Monday 04/14/2025

First thing was the monthly Resident Association meeting. One of several topics was the introduction of the car-free-trial program. The idea is to encourage people who are thinking about maybe someday giving up their car. If you promise to not use your car for two months, they’ll pay you $300 to defray the cost of your Uber rides, and for your report at the end. When I heard about this (Day 6.104) they were going to offer $200, and I urged that it be more. Glad to see they stepped it up to $300. We’ll see what kind of response it gets.

Then I zipped to my car and across town to CVS for my scheduled 11:30 appointment for a Covid shot. Got there at 10:40. The CVS website said I could wait to check in at 11:15, or I could reschedule. Hmmm. I tapped “reschedule” and found I could change to 11am. OK, do that. So now I wasn’t early and could check in, and in fact the nurse shot me and I was out about 10:50.

Then down to FOPAL for the post-sale tidy of my section. Back to CH to do an errand for a friend, Pam. She had an operation and emailed via her phone, she would be going from the hospital to another location for rehab, could I get her computer and bring it to her. Except she didn’t know where she would be transferred yet. So I stopped by her apartment and found her friend Judy bagging up clothes for her. We agreed to take her stuff together, when we knew where she would be. So that’s pending.

There was a concert by Steve Gill and friends this evening. He comes around 2 or 3 times a year. Tonight they were doing songs of Johnny Mercer. It was OK. Joanne showed up and sat beside me so that elevated the experience a bit.

Sunday 04/13/2025

Usual Sunday morning routine. At 11 I left for the Museum where I led the noon tour. Nice group of 20 who seemed to enjoy my gab.

In the afternoon, Jerry presented at the Sunday@Home. In 2000, Jerry and Betty took a 2-month trip around the world. He used a video camera to document their trip, later boiled 100 hours of video down to four hours. Today he showed the first hour to a packed house. This was Viet Nam, Thailand and Burma. Very good quality amateur travelog, well edited.

Saturday 04/12/2025

In the morning I decided to goof around and follow up on a request that Lou made yesterday. For a joke he wanted to send a friend a picture of Jesus riding into Jerusalem like a circus performer standing on the back of a donkey. I thought, heck, no problem. So I tried to get that from one AI image generator after another, and only got the one matching the prompt on the fifth try, at ChatGPT. See previous post for pictures.

At 10 I met with Patty and Bert on the 11th floor to discuss our proposal for what Bert brilliantly dubbed, “The Living Room in the Sky”. Well, it will be like a living room and it is surrounded by windows with a panoramic view, so ok. We worked out the points we had disagreed on. Now I get to draft something for them to comment on.

I got a phone call from CostCo. Their Optometry lab says they can’t put my prescription into the frames I picked out; could I please come select a different frame? I guess the couple of decimal points added strength made the lenses just that bit thicker than before. That’s fine as I had been having a little buyer’s remorse over the frame I had picked yesterday. So after lunch I drove over there and picked a frame that was maybe a little more to my taste than the prior one.

Then I finished editing Alice’s video and posted that. Then goofed around until it was time to go to dinner. Joanne and I met at 5:15 and walked to Ettan, an upscale Indian place. Interesting food, not bad. We agreed that Ethel’s Fancy, where we ate a couple weeks back, was better.

My friend Lou asked me to use my AI skills to make an image he wanted for a joke email. Summarizing his description, in its final form the prompt was basically

As Jesus enters Jerusalem he is practicing his circus bareback riding act. He is standing on one leg on the back of a trotting donkey, the other leg extended out to the side. Jesus’s white robe flaps behind him, his arms are spread out to catch the wind, a look of pure glee on his face. The donkey is hee-hawing in glee. Citizens of Jerusalem look on in awe and glee.

The prompt evolved over subsequent attempts. My first attempt was with Midjourney. (At this point we hadn’t added the “entering Jerusalem” phrase.) Midjourney didn’t get “standing on one leg”, and it had problems with the animal’s legs.

Next I tried ideogram.ai. It also did not understand “standing on one leg”. At least it gave the animal all its feet.

Then I tried Gemini.google.com. The prompt now had “entering Jerusalem” and Gemini did a nice job with the scenery. It also understand the standing on one leg phrase, but it got a little excited and… behold, three-legged Jesus:

I went to Leonardo.ai. At this point the prompt had “children run behind” but Leonardo wouldn’t accept a prompt that had the words “bareback” and “children” in it. So I changed that to “citizens of Jerusalem”. Leonardo also didn’t understand bareback riding, and gave a very pedestrian image, with Jesus almost falling off the rump of the donkey.

