Day 245, vintage computers, mulch prep

I went to the concert at Rinconada, but left fairly quickly. The opening was “Business Casual”, a local a cappella group. They do covers of well-known songs, with percussion by a pretty talented beat-boxer. The main act was I Forget Their Name because they weren’t very good. Trying to do Eagles and other 70s bands and not good at all.

Back home by 7:30 I watched half of the RiffTrax version of Cat Women of the Moon.

Sunday, 8/4/2019

Had coffee at Mlle. Collette. Then went down to the Museum to attend the Vintage Computer Fest. One of the features this year was a meeting of an Apple I user’s group, touted as the largest assemblage of Apple I ever, or at least for a while. There were at least half a dozen on display. Steve and Steve sold about 200 of them. The user group’s registry lists about 75 known to exist now. One of the ones on display included the original shipping box, with a return address of, not Apple, but Steve Jobs’ own house.

I was disappointed by one exhibit that initially intrigued me. In the past few years there have been some amazing small computers released, the Raspberry Pi, the Arduino, and so on. Complete systems with video out, USB in, competent CPUs and for a file system, a 16GB SD card. (Note the G, it still boggles me that you can get a 16 or 32 gigabyte “disk” in a chip the size of your little fingernail.) Well, one exhibitor here was the founder (and sole proprietor) of MakerLisp, a credit-card sized system with a Lisp interpreter in ROM. With the Pi, the Arduino, the BeagleBone, you write code on a PC in a dialect of C++, compile it, and download the binary to the little system. That makes the development cycle somewhat tedious, and the C dialect is not a pretty or friendly language. So the idea of a card computer with an interpreter for a (sort of) high-level language on board is attractive. So I eagerly opened the MakerLisp website and was quite disappointed at the very shallow support and documentation level. Basically if you aren’t already a Lisp maven, you can forget it. There’s no help here. To call the docs (which I downloaded and looked through) “minimal” is to flatter them. The only people who could buy this pretty little machine and put it to work are people with the same depth of experience as the designer himself.

(Hmmm… I wonder how hard it would be to implement APL on a RasPi…? You know, that is not as silly as it sounds; there already exists GNU APL, free, runs on Linux; and there is an Ubuntu port for the Pi. Use an APL shared variable to map to the I/O pins on the Pi….)

Another educational effort is the 1620 Jr. project, for which I can’t find a website although I’m sure they have one. A real 1620 was restored and sometimes demonstrated in the old exhibit space ten years ago, but has since been put into storage, partly because it was too hard to maintain its typebar-typewriter output device. Some of the guys who did that restoration have obtained the console of a 1620 and backed it with a cycle-accurate simulator and a modern typewriter for output. Their aim is to offer a course in which students will learn how to program the 1620, practicing lessons on simulators on regular laptops, then bringing their debugged programs to the realistic console to run. But the Museum is in the throes of personnel changes, so it’s on hold.

I headed home for the afternoon. At 3pm I remembered to call Lyngso Garden Supply and get the delivery time for the 3 cubic yards of mulch tomorrow. 9am-11am. I emailed that info to Richard the gardener, saying I would go and spread out the tarp in the morning. Then I got anxious, worried that the big tarp that I had carefully stowed at the back of the garage might have been tossed out by a contractor. So I drove over to Tasso street. The tarp was fine, so I spread it out at the end of the driveway, weighted it down with bricks, and just to make sure no contractor decided to drive into the driveway and park on it, move the garbage cans out onto it as a barrier.

Back to C.H. for supper and a quiet evening.

Day 244, interview, docent, concert

Saturday, 8/3/2019

In the morning I went to check out the Farmer’s Market. Remember I looked for it last Sunday and found only an empty parking lot? That’s because I had the downtown market confused with the one on California Avenue, which does happen on Sundays. This one is on Saturdays, duh. I bought one basket of cherries. Actually these cherries were not as nice as the ones I’ve been getting at the grocery store. But they are more… farmer-y?

