About 10am I decided to go walk the California ave. market. Cal. ave. has opted to keep their on-street restaurant seating from Covid times; then the large and popular Sunday farmers market folds itself between and around these, so there is a really intense four-block scene. It was just fun walking along in it. I treated myself to a packet of medjool dates, which I hadn’t indulged in for quite a while.
Well, maybe not everybody likes it…
Nobody wearing a mask any more of course.
Back at CH, at 4:30 we were to have a Sunday at Home talk with me on AV. This is a monthly series of talks by residents on their own knowledge or specialty. Today it was Ian, our retired nuclear physicist, who had put together a talk on how plants like sunflowers form spirals based on the Fibonacci series and the golden mean. This meant lots of slides which he wanted to manage from his own laptop.
So we did the simplest thing, I set up as zoom host, and he joined from his laptop and shared his screen. This worked fine. I managed to get all the things right: voices in the auditorium mics were heard by zoom attendees; zoom attendees when un-muted, could be heard in the auditorium, there was no feedback, everybody could see and hear. Oh, and I remembered to start the zoom recording at the beginning of the presentation. It was the FIRST TIME that I managed a hybrid auditorium/zoom event with no glitches!
I was scheduled for dinner with Suzanne and Jim (I also had dinner with them on 3.245), and had promised to bring dessert, so at 10 I headed out on foot to walk to Town and Country to buy something at Douce France, a pastry shop. I did that, buying three cute little fruit tarts. Had coffee at Peet’s, and walked back.
I fixed another problem in my software hobby and then it was time to go down to the auditorium and run a movie. This is part of being an AV volunteer. I went down an hour early and as usual there was an issue. In this case, the chairs had been moved to set up for choir practice, with lots of chairs on stage, blocking the drop-down screen. So I moved chairs. A short time before 3pm, two guys came in from facilities and moved the rest of the chairs. Apparently they had been scheduled to do that. Of course I didn’t know that and didn’t dare wait in hopes of it.
The movie was the 2022 version of Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris, which is a lovely feel-good movie. If you want a pleasant time-killer it will do nicely.
Off to dinner arriving on the dot of 6:30 and had a very pleasant evening with Suzanne and Jim. Got back latish and forgot to blog. Oh well.
Went for the walk in the morning. Then sat down in my chair and picked up my laptop and basically didn’t move the rest of the day. What was I doing? I was indulging in the delicious game of debugging my old app.
Back in about 2014-16 I wrote a very complex app with a sophisticated graphical user interface. Called PPQT, its purpose is to be a tool for the lengthy task of post-processing a completed book for project gutenberg proofreaders. When it was done I used it to process several books, and a couple of other people who did the same volunteer work used it. And then I set it aside and moved on to other activities, abandoning my 30,000 lines of superbly commented Python.
Then for the last couple of months I’ve been dusting it off just for fun. In the intervening years, the library it is based on, called Qt, has moved on a couple of versions so there were dozens of little API changes to accomodate. Today the work had reached the point where the app should be ready to run, and I spent the day running it, finding another bug, fixing it, running it again. Just totally absorbing fun. That’s all I did, except eat a couple meals and take one short nap.
That’s it in the usual mode, displaying the OCR’d text of a book on the left for editing, and the matching page scan image on the right. But there is lots more function under the tabs on the upper right. Almost all of which is tested and working again!
Who needs it? Nobody! With it off my mind maybe I can work on some other hobby.
Did the gym in the morning. The new machines are controlled by a central computer. You sign in to each machine by tapping your id card on the screen. It remembers the resistance you set for each machine previously and automatically sets that. Previously, all machines had counted out 12 reps each time. Today it started counting out 21 reps! I guess I’ve leveled-up.
At 1pm a dozen people gathered in the lobby and walked to the nearby park where the same photo team had set up, and they photographed us walking and talking in a natural way, in the park setting.
Walking & Talking in a “Natural” wayWant a glamorous career in professional photography?
