Wednesday 10/15/2025
Catching up on deferred chores and old mistakes. A couple days ago, Gigi, in charge of the Book Talk series, asked if we had video of the most recent one, which was a very nice presentation by Agnes and Ian on the book, The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, pioneering AI researcher and Stanford professor. Agnes, herself a child of Chinese immigrants, spoke for 20 minutes on the part of the book where Dr. Li talks about her immigrant childhood. Ian, retired Cambridge physicist, talked for 20 minutes on the technical side of AI, then both answered questions for another 20 minutes.
Weeks previous we had the Broadway musical show. I hope I noted then that, owing to a literal slip of the finger, there was no video recording of it. But now, when Gigi asked about the video of the book talk, my brain mushed around and mixed them up, and I said no, that’s the show I didn’t record. No video. Now follows a flurry of emails between Gigi, Agnes, and Ian about whether they could reconstruct their talk, or at least put their scripts up on Resweb, etc. I’m feeling terrible for causing all this.
And then this morning I realize, wait a bleepin’ minute, it was Broadway I didn’t record. What was funky about the book talk was, that Ian would not let me do a zoom recording, he had to connect his laptop direct to the projector. So indeed there is no Zoom cloud recording, but I think — maybe? — didn’t I? — record it on the local disk. So I go downstairs and check and yes, there’s a nice video waiting for me on the AV hard drive. So I email them all, wait, hold the panic, it’s ok, I have video. Then I get to work and edit and upload the video of their talk. Here it is. There’s one major hack, in that I spaced out at the start and didn’t switch cameras after Gigi introduced Agnes. So the first 10 minutes of Agnes’s talk the video shows the front row of the audience, with Agnes’s voice over. Amateur.
Then I continue with the task I started yesterday, editing the video of the Appreciation Fund kickoff. And quickly find that certain performers (not me this time) screwed up with the microphone, so one whole musical number has no audio. So I drop that. Then I find that a certain other performer, who read a long funny poem, insisted on holding the mic her way, not the way I told her, which ended up with a broken up and mostly inaudible sound track for that. It took several tries through the day to get in touch with her, but I do, and at 4 I go down to her place and have her read the poem into my computer. Tomorrow I will be able to put that audio over her video.
At 4:30 I set up a mic for the birthday dinner entertainers. Six times a year there is a birthday dinner party for everyone with a birthday in that 2-month span. Joanne was in this one, and I was an invited guest at her table, along with Richard and Betsy, both with birthdays, and Roberta, Richard’s spouse. Here’s a panorama that Richard took of Roberta, me, Joanne and Betsy.
At 7:30 there was a talk by, sorry I forget the dude’s name, long-time Palo Alto archivist and historian, about some characters from Palo Alto History.
Codgerville 