Saturday 10/05/2022

First thing to do in the morning was to take a tech squad call to Jerry (a woman) whose iMac, iPhone, and iPad were all supposedly unusable for different reasons. On the iMac, she “can’t read her email.” She gets email via the web from AOL. Firefox is hung up on some kind of AOL error message that can’t be dismissed. I force-quit Firefox and restart it, and all is well. We talk about some issues managing bookmarks etc.

Then to the iPhone. Well darn, now it is working fine. As is the iPad. My intense tech presence has fixed everything.

At 11 I go to the museum to lead my 2nd docent tour of the week. About 15 people, nicely appreciative.

At 4pm I meet with Lennie in the auditorium and she gets fully trained in proving simple microphone support for an event.

I have supper with Patty, Edie and Eva.

Friday 10/04/2022

First day in a long time with no commitments on my Google Calendar. I spent most of it in a blissful haze doing programming on my app. Yeah I know, it’s all wasted effort, but I got a lot done.

I was to meet with Lennie to train her in Microphones 101, so she could do an event on Monday. However when we got in the auditorium we found John and Francis hard at work rehearsing an event they are running, and having some technical issues. I had nothing to contribute to that. So Lennie and I had a verbal training session and will meet again tomorrow, I think.

At 3 I decided I didn’t want a nap after all, and drove down to FOPAL where I found 5 boxes of books to cull and price. Glad I went because if I had waited to my normal Monday visit there would have been a real mountain.

Thursday 11/03/2022

Did the round of strength machines in the gym in the morning. Tidied the apartment anticipating that Wanda would be cleaning it this afternoon. Put on my red docent shirt and at 11, brought the car around to the front, to pick up Dr. Margaret, who wanted to come along to the museum to hear my docent talk.

Led a group of about 16 people including neighbor Margaret on the tour. Got quite a nice hand at the end. Then the two of us had a late lunch at Cucina Venti, across the street. Very pleasant lunch and talk.

Did nothing much else the rest of the day.

Wednesday 11/02/2022

Went for a walk, the first in several days. Did my laundry.

At 2pm I went down to the auditorium and made sure I was ready to record video of the Appreciation Fund Kickoff. This was an elaborately planned event. This picture doesn’t do it justice.

The tables were decorated with fake bills and coins. There was plenty of wine and some really nice snacks from the kitchen (deviled eggs, cheese-stuffed little peppers, shown). There was a sing-along to familiar songs with new lyrics extolling the labors of the staff. Lots of labor and skill went into making it a fun event.

Afterward I had less than an hour until it was time to put on my red Stanford sweatshirt and my red fedora hat and head off to the first game of the SWBB season. I rode with Patty and Martha in Patty’s car. Every year Vanguard U. a small Christian school in Costa Mesa, comes to us for an exhibition game. Offers themselves as sacrificial lambs more like. The final score was 100-20. All 15 on the Stanford roster played, and 14 of them scored.

Tuesday 11/01/2022

Gym. Then did some desk work, bills, etc. At 10, sat down and dashed off 200 words for the writers group, which started at 10:45.

At lunch I was buttonholed by Florrie who wanted help with an iPad and iPhone. I really don’t want it to be thought that anybody can get a personal consult without going through the tech squad. But Florrie is nice and I gave in. We worked on how to get photos out of texts and into albums, and how to get Netflix on the iPad and such.

At 4:30 I started cleaning up for the evening event, a reception at Stanford for Buck Cardinal contributors to meet Tara Vanderveer. Polished my shoes for the first time in, oh, about a year? Put on slacks and a turtleneck and my sports jacket, also for the first time in, oh, three years? Drove over to Maples to see a practice, and then walked across to the Arillaga center for the reception. Decent snacks and drinks. Tara entertaining as always.

Monday 10/31/2022

First order of business was an 8am video appointment with my doctor. Background: for a long time I’ve had a benign cyst on my kidney. Following the various CTs and ultrasounds I’ve had for other reasons, the radiologist’s report always mentioned it and its diameter in centimeters. Back around the end of 2020 it was up to 15cm in diameter, over 6 inches, and I started noticing its effect, mainly in my appetite, and I had it drained (day 2.238, 8/28/21).

I’ve been noticing similar effects lately so I had requested an appointment. The earliest office appointment was in December but I could get a video one today. Julia and I talked about the cyst and my symptoms, and she ordered an ultrasound. After that I will probably go and talk to the urologist I saw before. It turns out there is a laparoscopic procedure to reduce such cysts. I hadn’t known that; I thought the only surgical option was to open the abdomen, which is more of an operation than I want to get into.

Anyway my appointment for that ultrasound is the 10th. And the instructions are, one hour before I have to drink 24oz of liquid and if possible not pee until after the exam. Oooookay then.

At 9:30 I met with Ian in the auditorium to go over something about projecting a Blu-Ray movie that he hadn’t known. Between that and the doctor I completely forgot to go for the usual walk.

I went down to FOPAL and processed three boxes of book — computer book donations are rather light this month so far — and did some sorting too by way of penance for not walking.

Sunday 10/30/2022

After watering the plants and doing the puzzle… actually not doing the puzzle, it was extremely tricky and I had to look at the solution to finish it … it was nine-ish. I had received a Tech Squad dispatch in the night. Carol with a printer jam. I like Carol a lot and knew she was the type to be up early on a Sunday, so I called her and she said, come on up. She had an old-ish HP laserjet with a broken paper tray (“but it works”) however she regards it with suspicion because “It was Ray’s printer” (her late husband). Anyway, she claimed it had started printing multiple pages from what should have been a one-page file. So not knowing how to cancel a job, she turned power off, and then it had a piece of paper jammed in it.

