Friday 9/4/2020
Went for a run, which was fine.
About 2am I had a brief spell of wakefulness, during which I realized what I need to do for the volunteer coordination was to extract the data from the signup sheets and combine them to get a picture of how much volunteer activity we have.
Background. Volunteers sign up for two activities, meal delivery and package reception, using online signup sheets. I make a new sheet for each activity, each week, so now I have several old signup sheets that have served their purpose. I’d like to delete them, but then I’d lose the history. However, the signup software, slottr.com, allows me to export the content of any sheet to an Excel spreadsheet. And recently I’d coincidentally been reading about using Python to process Excel spreadsheets. Perfect.
So I exported each old sheet to a .xlsx file. Then, for a couple hours before lunch and again after lunch, I coded up a quick Python program to read the spreadsheets, extract the names of the volunteers, and tabulate their names and the number of times they had volunteered, writing another spreadsheet of my own.
About 3:30 I had the numbers: 58 distinct volunteers had signed up for a total of 240 activities (one or another meal or package shift). I sent that off to Marcia and to a couple of staff members and it was time to sit down for CEO Rhonda’s weekly meeting. 120 participants on the Zoom. There were two items of news.
Regarding the KPIX story on our antenna, she refuted the claim that residents never knew about the antenna: there’s documentation that residents and neighboring property owners were informed in 2006 when the contract was signed. (On the other hand, they never specifically informed anybody about it when they were buying in. It just wasn’t mentioned. But on the other, other hand, why would they?) The engineer’s report measured all EMF in the building, which includes wi-fi and other sources such as outside cell antennas. The total was a couple orders of magnitude below the FCC limit. No doubt that settles it and everybody is happy (not).
In nicer news, CH has leased all six units in a new apartment house directly across Webster street. These will be used to house residents from the 3rd floor for the next few months. That’s what will enable us to finish the remodeling of both 4 and 3 simultaneously, instead of one floor at a time as they’ve been doing for the last 3 years.
Codgerville 