Day 343, plant stand, house concert

Sunday, 11/10/2019

Walked to Verve or coffee. Afterward, walked by the hardware store to pick up some abrasives and cleaner for the plant stand.

Around 9:30 I drove down to FOPAL to see what kind of mess my section was in after the Saturday sale day. Actually it was quite neat; I think some of the sale-day volunteers must tidy up the shelves. I could see where books had been sold, and not always where I had expected sales. For example I had had four books on various aspects of digital signal processing, and three were now gone. I had about 18 inches of various editions and volumes of Don Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming (with a post-it label calling it out as “Knuth Korner”), and it looked like none had been taken.

I spent an hour starting cleaning the iron plant stand. I cleaned the top tier and sprayed it with rusty-metal primer.

At 12:45 I started to a house concert in Castro Valley. The location was one where I’d attended house concerts at least three times, probably four, over the past decade, with Marian. The host recognized me when I came in. The performer was “Mark Hummel and the Deep Basement Shakers”. Mark Hummel has himself introduced as “Emmy Nominated Mark Hummel”; he specializes in blues harmonica. At one point the lady in front of me went to the bathroom, giving me the opportunity to get a brief video. Here’s 40 seconds of Hummel on a solo.

I stuffed myself on the snacks everyone brought. The drive out and back was unremarkable. Generally a nice experience.

Day 342, mostly SWBB

Saturday, 11/9/2019

The big event for today was to attend a SWBB game to be held at the new Chase Center in San Francisco. This was an event arranged by USF, with the USF women versus Stanford at 3pm and the USF men versus Princeton at 6pm.

In the morning I went down to FOPAL just to check my section at the start of Sale Day. Looked fine, but customers hadn’t begun rooting around in it yet. On the way back I stopped at the hardware store to buy a couple of screwdrivers. I wanted to assemble one of the 11×14 picture frames, and it needed a straight screwdriver, and I didn’t have one in my kitchen drawer. When I went to the storage locker in the basement and checked my toolbox, the multi-bit (“six-way” they are called because they feature two sizes of straight bits, two of phillips, and also fit two sizes of nut) screwdriver that I thought I owned, wasn’t there. I assume it got lost in the last or previous Repair Cafe day?(*) Anyway, I wanted a new one, hence the stop at Ace Hardware. I bought a “six-way” or the kitchen drawer and an “eight-way” for the toolbox.

After lunch I met with Patty who wanted a ride to the game, and off we went. The nav. system in the Prius refused to admit that the Chase Center parking at 1800 Owens street existed. Note to self: get GPS updated next time you get service. So Patty set up guidance on her phone. Entry to the parking, like entry to the arena, was controlled by an e-ticket on the phone. It all worked fine. The new Chase arena looks like — any other big commercial arena, and I’ve been in a few. Well, the monster video screen above the court is better than any I’ve seen before. But I can still carp. Big professional TV presumably maintained by professionals, right? And you can stand there and look up at the screen showing the court and the players, and down at the court and the players, and it is very obvious that the color balance is off. The players look like they have a sunburn and the wood floor is pinkish-yellow instead of brownish-yellow. Sheesh. The lighting levels and colors are completely under their control, how hard is it to tweak the video so it actually resembles the subject it is showing?

Got back to CH in plenty of time for dinner.

(*) Days later, I found it neatly stowed in the case where I keep my power drill. Now I have three.

Day 341, Docent, printing

Friday, 11/8/2019

Went for a run. Do not remember (now, 24 hours later) what I did between then and 11am when I left for the Museum to do the 12pm tour. There was a Go Language conference on the upper floors, and those people had filled the parking lot, but in fact museum attendance proper on the ground floor was very light. My tour group was just six people. But they stuck with me the whole way.

Back at the “land-locked cruise ship” I took a short nap and then (anything to avoid actually writing) made some notes on the next phase of the novel, then spent an hour printing big pictures on my new printer. It does very nice, 11×14 prints. It would do 11×17 if I only had any paper that size.

That was about it; for supper I took one of my cans of beer to drink, big whoop.

