Wednesday 09/21/2022

Went for a slightly shorter than usual walk while my first load of laundry ran. Then finished up the other load.

At 1pm was the monthly FOPAL volunteers zoom meeting. The main topic this time was that there have been several instances of nice items growing legs and disappearing from the sale room. The Art section manager had set up a display of prints and a day later, somehow, a couple of them had disappeared. Some items that were in the high value boxes, where we stage books that are valued over $25 to be picked up and sold by the eBay volunteer group, also vanished. So the board has decided to put up a couple of cameras. The footage will be saved on a local server for a while, but only reviewed if there is a question about something vanishing.

At 3pm we had a talk by a resident, a rather new resident, Lou Thompson, whose career has been partly as a consultant advising the California High Speed Rail project. He reviewed high speed trains around the world. China has been building an amazing amount of HS trackage just since 2008. Then he reviewed all the stages the pathetic California HSR project has gone through. It has never been fully funded, or properly managed, or given adequate oversight by the legislature. The state is legally obligated to keep working on it because (a) the HSR Initiative we passed is the law and (b) we have taken and spent a lot of federal money as well, and would have to give it back. But the costs keep rising and the completion date keeps receding. He had no solutions. Good talk, well organized.

Talked Jan (pronounced Yon), who like me has a ticket to the Redwood Coast Music Fest coming up in just over a week. We will drive together in my car. He has a reservation in the same hotel as me.

Tuesday 09/20/2022

Went down to the gym for some exercise in the morning. Attended only part of the writers meeting at 10:30, because I was called to go down to the Auditorium for my Covid booster. I am now bi-valently protected.

There wasn’t much to do, yet I felt very busy, mostly trying to work with various people scheduling future A/V event coverage. I really dislike this stuff. Although it does keep me in touch with my neighbors. But I look forward to the day I can shed the job.

Actually I felt kind of depressed in general all day. Well. Whatever. At 4pm there was a piano concert, a father-son duo, playing on the two grand pianos in our lobby. They play pretty abstract jazz forms, kind of like Hiromi last week but not IMO as interesting. Afterward I didn’t feel like eating in the dining room. So I got in the car and drove down to Mike’s in midtown. I had a really delicious pasta dish and a beer.

Monday 09/19/2022

Went for the standard walk. Got back just in time for the start of the Event Coordinators meeting. I learned about the events planned for October and put them in the AV spreadsheet.

Then I made a sandwich for myself and ate it, and headed down to FOPAL to process what turned out to be 5 boxes of books, mostly very old and not interesting stuff.

Back in time for Rhonda’s open meeting at 4pm. Got some supper in the dining room and then met with Kass at 6:30 to provide sound support for a candidate night. Residents are allowed to bring in candidates for office for informational meetings. This was Patty’s event, her candidate is Vicky Veenker, candidate for City Council. Smart, well-spoken. Kass is now broken in as an AV tech for at least the simple meetings, where you need just microphones, no projection or zoom.

Back to my room at 8:30, filled the hummingbird feeders for the third time today, and going to bed.

Sunday 09/18/2022

In the morning I walked to the P.A. Cafe in Midtown for some breakfast and walked back, three miles yay me.

In the middle of the day I made myself work at developing the ideas for this YA SF novel I’m playing with. I started writing a brief synopsis, as for pitching to an agent, but somehow that turned into a long dialog scene where my main characters help each other (and help me) figure out what the aliens are really up to.

At 3pm it was time to set up and rehearse for a Sunday At Home event. These are informal talks by CH residents, in this case by my writing pal Prudence, who took a lot of good pictures on a trip to Zimbabwe and Botswana earlier this year. I thought it was going to go smoothly, and for the most part it did. But there is always something. In this case, it was the goddam clicker. The clicker is a little hand-held device that has a laser pointer and four buttons. It has a little USB dongle that acts as a receiver. You plug the USB thing into a port, and when you press any of the buttons on the device, the dongle convinces the computer that you just hit one of the four arrow keys on the keyboard. It “just works” for everybody else. It wouldn’t work for me. So half an hour before show time, I have to move things around so Prudence can reach the laptop from the podium and press the actual keyboard keys to advance her slides.

One nice thing, for the first time since the pandemic, there were many, many more people physically in the auditorium than on Zoom. It was like 10 on Zoom and easily 60 people in the real audience.

Had dinner with Stew the organizer, and his wife Kathy and Prudence. Then I think I will go to bed early.

Saturday 09/17/2022

Overcommitted Saturday. Had a docent tour to do at noon. At nine I went to get dressed in my red docent shirt which I last wore a week ago on a warm day, then hung up on a hanger. Phew, that’s ripe. So I put on a t-shirt instead, and hand-washed the docent shirt in the basin and trotted down the hall to the laundry room and ran it for 15 minutes in the dryer. And ironed it and put it on.

