Sunday 11/20/2022

Off at 11am to the SWBB game versus South Carolina, #2-ranked us versus #1-ranked them. We led most of the way but they tied it in the final seconds of regulation, and then they won in overtime.

Back to CH in good time to set up for a Sunday@Home presentation, resident Paul presenting his best pics from a couple of decades of nature shooting trips in Alaska. Really fine photography. I was most pleased by the fact that the whole zoom-hybrid meeting thing worked very smoothly, no glitches. Possibly the first time ever.

Saturday 11/19/2022

Only scheduled thing today was to lead a docent tour at noon. I actually spent an hour working on the novel, mostly making notes on different characters’ motives.

At 11am I slammed an ibuprofen and a tylenol, and by noon I was able to walk pretty freely, as long as I went slow and took shorter steps than usual. If I walked with my normal stride it hurt, although not as much as yesterday. I figure to be back to normal sometime next week.

The tour went ok, about 20 people.

Back at CH I got a tech squad dispatch for a person with Apple Mail problems. I don’t like Apple Mail. Turned out to be a tricky thing. She had bought a new iPhone with the latest iOS 16. iOS 16 is a major update that changed a lot of things. It seems that it added a new Privacy feature to the Mail app on the phone. If that is turned on, which it was on the new phone, Mail on the phone will not download any linked content in an email, such as images.

Somehow Mail on the phone magically transferred that rule to the Mail app on her MacBook. It stopped downloading linked images too, but instead of explaining why, it would just put up an obscure message about “some content could not be downloaded privately.” Which was the main issue the person had. Turning this off on the phone magically cured the MacBook also. It’s all juju, really.

Friday 11/18/2022

Since I had canceled out of the Baylands bus I had nothing on the day’s calendar. During the day I solved a couple of software mysteries. I have my app now on two different Macs, the laptop with the new Apple M1 silicon, and the old iMac with Intel silicon. On the latter the app behaved oddly in a couple of ways and I resolved those issues. The next thing will be to try to package it.

I edited the video for Dr. Margaret’s talk. Due to a blunder by me, nobody else is to blame, we lost the first 3 minutes of audio. The audience in the room heard it fine, but I had neglected to click one thing to send the room audio out to zoom, and of course it was the zoom meeting that was recorded. Well. Nothing to do about it now.

About 10am I went out for a walk, not sure how far I would want to go. Turned out, not far. The pain and stiffness in the left hip was annoying enough that I only went around a 3-block orbit. Later I walked one lap of our roof (840 feet or 1/6 of a mile if you follow the marked path). I think it is getting better but I’m going to be sore for a while longer.

Dinner with Patty and Leon and Margaret. Talked about the insanities going on a Twitter, with Musk trying to micro-manage the remaining coders. That is not how a high-tech CEO should operate.

In the morning I called Facilities to hang the new art. The guy came up in half an hour. Here’s my outside gallery now.

Thursday 11/17/2022

Took two ibuprofen before bed and slept normally. Thought my hip was normal until I actually tried walking down the hall, meaning to go to the gym. Oops, gimpy. Decided not to go to the gym. Also, later in the day, canceled out of the Baylands walk on Friday that I had signed up for.

At 9am I went down to check in at the nurse station on the 3rd floor. They are supposedly monitoring me after my fall for 72 hours. While I was there I noticed that from that lower floor, the Hoover Tower was framed by autumn foliage. I went back up and got the Nikon and the 500mm lens. The best composition was actually from the 4th floor. I had to shoot through a dual-pane window, though. Anyway,

By evening I was walking pretty normally, and I hope/expect to be fully normal by Saturday when I have a docent round.

Futzed around with a couple of projects. Then when it was time for Wanda to clean, I drove down to FOPAL, and was glad I did as there were 5 boxes of books to process. There would have been a huge pile by Monday.

On return, I picked up the large package of the painting I bought in Eureka. (Day 3.293) It was wrapped in four layers of bubble wrap alternating with cardboard. When I got it out, the question was, would I still like it? I do still like it! It will look very nice on my outside wall. I need to book facilities to put up a hook for me.

Wednesday 11/16/2022

Went for a the walk in the morning. Then got through a number of tasks. I did the laundry. I edited the video of the zoom recording of the Trust Seminar, and put it on a thumb drive, and left that in Lennie’s mail cubby. I called Kass and verified she was ok with running the movie on Saturday; then put the DVD for the movie in her mail cubby.

I read the “quick start” pamphlet for the IBM medicare advantage plan that starts on 1/1/23. Then I signed in to the website, which was a little unsettling. My current, and soon to be previous, Medicare Supplement plan is with the same company, United Healthcare, and when I try to log in to the special IBM web portal, it recognizes my name and password and logs me in to the AARP Supplement page. I guess I will wait until 1/2/23 and hopefully then it will go to the right place. If not, I’ll have to call customer support.

I signed up to do a docent tour on Saturday. I printed a couple more bridge pictures, it had been a couple of weeks since I changed my gallery outside. Speaking of the gallery outside, the museum in Eureka has shipped the painting I bought and it should arrive tomorrow.

