Thursday, 1/30/2020

Went to Yosemite for museum work. I was the only volunteer there today. Toni is out getting her 2nd cataract operation. The two staff members there were very impressed with my booking of the Conservation Studio tour at the V&A. Before lunch I helped Aurora complete another 1-1/2 aisles of the treasure hunt, opening boxes looking for the missing Ferrante plug-board.

For lunch, Greta and the volunteers from Shustek joined us for lunch. Greta, who once lived in London, suggested two more museums worth going to. After lunch we did another hour of organizing boxes. Then Aurora had to leave for a meeting, so I could leave early enough to make the 4pm Resident/Trustee meeting at Channing House.

There is a monthly Resident’s meeting, but this is different. Less frequent (annual? don’t know) and this one was primarily to present the budget the trustees have approved for the coming fiscal year (March-February). Bottom line from a 20-slide detailed presentation, the finances are healthy. Resident monthly fees will go up 4% as of March.

The budgeting process is interesting. Channing House is governed by a board of Trustees who are volunteers from the community at large. Two of the trustees are residents. The staff, headed by CEO Rhonda, report to the board.

The budget is created from the bottom up by a Financial Liaison Committee (FLC). This is composed of residents only. It includes the resident trustees, and 4 or 5 other residents who have financial expertise (place is full of retired CEOs and CFOs).

The FLC over a couple of months meets with the directors of the 6 operational departments (Rhonda’s direct reports) and put together recommendations on changes for each department from the prior year. The FLC reports that budget to the Finance Committee, which is a subcommittee of the board, i.e. all trustees. They report the final budget to the board who approve it.

After the meeting I had nothing to do but tidy up, in preparation for

MOVING.

Tomorrow at 8, Angela and the move team will arrive. I go away for 10 hours. At 6pm (maybe before) I will be shown my upgraded apartment 621, with all my furniture and belongings moved back to where they were in September. The move then (Day 278) was so smooth I am confident they’ll get everything right.

I am very anxious to see this. It will be the first time I have seen my new area rug, which has been lying here in this living room rolled up for a month. I will also have new windows (double-paned), a blackout drape in the bedroom, new paint, new carpet in the bedroom and new vinyl flooring in the living room.

Wednesday, 1/29/2020

Crap, I thought I’d done a blog post for this day. Noooooo I have not.

I went for a run. I showered and shaved and went down to FOPAL around 10:30. The carpet has all been renewed and everything is pretty much back in operation. I worked the computer section, there wasn’t much waiting, then did some sorting. About 12:30 I took a lunch break, and went back to sorting at 1:30 until 4pm. So about 5 hours of work.

Back home and a quiet evening.

Monday, 1/27/2020

Started the morning with an adventure: calling London. There’s a tour I want to take at the Victoria & Albert, their “Behind the Scenes Conservation Studio” tour. However unlike their other tours, they don’t have web-booking for this; they say “to book a place please call”. Well all righty then, let’s call. Over on the right of the V&A site they give the international number, +44 (0)20 7942 2000. Not too sure about that (0) part! Is that an optional 0 or what? But the rest matches the instructions on the T-Mobile site: dial + (same key as 0), country (44), city (20), and number, presumably that’s the 7942 2000. But every combination I try, with or without the extra 0, gets me a male voice “The call cannot be completed as dialed.”

So now it’s 7:15. Well, how about my Channing House land line? I go to the phone and dial 9 (outside line) 011 (international call) 44-20-7942-2000 and it rings and a recording with a lovely accent says “Thank you for calling the Victoria and Albert museum, for bookings press 1…” Hah! Suck it, T-Mobile.

Pressing 1 gets me a man with an even richer BBC accent who takes my booking for Wednesday the 19th, and I’m all set with that tour.

From there, out for a run, which felt fine. Shower, shave, spend an hour catching up with the internet. Then to FOPAL about 10 where I worked until 2. Home again to relax. Just before supper time I got an email from Burt, who manages the Tech Squad. Would I handle a problem, Nancy can’t send email from her Mac.

So I call Nancy, she says sure, come right up, and I do. She’s on the tenth floor, which was the first to be upgraded. I will be moving back to the newly-upgraded 6th floor on Friday and boy, I can’t wait. The upgraded halls, carpets, lights are so bright and new looking!

Anyway, Nancy has a big iMac (like mine). Unlike me, she uses the Mail app (I’ve been using Gmail in a web browser for a decade now, and never start the Mac Mail app), so the interface is unfamiliar. But whenever she tries to send an email, she gets an immediate email back from Comcast: your Comcast mailbox is full, you must delete some messages before you can send one.

Whu?

Cutting to the chase: she has for years been (a) never deleting anything from her inbox, which now has 11,000 items, and (b) her Junk box has another 28,000. And these are housed on the Comcast IMAP mail server. There is also a Trash category, which has over 250 messages in it, because she’d been actively deleting things in response to the error message. Unfortunately that was ineffective because Trash was also located on the Comcast server, plus the option for when to delete trashed messages was set to … Never. So deleting them just moved them from one folder to another.

I worked my way through the unfamiliar Mail interface to figure out how to make Trash be located “on my Mac” and for trashed items to be deleted after a week. Then I manually deleted the 250 items in the Comcast Trash folder. Now she could send email, which we verified.

Mail allows one to set up local folders to which you can drag messages, which deletes them from the server. I noticed there was quite an elaborate set of subject folders already defined. “Yeah, my sister set those up for me. I don’t use them.” Not wanting to get in between sisters, I just pointed out that, if she dragged messages to folders, or to the new Trash, they were deleted from Comcast, and left it at that.