Museum attendance was light but I had a group of ten or so that stuck with me. Back to CH by 1:30. At 3pm I was scheduled to play a movie in the auditorium. Went down at 2:30 and set up. Movie was Here Today with Billy Crystal. An older guy is sliding into dementia. This seems familiar. It was just not so long ago that I was asked to run The Father with Anthony Hopkins playing an older guy who is sliding into dementia. I must ask Karen, who chooses the movies, if this is a theme or what.

At 5:30 I went down for dinner and fell in with the Allens and the Hartzells. From the dining room I went to the garage and drove to Los Altos, the Bus Barn, to see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I read the book some time ago, and mainly remember how it conveyed the inner world of an autistic person. Of course on stage you have the outer world. How would they do it? With lots of projections around a bare stage. The actors who portrayed Christopher and his two parents were really good. However the script had me shaking my head. So depressing, as everybody lies to the kid. He is betrayed by the people who should support him, over and over. So many times the script has people saying “Christopher, I promise…” and you know they can’t possibly promise that. In the end they tried to wrap it up with everyone getting together again. Nope, I don’t think so.

Anyway it ran long and I didn’t get to bed until 11. Near thing, the Prius might have turned into a pumpkin.

Friday 09/16/2022

Had breakfast in the dining room for the first time in weeks, because AV member Kass wanted to talk about an upcoming event, so we met for breakfast. After which I went for a walk. That was fine.

Experimented with yet another piece of “AI” photo software, Topaz Photo AI, which I got free for having bought their package of other apps. This shit is truly amazing. Put in an OK scanned slide image, it mulls for ten seconds, and produces a massively improved version: larger, sharper, cleaner, brighter. Doesn’t do anything over the top, doesn’t make it too bright or saturated, just … better. Crazy. Printed a couple more bridge pictures.

At 3 I got with Prudence about her slide show for this coming Sunday. She has it in Photos on her mac. I hate and despise Photos, and today only gave me more reasons. She has 140 pictures in an album, all arranged in exactly the sequence she wants to give her talk. I need to get her show onto my computer, also a Mac running the same level of software. There is NO WAY to transfer the images and retain their sequence. The stupid thing will export the album to a thumb drive and even give the pictures filenames with sequence numbers. Great! But when you import the pictures off the thumb drive it scrambles the order. And there is no way to make it sort the pictures in an album according to their filenames. Well, long story short I worked around it with some labor.

At 5 I went down and set up a mic and speaker for the organizer of the Gift Shop Gala and Liqueur Tasting. Which is pretty much what it says: the gift shop people brought out all their back stock onto tables in the lobby, and there were cookies and bottles of liqueur to sample.

Thursday 09/15/2022

Went down to the gym at 7:10, and found Susan and Harry using the green machines. As I feared the one machine with 5 exercises is a bottleneck. I spent 15 minutes on the cyber cycle waiting for them to clear out. Anyway, sigh.

The main activity today was to pick up sister in law Jean and go to Filoli to meet with her cousin Darlene, partner Jessea, and the guest of honor, distant relative Pauline. Pauline’s parents Michelle and Sophie are like 4th cousins of Marian. They and their kids Pauline and Aurellien visited en famille back in what, 2016? Marian and I and Darlene had a big family picnic with them at Palo Alto’s Foothills park. For this summer, Pauline has been doing an internship at Cal and living with Darlene and Jessea. She’s getting ready to go home and this was an occasion for (mainly) Jean to see her before she left. So we walked around the Filoli gardens and had lunch in their cafe, and it was very nice. Of course we took pictures.

Wednesday 09/14/2022

A day with few commitments and a lot of napping. In the morning I went for the standard walk. Then I printed pictures of a couple more bridges. My picture rails are full with six big pictures and I have to decide how to continue. I guess I will take away the first three and go on with the next three?

I’m very pleased with the various “AI” -based photo software I’m using. Starting with a 2500x1800px scan of a slide, excellent composition but barely enough pixels to print 6×8 inches; also tending to lack contrast and color. Luminar does a great job of opening up shadows and perking up colors in one quick step. Save that and drop it on Topaz de-noiser which simultaneously takes away the grain while making all the fine details beautifully sharp. Save and drop it on the Topaz “gigapixel” app to just double it in size. The “AI” figures out how to add pixels without seeming to duplicate anything, it just becomes a higher-res picture, 5000x3600px. Then into Affinity Photo for final tweaks and because Affinity does a better job of managing the printer, and print it on 11×14 or 11×17 paper.

