Did the gym in the morning. Originally I had planned to go to Yosemite today, but that was canceled on Tuesday, so the day was pretty much unscheduled. During the rest of the day I handled two tech squad calls, and read quite a bit.
I am really enjoying a science fiction series, The Silver Ships. Highly recommend to anyone who likes SF. What’s different about it is that the main characters are all nice people who care for each other, and who defeat violent opponents using imagination and clever strategies, avoiding killing when possible. There are 20 books, all(?) available through Kindle Unlimited. I’m on the 8th one and it is the best one yet.
Instead of a walk, I repeated my round of Zoom Room screens trying to nail down exactly what you have to do, to cast your screen to the big monitor, with sound. That got me to 9:30 when the Nominating committee met again, and discussed who to ask next, since Gloria turned us down. We settled on Sally, and later in the day I heard she had tentatively accepted, so that is probably settled.
Immediately after I met with David M. in the auditorium to show him the over-the-ear mic that Bert and I had made work yesterday. He will use it in tonight’s event.
I sent an email to three A/V peeps suggesting we meet on Friday to learn the Zoom Room stuff. Then it was time for lunch, after which, at 1pm, I had a meeting with the Financial Advisers, the regular annual meeting to examine the state of my Nest Egg and the rest of the estate. They have some new software including one that does a simulation of how my funds will change over the next 20 years, under a wide range of good and bad financial scenarios. Bottom line, I will have enough money to keep me past age 100, even under worst-case assumptions. Under normal conservative assumptions, when I’m 100, the total will be numerically higher than now, but adjusted for inflation, will be worth only a bit less than it is worth in today’s dollars. (That’s including the annual gifts I’ve been making.)
I had positive responses to my meeting email, so I reserved two rooms for Friday. Then I could chill for a while. I took a walk down Channing to Pardee Park.
At 5, I went to Lee’s apartment; she had invited me to dinner along with the David G and his wife Helen, and Shirley. Lee lives in a two-bedroom unit that is gorgeously set up with lots of built-in cabinets and work areas. She shared it with her husband Merrill, who died not too long ago. Shirley is a relatively new resident, another widow. We had drinks and chit-chat, went down to supper and more conversation.
Which brought us to 7:30 and a talk by Jerry Elkind, who was the lab manager at Xerox PARC 1971-78, the years when the people at PARC were inventing everything: Ethernet, the Laser Printer, the graphical interface with windows and menus, everything about modern computers. He had some info on why Xerox didn’t manage to convert all this into commercial success, instead letting Apple, IBM and Microsoft have all the glory, but I didn’t come away feeling like I understood that any better.
Did the round of gym machines. Then went around to three different venues, the Activity room, the Training room, and the Conference room. In each of these places, IT has installed a big TV screen managed by Zoom Room software. I was practicing how to do a screen-cast from my laptop to the TV. This ability is important for our A/V team to understand going forward. I fought through several problems of my own making and think I have it all figured out, but I need to make another round of tests and write some notes. Then I will schedule some training for the committee members.
Joined the writers meeting for half an hour, and then went to the auditorium to join Bert.
Back story. Bert is part of a “barbershop” men’s singing group. They wanted to have a performance here, which got postponed by somebody’s illness. But setting up for that, Bert wanted to try a new style of wireless mic. We have four “lapel mics”, small mic with a clip to attach to clothing, and a wireless transmitter. Bert bought three feather-weight mics that consist of a stiff wire that wraps around your ear and lays alongside your cheek. The mic plugs in to the same wireless transmitter pack, in place of a lapel mic.
When he tested these, however, they were much much too “hot”, sensitive, and went into instant feedback no matter what setting on the sound board. So he had brought in the sound engineer who is also a member of the singing group. The three of us met today and investigated the problem. The guy really did know his onions, sound-wise. We worked out the issue as a setting on the wireless receiver bank in the rack backstage, and got the new mic working nicely. It’s an improvement over a lapel mic in several ways. One, it doesn’t have to be clipped to clothing, which has been a problem with female presenters who often don’t have collars or lapels close to their voice-boxes. Two, it sounds better.