Day 340, Yosemite, not theater

Thursday, 11/7/2019

Drove to the Yosemite Ave. warehouse for a day of working with artifacts. In the morning I put away some artifacts that had been brought out 3 weeks ago for a researcher. People researching computer history can ask to look at artifacts. When their project is approved, the relevant things are found and moved out to tables in the open area of the warehouse. In this case, the person was researching keyboard technology, and ten or so things with keyboards had been brought out. Aurora the curator said he got really nice photos, but I haven’t seen them.

Anyway, you don’t just put something away any old where. You look up its object number in the database; verify the location it came from (row, block, shelf numbers); walk over to find that location and make sure there is space on the shelf and nothing is in the way of transporting the thing; walk back and pick it up (or for heavy things, put it on a cart); move it to the location and shelve it. With over 110,000 objects, it is imperative that you know where objects are at every point.

Some of the things had been in boxes. In that case you have the additional step of repacking it in its box with other artifacts, then shelve the box where it came from.

In the afternoon Steve and I worked over inventorying more boxes. Lucky us, the boxes we took down from the shelf turned out to be part of the big collection of slide rules that the museum received in 2005. You do a database search on the box number; that turns up records for all the objects supposedly in the box. You verify that there are that many objects in the box (one box had 35 rules, one had 54). You go through the list of object numbers, finding each object, verifying that its database record is complete (often it isn’t) and that it has a photograph (often it doesn’t). If anything needs photographing, the box moves to the to-be-photographed cart. Or if it needs repacking (as the box of 54 rules did, they could be much better arranged) it goes on the repacking cart. Or rarely, the box goes on the “reshelve” cart so Aurora can figure out a more efficient place to put it. The box’s location record gets updated for each of these moves, of course.

Coming back, I stopped at FOPAL to hang up a cute picture in my computer section.

anime with three books

This came from a wonderful collection that Frank found, of pictures of anime characters holding computer books. I mean, the internet is a wonderful and bizarre place. Somebody has created and curated a large collection of pictures of anime characters holding computer books. Just specifically that.

Back home to rest. Then at 6:30, out to attend a play at The Pear. This turned into a fiasco. I thought to just buzz down 101 to Shoreline. Hah! When I hit 101 it was bumper to bumper creeping. I got off at San Antonio with fifteen minutes until start time. Went up to Middlefield and started South with ten minutes to go. Somehow — and I don’t like the implications of this — I missed the left turn onto Shoreline and found myself too far down Middlefield, at Ellis. Back under 101 and north to Shoreline, by which time it was 7:10 and no possible way to make the curtain. So I headed back home, but retracing my steps back to Shoreline and Middlefield. Yes, I know this intersection. Yes, I am positive I came down Middlefield 20 minutes ago, through here. And I didn’t see it. Was I distracted? I don’t know. But I don’t like it.

Day 339, FOPAL, Docent, papers

Wednesday, 11/5/2019

Today I had a docent tour to run starting at 11:30, but it is also Wednesday before book sale at FOPAL, the day that section managers should have their sections in final shape for the sale. I could do that before or after the museum; I opted for before. So I had breakfast at CH. Carrying my red docent shirt for later, I headed out for FOPAL at 8am.

There were only two boxes of boooks waiting for me, and I ended up shelving only 8 additional. Then I did an hour of sorting which brought me to 10am. I took a break and had coffee and a scone at the local Peet’s Coffee before heading to the museum.

There I met a group of 22 undergrads from the University of Toronto. They are so cute, just adorable. Lucky for them, Pat, docent of the 1401 lab, was available and offered to do them a 1401 demo. So I gave them a short tour and turned them over to him. They had a good experience, I think. The professor said they were going to the Intel museum that afternoon. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I bet they didn’t get as good a show there.

Stopped at the car wash to get the car cleaned up on the way home. Looking forward to driving at least one other person to the SWBB game in the city on Saturday. I’d have paid for an external detail job if it could be done in a reasonable amount of time, but the lady at the entrance barely spoke english and seemed to think they didn’t do polishing. Which they certainly do, but I asked a more informed employee while my car was going through the regular wash. Detailing would be near $200 and take half a day. I seem to recall they once did a quick polish operation in less time, but that was probably long ago. Anyway, if I’m going to spend $200 on a polish, I’ll do it at a “real” detailing shop, not a shed attached to the car wash.

