Thursday 02/04/2021

About the only thing of note today was that I got the Prius serviced. And for an additional $400, I had a catalytic converter anti-theft plate installed on the bottom of the car. Although I park in a secure garage, there will be times when I go somewhere and park on the street, maybe during a concert — yes, someday I expect to attend concerts and plays again — and I don’t have to worry about coming back to the car and having the sound of an open exhaust. And although I do carry comprehensive insurance with a $100 deductible, so it wouldn’t cost me $3000, a stolen “cat” still takes the car out of service for a day or two and is just very angering.

I thought about taking a fat sharpie and writing something rude on the shiny new plate that runs across between the frame rails. Like “suck it, asshole”. But that might be misunderstood by legitimate mechanics. Or it might inspire a frustrated cat thief to key the car as he left.

I measured the distance to the dealer on google maps; it was 3.6 miles. So I drove down and walked back. There was a nice almost 4 miles (by the end of the day), done. At 2pm when Wanda came to do my room, I called up a Lyft for the return trip. This was the first Lyft I’d had in a year.

I took a look at the current Prius Prime (the equivalent of my plug-in, with 20 miles of battery before the ICE kicks in). A very friendly salesman said he would get me an estimate on the trade-in value of my (very clean, low-mileage) 2012 Plug-in. Later he called me to say that his manager actually was the salesman who sold us the 2012, and remembers it and us. I don’t know if that’s baloney; it was one of the first Plug-ins they handled so maybe he remembers it. More likely he just looked it up in the dealership sales file. Type the license plate into his computer, boom.

Anyway, said manager now thinks it would be worth $7500 for trade-in. That’s rubbish. I know they are going for $9000 and up. I told the friendly salesman I would probably not be buying until the pandemic was over and I could actually drive anywhere. “Call me around Thanksgiving,” I said, and he said he would.

Weddnesday 02/03/2021

Went for the usual walk which felt fine. After a bit of lounging around and tidying up my room, I went to Stanford Shopping Center. All I did there was go into Macy’s and buy a belt to replace the current one. I had shortened this belt back in December, to fit the new waist I got when I lost 10 pounds over the aorta hospital period. But then, being made of a fairly stiff leather, it had started to break at the new hole I was using.

Today I found a similar, reversible belt in the new length (34), and in a more softer, more flexible leather. So that was good.

At 2pm we had the RA Executive Committee meting. Nothing much to report here. The primary discussion was about the plans, by the editors of the monthly resident newsletter, to have a special issue devoted to resident reactions to the plan to take over dining services from Sodexo. We decided it wasn’t awfully wise to have a lot of uninformed comment on a plan that hasn’t been done yet, but it was a matter of press freedom so we couldn’t tell them not to do it.

Tuesday 02/02/2021

Today was the 14th day after my 2nd vaccination shot, and the day I decided I would begin doing a few things I would not have done before. I had collected quite a list and started out about 9am to do some of them.

I went to Piazza’s market and bought some things that, before, I would have ordered through Instacart. Then I went to BevMo! in Menlo Park, because the Rogue Brewing Co. website said, they stocked my favorite beer, Dead Guy Ale. It’s an amber ale that is on the opposite end of the bitterness scale from an IPA, mellow, a bit sweet. Also quite potent. I had a can for dinner, but drank about half before the tray arrived, and felt quite the little buzz for an hour afterward.

That ran the time close to 11am when the writers’ group met. I had written for this week so I didn’t want to miss it. The prompt was, write about someone you remember who taught you something. I wrote a somewhat fictionalized account of a moment early in my IBM career. Fictionalized because I can’t remember the name of the guy I’m remembering, although I am clear on the details of the problem and the punchline. See below.

Yesterday, I didn’t mention, I had declined dinner (didn’t care for the selections) and instead made myself a lovely cheese, salami and mayo sandwich. Today I had declined the lunch selections, so I made myself a lovely open-face PBJ. I am such a sophisticated gourmet.

After lunch I went out again, this time to IKEA to buy a pillow. The last two pillows I’ve bought, I got at BedBath&Beyond, but the only standard size firm pillow they have, is a MyPillow. And I will not support that sonofabitch with another dollar. So I remembered that IKEA has pillows, and went there. I will find out tonight if the Lagensrom or whatever it was called, is satisfactory.

