Tuesday, 12/31/2019

I had nothing planned today except the A/V committee meeting at 5pm. I’m not sure where the time went. I did some writing, yay, played a little computer game, meh. Attended the meeting. There are few January events owing to the auditorium being closed for a month so that the A/V equipment can be upgraded. Except that nobody can seem to get any updates on the progress of that work contract, if any. Mystery. Anyway I was assigned one event, for which I will have to make work the rolling video screen, a large monitor on a rolling stand. Adventure.

Skipped supper because of a New Year’s eve party on the 11th floor, so I could fill up on snacks, which I did. The 2nd floor was sponsoring it, and they had decided to do a game night, setting out tables with a variety of board and other games, with one volunteer at each table who knew the game to act as dealer/teacher/monitor. It worked pretty well, a lot of people were playing, many on games that were new to them. I played a couple of rounds of a word game called one-up, using scrabble-like letter tiles.

And to bed by 10:30. Fireworks, feh.

 

Sunday, 12/29/2019

Did the crossword puzzle at home, then walked out intending coffee at Mme Collette’s, but the mademoiselle was taking the holidays off. Walked instead to Verve. Back home, I spent an hour trying to adjust the TV for a better picture, using youtube adjustment videos. And finally ended up resetting the picture controls to factory defaults. Dunno where I went wrong, but when I had the brightness/contrast perfect to display grayscale bars from 0 to 255, the resulting color images on live channels were flat and too light.

I’d been invited to have lunch with Ian and Jean and Michele.  This was a pleasant occasion. Ian and Jean are a retired nuclear physicist and chemist, respectively. Somehow the issue of the Chinese government came up (not my doing), and Jean, who was born in China, was ardent that I understand there were two sides to the matter of the Uighurs and other minorities there. No doubt. There always are. One side’s separatist terrorists are always the other side’s heroic freedom fighters and vice versa.

In the afternoon I spent some time writing on the novel, and straightened out some of the tangle that was causing me distress last time. I also looked back to an earlier scene to clarify some dialog that set up a clue for later. Then I read a bit of it and was (again) really pleased. I very much like what I’m creating. I like the people and I like the incidents and words they’re experiencing. Back in the 80s when I was writing, I came up with the phrase “a sense of gift”, meaning, the feeling that I had something other people would enjoy, and I had the power to give it to them. That feeling carried me through the tedium of a lot of writing, and I’m starting to get it back now. Maybe I can drive through and finish this damn thing soon.

A bit before six I took my hat, coat and umbrella and went to the dining room for a quick supper, and then walked the quarter mile to the Lucy Stern center to attend the new musical version of Pride and Prejudice. It seems that Palo Alto Players have produced the world premier now of four of the musicals written by Paul Gordon, who seems to specialize in musicals based on classic novels: Jane Eyre, Emma, Daddy Long Legs, and now, Pride and Prejudice.

I enjoyed this production a lot. All the actors were very skilled at acting, had good voices, danced well; the lyrics were clever and appropriate; the set design and staging were good; the sound augmentation was just right, natural and intelligible. I didn’t remember the novel well enough to know how it all worked out in the end, so at intermission I was really curious how in the world they would bring these people back together. But they did, sniff.

 

Saturday, 12/28/2019

I had a date with Peter to suss out the 11th floor sound system at 10, but while I was sitting around after breakfast, Craig called, asking me to take a tech call with Margret whose Mac was acting up. He and she thought she had the MyWay browser malware. I read up on that before looking at her machine. I’m not sure she did have it, at least, I couldn’t find any executables or any browser plug-ins by that name. But in the course of looking I needed her admin password, which she was sure was a certain string, but it wasn’t. So after trying all the passwords in her text file of old passwords and failing to get in, I got to learn how to reset the admin password on a Macbook Pro. It isn’t hard; but I’d never done it before.