In the afternoon I spent an hour answering an email from Katie The Tax Accountant regarding the ongoing effort to complete an IRS form 7-oh-whatever, to recover I forget what part of Marian’s estate tax exemption. Lots of small questions to finish the job, like “Did Marian have an interest in any other trust?” and so forth. All easy to answer except one.

Back in August they said they would file for an extension past the 9-month cutoff for this filing. I said fine. This email asks, did I receive approval of the extension from the IRS? Um, no. The email makes reference to maybe having given the IRS my old address. Despite the fact that in the email exchange of August, I gave them the Channing House address. (OK, I probably never logged into the tax accountant’s website and updated my info there.)

Two days ago I got an email from Richard, the gardener, saying his invoice for August work had been returned by the PO, and could he have my current address. So very possibly the PO is no longer forwarding mail to the Tasso address. However, they were doing so very reliably, back in September and October.

So I sent off my detailed reply to all Katie’s questions, but with a bad feeling that maybe the extension had been botched; that the whole exercise would be a failure; and I would end up paying for a lot of accountant hours with no benefit. The benefit had never been that clear to me anyway, but whatever.

Day 338, plant stand, Jean, move, SWBB

Tuesday, 11/5/2019

I had breakfast in the dining room (Tuesday is Belgian waffle day, and when I start getting excited about that? Just shoot me.) and left at 9:15 for the welding shop where I picked up the mended plant stand.

Then to sister in law Jean’s place to supervise updating the phone I lent her months ago. She admits to not using it much, but she’s a photographer and I talked about iPhone photos, and demonstrated using air drop to move pictures to her desktop Mac. That impressed her, so maybe she’ll start carrying it more. Jean is amazing in many ways, at age 90-something still living alone, firing on all cylinders mentally, and has even had a remission of a sciatica-like pain that troubled her all last year.

On the way back to CH I stopped at the hardware store and bought: a 9×12 plastic drop cloth, a wire brush for the drill, and spray cans of rusty-metal primer and satin black. I parked out front to unload the plant stand and bring it up to my balcony. Then took the car around to the garage, and brought up my drill case and the hardware stuff. Then spent an hour beginning the process of cleaning the stand.

This is going to be a long job. Where it isn’t rusty it is caked with gummy dirt. The drill-powered wire brush is effective for the flat bits, but it has many curly bits where the drill brush can’t go, and I will need to use sandpaper or steel wool or something. The rotating wire brush cut through the dirt and black paint to reveal that the stand at one time was painted pale green, or else had a pale green primer coat. Standing in the hardware store I debated whether to use a black finish coat or a green one. Now I need to rethink that.

At 3pm was the monthly Renovation Upgrade Status Meeting. At this one, we 6th floor people got our move-back dates (January 20-31st) and the 5th floor got their schedule for move-out dates.

Going in to dinner, Dave Golden (the other, other Dave) asked if I was going to SWBB tonight, and offered to drive, so fine. He has a 2016 Camry hybrid. Every time I ride in a newer car, I get antsy to upgrade my 2012. Those newer widgets…

Stanford played Eastern Washington. It’s a division 1 school playing in the Big Sky conference, but they were completely outclassed. Stanford’s defense just shut them out; they scored 15 points in the entire first half, and ended up shooting 11%. Stanford’s freshman “big”, 6-5 Ashton Prechtel, not only had a couple of blocks but also stepped back and shot three, three-pointers. It’s gonna be a fun season.

Day 337, A/V, welding, novel, photos

Monday, 11/4/2019

Went for a run in the morning. Did not remember to wear a sweatshirt, but the temperature was just high enough — and with the time change, there was enough sun shining on my back — that I didn’t miss it.

Next up was my first assignment running the audio/visual for a performance, in this case a talk by George Marotta. This was nominally a “Book Talk” and a review of Dereliction of Duty by General (Ret.) H.R. McMaster. But George, who was in Viet Nam in 1957 working for the US Aid program, just in time for the Tet Offensive, talked a lot about his own experiences. For example, while working in the State Department under Robert McNamara, George was responsible for administering the program run by the Rand Corporation, including working with a Rand employee named Daniel Ellsberg. He reminisced about how McNamara was insistent that Rand was to keep very good records, which they did, and those documents ultimately were published by Ellsberg as The Pentagon Papers.