From there I went to the big Safeway in Menlo Park, because Piazza’s didn’t have Quilted Northern toilet paper. I keep a personal stock of that because I don’t like the thinner stuff that CH supplies, and I was running low. Aha, Safeway did have it.

There’s another item on my list that I didn’t get to, Macy’s to buy a belt. I’ll do that tomorrow maybe.

Here is the fictionalized account of a memorable moment in early IBM. With an illustration, even.

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It was 1968 and I was just into my second year as an IBM “field engineer”, a title for we who repaired IBM data processing machines on the customer’s premises.

Every morning I would don my business suit, white shirt and tie, pick up my pager (remember pagers?) and my brown leather briefcase full of tools and spare parts, and drive to the IBM office at 340 Market Street. After a brief team meeting we would pick up our first calls from the girls in the dispatch center, and head out for a day of fixing machines.

I was trained on the card accounting hardware: keypunches, card sorters, and the big gray rhinoceros-sized accounting machines. I was becoming more confident in my ability to diagnose faults in these electro-mechanical beasts, where maintenance might require lubricating a cam shaft or adjusting a spring’s tension as it often as it did changing a vacuum tube or filing the contact points on a relay.

One thing I was not trained on, and feared, was the Selectric typewriter, with its bobbing “golf ball” print head. In IBM’s highly stratified hierarchy, typewriters were part of Office Products Division. OPD had its own band of field engineers that worked out of a different floor at 340 Market. I was in the Data Products Division where we worked on digital stuff, including the real computers like the then-new IBM 360 line.

However, this sharp line was being blurred, because a few DPD machines were using Selectric typewriters as I/O devices. Around the office I’d heard plenty of bad-mouthing of the Selectric as a fussy, touchy, hard to maintain beast, and I was frankly glad I’d not been sent to school to learn it.

One day, my pager went off and when I called the desk, Peggy the dispatcher asked me to take a call to work on a 6400 accounting machine. I only vaguely knew what that was, and said so. “Please, can you go look at it?” Peggy pleaded, “I’ve got nobody else free and the call is two hours old. I’ll get some backup for you as soon as I can.” So I drove to an unfamiliar office somewhere south of Market and faced… my worst nightmare.

The 6400, now long (and deservedly) forgotten, was a “ledger card accounting machine.” Picture a wide formica desk. Set into it is a keyboard and a huge version of a Selectric typewriter. Its platen is over two feet wide, with multiple forms tractors, so it could type on different forms at once. To one side is a smaller desk with a drawer and inside the drawer— is a second Selectric typewriter! This is the ledger card unit; the operator could drop a customer’s ledger card into the drawer, it would index down to the next free row and type a summary entry on the card and spit the card back out.

The problem, the woman who ran the thing explained, was that sometimes when she was typing, the main Selectric would jump a few spaces, or type an extraneous character. She tried to show me the problem but it wouldn’t fail and she didn’t want to set up a real job and let me mess up customer records. She looked at me dubiously and left me to do what I could with this twin-Selectric monster.

I poked ineffectually at the beast for nearly an hour, reading the manual, trying different things, finally getting it to fail but not in any clear pattern. I called Peggy the dispatcher, who said, “Right, Rich is on his way now, that’s his customer.” That was a relief.

In a few minutes Rich, who I had only met in passing before, arrived. He was brisk and cheerful and casually dismissive of my attempts to explain all the things I had tried. I showed him the problem and he pushed me aside. He sat at the keyboard for a minute, then pried up the keyboard cover and rocked the keyboard back. There, stuck in the key levers between the space bar and the shift key, was a large paperclip.

“Needlenose,” he said, and held out his hand. I put my needle nose pliers in his palm. He carefully extracted the paperclip and lowered the keyboard back into the desktop.

“Ya see, Dave,” he said, waving the paperclip under my nose, “Ya gotta think stupid. Don’t complicate it. Think stupid.”

And many times I’ve found that motto a very good diagnostic aid. When faced with a difficult problem, don’t complicate things. Think stupid.

Monday 02/02/2021

Out the door at 7:15 to walk my fecal sample to PAMF. So my morning walk out of the way before 8:30.

I spent some time today organizing the list of things that I intend to do starting tomorrow, the 14th day after my 2nd vaccine shot. Several of them took planning. One was, scheduling the car for service. I could have set the “60K mile service) up on the Toyota Palo Alto website, but I wanted something extra, so I called them up. Spoke to a service writer named Tony and asked, “Do you install catalytic converter anti-theft plates?” That item was not on the website. “Sure do,” says Tony, so I booked that, for Thursday.

