Tuesday 01/07/2025

Took a short walk in the morning, mostly to pick up a prescription at CVS. I thought really hard on the writers group cue, “celebrations” and came up completely dry. So just sat through the meeting.

After a nap I practiced some music. I’m really feeling good about my voice and delivery. Drove out at 3 to do a couple of errands. That was about it.

Except that yesterday and today, I was doing a bunch of emails on our in-house AI mailing list. This is developing the idea for a ResBot. We have a website we call ResWeb (resident web) that has tons of info but isn’t that easy to navigate. We read about a group at SJSU who had built an AI to help students find their way through their website — asking natural language questions about courses, hours, and university events. Could we do something like that? Here’s the summary I put together,

Channing House has an in-house website we refer to as ResWeb. (URL is intranet.channinghouse.org, it is quite distinct from the public facing site channinghouse.org).  ResWeb is rich in info and we frequently refer residents to “check ResWeb” for something or other.

It would be nice to have a chat-type interface to ResWeb so residents could query it with questions like —

* what room for Mrs. Galenson

* which resident was a provost at Stanford

* what’s the number of the activity director in the lee center

* what’s for lunch thursday

* is there a video of that talk about housing in palo alto

* who runs the bridge games and what day do they play

— all of which are answered on ResWeb, at some level or other.

It appears that what would work for this is LLM access, augmented with the scraped contents of ResWeb (RAG or “resource augmented generation”). The LLM could be accessed via API to OpenAi or Anthropic, or probably more economically by implementing a local model such as LLama3.

So that’s the general idea. It appears all the tools and concepts and all the open-source libraries and components are available to make it work — but there are many organizational hoops to jump through to make it happen. Although claude.ai showed me what it said was the Python code to make it happen (and it was quite readable), I will never try to implement it myself, because if I did I would be stuck maintaining it. But I would like to see it happen. Especially if we could do voice input it would help a lot of residents.

Monday 01/06/2025

Started the day at PAMF at 8am for an echocardiagram. With that out the way I drove down to Peet’s coffee near FOPAL for breakfast. Their tables were full but no problem, took my coffee and goodies out to the car, more comfortable anyway.

Then into FOPAL to process 5 boxes of donations and set up my section for the monthly sale next weekend.

Back to CH in time for lunch. After lunch I attended the drama group’s rehearsal. Later this month I do AV for their performances of five short plays. Today I took notes on what would be needed for microphones (not much).

At 4pm I attended the Poetry Out Loud circle where people read out poems they like. I had selected a poem and read it also. But I need to read more widely in modern poets. I am formulating a plan to do that.

That was the day, pretty much.

Here’s the picture for yesterday’s lunch party.

Sunday 01/05/2025

Started the day by walking to California ave. Partly to walk through the street market, and partly to check out a new restaurant. But said restaurant is closed Sunday, so no go. I felt good so I walked home, where prior couple of times I’ve Lyfted home. Four miles for the day.

At 1 I met with Mary R to brainstorm on how to present “Annie’s Song”. There’s a long section between the 2nd and 3rd verse where John Denver just hums or sings “Oooooo…” I was thinking I should recruit a couple of backup singers to do the “Ooooo” part. Mary said no, I should just tell the audience beforehand, there’s a section of humming, and they should all join in. Audience participation. I will do that.

I have been asked to sing for the monthly birthday dinner. One day a month they do a happy birthday dinner in one quadrant of the dining room and it’s customary for one or two of the resident musicians to play for a few minutes at the start. I did it once sometime last year, and Barbara, who organizes these, requested I do one of the songs I did then. First ever request for a repeat performance. So I’m practicing that song and one other.

Saturday 01/04/2025

Today’s big event was to have lunch with my relatives. Sister in law Jean came, along with her house-mate Sally. And cousin Darlene and her partner Jessea came over from Oakland. I set us up with a table for seven, adding Patty, who knows Jean from previous meetings, and Joanne, who I thought would get along well with Darlene (and she did). Great comfortable lunch with stories going around the table. Everybody had a good time.

Jean and Jessea took pictures but not on my phone. Will add a pic when I get one.

