Tuesday 01/24/2023

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.

Monday 01/23/2023

Went for a walk. Picked up a med.

Having some problem with my left foot, where the big toe has for years been turning inward, and finally is starting to irritate the second toe. So I put in a request for a podiatrist appointment at PAMF. Also scheduled a service appointment for the Prius, because it’s due and it looks like I’m keeping it.

Met Bert in the auditorium. He wanted to try some new mics. His barbershop group is performing here on Thursday and they want to use these cute little invisible mics that wrap around your ear and lie on your cheek. But when we plug one into one of the transmitters for our regular wireless lapel mics, they feed back. Funny thing is, they act like there is automatic gain control: if you talk into the mic, it sounds ok, but when you stop talking it its amplification comes way up and it feeds back. But there’s no AGC built in to the transmitter or the sound board, and the mic itself is just a wisp of wire. Odd.

Went down to FOPAL and processed a ton of books, took 2 and a half hours.

Came home, napped, forgot all about Rhonda’s open meeting at 4pm. Again. Even though I had made a specific note of it in my calendar.

Feeling very down on everything. I do not want to buy a new car. I do not want to travel! I don’t want to go into an airport, I don’t want to get on an airplane, I don’t give a flying fuck about any foreign scenery. I’ve seen mountains. I’ve seen Paris and London and Aukland and Sydney and Honolulu. People keep asking me where I’m going next. Probably to the bathroom, and later to bed. Fuck off.

I got hold of the draft events calendar for February (I’d had to miss the Event Coordinator’s meeting last Monday), and filled in my A/V events spreadsheet with scheduled events. One, there are 16 events in February that need some kind of A/V support. Yes, more than one every 2 days. Two, of those, 10, TEN, have never been booked the proper way, by the sponsor filing an Event Planning Form, which is what people are supposed to do if their event will need setup or support by facilities, housekeeping (e.g. chairs arranged, piano moved) — or A/V. We find out about them second hand. And I am not happy about that. Oh hey let’s just schedule a lecture for the auditorium and zoom, the A/V folks will show up, they always do.

Sunday 01/22/2023

After breakfast and watering the plants, I collected the pink slip for the car and my checkbook, stowed the Prius charging cable in its trunk, and went and had the car washed. So it was all pretty and ready to be traded in for a maximum amount. Then off to Boardwalk Chevrolet for an 11am meeting.

It turned out that “Jenny” with whom I had exchanged emails and texts, no longer worked there. But another nice young person, David, had taken up my interest. Yesterday he had texted the availability of the Bolt I was interested in, a red 2LT trim level with adaptive cruise and infotainment package. Today he showed me the red ones in stock. Unfortunately, that one had been sold around noon yesterday! There was another 2LT with the right options but it was boring silver colored.

So with a little regret, but actually some relief, I thanked him and left. He promised to contact me if or when another appropriate Bolt shows up. I felt relief because I am actually quite conflicted about whether to make this switch. The Prius is in such good shape, and with my driving habits gets such good mileage (since last fill-up: 175 miles at 75mpg), that it’s really hard to show where there is is $25K value (net cost after trade-in), for me, in a new car.

Anyway I was back to CH in time to pick up my basketball car-pool of 1, Martha. Lenny had opted for a concert today; Patty had ridden the CH bus to the ballet; and David G. rode his bike.

Stanford had no problem with Colorado today, taking a double-digit lead early and holding it all the way. The 49ers also had a win, but I didn’t watch. I sped through the recording in 5 minutes to see what happened is all.

Saturday 01/21/2023

First up was a quick meeting of the nom. com. at which we got an immediate refusal from our next candidate for VP. After she left, we agreed on the next three names to ask. Lois, the committee chair, will ask them. Starting with my across the hall neighbor Linda.

I went out on an errand run. Groceries, and CVS to try to get some prescriptions straightened out.

I took a tech squad call to a person with some problems with Mac Mail.

A few days ago I was reminiscing about two photo books that I supervised the making of, back in ’10 and ’11. These were made at Blurb.com, where they still reside (one and the other). They were rather nice if I do say so; I edited the books together using photos taken by other fans at Maples. I lost my only copies of them just after moving to Channing House (loaned them to someone who lost them).

So, checking on them and seeing they were still alive in cyber-land, I ordered a new copy of each. It didn’t occur to me that (duh!) Blurb would have my old 2340 Tasso address. It took a couple of weeks to print and ship the books then today I got an email saying, there’s a problem with your shipment. The tracking number, via UPS, revealed the problem. UPS had handed the package of to USPS for delivery, and my USPS mail forwarding had expired. So they “returned” it as of today. But returned it to whom? To UPS? Or to the sender? UPS was no help. The USPS station in Palo Alto is only open weekdays. But Blurb customer service actually responded! And I think it may get straightened out.

Next I noticed a text from Jenny, my contact at Boardwalk Chevrolet. “My” red Bolt is now in stock. So I am going to see her, and it, tomorrow morning at 11. I may actually have bought a new car by this time tomorrow.