So I went to chatgpt.com, and it got it right. While it took the longest time of any of the AIs to generate the image, 3-5 minutes, it got every detail right. It even added palm fronds on its own, so it clearly knew the references.

So that’s your pre-easter tour of the current state of AI image generators.

Friday 04/11/2025

One of the bloggers I follow says when she feels as if she’s wasting time, she starts a Done To list, recording her day in detail. I thought, hmm, think I’ll try that. Here are the first few entries.

7:30 Shower, shave, brush teeth & hair, dress
7:50 computer, open tax prep invoice, discover it claims to be submitted
to financial advisors
7:55 email fin. adv. asking for confirmation invoice paid by them?
8:05 check laundry room for missing sock – find it! behind machine under a pipe
8:10 search 5th floor and 4th floor lounge for the chair Patty likes, find it on 4th, chance encounter with Lois who says she can tell me where they got those chairs, will email me and patty
8:16 find medical release form to request CT scan images for PCP – returned by fax – must ask at desk if they fax

Next I went to the lobby to meet with Joanne for a walk. The front desk person says no, we don’t fax, go the UPS store. Then off for a lovely walk with stop for coffee. Back to CH in time for the line dance class at 10:30.

After line dance I take the car out for an errand run. First to the UPS store to fax the request to please send my CT scan on CD to my PCP. I can’t imagine why Stanford Hospital cannot share imagery a quarter mile to my doctor at Palo Alto Medical Foundation by electronic means. No, they have to get a two-page release form from me, and then allow 14 days for a CD to be mailed to the doctor.

Next to the bank to deposit a check. Then to Costco to order new glasses. That took an hour. The lady was very friendly and patient, helping me find acceptable frames. I wanted an exact replacement for the frames I got from them three(?) years ago but nope.

Back home for a long nap, then up to 11 for the TGIF party, this month put on by the 9th floor. Ate snacks and wasn’t hungry for supper, so just vegetated in my room from 5:30 on.

Thursday 04/10/2025

Spent an hour trying to learn “blues turnaround” for the acoustic guitar off youtube.

Drove to PAMF for a 10am appointment. This was to do an actual “refraction” test, “Which is better, 1 or 2?” “2” “OK, which is better, 2 or 3?” and so on. Conclusion, small change in my prescription, plus the addition of a 2 diopters of “prism” correction. That’s to reduce a tendency to double-vision that has been developing the last couple of years. So now I can go order new glasses. Do that tomorrow sometime.

Back home to change into my red docent shirt, and off to the museum to help lead a tour of “40 students from UC Berkeley” scheduled for 1pm. Whoever scheduled that on the UC side did a crap job of it. First, the bus with 40 nice young people — mostly grad students, well into their 20s, not kids — pulled up at quarter to 1. That’s fine, but then they let us know that their plan was to eat lunch. They had brought their own food service, but they spread out in our lobby and patio and had a nice lunch. So about 1:15 their leader started getting them back together. The other docent, Shmuel, took the first half and started his tour about 1:20.

I was to keep the other 19 occupied for at least 15 minutes to give Shmuel a start. That’s normal, and there’s plenty to look at and do for that length of time. In fact, one of the docents who does the live 1401 demos was there too, and opened up the 1401 lab so I took the group in there and they got to punch their names on a keypunch and get their names printed out on the line printer. Which is fun, but now it’s 1:40.

So I lead the group back to the lobby and head for the exhibit area, and the leader calls me over and reminds me, they have to get on the bus at 2:15. Oh, nice, now I get to do my usual 1-hour tour in 30 minutes. So I do a highly abbreviated tour, skipping a lot, and deliver them at 2:15. But on the students’ behalf, what a waste. They didn’t see half of what they could have seen. They should have had a relaxed 1-hour stroll with my lecture, and then time to explore on their own. But I guess they won’t know. They said “thank you” very sincerely.

Spent an hour and a half editing Alice’s video and still didn’t finish it. Finish it tomorrow.