Then up to the penthouse and Peter and I futzed around with the electronics there, in preparation for a party he is hosting on the 5th. There is a host of electronics there, including a humongous TV, a 4K job (i.e. 3840px across) and at least 75-inch, maybe 90-inch wide. It is driven off a Yamaha receiver with inputs from a Comcast DVR, a Roku, a Chromecast, a Blu-Ray, and a computer plugged in to an HDMI port on the front.

Funny thing about that; the Comcast box on the TV has only the basic subscription, so you couldn’t play from Netflix or any sports channel, and at the moment it seems to not play any channels at all, owing to a problem with Comcast. Don’t know if the Roku works or for what channels.

Peter wanted to drive the TV from a Macbook. That’s supposed to work but didn’t. So we worked out how to plug his Macbook into a spare HDMI on the back of the big TV. Then the question was, how to provide nice background music from an iPhone, using a different amplifier that drives other speakers. So we fiddled with that for a while and got that working.

At lunch I sat with John, who was going to the BB game, so I cadged a ride with him and his wife Eve. The game was with UC Davis and was an unexpectedly hard challenge. The Aggies, well, both teams really, were playing very aggressive, intense defensive games and Stanford struggled against what should have been a weaker opponent. They trailed 30-32 at the half, and only gained a lead with two minutes to play in the third quarter. The final score of 67-55 does not reflect the difficulty of the game. Freshman Haley Jones had a breakout game.

 

 

Friday, 12/27/2019

Not a vivid day in my recollection. Breakfast in the dining room. Had been thinking I had nothing scheduled and would perhaps wander down to FOPAL and sort, but then I actually checked my calendar and I had in fact signed up to lead a tour today. Oh, right; I originally signed up for the Friday, then they asked for help covering Thursday at the last minute, so I did that — and ended up doing two tours that day. Well, off to do my third tour of the week.

In the afternoon I looked at a couple of tutorial videos on how to play Surviving Mars. I’m just about ready to start building my own colony for real.

 

Thursday, 12/26/2019

Last week, the museum put out a request for somebody to please cover the public tours on the day after Christmas, and I signed up for the 12:00 one. So after taking a nice run this morning, I got in my red docent shirt and went down there.

The place was jumping, lots of visitors coming in. When I started the tour I had a crowd of about 40, which is too many for anyone’s comfort. I told them at the start, all the exhibits are well signed and informative, I don’t mind a bit if you just wander off. Quite a few did, but I still ended up with 20 or so that stuck with me.

There were still lots of people coming in. I checked the schedule and there was only one docent scheduled for the 2pm tour, so I stuck around. That was The Other Dave, and he was pleased to be able to split the crowd. He took the first 25 or so, and I kept the rest, another 15-20. I stalled for ten minutes by leading them to the 1401 lab and riffing on computing in the 60s. Then took them around and it all worked out nicely.

Chilled out the rest of the evening. My DVR is only 4% full, which is pathetic. What happened to all the shows I used to subscribe to? To fill the last hour before bed, I went to Amazon and browsed around and discovered that my fave actress of all time, Xena Lucy Lawless, has her own mystery series on the Acorn channel. So I watched one ep of that. Not bad. She looks great, the writing was pretty good.

 

Tuesday, 12/24/2019

This morning brought an email from Angela the Empress of Upgrades (seriously, she does a royally fine job) with the word that my personal move-back date is 31 January. I have been to a couple of upgraded floors lately and my golly the difference is amazing; the hallways are so bright with new LED lighting and paint and carpet that it makes this fourth floor look like a dungeon.

I picked up yesterday’s mail after breakfast. It included a fat package from the Tax People, the official return on Marian’s estate. Bottom line, I am the recipient of 11 million dollars (settle down!) of exemption from estate tax. Since I presumably had a comparable exemption already, I can leave as much as $20 mil to my heirs tax free. Seems excessive. Earlier in the week I had paid their invoice for preparing this form, $1500. Now I have the form, it almost justifies the fee, it is about 5/8 of an inch thick and weighs at least a pound. Oh, wait, when I look at it, the great bulk of it is “exhibits” consisting of forms I already gave them, like Marian’s will, the old Trust document, etc. Well, whatever.