Then it was time to meet with Helene, who has been assigned by the C.H. newsletter editor to interview me and write up something for the newsletter. We chatted for half an hour. We’ll see what she writes up; I get to look at it before it is published.

Off to the Museum for the 12pm tour. About 25 people. Today and tomorrow are the Vintage Computer Fest in the upstairs event space, so the parking lot was full but not a lot of actual museum visitors downstairs. I mean to go poke around the VCF tomorrow.

On the way home I stopped at the grocery store and bought a few things. Then I stopped at the Tasso house to see what was happening. What was happening was that Clarence, Chuck’s handyman contractor, was installing faucets and light fixtures. No sign of the painters.

I had on the Google Calendar a concert at 8pm at Dinkelspiel. I thought to check the Stanford jazz site to verify the time and discovered, darn it, the concert was last night. I put it in the calendar wrong. The only concert on 8/3 is at Bing and not a performer I would have gone out of my way to buy a ticket for. headbang The one in their calendar for 8/2 is the one I remember signing up for.

There’s a free concert in Rinconada park at 6:30, maybe I’ll go that that.

Day 243, book, party, movies

Friday, 8/2/2019

OK, what the heck did I do yesterday? This is Saturday and that day has gone from memory. There’s nothing in my Google calendar, so I didn’t have external obligations.

I remember I went for a run in the morning. Then… at some point I put in an hour on Zooniverse, classifying stuff in a couple of projects. Oh, wait. Right. I uploaded a MOBI version of the book to Amazon and “published” a Kindle version to go with the paperback. I’m amused that Amazon accepted this because the file was generated by LeanPub and clearly says on the half-title page, “This is a LeanPub book…”.

Also, this was party day, Channing House held a party at 2:30 to celebrate the 7th floor beginning to move back and 6th floor getting ready to move out. Rhonda (CEO) commented from the stage that when the 7th move-back is complete, the renovation project will be half-done, two years down and two to go, and they are only a few weeks off of the originally planned target dates.

The party theme was black and white movies. I wore white pants, a black turtleneck, and my formal black fedora. I sat in a back corner, and Bert came and sat next to me. He’s the tech squad and A/V team leader and he asked if I wanted to be on the A/V team, and I do. He said they have a contract out for a full replacement/upgrade of the auditorium A/V equipment, so in a few weeks there would be a training session to learn the new gear.

I didn’t do much in the afternoon. Something I saw online reminded me of the classic anime film, Ghost in the Shell and just for giggles I did a search on the XFinity box and yup, it’s there on the “Tubi” app and free. I started it streaming and got bored with it 20 minutes in. But after stopping it and backing up to the main “Tubi” page there was a display of available movies and I spotted Rango, an animated feature from a few years ago that I’d always kind of wanted to see, so I ran that, all the way through.

So that was Friday. I better get started on Saturday before I forget.

Day 242, contractors, Yosemite, realty

Thursday, 8/1/2019

First thing after breakfast I sent an email to Mark, the sales guy for Davey Tree service. I’d heard nothing from them since accepting their estimate for trimming several days ago. I get a response in half an hour, “We’re coming today.” Gee, thanks for the warning. Later I confirmed with Chuck that they hadn’t contacted him either. The problem was, there is a flooring contractor scheduled to start on the kitchen floor today, and the painters aren’t quite done either.

So I drove over to the house on my way to a day of museum work across the bay. The Davey team were already at work, a huge truck in the driveway supporting a cherry picker, and a guy up among the oak branches. Mark was just driving away, and we conferred, and then talked to the second tree guy who was on the ground. He didn’t see any problem and would keep an eye out for contractors. When I said “flooring contractor” he said, “what kind, laminate or what?” I said, “laminate” and he said, “Oh no problem, my cousin does laminate floors, and I know he won’t have much stuff to bring in.”

So I went off to Yosemite. Today I and Steve spent the day beginning the implementation of Aurora’s grand plan to check every box. We fetched down a cart load of boxes. I was running the computer and Steve was handling stuff. I would do a search on the box number, and tell Steve how many objects were returned by the search. He would count to make sure there were that many objects in the box. Only once was the count wrong. It was one too high. We had to go through the objects and check their numbers against the search results. Yup, there was one object not listed as being in that box. So we searched on its number, and found it was recorded as being in a different box on a different shelf. So we went and found that box and shoved the item (an unpopulated PCB) into that box. Problem solved.

