Friday 04/15/2022

I made notes on what I did as the day went on because I had a feeling it was going to be busy.

• First up I worked on the letter to Wells Fargo. Yesterday I sent a draft to Joanne, stupidly as a PDF because I was using Pages on the Mac and she has an old PC. So she had sent me back an email with corrections. I entered all the corrections she wanted, then I exported the letter to .doc form and sent it to her. Hopefully she can open it and she is in charge of it now.
• Next it was 8:30 and time for my appointment with our CFO Jaisie. There was a mixup, she wasn’t in today, and had expected a telephone appointment. No problem, I called her. I learned a lot about what I wanted to know, namely, how does the Gift Shop do its banking.
• I wrote an email to Joanne summarizing what I had learned, and how sadly nothing about how the Gift Shop does banking is of any use to the Resident Association after all.
• I called Bert, mainly to find out why he hadn’t responded to my call for suggestions on what to ask the Heritage Circle Fund for. Well, he’s recuperating from a small operation and is behind in email. We chatted about several things and I learned some useful things.
• I called David M. about the speaker on Monday. I had told Harry, the event manager, that I would provide Zoom support, not realizing that David M. intended to do the A/V and had advertised the event has having no Zoom. I was pleased about that as it meant I was off the hook for doing A/V on Monday evening. David M. is a smart volunteer and extremely generous with his time so I am not going to complain about anything he does.
• Now it was time for a walk. Standard walk, and like the previous time, I felt more tired than I recall from earlier. I doubt if I could walk more than 3 miles now.
• Lunch.
• Realized I had received the powerpoint file from the presenter for Monday, when I thought I was doing the A/V. Emailed them on to David M.
• Talked to Jerry about his proposal for the Heritage Circle grant. We decided what to do next, mainly that I would write an email to IT manager Vanessa. We need her approval and support before going on. Later he called with the news that Vanessa is the duty manager this weekend (the staff managers rotate weekend duty) so she will certainly read her email and might even reply or meet in person this weekend.
• Spent an hour composing a fine email describing the project that we want to do and think the Heritage fund would certainly approve and pay for. Sent it to Vanessa. Then made an abbreviated version and shared it with Jerry, Lennie, Bert and David M, so whoever talks to Vanessa first will know what she has been told.

And that was the bulk of the day. This is what I call manager shit. I will get free of it I swear. It all started when Ian’s wife died and in the aftermath he asked me to take the A/V committee from him, and how could I say no to that? Now Ian goes about free as a bird…

Thursday 04/14/2022

It’s housecleaning day, so before I left for Shustek across the Bay, I tidied up for the cleaning lady. I also worked on the letter wanted by Wells Fargo, and sent it to Joanne for checking. And also sent an email to my AV team list, asking for suggestions on what we might ask for a Heritage Circle grant.

Then off to Shustek for a day of cataloging artifacts. One thing that I and Steve Madsen cataloged was a “Data Glove”, a fabric glove with lots of wires, part of a 1980’s research into human input to virtual worlds or something.

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At one point of the morning the people working at Shustek discovered that we were all recent widowers. Well, I guess I’m the oldest in that status, having lost Marian in 2018. Dave Bennett lost his wife just last November; Steve Madsen lost his just recently in I think it was February; and Sherman (forget his last name) also lost his wife recently. The Widower’s club. Statistically unlikely, given that (judging by Channing House) there are lots more widows than widowers, but there we were.

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In the middle of the day we had an indoor picnic lunch, all the volunteers from the other group at Yosemite came over, to hear a talk on the progress in converting the whole artifact database to a new software base, all in the cloud and hyper connected and shit. Another reason for this break was to give a surprise baby shower to Greta, one of the two absolutely stellar women who keep that place organized. We will have to get along without her for a lengthy maternity leave now; I hope she will come back from it.

This was a nice contrast on the two kinds of volunteer work. What I do for CHM and for FOPAL is simple. Although the work requires attention and effort, it is well-defined and bounded in scope and time. You go there, you do the job, you walk away and go home, done.

The other kind is what I’ve been calling “Manager work”. It has no boundaries of time, it is always on my mind. You have to get opinions from other people, you have to get concensus, you don’t do something and dust off your hands, all the tasks hang around pending on something else which relies on something else, etc., with no resolution. It’s what managers do, and I am a natural “member of technical staff”.

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In the evening I got an email from fave artist Carol Aust telling of the Hunters Point Open Studios weekend. I attended this in May 2019 (Day 0.154) and enjoyed it, and ultimately bought two paintings from one of the artists I first saw there. So I marked the calendar for this year, Saturday 4/30. Anyone want to join me?

Wednesday 04/13/2022

Today I spent time before and after lunch, creating Ebay listings for 3 vintage manuals. This involved taking pictures of their covers, title pages, a representative inner pages, processing those pics to look nice and square and readable, and writing the listings.

In between, at 10am I went up to 11 and met with Kass. She is going to do the AV thing for two different events, on this Friday and next. She had not operated the 11th floor stuff before. Just a few months ago I had written to IT manager Vanessa how bad these systems were. Since then the IT people have been busy because stuff is fixed and working again.

