Thursday 10/20/2022

Oh, only a couple of days until the date is 10/22/2022. That’ll be exciting. Went down to the gym first thing. Later I went out shopping.

At last night’s presentation, Dr. Margaret would have no truck with powerpoint or such. Instead she stood at a whiteboard and drew little sketches. In setting up for this event, we had a nice whiteboard but it turned out that (of course) all the dry-erase markers on it were failing. I scrounged around in the last 15 minutes before she started and found two adequate pens in the training room on the second floor. But I determined we would not be caught with dry pens again. She has another talk scheduled in November, and we have another frequent speaker who like to use the whiteboard.

So task 1 today was to stock up on dry-erase pens for the AV team’s exclusive use. I went over to Staples and found a nice set of what should be fairly bold markers. I also stopped at Ace Hardware and got two more rolls of wide blue masking tape, which we use to tape down extension cords and such.

If anyone wants to hear the talk, it’s here: https://vimeo.com/762443388

In the afternoon we had the rehearsal for the “wedding” on Friday. I can’t believe how elaborate a charade Stew is organizing. Anyway, I set up the mic and provided the recorded music on cue.

Wednesday 10/19/2022

Went for a walk while my first load of laundry ran. Finished the laundry and had lunch. Was impolite at lunch, sitting at the “open table” with others, but spent the entire time on my phone.

Why? Because remember I have these music pieces on the phone, for playing during Stew’s “wedding”. And one of them, the famous Canon in D, has about 3 seconds of silence at the start and I would like to trim that. So: you have your supercomputer in hour hand, it has a small audio file, you would like to edit this file, on your phone you also have your free copy of Apple’s Garageband app, which is an audio editor. Can you get a piece of music out of the Music app into the Garageband app? Well, there is an Apple support page that claims to show how, but in fact nothing it shows about Garageband matches what the Garageband app on the phone offers. So that was lunch.

Out of boredom I drove down to FOPAL. There were no computer books to price, so I did an hour of sorting.

At 7:30 we had an excellent talk by my 6th floor neighbor, Dr. Margaret. When the recording of the meeting is up I will link it here. She spoke about the physical effects of aging on the body, and she was both informative and very funny.

Tuesday 10/18/2022

Went to the gym in the morning. Veronica was training another resident on the machines so I only got one round. Did a couple of miles on the cyber cycle instead.

For the writers group I read a piece of the novel in progress, the piece I really wrote two weeks ago. But by exposing this work in progress, I hope to keep myself motivated.

Next job was to get the music for Stew’s pretend wedding under control. There are three pieces of music he wants played on cue, and possibly two others, depending on whether the person who is supposed to play those pieces on an actual organ, is able to.

Stew had found the music he wanted as Youtube videos, and his idea was to have them cued up on a web browser on a laptop connected to this little speaker. But that’s kind of a clunky interface, especially if YT decides to make you watch 5 seconds of a commercial when it is your cue to play the music. So I decided to download this music and if possible, put it on my phone.

Which I was able to do with quite a lot of video. There are dozens of “video download” apps and extensions for Firefox and Chrome. Unfortunately none of them work with YT. Google changed YT in the recent past to make downloading impossible, or more difficult. I was able to get around this to capture just the audio. Then moved it to the Music app on the laptop, and from there to the Music app on the phone. Then I went up to 11 and plugged the phone into the little speaker and it worked.

I also helped Grace with her iPhone.

For dinner, I had a table with Joanne, Patty, and Jerry. Nice group.

Monday 10/17/2022

Went for the standard walk. At ten, met with Jerry, Bert, David G and Ian in the auditorium, to have Gerald of the IT staff explain the new Zoom Room setup the staff have created, for running zoom meetings. I didn’t absorb some of the details. David G., who will be running a meeting tonight, stayed after and practiced, to good effect it turned out.

