Wednesday 05/03/2023

First thing I was to head out for an 8:30 appointment for a routine blood draw ordered by my PCP. But it is also laundry day, my slot for our 6th floor machines is 8-12. So I started a load at 7 and was able to start the second load just before I left. Down to Sunnyvale to the clinic — for some reason, the PAMF website didn’t even offer blood draw appointments at the nearby clinic. NPO of course.

Then, hungry for breakfast, I stopped at the cafe in Midtown and had an omelet. So back to CH near 10 to rotate the laundry.

Yesterday during the event on the 11th floor, the new microphones had seemed to have a problem where they would cut out for a second or two, intermittently. As I noted, that seemed to mean I should return them. But I wanted to reproduce the problem. So now I went up there and set up the system. I was also listening to a podcast on the phone, so I set the phone on a table playing the podcast, and laid a mic on the phone so I could listen to the amplified podcast coming out of the speaker. For 20 minutes. And it didn’t cut out, it sounded fine.

Now what? I dunno. I got to talk to Bert.

---

Later in the day I got my official invite to try Google Bard. It gave me some reasonable responses to health queries and general knowledge. Then I decided to try it on code. Something I know about is the use of the Qt GUI platform with Python, PyQt. So I asked it to write me a specific piece of code using Python 3.10 and PyQt6.

It kind of did, reeling off 100 lines of some credible looking code, but when I pasted that into my development system and tried to run it, I quickly found it had made several mistakes. I went back and told it about those errors. It apologized profusely and gave me some revised code,. That also had errors, different ones.

A friend here who I told about this, asked if chatGPT4 could do any better. So I tried it. I will say that GPT4 gave me what I would call better-structured code, better-organized and more readable, but it also made the same kinds of errors.

Ironically the bots are being tripped up by the same thing human developers — well, me at least — have been having problems with. When Qt went from version 5 to version 6 they changed a number of naming conventions, so that code that worked in Qt5 had to be edited to do things like change the name Qt.KeyFind to read Qt.QKeySequence.KeyFind. Many, many such changes. It appears both bots have been “trained” on probably gigabytes of PyQt5 code and even though I instructed them specifically to use PyQt6.5, the code they regurgitate mixes in some of the old style names.

The problem is, you don’t know they’ve done it until Python tries to execute a statement with an incorrect name. Only then — because Python is not a compiled language where everything is checked at compile time — you get a run-time error. Which means one of these can lurk in what seems to be working code until the right combination of inputs sends it to the line with the error. And then you have an annoying and time-consuming search through the documentation trying to find the name that can’t be found, and figuring out how it should be rewritten for the current version.

Early on some users created automated scripts that would rip through an old program and fix all the names to the new style. But that should not be necessary with code supposedly written to the current standard. Which is what the bots claimed to be doing.

Anyway for this particular little corner of the coding world, I demonstrated that neither bot can be trusted yet.

Tuesday 05/02/2023

Did the gym machines. Then collected the new microphone setup from the downstairs audio cart and installed it on the 11th floor audio cart. Finished processing the video of Mickie’s book talk and started it on the lengthy video output phase.

Then it was time for the writers meeting. The cue was “nostalgic moment” and I thought of several but checking my folder of old submissions to the group all the good nostalgia was already covered with things I had written for them back in 2020 and 21. So I didn’t write anything for like the 4th week in a row.

After lunch I went to the 11th floor to set up for an event. This was a presentation by a realtor, Nancy Goldcamp, who has handled many Palo Alto sales including a number of CH residents. Followed by a presentation by I guy whose name I forget, about mitigating the tax consequences of selling a Palo Alto house by various kinds of trusts and bequests.

The audience was about 35 people who are thinking about moving to CH, or are on the wait list to do so. Plus another 5 or 10 current residents who haven’t sold their houses yet.

