Saturday 10/25/2025
Spent 9 to 12 in Susan’s place, installing her new Macbook Air. Mostly this went well as I anticipated. However, trying to install Microsoft Office 2024, the non-subscription Office package, went sour. Could not get Excel to “activate” and come out of read-only mode. And Word just crashed on startup. Later I talked to Leah Lin on the phone and she had a suggestion, saying MSoft’s web interface is not clear, and possibly I downloaded the subscription version which is a different binary than the fixed-price one. I will pursue this soon, as Word and Excel are the only tools Susan uses, other than Mail and a browser.
Then changed clothes to my red shirt and went to the museum to lead a private tour. This was for some alumni of the Rhode Island School of Design. It went ok, but over-long as, at their suggestion, I broke off my tour half-way and we all trekked to the other side of the building to watch the PDP-1 demo, which was run by Peter (somebody), a guy who as a college student wrote the first music synthesizer for the PDP-1, at MIT around 1960. Fun hearing a 65-year old computer playing a Bach organ concerto, using a program written by the guy standing beside it.
That was an intense day. I got home and collapsed for an hour. Then went down to dinner. Saw Susan, tentatively scheduled a session with her machine for tomorrow.
Codgerville 