Monday 02/06/2023

Not much today. I went for the standard walk in the morning, which was fine. Then I went down to FOPAL and prepared by section for the upcoming sale weekend. Sat around the rest of the afternoon. Went to dinner at 5 for the monthly “mixer” where you are assigned to a random table when entering the dining room. Sat with a couple of people I’ve not shared a meal with before, Carol and Erica.

Sunday 02/05/2023

What a slug I am. I only left my room once today, to eat lunch.

In the morning I remembered that when I was talking to the financial guys, Bob, who is semi-retired but was our main advisor since we started with them a couple decades ago, was reminiscing about the travel blogs that Marian and I did, and Patrick, the younger dude, asked, purely out of politeness I suppose, to see some of them. Well I hadn’t looked at our blogs of New Zealand, Germany, France, and Scandinavia in some time. Did they even still exist? Turns out they do, and I found those four and sent the links to Bob to share as he wishes.

But that led to looking at the blogs, and then starting to read them… end result, I spent at least 4 hours today reading those old travelogues, from 2005, 2009, 2012 and 2014. Three of them. I got sick of it before I could read the fourth.

The other thing was to watch SWBB as the Cardinal took on the Huskies in Seattle and — got beat. It was close, the game was tied with 2 minutes to go; but they couldn’t close the deal and lost by 5. My personal opinion on this team is, despite them having a few superb talents, they aren’t the complete machine they need to be and should be by this point in the season. They are definitely over-rated at #2 nationally, and I predict they won’t make it past the Elite Eight in the post-season. And it is not a sure bet they can win the PAC12 tournament.

That’s it. Sitting around like a slug, reading my own writing.

(Oh, why “soggy”? It was raining this morning, but that isn’t it. Somehow Marian and I used “sog” as a verb for just unstructured and undisciplined time. “We just sogged around all afternoon.”)

Saturday 02/04/2023

At noon I led a tour at the museum. Odd one. I started with a few people, but picked up people as I went along until I had over 20, then they mostly fell away and I ended with five. Well, that’s five that were really interested.

Had supper with Patty and Sue and Edie. Then at 7:15, off to a play at the Bus Barn. This was Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a surreal comedy by Steve Martin. It’s an impressionistic, eclectic, fantasy about what might go on if Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso happened into the same café in Paris one night in 1904, when both were about age 26 and just coming into their best years. It had some jokes, there were some people in the rows behind me who laughed a lot although I didn’t. The actors worked hard but there was some mis-casting, Picasso especially didn’t have the strength of personality needed for his lines.

Friday 02/03/2023

It was raining so I didn’t want to go for a walk outside, so I went down to the gym and walked 2 miles on the treadmill (at 3mph, 40 minutes).

At 11 I had scheduled three of my AV team to meet me in the Training Room to practice sharing a screen with the Zoom Room. I had worked this out on prior days, but three other people managed to find glitches in the process, of course. One surprise was, that Peter particularly wanted to show a Netflix video to a group in the Conference room. But it turns out, the Netflix app on a Mac, knows when you are sharing its window with Zoom, and shows only a black screen.

At 12 I went to set up for the 1pm rehearsal of the Sock Hop. This went very well, I had my MacBook putting sound out to the room, and simultaneously video to a big TV 30 feet away (using the magic of Zoom Room again). The music comprises 23 songs, some with video, some with just lyrics on a black screen. Because I had set “chapter” markers at each song, I could use the keyboard to jump ahead to the next song, or back to repeat a number. All the singers sang. The organizers thought the whole thing ran too long, and may cut a couple of songs. But generally it all went well. Which was a big relief.

Thursday 02/02/2023

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.

Wednesday 02/01/2023

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.

Tuesday 01/31/2023

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.

Monday 01/30/2023

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.

01/28/2023

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.