Wednesday 02/01/2023
Instead of a walk, I repeated my round of Zoom Room screens trying to nail down exactly what you have to do, to cast your screen to the big monitor, with sound. That got me to 9:30 when the Nominating committee met again, and discussed who to ask next, since Gloria turned us down. We settled on Sally, and later in the day I heard she had tentatively accepted, so that is probably settled.
Immediately after I met with David M. in the auditorium to show him the over-the-ear mic that Bert and I had made work yesterday. He will use it in tonight’s event.
I sent an email to three A/V peeps suggesting we meet on Friday to learn the Zoom Room stuff. Then it was time for lunch, after which, at 1pm, I had a meeting with the Financial Advisers, the regular annual meeting to examine the state of my Nest Egg and the rest of the estate. They have some new software including one that does a simulation of how my funds will change over the next 20 years, under a wide range of good and bad financial scenarios. Bottom line, I will have enough money to keep me past age 100, even under worst-case assumptions. Under normal conservative assumptions, when I’m 100, the total will be numerically higher than now, but adjusted for inflation, will be worth only a bit less than it is worth in today’s dollars. (That’s including the annual gifts I’ve been making.)
I had positive responses to my meeting email, so I reserved two rooms for Friday. Then I could chill for a while. I took a walk down Channing to Pardee Park.
At 5, I went to Lee’s apartment; she had invited me to dinner along with the David G and his wife Helen, and Shirley. Lee lives in a two-bedroom unit that is gorgeously set up with lots of built-in cabinets and work areas. She shared it with her husband Merrill, who died not too long ago. Shirley is a relatively new resident, another widow. We had drinks and chit-chat, went down to supper and more conversation.
Which brought us to 7:30 and a talk by Jerry Elkind, who was the lab manager at Xerox PARC 1971-78, the years when the people at PARC were inventing everything: Ethernet, the Laser Printer, the graphical interface with windows and menus, everything about modern computers. He had some info on why Xerox didn’t manage to convert all this into commercial success, instead letting Apple, IBM and Microsoft have all the glory, but I didn’t come away feeling like I understood that any better.
Codgerville 