Friday 10/25/2024
Today I spent some time fiddling with a PC. After I told Mary Beth, who runs the gift shop, about how Romie’s iMac was ready to sell, she mentioned that another resident, Dennis, had a Dell laptop to give away. So I went and got it, and decided the best use of it was to install Ubuntu Linux on it. I had to fiddle around a bit to make it work, including a rather arcane bit of tech to make the internal audio speakers work. I searched the internet for “Dell Ubuntu internal speakers don’t work” and got many hits, finally finding one that explained how to add two lines to a certain configuration file. This is not something the average user would know how to do — use the gedit editor in supervisor mode to edit a config file 3 levels deep in /etc. But I did, and when I rebooted, voila, the speakers worked perfectly. Anyway, there’s a nice laptop for someone, probably an employee, to buy for a kid to use.
My dinner tonight was at the “Webster Street Grill”, a special fancy dinner that our dining services stages every month or so. You pay extra for it. David G and his wife Helen had assembled a party for this and invited me. This was a six-course meal, the chef getting to show his stuff. It was pretty good, not every dish was four-star but not bad.
I had to leave a bit early; I had promised Sandy that I would check in with her in the auditorium as she was running a jazz concert. She didn’t actually need any help but appreciated the reassurance I guess. There were two musicians. Terrigal Burn on piano and Tamara Dunn singing. He’s mostly a musician; she has a day job, professor of immunology at Stanford.
Mr. Burn didn’t make a friend of me for sure. He didn’t arrive until 7pm (for a 7:30 show) and came with a cart full of his own audio equipment that he proceeded to put together, except he needed more power outlets, oh wait this will do, fuss fuss fuss. Tamara didn’t arrive until 7:15, so no time to do a proper sound check. And Mr. Burn then spends 2 minutes talking to the audience without a mic, until he notices that people are yelling “can’t hear!”. And she didn’t stay close to her mic, wandered around so her volume varied. Amateurs. Still, they were both quite talented and the music was nice, what you could hear.
Codgerville 