Saturday 01/14/2023

Today I led a tour at the Museum. About 25 people, who seemed interested. One young woman went out of her way to tell me she really enjoyed it. Nice.

From there I went to Best Buy and spent a bit of money buying a new, 55-inch, LG OLED TV. The clerk was worried it wouldn’t fit in the Prius. Ha Ha, I said. It fit with a foot to spare. Brought it home, used a grocery cart to wheel it up to my room, and spent from 3 to 5pm installing it.

It works pretty good. It is “smart” in that it has a built-in OS with all the functionality of a Roku, i.e. I can stream from our interrnet on any streaming source I have a subscription for, which is currently, only Amazon Prime. Lots of people around here do Netflix and Disney and Hulu. I can have 3 months of Apple+ for free with the new TV and I might activate that just to see.

Anyway I was pleased that the installation, including attaching the base, connecting all the cables, getting it on the house wi-fi, and so on, all went quite smoothly. I approve of the user interface that LG provides, it is far far simpler and more intuitive than the current Samsung TVs.

Had dinner with Patty Connie and Marianne. Nice.

Friday 01/13/2023

Heavy rain in the morning so no walk. At 10am I met with Stew and Jim to rehearse for Jim’s Sunday @ Home presentation this Sunday. He’s a bit nervous about it. But everything appears to work. We agreed to meet at 3pm Sunday to be sure to have plenty of time to get ready for the 4:30pm talk.

Jim will talk about his years in the 60s and 70s at the HP labs, in the dawn of the IC industry. He mentioned in passing to me that he thinks his personal collection is the largest collection of HP memorabilia, since the HP official archives were lost in a fire. So I mentioned CHM, and later emailed Dag, the curator about him.

At 3pm I was slated to meet Reni, the currently only actual fitness person on staff, in the gym, to address some complaints I had about the new machines. So feeling the lack of exercise, at 2pm I went down and spent most of the hour on the cyber cycle and the treadmill.

Reni is of south asian extraction, about 4 foot five and bouncy. She showed me a number of features of the new machines that I had not been aware of.

Dinner with Dr. Margaret, Sandy, Joanne T, and Gwen. Very pleasant.

8pm up to 11 to run the SWBB game vs. UCLA on the big TV. Six people showed up. The Cardinal started slow. The game was tied at the half, and still very close after three quarters. Then in the fourth, Stanford just stifled UCLA, who didn’t score for 8 minutes while Stanford took a 15-point lead to win.

Thursday 01/12/2023

Went down to the gym and the stupid aduction machine overstretched by hips, so it was sore walking later, and the other machine wouldn’t recognize my ID card. Grump. Tried to take a walk after but cut it short for hip discomfort.

Spent a couple of hours deleting LastPass and installing DashLane into all my browsers. It seems to work well. All the passwords transferred over fine. It turned the LastPass credit card records into “secure notes” instead of recognizing them as credit cards, but that was easy to fix manually. So generally that conversion went smoothly.

At 2:30 there was the major Zoom meeting, led by Gerald of IT, to introduce the new TV remote and talk about the schedule for converting every apartment to a new Comcast box and remote. The crowd was a bit cranky (change is never popular) but Gerald dealt with us with great patience.

Right in the middle of the meeting I had a call from “unknown caller” so I didn’t take it, but later looked at the voice mail. It was from Road Scholar, telling me that my planned Spanish Art tour in mid-April — the one that I had put a deposit on — the one that just sent me an email reminding me it would soon be time to pay the full balance on — that trip? Was canceled “due to lower enrollment”. They “hoped” to get me re-booked on a later one, call them back. I did but got a recording saying their small dedicated team of re-booking specialists — they apparently have a whole department for this — was busy, leave a message, they’d call me back.

I spent a few minutes wondering if I wanted to go back to planning my own trip, like I had started to do. No, not really. It was turning into a bunch of work. I’ll just ride with it and see what Road Scholar comes up with.

I spent time shopping for TVs. My TV is fairly old. How old is it, Johnny? Well I happen to still have the old Home Inventory that Marian created back when, showing all the possessions and their original purchase date and price. And, oh my goodness, the TV dates to 2011. I’m surprised it’s even in color, at that age. Anyway, it has started to have these little spells when the image flickers rapidly. So I have selected my next TV and I may just go buy it tomorrow or Saturday. It’s a 55″ LG with an OLED display. So about 10% bigger, more pixels, etc.

Not a Samsung! The current one is a Samsung, and it did well for us. However lately I have helped a couple of other people with their new Samsung TVs and My God is the Samsung user interface bad. Awful, just awful. So overcomplicated and unintuitive.

