Sunday 08/10/2025

Sunday morning stuff. My daphne is definitely kaput, darn it. Should I try to get a new one? Or plant something tough but boring, like a begonia. TBD.

Had a brainstorm. Wanted to have an online place to put all the good tech writeups I have done, so the AV team could access them, which is not tied to my name or user-id. But it turns out we had one all along. We had set up a free outlook email address, which is the user-id for our Zoom and Vimeo paid accounts. It turns out, that is automatically a minimal Microsoft membership, which includes 5GB of cloud storage. Perfect. So I started moving all those documents off my dropbox into that place.

After lunch met with Joanne and we made a Costco run. We each had a couple of things to look for. What a crazy place that is. Just insanely busy on a Sunday noon, huge parking lot 99% full, solid lines of people waiting to check out, you take one of their giant shopping carts and weave back and forth around the other shopping carts in every aisle. Crazy.

Later I figured out how the new mixing board uses its USB port and that finishes the docs. Now I just have to get all the files into the Microsoft cloud drive, and print them out, and make them known to everybody else.

Saturday 08/09/2025

First thing I spent 90 minutes in the auditorium exercising all the features of the new sound board. (This thing.) Well, except one. But I experimented with the Equalizer, which lets you tweak the sound of each mic, and the effects, to the extent that I figured out how to put a little reverb on a voice. And to play music from a phone into it via Bluetooth, and to play music from your laptop into it via a cable, and to play music off an SD card. The one feature I couldn’t try was that you are supposed to be able to connect to it by USB cable, but it takes a USB-B cable, not the old USB-A or the newer USB-C, so I couldn’t do that. I ordered a cable, so will try another day.

Anyway I got a start at writing up simple explanations of how to use those features. Then I put on my red docent shirt and went to the museum and led a tour. The crowd was very appreciative, which was nice.

Friday 08/08/2025

First thing was the usual Friday muffin walk with Joanne. Then I had an hour to work on the AV document I’m writing. Then the Line Dance class.

A neighbor who had become a friend, Pam, has been away for months, living at The Forum and getting rehab from a series of physical problems. She was scheduled to return to our Skilled Nursing section today at noon. She had emailed me asking me to help get her computer set up again. She had a MacBook that she took with her, leaving behind accessories such as her backup drive. So at 11:30 I went to the third floor where her apartment was, and got a nurse to open the door for me, and took all her computer stuff, mouse, keyboard, backup drive, USB hub, from her desk and carted them across to the SN wing. Well, Pam wasn’t there yet. There was no desk in the room assigned to her, but a coffee table that would work, so I set up her stuff as best I could and went away.

Did some more writing and editing on my document, then went back to SN at 3:30. Pam was there, and her friend Judy. So now I could put her MacBook in place and get her complete setup on her coffee table all ready to use, and a backup started.

However she then told me that during her latest operation, to fix a bone in her ankle, they had discovered bone cancer, very likely metastasized breast cancer, stage 4. Not a secret, she said.

This hit me fairly hard. I’ve worked with Pam on organizing events, she chaired the Event Coordinator committee meetings for a couple of years and did that well. Somebody dies here about once a month, but until now it’s never been anyone I knew well — just another in-memoriam card on the desk in the lobby, oh well. Pam isn’t dead but it doesn’t look good for her. She’s debating whether, after a recent series of health problems and two operations, she wants to start the oncology circus of radiation and chemo.

I had an early supper and met with Joanne again at 6:45 to drive over to Stanford to attend a concert by the Stanford Chorus. That was the first time I had been inside the Bing Concert Hall since about 2016 I think. It was a pretty good concert of a variety of pieces by a very large (at least 100 people on the stage) and well-trained group. Joanne, thank goodness, is strong, bright and vigorous, as am I, pretty much. How long, I wonder…

Thursday 08/07/2025

No, I didn’t go down to the gym. I did some writing, though, on the how-to document about using our new sound mixer board. Which is turning out to be a longer job than I expected, and not done yet. But several hours at my desk actually using my desktop computer. Did I leave the building today? No, actually I don’t think I did. Well, tomorrow I will, more than once.

Wednesday 08/06/2025

Joined a group walk organized by Joanne. Six people, two cars, drove down to the Baylands, walked 2.5 miles in about an hour, we don’t dawdle, baby. After lunch I cleaned up more photos. By cleaned up, I mean, I have a Dropbox folder where I dump any picture I want to keep. And periodically, like every six months or so, I go through them, maybe crop and straighten and tweak the color, and move the final image to a folder that makes some sense, like Channing_House_local or something.

