Tuesday 12/10/2024

In the morning, peeled off the Zio patch and later mailed it back. I have been feeling the PVC’s only occasionally, maybe 10 minutes, twice a day? So don’t expect any dire results when they come in.

Did a variety of little things, somehow there is always something to catch up with, and cleaned the apartment for the cleaner coming at 3. Then at 1:30 went down to warm up the auditorium for the tech run-through of the holiday concert. When it finally got to my part, Alice and I were — meh. I’m not posting a video. But the other acts were pretty mediocre too, so it all averages out.

Pulled off a bit of a technical coup, though. I was video recording the rehearsal, which wrapped up about 4pm. Back in my room I sat down with the record file and extracted separate clips, one of each of the acts. And put them on my dropbox public folder. And emailed the entire cast with a list of links to each of the performances. Want to see yourself? Here’s your link.

Had that all done by 5:25 when I went to dinner. Who’s a hot video tech? I’m a hot video tech, that’s who.

Monday 12/09/2024

In the morning was the monthly Resident Association meeting. No huge news there.

I had the feeling that this week my calendar was really really full and I was feeling stressed, but in fact, since I did my FOPAL work on Saturday, there was really nothing else going on today. Took a walk. Talked to Laurel about Christmas plans. Wrote some emails on various subjects. Where did the day go?

Sunday 12/08/2024

Watered the plants, did the crossword, then had a couple of hours to kill. Met relatively new resident David G2 (to distinguish from long-time resident David G)(not to be confused with David T, David T2, or David M) for lunch, and then the two of us drove over the hill (the Coast Range) to the seaside town of San Gregorio. I wanted to hear the farewell concert by The Quitters, a band I’ve heard several times including Day 0.259 and two years later, Day 2.222. They are retiring and this was their last show.

The San Gregorio Store is a small venue, and unfortunately I didn’t plan to get there early, so there was only standing room when we arrived. We stood for the hour of the first set, then we bailed.

Had supper with Mary R, the producer of our upcoming holiday music show (and by upcoming I mean, this Wednesday) and some others, and we talked about who needs music stands and who needs what kind of mics.

The play I went to last night was a musical version of A Christmas Story. This started out as a short story by Jean Shepherd. That was made into a 1983 movie that apparently is now considered classic and is re-shown every year: the tale of a 9-year-old boy who wants his parents to get him a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas. I remember having seen the movie. In 2012 it was made into a stage musical, which according to Wikipedia had a television production in 2017. I think I might have seen that, although I’m not sure.

Anyway the Bus Barn staged the musical with a big cast, all working really hard doing some clever choreography. There were a couple of problems. A technical issue was that, although I could see most cast members were wearing microphones, there was little to no amplification, and I couldn’t get the lyrics, even though I was sitting like 25 feet from the stage. The singing by the kids, especially Ralphie, were drowned out by the small (4-piece) orchestra. The bigger problem was, this is such a silly, shallow story. It only works if you can really catch the nostalgia vibe and get involved with Ralphie’s quest, and I didn’t. So I left at intermission.

Saturday 12/07/2024

First thing was to meet with basketball friend Harriet where we have met before, the coffee shop in Midtown. Re basketball she says a couple of people have asked her about me, hoping I was all right. That’s nice to hear. She said there is noticeably less fan energy now. I’m not surprised. I walked to Midtown (2.7 miles for the day) but Harriet drove me back. When I got out of the car I noticed this back-lit coleus(?) in the planter outside the door.

Looking ahead at my calendar, next week is just jam-packed with things, so I decided to get my FOPAL work out of the way today. I did that, got my shelves all ready for the sale. Then I bought a couple things at Safeway and went home.

Friday 12/06/2024

Took a walk but didn’t feel 100%, so cut it short. At dinner yesterday, Joanne said I ought to start attending the line dance class. This is one of about 6 different exercise classes at CH. There’s strength & balance, and seated strength and balance, and yoga, and pilates and probably some other thing. Line dancing is on Fridays at 10:30, so I went. The instructor does a great job. I am grossly uncoordinated for this, always a step behind what he’s calling out, but frankly so were a majority of the dozen people who attended. Anyway I didn’t trip or bump into anybody and got a mild sweat out of it, so I guess it was a success.

During the day I got back on Charity Navigator and got the contributions done that I had a problem with yesterday. Speaking of yesterday, here’s a picture of the Gunn High choir from last night.

Worked out the chords to “Grateful”. It is a very difficult song — have I put in a link to it? here — other songs I’ve worked on have a solid rhythmic “groove”, or at least a basic 1-2-3 or 1-2-3-4 time. So I can strum the guitar in that rhythm, and sing along. Try counting 1-2-3-4 to that video. The chorus, maybe, but the verse? No way; there’s a beat but it’s very loose and changes all the time. So there’s no strumming. Still, I love the message and want to sing it.