I want to get back to managing the Computer section at FOPAL so I sent an email to Janette, the manager, CC my stand-in Chuck. Got emails back from both later. My section can be worked Tuesday afternoons and Thursday mornings, under their plan to minimize people in the space. Probably won’t go this week, as I also need a pass card for their new door locks, which Janette is mailing to me.

I booked teeth cleaning a couple days ago, for next week. But I would also like a full eye exam; I think it is time to update my prescription. As near as I can tell from my history at PAMF, it was 2011 when I did that last. But I don’t really trust their website. There’s another “opthalmology” item from 2017 but it doesn’t say it was an exam.

Anyway, it appears that PAMF no longer has its eye clinic that it used to run down on Mathilda avenue. And there is no way to make a specific appointment for an exam, using the MyHealth website. I need to follow this up through my PCP, I think.

I also wrote humbly to my cardio, Dibiase, saying that since I started taking my BP in the recommended way (sit erect with my arm supported on a table), I am getting much lower readings. I gave her the average and max values, and said that I had accordingly not implemented her suggestion to add a third Metoprolol pill per day.

My 13-inch LED light bar arrived from Amazon and I spent an hour installing it in the spray box. Here is how it looks. Note the color difference from the bathroom lighting.

This worked out very well because the box has a 12-volt supply. All I had to do was tap into it, bring the wires out to the front, and connect them to the light bar.

My neighbor Doctor Margaret writes she has found yet another series of English canal boat shows on Prime video. So now I’ll watch one. Hope its as good as Travels by Narrowboat, which I have used up.

Sunday 01/31/2021

Did the usual Sunday things. Well, watering the plants is pretty easy this time of year, with everything cut back or half dormant. Stick in the meter, say “you’re fine”, move on.

In the bathroom, on the spur of the moment, I decided to take the fecal sample for the FIT test that I was given back on Wednesday (2.056). Then I would, for my morning walk, walk the sample up to PAMF and turn it in at the lab. Haha. The lab in the PAMF main building isn’t open on Sunday.

The sample says turn it in in 24 hours. Lab will be open at 6:30 tomorrow. 24 hours will be about 8am. Oh-kayyyy I guess I need to walk early tomorrow.

Later in the day, preparing for the arrival of the lighting strip for my spray box (which Amazon says will arrive today), I checked my tool box and inventoried my electrical stuff and realized I don’t have any butt connectors or wire nuts. So for a second walk, I went to Ace Hardware and went right inside and search for stuff. Got what I needed. Getting very bold as a vaccinated person, although my two weeks aren’t up until Tuesday.

In the afternoon, I wrote a piece for the writers’ group, based on the prompt, “…choose a person whom you find rewarding to think about. … This might be someone who guided you at a certain time, or who taught you.” I’ll put it here on Tuesday after I read it there.

The lighting strip package was delivered but only after 6pm. I’ll work on that tomorrow. After my early walk.

Saturday 01/30/2021

I moved my little spray booth (see Day 1.279) back indoors, to the bathroom, which is a practical location in most ways. I sprayed a little more test clear coat, verifying a failure really. But I became very aware of a problem: because of the location of the lights in the bathroom, there is a shadow in the spray box. I need to keep the work inside the open front of the box so the fan will pull the overspray into the filter. But that puts it in shadow, which means I can’t well see the color or density of the spray I’m laying down.

Obviously the booth needs a light. “LED strip” I thought, and went to Amazon, and found a 14-inch by 1-inch, 12-volt LED light bar. It will fit perfectly under the front top of the box. All I will have to do is get 12 volts to it. The box itself runs on 12v from a wall adapter. So all I have to do is open up the box and find where the 12v wires are, tap into them, extend them to the front and connect to the light bar which arrives tomorrow.

That turned out to not be as easy as one might think. The back end of the spray box containing a fan and a filter and the switch with the 12v supply, turned out to be quite difficult to open up. But half an hour of unscrewing things and swearing did the job. So tomorrow I’ll have the fun of modding the box with a light bar.

Other than that not much happened. On my walks I saw two birds, I’ll put pictures of them here.

Friday 01/29/2021

Went for The Walk about 9am, which felt fine. Then I paid a couple of bills. Then I sat down at the big computer to edit the video I’d shot of the meal cart safety talk. This took an hour to get it organized.

