Friday 11/01/2024

There was nothing on the google calendar but I had an internal to-do list. First up, a walk. On return I spent a bit of time looking for things to do in Seattle, Christmas week. Found one thing, sent to Dennis and Laurel, except I used her old email. Called Romie to find out if her iMac was finally on the proper network, and it is, and now she can print. So that’s off my mind.

Then finalized the AV report to Rhonda on auditorium improvements. Two punchy pages of recommendations.

After lunch I sat and read a chapter of Nexus, a book Joanne loaned me that I need to get read and give back. It’s about the history of information in human society, and the part I read had an example that was chilling in the light of current events. He reviews the history of the witchcraft scare of 1580-1650, during which tens of thousands of people were accused of witchcraft, tortured, and executed. This really started with a book by a crank who spun an elaborate conspiracy fantasy about thousands of secret witches at black masses having sex with Satan. The fantasy was picked up and elaborated by others and became the new consensus reality. He writes,

Witch hunts were… a prime example of a problem that was created by information, was made worse by more information. … demonstrates that releasing barriers to the flow of information doesn’t necessarily lead to the discovery and spread of truth. It can just as easily lead to the spread of lies and fantasies and to the creation of toxic information spheres.

Fear of immigrants, anyone?

At 3pm I took a tech squad call from Gloria, who had some small email issues. Then out to Safeway, leaving the car up at the surface lot. At 5:45 met with Joanne, Patty and Caroline to drive across town to try out the new location of Kirk’s Steakburgers. This restaurant has been a Palo Alto fixture for decades, in various locations, but just last week they moved to a new place in Midtown. Had a good burger and shake and good conversation with people I like.

Thursday 10/31/2024

Took a walk, shorter than usual (hey, but 3.3 miles for the day) so as to be back by 9:30 when I met with Romie to have another crack at getting Bitwarden to work on her new iMac. I failed.

Then I wrote up the AV team’s conclusions that we reached yesterday and sent the draft to the team for comment. One point was the problem that because the auditorium has a flat floor, people in the middle and back can’t read the closed captions when we show movies. The bottom edge of the screen is blocked by the heads of people in the front rows. We said that somebody should try raising the angle of the projector, and if that helps, then a project to raise the height of the screen would be worth doing.

Later in the day Bert called, he had found the remote for the projector. Let’s try raising the angle ourselves. First we went to the Halloween party. The staff here really gets into this every year, with dozens of housekeepers, nurses, facilities and office people dressing up in very elaborate costumes. There must have been 200 people in the lobby, loud music, etc.

Bert and I grabbed Lou and we went in the auditorium and started a DVD playing with closed captions. The projector, which was new last year, is really a good one, and its remote works slick. You tell it to put a grid on the screen, and then you can tell it to shift the lens to move the grid left, right, up or down in pixel increments. We ran it up until the top of the movie image was right at the ceiling, at least 18″ higher than normal, and yeah, it was easier to read the captions from far back.

So back to my room to rewrite that whole section of the report. Then practiced guitar a bit and it was time for supper. I had made a date with Connie, founder of the writers group. I had written up an essay about the realization I had come to back on Day 5.321, the “pledge of release” etc. I had sent it to Connie asking for her thoughts. So she had some, and we met for dinner and talked about things. Her life experience has been very different from mine: she divorced fairly early, and lived as a single mother of four (she laughed and said all her kids were now 60 or older), not marrying again. She had remained friends with her husband and his second wife, and had helped to care for him when he got early onset Alzheimer’s, from which he died. Anyway she had an interesting critique of my writing and I will need to rewrite based on her input.

Oh, I forgot. This morning my bedside lamp failed. This was a space-mushroom shaped thing, a shallow glass dome with a shiny steel stem and base, which operated by touch. When I tapped it this morning, it didn’t come on. At first I thought the power was off, but I could see a pilot light across the room, so, no. Just the lamp had stopped responding to touches. Later in the day I took it apart far enough to see that all the electronics were in one little black box (literally). Something in that failed, and there’s no fixing it. So with a little internet searching I found a very similar, maybe identical, lamp and ordered it.

Wednesday 10/30/2024

Laundry day. In between laundry loads at 9:30 I spent half an hour with Romie’s new iMac trying to figure out why the Bitwarden password manager wasn’t working with the Safari browser, and failing. Also why she can’t run her printer, but I think I know that one. Try again tomorrow.