After lunch I created a new “Pro” Vimeo account for storing resident videos. I passed the admin duties to Lennie and Jerry, and Jerry said he would get right on it uploading the many videos (recorded Zoom meetings mostly) that haven’t been available.

At 3pm I met with Lennie in the auditorium to try her relatively new Macbook Air using the projector. It failed exactly like my new MacBook Pro fails: fine picture for 2-3 seconds then black. Informative but not helpful. I am going to be doing a zoom session this coming Monday and will have to use my 5-year-old MacBook again, and bypass all the stuff that IT has installed.

Patty is urging me to have the AV committee submit a grant request for something to the Heritage Circle. Think big, she says, not little thousand-dollar projects. Just what I need, another project to manage.

Tuesday 04/12/2022

Since I had no walk yesterday, I took one this morning. Finished without stopping but TBH I have to admit it was more tiring than usual.

The next activity was to walk with Joanne the new Treasurer, to Wells Fargo to try again to get signature authority straightened out. Recall that we went there two weeks ago and were told the kind of letter we would need. I composed the letter and sent a PDF of it to the banker dude. He replied he was passing it up to have the wording approved, and that he would be out of the office until Monday 4/4. All the week of 4/4-8 we got nothing back from him despite me sending two emails.

So yesterday I printed out the letter, which calls for 5 signatures from various current and former officers of the organization, and yesterday evening got those signatures except for Andrew, whom I called this morning and he signed at 9:30 and at 10:30 we were at the bank.

Well, come to find out that Mr. Padilla had been out of the country all week, was only just back, and only now could tell us that no, the wording wasn’t correct. We needed more banker buzzwords and he hand-wrote a template for the letter we really needed.

Joanne tried to talk him around but to no avail. So we get to do a new letter and get more signatures. And Joanne has a bunch of medical appointments this week so the next time we can go over there will be next week.

Meantime I have made an appointment with the Channing House CFO to learn more about how the Gift Shop does their banking through Channing House. If this works out, then it could be the next thing we do at WFB is close the account entirely. Which would be very satisfying.

I took a tech squad call to Susan, who is one of my favorite neighbors anyway. Her Mac Mail app was behaving very strangely, and when she tried to reboot she would get a message “Restart canceled by Mail.app”. Yeah well I know how to deal with apps like that. I taught her the 3-finger salute, command-option-escape that brings up the app killing dialog. Force-quit Mail, reboot, start Mail, all is well. Strange behaviors gone.

Later I checked out the microphone equipment on the 11th floor because very belatedly we were asked to provide AV support for an event on Friday. This Friday. On Monday. Grump.

Monday 04/11/2022

Couldn’t go for a walk because there was a Resident Association meeting at 9am and I’m too lazy to get started walking early enough to be back by 9am. The meeting was informative but no bombshells. I was relieved to see CEO Rhonda taking the staff question time; she’s been invisible around here for a couple of weeks and I start to worry, is she on the way out? But apparently not. One of the things she talked about was the difficulty of recruiting new staff to fill in the many resignations we’ve had lately.

After a quick bite I went down to FOPAL for the post-sale processing day. First, count all the books, and report the pre- and post-sale counts. My section moved about 60 books, about 15% of the total stock.

Next, triage. Look at every one of the 350-odd books still on the shelves and decide whether to leave them as is, or reduce the price written in the flyleaf, or to give up on the book and send it to the bargain room. I sent 3 boxes to the bargain room, books that had been on the shelf for at least 3 sale days and been price-reduced to $2.

Finally, process the single box of new donations waiting, pricing and shelving about 10 books.

Back home in time for a nap before the 4:45 Sixth Floor Meeting. Just about all the 6th floor people showed up. We congratulated ourselves on being the best floor in the building, which I think is true, a really nice bunch of people and no duds. Went over a few business items and then all went down to dinner together.

Oh, yesterday’s drip-drip runny nose? All dried up again. So did I have a one-day rhinovirus? Or was there one day of especially heavy pollen, and today’s morning sprinkles washed it all down?

Sunday 04/10/2022

I am not usually affected by pollen, but yesterday and today my nose has just… well if my legs could run as well as my nose, I’d be Usain Bolt. Ruined a lot of kleenex.

At 9am I drove down to FOPAL to tidy up my section, as usual for the Sunday of a sale weekend. People get books from other sections and leave them on my shelves. Why?

On return I brought up from the car, a box of ancient computer manuals. These were books that I didn’t think would sell in my section, and also didn’t fit what I think of as the demographic of the Vintage Computer Fest. And although I think they should be valuable, they are so rare that you can’t find any comparables at Bookfinder.com, so our high value section won’t take them. Which leaves only trying to sell them myself, on EBay.

This box was dropped off at my section with a note from someone named Nancy, and I’m not sure which Nancy it was. And I’ve been dithering over it for weeks. Well today at least I inventoried it. There’s one from 1991, one from 1980, and all the rest are 1970 or earlier. Control Data FORTRAN Reference Manual from 1964 is the earliest. Bunch of IBM manuals from the mid-1960s.