I had recorded two of the 10-minute sessions. The speaker covered the same points in the same order, which was handy. The first session was acceptable, except that during his third point, somebody’s phone rings, and she walks in front of me to take the call elsewhere. The recording of the second session was OK also except that some male voices were having a conversation somewhere across the lobby and their chat is audible. However, I clipped out just the third point and cut it into the first presentation, replacing the woman with the cell phone.

If I ever do that again, I have to solve the audio problem. I need a lavalier mic on the presenter and somehow get that audio into the recording. Well, I probably won’t do that again anyway. Or, after the pandemic, presentations will be back in the auditorium where we have a proper mic setup with a mixing board and all.

Anyway the video is ok and will soon be up on the CH site with other useful videos.

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At noon it was time for the Stanford Women to play WSU for the 2nd time in 48 hours. They opened a 15 point lead in the second quarter and maintained it until WSU basically gave up, and both teams put in their b-squads.

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At 4pm it was CEO Rhonda’s weekly Zoom chat. The principal topic this time was: we are dumping Sodexo as our dining services! Instead, as of 20th April, food service will be fully in-house, staffed and managed by CH. Rhonda explained there were two reasons. First, “while we have good food, we really need great food,” and second, the pandemic has shown them that in an emergency it is crucial to have all management unified. “We have no complaints with the Sodexo staff on-site, but there have been times in the Covid crisis when their hands have been tied by corporate decisions elsewhere. We need everybody on the same page.”

All Sodexo employees are being offered employment as Channing House employees, retaining their seniority and at least the same pay. CH has signed a two-year contract with Strategic Dining Services to manage the transition, their first task being to recruit a Dining Services Manager who will run the show and report to Rhonda. They will also be developing supplier agreements to procure food. That’s a fairly big job, as we won’t have Sodexo doing all the shopping. Shopping for 300 meals three times a day is not like shopping for a household.

Aerobics class. Then looked out to see fairly heavy rain, but the forecast was for clearing later, so put off walkies. Made a new signup sheet for the meal deliverers, and publicized it. At 11, as scheduled, facilities came by to change out the filter on the HVAC units in my ceiling.

Yesterday we had an email alert that there had been a catalytic converter theft from our very parking lot. I had posted a warning to CHBB about this last October, based on frequent complaints on the Neighborhood website. Now I put together an info sheet and posted it. I will append it here. Several people responded appreciatively.

Then I was chatting with my cross-hall neighbor Florrie, as she came back in from what was supposed to be a drive, but in fact she had found her Prius sounding like a dragster. She was a second cat theft victim. She had just sat with James and reviewed the security camera take from two nights back, and yep, there they were — unfortunately the license plate of the thieves didn’t show.

Florrie says she had been considering giving up her car anyway, and she was taking this as a sign it was time to do that. You’ll still have to get it fixed, I said, and sell it? Nope, she has it all figured out; she is donating it to KQED. They’ll take it away and she’ll take a tax write-off.

Daubed a bit more clear coat on two small parts, and decided that although clear coat with a brush is adequate for touch-up it will not do for large areas that have to look good. Must be sprayed. I have two clear coat brands, and I sprayed another coat of the second one on my test piece of plastic. It is not looking good for Mission Models brand; it goes on with a fine orange peel that feels almost like sandpaper. But I’m almost out of the other one, and it will be days before the two bottles I ordered will arrive.

At 2pm it was time for Wanda to clean my unit, the first time in two weeks because of shorthanded staff. At this point I went for an hour’s walk, and still had to kill time in the lounge on return until she was done. Evening entertainment: Battlebots.

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What I posted to the in-house bulletin board, CHBB:

We recently had a catalytic converter theft in our own parking lot. This crime is increasingly common, with reports in Palo Alto every week or so. Here is some info about it.
What is a catalytic converter?It is an essential piece of emissions control required on every car from 1974 on. Physically the “cat” is a melon-sized metal bulge in the exhaust pipe. Inside it is a metal honeycomb seeded with small amounts of the precious metals Palladium and Rhodium. These act as a catalyst to speed the conversion of nasty engine exhaust gasses into water and CO2.
Why do thieves want mine?Prices of the rare metals have spiked in recent years. A “cat” is worth $100 and more as scrap. The converters on hybrid cars are preferred because they get less wear, so there is more residual metal. The ones on Priuses are especially easy to get at, but other makes and models are also hit.

