Monday 01/30/2023
This morning, sitting with my computer sipping coffee, something that was said on the TV news made me remember something my mother often said. When in conversation any slur on women drivers came up (not infrequent in the 1950s), she would confidently counter, “You know, the inventor of the traffic signal was a woman.”
Was she right? Wikipedia was there just under my fingertips. And, uh, sorry, no. The first electric traffic signals were invented by men.
In 1912, the first electric traffic light was developed in 1912 by Lester Wire, a policeman in Salt Lake City, Utah….
The first four-way, three-colour traffic light was created by police officer William Potts in Detroit, Michigan in 1920
Sorry, mother.
At 10:30 I met with Gerald of IT on the 11th floor and he showed me how to share my screen with the rolling TV, using Zoom Room. It’s really quite simple. I am now set up for the Sock Hop rehearsal on Friday.
Then I went to FOPAL and processed 7 boxes of books. We’ve had a donation of books from the library of the late Martin Kay, a distinguished professor of Computational Linguistics at Stanford. Hence, quite a few books on, duh, Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.
Back home I replaced one song in the Sock Hop video. Jerry, who is going to sing Unchained Melody, had supplied a different accompaniment track. Most of the songs are original recordings, either just audio or old TV videos, like Elvis doing “Don’t Be Cruel” on the Ed Sullivan show. But for a few numbers, certain self-confident residents are going to karaoke the songs. Jerry has a decent tenor and has been taking voice lessons for some time. Nevertheless… well just say that in his shoes, no matter how many lessons, I would not put myself up against Al Hibbler, who had the original hit, or against Bill Medley, the version of the song that everyone remembers. Anyway, I cut in his new accompaniment replacing the previous one.
Then I had iMovie export the finished video again. After dinner, I again inserted chapter markers at the start of each of the 23 songs. iMovie doesn’t do chapter markers, so I’m using a third-party app, the one that wouldn’t run on my iMac because the iMac is too old. Anyway, that’s all done now. Showing the video using Quicktime Player, I can jump to the start of any of the numbers.
Dr. Margaret invited me to dinner, along with new residents Bob and Anne Marie Willis. Very pleasant.
Codgerville 