Anyway, I got the screen and projector and mics all set up and the presentation went off quite smoothly.

A few days ago, I noticed an object on the balcony outside the common lounge on this 4th floor: a wrought-iron plant stand. It has 6 pot shelves arranged in a climbing spiral around a central pole, the whole being 4’8″ high and a bit under 2′ wide. It’s dirty, rusty, and has two broken welds that make it unstable. I asked around and eventually found the lady who said she owned it, who said I was welcome to it if I wanted to fix it up.

Yesterday I used Yelp to find a local welding shop. Today I brought the car around front, lowered the rear seat, and brought out the stand, which fit in the Prius just fine. And off to Mountain View to a modest little hole in the wall where the guy said, sure, I can fix that, tomorrow morning ok? Which fits my schedule perfectly.

Back to CH where I spent an hour making progress with the novel. Added 700 words, mostly well-chosen.

Then I spent an hour going through my collection of pictures and picking out candidates that have enough pixels, and enough photographic quality, that they are worth trying to print at 11×14 or 11×17, with my new printer. Way back in April (Day 149, for one) I started the project of printing my best images for framing. I’ve got a half-dozen of those framed here in the closet now. Just after the estate sale, I found a box of 11×14 frames in the garage — something that Deborah had brought in to sell, I suppose, and left — and appropriated them. Now I have a printer that can do 11×14 or 11×17, and I have some 11×14 photo paper. My eventual aim is to have a photo wall, outside my 6th floor apartment. Each occupant “owns” the hallway wall outside their apartment. People put up all sorts of art. I’ve got it in mind to put up printed photos, a rotating collection of 4 or 6 at a time.

Tomorrow is a busy, busy day. And so to bed.

Day 336, coffee, FOPAL, tickets, dinner, plan

Sunday, 11/3/2019

“Fall back” day. Did my usual Sunday morning thing, doing the NYT crossword at home, then going out for coffee. Today I took the car and went to good old Palo Alto Cafe in Midtown. Then, because I have something else to do tomorrow that will interfere with my usual Monday FOPAL stint, I drove on down Middlefield to FOPAL and did the Computer section pricing and shelving. The shelves are pretty full, although I think I will add more on Wednesday. Then we shut down shelving for the upcoming Sale Weekend.

Interesting internet curiosity going on. My favorite tool for book pricing (and others’) is, or was, BookscoutPro.com. This odd little site does (or did) only one thing: given a list of ISBNs, it would present the range of prices for those books, gathered from Amazon and Ebay. It had a brutally simple UI, was blazing fast, and told us just what we needed to know to price used books. And last week it stopped responding. Its server still answers to pings, but it doesn’t respond to HTTP requests any more. Frank, our internet (among other things) expert thinks it was a one-man operation and the one man has either died or lost interest. He and I discussed how we might go about getting the source code of the site and running it ourselves, or recreating its function.

I spent 90 minutes culling, pricing, and shelving, including taking a pre-sale count. Then I spent another 90 minutes sorting. Sorting, by myself, is a highly satisfying occupation. I just blitzed through about 8 boxes of books, creating a nice clear space in the sorting room. Then I bought a few groceries and headed home.

About 2pm I got a call from George, who is giving a talk on Monday. The A/V committee assigned me to run this show and I had emailed him about the details of his laptop earlier. Now he very sensibly wanted to do a trial now, since he had another commitment that ran right up to his scheduled start time. Excellent idea. We met in the auditorium where I turned on the projector and we connected his laptop. All fine.

And only as I wrote this, I remembered: did I turn off the projector? I zipped down to the auditorium and no, I hadn’t. It’s an expensive projector but it wasn’t shining its light. Hopefully with no input it wasn’t burning itself out over the last 8 hours or so.

