Thursday 09/09/2021

No exercise out of laziness. Due to increased Covid restrictions, the aerobics class, along with other classes that had been done in person on the 11th floor, has been made Zoom-only, and I didn’t feel like zooming in.

Off at 9am to the East Bay, Fremont, the Shustek center. Spent the day cataloging along with Steve Madsen. We cataloged a holographic projector made at IBM Research around 1950, and about 6 big circuit boards which were were part of a massive donation from someone who worked at Quantel, a UK maker of digital products for the broadcast industry.

Back home by 4, took a nap and made a sandwich, then rolled out the door at 6:30 to attend a soccer match. Harriet, basketball buddy, had gotten two seats from another basketball fan, for the Stanford Women v. USF Dons, and invited me to come along.

I know it’s sexist but USF Dons just doesn’t sound right for a women’s team. A Don is a Spanish nobleman, right? So they should be the Doñas, right? Or maybe the Donnas?

Anyway, the sky was unusual. Sometime around 5, clouds started coming in. This looks like the build-up to the forecast of possible thunder-showers tonight. It made an unusual sunset.

I have not watched much soccer and have not found it very interesting when I did. This game didn’t change that. It must be the most frustrating game ever, to play. It appears nothing ever works the way the player wants it to. Thwarted at every step.

The Doñas had a good defense, and although the ball was in their end of the field a lot more of the time than it was near Stanford’s goal, nobody scored in the first half, or until about the 70th minute. Then the ball bounced off the top bar, down onto the Doñas goalie’s hands, back up to the bar, and into the goal. That’s how the game ended, Stanford 1, USF nil.

Wednesday 09/08/2021

Went for the standard walk this morning, the one I cut short yesterday, and finished it. The difference? This time I pre-medicated with two Ibuprofen. I imagine that’s what did it; anyway the hip pain wasn’t an issue.

I started my laundry at 10am, and finished it after lunch. Then time for a nap and off to the Resident Association Executive Committee meeting. One thing discussed was that there is a list of over 25 new residents either just moved in or booked to be moving in to CH in coming months. Each move also entails, typically, remodelling a unit to suit the incomer’s tastes. But people are feeling confused and upset. There is a lot to be known about CH, and the documents we give new residents are sadly out of date. Discussion of how to better and faster orient new residents.

At 4pm I met with neighbor Margaret about a problem she has with mail. She sends mail to the Channing House Writers address, which is a Google Group. It never shows up. Other email is working fine. I was as baffled as she. I had her leave the Group and had the moderator (Jerry) reinstate her. It made no difference.

At 5:45 I joined a group of 5 others for dinner as planned.

Tuesday 09/07/2021

I went out for a walk this morning, and my hip started hurting half a mile in, so I cut it short. This is not good.

Writers group at 11; I had not written. Then down to FOPAL for final prep of my section before the sale this weekend. Second regular open sale after Covid. I had disposed of a bunch of books that hadn’t sold since last year, so hopefully I will have a little more action this time.

I bought a few groceries and came back to CH for a nap. Then at 4, drove down to Jean’s in Mountain View, where at 5 Marc Lacrampe arrived. He’s on a bit of a drive, from Seattle to visit one son in Portland at Reed College. Then to Jean’s, and tomorrow he goes on to pick up another son and camp 3 nights in Tuolumne meadows. We went over all our shared news at length and ate pizza with a nice fruit salad Jean had prepared.

Monday 09/06/2021

Today is the day for the first event in the auditorium since February 2020. And as chair of the AV committee, I took it on myself to make sure the stage was set up and the audio was working.

The event was the “first monday book talk” when on the first monday of the month, they get in somebody to talk about a book. Hopefully an author. The author was me, back in 2019 shortly after I moved in. But today it was Darwin Patnode, who was to speak on the works of Stephen Crane, notably Red Badge of Courage, which as Mr. Patnode summarized it, sounds like a very unpleasant read. Although apparently it is assigned by high school lit teachers often.

Anyway, Mr. Patnode likes to have a lectern and a whiteboard. No need for the screen, projector, HDMI hookup to show PowerPoint slides.

Every event has an organizer, and the event organizer committee is one of the biggest and most active. Normally it would be up to the event organizer to find a white board and position the lectern. This event is organized by George who is getting a bit, um, doddery? So I took that on. The event was to be at 11am, and at 8:30 am I commenced my search for the big whiteboard on rolling casters. About 10 I was getting more than a bit antsy but finally a member of our depleted staff (labor day!) found it in Angela’s office.

So the event came off just fine. Here is a panorama taken from my post back of the AV console.

The seating has been arranged for a maximum audience of 50, and everybody has to be masked. Oh, I think the speaker took off his mask? I don’t have a picture to prove it.

In the afternoon I worked on the Chrysler, removing the frisket covering all the chrome trim areas. I am so crap at this. After scratching the my spray paint job twice I was near to chucking the whole thing. But I will carry on and see if I can rescue it.

