The Resident Association meeting was at 9 this morning so no walk. David G was running the AV and had a number of problems, as usual, with the Zoom side of it. Turns out there was never any audio going out to Zoom, I have no clue what he had f’d up, but the net result was, the zoom recording of the 90-minute long meeting (!) had no sound on it, either. So no recording for the secretary to review for her notes, or for people who missed the meeting to replay. There were other minor f’ups as well.
Sunday I’m going to be running one. We’ll see if I can do better.
Then down to FOPAL for post-sale cleanup. My section had a big sale weekend, with 125 books fewer now that before the sale. At an average of maybe $3 a book (the majority are priced at $2, some higher) that’s what, $400 give or take. If it were going to me instead of the Library, I’d be making about $30/hour for the time I spend down there. I guess that’s not bad.
Afternoon I worked on my obsessive software hobby project. It is getting perilously close to time to actually run it. Had dinner with Patty, Chuck, and Joy.
Pretty much did nothing. Went out to Safeway for a couple things. Fiddled with this and that hobby. At suppertime, decided to walk the mile and a half to Midtown and have red curry duck at Indochine, a Thai restaurant. Did that, took a Lyft back.
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.
Went for the standard walk. Then followed up on a call from the Tech Squad. Joan has a new TV but wants her CD player to work through it as it did with her old TV. What I find is a huge (easily 70-inch) new Samsung TV that her son-in-law installed for her in an existing media wall unit. Underneath is a blu-ray player. There is a loose HDMI cable visible under the TV. This should be simple, I think.
Not quite. First off the tv almost exactly fits the media unit, with like 2 inches of clearance on either side, and I can barely get my nose over the top. And son-in-law has fastened it solidly so it doesn’t rotate or slide in any direction.(I think he glued it, I don’t see any screws.) Which is ok as earthquake proofing, but now there is no way to get to the back of the tv where presumably there are HDMI ports. OK I can just barely see them using my iPhone as a flashlight. And two, the cable seems to be too short to reach the ports. But I get down on the floor and turn the DVD on its shelf and look behind and there is some slack, which I push through the back of the media cabinet and now the cable is long enough, and mostly by feel I manage to connect the cable to the TV.
Now to make it work, we turn on the tv and we see the usual Samsung “smart tv” interface which I have tangled with before, trying to show a movie on the new Samsung that Stew installed in the 4th floor lounge. People, if you need a new tv, get an LG, a Sony, a Vizio — not a Samsung. Fine screen hobbled by horrible software. Anyway I walk Joan twice through how to find the HDMI3 source and her music plays very nicely.
Later I print a bridge picture and work on software. And then on fiction. Which brings me to
Fiction Is Hard part 999
Simple. I want a scene in which Ethan first hears of the alien ship. I write a nice opening, he comes into the kitchen in the morning and has some chit-chat with his mother and then he sees the Washington Post on the table with the headline Alien craft sighted? Unusual asteroid changes orbit in “impossible” way. And next he’s going to read some important exposition from the paper.
What, exactly? Here’s where the rabbit hole opens. I know the broad outline; the incoming object showed up as a moving dot, a couple of pixels, on some astronomer’s images. But I want Ethan to read out sentences from this WaPo article. It should name an astronomer and an observatory, a real one, and details of real telescope technology. So the question is, what observatory is likely to have spotted this thing? And what would they see? I go to the internet and soon am learning about NASA’s program and JPL’s program and observatories like Pan-STARRS and oh, here is exactly the kind of image I was thinking of,
First sight of Comet C2021 A1
But so many questions — and an hour has gone by and I have not actually written anything although I am inching closer to it.
In the evening we had a concert, ok stuff by a local guy.
Did my round of machines in the gym. During the morning I actually sat at the desktop machine and did some work on the novel. Not very productive work, but it was satisfying to have done it. I tell myself, see, if you like that little endorphin rush of accomplishment, you just have to write.
Met with Stew and Bert to talk about the sound support for an event Stew is planning for two weeks out. This is a TGIF party but Stew and his 4th floor people are going to stage a “wedding” between two stuffed animals. I’m sure it will be adorable.