Rest of the day just fiddled around. Watched a YT video on how to do funky strumming on the guitar and practiced that; I’ve got a song that needs a funky kind of rhythm. Also followed up on a suggestions from Joanne (the Other One) that we should get the Keller Sisters back for another concert (Day 5.223). Talked to Kay, then sent an email to the Kellers. We’ll see.

Friday 01/03/2025

Out the door early to drop the car off at the Toyota shop. Partly for routine 80K maintenance; partly to make the passenger-side windshield washer work; partly to investigate the batttery that the AAA guy said was bad. Regarding the battery, Toyota said it tests OK but was low on charge. This seems odd as I have made a point of driving in non-battery, ICE powered mode for several days. Makes me wonder about the alternator but they didn’t mention checking that. Hmmm. Wish I’d asked about that. They also found other things to do, e.g. replace the coolant because it has been ten years.

So I walked back from there to Midtown and had coffee and while I was sitting there, a rain shower moved in. So I got a Lyft the rest of the way home.

Worked on making a better score for “Annies Song” — the sheet music I have doesn’t match the performance from the record. Practiced that and a couple of other songs. Attended the Good Times committee meeting. The February show is pretty final. Going to be a good show.

Thursday 01/02/2025

Started the day with a checklist of five items I wanted to get done, and ended the day with all check off. Yay me. I booked the car for service. Its last service was in January 2024. When the AAA guy looked at the battery he noted it was dated January 24. I did not remember that, but it’s right there on the dealer invoice, I approved a replacement 12v battery on that service.

I spent some time finding a poem to read aloud at the poetry out loud group meeting on Monday. I’m not sure there will be one; this is Joanne’s event and she’s been away. But I’m prepared. The poet I settled on is Jane Hirshfield. These lines are not in the poem I plan to read, but I like them:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

I spent a couple of hours re-stocking my hallway gallery. I took down the “Ploog” display that has been up since early November (Day 5.343) and put up instead my best “people” pictures, striking images of faces.

Came into the dining room for supper with John and Frances and Sophie and Mark, all perfectly nice people that I like, so we made a table of five. I regretted it. The other four spent the whole damn meal talking about Trump and what the Democrats should have done. Boooo-ring. I just kept quiet and left the table without dessert, complaining I was cold and needed to get a sweater. Which was true.

Got a package in the mail, some home-made candy. The return address was unfamiliar and instead of a name, just the initials CMJ. Who the… The card inside was very friendly remembering all the cookie recipes Marian had shared, signed Chris. FInally I remembered: Chris Johnson, our hairdresser for 40 years, who retired just after I moved to Channing House. I will have to reply I suppose.

Wednesday 01/01/2025

Started the day by creating a new sheet in my file of crossword puzzle solving times, and updating the graphs to reflect 2024’s averages. I keep these numbers because I can, and because I expect that if I experience cognitive decline I might get an early indication here. But there’s no clear signal as yet. For example here are the average solving times for Friday puzzles, the most challenging that I normally finish. (Saturday is much harder, full of puns and riddles, and I fail to finish Saturday about 1 in 8 times.)

I don’t know what went wrong in 2015. But there is no clear trend here, no sign of a fading brain. Then I did the laundry, so starting the year with clean undies.

Yesterday I went to YouTube hoping to find one or two tutorials on playing “Annie’s Song” on guitar. My first search produced thirteen hits, and I was scrolling through them, more appeared. I’ve watched several and am pretty discouraged. I could probably learn to play the accompaniment but no way could I play it while also singing it. I would rather be able to focus on singing it technically well (breath control) and with feeling, so I am going to have to karaoke the accompaniment. I had spent a lot of time getting the John Denver audio, stripping the voice, changing the key — but I don’t like the result. It would be hard to sing along with for a couple of reasons. So I will seek other comp tracks.

Wanting to get out, and also wanting to start the car daily until I can get that battery checked out, I drove down to the baylands for a short walk.

Ate supper, as yesterday, with other 6th floor people in our dining room. However I had forgotten to get my sack supper during the 8am-10am time. No problem, I can make a sandwich, so I made one. People brought cookies, several kinds. Gorge.

