Friday 03/24/2023

Went for the walk this morning, it was fine. Spent a few hours setting up my new gallery. Took down the display of New Zealand mountains that had been there for a couple of months. Printed, framed and put up 10 action shots of SWBB players over the years. It took a few hours over the last few days to go through my archives and select the cream, about 30 shots worth printing. The criteria: well composed, convey a clear story, and are real suspended action, with people’s feet off the ground. OK, like this,

Eight, mostly like that, printed on 11×14 or 11×17 paper. So I’ll leave those up for a couple of months at least. Actually there are another eight that are as good, maybe I will gradually rotate some others through.

Pam has been having problems installing a new HP printer. I had taken a look and been baffled. I couldn’t figure out how, using its little tiny LCD screen, to get past its “please install HP Smart software to complete setup” and get into the settings and learn its MAC address, which we need to let it use our network. Bert said he could, so the two of us met at Pam’s unit and Bert cracked it. I’m not sure what he actually did, but he got to the settings, and after half an hour we had it working.

At 2pm it was time for the monthly meeting of the A/V team. I had us meet in the Training room where I could easily put my laptop on the big screen on the wall, and we went over the interface to zoom for our hybrid meetings, talking especially about recording meetings in the cloud and then transferring them to Vimeo.

Had supper with the Allens and Lenny. Did a little on the stingray after.

Thursday 03/23/2023

Spent the day at the Yosemite warehouse of CHM. Helped to clean up and put away a number of artifacts that were brought out for a researcher. Bringing things out for her had caused Aurora (curator) to notice two boxes in which there were dozens of items stored in manila folders, but the artifact object id numbers weren’t written on the folders, so I did that.

I wanted to look something up about an object in the database. Using the laptop provided for volunteer use, I logged in to Windows with my assigned volunteer id and password. That worked. Then the database was acting flaky, as it often does, so I rebooted the laptop. When I went to log in to Windows again, it said my password was incorrect. And that was that, I couldn’t get to the database to check anything about the objects I was documenting. At lunch, Greta (other curator at the Shustek center) said she had not been able to get anything done all morning due to computer problems, either. The CHM systems are a bit of a mess sometimes.

Aurora’s main concern was that, in recent heavy rains, a roof drain in one corner of the giant warehouse had blocked up, and rain pooled on the roof, and began leaking down onto a corner of the pallet racking, soaking several boxes of stored objects. So a couple dozen things were spread out on tables being dried, inspected, and repacked.

Maybe the computer and network problems were due to water, also.

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Total side-track:

• pallet: a wooden platform used for storing and moving goods or freight
• pallette: a flat board used by an artist to hold and mix paints, or the selection of colors on such a board
• palate: the roof of the mouth, or the sense of taste

English is tough stuff.

Wednesday 03/22/2023

First activity today was the laundry. Every other Wednesday my pile of tighty whities hits bottom and I know it’s time. This time I had to run three loads: the usual whites-with-bleach, shirts and socks, and then my bathrobe. The one I sit around in every morning for an hour or more, sipping coffee. It had started to smell just a bit. I like to wash it every couple of years whether it needs it or not, and it did.

Worked on some hobbies, a little bit on the stingray, more on pictures. From 2007 through about 2017, I was trying to take decent action pics of the SWBB players. I have quite a lot of these images on the computer, all nicely organized in folders, games within years, like 2012/2012-10-15 USC and so forth. It took a few hours to flip through all of them and pull out 20 or so really striking shots. I plan to print off maybe 8 or 9 to put on my outside gallery shelves.

At 4:30 I went down and set up a mic on a stand in the dining room, for use by the committee who put on a monthly Birthday Dinner.

At 5 we had a sixth floor meeting mostly to discuss our upcoming responsibility: the April TGIF party. Each floor is supposed to host a TGIF, in turn by months. Actually we were supposed to do one in December but that was when our current Covid outbreak started and it was canceled. So all that was accomplished today was to form a committee, which I am not on thank goodness.