Later on, I took my M1 Macbook Pro to the auditorium and again tried to connect it to the hardware there. And again failed. Well, improved it. From the projector screen going black after two seconds, now I have the image remaining but flickering every 1-2 seconds. Blinkety blink. This is actually progress, because I find quite a few complaints online about M1 Macbooks making external monitors flicker. So I can hope Apple will fix this someday.

Meantime, the way IT has set up the hardware, I can’t use any of my Macs to do a hybrid zoom.

Saturday 04/09/2022

First thing I drove to Sunnyvale to check out the electronics flea market run by a local ham radio organization. The point was, was it a place where FOPAL could sell books? I wrote a note to interested parties after, about the small amount of book selling I saw. Turns out, Allen, a volunteer at FOPAL and also at CHM, was planning to sell some books there himself, but by the time he arrived at 6am, they had already sold all the vendor slots and he couldn’t get in.

From there I went to a Safeway and bought a few groceries, then came home but parked on the street as I meant to go out again. Took a break for lunch then drove over to the Stanford campus for “cardinalpalooza”, a day when several sports were happening and tickets were free. I watched men’s tennis for a while, the first time I’d been in the tennis arena. Then I wandered through the “family-friendly” stuff on the plaza, and to the baseball stadium where I watched part of a game.

That was about it for the day.

Friday 04/08/2022

Went for a walk. Then fiddled around tidying up the taxes. Printed my estimated tax vouchers, and made an addressed stamped envelope for each of the four. Wrote the check for the April one. Put the folder of 2021 tax documents away in the box with the last decade’s folders.

At 2:30 I joined David M in the auditorium where he was experimenting with the setup for a Sunday event. There is a new piece of equipment: the IT staff have added a powered dock that integrates the sound and video. All he has to do is plug in one USB-C and his PC sees two alternative screens. So now you have a three-monitor setup, your laptop’s screen is one; a separate monitor is one; and the projection screen is your third. This makes it possible to manage a Zoom host screen on the laptop, prepare visuals on the monitor, and then slide a selected visual onto the projector screen. Nice and quite a bit simpler than before.

Except when I tried it with my new Macbook Pro, it didn’t work. The same problem I ran into before, the Mac sees the other screens, but after a few seconds, the projector screen goes black. Later in the day I installed an OS update. Tomorrow I will try again; maybe the updated OS (or just the reboot) will have made a difference.

Much emailing back and forth on the issue of whether we should have a resident Vimeo account. Decided not to discuss it at the RA meeting on Monday.

Thursday 04/07/2022

Notice please that on 3.122, one-third of the year was behind us. Just sayin.

Today I went out for a bit of a walk and to deposit a check at the bank. Then I buckled down to a bunch of work. Primarily, creating a new residents-owned Zoom account and passing the information on how to log into it, to the people who will be using it. In the course of this, came my tax filing info from the accountants, so I was saving files in logical places, and doing e-signing of documents and so on. There is still some dumb clerical work for me to do which I put off to tomorrow.

I went out to meet Scott and Tom for lunch at Pro Bono. Unfortunately, Tom didn’t show. I was complaining to Scott that all the complicated stuff I was doing felt like being stuck in a first-line manager job. I really got to work clear of the decision-making processes around here. I want to be busy, but with the kind of practical work I enjoy: sorting books at FOPAL, documenting new acquisitions at CHM. Not trying to get people’s opinions sorted out and making decisions and writing endless emails.

Among the emails was another bombshell from staff: would the residents like to have their own Vimeo account on the same basis as the Zoom account? That is, that they’d reimburse us for the first year if we could commit to funding it from then on. More decisions: who would pay, who would manage the account and upload shit to it? More emails to compose and send to a different set of people.

Wednesday 04/06/2022

Today I had organized an outing for four of us: me, sister in law Jean, and 6th floor neighbors Patty and Carolyn. I was going to drive us in the Prius, but since Carolyn has a new Chevy Bolt, we took that. I drove part of the way, my first experience driving and all electric car. The Bolt is nice, a small somewhat hard-riding little sedan. Or I guess, mini-SUV or hatchback. Anyway it was fully charged when we started, showing 260 miles of range, and still had over 50 left on return.

Where we went was to Point Reyes National Seashore, in northern Marin County. The original plan was to go for a walk on some trail near the visitor center, then find lunch and return. However we got a bit lost — how do you get lost in this day and age? The car didn’t have GPS so we were using phones, and around Bolinas there was no phone service. So we took one wrong turn. Anyway by the time we got to Point Reyes there were enough hungry people that we went for lunch first. Then we found that all the restaurants and delis in Point Reyes were closed on Wednesdays, so we ended up getting our walkies going up and down the one main street. Finally found the bakery was selling pizza and calzones.

Then back to the very nice visitor center, and two of us, me and Patty, went for a walk on their shortest loop trail. Jean poked around in her usual fashion finding weeds and Carolyn chilled in the center. Then back home.

Tomorrow I have a lunch date with Scott and Tom, and a list of things to accomplish in the morning.