Tuesday 01/14/2025

First up: walk to the dentist and get my teeth scraped. Followed by breakfast at Mme Collete’s coffee shop.

The writers group was especially good today. The theme was a moving musical experience. I cheated, there was a similar prompt two years ago when I wrote about 2 musical events that moved me (the whole text is at Day 4.088) so I just lightly updated that and read it. But other people had some truly moving essays.

After lunch Joanne picked me up, on her way from her line dancing class, and drove us to Costco. I hadn’t been in a Costco in some time, my goodness what an amazing place that is. Our goal was to find me a few shirts or jackets to spruce up my boring wardrobe. I rummaged through the piles on many tables, prices were very low, quality decent, and I got three jersey like shirts I can pull over a turtleneck or a polo, and a light jacket that I really like and will wear often.

We got back to CH just in time for the monthly Hearing Support Group, where a guy from Pacific Hearing gave a talk on cochlear implants. This corresponded with the time when my apartment is being cleaned so I went to that, as did Joanne. Fascinating technology, although I am glad I am nowhere near needing even a hearing aid, much less an implant.

Twice during the day I ran through my 3-song set for the birthday dinner tomorrow. A couple more times tomorrow before 5pm showtime will be good.

Monday 01/13/2025

First up was the monthly resident association meeting. For once I wasn’t needed for any help with the AV. I just sat in the back and listened. After Rhonda spoke (she is always the last speaker, after which the meeting goes to open Q&A with the RA president) I hopped up and intercepted her outside the auditorium and asked if I could talk to her about implementing some AI projects (see 6.036 ResBot). She asked me to put it off until she had hired a COO. She had reported to the meeting that they had almost hired a COO but that person’s current employer had offered many inducements to keep her, and she had decided to do that. So the search starts over.

Immediately afterward I headed out to FOPAL for the post-sale cleanup. That took less than two hours, good. Then home for a nap and then practiced my songs for the birthday dinner coming up Wednesday night. Only two more days to rehearse, gulp.

01/12/2025

Usual Sunday morning stuff. Reading the paper I saw a strong review of “Some Like It Hot”, a touring Broadway company at the Orpheum in SF. Sounded like a fun thing to do with Joanne, but then I thought, no, going to SFJazz concerts is such a pain, coming back on the CalTrain at 11pm, yuck. Then it occurred to me, I bet they do matinee shows too, duh. Checked and they do, so I wrote the available matinee dates on the review page. Took it down to breakfast and showed it to Joanne. Later in the day she emailed yes, let’s, so I booked it.

Kay says we need to fill 15 minutes at the birthday dinner this Wednesday, so I needed one more song, so I spent some time going through my collection of songs I know and picked one. Practiced all three and timed them, 13 minutes with brief intros, so that’s fine. Need to practice more. Never enough practicing.

After lunch I had an afternoon open so I decided to do something I’ve been meaning to do, register an account with ZipCar. Two Zips are in our garage now and there is a Channing House discount deal. The registration process is not too hard, and the app then says we usually approve in a few minutes, wait for an email. I waited more than an hour, no reply. Later Carolyn told me it was three days for her. So it’s after 2pm and seems I won’t be trying out a Zip today. It’s a beautiful day and I feel like a drive. So I set out in my own car, deciding to go to the Legion of Honor in SF, which closes at 5, but if I get there before 4, that’s enough time to see what I want.

Except there’s a really slow jam in Palo Alto trying to get to El Camino, and then I hit 19th avenue in SF and it’s slow and time keeps bleeding away. Finally I can see that at best I’ll have 45 minutes in the museum, so to hell with it, and I loop back from Golden Gate Park and go home. It was a nice drive on 280 with a full moon rising to my left.

Saturday 01/11/2025

Not much to do today. At 1pm I met with Ian in the auditorium and we worked through a problem with zoom room. At 3pm I met with Kay in the music room and we practiced a song for the Birthday Dinner — which is coming up next Wednesday, damn that rolled in quick.

Took a short walk, took a long nap. Typical Saturday.

Friday 01/10/2025

In the morning I went on the standard walk. Back in plenty of time for the line dancing class at 10:30. This is an exercise class that I decided to join because Joanne suggested it, and she is usually there. The class leader, Will, is very good at his job, gives clear directions and leadership. There are about 10 people of varying levels of dexterity. Dexterity isn’t the right word for “light on your feet and coordinated”. What would that be, podiatrous? Anyway.

Practiced some music, did some reading. Finally it was time to go downstairs and meet Joanne for a dinner date. We went to the Village Bakery in Woodside, a very nice little restaurant. Had a reasonably quiet table for two and had a long talk, a serious talk but a friendly one, over a very good meal.

Thursday 01/09/2025

For the first time in over a year, I think, there was a volunteer work day at the CHM warehouse on Yosemite drive in Milpitas. Just about the whole crew was there.

In the evening we had a concert by Steve Gill, a musician who has been doing free concerts at CH for 16 years. Bert couldn’t come and asked me to make a video recording. which is kind of presumptuous but oh well, I used it as an excuse to practice using the cameras. Sandy had signed up to do the mics, and she did, I stayed out of her way and just ran the cameras. Now I have to copy that to my computer and upload it somewhere.

Wednesday 01/08/2025

First up was to join a walk in the Baylands organized by Joanne. It included Martha, Susan H, Joanne The Other One, and Erika. Pleasant 2-mile outing over trails I have not taken before.

The rest of the day went to napping, reading (Life as no one knows it by Walker, on the new physics of Assembly Theory)(difficult read, as a tech writer I kept finding flaws in the presentation) and music.

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.