I went out to run a couple of errands and went by the tree we planted for Marian in Bol Park. It has one little green leaf at the top, all others are brown. I hope this is just winter time and it will start coming back in a few months.

In the afternoon I spent some time sitting at the keyboard facing my novel and deciding what to do next. Which will probably tearing up and rewriting the last 3 chapters I wrote.

 

 

 

Monday, 12/23/2019

Went for a run in 50º chill. Felt ok. Then to FOPAL for four hours of work. And then home feeling a bit sore, promising myself “Two ibuprofen and a nap”. Treatment applied as directed, and I felt much better.

Did a couple more tutorials in the game. It begins to get hella complex; as the “commander” of the nascent mars colony you are to simultaneously manage robots extracting minerals, robots doing maintenance on machinery that continually breaks down, personnel assignments in the dome, keeping colonists happy so they don’t go back to Earth, building new facilities, earning money by shipping minerals back to Earth, and on and on.

All of which brought this thought up. We used to worry about violent video games teaching violence, Grand Theft Auto teaching disrespect for the law, etc. Well, Surviving Mars is just one of a whole genre of games where the player has to administer something, balancing complex nets of resources. Stellaris is another, and all the Civilization series where you have to build a nation from scratch. So, do these games teach management skills? Are players who excel at them, good at allocating personnel and resources in real life?

Late in the afternoon, a call from the desk, you have a package. I went down to get it and it was (ta-daaa) the rug I ordered from Amazon. It came as a roll 8 foot long and about 10 inches in diameter. So, not a thick luxurious rug, but I didn’t expect that. I left it rolled up and stowed against the wall. I won’t see it until move-back day.

I should mention that I checked in with Dennis on Thursday and again this evening. Toni had an operation on her foot earlier last week. As of Thursday, Dennis was a bit troubled because she was invalided more than they’d hoped. Today things were a bit better; she was getting around and beginning to work at home.

Day 21 a year ago, I started cleaning out the pantry of jars and boxes of staple foods I would never use; then attended the movie Bohemian Rhapsody.

Sunday, 12/22/2019

Coffee, newspaper, puzzle at the old stand, the P.A. Cafe, driving there in light rain. Coffee over, I was thinking about what to do with the rest of the day, and I really must learn to control this urgent feeling of needing to do something with my Sundays. This time I thought about a story in the paper about a Christmas market in the Ferry Building. I’ve walked through the Ferry Building market before, it was pleasant; what the heck, let’s drive to the city and do that.

As I went North on 101 the rain became heavier, and was torrential when I reached The Embarcadero. There were no obvious places to park and it was miserable out. This is really stupid, I thought, and decided to, as the GPS likes to say sometimes, “Make a legal U-turn…” and headed back the way I came. The rain continued very heavy, wipers on high and big puddles extending into the freeway traffic lanes at several points. Nasty driving.

Back home, I began to play the SWBB game at Texas, that started recording at 10am. Texas although unranked, seemed to have an excellent defensive plan. At any rate, Stanford shot terribly, 19% in the first half, trailed most of the game, got within 2 points several times in the final minutes, but lost. Their first loss of the season. Actually, it might be a good thing. They won’t be burdened with a #1 ranking next week, and they’ve had some weaknesses exposed they can work on.

For lunch I didn’t like the look of the menu at CH, and walked up University to Wahlburger’s (the rain had vanished) and had a very nice “burger bowl,” basically a salad bowl topped with guacamole, a burger patty, and bacon.

In the afternoon I started exploring a new computer game, Surviving Mars. I got it as part of one of the Humble Bundle discount packages. I worked through two of the early tutorials and it looks like it could be fun.