Saturday 05/03/2025

For the first time in weeks, I walked to Cafe Zoe for breakfast. Walking back I realized it was nearly 10, and the Palo Alto May Day Parade would be finishing up at the park just down the block from CH. Lots of community booths, and a display of old hot rods and classic cars. Nice. I didn’t take any pictures.

Lounged around lazily most of the day. But spent another hour with Claude on fiction writing. The new prompt is helping, they are much less effusive than before, and actually had a couple of good suggestions. One of their questions led me to understand a major reason I’m stuck on this book. We’ll see.

What pronoun should we use for an AI? Certainly not going to refer to Claude or ChatGPT as “he” or “she”. I used “they” above; that feels better, but we need a unique pronoun for a non-human voice in a conversation. Maybe a normal pronoun with “AI” inserted?

I asked Claude and thai said… hai said… thair suggestion was helpful… I took hais advice…

Friday 05/02/2025

Had a 10am private tour at the museum. This was great fun. The group was 14 technical people from Promon, a Norwegian company that develops security software for mobile devices. So, geeks. Nice mix of ages, a few old enough to know what slide rule is. They understood all the stuff, they paid attention, they were interested and responsive and gave me a nice round of applause at the end. Great tour.

At 1pm I set up the auditorium for a rehearsal for the upcoming concert. 12 different performers or groups of performers. This was a “free” rehearsal, just getting used to the stage. Next Tuesday we do a “tech” rehearsal where we try to get the actual time and flow of events right. And the concert is Wednesday. Today I was OK, I fluffed a couple of chords but sang ok.

And looking ahead I have a completely free weekend, which is nice. Wonder what I will do with it?

Thursday 05/01/2025

An uncommitted day on the calendar. Frittered away much of it. Spent some time with Claude.ai. Back on day 6.108 I mentioned trying out Claude as a writing partner. Claude was so full of chat, comment, and ideas that it was kind of overwhelming, and I set it aside. Since then I have learned a bit about AI prompting. Today I asked Claude to help me write a new set of Project Instructions, aka global prompt, for the writing project, which it did. Then just couldn’t figure out how to proceed. Mental or writer’s block. Frustrating.

At 7 joined Joanne and we walked the half mile to the Lucy Stern theater to see the Palo Alto Players production of Jersey Boys. I was sure I had seen a musical about the formation of a singing group, but that, whatever it was, was not Jersey Boys. This plot was completely unfamiliar to me. But the show was quite good. The production was A+ quality, I can’t imagine a Broadway show being better. Dozens of set changes and costume changes and just endless, skillful, dancing and singing. So much snappy choreography. And of course great songs, “Sherry Baby”, “Dawn”, “Walk Like a Man”.The only thing I’d downrate it for was audio quality. It was loud and I mean, my ears are still ringing like after a rock concert. And one of the main characters was hard to understand, some combination of his joisy accent, his style of delivery, maybe a mic issue? But all told, top notch stuff.

Wednesday 04/30/2025

In the morning I took care of a bunch of little email things, they amounted to nothing but were cluttering up my in-box. I got my lunch as carry-out and at 12, watched most of a webinar from Stanford, presentation of the 2025 Stanford AI Index.

Then down to meet Joanne at 1pm for a walk. This was a weekly group walk she organizes, except this week everybody else was ill or had a conflict, so it was just me and her. Imagine my dismay.

Back by 3, I had time to prepare for 4pm when the AV group had its monthly meeting. I presented on what I’d learned about stage monitor speakers, and Jerry talked about how he had presented his travel video avoiding the laggy response of zoom.

Tuesday 04/29/2025

The writers group prompt this time was “a dialogue”. Any dialogue. Between 9 and 10:30 I cobbled together something, a dialog as an SMS text exchange. Got a couple of laughs. This prompt got some silliness. Peter had a dialog between the dairy products in his refrigerator. Joanne wrote a dialog between a queen termite and her king termite discussing the different kinds of cellulose products they could eat.

After lunch I went to neighbor Phil’s apartment and we packed 8 more boxes of his books. I schlepped them down to the Prius and off to FOPAL. Only three boxes of computer books to process. Then at 3pm when they took donations I gave them Phil’s boxes.

After supper a concert by a local jazz group, an hour of jazz versions based (sometimes rather loosely based) on Beatles songs. Not what I had expected, I’d thought they would be more a Beatles tribute band but no, they completely reworked the songs, changing rhythms and harmonies all over the place.

Here’s my silly dialogue. Read it slow, with pauses between, like actual text messages come.

Monday 04/28/2025

Took an early morning walk. Picked up a prescription at CVS, which turned out to be spironolactone, the drug that I cut back from 1/day to 3/week some time ago. So I still have not only 20 or so still in the working bottle, but discovered that I also had another full bottle in the spare-pills drawer. ‘Scuse me a sec…

switches over to CVS.com and turns off auto-refill for that drug…

Now then. At 11 I went down to the auditorium and set it up for a test of monitor speakers. This was because Bert’s friend Larry was going to come by and give advice at 1pm. The problem at hand was that professional musicians are used to have monitor speakers that point back at them so they can clearly hear what they sound like. When I tried to do that for the Keller Sisters, anytime I got the monitor up loud enough to suit them, I would get feedback.