Wednesday 04/09/2025

Did the laundry. In between loads, I wrote a long email to Patty and Bert about the 11th floor that we are planning for. I was busy all morning and I can’t remember on what. Emailing back and forth setting up a date with Joanne for Saturday was the least of it. Started work on editing a video from the book talk last Monday.

The 6th floor monthly meeting was at 4:30. Elvyra, the new COO, visited. Various issues were discussed, like, housekeeping isn’t keeping our laundry room and other common spaces as clean as they used to.

At 7:00 I went to the auditorium where David M was setting up to run an event, and the Zoom Room was failing again, but in a new way. It just couldn’t see the cameras. Zoom users saw a black screen. We couldn’t resolve it. The event was Sarah Dean, the new artistic director of the Pear Theater. She had some nice slides and those went out on zoom, but no camera view of the speaker. I don’t know how many attended via zoom. There were about 50 physically in the room. The typical Zoom audience is between 10 and 20. Frankly I’m a bit tired of Zoom Room being flaky.

Tuesday 08/04/2025

For some unknown reason I had selected a 7:30am appointment time for my eye exam. Maybe that was the only slot available, I don’t remember. Anyway I zipped up to PAMF at 7am and got examined. Bottom line, the opthalmologist lady, Dessy, said my cataracts are not advanced enough to recommend surgery. She dilated me for the exam, then found out I probably wanted a new prescription, so now I have to come back for the proper exam. But she got me a slot on Thursday for that.

Then there was the writers meeting. Before and after that I pulled all the USB devices off the new desktop computer and rearranged them so there is just one USB hub. It had been a mess with three different USB hubs daisy chained, and some things weren’t showing up at all. So I got all that tidied up.

Patty insists I see the movie Ex Machina, so she is having a movie night in her room, inviting me and some others including Joanne. I’ll report on that experience later. Or not.

Monday 04/07/2025

First thing was a live event in the auditorium, the First Monday Book Talk. Speaker was resident Alice, basically giving a report on the biography of Ketanji Brown Jackson, first black female supreme court justice. Alice had an extensive set of powerpoint slides. I wanted to use Zoomroom because it gives me a good set of video recordings. However there was a stupid problem with zoomroom, which had apparently resolved itself Sunday night, but was back this morning. And our one staff IT guy had the day off. I’m not sure how I resolved this, exactly. It was in this state where Zoomroom couldn’t join the meeting for the bogus reason that “the host has another meeting in progress”. So in frustration I closed the lid of my laptop, and that seemed to clear it up, as it then joined the meeting. Opened the lid of the laptop, all was fine.

Computers. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.

Also I was going to show Alice’s powerpoint off another of my machines, but that wasn’t working well, and she suggested doing it off her machine, which I didn’t think would work but turns out, she knew PowerPoint better than I did, and it worked fine. So the event came off smoothly more despite me, than because of me.

That over, I buzzed off to FOPAL to process a couple of boxes and put my section in shape for the sale weekend. Other volunteers there were in a tizzy because, contrary to policy, somebody had accepted a huge donation, 30+ boxes of books, the weekend before the sale. So the sorting room was jammed full and… I’m sure they got it all straightened out but I did my thing and left.

First Monday of the month is also the scheduled time for the Poetry Out Loud group, headed by Joanne, although in fact she wasn’t able to be there today. But I was sort of ready having read ome Pablo Neruda poems and I picked one to read.

Sunday 04/06/2025

For fun I drove over to the Cal. ave market, where I noticed some really amazingly huge and ripe strawberries, reminding me of the ones we used to pick on Paul and Katie’s farm on San Juan Island. So I bought a basket of those.

Then to Stanford Shopping Center. I checked Nordstrom’s selection of polo shirts, meh. Then went to Neiman Marcus where I found the second most expensive polos in the galaxy. Not $1000 like at Brunello Cucinelli, no indeed, much cheaper. One polo shirt, $425. Thanks so much for your time, byeeeee.

At 2pm I met with Joanne and we went for a hike. I picked the Coyote Hills park on the other side of the bay. Lovely day, lovely time with my pal. We ate strawberries in the car after the hike. There were still some left which I took down to the dining room and shared at the community table.

Re the polo prices, Joanne said, have you checked L.L. Bean? Uh, no. So later coming back from supper I found the LLBean catalog under my door, with a paper clip on the polo page. I ordered a couple. Hopefully I will like them better than the Lands End ones I ordered and didn’t like.