of a complex landscape, while a narrator read evocative and strange letters to a woman named Esther. Nothing was really resolved, but soooo atmospheric.

Then I tried out the alphabetically first new game, Alien Spidy. It is about this just adorably cute little spider running around and scoring points and avoiding traps. So cute. Also so impossible to do. This needs a kid’s reaction time. I couldn’t get through the tutorial. You have to combine hitting the spacebar to jump while simultaneously using the mouse to shoot web strands to swing over obstacles. After about 50 tries I gave up.

 

Tuesday, 3/31/2020

One thing I did this morning was to go down to the garage and run the car. Well, I went twice. First time, I stopped in the lobby, informed the desk person what I was going to do, so she would know it was legit to buzz me back in from the garage — i.e. I would not be violating the single-entry protocol. So down to the basement level, through the four heavy doors to the garage, and realize… that I didn’t have the car key.

Prior to two weeks ago, I always had the car key in my left front pocket. But then, realizing I wouldn’t be driving anywhere soon, I put it on the desk. So. Get buzzed in, up to 6, walk the hall, get the key, back to the first floor, explain why I am going to the garage again. Sympathetic laughter from the desk person. Back to garage. Car seems fine, but I start it and let it idle 5 minutes.

Next I explored the question, can I sanitize paper in the microwave? I distributed all these grocery order forms. Tomorrow morning I will collect them from the clipboard in the lounge and have to amalgamate the order. Later I will be getting checks from all those people. In each case, paper that has been handled by others. I read the virus is detectable on paper for 2 or more days. Chinese banks are using UV light on money and also letting it rest for 14 days.

Now, detectable is not the same things as infectious. What is detected is the RNA, but that doesn’t mean it was part of a functional virus. Maybe the virus degrades but leaves its RNA guts behind. Also, it is highly unlikely that any of my 6th floor neighbors are infectious. But you can’t be sure! So I would like to definitively sterilize the order forms and the checks. Obvious idea: microwave them! Would it work? Consulting the googles produces a lot of contradictory answers. Nobody has done the research to really know.

Lots of people pompously state that obviously not, because microwaves only heat water molecules. That’s not true; microwaves act on polarized molecules, which water is, but also most oil and some sugars. I ran a little test. I don’t have any oil on hand, but I have some very oily peanut butter. So a dab of peanut oil on a piece of paper towel, zap 2 minutes, that oil got very hot and smelled burnt. Microwaving clean paper towel only heated it very slightly.

A virus is composed of lipid molecules wrapped around an RNA strand. Lipid molecules are strongly polarized, that is exactly why they can be assembled into a spherical coat. Microwaves ought to heat the lipid molecules, and that would destroy the virus. That’s my ignorant common sense analysis. So my plan is to pick up the order forms wearing gloves, and nuke them for 4 minutes before handling them.

Yes, I know about the woman who microwaved money and it burned. Currency has metallic stuff in the paper and in the ink. My order forms don’t. Oh, ya know, though, the MICR characters on the bottom of a check are magnetic. Hmmmm…. nope! I just microwaved a blank check for 1 minute on high. It got slightly warm to the touch but the numbers did not start glowing like the letters on Sauron’s ring — which I had kinda hoped to see.

Next thing was to investigate Remote Management software. We clearly have at least another month of not entering other apartments, so can we do remote tech support? In an hour I learned a lot about the Remote Desktop Protocol and remote management clients. I netted that out in an email to my tech support buddies, Bert and Craig.

After 7pm I collected the order forms (with gloves on), and nuked them.  This had the amusing side effect of erasing the room numbers I had written on them a Frixion erasable pen. As I learned last year, the erasable pen erases by heat.

I assembled the order, it added to just 30 items, and emailed it to the address at Edgewood market using the same email format that Marcia had used the day before.