Went for The Walk, no problem. Stopped at CVS to pick up two prescriptions. They make this extremely convenient: they send a text to remind me that I have renewals waiting, and I just stop by and pick up the pills, takes a minute. But I think CVS has a little scam going on with prescription auto-renewal. One prescription was for Atorvistatin, a simple statin. When I got home I found I had more than 30 tabs in the old bottle. Just think, on a corporate-wide basis, if they just get people to renew a week earlier than necessary, how many zillions of extra pills can they sell?
The other prescription was for Metoprolol, one of my blood pressure drugs. I now have three full bottles of Metoprolol, plus the one I’m working on. This is not entirely CVS’s doing. At one point I was taking that 2 pills/day, then it was cut back to 1/day. Still, three bottles full? A couple months ago I went to the CVS site and put the Metoprolol prescription on hold — supposedly. Must go check that again.
In the afternoon I, and other 6th floor residents, was part of a photo shoot. For some time there has been griping among residents, with the way Channing House portrays itself on channinghouse.org. There are a lot of pictures of people who are not residents, doing things that residents don’t do, and nothing that really reflects the actual lifestyle and personality of the place. Finally the staff scheduled a marketing company, Love & Co., to do a new look for the site, starting with pictures of actual residents in the actual building.
The team was four people, the main photographer, a gopher, another person, and a CH staff member. They took pictures on other floors earlier and go to 6 about 1:30. They spent a lot of time taking pictures in Caroline’s apartment, then Dr. Margaret’s, then mine, then Linda’s and Gwen’s. We had been warned of this of course. I had made my place look as nice as I could. After they shot about 500 images (I exaggerate a little) of the rooms and furniture, they invited me in and shot a few more with me sitting in my chair with my computer.
At 5pm we had a floor meeting. The only real business was to start planning our TGIF. Each floor does a TGIF party, once a month. We’ve been lucky, our month is December. We just have to do the party following the Holiday Chorus performance. How many half-gallons of eggnog do we need, and how many bottles of cheap brandy?
Went down to the gym and worked the machines. Then started doing stuff. Over the course of the day and several emails, I managed to get the AV team scheduled for some training next week. I also wrote to Tom, the Provinet guy who is responsible for moving our AV upgrade forward, and got a reply later.
Big step next: called the IBM retiree line about the new IBM retiree medical coverage. They have hired United Health Care to offer a “Medicare Advantage” program for what seems a very reasonable monthly premium. This has at least some degree of coverage for vision and for dental work, which I didn’t have before. Long phone call with a very helpful rep.
Printed a couple more bridge pictures, and organized the prints that I had made already. Worked on my software project.
After supper, looking through my box of DVDs for something to show before the Saturday movie — it tickles me to show something unscheduled in the hour before the planned start time — I found a CD case with a Bobby Darin documentary. Inside the case was another disk, one I apparently recorded off PBS, a recording of Bobby Darin doing a live show in Vegas. Huh. It ran an hour and a quarter and really wouldn’t be suitable, too long for one thing. But it was fun to listen to.
The Resident Association meeting was at 9 this morning so no walk. David G was running the AV and had a number of problems, as usual, with the Zoom side of it. Turns out there was never any audio going out to Zoom, I have no clue what he had f’d up, but the net result was, the zoom recording of the 90-minute long meeting (!) had no sound on it, either. So no recording for the secretary to review for her notes, or for people who missed the meeting to replay. There were other minor f’ups as well.
Sunday I’m going to be running one. We’ll see if I can do better.
Then down to FOPAL for post-sale cleanup. My section had a big sale weekend, with 125 books fewer now that before the sale. At an average of maybe $3 a book (the majority are priced at $2, some higher) that’s what, $400 give or take. If it were going to me instead of the Library, I’d be making about $30/hour for the time I spend down there. I guess that’s not bad.
Afternoon I worked on my obsessive software hobby project. It is getting perilously close to time to actually run it. Had dinner with Patty, Chuck, and Joy.
Pretty much did nothing. Went out to Safeway for a couple things. Fiddled with this and that hobby. At suppertime, decided to walk the mile and a half to Midtown and have red curry duck at Indochine, a Thai restaurant. Did that, took a Lyft back.
