Wednesday 03/16/2022

Went for a standard walk first thing. Felt well and strong, yay.

At 10am I held a meeting of the A/V support team in my 6th floor lounge area. We talked at length about hybrid zooms, what we’d learned etc. Yesterday morning I had tested a second way to get room audio into zoom and told them it worked. Later, David M. had tried it and says it had not worked. We also discussed at length what more equipment we need and how to get it from Vanessa, the rather uncommunicative IT manager.

Then we went to the auditorium so I could show them the second way worked — and it did not. What the hell… I swear to god it worked yesterday but today… no.

I am committed to running a hybrid zoom Saturday, David M. on Sunday, and the big Judge Cordell one on Monday.

After lunch it was time for the monthly FOPAL section manager’s zoom. Nothing new there.

Spent the rest of the day being quiet, reading and watching YT videos and real TV.

Tuesday 03/15/2022

Last night I went downstairs to the auditorium and tried out the tech for bringing room audio into zoom, and it all worked the way I thought it should. So this morning while drinking my coffee I wrote to my AV gang documenting that. Later in the morning I went down again and tried out a different and better method, and came back up and documented that.

Then it was time for a meeting of the Strategic Planning Committee, preparing for the Board Retreat this Saturday, which I am supposed to attend. There’s a good Saturday ruined… well, no, actually it could be quite interesting. We’ll see.

Next I joined the writers group in progress. When asked if I’d written anything for them I could honestly say I’ve been writing my ass off, but all in emails for the AV crew.

That over, I got a hasty lunch in the dining room and went to FOPAL where I completed the work that I left unfinished yesterday, owing to not feeling very well then (feel fine today). FOPAL had been deluged with donations yesterday it seems, the sorting area filled with many boxes and bags. So after I finished fixing up my section, which took under an hour, I spent another hour doing sorting. Haven’t done sorting in a while; it’s a fun task.

Then it was time to drive over to meet sister-in-law Jean for coffee, near her church in Mountain View. Pleasant chat reviewing all the various relatives. I meant to ask her about whether she is missing the iPhone I took away from her months ago, promising to upgrade it (I’ve been dithering over that for months). But I forgot to bring it up.

I didn’t feel hungry this evening, anyway had eaten a decent lunch and a giant fudge brownie at Starbucks, so had a minimal cheese sandwich for supper.

Monday 03/14/2022

First thing was the RA meeting, our next big attempt at hybrid auditorium/zoom meetings.

From the standpoint of the about 75 people in the auditorium, the meeting went well. I’m told the remote attendees had bad audio. The only way, I’m told, that David G. could get audio out to zoom was to unmute one of the two laptops he was using, so the room audio could go acoustically through it to zoom. That is not how it is supposed to work! I was there but not directly involved and didn’t realize what was happening.

After the meeting, David G. and John M. worked together trying to solve that problem and tried to get John ready to host the next big deal, Judge Cordell on the 21st. David G. wrote to the AV team that he had not been able to solve the audio issues. I don’t understand the goddam issue. There are not one but two electrical feeds of room audio that could be piped in to a laptop. I need to go down there and do some tests.

After that, I zipped back to my room and made some phone calls trying to get somebody to do simple A/V for the Hearing Support group on Tuesday. They put in a request just a couple days ago — there is supposed to be a month’s lead time for such requests. So I got somebody on the second try.

During these phone calls I got a sudden wave of vertigo. Not bad but enough to make me feel ill. Nevertheless, I needed to go to FOPAL for post-sale cleanup, which I did. Took my post-sale count and tidied the shelves, then came on back and sat down in my easy chair and had a two-hour nap, after which I felt better.

Then I figured out the answer to a nagging problem. The system for online event support, online EPFs (event planning forms) has finally started working. Whenever somebody files an EPF that requests audio/visual support (most but not all of them), I get an email copy. What to do with the emails? In the old days, the EPF was a paper form that I’d get in my cubby in the mail room. Once a month we would have a committee meeting and distribute the EPFs into the hands of the members who volunteered to support a given event. How to do it now?

I had set up an online spreadsheet, a Google Sheet, listing summary info for all the events, and today I realized that you can insert a “note” — any text document — into a cell of a Google Sheet. So now I just copy the contents of the emailed EPF and paste it into the Notes column of the sheet in the row for that event. And it’s there for review by anybody. And the major point, out of my in-box.

Then I wrote comments on Bert’s proposal for video equipment. And that brought us to supper time. I was going downstairs alone, standing by the elevator, and decided on a whim to walk down the hall and knock on the door of Leon and Margaret and see if they were going to dinner. They were, and with Cindy we had a nice table for four.

Sunday 03/13/2022

Read the paper, watered the plants, did the crossword. Now what? Decided to walk to California Ave. Did that, had a pastry and a bottle of juice, decided to Lyft home.