At supper I sat with Kay and Don, the couple who still live in their home but take meals here, pending availability next summer. Tonight they were hosting two grand-daughters, Sienna and Clara, ages about 4 and 6 I guess? After supper they were going to go swimming in the CH pool. Kay asked a couple of times, wouldn’t I like to have a couple of grand-kids to mind? Just for the evening? I don’t think she was enjoying being a mommy again.

Saturday 1/25/2020

Today’s main thing was to lead a private tour for a small group from the American Society of Systems Engineers. Only eight people, various ages, very receptive. The 1401 docents, Bill and Steve, agreed to work overtime and give my group their own demo at 12, which was very nice of them.

Since I didn’t write this post that evening and now it’s 24 hours later, I don’t remember how I spent the afternoon.

Friday, 1/24/2020

Today’s main activity was to take advantage of a field trip: a bus ride to the Oakland Museum of California to see the traveling exhibit, “No Spectators: the Art of Burning Man”. I’ve been aware of the annual Burning Man art/performance/rave but never attended (or much wanted to). A city of many thousands of residents is created on a flat dust plain in Nevada, celebrates itself for a week, and is carefully deconstructed and removed.

The exhibit had lots of photos and a few of the smaller artifacts. Heroic-scale art constructions are the prize features. Some of the smaller objects were here and I was impressed enough to take a few pics.

The silver dancer at OMCA was about 15 feet high, one-fifth the size of the one that appeared in the desert a couple of years ago. I was taken by how she rose up out of the nice hedge of Ceanothus that was just coming into bloom. The steel dodecahedron (? I didn’t actually count the faces) was just lovely.

In the evening was a SWBB game against Colorado. The Buffs came very near getting the upset. Their aggressive, pressing defense seemed to throw the Cardinal off their game (and they were not helped by lacking two more, for a total of five, injured players from the roster of 15). Stanford trailed most of the game. With seconds to play, Colorado hit a clutch three to put them up by 2 with 1.6 seconds on the clock. The Colorado bench were on the court celebrating until the refs shooed them off.

Stanford inbounded from in front of their bench. Lacey Hull did the inbound, a high lob to Ashten, the 6-5 center, standing at the post, and she laid it in on the buzzer for a tie: overtime! That five minutes was close as well, but Stanford got a 3-point lead with a minute to go, Colorado had to start fouling. Stanford made their free throws, and ended up winning by eight.

At 12:53am the fire alarm went off. To quote the official memo from our CEO,

The good news is that the alarm woke many residents. While this is an inconvenience, one of our most frequent complaints in the past after a fire alarm was that people could not hear the alarm. This issue appears to have been resolved.

Yeah, I think so. The loud continuous honking came out of a speaker in my ceiling, and from speakers about every 20 feet along the hallways. I got up from bed and listened. I heard no sirens nor people shouting or running, so I judged I had time to put on clothes, which I did. Then went to the Lounge on our floor, turned on the emergency radio, and heard two other floors reporting in exactly as we’ve been trained to do. So I reported 4th floor in, no problems. I think eventually all 9 floors reported in using proper radio procedure. However, also from the official memo,

The not so good news is that the front desk was immediately flooded with calls from residents. Many were angry and yelled at Felicia demanding that she shut off the fire alarm. These calls caused Felicia to miss important phone calls from our fire alarm monitoring company and the fire department. In addition, the front desk receptionist does not have the authority to silence the alarm.

About 10 people in all gathered in the lounge over the next five minutes, out of about 25 on the floor. The PAFD arrived about 1:03 by my watch, no siren. About 1:10 the alarm was silenced and the all-clear given on the radio and the PA system.

It turns out the alarm was because of a momentary pressure drop in the sprinkler lines, seen as water flow. The timing has been adjusted so as to prevent such a short drop triggering another alarm.

Thursday, 1/23/2020

I got up (again) at 6:10, and before 7:30 was out for a run — to make up for skipping Wednesday’s, and anticipating that tomorrow I won’t have time, either.

At 10am I left for the Mitchell Park library for a meeting of FOPAL volunteers. There was FOPAL business, among which I was pleased to learn that they are going to acquire a proper garbage cart so we can dispose of non-recyclable rubbish. The place generates a massive amount of recyclable paper and cardboard but there are things that need to go to the landfill, and until now there’s been no garbage cart to put them in.

The entertainment was a presentation by the president of Foothill Community College. I think it was really a rehearsal of her pitch for two bond issues they are putting on the next ballot, but they certainly presented an interesting and glowing picture of the work the Foothill/de Anza campuses do. According to them, the California Community College network is the second largest educational institution in the world, after the nation of India’s. And they stressed that all their teaching is by paid instructors. “You go to Harvard and take Psych 101, you’re in a class of 500 students and you are taught by a grad student. At Foothill, you are taught by Doctor Smith and you can see him in regular office hours any time.” And money: if you maintain at least 12 units with passing grades, tuition and books are free. If you live at home, doing the first two years at Foothill saves an estimated $85,000 over doing them at UCB — and 85% of their graduates are accepted for transfers into the UC system.

That over, I drove to the Yosemite warehouse where we continued opening boxes looking for the lost Ferranti plugboard (see 1.045). And home to rest briefly, write this post to this point, then eat and head out to the Pear Theater.

Here’s the kind of thing one comes upon when opening boxes in the CHM archives. It’s a circuit module from ILLIAC II, an experimental supercomputer of 1962. Per the original label, this module implemented bits 0-4 (of 51 bits) of the Accumulator.

Apparently they hadn’t worked out printed circuit boards, but wired all those transistors together with elaborate point-to-point wiring. This is odd to me, because I know that the first integrated circuits were produced in 1961. But I guess the ILLIAC designers had started earlier and were locked in.

Anyway, it wasn’t the Ferranti plugboard, so close up the box and put it back on the shelf.

Aurora (curator) shelves a box of ILLIAC modules, helped by Tom (volunteer).