At 7:30 I will leave for a play at the Bus Barn, I will summarize that tomorrow.

Thursday 12/05/2024

No after-effects of yesterday’s long walk, so yay. Today was for getting some shit done. First project on the list was to try to get a usable video from Ian’s talk of Day 6.001. That event had several technical glitches and the video recording had some problems. But over 2 hours I managed to patch together an acceptable video. After that I did the monthly review of the Schwab accounts. The Nest Egg is in OK shape, recovered from a dip last month and just barely above where it was at the start of the year.

After lunch I worked on my annual charitable giving. I use the charity navigator site, which remembers all my donations from last year. I had some problems with their user interface this time, but got most of the work done. I need to go back tomorrow to finish.

I walked out for an hour doing a couple of errands. Then there was time for a nap, and then I met with Joanne at 5 to go out for an early supper. We went to Coconuts, a Jamaican-style place nearby. It was ok. Not super but could go back.

Back to CH in plenty of time for the 7pm concert, the Gunn High School Choir in their annual visit to CH. The leader, Bill Liberatore, said this was the 25th visit, they started coming to CH in 1999, and “So I guess I’ve been here longer than most of you.”

I got into the auditorium early, 6:35, to check in on my AV volunteer Tom, doing the mics. And the stage light panel wasn’t working. We’d had this problem before and I couldn’t remember what the magic was. I finally remembered, there’s a particular button that has to be pressed down, and it wasn’t. Did that, lights worked.

The 35 or so high school singers were just finishing a quick rehearsal. I noticed that the facilities guys had not replaced all the chairs, there were two big stacks of chairs that should be spread out on the floor to make the back two rows. And this would be full house, too. Shit. Do I want to schlep 20 chairs the length of the room? Wait, there’s all these cute young people standing around… I grabbed a mic from Tom and asked, could we have a few of you young men take some of these chairs and line them up there at the back? I was immediately reminded that I am a sexist old relic, when two young women (both taller than me) each grabbed a chair and headed for the back. Anyway in a couple of minutes the kids had added two full rows of seats at the back, nicely lined up and ready. And by the time the show started at 7, all those seats were full. There would have been a bunch of people standing (and grousing loudly) had I not taken proactive action. So I’m feeling good about myself on that account.

Wednesday 12/04/2024

First thing today was a hike organized by Joanne. The participants were me, Joanne, another Joanne (Joanne L.) and Erika. The latter two are enthusiastic walkers, and as I’ve mentioned before my friend Joanne is a sturdy and rapid walker, so there was a serious question whether I could keep up with them. We hiked in the Arastradero Preserve, a large piece of hilly California countryside owned by Palo Alto. At the end Joanne L. checked her Apple watch and announced that we’d gone exactly four miles and totaled 700 feet of elevation gain. I did indeed keep up without any special difficulty. I think if I had needed to go further, I could have, after maybe a break and some water.

Idled away the afternoon. In the evening we had a screening of a movie, “Stripped for Parts” about the venture capital firms that buy up newspapers and shut them down. Well made documentary, could have been shorter. Turns out the Mercury News that I get was the victim of such a “vulture capital” buy-out, reducing the Bay Area News Group from 7 papers to 2. Also I learned about the San Jose Spotlight, one of many non-profit journalism outlets formed by newspaper people made jobless by corporate takeovers.

Tuesday 12/03/2024

And so we roll into this blog’s seventh year of (almost) daily production. Between 8 and 10am I wrote a short piece for the writers group. The cue was “I only met them once but…” about someone who had an effect on your life. The only famous person who had such an effect, I realized, was Ken Iverson. (Who? Sorry, you hafta be a computer nerd.)

Then practiced guitar from 10 (I never start earlier for fear of bothering my neighbor Carolyn who can sometimes just barely hear me) until 10:40. Then the writers meeting. A couple people had encounters with genuine stars. Joan had spent an hour chatting with Jay Leno. Mary Ann had heard Dylan Thomas read his own poetry.

At 1:30 I met with Alice and John and we practiced our number. We agreed we are good enough, we’ll keep practicing individually but should be fine for the show which is next week.

That’s about it. Here’s the Iverson piece.

Kenneth Iverson was a mathematician and computer scientist who had a large impact on the computer industry at the very beginning of that industry, the late 1950s into the 1970s. His signature contribution was a notation for describing operations on data, which developed into the APL language (named from the initials of his first book, A Programming Language). When he failed to get tenure at Harvard—he later said, because he had “only published the one little book”—he took a job with IBM Research in 1960. There his notation was used first to document the architecture of the model 7090 mainframe, and then, more famously, to document the design of the IBM 360 series just then being designed by him, Fred Brooks, and others.