Tuesday 12/31/2024

Picked up my sack supper at 9 and headed off to FOPAL to finish cleaning up the donations from the previous week. This included two boxes of old software, including such nostalgic items as Eudora Mail. Which I remember using on an early Mac around 1998. Priced these and into two boxes to save for the Vintage Computer show next summer.

Got back to CH in time for the “fancy” lunch they set out for the occasion (apparently tomorrow’s will be even fancier). After, spent a lot of time trying to settle the question of would I/could I accompany myself for “Annie’s Song”. I created an audio file of just the accompaniment to John Denver’s record, pitch-shifted down to my range. Then I thought, well maybe somebody has published a guitar tutorial on YouTube. I did a quick search for “annie’s song guitar tutorial” and found, not one or two, but 13 hits. Reviewed most of them and settled on two that seem to be teaching simple enough techniques I could learn them.

Had picnic supper with a few others in the 6th floor dining room. At 7 went down to the party in the lobby, which was not that exciting. But Marcia grabbed me and asked for help with the TV. There’s no TV in the lobby but they had rolled in the mobile screen for this; however, no connection to Xfinity – streamed content only. So at 8:30 we started searching for a streamed, live, cast from the Times Square ball drop. Of course we couldn’t find any. Lots of channels supposedly “live” (NBC Live, CBS Live, Fox Live…) and all of them were showing stuff other than Times Square, recaps of Paris or Dubai. So I am standing by the TV, fighting with the Samsung “smart” user interface, a room full of people are watching me and yelling helpful suggestions, waiting to see something on the screen and there is nothing to show. I really resent being put in that position. Cortesi the AV genius can’t find something simple like the Ball Drop.

After 9 I edged out and left. Happy GD new year.

Monday 12/30/2024

I left for FOPAL at 8am, and worked there until 1:30pm. Leaving behind still 5 boxes of books. So I need to go back tomorrow.

At home I futzed around with “Annie’s Song”. I obtained sheet music and transposed it to the correct key for me. Then I tried playing it on the guitar while singing. Nope, nunh-uh, I can’t do anything like how Denver played it.

So that means getting the audio and doing basically karaoke, which is OK. Except John sings it in D, rather high, and I need to sing it much lower, in A. So I did the trick with the AI web sites that I’ve done for previous Good Times shows. One site will extract the audio from a YouTube link. That gets me Denver singing as a audio file. The other site will take the audio file and pitch-shift it to whatever key you want, so that gives me the Denver audio but him singing in A, a low tenor range instead of a high tenor. Finally, that site also has the function of stripping out a vocal leaving the accompaniment. That will give me the karaoke music I need.

Sunday 12/29/2024

Yesterday I tried to sign up to do a docent tour today at 12. However looking at the schedule this morning, I realized I had not actually finalized the sign-up dialog they use, so I probably wasn’t signed up, but maybe I was. So I put on my red CHM shirt and went down to the car at 11, figuring I’d go down to the museum and if I wasn’t needed, fine, no harm no foul.

And the car was stone dead. I think possibly I had left an interior light on when I last parked it more than a week ago. Anyway, not going to CHM. Instead I had to call AAA. The AAA guy came in half an hour and was very helpful. He noted the 12 volt battery was only a year old (I did not remember authorizing the dealer to replace it, but whatever) and it registered in poor condition on his meter — on a scale I don’t understand. Anyway he didn’t offer to replace it but instead suggested I get the dealer to do a warranty replacement ASAP.

I drove the car a bit and it seemed fine. I’ll know more tomorrow.

The Good Times committee is getting back in operation for the February 14th show of Love Songs, and I was reminded I’ve committed to singing “Annie’s Song” by John Denver. So I spent some time finding music and lyrics for that. This is kind of an annoyance because I have a list of other songs I want to learn and practice, with an eye to someday doing a concert. But I’ll have to focus on Annie for the next month.

Frank from FOPAL writes that there are 15 (fifteen!) boxes of books by the computer section. So my plan is to spend the day at FOPAL tomorrow.