Then I’d check whether each object had a photograph in the database. A few did not, and Steve would mark them with a “photo needed” tag and that box would go on the “to be photographed” shelf. Otherwise it was all good and went on the “return to storage” shelf.

We ripped through a dozen boxes in the day, at the end of which Steve commented, “Well, I said this was going to be a ten-year project. Now I think it might only be eight.”

I came home by way of Tasso street. The tree guys were gone and the trees looked fine. The oak branches are well clear of the house now. The big Pittisporums are not touching the house roof either, and there’s quite a bit more light in the back yard.

Inside I found that nothing had been done with the floor, apparently that guy didn’t come. The painters were pretty nearly done. I was distressed to find that they had sealed the butcher-block counter tops in the kitchen with something hard, that looks almost like varnish. That’s not right at all.

I texted Chuck with these observations. Later in the evening he called me up. He’d talked to the flooring guy who had said, well, some materials didn’t come in, so he can’t come until Monday. That pretty well messes up the time-line for opening the house on Friday week. So Chuck says now we’ll slip it a week to 8/16, and I have to agree. He’ll discuss the kitchen counters with Eric the painter.

Day 241, FOPAL, tour, realty, play

Wednesday, 7/31/2019

Started with a run; it felt fine.

Paid a couple of bills. Yesterday I got an email from Amy wanting the signed contract for the staging, so I did that routine: print out the contract PDF, sign it, scan the signed page, and email the scan back to her. About 11am I left for FOPAL where I found four boxes waiting at the computer section, but they only yielded a dozen books to shelve. Lots of immense paperback tomes, Everything about Windows 95, The Complete Red Hat Linux Version 3, and so forth. Fifteen-hundred page doorstops, now of no interest to anyone. However, the haul did include several high-value books, little specialist books that people are paying $35-70 for.

Then I spent a couple hours sorting, before leaving at 1:30. I had received a text from Chuck telling me how much the painter’s estimate was. I had intended to bring my checkbook along so when I got that text, I could write a check and take it to Tasso street. However I had not brought the checkbook, so now I had to go back to C.H. and get it; write the check; and go deliver it.

Now I had an hour before I was scheduled to give a tour to a private group. I had meant to spend it sitting quietly, possibly napping, in the car. However at this point I started exchanging texts with Chuck and that led to realizing that still hanging is the issue of getting fresh mulch spread on the landscaping. What day will it be ok to block the driveway with a pile of mulch, what day will Richard the gardener be available to spread said mulch, I need to order the mulch to be delivered, aaaaagggghhhh!

Flurry of texts and emails (Richard doesn’t do texts) and settled on a date of Monday. Also got an email from Amy, fine you signed, but can you send the check, also? Then into the museum to wait for the tour group to arrive, which they didn’t, so I spent the time calling Lyngso Garden Supply and scheduling the delivery. But they couldn’t give me a time, “call back on Sunday afternoon and we can tell you what your 2-hour window will be.”

Compounded by: I had signed up to lead a tour of 25 people, but the document waiting at the counter specified 50. No way can one docent lead that big a tour. But when they finally showed up they were a reasonable group of 25 after all. And pretty independent, a core group of 10 or so stuck close to me, the others kind of wandered around us on cometary orbits. Which is fine with me.

After the tour I could email Richard about the uncertain start time on Monday. Back to C.H. where I wrote Amy’s check and mailed it, fortunately the usual mail delivery hadn’t happened on time so it went out tonight.

For supper I spotted an Open table with one other person, who turned out to be Beverly, and we were later joined by Cathy. I like the Open table concept. By sitting at one you are saying, I’m unaccompanied and open to anybody’s company. There are smaller tables where you can sit by yourself and nobody will bother you, or tables where people who know each other arrive in a group.A couple of nights back, I sat at an empty Open one, and nobody joined me, which was dampening. So I saw Beverley (who I didn’t know) sitting alone at an Open table I joined her and that was Ok.