Today I had scheduled to do a docent tour at noon, but I had also invited a neighbor, Marion, to come along and see the 1401 demo at 11am. She has deep experience in computers (programmed an IBM 650, a vacuum tube computer, as well as the 1401 and d 360) and I have hopes of getting her to volunteer at CHM. She greatly enjoyed the demo, it certainly tickled her memories, but I don’t think she is going to volunteer.
She had arranged for her son, Owen, to join us, and the two of them joined my tour. Afterward we went for Marion’s favorite fast food, fish tacos at Rubio’s in Sunnyvale. Owen is a programmer, working from home for a cloud computing outfit called DataDog. His wife started out as a programmer for a video game company, but took a steep turn and went back to school to become — wait for it — an Egyptologist. On my tour I also had a half dozen comp.sci. grads from MIT. That was depressing. Apparently they are giving computer science PhD’s to children now. Or so it looked to my elderly eyes.
Got back to Channing House at 2:30 and got into the auditorium just in time to set up to project a movie at 3pm. Kass was there ahead of me as arranged, had lowered the screen and dimmed the lights, but I was the one with the DVD.
This was to show the last third of Amadeus, after the fiasco of last week when we didn’t know what to do when it ended early (Day 296). Turns out all you had to do is flip the disc over. It even says, in very fine print, “more content other side”. Anyway now we showed the last third. Spoiler: he dies. Was it disease, or poisoning? Nobody really knows.
Went for the standard walk. Then followed up on a call from the Tech Squad. Joan has a new TV but wants her CD player to work through it as it did with her old TV. What I find is a huge (easily 70-inch) new Samsung TV that her son-in-law installed for her in an existing media wall unit. Underneath is a blu-ray player. There is a loose HDMI cable visible under the TV. This should be simple, I think.
Not quite. First off the tv almost exactly fits the media unit, with like 2 inches of clearance on either side, and I can barely get my nose over the top. And son-in-law has fastened it solidly so it doesn’t rotate or slide in any direction.(I think he glued it, I don’t see any screws.) Which is ok as earthquake proofing, but now there is no way to get to the back of the tv where presumably there are HDMI ports. OK I can just barely see them using my iPhone as a flashlight. And two, the cable seems to be too short to reach the ports. But I get down on the floor and turn the DVD on its shelf and look behind and there is some slack, which I push through the back of the media cabinet and now the cable is long enough, and mostly by feel I manage to connect the cable to the TV.
Now to make it work, we turn on the tv and we see the usual Samsung “smart tv” interface which I have tangled with before, trying to show a movie on the new Samsung that Stew installed in the 4th floor lounge. People, if you need a new tv, get an LG, a Sony, a Vizio — not a Samsung. Fine screen hobbled by horrible software. Anyway I walk Joan twice through how to find the HDMI3 source and her music plays very nicely.
Later I print a bridge picture and work on software. And then on fiction. Which brings me to
Fiction Is Hard part 999
Simple. I want a scene in which Ethan first hears of the alien ship. I write a nice opening, he comes into the kitchen in the morning and has some chit-chat with his mother and then he sees the Washington Post on the table with the headline Alien craft sighted? Unusual asteroid changes orbit in “impossible” way. And next he’s going to read some important exposition from the paper.
What, exactly? Here’s where the rabbit hole opens. I know the broad outline; the incoming object showed up as a moving dot, a couple of pixels, on some astronomer’s images. But I want Ethan to read out sentences from this WaPo article. It should name an astronomer and an observatory, a real one, and details of real telescope technology. So the question is, what observatory is likely to have spotted this thing? And what would they see? I go to the internet and soon am learning about NASA’s program and JPL’s program and observatories like Pan-STARRS and oh, here is exactly the kind of image I was thinking of,
First sight of Comet C2021 A1
But so many questions — and an hour has gone by and I have not actually written anything although I am inching closer to it.
In the evening we had a concert, ok stuff by a local guy.
Codgerville 