I pulled the paper out, and — only because I’d checked a youtube video before calling her — I knew to pull out the toner cartridge and check for more jams. There weren’t. Then we tested it and it was fine, actually it prints really fast and cleanly. I pointed to a button on top with a red X in a circle and I hypothesized that was the cancel button, so we printed a two-page file and hit the red X and sure enough, it canceled the second page.

My guess would be that the unexpected multiple pages were because she had accidentally printed the wrong file, or had accidentally set the print dialog to multiple copies. Anyway, problem solved.

At 10 I went to the Auditorium to join Bert as he was setting up for the big Appreciation Fund kick-off party coming Wednesday. (There is No Tipping at Channing House, but each year the residents (not the staff) run an Appreciation Fund drive, encouraging contributions from everyone to a Fund which is then disbursed to staff members at Christmas. Recommended donation, well, however much you feel you want to tip on one day, times 365.) Anyway, we worked through a couple of problems he was having projecting slides and a video.

He had a video of a dance group doing a very clever and amusing routine to “Stayin’ Alive” (here it is) except, the YT version has several inexplicable freeze-frame gaps in it. So I took it from him on a USB stick, and fired up iMovie and edited out the gaps and gave it back to him later.

At 2pm I met with David G. He had gotten a lesson from Gerald on Friday and thought he knew how to schedule meetings in the zoom room. Well, we tried several times and it didn’t work. But that killed an hour.

I’ve written about the miraculous Topaz AI for photos (3.278) so I downloaded the trial copy of Topaz AI for videos and tried it on the dance video. However it didn’t make any detectable difference that I could see.

Saturday 10/29/2022

The thing today was a day trip with Jean and Patty (Dennis had to drop out) to the DiRosa Art Center in Napa. Patty and I drove down to MV and picked up Jean, and then off by 237 and 680 to Napa, about a 2-hour drive.

This art center was created by Mr. DiRosa, who was a writer who got tired of the city life in SF, and moved to the quiet hills of Napa, where in the 1960s he had a successful grape growing operation. Not a winery, he just grew grapes and sold them to other wineries. Then he inherited some money. He also developed an interest in art, particularly the work of various California artists who centered around the art school at UC Davis (who knew that a campus known for agriculture was also a hotbed of art?) With his money he started collecting, and eventually built two gallery buildings as well as filling a 30-acre field with outdoor sculpture. The art he focused on is called generically, “California Funk”. It’s full of jokes and outrageous combinations of images. I took a few pictures, see below.

After having walked the place for an hour we went for lunch. Following the suggestion of one of the museum people we went into downtown Napa to a Greek place, the Small World Cafe, and had lamb gyros. Downtown Napa was full of parents and kids in costumes, apparently they had just had a Halloween parade.

And so drove back, about 200 miles round trip for the day.

Friday 10/28/2022

I started out for my walk this morning but felt very low. A severe case of the fuckitalls. I’ve been feeling this for a while. I cut my walk short and just hung out in the room.

Today was the CH flu clinic day. I got my flu jab at lunchtime.

In the afternoon I spent a while trying to work out a way to handle access to the three zoom rooms that staff have set up. Theoretically you can send an email to one of them with a standard Zoom invitation. The zoom room pc will theoretically note that and reserve itself for that meeting.

This works fine for Gerald, the IT staff guy. It doesn’t work for me or the other guy who’s tried it. Gerald suggested we install the Zoom add-on to Gmail, but that requires binding one person’s Google ID or Gmail address to that particular zoom account.

It occurred to me that when I set up the house zoom account I had to supply an email, and rather than permanently linking it to my personal email, I got a free email from Outlook.com. So I should be able (per the zoom documentation) to attach the Zoom Outlook Add-in to that email account. Then we could log in to Outlook and send invitations the same way Gerald does. But two hours of fiddling couldn’t get it to work. I suspect it is because the email account is a free one, not one linked to a subscription to Microsoft Office. But the damned software doesn’t tell you that; it just says “Installation failed” but not why.

Thursday 10/27/2022

Did the gym round in the AM. Went out to Safeway for a few items. At 11 it was time to go up to the 11th floor to meet IT staffer Gerald and Bert to talk about doing Zoom Room on the 11th floor. Unfortunately the big roll-around TV has been damaged. This is a large (75-inch?) screen on a rolling stand, to which the IT staff have added the “zoom room” equipment including mics, camera, and a PC. Alas someone recently rolled the upper corner of the TV into something solid, damaging the screen. It was kind of working, with a big black spot in the upper left corner and pretty colored lines going down from it, until I walked up and touched the black spot area. Then the whole screen went black. Ooops. They have ordered a new screen which is supposed to be here Monday.

Next I spent some time going over the info book on the new IBM health plan. It seems a pretty decent plan. However I have not yet received the promised ID card that I need to log on to their system, and to give to providers.

With Wanda coming to clean at 2, I headed out down to FOPAL and put in a couple of hours sorting.

In the evening was a presentation on Diego Rivera by neighbor Harry. David M. was doing the AV for quite a complex presentation, not only slides but videos. And although he protested that he had run the videos “a hundred times”, when it came time to show them, they first didn’t have sound, then too much sound, and generally the presentation was hashed pretty badly by my best AV guy. I felt awful for him. But I don’t have any suggestions, I don’t know what he was doing wrong.