I headed down to FOPAL to process books, only four boxes but quite a few saleable books, including one textbook that is currently going for $300 on amazon and ebay. That’s always a fun find. I also fielded a phone call — whoever is nearest the phone and willing, answers it — and helped a guy who is downsizing and has, he guessed, about 50 boxes of books to donate.

Back to CH and at 2:30, met with Bert and Stew on the 11th floor to help plan how to do the AV for Stew’s pretend “wedding” this coming Friday. For their TGIF, the Fourth Floor is doing a pretend wedding between two stuffed animals. Gag me with a spoon. However, Stew has talked CEO Rhonda into “officiating” at the mock wedding and he is very concerned about getting the microphones and the recorded music (and the live music) to work right.

I ordered a B.L.A.T. sandwich and chef’s salad from the kitchen and ate in my room. At 6:30 I went down to assist David G with his event: two people from the League of Women Voters going over all the propositions on the ballot. The presentation of the props was ok. Technically the new setup worked very smoothly, all credit to David G. for absorbing Gerald’s talk and putting it to work.

Sunday 10/16/2022

About 10am I decided to go walk the California ave. market. Cal. ave. has opted to keep their on-street restaurant seating from Covid times; then the large and popular Sunday farmers market folds itself between and around these, so there is a really intense four-block scene. It was just fun walking along in it. I treated myself to a packet of medjool dates, which I hadn’t indulged in for quite a while.

Nobody wearing a mask any more of course.

Back at CH, at 4:30 we were to have a Sunday at Home talk with me on AV. This is a monthly series of talks by residents on their own knowledge or specialty. Today it was Ian, our retired nuclear physicist, who had put together a talk on how plants like sunflowers form spirals based on the Fibonacci series and the golden mean. This meant lots of slides which he wanted to manage from his own laptop.

So we did the simplest thing, I set up as zoom host, and he joined from his laptop and shared his screen. This worked fine. I managed to get all the things right: voices in the auditorium mics were heard by zoom attendees; zoom attendees when un-muted, could be heard in the auditorium, there was no feedback, everybody could see and hear. Oh, and I remembered to start the zoom recording at the beginning of the presentation. It was the FIRST TIME that I managed a hybrid auditorium/zoom event with no glitches!

Saturday 10/16/2022

I was scheduled for dinner with Suzanne and Jim (I also had dinner with them on 3.245), and had promised to bring dessert, so at 10 I headed out on foot to walk to Town and Country to buy something at Douce France, a pastry shop. I did that, buying three cute little fruit tarts. Had coffee at Peet’s, and walked back.

I fixed another problem in my software hobby and then it was time to go down to the auditorium and run a movie. This is part of being an AV volunteer. I went down an hour early and as usual there was an issue. In this case, the chairs had been moved to set up for choir practice, with lots of chairs on stage, blocking the drop-down screen. So I moved chairs. A short time before 3pm, two guys came in from facilities and moved the rest of the chairs. Apparently they had been scheduled to do that. Of course I didn’t know that and didn’t dare wait in hopes of it.

The movie was the 2022 version of Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris, which is a lovely feel-good movie. If you want a pleasant time-killer it will do nicely.

Off to dinner arriving on the dot of 6:30 and had a very pleasant evening with Suzanne and Jim. Got back latish and forgot to blog. Oh well.

Friday 10/14/2022

Went for the walk in the morning. Then sat down in my chair and picked up my laptop and basically didn’t move the rest of the day. What was I doing? I was indulging in the delicious game of debugging my old app.

Back in about 2014-16 I wrote a very complex app with a sophisticated graphical user interface. Called PPQT, its purpose is to be a tool for the lengthy task of post-processing a completed book for project gutenberg proofreaders. When it was done I used it to process several books, and a couple of other people who did the same volunteer work used it. And then I set it aside and moved on to other activities, abandoning my 30,000 lines of superbly commented Python.

Then for the last couple of months I’ve been dusting it off just for fun. In the intervening years, the library it is based on, called Qt, has moved on a couple of versions so there were dozens of little API changes to accomodate. Today the work had reached the point where the app should be ready to run, and I spent the day running it, finding another bug, fixing it, running it again. Just totally absorbing fun. That’s all I did, except eat a couple meals and take one short nap.