I had to leave them because it was time for a scheduled 12:30 lunch with Steve Madsen. I know him from the Museum where we are both docents. But he is also involved in Rotary, and through that, knows Gloria, who moved in to CH a year ago. Gloria had invited him to lunch, and me.
Steve is considering carefully whether he wants to move to a senior residence, and has checked out some others. After lunch we gave him a tour of Channing House. He’s a very deliberate sort, asked sensible questions but didn’t say a lot.
About 4pm Jerry, who I mentioned yesterday, called. He thinks he had a problem singing to the recorded music the other day, because the sound of the accompaniment comes out of speakers on the ceiling aimed away from the stage, so it comes back with a small delay. He wanted to experiment with maybe having a monitor speaker on the stage pointed right at the singers. We figured out how to do that and went down and tried it out. So that was another hour of fiddling with the sound system.
This morning, sitting with my computer sipping coffee, something that was said on the TV news made me remember something my mother often said. When in conversation any slur on women drivers came up (not infrequent in the 1950s), she would confidently counter, “You know, the inventor of the traffic signal was a woman.”
Was she right? Wikipedia was there just under my fingertips. And, uh, sorry, no. The first electric traffic signals were invented by men.
In 1912, the first electric traffic light was developed in 1912 by Lester Wire, a policeman in Salt Lake City, Utah….
The first four-way, three-colour traffic light was created by police officer William Potts in Detroit, Michigan in 1920
Sorry, mother.
At 10:30 I met with Gerald of IT on the 11th floor and he showed me how to share my screen with the rolling TV, using Zoom Room. It’s really quite simple. I am now set up for the Sock Hop rehearsal on Friday.
Then I went to FOPAL and processed 7 boxes of books. We’ve had a donation of books from the library of the late Martin Kay, a distinguished professor of Computational Linguistics at Stanford. Hence, quite a few books on, duh, Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.
Back home I replaced one song in the Sock Hop video. Jerry, who is going to sing Unchained Melody, had supplied a different accompaniment track. Most of the songs are original recordings, either just audio or old TV videos, like Elvis doing “Don’t Be Cruel” on the Ed Sullivan show. But for a few numbers, certain self-confident residents are going to karaoke the songs. Jerry has a decent tenor and has been taking voice lessons for some time. Nevertheless… well just say that in his shoes, no matter how many lessons, I would not put myself up against Al Hibbler, who had the original hit, or against Bill Medley, the version of the song that everyone remembers. Anyway, I cut in his new accompaniment replacing the previous one.
Then I had iMovie export the finished video again. After dinner, I again inserted chapter markers at the start of each of the 23 songs. iMovie doesn’t do chapter markers, so I’m using a third-party app, the one that wouldn’t run on my iMac because the iMac is too old. Anyway, that’s all done now. Showing the video using Quicktime Player, I can jump to the start of any of the numbers.
Dr. Margaret invited me to dinner, along with new residents Bob and Anne Marie Willis. Very pleasant.
The play, The Play That Goes Wrong, was pretty funny. It’s about a very amateurish local theater production of a stereotypical British murder mystery, in which every possible thing goes wrong, and the players keep a stiff upper lip and carry on regardless. I can recommend it for a light evening of entertainment.
Sunday 01/29/2023
Stew had scheduled a short rehearsal for the performers for the sock hop for 9:30am. Prior to that, I needed to finish the hour-long video with the 23 songs on the program. What I needed to do was to add chapter markers to the video. iMovie does not do chapter markers.
I learned of a well-regarded app that does this, and when I tried to buy it from my iMac, the App Store would not let me, it required the latest MacOS. Which my iMac can’t run. It’s from 2015, getting senile, can’t be upgraded. So I bought the video app for my very up to date laptop. So I would have time after finishing my coffee and the paper, and 9:30, to do this.
But I needed to export the final version of the video, which takes half an hour at least. So I started that at 11pm and left it to run as I turned in. During the night the video rendered into the dropbox and propogated to the laptop, all 4.3GB of it.
In the morning I had my Sunday paper and coffee, and dressed and watered the plants, and then sat down to add chapter markers to the video. That went smoothly. The chapter markers made it easy, during the rehearsal, to jump back to the beginning of a song, or scoot forward over 4 or 5 numbers to the exact start of another.
