Monday 04/03/2023

Went for the standard walk, all ok. Soon after it was time to set up for an event. This was a “first Monday book talk”, a series of talks featuring Channing House, or maybe just local, published authors to talk about their books. The speaker was Peter, talking about the story of his early years growing up in Budapest under first the Nazis and then the Soviets (Painted Pebbles).

Gigi, who is now producing this series, had agreed that it would continue to be, as it has always been for nearly a decade, an auditorium event, no Zoom. (Well, in early 2020 at the start of the pandemic, it was zoom-only.) So I was looking forward to an easy setup, just a couple of mics and put Peter’s slides on the projector. But there had been strong requests from certain people that they were shut-ins and wanted to see it, so at least do a recording. So I had to set up to record it as well, video and sound.

And it all came off very well indeed. Or so I thought, until later in the day I went to transfer the .mov file to where Lennie could upload it to Vimeo and publicize it. Then I discovered that the one-hour recording massed sixty gigabytes. What? A gig a minute for a 1080p video? That’s about 500 times more data than I’d expect. Then I discovered that the Mac Finder has an “encoding” function. So I “encoded” the video and the result was a more reasonable 4.5GB file. I don’t understand but that’s ok.

Anyway after lunch, off to FOPAL. For this 3-mile run down Middlefield, I thought I would try the brand new Palo Alto local transport service, Palo Alto Link. It’s basically a copy of Lyft, run by the City, and operating only within the Palo Alto city limits. I installed the app and summoned a ride, which came very quickly. But then it started to go wrong. First off, I discovered that it wasn’t a simple ride but a ride-share deal where the driver gets directed to pick up other people and drop them off, on the way to your destination. And it went quite far out of what should have been my route to pick someone up. Then the driver, following his app’s directions, headed out into the boonies of Palo Alto, west of San Antonio road, and said “here we are.” But I am quite sure I put in the correct destination. It just invented a completely random other destination. He was very apologetic and drove me to the mile and a half to the right place.

At FOPAL I found ten boxes, so I spent a couple hours processing half of them. I’ll go back tomorrow. Then it was time to summon another Link to go home. But the app gave me an error message and kept saying, so sorry, please retry. So I called a Lyft instead, $13 instead of free. Plus, that driver was completely unfamiliar with Palo Alto and as far as I could tell, the rules of the road. So not a great experience. Nothing daunted, I’ll give Link one more try tomorrow, although at the planned price of $1 for a senior ride, for that run is only just cheaper than using my own car.

This was Mixer Monday, when at dinner you take a random table number from a hat when you go into the dining room, and I ended up with a very congenial random group. One of whom is a Texan with relatives still in Austin, and may be able to hook me up with a place to stay for the 2024 eclipse. More on that another time.

Sunday 04/02/2023

At 10 I met with Susan in the auditorium. She has made a powerpoint for her book took (next month) and was unsure how it would look projected on the big screen. I demonstrated how easy it was to share her laptop’s screen onto the projected screen using Zoom Room. Which is fine for auditorium-only, as book talks are.

At 1:30 I drove down to the museum to lead a private tour, 7 guys from SAP. Also Scott joined me to observe. The tour went OK, but I think I need to do better at “reading the room” i.e. judging what a small group like this one wants, and adjusting on the fly. My canned patter is ok for large miscellaneous groups but I think I bored these guys with some of the more obvious stuff.

Worked on the model a bit, and read some cheap science fiction. So life goes.

Saturday 04/01/2023

First thing this morning was to start with the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. This is an annual deal, where a couple hundred competitors sit in rows in a hotel in Connecticut and solve crosswords competitively. And another several hundred pay $50 for the privilege of solving the same puzzles online. I had paid my fee and was ready to go.

And I bombed. On the first puzzle I went over it for the first pass and filled in three words. Second pass, added one more word. You had 15 minutes to finish the puzzle or your score for the puzzle would be zero. Or you could turn it in with. 95% of the blanks, still blank, and get a score very close to zero. And there would be no way to recover from that.

Last year I was in the middle of the pack, 180 out of 283. But with a zero on the first puzzle… fuggedaboutit. I closed the web page and wrote off the tournament.

I went for a walk, stopping at the downtown farmer’s market for the first time in months. Did a little on the model. Then about 2pm I did something to my MacBook. I had leaned it on the side of my easy chair, and I sat down and thought, maybe that’s squishing the computer? I got up and pulled it out and it looked fine. No dent or scratch or anything. But when I opened it up — the screen stayed black. It was alive. If I forced it to reboot, it made the startup “bong” noise. And, this is a trick I learned at the Genius Bar, just look at the Caps Lock key as you press it. If the little green LED comes on for caps lock, the OS is alive.

So I carried the MacBook to the Apple Store where I was able to get a Genius slot right away. The Genius couldn’t help, but he took the machine and said it should be ready for pickup by the end of the week. It is still in warrantee so no cost.

Then home and got out the OLD MacBook, the one that I was going to give away, but it works better with the auditorium equipment than the new one so I kept it. And here we are.

