Sunday 04/23/2023

After my Sunday religious rituals — i.e. reading the Sunday paper, watering the plants, and doing the NYT crossword — I sat down at my beautifully clean desk to do some video editing.

I have been unhappy with the quality of the videos we make from our lecture series. (They are all available to the public on our Vimeo Channel.) Basically we have taken the recording that Zoom makes by default of the meeting, trimmed off any dead air at the ends, and threw it up on Vimeo.

Recently I found a set of options on Zoom that cause it to save multiple different video streams: one of the speaker alone, and a separate one of any shared content (e.g. powerpoint slides). So this was done for a really interesting talk last week about Artificial Intelligence. The speaker really knew his stuff and presented well, and I thought I could make a good video using the separate streams.

So I downloaded them to my big screen iMac and opened iMovie and set to work. Immediately hit a snag: I didn’t know how to get iMovie to cut back and forth between two streams. I knew this is something people do. You shoot the same interview with two (or more) cameras, and there has to be a way to smoothly cut from one camera to another, without losing sync with the sound.

Well, if you don’t know how to do something, there is only one place to go. No, not ChatGPT, not yet. I refer to YouTube. It took a little searching but I found a good YT tutorial on how to do exactly what I wanted. Then over a couple of hours, I made a video that mostly shows the speaker talking, but cuts smoothly to his slide whenever that is needed to let the viewer read the details. It isn’t up on the Vimeo channel as I write, but soon will be.

At 1:30 it was time to join the carpool of Channing House fans of the Pear Theater, to attend the Sunday matinee of “Pear Slices”. That’s an annual festival of short, new dramatic works by local authors. Not a skit show, these are serious one-acts. Of the ten (ten!) short plays, several were funny or thought-provoking. Some were duds, but that’s how it goes.

Saturday 04/22/2023

First activity today was to unbox and try out the new microphone system that I ordered after that shopping frenzy of 4.139. I ordered it on Wednesday and it arrived Friday morning. It turned out to be quite nice, very respectable build quality and decent sound. I plugged it into our portable amplifier and it worked immediately. I have to order a couple of more cables and doo-dads to have a complete system, and I need to try it out in another location. If all is good I may order two more copies.

At 10 I went down to set up the auditorium for a major event, the memorial for Lily Loh. Lily and her sister Helen moved in about the time I did. Lily especially was a well-known character, always bubbly-cheerful with a loud and frequent laugh. She died quite suddenly and two weeks ago. Helen and Lily’s son Derek had set up quite an impressive memorial. They had reserved the whole auditorium and had it set up with tables to seat, oh, I guess close to 100 people. Our Facilities people can do this kind of thing, completely rearrange the place and make a dozen large tables appear, if given enough warning. And Dining Services set up a whole service with hot trays of Chinese food — I’m pretty sure it was done in our kitchen, not brought in — fried rice, broccoli beef, garlic chicken, etc., plus drinks including wine. Well, I imagine they charged the family for the wine. There was probably a charge for all of it, but point being, it was all set up and executed in-house.

My small part in this was to turn on the system and set up microphones, and help Derek connect his laptop to the system to show a very nice slide show he had put together on a loop, with Spotify playing a collection of Lily’s favorite songs, mostly 50s R&R. A niece of Lily’s was the emcee and did an excellent job, keeping people on point and moving along.

It all finally wrapped up around 1:30 and I could put all my gear away. About 12 my phone had popped up an alert. Because I have my tickets in my “wallet” app, it wanted to tell me that I had a Stanford Baseball game at 2:05. Well heck, why not. Their season is well under way and I haven’t been to a game yet, and it was a beautiful day outside. So, off to the ball park.

Stanford wasn’t doing very well, down 0-3 after 3 innings against UW, And I started yawning, I came on home for a nap. For supper I had the remains of my fish and chips that I had brought home after Friday’s outing.

At 7:15 I picked up Patty and we went to a play. I have maintained my two-seat season ticket to the Bus Barn theater. I put out a notice last week on email, “anyone want to go with me to Harold and Maude?” and Patty was first to reply. While we were sitting down there was a tap on my shoulder and there were Scott and June! I had no idea they were Bus Barn patrons.

We debated about H&M on the way home. Maude is the distillation of the 60s and teaches depressed young Harold how to really live his life. It was very well acted by all parties and pretty funny in spots. We thought it went on a bit too long. I thought there were gaping holes in Maude’s philosophy that made it impractical without a very special combination of virtues, but Patty thought it worked.

So finally to bed at 11:15 after a full day.

Friday 04/21/2023

I had to kill time until 10am so I cleaned up the desk, putting away all my model-making crap in the closet, then I got out the spray cleaner and the Lemon Pledge and made it all nice again.

I have a plastic display case coming for the Corvette.

