Monday 06/02/2025
First thing up was to do the AV for a First Monday book talk. The speaker was my newest 6th floor neighbor, Bob McLean. He moved in last year, a retired high school english teacher. The book he was presenting was a biography of Dorothy Donnelly who was a remarkable actress and writer around the turn of the last century, 100 years ago. The book had been written by Bob’s late wife. He did a good job of the presentation as you would expect of a long-time teacher, with lots of interesting pictures.
As soon as that was over I zipped off to FOPAL and spent two solid hours processing a bunch of books. Got back at 3:30 just in time to brush my hair and join Joanne’s Poetry Out Loud meeting. Nice poems to read and talk about.
That ended at 5 and it was off to the dining room for the monthly “dinner mixer”. As you come in the door you draw a table number from a hat, and sit with whoever draws the same number. I sat with Carol, Joan, and Alice. Although I know all three of them well, we agreed that the four of us had never sat at the same table before. So the mixer worked.
Back to my room expecting to join Patty on the 11th floor to assist her showing a movie at 7:30, but I had an email from another resident, Lee, saying that Bert had been helping her but he has a cold, could I please assist her? Simple problem, there is an offsite memorial for a long-time resident on Wednesday and she wanted to send the zoom link to the internal mailing list. Except the only copy of the zoom link she had was a printout. And zoom links are like 200 random characters long. But I kept paging through the material she had, and aha, she had received the same link in another email. So all she had to do was find that other email, copy the zoom link, and paste it into a new email. All complicated by the fact that she was using Yahoo mail on a PC, about which I know zip. But Lee is not an idiot and managed to do most of it herself.
Then up to 7 where I was confident the blu-ray player would show Patty’s movie. It was behaving perfectly for me after I fixed an issue, Day 6.159. And it didn’t work. Just like before, when the receiver is switched to the player as a source, the TV says it gets no signal. I am so fucking sick of that 11th floor media center. That 10 year old receiver is junk and the 1 year old Samung TV is a pain in the ass.
But 5 or 6 people were already settling in to watch the movie that Patty had invited them to see, what to do? I pulled the hdmi cable from the player out of the receiver and stuck it into a spare input on the TV itself. That showed the movie except that the sound broke up every few seconds so the dia ounded like th . Fortunately the movie was My Favorite Season and all the dialogue was in French. So everybody, about 9 people in all, sat and watched the whole thing reading the subtitles and nobody cared the sound was breaking up.
P.S. it wasn’t the old DVD disc, either. Patty just called me to say she played it on her personal TV and player and the audio is fine, no breakups. I’m fairly confident that the problem is the TV or the receiver again. The sound we hear is from speakers attached to the receiver (as normal in a “home theater” setup). The receiver is connected to the TV with an HDMI cable with ARC, audio return channel. So whatever sound the TV makes, comes to the receiver for amplification. All well and good normally. But in this case we had the signal from the DVD player going into the TV on HDMI 3, and the TV had to turn the audio around and send it out the ARC channel on HDMI 1 to the receiver. Somewhere along there is a glitch. Whatever, it’s all crap and should be replaced.
Codgerville 