Thursday 10/31/2024
Took a walk, shorter than usual (hey, but 3.3 miles for the day) so as to be back by 9:30 when I met with Romie to have another crack at getting Bitwarden to work on her new iMac. I failed.
Then I wrote up the AV team’s conclusions that we reached yesterday and sent the draft to the team for comment. One point was the problem that because the auditorium has a flat floor, people in the middle and back can’t read the closed captions when we show movies. The bottom edge of the screen is blocked by the heads of people in the front rows. We said that somebody should try raising the angle of the projector, and if that helps, then a project to raise the height of the screen would be worth doing.
Later in the day Bert called, he had found the remote for the projector. Let’s try raising the angle ourselves. First we went to the Halloween party. The staff here really gets into this every year, with dozens of housekeepers, nurses, facilities and office people dressing up in very elaborate costumes. There must have been 200 people in the lobby, loud music, etc.
Bert and I grabbed Lou and we went in the auditorium and started a DVD playing with closed captions. The projector, which was new last year, is really a good one, and its remote works slick. You tell it to put a grid on the screen, and then you can tell it to shift the lens to move the grid left, right, up or down in pixel increments. We ran it up until the top of the movie image was right at the ceiling, at least 18″ higher than normal, and yeah, it was easier to read the captions from far back.
So back to my room to rewrite that whole section of the report. Then practiced guitar a bit and it was time for supper. I had made a date with Connie, founder of the writers group. I had written up an essay about the realization I had come to back on Day 5.321, the “pledge of release” etc. I had sent it to Connie asking for her thoughts. So she had some, and we met for dinner and talked about things. Her life experience has been very different from mine: she divorced fairly early, and lived as a single mother of four (she laughed and said all her kids were now 60 or older), not marrying again. She had remained friends with her husband and his second wife, and had helped to care for him when he got early onset Alzheimer’s, from which he died. Anyway she had an interesting critique of my writing and I will need to rewrite based on her input.
Oh, I forgot. This morning my bedside lamp failed. This was a space-mushroom shaped thing, a shallow glass dome with a shiny steel stem and base, which operated by touch. When I tapped it this morning, it didn’t come on. At first I thought the power was off, but I could see a pilot light across the room, so, no. Just the lamp had stopped responding to touches. Later in the day I took it apart far enough to see that all the electronics were in one little black box (literally). Something in that failed, and there’s no fixing it. So with a little internet searching I found a very similar, maybe identical, lamp and ordered it.
Codgerville 