At 1pm I had a haircut so now am back to my Steve Jobs-like very short hairdo. At 4:30 we had the monthly floor meeting. The first attended by my new across-the hall neighbor Linda. Then most of the 6th floor went down to dinner together.

After supper I worked on two other hobbies, software and science fiction, while keeping one ear on a zoom meeting. David M., our most skilled AV event person, ran one of the regular Speaker Series events in the auditorium and he had a problem with getting audio to the zoom audience. He solved it after ten minutes; I don’t know what the problem was although I mean to ask him. Anyway, our run of botched hybrid zooms continues. I’m going to run one Sunday, maybe I can pull off a flawless one.

Tuesday 09/13/2022

Went to the gym first thing, did the recommended double round of the machines. My first scheduled event was at 11. During the interim I took care of a pending item. I decided that it just wasn’t the right thing to send that model to youtuber Sarah. So I unpacked the box and put the model back on my desk. Then I printed two more of the London Bridge series of pictures.

At 11 I met with staff person Jasie, her tech consultant Tom, and IT techs Paul and Gerald. And Jerry, my neighbor and our video production guru. This was to discuss the upgrade of the auditorium. We went over all the parts of the build, the projector, new cameras, screens, etc., what we wanted, what was possible, in quite a bit of detail. They went off to start working with the contractor, ICS.

At 2:30 I went to the auditorium to help one of my AV committee members, Rich, on what should be a simple meeting: no zoom, just project hand out mics and put powerpoint slides on the big screen. Hah. The presenter didn’t arrive until one minute to 3, when the talk was supposed to start, and some audience was already there. She had her slides on a cute little Macbook Air, a new one, with only two USB-C ports. So I have to run back to my room and get a USB-C to HDMI adapter. Then try to work with her machine, which of course does the worst possible thing when it sees a second monitor added: it decides I must want that to be the main screen and moves the menu bar there, “there” being the projected image that I’m standing to one side of and can barely see. Anyway after futzing around for ten minutes we get her slides showing properly on the screen, but the remote clicker doesn’t work so she has to say “next slide please” each time.

Oh well. About 4:45, John calls from the auditorium. He’s doing a rehearsal for an upcoming event (which is an excellent idea and good on him) and he can’t get the camera to work. I tell him the couple of things I can think of but that doesn’t help. I suggest he try to get Paul or Gerald if they haven’t gone home. I am really coming to hate our AV equipment.

Had dinner with Patty and the Allens.

Monday 09/12/2022

The monthly Residents Association meeting was at 9am. I went to the auditorium at 7:45 and as usual found stuff to move. I put the whiteboard to one side so I could move the piano off the stage, set up a table for the secretary, bring the podium up from the floor to the stage, etc.

The RA meeting is David G’s event, he’s been doing it a long time, but there were several glitches this time, mostly to do with various people’s slides. They didn’t get to him, or whatever. So things had to be delayed or taken out of sequence, and a lot of fiddling around on computers occurred. So annoying and distressing.

At 12:30 Harriet arrived. The nominal excuse for this was that she needs an iPad, and the Gift Shop had an iPad that I cleaned up and reset some time ago. So she agreed to buy it for $100, and I bought her lunch. I invited Lennie and Carolyn as well, and it turned out very well because, unbeknownst to me, all three had graduated from Wellesley!

After Harriet left I went down to FOPAL and did my post-sale cleanup. I counted the books remaining, and I went through all the shelves and sent those books that had seen at least 4 sales — which would be the ones with my datecode for June or earlier — off to the bargain room. Four boxes of them.

This was the day of the monthly “mixer”, in which the tables in one part of the dining room are set aside and you can take a number at random from a hat as you come in. That gives you your table number and so you sit with 3 or 4 other people chosen at random. I ended up the first at table 35, with Mary Ann, Lois and Michelle, all people I already knew well, so not much of an adventure although pleasant enough.

After supper I printed the first picture of what I plan will be a series of prints of our pictures of the Bridges of the Thames. We took those pics as Ektachrome slides in 1975-77. Around 1990, give or take, I borrowed an enlarger from Bill Pawek and made photo prints of the best of them. We had those around the house for a while. I scanned the slides in around 2005. Now I plan to reprint them with modern equipment.

I scanned the slides at a decent resolution but they aren’t quite high-res enough to make good prints at the 11×14 or 11×17 size I want. So I bought some digital toys from Topaz Labs. Really quite amazing software for de-noising, and for up-scaling, images. So I can take one of my 2600×1800 pixel scanned images and double it in size with no loss of quality at all, and print it at 11×14 inches. Looks great.