At 1pm it was time for the monthly FOPAL zoom meeting. The sale weekend just past netted $19,000. Not bad.

At 4pm I went down to set up a microphone for use by the people running the entertainment for the monthly Birthday Dinner. They had set up an electronic piano in the doorway between the auditorium and the dining room. I was chatting with the couple of people there, while I turned to walk past the piano back into the auditorium. I caught my left foot in the cord, so I couldn’t swing the left leg forward for the next step. Falling forward I yanked my left leg, pulling the muscle in my left glute. Fell on the floor with a severe pain in the ass.

The nurses came and I found I could stand up and walk, with care. An hour later Dennis called to see how I was. The nurses had called my next of kin to report a fall.

At 7pm I was back in the auditorium to run the AV for Dr. Margaret’s talk on end of life issues. Almost everything went smoothly. We lost the first 30 seconds of audio on the zoom recording, but that was it.

So a busy productive day.

Tuesday 11/15/2022

Went down the gym early, just at 7, and found 5 other people there. Gym isn’t that big. Actually there was plenty of room; the real bottleneck is the third of the three computerized machines. Number 1 does 2 exercises, number 2 offers only one, and number 3 has 5 different exercises. Susan was on number 3, so I went and rode the cyber cycle and then Harry was on number 3, and the heck with it, I left.

At 8:30 I was down to the auditorium with Bert and John to do a tech walk-through of Dr. Margaret’s talk for Wednesday night. It’s going to be a good talk.

I went away for an hour and then came back with both my laptops, because I was to run the tech for a presentation on trusts and such, sponsored by the Heritage Circle. There were two presenters, each with a powerpoint on a thumb drive. I copied the presentations to mac #2 which shared its screen to provide the slides to zoom and the big screen. Mac #1 was the zoom host. The auditorium Zoom Room PC had recovered from whatever was its issue on Monday morning, and behaved itself.

Everything hung together and there was only one glitch. Presenter Jeff had supplied his own wireless clicker to advance his slides. Presenter Kimberly used it also, but had never used it before. Going to her second slide she clicked some button on that clicker, that made Keynote on mac #2 just close its window. Ooops. “Did I do that?” Kimberly said. I am scrambling to find Keynote and get it to open the slide file again, and go back to sharing its screen. So, 30 seconds of panic and we were back on track.

Anyway, a major 90-minute AV event that was almost flawless. Here’s my work area,

Clockwise from the bottom: Mac#2, sound board, Sound system iPad, Zoom Room PC, Mac#1, Zoom Room control iPad.

My view of Kimberly and the audience.

That was all the excitement for the day.

Monday 11/14/2022

First up was the Resident Association meeting at 9am. When I got to the auditorium at 8:30, David G. and IT staffer Paul were struggling with the zoom room box, the box that has made running zoom meetings so much more straightforward. Not today. Whenever they tried to get the box to join the scheduled meeting it would report an “unknown error”, always the best kind of error message.

As time ticked on to 9am, David G opted to do it the old way, pulling all the cables out of the zoom box and plugging them into his laptop. That worked more or less well to get the meeting started, although zoom attendees were complaining they weren’t getting sound, although I’m pretty sure they were, or at least, that sound was being sent out of the zoom host. Didn’t matter because then the wi-fi in the auditorium got flaky and the zoom app in David G’s laptop disconnected and closed the meeting. So we were down to auditorium only.

Which made it awkward for me, when, 15 minutes into the meeting, it was my turn to give my pitch for getting new recruits for the AV committee. Well, I gave it anyway.

Then I headed out for my 10:30 appointment with Dr. Lee, the urologist at PAMF. We looked at my most recent CT scan, as more informative than the more recent ultrasound, and he showed me the left kidney. Kidneys are shaped a lot like shrimps in general outline, although quite a bit bigger. Super-jumbo soft-shelled shrimps. Except my left kidney is like a shrimp santa claus with a huge pack of toys on its back, several times as big as the kidney proper.

He argued against doing an operation, mainly because of all the work I’ve had done on my heart and circulation. He just didn’t like the idea of general anesthesia for someone my age and condition, at least, for a problem as relatively small as a cyst. He recommended getting it drained again, as it took 18 months to refill. Well, at least 12 months. So that is what we will be doing.

From there I went to FOPAL and did the post-sale thing. Took a book count (50 books sold, or at least, vanished, from my section in last week’s sale) then looked at every book and put all the ones (two boxes worth) that had seen four sales, on the table to ship to the bargain room. Priced one box.

Bought coffee and cheese and bread and came on home.

I’m giving a pitch for members of the AV team at the RA meeting Monday. Yesterday I prepared a 3-slide presentation and sent it as a PDF to David G for incorporation into the agenda file. At supper yesterday he asked for it as Powerpoint instead. So this morning before the newspaper arrived I figured out how to get those three pages of text out of a Pages document and into a Keynote document, so I could export them as a .ppt file.