The timing is a little awkward, since I must be back here by 1pm to drive another person to the SWBB game. But if I can nail down that red Bolt with all the luxe options, I don’t need to take delivery tomorrow. I just don’t want the one and only to be sold out from under me.

Friday 01/20/2023

Busy day today. First thing, 9am, met with Ian in the auditorium. He has an event at 11 and wants to plug a laptop in to the projector. Said it only worked with the stage HDMI jack. Showed him the jack on the AV desk worked fine at least with my Mac.

At 10 I was to see Marlys. She has a new iMac to replace one just like mine, a 2014 one. She was scared of transferring all her data, thought it was very complicated, Bert had told her to go to Apple, blah blah. I checked and showed her, she has a nice little external backup drive, and a current backup. We pulled that off the old iMac, stuck it on the new one. Booted up. It asks, what language shall I speak? What time zone are we in? What wifi should I connect to? And then, How do you want to transfer data, from a backup drive? Yes pleze. OK, would that be … this one? It shows the icon for the backup drive. Uh huh. OK, I’ll start transferring, and it does. It is that simple. Bert is a Windows guy and has no idea.

At that point we confirmed that her backup file is almost 1TB, and the new iMac has only 1TB storage. So she agreed she would pack up the new one, take it back, kiss the shoes of the Apple people, and pay for one with the 2TB storage option. But at least, after she does, she knows it will be really simple to initialize it.

Now it was time to change to my red docent shirt and go lead the noon tour at CHM. This turned out to be a bit of a fiasco. Attendance was light, and nobody wanted a tour, except one guy. A 20-something English bloke, over here on holiday but wanting to work in Silicon Valley. So I led a tour for one guy. We just walked around and chatted.

Back home, take off the red shirt, time for a meeting of the Nominating Committee. Our #2 choice for RA VP turned us down. So time to pick a #3. Inconclusive discussion, I guess we narrowed the list to two names.

Quick nap, then time to put on a Stanford sweatshirt and my red fedora and off to a SWBB game, against Utah. Expected the team to play well after the rather humiliating loss to USC. Utah is ranked #8 and played like it, very tough defense. Stanford started off slow, down 2-10 right away, then came back to hold a slim lead through most of the game and won by 10.

Thursday 01/19/2023

Tidied the apartment in anticipation of Wanda cleaning it in the afternoon. At 9am went to the CH Salon on the 2nd floor to get my hair cut by Leah. Then off to the Shustek center in Milpitas for a day cataloging along with Steve Madsen.

We cataloged all the various pieces of a single donation from one of the founders of Foveon. Foveon started out making high-end high resolution digital cameras for professional use in 1999, when digital photography was a new thing. What we worked on today was the first Foveon camera sold, which the donor had retrieved from the original buyer after 20 years. I didn’t take any pictures, it wasn’t that interesting visually.

Wednesday 01/18/2023

Went for the standard walk. Stopped on the way back to pick up prescriptions at CVS. Somehow in the changeover of insurance they have revived an old prescription for Metoprolol. I now have 4 full bottles of this med. I went online and I hope shut that prescription down.

My main job today was to assemble the video for Stew’s Sock Hop. Stew in planning this for 2/17, and planning has been going on among about 8 people for weeks. They finally settled on a final-final list of 50s tunes, and which were to have sing-along lyrics. Jerry did a great job of finding all the required videos and getting them all formatted to the same size and quality.

Today I put them all together into a 1-hour video, adding lyrics where required. Took about three hours of work.

There was supposed to be a FOPAL monthly zoom conference at 1pm. I forgot about it and napped right through. Later I found that they had zoom problems and canceled. So I didn’t miss anything.

I also forgot I had promised to set up a microphone for announcements at the bi-monthly birthday dinner. Barbara called me at 4:45 to remind me, bless her. So I went and did that.

Tuesday 01/17/2023

Did the gym round at 8. Then, this was an open day except for the writers meeting. So I made a hasty list of all the things I’d been putting off, and started doing them.

First up was to straighten out access to my IBM medicare advantage account. The problem was that up until 12/31/22 I had had an AARP medicare part B plan which was managed by United HealthCare (UHC). Starting 1/1/23 I have an IBM medicare advantage plan managed by — UHC. Every time I tried to sign in to the new account, following the instructions in the “get started” pamphlet, I would get derailed into the old account, where it would helpfully inform me that my coverage had ended.

It took just under 40 minutes on the phone with the support people to finally get this straightened out. The first suggestion was that I register as a new account. Unfortunately that was rejected because my email was already in the system, tied to the old account. The nice lady seriously suggested that I get another email account with Yahoo or someplace. I politely but firmly rejected that solution. Eventually she was able to push me up two support tiers to a lady who actually knew something about the “HealthSafe ID” system that UHC uses, and she got the job done. I was able to sign in to UHC, and it said, “Oh it looks as if you have two policies, which would you like to see?” and listed both. Yay! Solution!

Once in, my next job (#2) was to get UHC to use electronic funds transfer to charge my monthly fee — which they had already been doing for the AARP account. I expected an issue with this and possibly more phone calls, but by golly, they were already doing it, had already done a successful EFT for my January premium. All good, no effort.

