Thursday 11/21/2024

Yay, an uncommitted day. I ended up doing all sorts of things. Paid a couple of bills, tidying up my desk. Took a tech call, user with a Mac couldn’t send email. Wrote various emails and talked to people about AV scheduling. Read some from the book I’m working through Yuval Harari’s Nexus. Met with the Good Times committee to finalize the song selection for the February show. It appears I am down to perform “Annie’s Song” by John Denver. Not sure about that one. I checked the music and I will definitely not be playing it on the guitar. Anyway, somehow the uncommitted day went by with no gaps.

There is severe weather all up and down the West Coast (Laurel, in Kent, is hunkered down with no power; I-5 is closed at the Oregon border; heavy rains and flooding in Santa Rosa and so on. So I had the weather radar map open all day, and the picture was quite remarkable: all the green and yellow precip keeps streaming in and across the North Bay, sometimes sprinkling on San Francisco, but our streets stayed dry all day. Supposedly we will get an inch of rain tomorrow, excuse me but I’ll believe it when it happens. Planning on a normal morning walk but I will carry an umbrella.

Wednesday 11/20/2024

I had planned to go on a group walk led by Joanne, but at 8am she emailed the group calling it off because of the forecast rain. There is heavy rain north of the Golden Gate, the southern fringe of a major storm in the Pacific Northwest, but in fact there’s been not a drop south of the city. I looked out and decided to chance it, so I took an umbrella and headed out on the usual route, and all was fine. Gusty winds but dry.

At 1pm it was the monthly FOPAL zoom meeting. The sale this month netted over $19K. Some other info about procedures and rules, whatevs. At 2:30 I went to the Activity Room to set up for the Car-Free group, an interest group that shares info on getting around after, or in some cases if and when, you get rid of your car. Today they wanted to have a presentation by a person from Waymo, zoomed in on the big TV there. I set that up, then I had to stay around because I was nervous. Rachel, the Waymo rep, planned to show a video. That can be a fraught thing when sharing a screen on Zoom.

Thing is, I had scheduled the AV team meeting for the dining room at 3:30. So when at 3:32 Rachel’s video started, and had sound and looked ok, I could scoot off for that. I had assumed we could use Quad IV for our meeting, it is usually deserted between meals, but I had forgotten this was the monthly Birthday Dinner day, and they had already set up all the tables in that Quad with white linen and wine glasses etc. We couldn’t use the auditorium because the drama group was rehearsing. So we squeezed into the Quad 1 area where the Wednesday afternoon coffee hour was going on, for our meeting. Also some of our members were late because they had been in the Dining Services Committee meeting at 3. Somehow, Wednesday afternoon is hectic. Stopped for tea with Dr. Margaret and Gwen to relax.

Tuesday 11/19/2024

In the morning I drove out to buy a few things at the market. Did a little guitar practice. Then the writers meeting. I had nothing to share, but others had interesting takes on the topic “bucket list”. I’d really given it some thought and had nothing. I don’t have a bucket list, any unattained achievements. Shows a lack of ambition, I guess.

I spent the whole afternoon doing something I hadn’t done for years: coding. And installing UNIX software, issuing command lines in the Terminal app to create directories and so forth. All this because I want to try using one of the large language models, Claude, via its programming interface, rather than via the simple web page at claude.ai. Why? I have a vague sort of idea for an application. We’ll see. Anyway I opened an account and then accessed Claude via running simple program I wrote in Python. Took several hours and forced me to recall a lot of UNIX trivia that had moved to the back shelves of my mind.

Monday 11/18/2024

My goodness but the year is ripping along to its close. Anyway, I took the standard walk in the morning, then went to the Event Coordinators’ meeting. Then spent a bit of time updating the AV spreadsheet with the December events, from the draft December calendar. There is a ton of events, but thankfully almost all are concerts of various sorts, lights-and-mics jobs with no zoom complications.

I’ve mentioned the AV spreadsheet before, it’s a Google Doc with one row for each event. The members of the AV committee all have read/write access to it so they can enter their initials on the events they want to run, or check details of events. Because it allows anyone with the URL to edit it, I won’t put the URL here, for fear some nefarious person would do some mischief. But here’s a screen shot of December as it stands now.

See those little dog-ear triangles on the right? They show there’s a “note” attached to that cell. What’s in the note is a copy of the Event Planning Form that was submitted by the producer of that event, which has all the details, like number and placement of mics. If you have access to the real document, you just hover that cell with the mouse pointer and the EPF pops up so you can read it.

From there I grabbed some lunch and went to FOPAL to process 5 boxes of donations. And back in time for a quick nap and then it was Rhonda’s monthly Open Meeting. This time she presented a talk that she had given to, I think, the local chamber of commerce, on “the rewards and drawbacks of managing a retirement facility”. It was quite interesting, in part going over all the different agencies whose jurisdictions CH is under, with their conflicting requirements. (California dept of public health, Santa Clara County dept of public health, Cal/OSHA, Palo Alto City, Palo Alto Fire Dept — and that’s about 1/2 of the list). And the rewards being working with a top-notch dedicated staff and a bunch of smart, creative old fogies.

