Wednesday 03/12/2025

Today was laundry day. In between loads I continued setting up the new mac. Pretty much everything works. I have a pair of external speakers that I am having trouble finding a USB port for. More seriously I have a new backup drive. So I was able to back up the new machine. But with the old system, it shared the backup drive on the local network, so I could use it to back up the laptop as well. But I can’t get that working. Yet. Tomorrow maybe.

Practiced music for an hour. Then it was time for the monthly 6th floor meeting followed by dinner. After which I went for a walk in the rain. There is a nearby restaurant that Joanne and I want to eat at tomorrow, but their website didn’t seem to offer a way to make a reservation. They only open at 5pm. So I walked over there after supper, in light rain, and made a reservation the old fashioned way, face to face with the pretty young thing at the desk.

Tuesday 03/11/2025

Today is housekeeping day so I tidied up first. Then because I felt guilty for not writing anything for the last 3 writers meetings, I made myself sit down and think of something to with the prompt, “shout out — whatever’s on your mind”. So I wrote about the hype storm around AI, how hard it is to tell actual progress from hype, and gave a very pessimistic view of the future of an AI bureaucracy. Others wrote interesting things too.

Then headed out for a 1pm appointment at the CVS in Mountain View where I had made an appointment for a Covid shot. Unfortunately the nice young nurse there was a stickler for the rules. She checked and found my prior shot was 10/24/24 (which I knew) and that was two weeks less than six months ago. The CDC recommends a booster at 6 months, so sorry, can’t give you one early. So I wasted that trip. (They didn’t have generic zantac, either.)

Got in a couple of hours of music practice through the day. At an early supper and met with Mickie at 6pm to drive down to CHM to hear Sal Khan talk about his new book. Mostly he talked about the AI tutor they have added to Khan Academy. It wasn’t a great talk, and I was bothered by the sound reproduction in the big auditorium at CHM. It was kind of diffuse and echo-y and hard to understand.

Monday 03/10/2025

Started the day with the 9am monthly Resident Association meeting. This finished unusually fast, before 10am, so I had an hour free to practice music. I have actually scheduled what I’m calling my concert beta-test. Saturday I will run through an hour of my repertoire to an audience of four, two of whom are knowledgeable former music teachers.

Then it was time for lunch with a prospective couple, the Burtons. The marketing team sometimes do this, ask residents to have lunch with prospects. Jenny from marketing asked me, then she said, “who would be a good fourth person?” I waited a whole three seconds before I said casually, well, Joanne is always a good representative. So this was lunch with me and Joanne and this couple who may someday be neighbors. They were nice. He was in product development for a bunch of high-tech companies including Sun (AKA The Competition, when I was Silicon Graphics), but we never worked for the same outfit.

Right after lunch a traveling nurse sent out by United Healthcare stopped by for an annual checkup. This is a feature of the UHC Medicare Advantage plan that IBM subsidizes. It’s a 20-minute chat where she reviews my meds, takes my vitals, asks if I have had a fall in the past year. I lied and said no. That time I fell while hurrying back from the train station in the dark doesn’t count.

Then down to FOPAL to do the post-sale cleanup of my section. There was only one box of donation to process, so I was out in an hour. Bought a pound of coffee and headed back. After supper a little more music practice. Getting serious, are we?

I’ve almost half way into Fei Fei Li’s The Worlds I See and liking it a lot. She does a great job of weaving together her personal story of being a confused immigrant teen, with the story of the start of machine learning and vision.

Sunday 03/09/2025

It being spring-forward day, I put on a polo shirt rather than a turtleneck. And I turned the mattress of my bed, and changed to a different blanket. Because that’s what I do at this time.

Two different women have told me I should wear more color. My shirts are mostly black, gray, sometimes beige. So I got onto Lands End and ordered some more colorful polos.

Practiced music for an hour in the morning. Late in the afternoon, I sent an email to four people inviting them to listen to me play for an hour, and give me notes. I’ve been planning to do this for a while and finally decided to get off the dime and do it.

After lunch I brought the car around, to be one of four cars in a pool of people going to The Pear for Gods of Comedy. This is a farce about a classics professor who is in a crisis, having lost a priceless ancient manuscript. She calls on the gods of ancient Greece for help and gets, not Athena or Zeus but Dionysus, god of comedy, and Thalia, the Muse of comedy. Who are total klutzes at working magic. Hijinks ensue. It was quite well done. I didn’t actually laugh out loud although other people did, but I was amused.

Saturday 03/08/2025

Plan today was to attend a concert by the Keller Sisters at the San Gregorio General Store. Originally several people were planning to carpool, but all of them dropped out except Joanne, so this turned into our little outing together. I didn’t plan it that way but it pleased me no end.

So off we went for a nice drive over the mountain through the redwoods on a beautiful spring day. The concert was excellent. We were back by 2:30 or so.

