In the morning I met with Alice supposedly to do a rehearsal of her book talk this coming Monday. However, the damned Zoomroom system in the auditorium was doing something weird so we go nothing done.
I idled around mostly reading and napping the rest of the day, except I took a tech squad call to help Lois after supper. She was trying to get into her husband’s laptop — he is disabled and in assisted living now — because she needed to use his gmail account to finish their taxes. There was some confusion about passwords and accounts, but we managed to get it straightened out and I left her signing in to the tax accountant site.
Walked the standard walk in reverse so as to end up at Mme. Collette’s coffee shop as a treat. Finishing the walk I was thinking how Joanne was coming back from her Sicily tour tonight, and how her custom is, every Friday morning, to pick up a bran muffin from a certain bakery. So not wanting to walk an extra mile, I hopped in the car and drove to the bakery, got the particular bran muffin. Then since I was out, I drove down to FOPAL and got caught up on computer books. Back to CH I put the muffin in its bag on the railing by the door of her apartment, so she’d find it when she came in this evening.
Rest of the day was mostly reading. I’m reading Bill Gates’ autobiography and finally got to the interesting part, when at age 13 he and Paul Allen are let loose on a teletype terminal connected to a mainframe and he starts teaching himself programming. He was writing, or at least trying to write, quite elaborate games, like his own version of the classic Lunar Lander, in BASIC. (At about the same age, and about the same time, Steve Wozniak was teaching himself computer design by reading schematics.)
Out at 9am to drive across town to the Stanford Medicine imaging lab over by California ave, for a “CT with contrast”. This would be the fifth? sixth? scan since my dissected aorta was repaired back in 2020. The CT scanner is a big white donut; not the coffin-shaped box of an MRI. They put an IV in my arm and tell me, here comes the contrast fluid now, and a few seconds later I get a warm flush from my genitals up to my neck and a metallic taste at the back of my mouth, and the sled I’m lying on dives into the donut hole and back out. That’s it, put your clothes back on, see you next year.
Then off to Stanford Hospital where the cardiac medicine clinic is. I was seen by a surgical nurse. (I haven’t seen my surgeon, Dr. Amelia Watkins, since 2021 but I’m still her patient.) Anyway the nurse said the repaired aorta looks the same as last year, just fine, no change. Which is good news.
At 4 I met with Patty and Bert to talk about the 11th floor TV lounge. We are supposed to be proposing changes for the CAAG and we had to work out how to proceed.
Then down to the auditorium to set up for the Keller Sisters show. I thought I had the problem of a stage monitor worked out. The monitor sounded fine to me; when I sang into their mics I could hear myself just fine. But when Sheryl and Kerry and their guitarist Terry arrived about 7 and they tried stuff out, they complained they couldn’t hear themselves. I don’t know. We fiddled with mic levels, got something that was acceptable to them, although they kept complaining. They put on a good show and everybody in the audience of about 60 people were smiling and having a good time. But Jerry and I have to work on that setup. I just don’t know.
Since Sunday I’ve been having a burst of gout in my left big toe. Just the same I went for a walk this morning. I cut it a bit shorter than usual, but still, 2.9 miles for the day. Returning, I realized that the concert I promoted, with the Keller Sisters, is tomorrow night, and I should go around and put ads for it on all the floor bulletin boards and in the elevators. So in half an hour I made found a photo, made up a one-page flyer, and posted it on 9 floors and four elevators.
At 11 I met by arrangement with Patty. She wanted to look at the different kinds of chairs there were in each of the floor lounges, trying to figure out the right kind of chair to use when making over the 11th floor TV lounge. We walked down floor by floor and tried a lot of chairs. One attractive one was light enough I flipped it over and saw it came from West Elm. So later I went on the West Elm website and looked at their chairs. Which are rawther expensive. I mean, $900 for a chair is typical.
At 2pm I met by arrangement with Sandy. She has a security video showing, well kind of showing, the moment when another car damaged her car in our parking lot. To file an insurance claim she has to submit still images so she wanted to get still images from the video. I had checked it out in advance; it’s really quite easy. So I showed her that.
Had supper with Jerry and Betty and Patty. Heard about J&B’s recent trip around New Mexico. And of course Patty has to say, “So Dave, when are you going to travel somewhere?” Good question. Nothing planned and stop asking.
Not much of a day. Writers meeting, I had nothing to read. Peter read a great account of a memorable meal, in Hungary 75 years ago. I went up the 11th floor and tried out the DVD player there, which I was pretty sure didn’t work, and it didn’t, and I reported on that by email. Later I wrote an email to the common areas group about the 11th floor setup. Which proved a bit premature and offended Patty so I had some diplomacy to do. Later I had tea with Dr. Margaret. She wanted to talk about Bill Gates’s autobiography. She is one of those people who just does not understand computers at all, and cannot fathom what he is talking about when he talks about writing code. I tried to help but didn’t make much headway.
Took the standard walk, in light rain; all fine. Then I completed my tax paperwork. I authorized the preparer to e-file; the e-file was confirmed later in the day. And I paid my 2024 Federal and State taxes and my first estimated 2025 payment for both of them, all electronically. As I had been warned, large realized capital gains this year meant quite sizeable payments. But the Nest Egg accounts can stand it.
Then off to FOPAL. Processed 7 boxes but not a high-quality donation; a lot of “how computers work” and “computer management” books from the 1970s and 1980s, not saleable at all. Four and a half of the seven boxes culled for the bargain room.
