Thursday 07/20/2023
Did the gym round. Tidied the apartment then drove to Milpitas to work at the Shustek Center. Full complement of volunteers for once. Toni and I were assigned to start cataloging the documents from the “Kossow Collection”. Story time.
Al Kossow is a dedicated, energetic, and slightly eccentric volunteer computer historian. He heads up a one-man operation to collect data from old media and hardware. His HQ is one large corner of the Shustek center building where he has built what an uncharitable person might call a hoarder’s nest of hardware and media. But out of this has come his personal website, Bitsavers.org, where you can read scanned copies of manuals for all the old computers. And a large amount of data retrieved from old and decomposing reels and disks at Shustek. So CHM gives him space and funds.
He had recently designated a bunch of manuals from his hoard to be added to the museum collection, and we started on that, a large pile of manuals on a rolling rack. Because neither Toni nor I had done document cataloging before it took us a while to get a work flow going. It was like handling the Sandy Fraser papers except also entering the documents into the computer system.
I had to leave not long after lunch. On the way out I stopped to take a picture of one aisle at Shustek. On the left are boxes labeled “Kossow Collection”. Those are the documents that
have been cataloged and stored properly.
One reason I left early was for the ice cream social on the patio at 3, except I learned it had been rescheduled for Monday. At 3:30 I met with Stew, Joanne, Kay and Lou, the team planning the C&W party for September, to go over some details. One of the details is that we were planning on Mary, the chorus leader, singing Patsy Cline’s “Walking after Midnight” but Mary is going to be away on the date, so we decided to video her before she left. I did some thinking about how best to do this, and there was a flurry of email to set a date for this shoot, next Sunday.
Plus the AV group meets tomorrow and Bert, just back from vacay, has tested positive and is sequestered and wants it on zoom. So I figured out how to make that happen.
So the AV committee, and AV planning, and CHM work on Thursdays and a tour to lead on Saturday, and FOPAL work on Monday and planning for the VCF…
Am I possibly overcommitted?
Codgerville 