Friday 03/31/2023

Started with walk. Cut it short just because. A wave of fuckitall I guess.

At 10 by arrangement I met in the lounge with Dr. Margaret. She means to take the same Road Scholar tour of the Greek Islands that I took back in 2019. She plans to leave three days early and wants to plan the extra days in Athens. She had seen a New York Times column where somebody used ChatGPT to plan a trip, and wanted to try it.

So I showed her the very easy sign-up and she started asking the bot about Athens and, like everyone who tries it for the first time, was amazed and delighted at what it comes up with.

After lunch I went down to FOPAL. I had used their sign-up scheduler to sign up for a sorting slot from 1-3. I and another volunteer, Andrea, were extremely productive. In two hours, with a few minutes help from a third volunteer, cleared 24 boxes of books.

In my daily calendar I had noted that I needed to be in the lobby at 6:15 to set up a microphone for the TGIF party, sponsored this month by the 8th floor. And of course I totally forgot, didn’t remember until 6:45. Fortunately Bert was there early and did the microphone thing. Actually they weren’t using the mic anyway, at least not for the parts I saw. I would worry that I’m losing my mental grip, except that’s pretty much the kind of forgetting I’ve always been prone to. One of the big advantages of being married is, you have somebody to remind you of shit.

Thursday 03/30/2023

Nothing much today. My only real activity was a docent tour at 2pm. I’d volunteered for this particular one because Jesse, who dispatches volunteer docents, asked for someone to please take Thursday 2pm. A group of 15 Japanese high school kids didn’t want a custom tour but hoped to join the regular tour.

The kids were mannerly but I think I bored them; most of them peeled off about 2/3 of the way through. So I started with over 20 people, 15 students and a handful of regular visitors, and I finished with about 10 people, mostly regular visitors.

The museum is finally starting the training series to create some new docents! First time since, oh, 2017 or so when I took the training. And the docent class was taking a walk through the exhibit area just ahead of my tour. And one member of that group is: my friend Scott! Hi, Scott!

Wednesday 03/29/2023

Would have gone for a walk but our umpteenth rainstorm of the year was happening, so I walked on the treadmill downstairs. Then I took a tech squad call for Mrs Gee, who is extremely old and lives in the Lee Center. I had never actually been to the ground floor assisted living area there before and it was kind of interesting.

Mrs. Gee’s main problem was very easy to solve, but then I noticed that both Yahoo and iCloud were demanding passwords. And of fucking course she doesn’t know them. She did have a very old printout of passwords for various accounts. I’m presuming it was prepared by a younger relative or such, years ago. Since then many of the passwords have been changed and written in pencil, some multiple times. It had some clues for Yahoo, but nothing about her Apple ID.

I run into this over and over. People with multiple Apple devices, which seems to be every other person here, have an Apple ID, and they use iCloud to sync their devices. And inevitably they reboot and then the Macbook Air or the iPad or whatever, wants to be signed back into iCloud and inevitably this sets off a frantic search for the piece of paper or the little notebook where they wrote that password down two years ago. “No problem,” you say, just click “Forgot password” and go through the reset. Sure. But Apple always wants to send the two-factor confirmation to a different Apple device that they own. “Please enter the code from your Macbook.” Except, like Mrs. Gee, her Macbook is also signed out of iCloud, so it ain’t showing no codes. I gave up. She was getting mail from Gmail and Yahoo, and I didn’t judge her computer competency high enough that she would miss iCloud.

(Later I heard from another resident that she used to be very sharp, and in her career was involved in high-level budgeting for some State office. So not computer illiterate.)

Fiddled away the rest of the day. Well, I got the body of the stingray properly polished. The sprayed-on clear-coat always has some “nibs” as the body shop people call them, little dust grains or whatever. The only cure is to sand them out, and then sand the sanded areas with finer and finer grades of paper. After sanding with 8000 grit and 12000 grit it’s smooth enough to polish with regular polish and then fine polish.

At 7:30 I attended by Zoom a talk from our auditorium (David M. at the AV board) by Philip Taubman, currently at the Stanford Center for International Security and a long time NYT journalist. He has written a biography of George Shultz. Hands up who remembers George Shultz? Foreign Secretary to Ronald Reagan? And according to Taubman, the man really responsible for ending the Cold War.

Tuesday 03/28/2023

Tried to do the gym round this morning, but another resident was hogging the machines so I only got half done. I thought I had the right time to go down there but I don’t know.

I again hadn’t written anything for the writer’s meeting. The cue was “my last act, or how I want to be remembered,” and it produced some nice work from my colleagues in the group. I’ll put some excerpts at the end.

I spent some time polishing the body of the stingray, and helping a neighbor learn to use the Dashlane password manager.

At 6:30 I walked with a couple of others three blocks to the Methodist church for an organ concert. This was a big deal. The performer was Anna Lapwood who isn’t even 30 yet, but has a string of musical achievements as long as your arm. She’s a perky blond with the mannerisms of a schoolgirl but she ran a very large organ console like a boss. Here’s a terrible picture from my spot in the front right corner pew.

