Thursday 06/23/2022
What a productive day this was. First off, out at 7:10 to once again register campers at Tara’s basketball camp. The “day camp”, for younger girls, was Tuesday and Wednesday, except on Wednesday, the Stanford campus suffered a major power outage. Besides basketball camp there were camps for every sport going on, and all of them had to be canceled. It wasn’t certain that today’s camp, the “elite camp” for older girls, would be held at all. However, there was minimal lighting inside Maples, and they decided to go ahead. So once again I was operating a table, this time for names A-E, along with a young woman named Cipria (?).
These older campers were a little spooky to me. These tended to be girls who had legit aspirations to be recruited by a college, and quite a few were tall, over 6 foot, taller than their parents. The thing is, they are very young, maybe 15-16? And they have these delicate child-like faces and child-like body-language, but tall wispy bodies… it must be very strange to be a parent to one of these. Look up some morning and realize your 15-year old is taller than her father…
By 9 they were all checked in. Back to CH where at 10am, Bert and I were scheduled to go into a resident’s apartment and break into her computer. Well, not exactly. But Janet had a stroke and is now recovering (and said to be quite talkative and cheerful) over at the SNF. Her daughter Lesley lives in Ohio. Lesley came out to visit last week, and wasn’t able to get into Janet’s Macbook Air. Janet, unfortunately, doesn’t remember what the password was. Facilities let us into Janet’s unit. Bert got Lesley on a speaker-phone whileI fumbled around with the Mac.
This was an interesting challenge. Janet had been quite tidy and organized, as shown by the notes and receipts she’d kept in a folder labeled “Macbook”. But none of the passwords listed in there worked to login to her Mac. When you can’t remember your login password, your Mac will prompt you to enter you Apple ID and its password. Your Apple ID is for Apple generally, apart from any device password.
We had Janet’s Apple ID, her normal email address. Unfortunately it seems that she’d changed its password, also, not too long ago. I bashed away at the Macbook, trying different variations of the passwords from Janet’s notes alternately on the login screen and the Apple ID screen. Did that one end in Ell Eye ess or Ell ell ess? or Ell ell Ess?
Finally it dawned on me to try the Apple ID on the Apple website instead, using my own laptop. Hah. Apple.com offers a very clear method to reset the password for your Apple ID; you only need the ID (which we had) and the phone number she’d used when she set up the account, which we hoped was her regular apartment phone. And it was. Apple’s computer rang the phone and read out a verification code to be typed in to the web page. And boom, we could define a new password for the Apple ID. That done, I could go back to the Macbook and enter the Apple ID and its new password. The Macbook contacted Apple which again called Janet’s phone with a new verification code. Enter that in the Macbook and it happily let us set a new login password. Job done!
With a major tech challenge conquered, I headed out to FOPAL. I didn’t mention on Tuesday that during that day, FOPAL had received a major donation from the library of Carnegie Mellon U’s Silicon Valley campus. Of which quite a bit was computer-related books. And now there were 17 boxes of computer books stacked up in my section. I processed 6 of them today, and figure to go back tomorrow and probably Saturday.
Codgerville 