Took myself out to supper at Mike’s in Midtown.

Wednesday 01/11/2023

Major event today was to participate in a marketing meeting, held to let interested people know about CH. This zoom session was promoted in the print brochure that was mailed locally a couple of weeks ago. (I linked to this brochure on day 4.027.)

There were four of us “typical residents” in the conference room, made into a panel of talking heads by the Zoom Room software. Me, Carol, and Sue and Kieth. There were a total of 42 attendees at the peak, so at least 35 outsiders. It went nicely.

We were to be there at 10:45 sharp so I had to start my laundry early and barely got it all done by 10:30.

In the afternoon I spent another 90 minutes going through the many entries in the exported LastPass vault, all of the sites I’ve registered a password at over the last decade, and deleted about half. Probably 20 that I use regularly, and another 75 or so where I said, ohhhh… maybe… someday I might want to go back there, and left them in. Next job is to install a new password manager.

At 4:45 it was time for the monthly 6th floor meeting, which is always fun to see all my floor neighbors. Then we went down to dinner. Socializing. It’s good for me.

Tuesday 01/10/2023

Did the gym machine round. Then sat around waiting for the writers meeting to start at 10:45 and wishing I had written something, because I didn’t on the two prior weeks. The cue was “opportunity”. Well I decided to write about a very current opportunity, and put together something in the 20 minutes before the meeting. I’ll append it below. What I did in the afternoon was to follow through with that activity, looking at the first 120 or so entries in the exported list and marking about half for deletion. Aside from feeding hummingbirds, that was about it for the day.

Oh! Almost forgot. In the daily covid email from staff? We have no, zero cases active, among either residents or staff. Yay us!

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Change as opportunity

For a decade I have used the LastPass password manager to, um, manage my passwords. It sits inside my various web browsers and whenever it sees a user name or password field, it happily fills in the correct items so I don’t have to. The only password I have to remember is the master password to my my LastPass “vault”. It has been very convenient, and, I thought, safe.

I adopted LastPass at the recommendation of Steve Gibson. Gibson is a widely-known expert in the field of computer security, and I’ve been listening to his podcast, Security Now, for more than a decade. He was an early adopter of LastPass. Joe Siegrest, the founder and original programmer of the LastPass app, was a guest on his podcast in 2010. He had allowed Steve to review the code of the app. Gibson praised the security and privacy built into its design, and recommended it. So I started using it.

As so often happens in the world of software, the original founder sold the product to a corporation and moved on, presumably a wealthier man. LastPass the product is now under its second corporate owner, one that, it seems, pays somewhat less attention to good security practices. Over the past year LastPass has suffered two serious security breaches in which unknown intruders exfiltrated significant amounts of user data. Encrypted data, but still. As a result, in a recent podcast, Steve Gibson said he no longer recommends LastPass, and described in detail the process of how to transition to a different password manager.

So I must, reluctantly, do that. (Here, picture the angel with the flaming sword sending Adam and Eve out of Eden into the wilderness.) But every change is an opportunity! If only an opportunity to learn how you might have done a better job earlier. The first step in changing password managers is to export your current “vault”. LastPass makes that easy; and in about 30 seconds I was looking at a spreadsheet listing all my saved passwords, row after row of URL, user-id, password; URL, user-id, password…

This presents two opportunities. First, the opportunity to review one’s on-line history. There are over 400 rows in the exported vault! Among them are many, many URLs that I haven’t visited in years. LinkedIn, for example; I killed that membership in 2016. So I get to relive my enthusiasms of the past. And then the opportunity to tidy up and delete the deadwood.

No doubt on a chilly night in the wilderness, Adam and Eve cheered themselves with thoughts of the new opportunities they faced outside of Eden.

Monday 01/09/2023

First thing was the resident association meeting. This takes 90 minutes or so. David G. always runs it. We go through a long agenda of assorted activity reports. Treasurer (I gave that report for 2 years, now it’s Joanne), dining services committee, gift shop results, introducing new residents, etc. All the AV stuff came off correctly, kudos to David G.

A funny thing happened during the meeting. A couple of days ago, Susan H had put a message on CHBB asking, please keep an eye out for the mate to this earring, I lost it somewhere. Today, during the meeting, somebody noticed an earring under a chair toward the back where I was sitting. The lady sitting near me picked it up and put it on the chair next to me. I picked it up and remembered the picture from Susan’s email. Where was she? Oh, right over there. I leaned over her and said, was it you looking for this? She was delighted. It kind of broke the meeting up when she yelled “MY EARRING” right in the middle, but everyone was pleased for her.