Sunday 09/05/2021

My back was feeling like it could use a rest — this is getting a little better but slowly so I didn’t do any strenuous walking today. Just half a mile to go to CVS to pick up prescriptions. Then reading and hobbies. Watched a Giants game in the evening for the first time in a long while

Saturday 09/04/2021

Today was the day I had agreed to another lunch with Ann (see 2.174 old girlfriend day), so off to Marin County at 9am, arriving a few minutes later than the planned 10:30. Ann showed me around her house, where she has lived pretty near as long as I lived on Tasso street.

It’s a fairly ordinary frame house on a quiet street. Its strongest feature is an absolute gem of a back yard. This street is at the edge of a developed area, so there are no houses behind, just a small woods of various trees and brush, then a grassy slope. From her backyard you can’t see any other buildings, the plantings are so thick. At the left edge of the property is a large Valley Oak, the kind that likes to lean over. Years ago they had metal pipes installed like crutches to support it, so the trunks — at least 16″ thick — lean over and shade the left half of the yard. In the center is a young Dawn Redwood, a little bit bigger than this one. On the right are some nicely maintained rhododendron. The whole thing is like a little glade in the deep woods.

Anyway after we’d admired her house, we went off for a walk around Marin Art & Garden Center, which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. It has some very nice plantings but no damn labels on anything. Neat plants, what are they, eh? So we went on to lunch at the same restaurant as last time, which was fine.

Then I came on home, about 150 mile round trip. After I got home I was thinking how Ann had spoken of maybe someday moving to a senior residence of some kind and I got to wondering if she was as real estate rich as I had been. So I cranked up zillow.com and checked. Uh huh. Her place would probably realize at least as much as Tasso street did for me. I was going to email and tell her, then decided that would be a little tacky, so didn’t.

Anyway it was a demanding day in all, and I was in bed by 9:30, completely forgetting to do a blog post.

Friday 09/03/2021

Rather than a walk, I just went to FOPAL to work on my section. I had started a general triage on Tuesday but need to finish it before next week, which is pre-sale week when I have to send in a definite count of the books on my shelves. Plus I wanted to clean out a lot of cruft that hadn’t sold in a year and wasn’t likely to. And I wanted to rearrange some of the shelves.

I got all that done, it took 4 hours. I’ll tidy up and do the book count next week.

I took a tech call, Kay was having trouble with her TV. Turns out the TV is monster, at least 60 inch diagonal, but somehow showing a standard def image all stretched out. Well, turns out Kay has been interacting at least sometimes with the Comcast box, not using the comcast remote but by hitting the teeny tiny buttons on the box. And at some point she must have hit the “format” button and put the comcast box into 480p. With that fixed it looked right to her.

Kay is one of those people — I hear their TVs as I go down the hall so I know there are several, at least two on our floor — those people who keep their TVs on a news channel, most often MSNBC, all the bleepin’ day long. Kay alternates between CNN and MSNBC. Nothing else, just news. I would go bananas, but whatever floats your boat.

Thursday 09/02/2021

So no aerobics this morning, I need to let my pulled muscles heal. Off to the Yosemite drive warehouse for a day of museum work. I was first tasked with replacing two catalog records. Two items from a large donation had been cataloged by other volunteers. The evidence of that was clear: they had bar-code tags hanging on them, and they had been photographed and stored on shelves. But there were no catalog records in the database. Another mystery of Mimsy, the cataloging software we’ve been using for more than a decade.

Anyway, I spent the morning recreating the catalog records for these two items. After lunch I did something new, because I admitted to knowing PhotoShop. The photos of objects are taken against a white cloth background, but some recent ones have had a lot of shadows and wrinkles. So Aurora the curator had started using PS to drop out the background entirely, leaving the object itself isolated in a pure blank white field. She asked if I wanted to do some of that. Sure, why not. So I spent the afternoon doing that: carefully select just the object; invert the selection; hit delete; check for mistakes; save.

Conversation at dinner was gloomy. Between (a) the fires burning into the Tahoe basin (an area everyone here knows) (b) the flash flooding in New York and New Jersey (c) the hurricane hit on New Orleans (d) the Texas abortion law (e) the withdrawal from Afghanistan (f) the on-going Covid pandemic and the latest variants — everyone is afflicted with a general sense of doom and gloom. We’re all fucked, basically, and we are just waiting for the next catastrophe.

Wednesday 09/01/2021

Went for the standard walk. Then sat down to kill some to-do items that have been bugging me.

Emailed Lennie to check progress on the online event planning form.

Inspired by Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast, I went into my T-Mobile account and changed both the password and the PIN. I already made sure my credit scores were frozen, I think I mentioned that a few days ago; but I hadn’t known about the PIN and its importance before. Most of the cell providers have you define a PIN as the primary security for customer service actions. Yes, you have a password to log into your account to do billing stuff and buy more service or whatever. But if you call customer service, there’s no password, just the PIN.

