At 10 this morning I was to lead a private tour. The group was, from the volunteer job website, “14 students from the University of Georgia Black Business Student Association & CHM donor Greg Gretsch.” They were mostly college soph and junior levels, and various majors, not all business, as their leader Greg told me. Greg also told me that this was the second year he had brought such a group, and said “Last year the docent they gave us, I forget his name, was fan-tastic.”
Way to set the expectation level, Greg. I don’t know if I was fan-tastic but I don’t think I bored anybody.
Then I didn’t have much to do until 4pm when I had scheduled the monthly A/V team meeting. Which went off smoothly.
Oh, yeah, finished the Corvette model. I will take some pictures tomorrow, I don’t want to disturb it until the glue under the door handles has hardened. No, not tomorrow; tomorrow gonna be killer busy. Saturday.
So busy I didn’t even have time to work on the model. Started the laundry and went for a short walk during the first load. Then finished the laundry while reading email.
Bert had written about the illegal microphones. The wireless mics we use on the 11th floor are 20 years old and are actually illegal by FCC rules. Plus one broke down a couple weeks ago. Wireless mics have two parts, the mic itself which is a transmitter, and a little base station receiver. Bert’d been looking online and yes, you can get a nice Shure base station with two mics for around $700 but there are also a slew of Chinese-made knock-offs at around $100. So we could have new, legal, mics for under $300 total, which is a sum that we can definitely come up with, from the gift shop or the resident association funds.
But that sent me into a major web rabbit-hole trying to find the “right” cheap mic setups. The ones he’d found had a couple of issues I didn’t like. So at least 2 hours of the day, off and on, went into browsing Amazon and B&H and such.
In between I took two tech calls, one to Florrie which turned out to be a wireless keyboard that was disabled. The other was to Pam, who wants to get the PBS Passport streaming service on her Samsung smart TV. We wasted a good 45 minutes in the miserable Samsung user interface proving that her 2017 model TV did not support the PBS app. Then I had to spend 20 minutes with my own brand new TV, ending up learning that PBS doesn’t have an app for the LG sets although they plan to someday.
Then it was time to go down and set up a microphone for the people to use who were running the monthly birthday dinner. A little bit of time free and then it was 6pm and I had been invited by Gloria to have dinner with her and tonight’s lecture speaker, Kirk Hanson. (Follow the link for his very impressive resume.) Also there were Edie, who had served with Kirk on some Santa Clara County committees, and Joan, who was a classmate of his in 5th-7th grades in Houston, back in the early 50s.
Hanson’s talk, on the ethics of artificial intelligence, was really quite well done. He is very up on the subject, knows all the players and the problems, and presented it well.
Did the gym machine round. Had the writers meeting. I didn’t contribute anything.
At 1pm I met with Derek Loh, son of my late neighbor Lily Loh, about A/V for his mother’s memorial this coming Saturday. It turned out, to my relief, that they don’t want to do a Zoom meeting after all. He wants to put a slide show up on the big screen from his laptop. We practiced that, it is a very simple process. And they need a couple of mics so people can reminisce about Lily. He plans to record the proceedings on a GoPro camera of his own.
I treated myself to supper out at a local restaurant: Red Curry Duck at Indochine, one of my favorite dishes. Naturally one order is enough for two so I brought home enough for another meal.
Before and after supper I put some finishing bits on the stingray. All that is left to do is to install the windshield wipers and the door handles, and give it a final polish.
About 3:30pm when I was coming back in from the garage, just back from FOPAL, I was thinking what a productive day I had. I skipped the morning walk because my tax returns were back from the accountant. I went through a whole process to download the forms from their secure site, and I e-signed the form so they could e-file for me. I printed out the four estimated tax vouchers (only 4, not 8, because I don’t have to pay an estimated tax to the state this year). Then I made up four stamped and addressed envelopes and tagged them with the dates when they should be sent and filed them, except of course for the first one which is due tomorrow, only it isn’t really due because I’m in one of the counties that had storm damage so I don’t have to send them until October, but I did anyway, mailing the April payment on my way down to…
The 10am Event Coordinators meeting, where everybody who sponsors events meets to finalize the calendar for the next month. That took an hour. From there I updated the Google spreadsheet of A/V events that is shared by everyone on my committee, to show all the May events. And looked at my calendar and oops, Friday this week is completely borked, so I can’t have the usual AV committee meeting on Friday. So I sent out email to the faithful committee saying, the spreadsheet is up, and can we meet on Thursday instead?
Then off to FOPAL to finish processing that huge donation of computer books that I started working on last Saturday. That took two hours, so I was back, feeling very productive, at 3:30 like I said. Laid around like a potato the rest of the day, pretty much.
Watering the plants I finished my next to last quart bottle of VF-11. This is a crisis. VF-11 is a plant food. We have been putting a tablespoon of VF-11 in each watering can before watering our plants for decades. Plants have been thriving on this as their only input (other than soil obvs.) for decades.
Last time I went to order more (sometime in 2020), there was a problem, they were out of the gallons but filled my order with quart bottles. Now although the website is still up and looking good, none of the items you can “shop” for are in stock. Supposedly they are stocked at Lowes and Home Depot. Well, no; Lowes website has it but says it is “no longer carried”, and Home Depot has it but says it is out of stock. Among the retailers they list was Summerwinds nursery, and anyway I have been meaning to replace a couple of plants, so I went on down there. They had no VF-11 of course, and in fact, no liquid plant food at all, which surprised me. How can retailers miss the convenience of adding a little liquid to a watering can? As opposed to stuff you have to dig into the soil.