Both presenters had laptops and wanted to put presentations on the screen of the big rolling TV. Plus needing sound amplification. The former was not hard to do. The latter shouldn’t have been hard, but I am sorry to say that the new microphones didn’t work out well. One of them started cutting out, just dropping out for a second or two. I had the speaker swap to the other one. Toward the end, that one also started cutting out. Very discouraging. I am going to have to return that set to Amazon, a major PITA.

Monday 05/01/2023

The morning was busy with A/V stuff. First, the people doing a public sing-along, which is a thing we do in the lobby from time to time, requested not the usual two, but three microphones. Which meant moving some microphones from the 11th floor to the lobby. I had that done before 9am.

At 10 it was time to set up for the 11am First Monday Book Talk. This month’s victim, um, speaker, was Mickie, who some years ago was a city council person and mayor of Menlo Park, among other interesting career excursions. Here’s her book. This was a non-zoom event, but I made a video recording of it. And trained Ian, hopefully he will be able to do the next one.

After lunch, off to FOPAL to process a bunch of books. Back home for a nap and then it was time for early supper. Early because this was the day for the monthly mixer dinner. You draw a table number from a jar on the way into the dining room so people sit in different combinations than usual.

Later it was time for the sing-along. They are working their way through 50 or so songs from the 1950s. I got frustrated because my voice just won’t work right for singing any more, so I left early.

Sunday 04/30/2023

Like it says. I helped Mickie rehearse for her book talk tomorrow. That was about it. Well, after finishing up with Mickie at about 2:30, I got in the car and rolled on over to Stanford to watch part of a baseball game. I did not stay to the end of the game, which turned out to be a mistake, because about 20 minutes after I left, Stanford hit a grand slam home run to take the lead. But ya know, I just don’t have the interest in the game. I think next year I won’t renew my season ticket.

Saturday 04/29/2023

Today was the day I drove a carpool of four, sister-in-law Jean, plus Martha and Gwen from Channing House, to the Shipyard Artists Open House. I’ve done this alone twice before, so didn’t take any pictures. No, wait, I did take one.

We walked around on our four separate orbits for a couple of hours. The open studios are spread over five of the old frame office (? or barracks?) buildings on the one-time Naval Shipyard at Hunter’s Point. Had a not very good lunch from some vendors.

That was about it for the day.

---

OK, forgive me if you know all about this. Surreal painter René Magritte once painted a realistic picture of a wooden smoking pipe, with the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” French for “This is not a pipe”. It was a way of warning the viewer to not mistake image for reality. So here in the studio of an artist who clearly favors the surreal style, there is an actual copper plumbing pipe coming out of the wall and going into the floor, and they’ve labeled it “This is a pipe” as a reply to Magritte.

Friday 04/28/2023

Took a shortish walk in the morning, ending with a cappuccino and almond croissant at Mme. Collette’s, for the first time in months.

Before lunch I spent almost two hours working with Bob’s iMac. Bob is a new resident and, just between you and me and the doorpost, he has lost some ground in the wits department. Bert has spent some time getting his TV working, which included calling in the professionals of our IT department. Bert doesn’t get along with Macs so when he saw Bob has an old iMac that Bob said “didn’t work”, he asked me to look.

Aside from its age — it’s a 2009 iMac, which is beyond geriatric in the computer world — its only real problem was that it was doing that annoying thing Macs do, demanding to be connected to iCloud. My heart sank. I have run into this so often around here. Somebody sets a person up with a nice Apple ID and all is well, then one day they reboot it or upgrade it or something, and it needs to be re-signed-in to iCloud and they have no fucking idea what their Apple ID is, or the matching password. In Bob’s case, he didn’t think he ever had an Apple ID.

Well he did, once, because it was asking for the password to go with the Apple ID for (his email at AOL.com). Which meant that resetting the password would involve getting a recovery email to him at AOL.com, so let’s get signed in there. The web browser thought it knew the AOL password but AOL didn’t agree. So now we do a password reset at AOL. Fine, but it wants to send a text to a phone number that “ends in **26” — which his current iPhone number does not end with. So he’s changed phones since the AOL account was created, but never updated the phone number in his profile. Well, it was probably set up in 2009. Probably by his late wife, or a younger relative.