And finished editing the many chapters of Joyce’s book. It wraps in 1995 with the description of the wreck she was in. She lived quite a bit longer. Anyone feel like writing an introduction or an Afterword?

Tuesday 05/08/2025

For the record I did not go to the gym this morning. I did go to the auditorium meaning to experiment with the new mixer board and get some pictures. I got the pictures but found a couple of issues, which I reported to our IT guy. But I can’t continue my writeup until those issues are resolved somehow. So back to clean up the apartment because it’s housekeeping day, and then spent some time working over some pictures. During the hours standing behind the table at the VCF I got interested in the women I was seeing. Women were (of course) a minority but they seemed to have a certain look. So I started sneaking candid shots with the phone. Phone camera is a great way to get candids, because, you know, everybody is always playing with their phone, right? Which happens to be an excellent camera. Here are a couple of the better ones.

Nerdy women, I love them to the bottom of my sexist old heart.

Then the writers meeting. And I went downstairs and was just going into the dining room with the Allens to sit down when I got a text from Joanne, saying, she was going to walk to the Edgewood market, did I want to join her. Well, yeah, so I told the Allens I had suddenly remembered a meeting, and zipped off to grab a hat and sunglasses and joined Joanne for what turned into a 3.5 mile walk. About 1:20 I remembered that I had a date with Peter and Brian for 2pm to teach them how to show movies. So we had to walk the 1.5 miles back faster than we might have done normally, but no problem, I can keep up with Joanne, barely.

So spent an hour showing Peter and Brian, who are the new self-appointed Tuesday Night Movie Committee, how to show a movie and run the sound system. Later I edited 2 more chapters of Joyce’s book; nearly done with it now. Then supper, and then to see the movie that Peter and Brian had picked to open with, The English Patient. Which is 2:45 long, so finishing at 9:45 which is my bedtime usually.

Monday 08/04/2025

First thing was to meet with the tech from the consultant as he installed our new audio mixer board. It’s an improvement on the old one in a couple of ways, mainly in that the features that were broken are fixed, Bluetooth input and effects. It’s a step back in a couple of minor ways. I need to go back and play with it a bit, and take some pictures, so I can document it for the team. But now I headed out for FOPAL where I knew there were a bunch of boxes of books waiting.

Sixteen of them in fact. It took four hours to go through everything and get my section all lined up and ready for the sale weekend.

Back in time for a short nap and then it was time for Poetry Out Loud, the monthly meeting led by Joanne. In the half hour before the morning meeting I had picked a poem to read, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. It’s really long but I read the first page and a half, really a fun read. The one part really tells you what the air quality was like in 1920s London, when everybody burned coal for heat.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

Later I helped Patty run a DVD on the 11th floor. Which for once went properly.

Sunday 08/03/2025

Had a good night of sleep. Did my Sunday morning things. At noon, met up with Joanne for a walk. We went to the Stanford Shopping Center to find a nice place for lunch. Really bad planning on our parts! Stanford Shopping Center around 1pm on a Sunday is a zoo. I think every church service in Palo Alto let out at 12 and everyone headed for the shopping center to find lunch. Well we did finally get a decent lunch and had a nice long walk and talk.

Chilled out the rest of the day. Feeling very good.

Saturday 08/02/2025

Like yesterday, out at 8am to pick up Frank and go set up for the 9am opening of the Vintage Computer Fest. At the end they announced the attendance had be 3,800 for the two days. It was crowded and busy the whole time. We went down with 31 boxes of stuff, here’s Fred carrying 16 of them.

Here is Adrian and Frank minding the store, with a typical batch of customers.

We came back with only 13 boxes, so about 2/3 was moved on to new homes. We took in something like $1,400, the final tally isn’t in yet.

At 5pm we started clearing up, packing everything neatly and moving it to Allen Baum’s car and to Fred. Off to FOPAL, unload. I finally got home at 6:30. Rather than eat in the dining room had a PBJ and a coke in my room. So glad that’s over. I have to give serious thought to whether I want to do it again next August.

Friday 08/01/2025

Out at 7:30 to pick up Frank at his house and on to CHM to prep our sale table. Picture later.

Spent the day behind the table, watching people look through our array of old computer books. Took in about $800 for the day. From 4:30 to 5:30 I attended a talk about the very first meeting of the Home Brew Computer Club. Several of the people who organized it and went on to start businesses around making hobby computer hardware, were on stage.

At 6, tidied up the table, tucked a lot of stuff under the tables for the night, headed out. Drove to FOPAL to pick up some things for tomorrow, left Frank there because he wanted to do a couple of things — he is a true hero of that organization — and got home to CH just in time to catch dinner before the 7pm cut-off for ordering. And so to bed.