Last evening I noticed that I was coughing, deep horky coughs like a cat trying to eject a hair-ball. But I didn’t feel bad.
Then during the night I woke up often, and coughed.In the morning my temp was slightly elevated, 97.8 versus the prior three days of 97.0; and I definitely felt sick. I emailed Joanne to call off the walk we had planned for this afternoon.
Kept feeling crappier. My temp reached 100.9 in the middle of the afternoon, e.g. almost 4 degrees above the typical morning temp. Although I don’t know what typical should be for the middle of the afternoon. Probably higher. But still, a serious fever.
I used one of my “Flu-Covid” test kits, it came up negative. So I just coddled myself and rested all afternoon. Called the nursing office to report my condition. Ordered dinner for delivery.
This is the first actual sickness I’ve had since returning from London on Day 1-80, February 2020. Never caught Covid, or anything else, in five years.
Not totally idle. At 10 I packed up all the Palm devices, 3 dead and one that worked, and took them back to FOPAL. I put the working one on the shelf with a $20 price on it. That’s for the original box, the device, a leather case for it, a dock/charger, manual, software CD.
Then we had a section managers meeting. Main thing there was it clarified for me how we should evaluate “high-value” books. I had been told they were “high value” if they were on Amazon at $30 or more. But no, the lowest online price, at ABEbooks, Alibris, wherever, has to be $30 or up. That will reduce the number of high-values I turn in, because I see a lot of books that are $35 on Amazon and/or eBay but $19 or so on other sellers.
Took a nice walk with Joanne in the morning. Passed the middle of the day quietly. Oh, I got one (out of 4) of the donated Palm devices to actually charge up and boot up. So I will put it on my shelf at FOPAL and hopefully sell it for $20.
At 2 I went to set up the auditorium for a rehearsal of our Christmas Concert. This was an optional rehearsal, so Kay the director said, any of the performers in the program could come, do their thing on the stage in any order. Since I was there with the mics all set and nobody there yet, I did my rehearsing by myself. Everybody else sounds fine, we got the mics at the right levels and so on. DG who is designated stage-hand, i.e. the guy who moves the mic stands to where they are needed, made lots of notes, and a good time was had by all.
I also helped Susan with another tech call. Her little external backup drive wasn’t doing its thing any more, and it has basically died. So I gave here links to where to get another one on Amazon, and she asked could I please send her to any other retailer than Amazon so I did that. Several people around here have sworn off Amazon as a matter of policy.
Had a quick planning session with Joanne in the morning, to check on the availability of the car, and her preferences for a couple of possible outings. Then I headed down to FOPAL where I spent 3+ hours finally getting everything settled down in my section. I put up the “Hold” sign in the sorting room, meaning, “Computers” could not take any more donations until after the sale, which is a week and a half away.
I put special labels on some shelves that I populated from this last donation, and I priced at least 100 old software discs. What is an AOL CD worth, still shrink-wrapped in mint condition? You go on eBay and check. Price it at half that or less. What is a set of install CDs for MacOS 10.2 “Jaguar” worth? On eBay, $14 to $30 depending on how complete it is. $5 sticker. All these filled two boxes that will be put away for the vintage computer fest next summer.
I took home the Palm, what I’ve been calling the sweaty palms. Palm Pilot was the original hand-held personal digital assistant, starting in the early 1990s. Somebody donated four of them and a couple of the docking stations they need to charge on. Two were a pair of early ones, M500 models. These had been in this box in somebody’s closet for who knows how long, probably 20 years. So I plugged in the docking stations and set them on to charge.
After an hour I pulled one off to see if it would boot or show something on its screen, but immediately I noticed — it was pregnant. The battery had swole up. Checked the other: same deal.
Lithium-ion batteries fail this way, and it’s a bad sign. It means the battery is generating gas. It could burst, it could catch fire. I put both of them out on the porch in a flower pot. If they want to catch fire, go ahead.
That left two of the much later Tungsten model. In their original packaging, no less. Unfortunately the first of these I opened had a ruined screen.
So that’s a goner. The remaining one has some blemishes on the screen but might be usable. I will try to charge it up tomorrow and see.
Anyway after all that fun I went to dinner, I’d been invited to a table of 7 by Karen Morrison. And immediately after, at 6:55, I joined Joanne in a packed auditorium to hear the Gunn H.S. choir singing holiday music. Massive group, at least 50 highschoolers in tuxes and black gowns, singing very good arrangements. Nice show.
OOPS, Scott is correct, the Apple Newton MessagePad was released in 1993. The first Palm Pilot was released in 1996s.