I knew nothing of this history when in 1970, at the urging of my friend Scott, I asked IBM for a transfer from servicing customer problems in San Francisco, to a new software development shop in Palo Alto. I doubt I had even heard of APL. An early APL time-sharing system had been developed by Iverson and others at IBM’s Philadelphia Scientific Center and had leaked out to a few universities, but not to any of my customers in San Francisco.

While I had written a couple of small programs, I knew nothing at all about the process of software development, and I set to work learning my new job under the generous and tolerant assistance of several experienced programmers (one of whom I would go on to marry). Our first task was to take that experimental APL implementation by the Philadelphia people and “productize” it — test it, document it, and package it for sale to IBM customers. Then we set to work making a completely new implementation of APL that would run as part of a different time-sharing operating system.

In the course of all this, 1970-1975, our organization was favored with only one visit from Ken Iverson. He stopped by and chatted with management, and then a couple dozen of us programmers were assembled in a conference room where he gave us a talk. In this same period Iverson was much involved with efforts to use APL as a teaching tool in high schools, and he and others were writing math textbooks using APL notation. His talk to us was a higher-level version of that, simultaneously clarifying the basics of algebra and calculus while justifying and explaining the advantages of APL notation.

I don’t remember the specifics of what he taught, but I remember being massively impressed by both the depth and the clarity of his presentation. It was an awesome display of sheer intellectual power.

So Ken Iverson is a person who, although I only was in his presence the one time, changed my life by his work and his example.

Monday 12/02/2024

Everybody wishing me happy birthday, nice. Took the standard walk. My left glute was sore starting out from being my landing cushion last night, but by the end of the walk it warmed up and felt ok.

Ran an event at 11, the First Monday Book Talk, with Alice as a trainee. This was Ian talking about his late wife’s book, A Political History of China. The tech went rather badly at first. We had Ian’s laptop all set up, his powerpoint slides on the big screen, all sweet. Two minutes into his talk he starts reading an excerpt from the book. Problem was, he had the text in a binder, and he rested the binder on the keyboard of his laptop on the podium. Which screwed everything up. Took several minutes to recover and get him started again.

After that I headed out to FOPAL. Stopped to buy groceries and a couple of energy bars for lunch. Then did an hour processing a small amount of donations.

Back home and at 4pm joined the Poetry Out Loud group which meets monthly to read poems. I had a good one I’d found and others read good poems also.

Prior to this Patty had emailed saying she wanted to take me out for a birthday dinner. She settled on Reposado, an upscale Mexican place up the street. Patty and Mildred and I were the party. Nice supper with nice people.

Sunday 12/01/2024

After an early lunch I caught the 12:55 Caltrain to the city. For cross-town transport I took Lyft, because Lyft has been bugging me for weeks to get 30% off my next ride. OK, I’m here. So that ride cost only $7.

Walked around the neighborhood of SFJazz, up to Octavia, which is kind of a funky little plaza with some semi-permanent pop-up stores and a youth vibe with young couples standing around shopping. Had an ice cream. Back to SFJazz for the 3pm show. This was a two-star bill opening with Eli “Paperboy” Reed followed by old-time harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite. “Paperboy” about whom I knew nothing, turned out to be a very enthusiastic blues shouter, highly energetic stage presence (to the level of me saying “oh come on dude, chill”) with a six-piece band that were good, and also quite loud. Loud enough that I thought about downloading a DB meter app for the phone. I was fiddling with my phone because frankly, Mr. Reed’s act didn’t engage me.

Musselwhite was a different thing. Quiet, modest, also old (he admitted to having turned 80, which got a lot of applause), but extremely skillful and soulful with the harp.

Coming out at 5:35 I wanted to get back to the Caltrain in time for the 5:55 departure. Brought up Lyft. I may have mis-used the app, but it seemed to be saying 6:10 pickup. No bleedin’ way. Cancel that ride, open Waymo. Right: pickup in 6 minutes. Trouble-free pickup and ride like last time, and made the 5:55 train with 3 minutes to spare.

Walking briskly home, on an especially dark corner, I didn’t see a low brick planter that jutted out from a building, caught my right foot, and fell. Came down on my left buttock and shoulder. Somehow my left arm came up and I back-handed the pavement with my left hand knuckles. That was the only damage, oozing abrasions on two knuckles. Damn if I know how I did that. Anyway, came on home, band-aids, ibuprofen, I’m fine.