Back home for a nap, then it was time for the monthly Common Areas Advisory Group, or CAAG. This is a large panel of residents advising the staff on how to improve common areas. Staff, i.e. Rhonda, has a lot of ideas and is willing to spend real money. Discussed today, among many topics, was a new fitness center, formed by combining the present Activity room with two adjacent spaces to make a 1200 square foot space for exercise classes. Actual architectural drawings exist and this is going to be started soon. But we talked about other spaces, notably the 11th floor. I got tagged with an action item, when it was discussed how the TV lounge there, while it needs improvement, could be used for small movie watching parties, and I said “but the DVD player doesn’t work” and now I have to figure out what to do about that.
So after supper I went up there and found, one, that the remote for the DVD player has disappeared. Who the fuck would take away the Sony remote for the Sony DVD player which is of no use whatsoever anywhere else?
I’ve been using Midjourney in small ways to generate images for a couple of years. Recently I saw email touting Ideogram 3.0 as a new, highly flexible image generator. I decided to feed it some of my old Midjourney prompts to see how it would do. TL;DR – Midjourney rules! In the following, the prompt is followed by the best Midjourney image, then the best Ideogram image.
two young adults, a man and a woman, leaning together to read a message on a phone she is holding, they appear concerned about the message they are reading, the young man has an olive complexion, dark curly hair, and is clean-shaven, the young woman has a mop of blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses which she has pushed up onto her head
In several tries, Midjourney just could not understand glasses “pushed up onto her head” but the rest was very satisfactory
Ideogram got the glasses right in one (1) of 4 tries, but also in only one of the four was the man clean-shaven. The other three men had a moustache or a beard.
I read a cheap SF novel which featured a green-skinned humanoid female warrior, and decided to see if Midjourney could do SF illustrations.
Style of frank frazetta: The alien female has light green skin and bronze hair in a long braid, with intricate tattoos on her arms and face. She wears an armored vest and black trousers and carries a futuristic rifle and has pistol in her belt.
Frank Frazetta was a well-known SF illustrator whose style featured voluptuous space babes. Midjourney had some shaky details in the guns, and the “pistol in her belt” is reduced to some sort of empty holster. But the mood and the expression are excellent.
Ideogram had no idea what Frazetta art was like. It got the guns right, but the style is totally wrong.
One of the images I used to illustrate “Annie’s Song” used this prompt:
a mature caucasian couple enthusiastically hugging seen from the side both wearing off-white garments background out of focus garden
Midjourney took “mature” to mean “old”, which was OK for what I wanted. Certainly it imagined a pleasant couple of people.
Let’s see what Ideogram makes of that:
Oooops! Count her fingers! Ideogram is making the kind of “hand errors” that Midjourney and DALL-E were ridiculed for in 2023. In addition, it threw in some out of focus vegetation in the foreground as well as the background as requested.
OK, enough. Clearly Midjourney wins, at least for my usage.
Sunday morning usual stuff. Wrote a thoughtful email about the common spaces committee. Played some music. Frankly I don’t remember what I did this morning, but I was busy doing it.
After lunch I joined the four-car carpool going to the Pear theater, although as a rider not a driver for once. Rode in Lois’s Prius, which looks just like mine (but not a plug-in).
The play was Penelope, and frankly I didn’t enjoy it much. I respected it, as a performance and as a construction, but I didn’t enjoy it. Lois and the other two riders in her car wanted to stay for the talk-back discussion afterward, so we did. Another half hour of not very interesting material.
Ordered my supper as take-away and ate in my room. Not feeling grumpy or anything; just not feeling like more socializing. Feeling introvert-y.
In the morning I worked on my how-to document for using the auditorium cameras. I wanted to add a section on recording video from the cameras. There are two ways to do it. I went to the auditorium and took some pictures of the equipment. Then added the section for the first way.
After lunch and a nap I drove to the museum and led a tour for some SAP employees. The total group was 80 people, but there were four of us docents. I took the first 20, and the other guys led off their groups of 20 at 15 minute intervals. It was a pretty nice deal, being first. By the time, 40 minutes later, I reached the end of the main area tour, I led the group to the other end of the museum and got them started on the new Chatbots exhibit. Then I left them and came on home.
Met a new couple, the Benedicts, two days since moving in. Had dinner at the same table. He was an independent computer consultant, helping businesses computerize back in the day.
Took a somewhat shorter walk in the morning. Because I had an idea and limited time to work it out. Today at 2pm the AV group would meet, and in the middle of the night I conceived something I wanted to share with them. I wanted to impress them, especially the newer members, that the auditorium with all its gear, cameras, projector, sound and computers, all that was ours to play with. Everybody in the group could come into the auditorium when they had time free and no events were in progress (which is most of the time) and just turn things on and play around.
That was the general message but I wanted to make it explicit. So in the wee hours of the morning I composed a little self-study course in how to use our three cameras and the video switcher and the box for controlling them.
On the way out to my walk I stopped and took a few pictures with my phone. After my walk I spent three hours fixing up the pictures and dropping them into a document with what I think are very clear directions on how to explore the features of the cameras. If a person sits at the AV desk and goes through this line by line, doing all the things it says, they will understand our camera setup. And should have fun doing it.
So at the meeting I gave that message and handed out 4 copies of the document (all I felt like printing with my ink) but later sent out a PDF to everyone.
Codgerville 