How do the thieves take it?It is easy to remove the cat if you don’t care about the condition of the vehicle afterward. You jack the car up a few inches with a portable hydraulic jack. You roll under the car with a battery-powered electric saw. You cut through the exhaust pipe ahead of and behind the cat. Roll out, throw the saw, cat, and jack into the trunk of your car, and drive off. It can take as little as 60 seconds. Here are videos that show actual thefts:
Theft on a street in England, total operation complete in just over 60 seconds:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybMIkySaXk
In broad daylight with getaway car double-parked. You can hear the saw working:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUlikgzaDOE
How will I know it happened?Oh, you’ll know! Your exhaust pipe has been cut open just after the engine, ahead of the muffler. Your car will sound like a dragster, or a water-ski tow boat. VRROOM!
What will it cost to repair?By California law the cat must be replaced with a factory part. Toyota charges $2,000 and up to replace one. On the Prius there is an exhaust temperature sensor just in front of the cat. The thief will often cut through that, which adds a few hundred to the bill.
Will insurance cover it?Only if you have the optional “comprehensive” coverage. Check your policy. With comprehensive you will pay a deductible, typically $500 or less. Without it, you pay it all.
Can cat theft be prevented?Yes, muffler shops and some dealerships will install a metal plate that blocks access to the converter, making theft impractical. This costs from $200 to $500.
Hope people find this informative,

Wednesday, 01/27/2021

First thing I drove to Sunnyvale to give blood for lab work.

I stopped on the way to fill the Prius gas tank. When I went to record the amount in my log book, I had to draw a line to mark the start of the year 2021. It was only five rows below the line for 2020. I filled up the tank five times in the plague year.

At the lab, the receptionist looked at my record and said, you have two sets of orders here, Doctor Marx and Doctor DiBiase. Well, I did the labs for Marx (see day 1.358, 11/24/20) except I had to skip the cholesterol test, so I guess that was still open. Then DiBiase had put in a blood panel, liver function, and another cholesterol.

The receptionist also said, you have a fecal test here, too. I said, yeah, I just mailed that in. He said, oh no, it will disappear, you need to bring those in by hand. What? said I; I followed the instructions on the package exactly, wrote the date, put it in the special return envelope, and mailed it. Yeah, he said, and they never arrive; I’ll make you up another one. And a few minutes later, while the tech was drawing my blood, he came through the lab and handed me a new FIT test kit. This is weird.

Back at the shop I did the laundry. I also tinkered a bit with brushing clear coat on the MG. Not sure about it but getting rather impatient with the whole process.

At 6:30 we had a SWBB game, Stanford at WSU. It looked like a runaway; Stanford just jammed the Cougar’s gears with defense while running the score from 13-9 up to 29-9, and at one point had more than a 30-point lead. But the Cougs worked their way back to only a 15-point deficit before the end. This game was a make-up of one that was Covid-delayed earlier. They play again on Sunday, and probably WSU will be harder to beat then.

Tuesday 01/26/2021

After morning aerobics it was time for the first monthly jazz lecture/concert by Stephanie and Paolo. After the series I’d enjoyed last month, I supported their patreon account and so now get a new concert every month. I would love to share the concert video here, but it is private to their paying supporters. Although I betcha some of their fans do share the URL (it’s just a YouTube link, not protected in any way), and you know? That’s fine. They’ll get more exposure. But it would be over the top to share the URL in a public blog like this, with my 3s of readers.

That took until well past 10 and I wanted to go to the meal delivery safety meeting at 11:45, so I didn’t zoom to the writers’ meeting. I video’d the safety meeting, all 6 minutes of it, with the iPhone, getting much better sound than with the Nikon. I also video’d the final one at 4:45pm, and probably Thursday I will edit the bits together to make a smooth piece.

In between I did some organizing. An Amazon order arrived yesterday with manila folders, so I could do some tidying of my tax files, and also my collection of papers related to Resident Association Treasurer. That took all of 10 minutes. I did some minor experiments with clear paints. I actually think applying the paint with a brush will work best and fastest for small parts. Larger parts and curved parts need the spray and I’m still working on that.

In the evening a proper storm has moved in and wind is swooshing around my corner windows and causing things elsewhere in the building to bang and clang at odd times. Oooh and my lamp just flickered very briefly…