Then there was an email from Patty, to a list of several SWBB fans, wondering about the coming game with USF next Saturday. It is to be played at the Chase Center in SF, and we started an email discussion on logistics, is it practical to take Caltrain, etc. (Answer: no.) In the midst of this, it occurred to me, I need a ticket for this. It’s not part of the home season pass of course. Tickets via Ticketmaster, $50. Turns out the event is a double header, women at 3pm, USF men vs. Princeton at 6, one ticket for both events. With the result that many of the good seats have already been bought by (presumably) men’s fans. And parking is $30. Well, got that all bought.

Went down to supper by the stairs, meeting David and Helen on the way. Then Patty said we should sit together. So nice supper with four other people. David worked at SRI and knew Doug Englebart.

After supper I thought about my oft-stated idea of spending a week in London, visiting museums and seeing shows. Quick check of Road Scholar, they have nothing like that. Given I know London fairly well, I don’t need excursions to the well-known places. So, plan it myself? How hard can it be?

First thing is, when? I look at the Google Calendar. Lots of conflicts with SWBB and other pre-purchased tickets. Also, January is when the move back to the 6th floor should happen. However, there’s a nice gap in mid-February, the 9th to the 20th, with no serious conflicts. So I open booking.com and look for hotels. There are several attractive places in Chiswick and around Hyde Park where I can stay for 10 nights for less than £1000. I find officiallondontheater.com, ticket brokerage. Lots of shows one could see with prices around £30-£50. And of course there are the museums, I would use TripAdvisor to refresh my memory of those. But it should not be difficult, the work of a couple afternoons, to plan a 9- or 10-day stay with one museum and one performance a day. So we will see.

Day 335, filing, SWBB

Saturday, 11/2/2019

We are approaching “Day 365” at speed. I’m mentally going over what I want to do or say at the one-year mark. I need to sum up, and maybe close this down, or decide how to continue it.

I took care of a little business this morning, paying for my next six months of car insurance and filing that receipt in the appropriate folder. Then I had a little panic session because something wasn’t where I remembered it.

Two days ago, I applied for an Apple Card. Just for fun, really; I already have three perfectly functional credit cards. The Chase Sapphire has the longest history, and Chase has been very good at fraud detection and alerts. The Hyatt card is another Chase one; I got it a decade ago when we were planning a trip to Europe and I found it was the only card (at the time) that did not charge a fee for currency conversions. I still use it primarily when traveling; I used it probably 15 times for small purchases on the recent Greek trip, and on the latest bill, there are all the transactions in Euros and converted to dollars.

The third card is a BofA card branded by Alaska Airlines. We got one each at Marian’s insistence, when we were traveling often on the west coast for SWBB away games. You get extra Alaska miles for purchases, and once a year, each card could be used to book a flight for two with the second traveler getting a flat $100 fare. After Marian died, I canceled her card but kept mine, for no very good reason. I hardly use it, although I have tended to use it for online purchases, because if it were picked up by scammers, I would not be discomfited at having to change its number and get a new card — as I have been when the Sapphire card had to be changed. So I’ve been using the Alaska card strictly for online purchase when I can’t use PayPal.

Anyway, I applied for and got an Apple Card. And then found out that I can’t pay my Apple Card bill the way I do all the others, using my SFCU bill-pay app. They just flat “don’t support bill-pay” — said the person who replied to my text query.

The only way to pay an Apple Card is to give them the routing and account number for your account (in my case, the SFCU checking account), and then they initiate an EFT to debit my account for the amount I want to pay. That’s just the opposite of what I am used to, where my bank initiates the EFT when I tell it to, via bill-pay.

Two things wrong with this. First, payment has to be immediate. You open the Wallet app and initiate the payment on your phone screen. It uses a very smooth, colorful UI, but I have to do it manually, and the funds are transferred right then. With bill-pay, I get a bill, then I tell the bank when to do the paying, and then I can forget about it; the money will be sent on my chosen schedule a couple of days before it’s due. If I want to pay off the Apple card a couple of days before the due-date, I have to personally remember to initiate it on that date.

Second, I’m trusting Apple to keep my routing and account numbers secure, and to not reach into that account and debit itself any amount except what I tell it. I suppose that Apple (and their contracted agent, Goldman Sachs) are about as trustworthy as anyone, but still. When I learned that, I very nearly decided to cancel the thing. And still may. I will cancel one or the other, the Alaska card or the Apple one.