A bad actor who knows your name, address, phone number and PIN — all of which were compromised for 10 million T-mobile customers in the recent security breach — can call T-mobile customer service and have your number directed to a new phone. Service will ask for the name, address, phone # and the PIN. Then he reads them the ID numbers from the SIM card in his phone, and boom, his phone is now attached to your number, and your phone is dead.

Think that’s bad? Well think what he can do with that phone? Every online account you own, has that number as its 2nd factor authentication. Dear Google, I forgot my password. They send an SMS text with a code to “my” phone which is now his. Now he can change the password on your Gmail and can read all your mail. And so on.

Anyway, I did a couple other things that were pending in the form of emails in my inbox. After lunch, at 2:30, I went down to the auditorium where I had called for a meeting of the AV team to try to work out how to do a live event with a zoom extension for people who couldn’t come, e.g. people in skilled nursing or whatever. Yeah, we have people in AL and SN who can zoom into meetings.

This was a frustrating exercise. All we had to do was to get a video image of our stage, onto a window on a laptop. Four high-powered techies and we didn’t manage it. I had wanted to get to where we could actually take a laptop out of the auditorium and check the audio levels. Nope. We barely got a picture from iPhone onto a laptop. I won’t go into details but it was a fiasco.

At 4:30 there was a meeting in the penthouse where the Heritage Circle announced its grants for this year. The Heritage Circle is a fund based on contributions from residents, that makes grants for projects that will enhance life at CH. This year they are funding outside bike lockers for resident use, and the cost of buses for excursions like to museums. (CH has a small bus of its own but it is neither big nor comfortable for things like a trip to the city.)

Tuesday 08/31/2021

I did the aerobics, but a couple of moves caused my hip or back to hurt, so I will probably skip it on Thursday. It’s weird how I can feel nothing going this way, but going that way causes a pang, which means re-injuring or at least stressing a sore muscle.

Last night, just after writing the blog post, I wrote a little thing for the writers group. The group met at 11 am, and when I read my piece it was very well received. I’ll append it below.

I drove to FOPAL and processed 6 boxes of books. Then I continued triaging some of the existing shelves. I cut the AI/Machine Learning shelf by half.

Back home I organized a meeting of the AV-interested techs for tomorrow in the auditorium, to finalize how we will do “hybrid” meetings, a live event on stage extended to Zoom.

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According to a highly authoritative (sounding) website, given the details of my time (3pm), date (2 December 1942) and place (Tacoma, WA) of birth,

• my Sign is 10°06′ Sagittarius
• my Ascendant is 17°33′ Aries

and this is my absolutely gorgeous chart:

But that’s not a picture of the remote event that truly affected my life from birth. This is:

This is an illustration of the Chicago Pile, the first artificial nuclear reactor. It was designed and assembled by a team led by Enrico Fermi (already in possession of his Nobel prize), and Leo Szilard (the first person to conceive of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, only a few years before, and the author of a letter, co-signed by Albert Einstein, that alerted President Roosevelt to the potential for creating a nuclear bomb). They led a team of a dozen scientists, the youngest of whom was a woman, Leona Woods, who was responsible for designing and implementing the geiger counters used to track the pile’s activity.

The pile was constructed in a squash court located under the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. (By coincidence, Leona Woods had played squash there two years earlier.) It comprised 330 tons of ultra-pure graphite blocks surrounding 5 tons of Uranium metal. Assembly began in early November 1942. Layers of graphite and uranium blocks were laid with Fermi keeping track of the approach to criticality — the moment when the uranium could produce enough neutrons to make the reaction self-sustaining. He called a halt with the 57th layer, on the evening of December 1st, 1942. The next day would see the experiment begin.

At 9:54 AM on the 2nd, the “zip”, an emergency damper rod, was withdrawn. Quoting the quite fascinating wikipedia article, then…

“Norman Hilberry stood ready with an axe to cut the scram line, which would allow the zip to fall under the influence of gravity. While Leona Woods called out the count from the boron trifluoride detector in a loud voice, George Weil, the only one on the floor, withdrew all but one of the control rods. At 10:37 Fermi ordered Weil to remove all but 13 feet of the last control rod. Weil withdrew it 6 inches at a time, measurements being taken at each step.

“The process was abruptly halted by the automatic control rod reinserting itself, due to its trip level being set too low. At 11:25, Fermi ordered the control rods reinserted. He then announced that it was lunch time.

“The experiment resumed at 14:00. Weil worked the final control rod while Fermi carefully monitored the neutron activity. Fermi announced that the pile had gone critical (reached a self-sustaining reaction) at 15:25.”

Two thousand miles and two time zones away, my mother was well into labor, preparing to deliver me into the brand new Atomic Age.