This evening I had a ticket for a TheaterWorks presentation, The Language Archive. I didn’t like it much, and left at the intermission.

Day 240, echo, alterations, brass polish

Tuesday, 7/30/2019

First thing today was to go to PAMF to have a cardiac echo test. This is preparation for a routine exam by my cardiologist in a couple of weeks. I had opted for an 8am appointment. The Encina street office of PAMF is nominally 20 minutes’ walk and my first plan was to do that.

However, yesterday afternoon my box of new clothes arrived from Bonobos. As expected, the blazer is a good fit in the arms and shoulders, but too tight around the waist. Two of the three pairs of pants are also juuuuust a bit too tight for comfort. Those two are from one line, the pair for a different line are exactly right, despite all having the same nominal size. Anyway, I wanted to drop off the jacket and pants for alterations at Jacquie’s Sew and Sew, a tailoring shop I’ve used before with good results. Jacquie’s opens at 9am. There were other options but I chose instead to toss the clothes into the car and drive.

The echocardiogram was a short routine operation. I’ve had them before, and from what I could see on the screen, it looked the same as before. The technician of course wouldn’t offer any opinion. “Your doctor will tell you about it.” Which is only sensible.

So to the Prolific Oven for breakfast, and then to Jacquie’s, where they took my instructions and clothes and said, August 9th.

From there, on to Tasso street. Here may aim was to polish the brass door and window handles. They were more than ten years from their last polish, and the window handles especially were more the color of a briar pipe than brass. There were two painters there, working away. I didn’t monitor them in any detail, strictly not my job. I set myself up on the front porch with my cardboard box of polish and cleaners and my cordless drill with brush and buffing attachments.

The painters had already removed all the brass door handles into a bucket. I started with those and they polished up very nicely and quickly, using only “Mr. Metal,” a product that I’d picked up at the hardware store that promised “shine without rubbing or buffing” and doggone if it didn’t pretty much do that. When there was no heavy layer of dirt or corrosion, it was a wipe-on, let-dry, wipe-off operation and the hardware looked shiny and good.

The window handles had, I”m not sure how, picked up a layer of gummy crud, like a thin layer of brown crayon. To get that off took soaking in cleaner and whizzing with the abrasive brush. Then I used Mr. Metal and followed with Brasso on a polishing pad.

Each window handle is held in place by three short brass screws. In order to reattach them, you have to start the screw while holding the window open. And of course, I twice dropped a screw trying to start it. Dropped into the bark mulch on the ground under the window. One time I found it. One I couldn’t find.

I was already short one screw, as I discovered when removing the backmost handle from the laundry room. The handles are acceptable with only two screws; clearly I’d lost one back at the turn of the millennium. So I drove to the hardware store and went through their quite good screw and bolt shelves. I found what I thought might be a replacement but in fact, it was just too large and a tighter thread. Who knows what thread standards they were using in 1930? So now I (or actually, the future owner) is short two screws, two handles held on by two screws. I’m going to have one more try at the hardware store later on.

I finished up around 1pm and headed home. When I checked the mail that evening, I found the Amazon package with three copies of To Thrive Beyond Belief. One for my bookshelf, one for the house library. What to do with the third?

Day 239, FOPAL, lunch, realty

Monday, 7/29/2019

Started with a run. Got mentally immersed in the podcast I was listening to and forgot to turn across the creek, so the route ended up a little shorter than usual. After showering I headed out to FOPAL, arriving around 9:30. I cleared the Computer section pile, pricing and shelving another 30 books or so. Somebody had donated several books about Perl, so I assembled a whole little section of books on Perl.

At 11am I switched over to sorting, all by myself. I cleared the table. Donors brought another 5 or 6 boxes, out of the normal hours for that, but whatever; and I took them in and sorted them. So when the regular sorting crew arrived, they found a nice tidy sorting room with a clear table.