The big event today was to go for a drive with some neighbors. Neighbor Phil had an out of town visitor, an old buddy named Ken, and he wanted to take him for lunch at a favorite seafood place, Barbara’s Fish Trap in Princeton-by-the-Sea, over by Half Moon Bay. But Phil gave up his car some time ago. He’d asked Patty to drive them but she didn’t want to and asked me to do it. So, Phil and Ken and Patty and I went off in the Prius.

We drove up Page Mill and down Alpine Road and Pescadero Road, and then up the coast on 1. The lunch was fine. We came back by 92, and Cañada road. There, just because, we stopped at the Pulgas Water Temple.

After we returned there was just time for a nap and then it was time to help out with the 6th floor TGIF. As I’ve mentioned each month a different floor hosts a TGIF party and this was our turn. It came off very nicely. Lots of people crowded into the 11th floor penthouse drinking wine and eating snacks and talking. I was supposed to be a host and circulate, which I did, and completely forgot to take a picture.

Thursday 04/20/2023

At 10 this morning I was to lead a private tour. The group was, from the volunteer job website, “14 students from the University of Georgia Black Business Student Association & CHM donor Greg Gretsch.” They were mostly college soph and junior levels, and various majors, not all business, as their leader Greg told me. Greg also told me that this was the second year he had brought such a group, and said “Last year the docent they gave us, I forget his name, was fan-tastic.”

Way to set the expectation level, Greg. I don’t know if I was fan-tastic but I don’t think I bored anybody.

Then I didn’t have much to do until 4pm when I had scheduled the monthly A/V team meeting. Which went off smoothly.

Oh, yeah, finished the Corvette model. I will take some pictures tomorrow, I don’t want to disturb it until the glue under the door handles has hardened. No, not tomorrow; tomorrow gonna be killer busy. Saturday.

Wednesday 04/19/2023

So busy I didn’t even have time to work on the model. Started the laundry and went for a short walk during the first load. Then finished the laundry while reading email.

Bert had written about the illegal microphones. The wireless mics we use on the 11th floor are 20 years old and are actually illegal by FCC rules. Plus one broke down a couple weeks ago. Wireless mics have two parts, the mic itself which is a transmitter, and a little base station receiver. Bert’d been looking online and yes, you can get a nice Shure base station with two mics for around $700 but there are also a slew of Chinese-made knock-offs at around $100. So we could have new, legal, mics for under $300 total, which is a sum that we can definitely come up with, from the gift shop or the resident association funds.

But that sent me into a major web rabbit-hole trying to find the “right” cheap mic setups. The ones he’d found had a couple of issues I didn’t like. So at least 2 hours of the day, off and on, went into browsing Amazon and B&H and such.

In between I took two tech calls, one to Florrie which turned out to be a wireless keyboard that was disabled. The other was to Pam, who wants to get the PBS Passport streaming service on her Samsung smart TV. We wasted a good 45 minutes in the miserable Samsung user interface proving that her 2017 model TV did not support the PBS app. Then I had to spend 20 minutes with my own brand new TV, ending up learning that PBS doesn’t have an app for the LG sets although they plan to someday.

Then it was time to go down and set up a microphone for the people to use who were running the monthly birthday dinner. A little bit of time free and then it was 6pm and I had been invited by Gloria to have dinner with her and tonight’s lecture speaker, Kirk Hanson. (Follow the link for his very impressive resume.) Also there were Edie, who had served with Kirk on some Santa Clara County committees, and Joan, who was a classmate of his in 5th-7th grades in Houston, back in the early 50s.

Hanson’s talk, on the ethics of artificial intelligence, was really quite well done. He is very up on the subject, knows all the players and the problems, and presented it well.

Tuesday 04/18/2023

Did the gym machine round. Had the writers meeting. I didn’t contribute anything.

At 1pm I met with Derek Loh, son of my late neighbor Lily Loh, about A/V for his mother’s memorial this coming Saturday. It turned out, to my relief, that they don’t want to do a Zoom meeting after all. He wants to put a slide show up on the big screen from his laptop. We practiced that, it is a very simple process. And they need a couple of mics so people can reminisce about Lily. He plans to record the proceedings on a GoPro camera of his own.

I treated myself to supper out at a local restaurant: Red Curry Duck at Indochine, one of my favorite dishes. Naturally one order is enough for two so I brought home enough for another meal.

Before and after supper I put some finishing bits on the stingray. All that is left to do is to install the windshield wipers and the door handles, and give it a final polish.