I had never been in the Methodist church although the outside of the building is a familiar landmark in Palo Alto, a huge 1960s neo-Gothic thing in pink cement. You can kind of get the idea of its style from this interior shot. It has not one but two large organs, and she was using them both, so she could play a riff on the big one in front and then echo it from the one in back. She played a couple of classical pieces, but she did several pieces of film music, including three segments from the sound track to Interstellar. I’m kind of sorry I never saw that film, now.

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Here’s a poem by Nancy Flowers. She is riffing on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, the wise ones being those who make their lamp oil last until the bridegroom arrives.

A Wise Virgin

A knock. I open wide to greet: Death, quiet
On my doorstep, hand extended,“Now.”
Where can I run to? Homo fuge! Flight!
No. All my days were hedged against tonight,
Lamps trimmed to meet this bridegroom and know how
To give him yes with incandescent will.

Nice, huh? Here’s a very different one by Connie Crawford.

It is inevitable

The extra key
to the safe deposit box
is on a key ring
somebody has made gaudy
by china beads and sequins.

At the bank,
when her signature
has been duly inscribed
as Box Holder Number Two,
I give the key ring to my daughter.
Then we cheerfully
go out to lunch
at the Fish Market.

It is inevitable
that one day she’ll take
this jingling trinket
from her drawer,
and, in another mood,
whatever it may be,
she’ll remember me.

Monday 03/27/2023

Went for the standard walk. Then drove down to FOPAL where for the first time in my memory, there were no, zero, boxes of computer books waiting to be priced. The sorters have been working through a couple of big donations, but apparently the donors were not computer people even a little bit. So I sorted for a couple of hours.

Worked on the stingray, putting the final coat of gloss clear on the body. Here it is.

And here is an example of detail work. Can you guess what this object, about 1/4-inch on a side, is? It’s the coolant overflow bottle obviously. I painted it ivory-white (the only off-white I had) to make it look like plastic, then painted gloss black on the bracket and the cap. Then dug out a bottle of yellow-green which was the same paint I used on the 1953 Chevy which was the first model I did, back in 2020. Painted that around the bottom half to make it look like it is half full of coolant.

At 6pm I went down and set up for Jeff Irish’s talk, and was all set by 6:30 which was an hour early. But finally it was time, and the whole event went off very nicely indeed. No glitches. 20 people on zoom, about 80 or 90 in the room. Now I am basking in the glow of a successful A/V event.

Sunday 03/26/2023

Killed time in the morning until 10:45 when I left for the museum. I stopped on the way to buy gasoline. This was the first fill-up since January! Enough of my driving has been on the battery that I averaged over 80mpg for that tank (and that two months). (So why do I want a new car?)

Led a tour of about 9 people — started out as 6 but picked up and lost some on the way. Included Michael, who is going to start the docent training that has just been announced and had an assignment to take a docent tour. I don’t think mine is typical, and also being very well-honed after my having given it for several years, is pretty slick.

Did a little work on the stingray in the afternoon, including putting on the 2nd and 3rd coats of clear spray. The body is just about finished, except for polishing.

Jeff Irish stopped by to try out his slides for his talk Monday. Who the what now? OK, one of my 6th floor neighbors and a good friend is Patty Irish. Her son Jeff, I would guess is in his 50s? (Hmmm, Patty is well into her 80s, so although Jeff looks to my eye about 50-ish, he is probably older.) He settled in Japan many years ago, married a Japanese woman, has two kids just entering adolescence. I wrote about having dinner with Patty and the granddaughter Akane.

Akane came a few days early so she could do shopping for high school stuff, and to give Grandma Patty the chance to shower gifts on her, like a new MacBook. Jeff and the son Rintaro arrived today. Jeff is to give a talk here tomorrow night. Patty has been very concerned about wanting this talk to come off well. She insisted that I do the A/V setup for it. I feel a heavy responsibility. So I was glad to plug his USB stick into the Mac I used for screen media and load the rather long Powerpoint package. It opened just fine in Keynote on the Mac, we paged through it, and I saved it on the hard drive and give him the stick back. We talked about what microphones we use etc, and he seemed reassured that this was going to go alright.

03/25/2023

Since the day was uncommitted on my calendar, except for a play at 8pm, and since Janette, who runs the FOPAL crew had put out a call for more sorters because of several large donations, I went down to FOPAL early, about 9, and worked a couple of hours.

After lunch I took a tech squad call to Jean W., and failed. Mac Mail on her Macbook showed no contents in either the junk or spam folders, but Mail on her iPhone did show stuff. Why? I poked around and confessed to being stumped.

I worked a bit on the stingray. It progresses.

At 7:15 I drove down to the Pear theater to see their production of Richard II. I did not stay after intermission. They were doing the script right, had all the lines with good understanding and expression. Several of their lines drew laughs from a part of the audience over on the other side (it’s done in the round), although I didn’t get the joke Must have been somebody’s relatives. Anyway, it’s just not an interesting play to me, and I couldn’t see sitting through another hour.