Anyway, that over, I went down to FOPAL and found six boxes of computer books, which I processed, and then tidied up the shelves all nice for the upcoming sale weekend. In going through donated books and pricing them, the rule is if they are on Amazon at over $20, they are set aside for the “high value” group of volunteers. Usually I find 2 or 3. Today there were seven, including one on Amazon at $44 and one at $73. That’s always fun.

That was about it for the day. It was a dry, cloudy day but the forecast is for rain tonight and thunderstorms tomorrow morning. So we are back on emergency alert, because of possible power outages.

Sunday 01/08/2022

Did my usual Sunday morning stuff, watering the plants, doing the big NYT puzzle. Then the trackpad on the desktop machine said its batteries were low, and I discovered I was out of AA batteries. Why didn’t I find that out yesterday, when I walked to Ace Hardware?

No matter. I decided to walk to Midtown, buy batteries, have a coffee. Which I did, and walked back as well. 3.3 miles for the day. That’s good because there is a resident association meeting tomorrow at 9, so no Monday walk.

While walking I worked out something I think I want to say during the marketing presentation coming up on the 11th. I’ll be part of a panel of residents supposed to tell about our lives at CH, for the benefit of an audience of people interested, or at least curious, about moving to CH.

Puttered around until 4, when I went up to the 11th floor to watch the Stanford women play at Cal. Years past, we would have attended that game in person. This year it didn’t even occur to me until yesterday. Anyway, the Cal women had figured out a good defense and held Stanford to their lowest score of the year so far, 60. But they still managed to win, 60-56.

Dinner with Jerry and Betty and Patty.

Saturday 01/07/2023

Yesterday, I forgot to note, I ran the numbers for the year in finance. That is, I filled in the December column on the spreadsheet where I keep track of The Nest Egg, and started the sheet for 2023. Looking back — a long way back! — I created this spreadsheet on Day 31, New Year’s Day 2019, to continue one that Marian first created in 1997. I noted then that the Nest Egg was down about 7% on that year (2018). Well this year it is down just over 8% over 2022. In between it has been up a couple times. So it is still about where it was then. In any case the bottom line is enough money to keep me in crack and hookers for a very long time, especially since I actually consume zero of those.

Alright, that was in poor taste. Whose blog is this, again?

I follow several YouTube channels. Mostly “makers”, people who create stuff. One of the best is Sampson Boat Company, about Leo who is reconstructing a 100-year-old sailing yacht. Leo does the work at a boat yard in Port Townsend WA, and in the latest episode he films a Christmas day trip from Port Townsend to Bellingham to pick up some newly-made diesel tanks.

I was completely blind-sided by the emotional impact of this episode. After some discussion of how the tanks were made, Leo shows the ferry ride across the sound and later, driving across the Deception Pass bridge. As soon as I started watching that ferry-boarding footage I teared up big-time. From 2000 through 2016, Marian and I went up to San Juan Island every summer. Paul and Katie’s farm was an integral part of our lives. The Washington State ferries were part of that; you were checking the ferry schedule all the time, and rode them anytime you had to get off or on the island.

And that’s all gone now. Paul died of brain cancer in 2017. Katie suffers from early-onset alzheimer’s and lives in a care facility. And of course Marian’s gone. Somehow that ferry-riding video just brought all that back in a rush.

I took a short walk up to Ace Hardware. Then at 1pm I headed out to lead a tour at CHM. I’ve been thinking of a couple of tweaks to my talk, but one of them requires there to be at least a few older people in the group. Today it was about 30 people who looked like they ranged from 20 to 35 years. Anyway, they mostly stuck with me and seemed to enjoy themselves.

Friday 01/06/2023

Took a standard walk. Felt fine. Entered the final numbers in the master spreadsheet. The Nest Egg ended the year about 8.5% down on the prior year. Which is a bit better than the financial markets as a whole, so let’s hear it for the Value Investing brokers.

Opted to kill part of the afternoon working at FOPAL. Back home, read and listened to a jazz concert.

Thursday 01/05/2023

The big storm was pretty much a nothing-burger as far as drama goes. Periods of moderately heavy rain, but no thunder, no floods, no local power outages.

At 9 I headed out through light rain to the Yosemite warehouse in Milpitas. I spent the day working with Toni building a custom box for an awkward-shaped artifact, a huge complicated circuit board. We also helped locate some objects and doing research to fix up the computer records of some items that had been returned from a loan to Stanford.

Bought gas on the way home. First fill-up in a couple months.