On the side of the Apple card: It is not associated with BofA, a company I trust only slightly more than I would Wells Fargo. Apple charges no fees for the pleasure of having the card. Apple doesn’t give “points” that you have to redeem in some complex way (I can’t tell you how many Alaska miles, or Hyatt points I have, or Chase ones, but I remember trying to figure out how to redeem such and being confused). It simply gives you 1% cash back. Finally the physical Apple Card, the stiff white piece of titanium that came in the mail yesterday, doesn’t show a number on its face. There is a standard 16-ditit number, but you have to go into the phone to see it; and they will change it for you anytime you ask them to.

So probably the Alaska card will go, next time I get a bill for it. But I still don’t like the Apple payment system.

OK, so there I was at my desk, paying this shit and filing that shit, and where shall I file the white titanium Apple card? I don’t expect to use the physical card much, just the iPhone app. Well, the same goes for the Alaska card, I don’t carry the card, I just use LastPass to fill its values into online purchase forms. Where do I keep it? Aha. I keep it, with some other things like my Palo Alto library card, in a 4×6 manila envelope, labeled in Marian’s neat printing, “LITTLE USED CARDS”. Where is that?

I was sure it was in my fireproof storage box, along with all other important but rarely viewed papers. But it wasn’t. I could see that envelope in imagination; I could remember handling it when going through the fireproof box last; but it wasn’t there. I looked other places, then I fretted for a while. And then, I had a vision of myself having put that into a pendaflex folder. Which one? I had already flipped through the pendaflex folders in the file drawer. But I went back and went through them one by one and… the very back-most folder was labeled “Card Info”. It was formerly (and still) for pieces of paper about card accounts. But when rationalizing the desk file drawer a few months ago, I had decided to move the envelope of seldom-used cards to that pendaflex.

Perfectly logical. Sensible, even. Panic over.

Finally it was 3pm and time to leave for the SWBB game. On Tuesday, I’d given a ride to Lennie and we casually said she would drive next time. I emailed her and she was riding with a friend, Carol, and I’d be welcome to ride along. So at 3:15 I went out the front door and there was Lennie, and minute later Carol rolled up and we were off to the game.

This was a game against the USA Basketball team, including Stanford alum Nneka Ogwumike along with other famous players, Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Sylvia Fowles and on and on. Players I’ve seen a number of times each over the years.

On the way to the game I said I expected Stanford to get beaten by a lot, the way Stanford beat Beijing Normal earlier in the week. But in fact they did extremely well. They took a lead in the first quarter and stayed ahead of the national team until late in the third quarter. They were down by only 6, mid-4th quarter. At the end they lost by 15, but that is a highly respectable result. One factor is that we have four very talented freshmen, and all played and did well. Tara’s strategy appeared to be frequent, rapid subbing. In part that gave everyone experience playing against top-notch competition (and can you imagine how excited the freshmen were, on the floor with women they’d seen on television since they were in grade school?). Every available player had at least 4 minutes; 8 of them had double-digit minutes. This was also meant, I’m sure, to deliberately tire out the older women by making them defend a steady stream of fresh 20-year-old legs. After all, Sue Bird is 39 and Diana Taurasi is 37.

Day 334, not much

Friday, 11/1/2019

Went for a run, remembering to wear a jacket, which I was glad for. Well, people in serious parts of the world would laugh, but a morning temp under 60º is chilly, here.

At 10am there was a meeting where 6th floor people shared experiences of their move-out with 5th floor people who are about to begin the preparation for move-out. I had nothing much to say, since my move was so smooth: not a lot of possessions, moving to a unit with nearly the same floor plan.

What happened the rest of the day? I remember avoiding writing for most of the afternoon. I am in a bad relationship to my novel just now. I spent a little time getting back to speed on Lisp and reading further in that textbook.

At suppertime when I went downstairs, I found the odor of the “catch of the day” to be powerful and offensive. And nothing else on the menu looked attractive. So I left, got in my car, and drove to Mike’s cafe for a light supper, followed by ice cream from across the street in Midtown.