While setting up I noticed that the feedback frequency was very low. Just short of feedback the sound would get deep and echo-y like talking into a deep well. So ok if it wants to feed back in the low tones, let’s cut the low tones. The sound board has a four-band equalizer for each mic, and I just rolled the 100Hz knob over to zero. Bingo, no feedback.

When he got there, Larry concurred with what I’d done. He had some other suggestions, and told me some great war stories about being sound man for bands. After he left I had Jerry come down and try it out, he’s the one CH performer who wants a monitor. We got it to work for him, too.

Then I put everything away.

At 4pm was the Common Spaces Advisory Group. Patty and I presented our proposal for the 11th floor tv area. Everybody seemed to like it. Rhonda said she would start getting prices.

Mary Beth, head of the Treasure Trove (gift shop) asked me to look at a donated iPad, so now I have to figure out how to reset to factory, an iPad for which the former owner is no longer able to remember anything like a passcode. I looked it up and will do this tomorrow.

Also an old Kodak Carousel slide projector. My goodness, all through the 60s to the early 00s, we used our Carousel a lot. Been 20 years since I touched one. The owner of this one had stashed two spare bulbs in the box. Good thing. The one in the projector burned out as soon as I turned it on. Power switch on, flash, dark. And the first spare was also kaput. But the 2nd spare worked. Bulbs cost $25 for 2, on amazon. The projector sells on eBay for around $30-$40.

Sunday 04/27/2025

Usual Sunday morning. In gardening news, all the four dragon-wing begonias have put out leaves. However the daphne has signs of a fungal infection again so I sprayed it.

Walked to the Cal ave farmers market (3 miles for the day). Bought cherries and dried apricots for myself.

At 1pm brought the car up to be part of the car pool caravan of CH residents attending Henry V at The Pear. Interesting production. The play has 30 characters at least, but they did it with a total cast of five actors. Plus king Henry was played by a woman. She did a great job, really nailed the famous “we few, we band of brothers” speech.

Saturday 04/26/2025

Tired of thinking up title lines.

Walked up to Douce France, Joanne’s favorite coffee shop, with her. Spent the rest of the middle of the day doing not much. At 3pm I drove down to FOPAL and was able to turn in the 5 boxes of books from Phil, and get a bunch more flattened boxes. Tomorrow or Tuesday I’ll get the rest of his donation.

Quiet dinner with Edie, Sophia and Marc.

Friday 04/25/2025

Started the day with a lovely walk with Joanne. Back by 10, then to Line Dance class at 10:30.

In the afternoon I helped a neighbor, Phil, pack up 5 boxes of books to donate to FOPAL. Put them in my car and drove down there, and found that some stupid construction…

FOPAL occupies a building that is part of what once was Cubberly High School. 20(?) years ago it was closed as a school, then the campus of many buildings was reopened as a community center. Now a local fire station is being remodeled, and the powers that be have decided that they would give the FD a new temporary home in the middle of the parking lot in front of the FOPAL building. Bad enough that we lost about 30 parking spaces, but today I found construction fencing completely closing off — or so I thought — access to the building.

Went home with 5 boxes of Phil’s books still in my car, wrote an email. Got a response that yes, it is possible still to get to our door, there’s a gap in the fence. Wasn’t obvious to me driving by but whatever. Anyway.

Dinner with Carolyn and new residents Liane and Weldon.

Thursday 04/24/2025

This was going to be the day where I was to perform a half-hour set at 2:30pm for the folks in the assisted living center. Jerry and Kay were scheduled to perform (vocal and flute) at 10:30am. So I went over there — across a second-story “bridge” to a different building — to hear them. On the way I passed a TV screen that showed the day’s activities, and while Jerry and Kay were listed, I wasn’t.

So then I tried to find out what was going on, but the Activities staff person was out, and her manager was out, and the regular aides only knew that there was a birthday celebration at 2 which might run to 2:45.

So I rehearsed a couple more times and at 2:15 went back with my guitar case and music stand, and found that the birthday celebration, organized by the resident’s relatives, involved cake for everybody, and a dude with a guitar and a list of songs for sing-along. At 2:30 he was half way through his song list and said “everybody just enjoy your cake and when you are finished we’ll sing some more,” so I could see that was going to be going to maybe 3pm, and if I played then I’d be rather redundant, let alone my audience would be full of birthday cake and falling asleep. Fortunately the activities director showed up and I arranged she would book me in some later week, and I went away. So that was a big nothing after days of rehearsing.

At 6pm I set up the auditorium for a talk by the founder of the Magical Bridge Foundation. They make innovative, handicap-friendly playgrounds. The presentation went off well enough, but I fucking forgot to un-pause zoom recording, which is a rookie mistake. So there is no recording. No big loss, I don’t think there will be any demand for a replay. But damn, son. You know better.