Apple introduced upgraded iMacs. They look to me like machines that if you order the right options, would be good for a decade or more. I wrote a guideline on what options to order and sent it to the CH tech mailing list. Unfortunately Apple still hasn’t announced a replacement for my 8-year-old 27-inch iMac. The new ones have a 23-inch screen and I just stubbornly want the big screen. An option is to buy the newly-announced updated Mac Mini, and pair it with a separate monitor. So I spent some time looking at “best monitor for mac” kind of websites trying to figure out the best deal in those.

And spent some time, at Kass’s request, editing the half-hour video of the appreciation fund show, down to 5 minutes so Rhonda can show it at a staff function.

At 2 it was time for the monthly AV team meeting. We had serious topics to discuss, how we wanted to respond to Rhonda’s request for reactions to two HC grant requests. The discussion was constructive and substantive, I’m very pleased with my team, and we have conclusions. Which I get to write up, oh joy.

We adjourned to the weekly 3pm Wednesday coffee and pastry break in the dining room, a nice little custom that dining services started a few months ago. There I sat at a table with David G and Kass, all three of us being owners of 27-inch iMacs, talking about what monitors we might buy.

Didn’t feel like coming down to dinner, had a PB&cheese and cup of bouillon in my room.

Tuesday 10/29/2024

During the morning I dealt with some management issues, emails to various people. And wrote a short essay for the writers group. The prompt was, “stuff” specifically, stuff you did or didn’t bring to Channing House. I wrote about my mid-century coffee table and the seagull sculpture that is always behind me in zoom meetings.

After lunch it was time to go down to the museum for the intro training to the new “Decoding Chatbots” exhibit. It’s nice, a lot of informative stuff. Scott was there too.

Monday 10/28/2024

Started the day with an early walk, standard distance, all functions nominal. Then off to FOPAL where I found 4 boxes of books to process.

Back home with time for a short nap, then down to the auditorium to set up for the Appreciation Fund show at 4pm. This came off just fine, no issues. At the party in the lobby following I ate enough snacks that I didn’t bother coming down for supper later. Pretty much read the internet for 2 hours.

Sunday 10/27/2024

Quiet Sunday morning. After lunch I set up the auditorium for a rehearsal of the Appreciation Fund party. I’ve mentioned this annual event a few times before: there’s no tipping here, so once a year the residents run a fund drive to get donations for an annual gift to all employees. Tomorrow there will be a half-hour show in the auditorium followed by a party in the lobby, with lots of solicitations and reminders to people. Usually over 90% contribute, many giving more than the recommended amount, which this year is $1300. (I gave quite a bit more. I mean, that’s barely $4/day.)

Today the people performing rehearsed and we worked out the tech details, who needs a mic and where, what’s on the projector when, etc.

In the afternoon I worked with the MuseScore app, figuring out the fingerings for guitar chords for RATCT and putting chord symbols in the sheet music. Soon we have to actually start practicing that song.

Saturday 10/26/2024

Morning I walked over to CVS to buy talcum powder. Why? Because the Dell laptop I was preparing for gift shop sale had a rubberized coating on the plate surrounding its keyboard, and this had degraded and felt gummy and sticky. Google “Dell sticky palm rest” and you’ll find lots of hits; it’s a common problem. And one internet post out of many had a solution: talcum powder. Spread it on, rub it in, wipe it off. And it made the rubbery surface much less gummy.

At 1pm I left for the museum and led the 2pm tour. Started with 15, picked up more on the way, ended with about 25 people. They seemed to enjoy it.

Had an early supper with Mary and Andrew, then at 6:30 Mary and I drove across town to St. Mark’s Episcopal to hear a concert by Lyyra, a female vocal group. They were pretty good. Some of the numbers (and some of the individual voices) were excellent. I wanted them to pick up the pace, have more rhythm, punch the lyrics more clearly. Despite lovely harmonies, the show as a whole seemed to drag a bit, some of the time. But who am I to carp?

Friday 10/25/2024

Today I spent some time fiddling with a PC. After I told Mary Beth, who runs the gift shop, about how Romie’s iMac was ready to sell, she mentioned that another resident, Dennis, had a Dell laptop to give away. So I went and got it, and decided the best use of it was to install Ubuntu Linux on it. I had to fiddle around a bit to make it work, including a rather arcane bit of tech to make the internal audio speakers work. I searched the internet for “Dell Ubuntu internal speakers don’t work” and got many hits, finally finding one that explained how to add two lines to a certain configuration file. This is not something the average user would know how to do — use the gedit editor in supervisor mode to edit a config file 3 levels deep in /etc. But I did, and when I rebooted, voila, the speakers worked perfectly. Anyway, there’s a nice laptop for someone, probably an employee, to buy for a kid to use.

