Thursday 07/31/2025

Hit the gym at 6:15am, so proud of myself. Later got a start on the final AV how-to document, on our microphone system. Then at 10 left for FOPAL where I met up with Frank and began packing boxes of books into Fred. Finally had 19 boxes, so the Forester really is an SUV. The Prius only held 16. (Prius is a stealth SUV.) With help from John and Henry and Jennie we got all the boxes down to the Computer Museum and schlepped them on hand-trucks up to the 2nd floor. Then Frank and I made a start at laying books out in some kind of rough organization, programming languages at one end, hardware at the other. Here’s a picture Henry took about half way done.

We’ve got way more books and boxes of software and shit to fit on the tables, but that’s all right. Oh and then Erik, who organizes the Vintage Computer Fest, came by with two large boxes of books that he thought we could sell. Surprise, one of his boxes had three books by some dude named Cortesi!

Anyway I was back to CH around 4, rather wiped out. Tomorrow we get an early start, finish organizing and laying stuff out for when the show opens at 10am.

Funny, the CHM volunteer guy put out an email looking for docents for this busy weekend. Sorry, dude, I’ll be busy upstairs.

Wednesday 07/30/2025

Tired of trying to think up titles. Also tired of not being able to remember what I did with the day. At one point this afternoon I remember thinking, damn, I have been busy all day and can’t remember what I was doing. Took a walk early. Stopped at Ace hardware to buy a teeny little battery to put in my oral thermometer, which finally died after like 3 years of daily use. Worked on documentation for the AV team, getting that folder of good stuff organized and editing things.

At 3 the Good Times group had a costume panic in the auditorium. My phrase. Stew and Lou brought up all the costumes that had been stored by a couple of decades of drama groups, in a locker in the basement. Lots of wigs and hats and masks and some clothes. The idea was for people to pick out things they could wear in the upcoming broadway show tunes thing. It was pretty funny, a dozen old farts trying on wigs. A picture was taken but not on my phone, thank goodness.

Lecture in the evening, ex-mayor of East Palo Alto, about its history and recent economic recovery. From “murder capitol of the nation” (murders per capita, not in absolute numbers) back in the 1990s, to recently a year without any homicides. New shopping center, new housing, etc.

The talk itself was ok but there were so many AV flubs I was squirming in my seat. Mostly not the fault of the volunteer who was running it. The guy doing the talking constantly fiddled with his mic, making scratching and thumping sounds. And he had a sheet of notes that he kept folding and unfolding, making more distracting noises. And he walked all over the place unpredictably, making the AV guy nuts trying to follow him with the camera. The guy who ran three videos for him had trouble getting the sound to come out, and he turned on these lame Youtube generated captions which lagged 30 seconds behind the voice on the video. We got to question time and turned on the audience mics and immediately there was feedback, at which point I left.

Tuesday 07/29/2025

In the morning I hit the gym at, believe it or not, 6am. Later, before and after the writers meeting, I edited two of my old how-to documents for the AV team, getting them all current and nice. I have one more how-to that I should write and then I will have put all my wisdom in the binder for all to read.

Writers meeting 11, I had nothing, several nice contributions from others, though.

Laundry started at 2.

At 4pm was the monthly AV meeting. Pleasant meeting, mentioned that John is going to do some of the administrivia now. Short meeting, allowing me to get the laundry wrapped up by 5, when I met with Joanne and we walked out to Tacolicious for supper. Our first chance to be together in days.

Monday 07/28/2025

First thing I took Fred and drove down to FOPAL. Stopped on the way to buy coffee. Then two plus hours processing 9 boxes of donations.

Filled the tank of Fred Forester for the first time. Drove home via Safeway to stock up on sandwich makings and gatorade.

At 2pm I had a meeting with a dozen other people to see a demo of a robot. The manufacturer, a French company, wanted input on it for use in senior residences. I had a poor opinion of this thing as I think my neighbors did. It basically can’t do anything useful except to hold a halting conversation. And the “ears” are just stupid.

Next was the Common Spaces Advisory group at 4pm. Nothing special to report there, except I got tagged with an action item, to come up with a furniture list to complete the green room, by the next meeting which will be 9/22.

Sunday 07/27/2025

Watered plants. I am not happy with my plants, or them with me. The Daphne is looking really bad; it had some bug infestation that I killed with Sevin, then some kind of mildew that I killed with copper mildew spray, but it just hasn’t come back very well. Plus the dragon wing begonias that I divided back in February (6.085) have really not come back like I hoped. Just barely hanging on, a few leaves on each.

Walked to the Cal. ave. street market just for exercise mostly. Took a Lyft back, so only 2.5 miles for the day. I have a plan to make up for that tomorrow.

Spent most of the day writing an illustrated how-to document on operating our whole video system. I’m quite proud of the result. This is all part of trying to get the writeups I’ve made over the past four years centralized and edited, so as to get myself out of a job.

