Friday 01/28/2022

Took a short walk in the morning, to Gamble Gardens. The rest of the morning I prepared to post a new sign-up sheet for my tray dispensing volunteers. We had been using 3 volunteers at lunch and supper shifts, but now that everyone knows the job, multiple people have told me that three is a crowd, two can do the job fine. So the signup sheet for the coming week only allows two volunteers in each shift.

Last week I promised some statistics, which meant getting out and dusting off the Python script I wrote a year ago, to collect statistics on volunteers then. It’s a feature of the signup software (slottr.com) that you can export the contents of a sheet as an Excel file. That gives you a spreadsheet with the names and times of people who signed up.

I had written a Python program to open such a spreadsheet, suck all the names out of it, and update a different spreadsheet that just has names and number of times each name has appeared. I can open this “tally” sheet and see that Leon Beeler worked 5 shifts, etc.

I had to modify the script to handle the new task, which took an hour to code and test, and then tallied the 3 weeks of volunteers so far. 64 different people have volunteered in that time (i.e. about 1/3 of the population of the tower), most for only 1 or 2 shifts, but several in double-digits. I really like my neighbors here.

After lunch I finally got to what I have been intending for a couple of days, planning a revised and shortened docent talk. Got a good start on that. Also worked on the VW model.

At 5:00 it was time to depart for a SWBB game. Stanford had closed down public access for several weeks but reopened effective today. The Cardinal played Arizona State and out-classed them in every way, leading by 30 at times. Tara put in all the bench-warmers for the fourth quarter and they let ASU come back a little, so we only won by 25.

Thursday 01/27/2022

Took a standard walk in the morning. Started later than usual, so that I could end up at CVS after 9am, when their pharmacy opens. Picked up a prescription.

Now I set to work on a project that’s been pending for weeks: selling some rare books. These were contributions from Allen B. Ordinarily I’d just have found them for sale online, verified they were selling above $25, and passed them on to Nigel of the FOPAL “High Value” committee. But these were rare enough that there were no comparables to be found. So the HV committee wouldn’t take them. I decided (last fall) to try selling them myself. I’d listed one set (a group of manuals all for the IBM 7040, a budget mainframe that IBM sold briefly in the early 1960s) and they’d done nothing. Now I edited the description and re-listed that group. Then another book, a Xerox corporate report by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (two people very famous in computer circles). This paper-bound report was a longer, and earlier, version of a very influential paper they published in 1977 in an IEEE publication.

I took multiple pictures and listed the book with a nice description, and a starting bid of $25 and a “buy it now” price of $50. And had lunch and a nap, and when I woke up, the book had sold! Somebody had “bought it now”. I emailed Nigel who replied that he’d come by and pick it up and see that it got mailed. FOPAL has a whole mailing/fulfillment shop that I’ve never seen, apparently.

Which brought me to 3pm when I had a date for a tech squad appointment with Kathy. She had various issues with her TV and DVD player which we resolved pretty easily.

Which brought me to 4pm when the semi-annual budget meeting was held. This event has our CFO present the FY 2023 budget and generally discuss the financial state of Channing House. Bottom line, we are still overspending our income but with the upgrade project completed, she forecasts a return to profitability over the next few years. Meantime we have 18 million in the bank.

Wednesday 01/26/2022

The main event today was a meeting of volunteers at CHM to prepare for returning to public access, now tentatively scheduled for 2/17. There were 25 or so regular volunteers in the room (plus another 7 or 8 on a big Zoom screen) and we are a very definite demographic, I doubt if anybody in the room was under 75.

The meeting was chaired by Kate McGregor, education (I think) director, from her remote location of… Homer, Alaska. She said a lot of things about how to design a docent tour. Mainly she inspired me to take another look at mine. As I said the other day, reading through the old script took over 1:15 which is just wrong; tours should be comfortably under one hour.

However, I make 6 stops, to make 6 major points about the progress to the “Revolution” of having a supercomputer in one’s pocket. I should not be talking for more than 5-7 minutes at any stop, which comes to 42 minutes plus at most 5 minutes of walking time, i.e. well short of 60 minutes. So my task between now and next Wednesday when I lead my first tour in 2 years(!) is to edit that script down to the essential points, so no stop takes more than 7 minutes to read.

But it was fun seeing all the docents again, two years older, and checking out the PDP-1 and the 1401 systems. One docent, Dave Bennett, lost his wife last fall and confessed to having a hard time since. “So much to do” on the one hand, and “lonely” on the other. I guess I’m fortunate in being less gregarious. I have more than sufficient people interaction just walking the halls here; but I wasn’t particularly lonely in 2019, either, check the early blog days.