With that out of the way, I killed time until 11:30 when I picked up Lennie (the other car pool members were either walking or biking to the game, or going instead to the ballet in San Franscisco) and off to SWBB. The Cardinal continues to play below their abilities. Are they over-rated at #3? They did not crush the Ducks, but they did lead the whole game and won by 8.
Met with Gloria and Martha for breakfast, to discuss the people who need a tour. Called them and set it up for 2pm.
Fiddled around until then. Met the people, Helen and Tom Gracon, and their son and son-in-law. Martha and I did a really good job of leading them around, I think. Channing House is an easy sell, really. They seemed favorably impressed.
Had supper in my room. Realized belatedly, I have a Palo Alto Players show tonight, at 8. No problem. I’ll walk over there at 7:15 or so, and report on the play tomorrow.
I was sipping coffee and reading the paper at 6:30 when I glanced out and saw we had an unusual foggy morning.
First up was a walk on a new route. At the writer’s group the other day, people were talking about a coffee shop I’d never heard of, Zoe’s, just across the creek into Menlo Park. So today I walked to that and back, and saw some streets that I’d never seen. It’s not that big a town and I’ve been here for 50+ years, and never got into that part of the Menlo Park-Palo Alto border area.
On return I was fiddling with the computer when Dennis called to say that Laurel’s husband Bill (I guess he would be a nephew-in-law?) had a stroke. From what Dennis said, it didn’t sound like the life-threatening kind, but possibly the kind that messes you up. TBD.
I took care of the first of the Tax Tasks, downloading my IBM 1099-Rs. Then edited the video for the Sock Hop, to account for the latest changes the committee wanted in the song lineup.
At 2pm it was time for the Nom. Com. to meet with our latest hopefully nominee for VP. I went down to the 4th floor and waited in the lounge, but the nominee hadn’t come back from some errand or other and it was getting close to 2:30, which is when I had called the AV committee to meet. So I went back up to the 6th floor lounge. That meeting went well, we got all the February events parceled out.
Then back to 4, and found the Nom. Com. in session with nominee Gloria. Who wasn’t saying yes or no, yet, but we had a pleasant chat. I am hopeful she will accept.
In the course of the conversation, she mentioned she knows a couple who had initially committed to another senior residence, but then decided they preferred Channing House. Except their kids were saying, “Mom, I don’t think you’d be happy there.” Gloria wanted to get the family a tour of CH, but to her surprise our two-person marketing department doesn’t do tours on weekends! Geez, that’s “Sales 101”, you are available when the customer wants you. Anyway, Martha and I said, “we’ll give them a tour”, and I think Gloria might set that up for tomorrow.
Passed the time until 7pm, when I left to join the basketball car-pool. Eight PM game time. Lennie drove. Stanford played Oregon State and on standings it should not have been a close game, but it was. How close? This close.
That was the final score. OSU might have had one last shot but when they inbounded the ball, our point guard got a finger on the ball and tipped it away and time ran out.
Did the gym round. That brought me to 9am, when I called the dentist office. They asked me to text over a picture of the detached crown. Which I did. It’s may more than a crown; it was a rebuild of a root-canal job, with a “post” as they call it.
Called again half an hour later and the nurse said, ok, Dr. Thomas Kono can see you at 1pm. T. Kono, turns out, is the son of my previous regular dentist, Dr. Kono.
Spent half an hour with Dr. Margaret over various tech concerns of hers.
Spent the next two hours refreshing my hallway art gallery, replacing the pictures of food that had been up there for a month, with pictures of sculptures. Some I had printed previously, and I printed a couple new ones.
At 12:30 I walked over to the dentist office and gave them my shiny new IBM health plan card to process. Then met Dr. Kono The Younger, nice young dude. He gave a gloomy prognosis. Some of the old root-canaled stub has broken off in the crown and there isn’t a lot left in the jaw. Although what’s there is in one piece at least. We can cement the crown back on but very likely it will break off again.
I opted to be optimistic and had him put it back. He ground down the top so it doesn’t quite contact with the upper tooth in normal closed jaws. Only contact when there’s something there to chew.