(#3) was to email Katy The Tax. The tax accountant is changing their system of electronic filing to use Citrix FileShare. They’d sent an email introducing this and promising to send an “invitation email” I would use to connect, but it hadn’t come. Sent that.

Here I attended the writers meeting. I hadn’t written anything, so just listened.

The Financial Advisers had coincidentally(?) and simultaneously started using FileShare, and their invite had come and I used it a couple days ago. It’s time for my annual financial review with them. This always involves filling out a complicated questionnaire. This year the form was a fillable PDF in the FileShare system. So (#4) I downloaded it and filled it and uploaded it.

Then I ordered some more low-carb shakes for my breakfast (#5). Then (#6) went to the CHM volunteer site and signed up for Thursday at Shustek and a docent tour on Friday. (My Saturday is open if anyone wants to propose an exciting outing.) Then I walked up to the dry cleaners on Emerson and picked up my sweater (#7).

On return I bumped into Lois and Sherry, 2/5ths of the nominating committee, in the lobby, where they were waiting to waylay Ian, the guy we want to nominate for the RA VP job. So I joined them. Ian is a good person to know, but he immediately and definitely refused to be nominated. As a retired academic (physics prof at Cambridge) he says (in his lovely british accent) he sat on entirely too many committees and won’t do more.

Finally I took the video recording of Jim Eaton’s talk from Sunday into iMovie and edited it, and sent a link to it to Stew and Jim.

Monday 01/16/2023

The big event today was that this was the first day of the big conversion of all Comcast boxes in the building to new X1 DVR boxes. There’s a long back-story here. In short, the contract between CH and Comcast, which covered very basic TV service for all units, expired in September. CH now has negotiated a new contract, under which all units will get a good selection of HD channels, and a new DVR box and new remote in every unit. Realizing this was going to be difficult, the first group of people to be converted were volunteers including the Tech Squad members and a few other adventurous types. Today was the day.

Like several others, I already had an X1 DVR, the old style X1 box and remote. On the schedule I was supposed to be serviced before noon, but of course things didn’t go like that. As of 10:30, Craig encountered the two installer guys in the lobby, waiting for their supervisor. They had problems with the first couple of installation. So I spent the morning waiting around for a cable installer.

At 2pm I had to go to a meeting of the Nominating committee, who are supposed to pick the people to fill three spots on the Resident Association executive committee, two members at large and a vice-president. The at-large job is super easy, just attend a meeting every month for two years. And, greatly simplifying the committee’s work, it turned out two people had already volunteered to be nominated for those spots.

The VP job is a little more of a commitment, since the VP is pretty much expected, after two years, to become the President for another two. Not required, but. Anyway, we agreed on our first and second choices for VP and will approach that person next week.

Back at my room at 2:20 and the Comcast guy showed up at 2:30. And was done and out by 2:50. Mine was a super easy install, since I had cleaned up all the wiring behind the media cabinet while installing the new TV. All he had to do was swap one black box for another, boot it up, and sync the new remote with the box and my new TV.

As soon as he was gone, I could finally head out to FOPAL to clean up my section after the weekend sale. I looked at every book and sent three boxes of books that had sat through four sales, to the bargain room. To my pleased surprise, there were only like ten books waiting to be priced. So I was back home again by 5.

During the day a facilities guy came by to collect the packing material from the new TV. He wouldn’t take the old TV, though. They don’t dispose of electronics, and he couldn’t accept a working device anyway. Give it to the gift shop was his advice, so I contacted Mary Beth who runs the gift shop. She said to put the TV in her 3rd-floor furniture showroom and send her a picture so she could advertise it.

Which I did about 7pm, getting a cart from the lobby, transporting the TV, and putting the cart back. Now I need to send her the picture.

Sunday 01/15/2023

Usual Sunday morning. Later in the day I found two good things about the new TV.

First, I had been disappointed that my MacBook doesn’t like to connect to it using an HDMI cable. This is a problem that computer has had with every HDMI I’ve tried it with, but I hoped it would be better with the new TV. Not so. Then I realized, duh! the new TV supports Apple Airplay. In about 30 seconds I had the Macbook mirrored on the TV screen, over the wi-fi. No cable needed, and no issues with picture or sound.

Second I found a different picture setting. The image had been very clear but just a touch too bright, some highlights burned a little. “Expert – Dark Room” setting corrects that. Rich colors, and that bit of glare has disappeared.

At 3 I went down to set up for an event. Jim Eaton talking about the early years at HP. He worked in the HP Labs in the 70s and 80s, saw the beginning of the HP calculators and other integrated circuit revolutions.

This was a live+zoom presentation. I used the three-page checklist I had created a while back. Everything set up fine and the event went off without a hitch. Jim’s talk was interesting. I had dinner with Stew and Kathy and Jim after.

Then up to watch the recording of SWBB at USC. They started horribly slow, scored only 4 points in the first quarter. Their defense was good; USC only scored 11, which would be a good defensive result if you had any offense to go with it. Stanford trailed by 3-7 points all the way and finally lost by 10. The first time USC had beaten Stanford since 2014.