Stopped on the way home to buy coffee. Picking up my supper, talked to dining supe Gloria who wanted to tell me that we don’t need 3 volunteers handing out trays, a point I had already come to on my own. Will cut it back to 2 per shift next week.

Tuesday 01/25/2022

Went for a walk this morning, as I hadn’t yesterday. At 10:30 joined the writers group. I hadn’t written anything on the topic of “conversation with an animal, preferably wild”. My neighbors had written some good things. Two stories of dogs were very affecting.

Went down to FOPAL for an hour and completed tidying up my section.

Did a few minutes on the VW model. Scanned the Cal. State 1099-G I received, adding it to the folder of 1099 and similar forms. The last of these won’t be in until near the end of February.

Monday 01/24/2022

I decided to FOPAL work first thing today, so no walk, but was at work at 9:15. Where I found 13 boxes of books. I spent 3:15 clearing them out, and barely got back to CH to pick up my lunch, which fortunately I’d booked for 1pm.

In the afternoon I revised my requirement statement for new mics on the 11th floor, making it a lot less formal and simpler. Then as only one person had signed up for the tray job from 6-7, I went down and worked that shift to help the one lone volunteer. It’s a fun and not at all difficult or pressured job.

Looking forward to Wednesday, when there’s a 6-hour meeting physically at the CHM. However that’s also my usual laundry day, so I rescheduled laundry for tomorrow.

Sunday 01/23/2022

Did a little work on the VW model. Worked 11:15 to about 12:45 because only one person had signed up for each hour of lunch. In fact, those two people could have handled it alone but I feel like they shouldn’t be left to work alone in a shift that is planned for 2-3.

Afternoon, went for a bit of drive but didn’t plan it properly beforehand, so basically just drove around for an hour. Then reorganized my two kitchen closets, which, except for the shelves where I store my hats, had rarely been touched since I moved in.

Saturday 01/22/2022

In the morning I went for a bit of a walk, finishing at the farmers market for a pastry and a bottle of fresh orange juice. At noon I went down to help with handing out trays, as there was only one person signed up for that shift. Marcia was there also and there was no rush. This volunteer task is really quite easy. But the kitchen staff does insist that we are helping. Later worked a bit on the model VW.

Friday 01/21/2022

Started the day with the usual MWF walk. Taking pains to notice any unusual feelings or fatigue, but nope. Normal. Normal is good.

After lunch I again talked through my docent pitch, and then signed up for the first docent round that will happen, if it happens, since two years ago. February 2nd, lead a party of 20 from the Danish Embassy! The Museum won’t officially open for visitors until that weekend, the 5th. If it does! Everything is iffy in plague times.

Did some work on the VW model. At 7pm, watched SWBB in the first of two games against Cal. Cal has improved a lot since last year, when both games were blowouts. This time the Bears played Stanford close. The game was tied at the half. Then Stanford exploded in the third quarter, outscoring Cal by 20, and the game finished with Stanford up 20. A Cal freshman, Curry, had 30 points.

Thursday 01/20/2022

Did my resistance exercises about 8am, and my have overdid them. I raised the resistance on several, small changes, like from 220 to 230 on the leg press, 45 to 50 on something else, etc. Have I mentioned these are air-pressure devices, where you operate +/- buttons to feed pressurized air into the cylinder that resists your motion? I was trying to find the resistance level for each, that makes it difficult to finish 20 reps. Now, thing is, I’m taking a fairly high dose of a beta-blocker, intended to keep blood pressure down, but it also has the effect of putting a cap on my heart rate. So the signal that I’m overdoing things, which would ordinarily be my heart rate going over 150, doesn’t happen. I just find myself suddenly tired and have to stop and rest for a minute or two.

So after this session I walked up from the basement to the ground floor to pick up a pastry, and then, heading to the elevator, I got a wave of dizziness, similar to vertigo but not quite the same. I made my way carefully to my room and had a nice lie-down on the bed and soon felt OK again. Only after reclining for 10 minutes did it occur to me to take my BP, and it was 117, not a record, but unusually low for me. Chances are it was lower still before that, and would account for the vertigo — but that’s speculation.

I felt normal the rest of the day, so this wasn’t a case of the aortic valve starting to collapse or anything serious, but probably just over-exertion.

Something I could do with minimal exertion was a long-delayed chore: I got out the script for my CHM Docent talk, which I had last edited in … 2017. And read it aloud, timing it. Yeah, it hasn’t got any shorter and still runs over an hour. Well, what would I expect? Anyway, got to go over it at least once more and I’ll be ready to docent again. The Museum currently plans to reopen the 2nd week of February.