After lunch it was time for the second scheduled hybrid zoom of the weekend. Also run by David M., whose memorial yesterday came off relatively smoothly. This one didn’t.

David M. was at the controls. David G., who will be running the Resident Association meeting tomorrow, and me, David C., and Lennie, another frequent zoom host, were sitting in the front row kibitzing. In the half hour before the scheduled start, David M. and the speaker, Sally, ran through what they would show. First her intro slide, then a video, then back to her slides. It all looked good.

I was watching the zoom on my phone. Lennie saw I was doing that and she got out her phone and joined the meeting. Unfortunately she didn’t select “No Audio” when that choice came up. Having the phone, in the zoom meeting, with its mic on, created a stunning audio feedback loop. Not a simple one. It goes like this:

• Lennie’s voice goes into the iPhone
• With a half-second delay to pass through the internet to Zoom.us and back, it comes out of the host’s laptop
• Which is connected by HDMI to the Auditorium sound system because its screen is being mirrored on the projection screen
• Lennie’s voice comes out of the ceiling speakers and enters her iPhone.

The long delay give the whole thing a pulsing, booming echo and nothing you did would shut it up until Lennie killed the zoom app on her phone.

We thought that was fixed, but then the reverb echo started up again. Everybody denied they were using their phones. Maybe it was David G’s laptop? The echo died out but as soon as Sally started talking, it came on again. Meanwhile, the remote participants were in the Zoom chat saying “NO SOUND”. David M. tried everything he could think of to make the sound start and the echo stop. Finally he got pissed and declared the event was cancelled, we would try again next week.

The dozen people who had showed up to the auditorium wandered away, David M. packed up his equipment, and David G. took over to practice for the RA meeting tomorrow.

At supper, Carolyn commented that at her church (where David M. also goes) the tech committee spends hours on Saturday setting up for the hybrid zoom for the Sunday service.

Saturday 03/12/2022

The main activity today was to lead a tour group at the museum. This was a custom tour, 20 college students from the Silicon Valley Innovation Center or some such. This was a failure, as a tour. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t hold their attention, and at least 3/4 of them had drifted away by the end. I picked up a few ordinary visitors along the way so ended up with 8 or 10 people but it was not a success. I really don’t know what went wrong.

At 3pm it was time for a memorial meeting here. This was unusual; rarely are people who die here also memorialized here. In this case, Vergenia (yes, so spelled) Partington had lived more than a decade here, and died at age 104. Her daughter Karen and son-in-law David M. are also residents, overlapping the mother’s last 5 years or so! Vergenia was apparently well-known here, although I never met her; she was living in the Lee Center before I moved in.

Anyway, David M. and Karen had been working for weeks on preparing multiple videos documenting her life, with lots of pictures, and interviews with her six (!) sisters and her children and grandchildren. David M. has been working extremely hard lately to master all the ins and outs of a zoom simulcast. On his behalf I am glad this is over for him and came off well.

I attended the first half in the auditorium. I learned that the Partington family with its 7 daughters started in poverty, the father a gardener on an estate in Chautauqua NY, and they ended up putting all 7 through college, 3 teachers and 4 nurses I think it came to.

There was an intermission and I went back to my room and joined the zoom side of it just to see how it worked out. There were only 19 zoom attendees, maybe only half from Channing House, while there were at least 50, probably more, in the auditorium. Then there was a reception with some really tasty snacks from our kitchen and wine. I bet Karen and David paid a good price for that support.

Anyway, hybrid zoom worked, all their videos seemed ok, so, good on them.

Friday 03/11/2022

Took care of what felt like a lot of pending business but it didn’t really amount to much. Well, I did finish the tax workbook, uploaded all the files, and turned in the electronic workbook. Hopefully that’s done for the year.

Oh, one of the pending things was to complete the application for a Palo Alto parking permit, through their ridiculously complicated, ugly, and confusing website.

Thursday 03/10/2022

Yesterday afternoon, Gerald, one of the IT staff people, emailed to say that a technician from the auditorium system vendor would come by at 8am today to diagnose the problem with the wireless mics. Would I like to be there? Well, duh.

So first thing I was in the auditorium. The tech was informative and helpful. Unfortunately his diagnosis was that our mixer board was failing and it wasn’t part of the system they had sold. Nobody is quite sure how old it is or when it was bought. He didn’t want to open it up and look; just advised replacing it. Warned that it might fail further, different mics cutting out, maybe during a performance.

He was able to help in another way, though. The whole system runs in one of two modes, auto or manual. In auto mode the mixer board is completely bypassed, and all the mics work. Unfortunately, the only way we had to capture the sound signal, the combination of all mics, for a zoom session, was via the MON jack on the mixer board. So for a hybrid zoom we had to run in manual mode, in which case, some of the mics were dying in the board.