After reading the paper, I watered the plants. Headed out to FOPAL where I found my shelves had seen a lot of sales, also been messed about with a lot. What do buyers have against bookends? Anyway, tidied that up. Then drove to Safeway to buy a couple of things. Practiced my pitch for the RA meeting tomorrow.

I noticed a strange pair of sunglasses in the front seat of the car. I stopped by the car-wash place and gave them to one of the workers, saying I assumed they’d been dropped by one of their guys yesterday.

Did the puzzle. Put the air-plant to soak. Checked the email several times to see if Sandy had decided to go to the concert or not — no reply yet. Called Florrie re her tech squad request – no answer. Called Sandy – no answer. Hmph, if she’s gone to church (?) she can probably go to the concert. Later, she emailed she was “go”.

At 10 Florrie called. Her tech problem was supposed to be not able to Zoom. I’m going to quote here what I wrote on the tech squad email reply.

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This was a tough one. Florrie couldn’t use Zoom because Zoom insisted on being upgraded first. To install the new Zoom (or anything else), MacOS requires an admin (machine login) password. Florrie had a couple of passwords on scraps of paper but none of them worked as admin passwords.

So now we have to reset the iMac login password. That’s doable but it requires using your Apple (iCloud) id and password. We tried logging in to icloud.apple.com and … of course her passwords didn’t work. So we had to go through the APPLE password reset process, which fortunately is not too bad if you have a working computer and a phone for the TFA text messages.

Then it required her to answer security questions and fortunately she remembered the answer to one of them.

Then it made her set up new security questions, the answers to which we wrote down.

Now we could reboot the iMac in recovery mode, and use the password recovery assistant to reset the login password for the iMac, using her Apple ID and password for authentication.

After rebooting the iMac we could start Zoom and have it tell us we needed to upgrade, and now we could upgrade by entering the new admin password.

After which I started a Zoom meeting on my macbook and she was able to join it from the iMac.

90 minutes. (I wasted some time reading web pages, I could do it again in under an hour.)

She still has an open issue: she has an external USB hard drive which should be working as her backup drive. However on rebooting the iMac, there was a dialog “enter the password to unlock this drive” and I just canceled that. She is probably not getting any backups done. If somebody set that drive up with encryption and a password, it will have to be reformatted to be usable.

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Anyway, off to the City for the boogie woogie festival.

Saturday 11/12/2022

Off early to Mountain View. Met with Jean, Darlene and Jessea for breakfast. Jean very pleased at the attention. Nice conversation for an hour. Jessea called Michelle Gassie (father of Pauline, see day 3.277 for a picture of Pauline) at his home in France and we all face-timed with him. Quite the little tech miracle when you think about it. Just casually pull out your phone and dial somebody 7500 miles away to say “Hi” and see them live.

Got the car washed and gassed, and also inflated the tires. I had a low-pressure icon showing up. Yup, all tires were down around 25psi. Pumped up to 35 again. Do that every 3 years whether it needs it or not…

At supper time, Sandy emailed to say she had something and might not be able to go to the concert tomorrow. I may have to spend the morning finding somebody to use the 4th ticket.

Walked to Lucy Stern center to see Palo Alto Players production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Left at intermission. Not because it was bad; on the contrary most of the cast was excellent and the dance numbers were really well done, the big “Be Our Guest” ballet was top-notch. But the Beast was played by a stand-in who lacked gravitas and vocal depth, and anyway the story is so hackneyed. I just couldn’t muster a care about it.

Friday 11/11/2022

Checking email first thing there was a note from Cousin Darlene, pointing out that Jean’s 95th birthday is tomorrow. I am so grateful that she told me. Her plan is to drop in on Jean at 8am mass, knowing that Jean goes to daily mass, and to share breakfast after. I will go down and join them for breakfast at least.

Went for a walk. On return, I called the Urology department and, pleasant surprise, was able to get an appointment for Monday. Then called Darlene and went over plans for tomorrow.

Checked in with Dr. Margaret who had some tech issues, which were easily resolved. I told her about the ultrasound tech looking at me and saying she could see the renal cyst and she, as a real doctor, said “good for her,” and assured me that it was possible.

Lunch was a date with next-door neighbor Caroline, cross-hall neighbor Linda, and a guy named David Ross, who had been Caroline’s neighbor for many years in Palo Alto. He lost his wife recently after some years of illness. He is thinking about moving to Channing House. They were going to show him around, including their apartments, and mine too, except that I had a date in the auditorium at 1, but told them my door was unlocked, go right in.

Met with Bert and John and Dr. Margaret to practice for her presentation which is next Wednesday. Got most of the kinks worked out of the zoom room equipment I think.

Then drove down to Mountain View to scope out the eateries near Jean’s church. There is a Le Boulanger just half a block away that will do fine. You might say, why didn’t you just use Google Maps. Well, I did, and it didn’t show the Le Boul. at all. Shoes on the ground wins.

Listened to the Friday night online jazz concert from SFJazz.