Afternoon, I took the car out, first to get beer, then to get it washed. The car, not the beer. My fave beer, Rogue Brewery Dead Guy Ale, has very spotty distribution. Rogue has a “beer finder” map, you put in your zip code and they show you the retailers nearby, to which their products have been delivered lately. And it’s like their distributors are playing a game, or randomizing for fun. Six months ago, I found Dead Guy at BevMo in Menlo Park. Next time it was not at BevMo, but at a grocery store on Alma in Palo Alto. This time it wasn’t at either of those places, but at Whole Foods in Mountain View. That’s where I went, and found one six-pack in the “craft beers” chiller. Well, that’ll do me for a couple weeks, maybe more. Then I’ll find it somewhere else.

Back up to Palo Alto to have the car washed. Surprising how dirty a car can get when it spends 90% of its time in a garage. Lozano’s car wash, which I patronized since the 1980s, has closed. But Ducky’s car wash is closer and does a good job.

Wednesday 01/19/2022

Took a call for the tech squad, mostly reassured Grace about her iPhone. It isn’t behaving oddly after all. Then went out on my standard walk.

Worked on printing or re-printing some prints. I received the professional print, where I printed a picture on my Epson and also sent the same JPG to mpix.com. Their print was not better than mine in most respects: color saturation, sharpness, etc. However they had warmed it up quite a bit, when comparing their print to mine side by side, the whites in my print had a distinct blue or cyan cast. My bad; I should have seen that. I reprinted mine correcting for this, making sure that white highlights were white, not 7000Kelvin blue. Then comparing the prints, I don’t see any advantage in paying mpix.

On the other hand, their print is certainly as good as mine, and cost a reasonable $10 + shipping for a 10×15-inch print. Would I put $10 in labor in materials into any print? Probably; good photo print paper is expensive, also ink.

At 1pm it was time for the FOPAL volunteers monthly zoom meeting. No special news there. The meeting ended on a note of classic Zoom comedy. There’s a lot of unintentional comedy in zoom meetings. For example it always amazes me how few people pay any attention to how they actually look in their little thumbnail windows. They show as dark silhouettes with a bright window behind, or you see only their foreheads. Today there was a couple eating lunch, their kitchen table nicely framed. And there was one attendee who had dark and frizzy hair, and was sitting so that a ceiling fan was right behind her head. The out of focus spinning blades made it look as if she had a tornado on her head, or a swarm of bees.

Anyway, after all the business was done and the host was checking, “any more questions, well it’s been nice…” at this point some doddering fool accidentally (I think) shared his screen. That’s a two-step process, you click share screen (and the host should have set the switch so attendees could not do that, so her bad) and then you have to click on the window you want to share. So now we are all looking at a PowerPoint (I think) screen where this person is editing a presentation on something unrelated to FOPAL. You could see his mouse moving around. He was probably paying no attention to the meeting, completely unaware that all the others were now watching him edit his presentation. Everybody is yelling, “Ed, stop sharing your screen” to no effect. At which point I clicked Leave Meeting.

I noted that my calendar said I had a haircut appointment for 3pm, but I checked with the front desk, and of course the beauty parlor is closed during pandemic precautions.

At 2:30 I got a phone call from “unknown number” which I expected was someone warning me about my extended warrantee expiring (I always press 1 and when they come on, tell them they are lying pond scum and should die in a fire) but no, it was Apple calling to say that my MacBook was back! When I dropped it off Saturday I was told to expect 7-10 days so this was a pleasant surprise, so I went and got it.

When I got home I found that Apple had wiped the hard drive and reinstalled the OS. Now, they did ask me twice, is your data backed up? And I was sure it was backing up, so fine. Now I have a brand new MacBook, I have to choose my language and time zone, and then tell it where to recover saved file from and… it doesn’t recognize the backup drive.

The backup drive is attached to the desktop machine. Long story short, for some reason the backups for the MacBook are kept in a “sparsebundle” file, and the Migration app didn’t know what to do with that. I go to the internet and quickly find directions on how to proceed. I have to physically attach the drive to the MacBook, reboot it, do NOT go into the Migration assistant but continue to the default new system. Then mount the sparsebundle as a drive, and NOW start the Migration assistant and it will recognize it as a backup.

That all worked, restoring all my settings and data files. Now it’s 4pm. However, I had never backed up the /Applications folder. After all, the apps are all the same… no they are not. Turns out there are several apps important to my use of things, which are not in the base OS and now I need to download them individually. My two web browsers, Firefox and Brave. My Sudoku game. My Solitaire game. My RSS reader. So that was a busy hour up to 5pm, downloading and installing important things. Oh, I just thought of another one, Graphic Converter, the simple graphic tool I used for photos I put in the blog.

But everything is pretty much back to normal now, and it is so nice to be off that Chromebook.