Saturday 07/26/2025

Worked on my estate documents in the morning. Only one missing item of info and I can put them to bed for another year.

Then drove down to Dennis’s place and he and I walked out to a local burger joint for burgers and shakes.

Returned to FOPAL where the volunteer Ice Cream Social was in progress. Ate some ice cream and talked to several people trying to line up support for the Vintage Computer Fest. Next Thursday is when we move 25 or so boxes of books down to the Computer History Museum and set up.

Came back and skipped supper, but spent a couple of hours working to organize the how-to documents for the AV group.

Friday 07/25/2025

First thing was a walk with Joanne for coffee and to get her muffin. Then I took care of several little errands around the place and before you know it it was 12 and time to meet her again for a lunch date. She had suggested lunch at the Menlo Tavern, which turned out to be a super nice place inside a big hotel in Menlo Park. For once she let me buy her lunch.

Now to work on a project I had agreed on with John yesterday: over the 4 years I’ve been AV chair I have written half a dozen how-to documents and he wondered if they were available, and where. Of course not, they were all mixed up in a single folder with dozens of other AV related documents. So today I was pulling the how-tos out into a separate folder, and of course I have to read them over and edit them. The first thing I did, partly before lunch, was to update and make even simpler, the instructions for using the 11th floor TV. And print it out and put it in the binder under the TV. But there are other write-ups more specifically for the AV team.

I got a bunch of that done, then I turned to a task that Joanne had talked me into. She was talking about how she had been updating and revising all her various estate documents and were mine in proper order? Did I have a Document Locater document for my estate binder? Well as a matter of fact, I do have exactly such a document, but now I had to check. Yes, pretty much, except there were a couple of things that were out of date. So I got those docs out and marked them up and I’ll edit and reprint them tomorrow.

Down to dinner rather late, which turned out to be fortunate, as I fell in with Mickie and a new couple, Karl and DeeDee, and we had a long getting-to-know-you conversation over dinner. Karl was a long-time employee of Amdahl and then Synopsis, so, a software guy. DeeDee was a counselor, social worker, then pivoted and became a programmer and then a tech writer at Apple. So, my kind of people.

Thursday 07/24/2025

Hit the gym at, would you believe, 6am. Two full rounds of the machines. I did this early because I had a date to walk out for breakfast with Joanne. We walked over to cafe Zoe in Menlo Park. There’s nothing special about Zoe, it’s just a neighborhood coffee place, but it’s a different and more scenic walk than our usual.

It’s irritating that I don’t remember what I did with the rest of the morning. I know I wasn’t idle… well, at 3 I met with John M who is maybe going to take over some of my AV chair duties. We get along well.

Then I took a tech call to help Mary Ann. Her vision is very poor, but she keeps an active email and writers-group presence. She has a Macbook that has been set up with screen zoom which would make the print big enough for her, but the problem is the keyboard — she can’t see well enough to resolve the symbols on the key tops. So she does almost everything with her iPhone, with the font set to almost the max available size. She had a printing problem that we pretty much resolved.

Wednesday 07/23/2025

Started the day driving down to FOPAL at 8:30 and worked there until 11:30. Got all the backlog cleared out. Then back to CH just in time to had Fred Forester over to his owner who was ready to leave on a date of her own.

A select few people who see that picture can say very precisely where she was standing. Well, three living people, is all. Because they’ve stood there, walked that ground.

At 3pm I met with Susan who volunteered to perform in the upcoming musical event, 9/19, when the Good Times committee is presenting a selection of broadway show tunes. She and I are going to try to sing along to the Supercallifragalisticexpialidocious scene from Mary Poppins. Today we practiced it a bit. If you try to sing along with the video of the movie scene, you basically can’t do it. My gosh they go at an incredible rate.

HOWEVER if you know what you are doing, any Youtube video has a settings icon which if you click it, gets a menu that includes “Playback speed” and click that and select speed 0.75 and hey, all of a sudden they are going at a rate a human mouth could keep up with.

Tuesday 07/22/2025

Hit the gym for one round of machines. Better than none. Then did some admistrative work for the AV team, but possibly I have a victim, excuse me, noble volunteer, to take it over.

Then with some time to spare I wrote a little thing for today’s writers meeting. Nothing special. Several much better essays in today’s meeting.

Did some more work on pictures from Joyce’s book. It’s as much trouble as the editing of the text, grumble grumble. But then I remembered to look in the big family genealogy book of Laurel’s that I got from Dennis a while back and never looked at. There I found some versions of pictures that were in Joyce’s book but printed much better, like this one of Joyce and Eleanor at ages 7 and 9, about.

Later in the day was the monthly Tech Squad meeting. Considerable discussion about the proposed new satellite campus, and whether the resident volunteers would provide tech support to the people there, a long 5 minutes walk away from 850 Webster.

After that I checked out the new music practice room, and took the liberty of moving a music stand from the green room into the practice room. Exciting times around here.