First thing after the gym and breakfast I headed down to FOPAL to complete processing donations and clean up my computer section. I did that, and took a pre-sale book count, and was back in my room by 10:40 just in time for the writers meeting. Not a great meeting. I had nothing to contribute and there weren’t a lot of good things from others.
At 1pm I met with Kass in the auditorium to show Amadeus. I mentored her in showing a movie using the blu-ray that is built into our equipment. As soon as the movie was started, I had to scoot out to my car and off to PAMF for a 1:45 appointment. This was a routine dermatology checkup. The nice doctor squirted cold stuff on a couple of pre-cancerous blips and that was that. Back to the movie.
The DVD ended and went back to its main menu at the 1:30 point, when it was clearly not over. Confusion. It appears that this long movie is a 2-disk set and we had been given only one disk. Sorry everybody, that’s all we have.
Later Pam, who had scheduled the whole thing, reported that, duh all you have to do is turn the DVD over, it is double-sided. We didn’t know that.
Back to the daily grind of retirement. Went for a walk. Paid a bill. Watered the plants. Went down to FOPAL where I found 11(!) boxes of books waiting. Processed 7 of them.
Back home in time to join the “mixer” dinner. First Monday of each month, the mixer committee sets aside about 8 tables in the dining room. They have little laminated table number tags in a bowl. When the dining room opens at 5pm, you can go in and if you like, take a random tag, and go find that table, and have dinner with “new friends”. Well everybody at the table I picked knew each other quite well, but it was a nice meal.
At 7 I went to the auditorium to help Kass with the AV for a candidate night she was running. Fortunately Rich also had showed up and was already setting up the mics, so I didn’t have to do anything but listen to two earnest city council candidates.
Jan called at 8am to say he was ready to leave. That was earlier than I expected; he had preferred leaving at 9:30 to drive North and I had to talk him into 9am. But he was ready and so was I, so off we went.
We arrived back at Channing House just after 3pm, so it was about 6 hours driving, plus an hour in Ukiah for coffee. Well, half an hour for coffee, and half an hour driving in circles trying to find the Starbucks. Anyway. Home safe and sound.
US 101 is a very pleasant drive once you are North of Santa Rosa. The scenery coming through the Sonoma wine region was very nice, with vineyards up the sides of the rolling hills. The 2021 Prius Prime was a nice highway cruiser. I really am glad I got to try it because now I know I would not want one. That user interface on the big screen is just awful, so confusing and very very dangerous for a solo driver to try to do anything while driving. (And you know you would.) After San Francisco it was getting warm inside and Jan in the passenger seat spent at least 5 minutes stabbing at things trying to get more A/C going. It’s very “modal” in that if you have the controls for the audio, or the climate controls, showing, they cover up half of the map, including the buttons to zoom in and out. So if the passenger is trying to cue up a podcast or audio book, the driver can’t see half the map and can’t reach over to zoom it in or out. Just as well, because the tiny little +/- buttons are small as pencil erasers (on a 12-inch screen) and are hard to hit when you are trying to just glance down quickly and get back to the road.
Pretty much music all day. The first stop was the Eagle Inn, an historic building in fancy Victorian carpentry style that has recently been restored.
This band played standards and was ok but not great. On to the old art museum for Groovus, which was another version of Coots and Holland but with a bass player and a singer. Fun. Someone sitting next to us at the Eagle tipped us that there was a pizza by the slice place next to the Eureka Theater, which was next to the art museum. So we popped out for a slice of very good thin-crust pizza for lunch.
Back to the art museum for Then in the same venue for Katy Cavera and the Lost Boys, which turned out to be a pick-up band of Kata Cavera, a very personable guitar and banjo player, and most of the people from Clint Baker’s Jazz Band of yesterday. Anyway, good music.
While at the art museum I looked again at those ink-on-canvas drawings and picked one I could really enjoy owning, and emailed the artist about it. No reply yet.
At this point my butt was sore from sitting through three hour-long concerts so I suggested we go back to the hotel for a break. We met again at 4:30 and caught the shuttle back to the Eureka Theater for two more shows, a blues band and Tom Rigney with special guest, famous cajun fiddler player Michael Doucet. This was a good wrap-up to the whole thing.
Back to the hotel and then around the corner to the local restaurant for a late supper.
Codgerville 