Joanne had other commitments and couldn’t lead what has become a customary Wednesday hike, so I took a solitary walk on my usual route. Then at 11 I “attended” a zoom webinar on Auracast, the bluetooth standard extension to allow broadcast of audio in public spaces. (I wrote about it back last month, 6.344.) The panel of experts backed up what I had picked up for myself: someday this will be common and widespread, because it is easier and much cheaper to deploy it, than the old T-coil technology. However, that won’t happen quickly because people don’t turn over their hearing aids that fast. There will be people with old aids expecting T-coil for, well, at least 5 years more, but the new hearing aids with auracast support are phasing in even now.
So we should probably install it if we are remodeling (which is very much in-plan). It should be part of any remodel of a public space that includes a sound system.
I didn’t do much else the rest of the day. Practiced a little music. Watched another episode of a Stanford lecture series. Ate dinner in my room consisting of the leftover goulash I brought home from last night’s dinner.
Yeah, I don’t know what happened with the numbering. All I know is, Day 1 was Sunday 12/2/2018. Like a good programmer I numbered the years from zero. Or maybe when I started I didn’t think the blog would last more than a year. Whatever, yesterday should have been day 6.365 but something slipped somewhere in the numbering. Never mind. Here we are, starting the eighth year of this blog. Probably my proudest achievement, keeping this going.
Several people wished me happy birthday, and Joanne took me out to dinner to celebrate. A really good dinner it was, at a place called Nachtmarkt (“nosh-markt” the owner said). Goulash and it was very good.
In the morning the Good Times executive committee, me, Stew and Lou, met to map out the next year. We’ve done six shows now, two a year, but decided to skip a spring show this year. In September we will do “The British Invasion” celebrating the Beatles and Stones etc. In the meantime we will occasionally show a great concert off DVD.
In the morning I had to run AV for a book talk. Here’s how Gigi described it,
Stanford Professor of Economics and co-director of Stanford’s Center for China’s Economy and Institutions will talk about his book, The Highest Examination: How the Gaokao Shapes China.
What is the gaokao? It is the college entrance examination given by the Ministry of Education throughout China. It is the modern version of the 1,400 year-old Imperial Examination that Chinese emperors gave to choose their bureaucrats.
Professor Li had some interesting slides, unfortunately his English was hard to follow. I fear the video recording will be less than good. Anyway, the gaokao might be the single biggest difference between Chinese and American culture. Far older than the similar British exam, a young person’s score determines their future educational path and much of their life.
Right after the talk I headed FOPAL where I didn’t get everything fixed like I want, but I had to break off and head back for the 4pm Poetry Out Loud. My contribution was to read Billy Collins’s “Questions About Angels“.
After supper I practiced “Feliz Navidad” again. Earlier I did a little more furniture rearranging, moving my leather Ekorns lounger to a corner. This is why so many people follow this blog, for gripping news like that.
Lazed around much of the day. At 1pm I boarded the bus for the Pear Theater to see Ada and the Engine, a play about the life of Ada Lovelace, darling of the Computer History folks. The play was pretty good, excellent performances by most of the cast. A good portrait of the original computer nerd, Charles Babbage.
Nothing on the google calendar for today. In the morning I set out early and walked to Midtown for coffee-and. (3 miles for the day)
Practiced some music. Spent 2+ hours looking for a poem to read at the Poetry Aloud meeting on Monday, without success. Contemporary poetry… some of it is good but not suitable for reading aloud. I think tomorrow I’ll dig up some Byron or something from the 18th century, with solid meter and rhymes.
Took a nice walk with Joanne in the morning. For coffee we stopped at a new place. We’d noticed that a new coffee bar had opened just a couple of doors away from Verve, a well-established place, and across the street from Starbucks. Pretty nervy, so we stopped in to check it out.
Turns out, this is a Yummy robot cafe. There were a couple of people behind the counter who took our orders and money, but the actual coffees were made by a robotic mechanism — actually a small mechanized assembly line, dispensing a cup, holding it under a spout, etc. Then the cashier calls your name and you go get it. We both commented that they should finish the design with delivery robots like we have in our dining room.
The coffees were not great. They don’t have different sizes, no small or large cappuccino, just one about 10 oz. No asking for a “dry” cap. My cappuccino was indistinguishable from a small latte at any other shop. If the robot assembly line can’t be set up to do different sizes of drinks, and drinks with different amounts of foam, milk, and coffee, and can’t deliver to a table, what’s the point? We’ll probably go back to Verve.
We stopped at the Little Sky bakery pop-up store as usual on a Friday, and at Ace hardware because I wanted some superglue.
At 11 I met with Peter in the auditorium and we worked out a problem he had with projecting a Netflix movie on our big screen.
Then it was time to leave for the Museum to lead the noon tour, or actually the 12:15 tour because, anticipating a big post-holiday crowd, they’d booked two docents for each scheduled tour. There were about 35 or 40 people ready at 12, so I took half on a side trip around the other areas of the museum while the other docent, Larry, took his half into the main space. So I ended up talking to these people for almost two hours. They seemed pleased and I kept their attention the whole time. I feel pretty pleased about that performance.
Codgerville 