In the afternoon, looking around Reddit (I used to spend 30-60 minutes a day keeping up with Reddit, but these days it’s more like a couple times a week), I found a post about a new novel writing tool with AI integration. It’s written in Python using PyQt, which is a platform I am very used to having written a couple of apps using those tools myself. So I spent a couple of hours installing it and giving it a bit of a test, and writing some notes for the author.

Friday 03/07/2025

Main activity today was to lead a tour at the museum. This was a private tour for 15 Apple employees. I asked them what their group did, the answer was “chips”. So I guess they were somehow working on the Apple silicon, either CPUs like the M4 (my M4 Mini is supposed to arrive on the 15th) or the new Apple modem chip. Or who knows. Anyway, hardware.

Because it was a private tour I wasn’t constrained to come in under an hour. On the other hand, since this was a bunch of people working in hardware, I didn’t need to spend any time on what is a transistor, and what is an integrated circuit, or Moore’s law. Just the same, when I parted from them and checked my watch, a bit over 90 minutes had passed. But they were fine with that.

In the afternoon I practiced music for another 90 minutes. And spend some time reading Fei Fei Li’s book, The Worlds I See. She is interweaving the story of her growing up in China and then as a high school student with limited English, in New Jersey, with the story of the development of artificial intelligence research. Nice book.

Thursday 03/06/2025

Nothing much planned for this day. I spent an hour diagramming how I will connect all the various cables of the new computer when it arrives. Yesterday I realized that I have bought a 5K monitor, but that the Mac Mini only supports up to 4K over HDMI. To go to higher resolution it uses its Thunderbolt ports. So I ordered a well-reviewed thunderbolt to displayport cable.

Anyway. I also went down to the auditorium and tested both our “AV” laptops, the new Dell and an antique but still functional MacBook, making sure that both can function as either a zoom host or a zoom attendee. Then I did some reorganizing in the AV cabinet backstage and found a couple of bulky boxes that haven’t been touched in a long time. One was a mish-mash of Radio Shack wireless mics and matching receivers. They were all made obsolete for us when our sound system was remodeled in 2020. So I pulled them out and will recycle them somehow.

Played some guitar, read a book. Quiet asocial day.

Wednesday 03/05/2025

Started the day with a standard walk, with the addition of Joanne’s company, which makes it an event, not mere exercise. Then I worked on the new AV PC. Since none of my crew jumped up to set it up, I decided to do it myself. When I was done it was very nice, if I do say so. You log in as the user named CHAV and immediately all the things you need for zoom hosting are right there.

After lunch I edited the fourth video, completely clearing out all pending events. Well, there will be another recorded tonight.

Also in the afternoon the desk called, I had a couple of large packages in the deliveries. I picked them up and opened them, and I now have all the pieces of my new computer — except for the computer.

That’s after unwrapping everything. Which created a large pile of packaging.

At dinner David G asked, “you have a webcam for zoom, fine, what are you doing for a microphone?” Excellent question, DG. I hadn’t given it a thought. I need to add a USB microphone. That brings up the whole matter of, where do all these cables plug in? There are USB-A and USB-C ports on the back of the monitor, and USB-C ports on the Mac Mini, and I have a USB hub with five more USB-A ports… I need to think this out, make a diagram, plan for neat cable dress. Tomorrow.

Tuesday 03/04/2025

Tidied up for housekeeping. Then paid a bill and did the monthly accounting. And resumed editing the event video I started last night. This is not a difficult process. A Zoom cloud recording gives me two useful videos, one the view from our cameras, the other the speaker’s shared content, slides or whatever. I stack them in iMovie, the slides on top. Then I chop away the slides to reveal the speaker behind the podium. When they say, “And this shows” and turn toward the screen, I cut back to the slides for ten seconds. I also cut out long pauses, and breaks when they couldn’t advance their slides, and boring questions from the audience… It takes about 2 hours to finish editing a one-hour lecture. So I got the first one done before it was time for the writers meeting. For which I had nothing, and Dr. Margaret scolded me. Fair enough, I deserved it.

After lunch I edited two more events, so that’s three for the day. Around those tasks I worked on a stupid PC. Well, they are all stupid. This is a nice new Dell laptop that the IT department bought for the AV team to use for Zoom hosting. But somebody has to make sure it is updated and has all the needful software. I tried to pass this to my team, three of whom are more familiar with Windows than I am. But one was sick, and one is busy, and blah blah. So I started on the job myself.

Monday 03/03/2025

Ran the only AV event in March that I am signed up for. That was the First Monday Book Talk, a morning event. The speaker was Miriam Freedman whose book is a biography of her mother, who was a Channing House resident back around 2005. Interesting story. I didn’t screw up the AV and got a decent recording, so that was alright.

Then off to FOPAL to process 6 boxes of books and tidy up my section because the monthly sale is next weekend.

Got back about 3:30, just in time to make the 4pm meeting of the Poetry Out Loud group that Joanne organizes. It’s a pleasant meeting.

After supper I started the process of editing one video, then set it aside. Tomorrow.