04/17/2023

About 3:30pm when I was coming back in from the garage, just back from FOPAL, I was thinking what a productive day I had. I skipped the morning walk because my tax returns were back from the accountant. I went through a whole process to download the forms from their secure site, and I e-signed the form so they could e-file for me. I printed out the four estimated tax vouchers (only 4, not 8, because I don’t have to pay an estimated tax to the state this year). Then I made up four stamped and addressed envelopes and tagged them with the dates when they should be sent and filed them, except of course for the first one which is due tomorrow, only it isn’t really due because I’m in one of the counties that had storm damage so I don’t have to send them until October, but I did anyway, mailing the April payment on my way down to…

The 10am Event Coordinators meeting, where everybody who sponsors events meets to finalize the calendar for the next month. That took an hour. From there I updated the Google spreadsheet of A/V events that is shared by everyone on my committee, to show all the May events. And looked at my calendar and oops, Friday this week is completely borked, so I can’t have the usual AV committee meeting on Friday. So I sent out email to the faithful committee saying, the spreadsheet is up, and can we meet on Thursday instead?

Then off to FOPAL to finish processing that huge donation of computer books that I started working on last Saturday. That took two hours, so I was back, feeling very productive, at 3:30 like I said. Laid around like a potato the rest of the day, pretty much.

Sunday 04/16/2023

Watering the plants I finished my next to last quart bottle of VF-11. This is a crisis. VF-11 is a plant food. We have been putting a tablespoon of VF-11 in each watering can before watering our plants for decades. Plants have been thriving on this as their only input (other than soil obvs.) for decades.

Last time I went to order more (sometime in 2020), there was a problem, they were out of the gallons but filled my order with quart bottles. Now although the website is still up and looking good, none of the items you can “shop” for are in stock. Supposedly they are stocked at Lowes and Home Depot. Well, no; Lowes website has it but says it is “no longer carried”, and Home Depot has it but says it is out of stock. Among the retailers they list was Summerwinds nursery, and anyway I have been meaning to replace a couple of plants, so I went on down there. They had no VF-11 of course, and in fact, no liquid plant food at all, which surprised me. How can retailers miss the convenience of adding a little liquid to a watering can? As opposed to stuff you have to dig into the soil.

I bought a couple of bright geraniums which I will have to plant soon, anyway.

During the day I did a little more work on the model. It has taillights and parking lights now.

These parts are tiny. The yellow lenses in the parking lights are less than an eighth of an inch across, ditto the little red “bullet” taillight lenses. Naturally I dropped them. Three different times one of the little MFs leaped out of my fingers and of course didn’t stay on the desk. Down on my stomach with a flashlight looking for a weensy little fleck of chrome or red plastic.

Main activity today was to drive to Oakland for a house concert with my favorite local band, Dirty Cello.

I like house concerts. Where else do you get to sit practically in the musicians’ laps?

I bought one of their CDs, “Dirty Cello Smokes the Sixties”, with Rebecca’s versions of “Purple Haze” and “For What It’s Worth” and “Gimme Shelter” and so on. Naturally I stuck it in the car — yes my car is old enough they were still putting CD players in them — and drove back down the freeways and across the San Mateo bridge singing along with the oldies. It felt really good, just buzzing along in light traffic, looking at the water and the green hills and singing loudly. The car is almost as good as the shower for singing.

I think I need a road trip.

Saturday 04/15/2023

Yesterday Frank, fellow volunteer at FOPAL, sent a picture of a large pile of boxes in front of my section. Some donor had unloaded a career’s worth of computer books.

So today I went down there and spent 2:30 processing about 2/3 of the stack. My usual Monday shot will finish it up. Out of a couple hundred books, at least 20 were “high value”, more than $25 used on Amazon, so that was nice.

Back home, I was to provide A/V support for a memorial get-together on the 11th floor. This was easy for me; all they wanted was the big TV so they could hook up a laptop and loop a slide show of old pictures. I had it all set for them and it went off fine. Back up to 11 at 4:30 to shut the TV down.

Worked a little on the Stingray. Fiddly finishing pieces on the outside. I’ve been looking at a really complicated kit, a 1/12 scale Bugatti, but not going to get that right now. Finish the ‘Vette and enjoy and empty desk top for a while first.

Friday 04/14/2023

Took a walk in the morning. At 1pm I left for the museum where I was to lead the 2pm tour. At first I thought this was going to be the usual weekday tour, maybe 10 people. I was chatting with 4-5 people by the entrance to the exhibit area when at 1:59 pm, a huge group, maybe 20 people, suddenly assembled from the far edges of the lobby, and I had a tour group of 30 or more. That was a surprise.

But I did a good job, one of my better tours ever I think. Most of them stuck with me, so there was still 25 or so at the last stop, and a nice round of applause.

Home for a quick nap. Then I had a ticket for a concert at Stanford at 7:30, so I went over there early at 6pm, and had supper from the food court in the student union.

The concert was the an early start to the summer Jazz Workshop, with a big band of high school musicians. Although the kids were excellent musicians, I didn’t care for the selection of numbers. There’s a lot of branches of jazz that I really don’t care for. I can kind of get it, follow the notes and chord sequences, but they don’t pull together into anything I want to hear. So I left at intermission.