Sunday 11/17/2024

Just chilled around the apartment much of the day, amusing myself with the internet. Walked over to University avenue to eat lunch in a restaurant. In the afternoon, Ian gave his talk on how AI systems work, sort of. Nice attempt.

Saturday 11/16/2024

Had a rehearsal of RATCT at 10, so I spent the hour before trying to get better with the guitar on that song. We don’t sound terrible, but it needs more work. All right, I need more work. Alice and John are fine.

At 11, I met with Richard R, who is interested in being part of the AV team. We went over all the auditorium systems. He’ll be good.

After lunch I was looking at an open afternoon with nothing to do. At lunch Ian had said he was going to see “Fiddler on the Roof” at Palo Alto Players at 2pm, and I gave that a thought, but no, it’s 2 and a half hours and I just wasn’t that interested. So instead, a walk. Where? Well, I haven’t been down to the Baylands for a while. Alone? Well… On the spur of the moment I dialed Joanne’s room and she was in and said she would be happy to join me. So we drove down to the Baylands and it was a lovely day, the tide was in, and over a thousand Shovelers were sitting in a quarter-mile raft of ducks on the water. I couldn’t remember which duck they were, but a guy with binoculars was happy to identify them for us. I remember Shovelers from Baylands walks with Marian, but always as a scattered few among other ducks. But this was a massive crowd of them.

Friday 11/15/2024

First thing was to take the standard walk, and to my pleasure Joanne joined me for this. Next up, at 10:30, was to meet with Tom G, to review what he’d need to do to set up the microphone for the Birthday Dinner next Wednesday.

Which brings me to 11 am, where our little AI interest group met. Only Bert, me, and David G showed up. Both of them have been doing interesting things with AI sites, especially DG, who has had dozens of interesting chats with Claude and others.

From there I drove down to Mountain View to have lunch with Jean, who is looking very well for just having had her 97th birthday.

That was the planned activities. At 4:30 I went up to 11 for the monthly TGIF, but didn’t see anyone I wanted to talk to and nobody called me to join them, so I came away again. After a good lunch with Jean I wasn’t that hungry so I didn’t go down for dinner, either. Just went down to pick up a package: a new bedside lamp. This was to replace the one I got on day 5.338. Because it had only one setting, supernova bright, it was just very unpleasant when I got up in the morning. I was used to a 3-way bedside lamp that comes up dim when I tap it. This new one, a $35 cheapie from amazon, looks ok and starts dim.

Thursday 11/14/2024

Boarded the bus for a trip to the De Young museum at 9:15. 21 people on the trip. Not the usual luxury coach but a smaller one. There were two exhibits to see. One was a retrospective of the work of Tamara de Lempicka, the other the seven tapestries of the Battle of Pavia. Both were worth looking at. I spent a good amount of time peering at de Lempicka’s stuff. I had never heard of her before the announcement from the de Young a couple months ago, although she was a Big Deal in the art world from 1920 through the 1940s. She developed a style based out of Cubism, and specialized mostly in female portraits like this one.

Not only the striking compositions (she liked big diagonal lines that crowd the frame) but the amazing technique — look how she rendered the look of nylon stockings, which were a new thing at the time. There were lots of little sketches, too. I can’t imagine how you get this detailed shading just with a stick of charcoal.

The tapestries were harder to see (click the link for some pictures), but amazing for their size, seven tapestries each at least 10×15 feet, showing hundreds of soldiers fighting, with millions of tiny details of clothing and armor.

Back home just in time for a 3pm meeting of the Good Times committee, planning our next musical experience. The prior one was the folk festival featuring Joan Baez; what do we do for an encore? The schedule has it falling near Valentine’s day, so the plan is: love songs.

Wednesday 11/13/2024

That was about it. First thing I did my laundry, finished by 10. Then worked on the score of R.A.T.C.T. to reconstruct the fingering for certain chords. Here.

All those guitar fretboard grids? I did those.

Since we decided to change the key from C to G, for easier singing, that meant all the guitar chords change also. So now I get to practice those instead of the ones that I had like three quarters learned for the key of C.

Tuesday 11/12/2024

I had been asked a while ago to write something for the newsletter about AI sites that residents could use. Carolyn reminded me yesterday so this morning I wrote a short article on that. I looked at several, using Safari because I use that browser rarely and it doesn’t have any history for me, no old cookies from signing in to these sites before, so I could see what a novice user would see. I think, for the novice user of chatbots, that perplexity.ai is easiest to get into.

Got that mostly done by 10:30 and joined the writers meeting. Topic was change, and I had nothing to contribute. There were a couple of cute essays.

At 1pm I met with John and Alice to practice R.A.T.C.T. We agreed to change key, for easier singing. So afterward I used the MuseScore software app to transpose the music from C to G, and sent it to the others. We’ll meet again on Saturday, meanwhile I have to work out all new guitar chords from the ones that I was practicing the last week.