But the tech spent quite a bit of time modifying the system so he could bring out the audio feed in auto mode, so we could do a hybrid zoom without the mixer board.

It’s my personal plan that next week, after the three (3!) upcoming hybrid zoom events, I’m going to take my tools some late night and open that mixer up. Look for the spider nest or leaking capacitor or whatever is causing the problem.

Around 1pm I drove down to FOPAL, checked my shelves prior to the sale weekend, and did a pre-sale count.

Later in the day I printed two more pictures for my picture rails. There are people who walk the halls for exercise and more than one has told me they like finding new pictures.

At 7:30 I went down to listen to classical music by five young musicians from the Music@Menlo organization. They were very skilled, which is no surprise as they are mostly graduates of Julliard and pursuing advanced degrees at various universities.

Wednesday 03/09/2022

Today being laundry day, and me holding the 10am-2pm laundry slots, I took only a short walk in order to back in good time to start the laundry. With the first load drying and the second load started, I went down to get some lunch.

There I was accosted by David G, who wanted my help at 1pm, rehearsing the setup for multi-casting a live and zoom meeting, the Resident Association meeting of next monday. It was already 12, and I didn’t see any open seats in the dining room and didn’t want to wait for service, so I went back to my room and had a Plan B, namely a lovely PBJ.

At 1pm I joined David and helped him set things up and try them out. The final setup is,

• The ceiling-mounted camera looking at the lectern where Carol, our President, will run the meeting.
• A second laptop that shows the agenda, a two-page powerpoint.
• A webcam on a tripod facing the audience.

David starts the Zoom meeting on his laptop. He takes his video from the ceiling camera, and “spotlights” it, so what zoom attendees see, is the lectern and Carol in the middle of the screen.

From the second laptop he joins the meeting, and its video is the agenda page, which he also spotlights, the now zoom attendees see the lectern on one side and the agenda on the other.

His laptop’s screen output goes into the system to the projector on the ceiling, which shines on a big screen at the back of the stage, so people in the auditorium can see the zoom screen, mainly they can see the agenda points..

At the end of the meeting when the last agenda item is “open discussion” the second laptop replaces the agenda with the webcam, so the zoom attendees see the lectern and a wide view of the physical audience.

I had to leave him at 1:50 because I had the RA executive committee meeting at 2. This is my last exec committee meeting, as I will be termed-out as treasurer effective next week. There wasn’t a lot of news although there was a lot of discussion.

Now I got an hour break, and then it was time for the 6th floor meeting at 4:45. No big issues there either, but we had good attendance for once, only a couple of people not there. My 6th floor neighbors are a nice bunch of people.

Had supper with Carolyn, Edie, and Patty. Carolyn has just sold her house. She didn’t say for how much, but they had a number of bids. I know it was a large house only a few blocks from Channing House, so I imagine she got at least 2.5 million. She wasn’t broke to begin with, either.

Tuesday 03/08/2022

Went for a walk in the morning. Attended the writers group at 10:45 although I had not written anything. The prompt, “something had to be done”, evoked several interesting responses from others.

I see that I was supposed to do something at 4pm but I didn’t. Had a nice supper with Susan and Harry.

Monday 03/07/2022

I had an appointment for a cardiac ultrasound at 8am. I also wanted to touch base with Ian, who was going to do an auditorium event at 11am. I knew he ate breakfast in the dining room early, so at 7:30, on my way to the basement for my car, I stopped off at the dining room — but he wasn’t there yet.

So drove to PAMF and had my chest ultra-sounded. Very relaxing, lie on your left side while the tech runs a cold gooey sensor over your ribs. It was done by 8:45 so I drove back to CH, ran in, and called Ian. Of course this proved unnecessary as he had everything in hand and was totally on top of the job.

So now I could go to my main job of the day, FOPAL, where this is the last few days before a real sale weekend, the first in months. There were I think two sale weekends last fall, after Delta and then it was shut down again for Omicron. I found another 10 boxes of computer books waiting to be triaged. Over the next four hours I went through all of them. The proportion of “keeps” was low, I shelved maybe 1 in 8 and sent the rest to the bargain room to get $1 if they could, or be recycled if not.

It’s interesting how donations ebb and flow. For a while I got so many books about compilers that I started a special shelf for them. That’s dried up and now I am getting lots of books about medical data processing. Just depends on who’s retiring and downsizing, I guess.

I walked out of dinner. I went down at 6. It was Italian night — the chef has been doing a different regional cuisine every day for weeks now. I chose Veal Saltimbocca, which is a veal cutlet wrapped in prosciutto, the thin-sliced ham. The presentation was nice, very professional looking, but the food itself was bad. The veal was tough as boots, I could barely cut it with my table knife, it was red in the middle, the ham was paper-thin as it should be, but also paper-crisp. I took two bites and excused myself and left.