I spent 45 minutes on the phone with AOL customer support but finally got his password reset, and logged in to AOL and reading email, yay. Now I could try to reset the Apple password, but by that time he had to leave for some appointment. I carried on until Apple wanted answers to his Security Questions. Name of your first pet? I gave up.

Later in the afternoon I printed out some nice flower pictures and changed out my photo exhibit. It was basketball action shots, now it’s big showy flowers.

Thursday 04/27/2023

Spent the day at the Shustek center, once again sorting through and storing the papers of Sandy Fraser. Here’s my luxurious work space.

That’s box number 19 (of 42) that’s open. I take out the next folder. Copy its label, if it has one, onto the top edge of an archival-quality folder. If it isn’t labeled, look at the contents and try to figure out what they are, and write something on the edge of the folder. Transfer the contents into the new folder and stack in the archival box. That’s new box #15 being filled. It really isn’t boring, it’s kind of fun figuring out what Sandy was up to in 1985 or whenever. He was trying to steer AT&T into the world of the Internet when the Internet was new. Attending conferences and giving talks and publishing papers in the IEEE Communications and so on.

In the evening I worked the AV desk for a concert. This was “Steve Gill and friends.” Steve has performed here a number times. The “friends” are a buddy that plays guitar and a younger woman who sings. (Sings very well, actually.) Tonight they were doing the songs of Johnny Mercer. “I remember you” and “One more for my baby” and so on.

Wednesday 04/26/2023

Took the standard walk. On return, I took the car out to Ducky’s Car Wash to get it looking nice for the excursion planned for Saturday. Gonna have 3 women in the car, it has to be clean, right?

After lunch I shot pictures of the completed Sting Ray. I’ll drop a couple in here. Then I started collecting pictures for the next set of exhibits in my hallway gallery. This is going to be pictures of flowers, because why be unconventional when you can be boring, right? Anyway some flower pics from various trips. Over the years I have, with some level of consistency, put keywords on the images that I saved.

I used to do this with Adobe Bridge, a very nice DAM (“digital asset manager”, fancy term for “app to keep track of a bazillion images”). Then Adobe, curse their money-grubbing souls, killed that product. No problem, the app still ran — until MacOS moved up to 64-bit binaries and won’t run 32-bit ones. So Adobe Bridge can’t be run on a modern OS and Adobe won’t upgrade it. And the current equivalent in the Adobe line is only obtained with an annual subscription because Adobe, may their bits all rot, don’t sell software any more, they only rent it.

OK, breathe. In… Out… There now. We don’t need Adobe any more, remember? We have Affinity Photo for image editing, and we have ACDSee for managing the collection. So I brought up ACDSee and told it “find all images with the keyword ‘flower’ or ‘blossom’ please” and it did. Scrolled through a couple hundred candidates and picked 20 that really stood out.

Tonight I’m going to an event at the Computer Museum, the 50th anniversary of the Alto, the first computer with a graphical interface. I’ll write that up tomorrow maybe.

Tuesday 04/25/2023

Did the gym machines. Did A/V support work, checking out the new mics and ordering more accessories, also sent reminder email to Gwen, Martha and Jean about our excursion this Saturday. Then it was time for the writers meeting; once again I had nothing. But so did the majority, the cue didn’t resonate with anybody much.

Then down to FOPAL for 2:30 working on my section, processing 5 boxes and rearranging the shelves a bit. In the evening we had a sing-along in the lobby. My voice sucks, I have no range at all.

Monday 04/24/2023

Took the standard walk for the first time in a while. Stopped on the way to pick up prescriptions at CVS. After a bit of rest I headed out to FOPAL where I found a massive pile of donations. I processed half of them; I’ll have to go back tomorrow.

Got back in time to meet with Bert on the 11 floor to review the new microphone setup. We decided to wait until we use them in an event, before buying more sets. The next event on the 11th floor is on 5/2.

Went to a concert in the auditorium in the evening, classical music with violin and piano. Left early. Not my thing.