At 12:15 I headed off to meet Scott for lunch. From there headed home. Sitting around, I got a text from Chuck. He has been scheduling various operations, and has hopes of showing the house for the first time a week from Friday, August 9th. That’s excellent news. He has a floor person he has used before, who quotes $2300 to put new vinyl in the kitchen and utility room, and another $2000 to refinish the “rest of the flooring”. I commented that seemed low, was it just a coat of varathane? No, this guy is good, Chuck has used him before, he’ll sand and varnish.

I ok’d both jobs, and said I appreciated the depth of his contact list. He replied that he got contractors to work for him because he pays them promptly, and by the way could I give the painter a check for his work on Wednesday? Back of the envelope calculation, I’m committed to about $20K of work, including the tree work, the painting, the flooring, the staging, and some misc. handiwork not yet scheduled. So I wrote to Cindy at the financial managers asking that she have the brokers get me another glob of liquid funds I can transfer from the managed Schwab account to the unmanaged one, which I can write checks against.

Looking at tomorrow’s schedule, I had planned to do laundry in the morning, but there are a couple of other things I want to do then also. Checked the house laundry room schedule and met Diane there. She’s running laundry until about 8. Fine. I’ll do laundry starting at 8. I want to sit up for SYTYCD anyway.

Day 238, slow Sunday

Sunday, 7/28/2019

Doing this entry rather late on Monday — the first time I’ve let a blog post slip so far.

Sunday morning I had coffee and read the paper at Verve, which I was surprised to find opened at 6AM. I got there at 7:15. Pleasant enough, although the inside seating, which looks very comfortable, is somewhat spoiled by just-too-loud music. Outside seating has plenty of sitting space in the form of benches, and is shaded from morning glare, but lacks tables.

On the way back, around 8am, I looked for the Sunday Farmer’s Market. I found the right parking lot, clearly marked as reserved for Farmer’s Market, but it was completely empty. Not a sign of a farm stand being set up. What time does it start? I’d think there would be people setting up an hour ahead, so maybe it doesn’t open until after 9am?

At noon I had been invited to lunch by Ann. I was a little uncertain when I accepted, what I was accepting for. Was this to be a tete-a-tete, and if so, was I to be propositioned? I’ve had more than one person tell me with great certainty that live males in a retirement community will be very popular, nudge-nudge, with the women who outnumber them. This always from people who are too young for a retirement community, not from any actual retirees.

So far I’d encountered nothing of the kind. OK, here’s a fact: since this blog is public, I’ll say right now, that if anything even minutely romantic happens, it will not show up here! But in this case, it turned out that Ann had very kindly set up a luncheon to let me get to know her, Marian, Robin, Ed (whom I’d dined with before) and Dirk. And very pleasant it was.

In the evening I finished watching a movie on Amazon Prime. I had been interested in the actress Melanie Stone since she starred in a commercial for a product I was writing about, Keto Chow. I watched her first feature appearance, Mythica: A Quest for Heros. It wasn’t bad, and she did as well as the rather disjointed script would allow her to do.

After that, I noticed Amazon suggesting a free movie, one of the Rifftrax series. These are really bad, cheesy movies with sarcastic voice-overs by two guys. This one was really funny. Normally “funny” TV gets a smile from me; this one had me laughing out loud at least twice. And so to bed.

Day 237, docent, sonnet, book

Saturday, 7/27/2019

Did nothing much between breakfast and departing for the Museum at 11am. Did my docent round, people liked it.

This morning I remembered the window handles at Tasso street. They are brass, and I think three times over the 40+ years I lived there, I polished them. They come up with a lovely warm shine, then over a decade or so, turn dark brown again. Which they are now, and I really would like them shiny. It’s not that bad of a job, especially if I were to use some kind of power tool. I have a good cordless drill, but I don’t have a buffer attachment for it. That’s a rubber disk on a spindle; you chuck it into the end of the drill and tie a lambs-wool pad over the disk, and then you can whizz away with your tool.