I bought a couple of bright geraniums which I will have to plant soon, anyway.
During the day I did a little more work on the model. It has taillights and parking lights now.
Needs cleanup back there.
These parts are tiny. The yellow lenses in the parking lights are less than an eighth of an inch across, ditto the little red “bullet” taillight lenses. Naturally I dropped them. Three different times one of the little MFs leaped out of my fingers and of course didn’t stay on the desk. Down on my stomach with a flashlight looking for a weensy little fleck of chrome or red plastic.
Main activity today was to drive to Oakland for a house concert with my favorite local band, Dirty Cello.
I like house concerts. Where else do you get to sit practically in the musicians’ laps?
I bought one of their CDs, “Dirty Cello Smokes the Sixties”, with Rebecca’s versions of “Purple Haze” and “For What It’s Worth” and “Gimme Shelter” and so on. Naturally I stuck it in the car — yes my car is old enough they were still putting CD players in them — and drove back down the freeways and across the San Mateo bridge singing along with the oldies. It felt really good, just buzzing along in light traffic, looking at the water and the green hills and singing loudly. The car is almost as good as the shower for singing.
Yesterday Frank, fellow volunteer at FOPAL, sent a picture of a large pile of boxes in front of my section. Some donor had unloaded a career’s worth of computer books.
So today I went down there and spent 2:30 processing about 2/3 of the stack. My usual Monday shot will finish it up. Out of a couple hundred books, at least 20 were “high value”, more than $25 used on Amazon, so that was nice.
Back home, I was to provide A/V support for a memorial get-together on the 11th floor. This was easy for me; all they wanted was the big TV so they could hook up a laptop and loop a slide show of old pictures. I had it all set for them and it went off fine. Back up to 11 at 4:30 to shut the TV down.
Worked a little on the Stingray. Fiddly finishing pieces on the outside. I’ve been looking at a really complicated kit, a 1/12 scale Bugatti, but not going to get that right now. Finish the ‘Vette and enjoy and empty desk top for a while first.
Took a walk in the morning. At 1pm I left for the museum where I was to lead the 2pm tour. At first I thought this was going to be the usual weekday tour, maybe 10 people. I was chatting with 4-5 people by the entrance to the exhibit area when at 1:59 pm, a huge group, maybe 20 people, suddenly assembled from the far edges of the lobby, and I had a tour group of 30 or more. That was a surprise.
But I did a good job, one of my better tours ever I think. Most of them stuck with me, so there was still 25 or so at the last stop, and a nice round of applause.
Home for a quick nap. Then I had a ticket for a concert at Stanford at 7:30, so I went over there early at 6pm, and had supper from the food court in the student union.
The concert was the an early start to the summer Jazz Workshop, with a big band of high school musicians. Although the kids were excellent musicians, I didn’t care for the selection of numbers. There’s a lot of branches of jazz that I really don’t care for. I can kind of get it, follow the notes and chord sequences, but they don’t pull together into anything I want to hear. So I left at intermission.
Spent the day at the Shustek center, continuing to archive the papers of Sandy Fraser.
Exchanged emails with a person who is planning media content for the Lily Loh memorial Saturday week. He has ideas that won’t fly in our AV system.
Stew and the gang that put on the very successful 1950’s sock hop are also starting to plan their next event, which will be country and western. In September. But Stew wrote asking if we could do some things that are clearly impossible. I was nice about it.
Went for The Walk in the morning. Then went down to FOPAL using the Palo Alto Link ride-share service, third trial. Figured out some of its confusing restrictions. Although I give it a specific address, what it tells the driver is the nearest street intersection. So when I tell it, “4000 Middlefield Road” it tells the driver, “drop off at Middlefield and Montrose” and all it shows me on the app is “Montrose ave.” Now I have never heard of Montrose Ave. It’s an obscure residential street on the East side of Middlefield, which I’ve never been on, and anyway I’m aiming at the West side of Middlefield. Plus, its intersection with Middlefield is a looooong block South of where I want to go. But at least I understand its quirks. When I went to come back, the best they could offer was a 24-minute pickup time, so I used Lyft again.
Today at 4:30 was our monthly Sixth Floor meeting. The main order of business was to assign tasks for the TGIF party that our floor has to sponsor this month in a week and a half. Other floors lately have been doing themes, and having entertainment. Our theme is “old fashioned TGIF, sit and chat and drink with friends”. No entertainment, no theme. Just snacks and drinks.
At 6:30 I went to prepare for a live event, Steve Chessin from FairVote.com, telling about ranked choice voting. Steve is the guy who checked us out a few weeks ago, to make sure he could use his overhead projector with our system. It was an interesting technical challenge, integrating the overheads with Zoom. I could write several paragraphs about how I made it work, but never mind. I made it work. Yay me.
Did the round of gym machines. Then killed time until time for the writers meeting. I had not written anything this time, so I just applauded my fellow writers.
At 4pm I went up to 11 to check on the AV setup for the Passover dinner. But Rich had gotten there early and set up everything as we had planned last Saturday morning. The setup for this dinner was impressive, tables with seating for about 50 people it looked like, all white table cloths and bud vases and such, and a catering line. Way to go, people.
Way back when they used to do a monthly dinner service on 11, the “Webster Street Grille” it was called; you had to reserve and pay extra. Be nice to bring that back. Currently they are trying to keep the budget down, so probably not right away.
Anyway, that was that for the day. Caught up on some of my DVR’d tv shows.
