Wednesday 04/19/2023
So busy I didn’t even have time to work on the model. Started the laundry and went for a short walk during the first load. Then finished the laundry while reading email.
Bert had written about the illegal microphones. The wireless mics we use on the 11th floor are 20 years old and are actually illegal by FCC rules. Plus one broke down a couple weeks ago. Wireless mics have two parts, the mic itself which is a transmitter, and a little base station receiver. Bert’d been looking online and yes, you can get a nice Shure base station with two mics for around $700 but there are also a slew of Chinese-made knock-offs at around $100. So we could have new, legal, mics for under $300 total, which is a sum that we can definitely come up with, from the gift shop or the resident association funds.
But that sent me into a major web rabbit-hole trying to find the “right” cheap mic setups. The ones he’d found had a couple of issues I didn’t like. So at least 2 hours of the day, off and on, went into browsing Amazon and B&H and such.
In between I took two tech calls, one to Florrie which turned out to be a wireless keyboard that was disabled. The other was to Pam, who wants to get the PBS Passport streaming service on her Samsung smart TV. We wasted a good 45 minutes in the miserable Samsung user interface proving that her 2017 model TV did not support the PBS app. Then I had to spend 20 minutes with my own brand new TV, ending up learning that PBS doesn’t have an app for the LG sets although they plan to someday.
Then it was time to go down and set up a microphone for the people to use who were running the monthly birthday dinner. A little bit of time free and then it was 6pm and I had been invited by Gloria to have dinner with her and tonight’s lecture speaker, Kirk Hanson. (Follow the link for his very impressive resume.) Also there were Edie, who had served with Kirk on some Santa Clara County committees, and Joan, who was a classmate of his in 5th-7th grades in Houston, back in the early 50s.
Hanson’s talk, on the ethics of artificial intelligence, was really quite well done. He is very up on the subject, knows all the players and the problems, and presented it well.
Codgerville 