Then at 5:45 Patty and her granddaughter who is visiting her, drove to Mike’s in Midtown for supper. Patty’s son Jeff married a Japanese woman and lives in Japan. The daughter, Akane, is 13, very pleasant and poised. Her father and brother will arrive on Sunday.

Back by 7, I went in to put away the Birthday mic, but David M had already picked it up. He was doing AV for tonight’s lecture. Unfortunately he had run into a problem with the overhead camera operated by the Zoom Room software. He went looking for me but I was out. Fortunately he had found David G. who fixed the camera problem by… wait for it… unplugging the cable and plugging it back in. That’s what I call tech support.

Tuesday 03/21/2023

Did the machine round in the gym. Well, most of it. There were a couple of other people and traffic backed up so I skipped most of my second set.

First task today was to enter all the A/V-related events from the draft April Calendar that we discussed yesterday, into the spreadsheet of A/V events that my committee shares. Then schedule the Zoom Room software for the events that have a zoom component. Then send an email to the group saying I’d done these things.

The writers meeting was next. The topic was “seasons and how they affect you” and I hadn’t even thought about writing anything. Others waxed eloquent on the change of the seasons.

3pm I met with Kass in the auditorium to get her squared away on how she would present some PDF slides before a movie she is running tonight. Think I’ll go check if she’s ok. Back in a flash…

Yup, proving the saying “there’s always something”, there was a problem. But David G was already there advising Kass, so I wasn’t needed. Fuck this shit.

Monday 03/20/2023

First up was the Event Coordinators meeting. This is a monthly meeting where everyone who sponsors or organizes events comes and we finalize the calendar for the next month. Lectures, concerts, bus trips, it never stops.

Rather than walk first thing, I lounged around until the meeting, then after I walked to FOPAL instead of driving. There I processed 7 boxes of books. Took a Lyft back home.

Sunday 03/19/2023

Spent most of the day in a happy haze coding a program. I really enjoy coding. About eight hours work over three days, not quite 400 lines (200 non-comment) and it was working just fine at 3pm.

Back in 1984-85 I wrote a book, Dr. Dobb’s Z80 Toolbook, about assembly language programming for the Z80. For that, I invented my own simple markup syntax. Remember, HTML wasn’t invented until 1992. Basically I re-invented Markdown, or would that be pre-invented it? I used curly braces, for instance {iloudi} meant “loud” in italics, and so forth. At the time, I had written a program in Pascal to convert the files into source for a word processor app, but that code is long gone.

So I still have the source files for this book (they are now living on their, like, 4th or 5th successive computer) and I conceived a desire to re-read it. But I didn’t want to read the marked up text, I wanted to see it formatted. So I need to convert my marked-up source to HTML. Obviously that meant, write a quick program to do it. And I did, in Python, and it was fun.

Not so fun: at 5:30 I joined our little car pool and off to see 1-seeded Stanford play 8-seed Ole Miss. And the women played like shit and lost. Trailed the whole game, committed a mess of turnovers, couldn’t hit easy buckets. Tied the game with less than a minute to go, and had the ball, but turned it over yet again. Then they had to foul, and the Rebels made their free throws and it was over.

I am seriously thinking of not renewing my season tickets next year. Or maybe renewing them but not going to all the games, for sure. It just isn’t fun any more. Tara has said she’ll retire “when it stops being fun,” and that’s good advice.

Saturday 03/18/2023

First thing, well, 8:15, I went down to meet with Martha and David G, to go and attend the Channing House Board Retreat. This was a day at which the staff reported on various things to the Board members. It was held at the Mitchell Park Community Center, a library and event place in Palo Alto. Catered, of course, so there were lots of delicious pastries and coffee in the morning, and a nice lunch at noon.

Besides the actual 10 or 12 Board members, there were all the elected offices of the Resident Association. And because a lot of the reported items had to do with trying to implement the Strategic Plan, Martha and I were included as members of the Strategic Planning committee which took up some of my time last year. David G. was there because he is a member of the Financial Planning committee which is an adjunct of the Board. Plus about 5 staff members, about 25 people in the room.