My dinner tonight was at the “Webster Street Grill”, a special fancy dinner that our dining services stages every month or so. You pay extra for it. David G and his wife Helen had assembled a party for this and invited me. This was a six-course meal, the chef getting to show his stuff. It was pretty good, not every dish was four-star but not bad.

I had to leave a bit early; I had promised Sandy that I would check in with her in the auditorium as she was running a jazz concert. She didn’t actually need any help but appreciated the reassurance I guess. There were two musicians. Terrigal Burn on piano and Tamara Dunn singing. He’s mostly a musician; she has a day job, professor of immunology at Stanford.

Mr. Burn didn’t make a friend of me for sure. He didn’t arrive until 7pm (for a 7:30 show) and came with a cart full of his own audio equipment that he proceeded to put together, except he needed more power outlets, oh wait this will do, fuss fuss fuss. Tamara didn’t arrive until 7:15, so no time to do a proper sound check. And Mr. Burn then spends 2 minutes talking to the audience without a mic, until he notices that people are yelling “can’t hear!”. And she didn’t stay close to her mic, wandered around so her volume varied. Amateurs. Still, they were both quite talented and the music was nice, what you could hear.

Thursday 10/24/2024

Took the standard walk in the morning, since I didn’t yesterday. Then went to the 11th floor and inspected the “mechanical room” there, where it is proposed we might keep a mobile tv. There is space, but there are several drawbacks that would have to be corrected. I took some pictures and wrote a judiciously-phrased email with pictures, to the relevant staff members.

I finished upgrading Romie’s iMac, wrote a sale info sheet for it, and messaged Mary Beth who runs the gift shop about it. She hadn’t answered by the end of the day. In fact, people not answering my mail is beginning to bug me. I wrote to Connie, who I think of as a writing peer and a friend, three days ago asking her to review an essay I wrote on the “pledge of release” idea. She hasn’t answered, nor answered my polite note that I sent this morning. Something is not right.

Did some reading for once, two long New Yorker articles that Joanne had xeroxed for me.

Went out at supper time and walked around California avenue instead of eating here.

Wednesday 10/23/2024

First thing today was by prearrangement, I met with Romie to install her new iMac, replacing an old iMac that had gotten just soooo slooooow. Set it up and started it loading from the old backup drive. Then went to an 11am meeting with Rhonda, Gerald, and Bert to discuss AV requests for the next cycle of Heritage Circle grants. This got a little contentious, first because two of the grant requests turned out to be under $2K and Rhonda doesn’t think HC grants should be so small, they can be funded from the Gift Shop. And the other request is Bert’s idea of a “video wall” to supplement the projection screen in the auditorium. He’s been fascinated by video wall tech for a couple of years, and I think there’s nothing in it to benefit us at all. In the end, Rhonda punted to us, asking the AV team to come up with some firm recommendations. End of meeting.

At 1:30 I met with a lady from the Youth Community Services and handed over the old guitar to be a donation.

At 4:55, David M called from the auditorium where he was setting up for the evening lecture. No audio coming out of the system. I had no clue, I said, quick go find Gerald before he leaves for the day. By the time I got down to the auditorium the problem was fixed. Gerald saw that somebody had turned down the master volume in the software. We NEVER do that, so didn’t know to check. Who did it? Dunno. But one more thing to check.

After supper I was settling in to playing around with Romie’s old iMac, I have hopes that after I reformat the hard drive and install a later OS, it will not be so dog-slow, when the phone rang. Again from the auditorium, the speaker needs a charger for his MacBook, do I have one. Uh, yeah I guess. So I bring the charger for MacBook down to the aud. so the speaker can show his slides. Boy that’s a rookie mistake, going to give a talk and your laptop isn’t charged. Anyway I had planned to listen to the talk on Zoom but now I’m down there, so I sit in the back and listen. This guy was one of 49 or so architects working on the Apple HQ building and he had lots of pictures and statistics about what a marvel it is. Among many other amazing stats, the whole circular thing sits on rubber isolators and can move up to four feet in an earthquake. So I got my power supply back and came away.