Saturday 10/08/2022
Today I had scheduled to do a docent tour at noon, but I had also invited a neighbor, Marion, to come along and see the 1401 demo at 11am. She has deep experience in computers (programmed an IBM 650, a vacuum tube computer, as well as the 1401 and d 360) and I have hopes of getting her to volunteer at CHM. She greatly enjoyed the demo, it certainly tickled her memories, but I don’t think she is going to volunteer.
She had arranged for her son, Owen, to join us, and the two of them joined my tour. Afterward we went for Marion’s favorite fast food, fish tacos at Rubio’s in Sunnyvale. Owen is a programmer, working from home for a cloud computing outfit called DataDog. His wife started out as a programmer for a video game company, but took a steep turn and went back to school to become — wait for it — an Egyptologist. On my tour I also had a half dozen comp.sci. grads from MIT. That was depressing. Apparently they are giving computer science PhD’s to children now. Or so it looked to my elderly eyes.
Got back to Channing House at 2:30 and got into the auditorium just in time to set up to project a movie at 3pm. Kass was there ahead of me as arranged, had lowered the screen and dimmed the lights, but I was the one with the DVD.
This was to show the last third of Amadeus, after the fiasco of last week when we didn’t know what to do when it ended early (Day 296). Turns out all you had to do is flip the disc over. It even says, in very fine print, “more content other side”. Anyway now we showed the last third. Spoiler: he dies. Was it disease, or poisoning? Nobody really knows.
Codgerville 