The elements of the Strategic Plan included points like “be a workplace of choice” and “improve memory care.” A lot of the first hours were on what they have been doing in these areas. I left my packet in the car so I don’t remember all the details, but they are doing many things to retain and hire staff in a very difficult hiring climate. And the memory care is a very elaborate program based in part on the “Best Friends Approach“. This has involved lots of staff training over months, and special training to on-board new hires.

A lot of this was pretty boring, but the final presentation, where Rhonda went over not just those areas but the “improving wellness” and “improving independent living experience”, was better. Unfortunately she asked us to keep the future plans confidential. so I won’t put them in here. But some major changes are likely to come in several areas.

One area she went over was, why is Channing House not a certified Medicare provider? We are not; we don’t (can’t) bill Medicare for anything. It’s because there would be small benefit to residents, and a huge increase in oversight, inspections, and paperwork, much of it duplicating the inspections and oversight already required by the California DPH and the California OSHPD, a parallel state agency.

Why little benefit? Medicare pays for skilled nursing only as rehab following a three-day hospital stay. Stay less than 3 days? No coverage. If you do qualify, Medicare then covers the first 20 days in full, followed by a max of 80 days at $200/day. (When Rhonda read this, a board member who is an MD laughed and said he had never heard of any patient who got more than two weeks covered.)

Point being, Channing House’s SNF provides custodial care. People who need it, often go into it directly, not from the hospital, and some can stay for a year or two. So any Medicare payment for nursing costs would be small or zero. (Treatment beyond the nursing care is provided by outside doctors or specialists who do bill Medicare.)

The issues of being a health-care provider are ridiculously complicated and Martha and I agreed on the way home that the staff are doing good work in a very difficult environment, and Rhonda is a jewel.

Friday 03/17/2023

Went for a walk but cut it short just because.

Worked on a little Python project that I thought up. At 3pm I left for Stanford to watch the women pretty much romp over a 16-seed. Watched part of the second game but left when it was clear Gonzaga would lose.

Thursday 03/16/2023

Tidied the apartment for Wanda to clean. Then headed out to the Shustek center for a day of artifact work. Except it wasn’t artifacts today. They have received a 47-box donation of the papers of Alexander “Sandy” Fraser, a noted computer scientist. Doctorate from Cambridge, worked on early computer software at the British firms ICL and Ferranti. In 1969 he moved to the USA, to Bell Labs, and continued in various positions at AT&T until he retired in 2000 as AT&T Chief Scientist. Author of many many papers and recipient of many prestigious awards.

So my work today was to make a start at getting these papers out of the boxes that the donor (his wife and son) had packed them in, and get them into archival folders in archival boxes with proper labels. It was fun, not a very demanding job but satisfying. Got through the first 10 or so boxes. Probably I will see those boxes off and on for weeks.

Wednesday 03/15/2023

First thing today was a haircut. Eight weeks since the last one, just about the right duration. Then, to fill the morning, I went down to FOPAL intending to sort books, but there were three boxes of computer books already, so I processed them.

At 1pm it was time for the monthly zoom meeting of FOPAL volunteers. The sale last weekend was very well attended and brought in $18,000, back to pre-pandemic levels.

I have decided that the next set of pictures I will put in my hallway gallery will be basketball action shots. From 2000 to about 2015 I took a lot of such pictures. So I started going through the digital files looking for ones worth printing. That took me up to 4pm when there was a zoom meeting, another one with the people from Pine Park Health. They’ve signed up enough people here that they are sure to have a person here at least half a day per week. This was to introduce the actual NPC (nurse practitioner certified) who would be the regular person. I forget his name but he seemed very personable, 40-something and bearded.

At 7:30 I went down to a lecture on Impressionist painting and gardens, which go together since most of the impressionists liked painting gardens, and the new style of painting came at the same time as a new fashion in flower gardens in France. My question, which I did not ask because the lecture had already run long and it wasn’t really relevant, was — how did the women stand to wear all those clothes?