That’s it in the usual mode, displaying the OCR’d text of a book on the left for editing, and the matching page scan image on the right. But there is lots more function under the tabs on the upper right. Almost all of which is tested and working again!

Who needs it? Nobody! With it off my mind maybe I can work on some other hobby.

Thursday 10/13/2022

Did the gym in the morning. The new machines are controlled by a central computer. You sign in to each machine by tapping your id card on the screen. It remembers the resistance you set for each machine previously and automatically sets that. Previously, all machines had counted out 12 reps each time. Today it started counting out 21 reps! I guess I’ve leveled-up.

At 1pm a dozen people gathered in the lobby and walked to the nearby park where the same photo team had set up, and they photographed us walking and talking in a natural way, in the park setting.

Wednesday 10/12/2022

Went for The Walk, no problem. Stopped at CVS to pick up two prescriptions. They make this extremely convenient: they send a text to remind me that I have renewals waiting, and I just stop by and pick up the pills, takes a minute. But I think CVS has a little scam going on with prescription auto-renewal. One prescription was for Atorvistatin, a simple statin. When I got home I found I had more than 30 tabs in the old bottle. Just think, on a corporate-wide basis, if they just get people to renew a week earlier than necessary, how many zillions of extra pills can they sell?

The other prescription was for Metoprolol, one of my blood pressure drugs. I now have three full bottles of Metoprolol, plus the one I’m working on. This is not entirely CVS’s doing. At one point I was taking that 2 pills/day, then it was cut back to 1/day. Still, three bottles full? A couple months ago I went to the CVS site and put the Metoprolol prescription on hold — supposedly. Must go check that again.

In the afternoon I, and other 6th floor residents, was part of a photo shoot. For some time there has been griping among residents, with the way Channing House portrays itself on channinghouse.org. There are a lot of pictures of people who are not residents, doing things that residents don’t do, and nothing that really reflects the actual lifestyle and personality of the place. Finally the staff scheduled a marketing company, Love & Co., to do a new look for the site, starting with pictures of actual residents in the actual building.

The team was four people, the main photographer, a gopher, another person, and a CH staff member. They took pictures on other floors earlier and go to 6 about 1:30. They spent a lot of time taking pictures in Caroline’s apartment, then Dr. Margaret’s, then mine, then Linda’s and Gwen’s. We had been warned of this of course. I had made my place look as nice as I could. After they shot about 500 images (I exaggerate a little) of the rooms and furniture, they invited me in and shot a few more with me sitting in my chair with my computer.

At 5pm we had a floor meeting. The only real business was to start planning our TGIF. Each floor does a TGIF party, once a month. We’ve been lucky, our month is December. We just have to do the party following the Holiday Chorus performance. How many half-gallons of eggnog do we need, and how many bottles of cheap brandy?

Tuesday 10/11/2022

Went down to the gym and worked the machines. Then started doing stuff. Over the course of the day and several emails, I managed to get the AV team scheduled for some training next week. I also wrote to Tom, the Provinet guy who is responsible for moving our AV upgrade forward, and got a reply later.

Big step next: called the IBM retiree line about the new IBM retiree medical coverage. They have hired United Health Care to offer a “Medicare Advantage” program for what seems a very reasonable monthly premium. This has at least some degree of coverage for vision and for dental work, which I didn’t have before. Long phone call with a very helpful rep.

Printed a couple more bridge pictures, and organized the prints that I had made already. Worked on my software project.

After supper, looking through my box of DVDs for something to show before the Saturday movie — it tickles me to show something unscheduled in the hour before the planned start time — I found a CD case with a Bobby Darin documentary. Inside the case was another disk, one I apparently recorded off PBS, a recording of Bobby Darin doing a live show in Vegas. Huh. It ran an hour and a quarter and really wouldn’t be suitable, too long for one thing. But it was fun to listen to.