So I stopped on the way home at the hardware store intending to pick up a buffer disk, and to my surprise they didn’t have them. So at home I opened up Amazon and ordered one. It will arrive Monday, but that means I can’t, as I’d sort of planned, go do any buffing of window handles tomorrow. Well, I can, but I’ll have to do it manually, no power assist. Looking ahead, I’m hoping that the house will be full of painters next week, and I might have a hard time working in around them. Well.

In the afternoon email is a notice from Amazon that my book is now available for sale. I ordered three copies, although I’m not sure on whom I will bestow the third.

Sitting around in the afternoon I recalled a thought that drifted through my mind a couple of times lately: recalling Emma Lazarus’ famous sonnet about the Statue or Liberty, The New Colossus, I wondered what kind of sonnet she might write about today’s immigration policy. Well, how about me, could I write a sonnet? And over about 90 minutes, I did, complete with proper sonnet rhyme scheme (mostly) and iambic pentameter (ok, ok, there’s one extra foot in one line, sue me).

(Removed, so as to meet the rules of most poetry magazines which don’t want anything published before, even in a personal blog.)

Since I’d never written a sonnet before, I think I’ll call this a day.

Day 236, walk, book, dinner

Friday, 7/26/2019

Didn’t feel like running; and anyway I used to have a habit of taking a longish walk on Fridays instead, so decided to have breakfast in the dining room and then walk to the Tasso street house to check progress.

Of which there has been none. The house is exactly like it was on Monday when I looked at it with Chuck. So I sent a text to Chuck suggesting that, as it was almost the weekend, he should try to stimulate the painter today, ok? And he didn’t reply, which probably means that, as on the prior couple of weekends, he is off playing the piano at some resort on the Russian River and out of cell phone coverage. Which is annoying. Both his absence on weekends and the lack of painting progress.

Chatted with neighbor Gloria, then walked up California Ave. and had coffee at the little invisible place in an alley, forget its name. And on home. (Over 10k steps for the day, yay me.)

Back home I worked on the book. This was mostly a matter of continuing to struggle with the LeanPub platform. The book is written in their flavor of Markdown, called Markua. Except they have been developing Markua for over two years now and keep not finishing the little corner features like poetry (i.e., a block of text in which the input spaces and newlines are preserved). I have 6 places in the book where I quote verse; they were defined with the Markua poetry markup as described in its spec, but it isn’t implemented so, when I complained in the user forum the developer suggested I use Code markup instead. Code markup (pre-formatted text in HTML terms) does preserve user newlines and indents, but it also uses by default, a monospaced font. But one can change that.

So I converted the poems to code markup and set the “Code” font to be the same as the body font, and regenerated. And discovered that code markup also doesn’t notice the markup for italics, so the italicized words in a poem aren’t, and it doesn’t recognize footnote references, so where I had a footnote reference at the end of a verse, as one should, it didn’t work. And in any case, the three places I had poems in the end-notes file (because I put poems in end-notes, ok?), this caused the PDF generation to end with an error.

Posted these issues to the user forum and the developer wrote back apologetically, yes, well, that’s how Code should work, the special characters you use for italics and footnote refs are meaningful in code so we can’t translate them. And the PDF generation errors? We’ll work on that.

So now I converted all the poems to block-quote markup. Blockquote markup does respect newlines, but loses indentations. But at least, it works in end-notes. Now I could generate a good PDF that, aside from poems not having indented lines, looks fine.

So I “published” a new version of the Leanpub book, eight purchasers will have had emails notifying them. But anyway, that version of the book now benefits from the dozens of little edits and tweaks I’ve made in the past weeks.

Then I generated a print-ready PDF and uploaded it to Kindle Direct. Kindle was happy with it, couldn’t find any problems, the preview looked good, so I clicked the “publish” button there. Sometime in the next 72 hours I’ll get an email saying the book is published on Amazon, and I can order a few author’s copies. One for my shelf, one for the C.H. library.

Took it easy for the rest of the afternoon, then went to supper, as invited, with Patti, Craig, Diane, and Karen and David. Very pleasant sitting with a bunch of chatty people, I hardly contributed anything.