If it comes off again, the options will be to either put a smooth cap on the stub, to keep material from getting caught in it, and go without that tooth. Or, to have the remaining stub extracted and a complete new tooth formed by an implant into the jaw. So that will be a decision down the line.
When I checked with the desk after the procedure they said the insurance checked out, they will submit a claim and let me know what the balance will come to. First real claim against the new policy.
At 2:30pm the Sock Hop committee met. Before it, I went to the auditorium and played the sound track through the system while singing along on a mic. Karaoke. That’s an important element of what they are planning and I could tell them that it works.
At 4pm was the annual Resident-Trustee meeting where they review in excruciating detail the budget for the next fiscal year. We are still losing money but with the end of the upgrade project last year, and an upswing in apartment sales since the pandemic eased, it looks like we might be profitable again in FY 25.
I was scheduled to lead a private tour at 11, and it’s laundry day, so I started the laundry at 7:30 and had it all put away by 10. So off to the Museum to guide 17 students from a Catholic university in Korea. They were cute but not very attentive. Possibly their English was not up to my speech level? Although I tried to slow down and simplify. Anyway a core about 6 stuck close and listened, the rest kind of wandered off. Which is fine.
Back in time to get lunch in the dining room. Idled away the afternoon. At supper time I made a sandwich for myself and when I took the first bite of it, a crown fell off. Actually more than a crown, it’s like most of a tooth with a spike at the bottom, so more like an implant. Anyway, I now am chewing only on the right, and tomorrow I have to try to get that fixed. Shit.
At 6:30 I went down to back up David M running an event. He was facing a new problem: it was an Auditorium plus Zoom event, but the first one where there was a music component, a number by a singer playing the piano. So how to make sure the music got out to the Zoom audience? Also, music over Zoom usually sounds bad. He had fought the same problem at his volunteer gig at the Congregational Church recently. Turns out, Zoom recently introduced some audio tweaks that you have to disable. He was able to find the right settings on our equipment. Then we had feedback, and it took a while to run that down. But we did, and then the event came off nicely.
Gloria Hom had assembled six other China-descended residents and they took turns talking about Chinese New Year memories from their childhood. It was pretty interesting.
Best laugh was when Gloria was trying to explain about the cycle of 12 animals, and the cycle of five elements, so your birth year gives you an animal and an element. She said her eldest daughter was a Fire-Horse, “which means, nobody is going to marry her.” Somebody in the audience immediately asks, who did she marry? Gloria, “Oh, I found her another fire horse, so that’s ok.”
First thing was to take the car to Toyota for service. I had booked it for 8am. Why did I do that? I could just as easioy have booked it for 9. So I ended up having to rush my morning routine. Whatever. To summarize, they found one of the tire pressure senders had failed, hence the persistent low-pressure warning light. This they charged $250 to fix, $125 for the part. Seems a bit steep. Let’s say they had to take the tire off the wheel to replace the sensor (which I believe is incorporated in the valve stem?). Also they had to sync the new sender with the computer. So that’s an hour of book time. But I bet the part could be found for less than $125. Yeah, I see them on Amazon as low as $15. Oh but here’s the real thing on Toyota’s website, $95.
Anyway, what was most shocking was the condition of the dealership. This is Magnussen Toyota of Palo Alto, a major dealership. The service department was busy, but the sales part was like a desert. There were no cars of any kind in the showroom. The big parking area around the front where cars for sale should be, was more than half empty asphalt. Very few new cars, about as many used. No sign of the 2023 Prius or any other current model. Is this dealership dying?
Back at the shop I took a tech call, trying to help Gigi who had been sent a video through ShareFile.com but when she downloaded it, it was 0 bytes. Obviously problem with at the sender end. When friend sent it again, it was again 0 bytes. My assumption is, friend is incompetent. Didn’t say that. Wasn’t able to help.
Writers meeting. I had nothing. Some interesting contributions from others.
Second tech call more successful. Connie had a problem with Dropbox and a problem printing. I was able to resolve both in short order. She claimed several other people had been unable to fix either. No comment. Anyway I’m a hero.
Did A/V managing, trying to schedule a meeting, and also loading scheduled events into the zoom room robots.
Codgerville 