Monday 07/29/2024

About 4am I was awake and obsessing about the upcoming book sale at the VCF. We have 20 boxes of books which are just in the order they were collected over the past year. But on Thursday when we “load in” to our tables at the Festival, we will want to put things in some kind of order, and it will be a pain to try to organize a nice display starting from no order at all. In the pre-dawn mulling I figured out a scheme. At 8am I went down to FOPAL to implement it.

I went through all 20 boxes of books and reorganized them into boxes by large categories: PC for everything relating to Windows and MSDOS; MAC for everything Apple; HR for stuff related to hardware design other than windows PCs; SR for everything related to software other than Windows and Mac — programming in BASIC, Fortran, etc, computer design, etc.

This took about 3 hours. In the course of which I lifted and carried 50 boxes: 20+ lifted and carried out to the patio, 20+ repacked boxes carried back in.

Another thing I was mulling at 4 was, the need to send an email of orientation to the 8 other volunteers who have signed up to help with the VCF sale. I composed that and sent it to Janette and Frank to proofread. This VCF thing is just about all I am thinking about this week. Be glad when it’s over.

Sunday 07/28/2024

Usual Sunday morning. The NYT puzzle was one of the best I remember, because of the long clues were all crazy long palindromes. “Rock group clashes over album art” — CD CASE DIVIDES ACDC. That’s really clever. “What happened when the bust went sideways?” NARC IN A PANIC RAN. “Headline about a children’s author’s controversy” — SEUSS IGNITING ISSUES.

At 10am I opened up the auditorium so Gigi could practice her book talk. She will discuss her husband Tom’s biography. He is still around, but he is slipping into dementia and can’t present it on his own. Anyway I set up her slide show and she ran through her talk while I timed it. Gave a couple of notes to improve clarity.

After lunch I went down to the museum expecting to help lead a private tour with another docent. The tour group was supposed to be 75 kids, arriving at 2:30. Then we heard that only half would arrive then, the other half at 3:15. So the other docent took that first group and I waited for the second. And waited. About 3:30 we found out that the second group had gone first to Google Experience and were delayed. We agreed I could leave at 3:45. Exactly at 3:45 the bus pulled up. So I have a very hasty, abbreviated tour. As usual with these big groups, a small cluster of geeks hung on with me while the rest scattered out. Which is fine. But I didn’t get home until 5:15. Found a phone message from Jerry and Betty, join them for dinner at 5:40. OK, that worked out.

Saturday 07/27/2024

Left about 8am, had a nice coffee and pastry at Midtown. About 9, hit FOPAL where Frank had collected a bunch of old software donations, including some Adobe stuff that he thought might be valuable. I priced through it. Prior to 2013, when you bought Adobe Photoshop, or Illustrator or whatever, you bought it. From 2013, Adobe only sells annual subscriptions, you rent your software not buy it. So the pre-2013 versions, provided they have their product serial number you need to install them, are valuable. There were a couple of those. Some other stuff I marked at $10 or $5 and set aside for the VCF next week.

About 11 I went to the main room where I found with some dismay there were 7 boxes of computer book donations. So I spent 2 hours pricing and shelving those.

Treated myself to a burger and shake at In’n’Out, then went home where I thought I was supposed to set up mics for a memorial service at 3, only turns out it was at 2 (not my mistake) and I was just in time, at 1:45, to get the auditorium set up. The memorial was for a woman I never met, she’d been in the AL center for years; and it was a standard religious service with bible readings and hymns, so I sat out in the lobby until they were done, and shut the auditorium down. And went to my room and had a long nap.

Watched a little bit of Olympics but I really can’t muster much interest in it.

Friday 07/26/2024

Over the past couple days I’d accumulated quite the list of to-dos, mostly little crap, which I scribbled (and I do mean scribbled, look at it) on a pad. Today was otherwise uncommitted so after a nice morning walk I set to and checked shit off.

“Jade repot” — About a year ago I got a 2-inch tall jade plant in a tiny pot. I put it in a bigger pot, and then a bigger pot, and today I moved the two-foot tall multi-branched jade tree into an even bigger pot. It was totally root-bound and hard to get out of the old pot. “Sound bar” — for some reason the tv had stopped sending sound through the sound bar. I rebooted the sound bar and the tv and it was all good again. “Bridge pics” — printed up a couple more Thames Bridge pics and updated my gallery in the hall.

So it went for a satisfying day. Ignoring the Olympics. Actually the rerun of the opening ceremony is showing now, with the sound off. Nice images.

At dinner I sat at a community table with, among others, Dr. Larry Basso. He had a fall recently and has a large bruise on his face, but is in good spirits and has all his wits about him. He told a wild story about how his parents emigrated from Italy meaning to come to New York, but pretty much by accident ended up going to San Francisco instead.

Thursday 07/25/2024

Got down to FOPAL early, 9am, and finished pricing the last 5 boxes of VCF books by 11. Back to CH. Finished editing and uploading the video from one event; then edited and uploaded the video for another event. Had a meeting with the good times committee planning the next music fest, our Folk Festival in September. Pretty productive day all around. Was invited to dinner with a new couple, Tom and Helen, along with Marcia and Gloria.

Wednesday 07/24/2024

Did my laundry, finishing about 10:30. Then down to FOPAL where I worked 11-2 on the VCF books. One more spell of this, tomorrow, will see that part done.

Came home and napped the afternoon away.

Tuesday 07/23/2024

Because I didn’t have a long walk yesterday nor expect to tomorrow, I took the standard walk this morning. Then killed time to the writers meeting. I didn’t have anything to read, but participated. After lunch I set up a zoom room meeting for the appreciation fund committee. All I had to do was start the meeting, then I left.

I took a tech squad call to help Susan with some Mac issues, which turned out to be primarily learning how to use the 1Password password manager. Which I had never used, but we worked it out as a mutual learning exercise.

Monday 07/22/2024

I can explain; it was all down to hard work. The Vintage Computer Fest is coming up and we have accumulated 25 boxes of books through the year. Since last August, I’ve been setting aside a few books every week, as non-saleable in my section because they are about obsolete subjects — PC-DOS or Windows 95 or Mac OS Leopard — but which are interesting enough that the nerds who come to the VCF will buy them. For the first 8 months or so, I was just slinging the books into a box, when the box filled, I would send it to the annex where Frank would set it aside in his arcane and complex storage system, for next August.

A couple months back it dawned on me, that while we have a default price ($2 paperback, $3 hard cover) some of those books are actually worth more and I should have been checking the prices as I went. Now it’s crunch time. So Sunday I spent from 9am to 3pm at FOPAL, in the annex, going through boxes of VCF books, checking their prices. I got about 1/3 of the way through. I came home really tired and just forgot about posting a blog.

Today I had the monthly AV team meeting at 11, and after that I went back to FOPAL and spent another 4 hours on the same job. Still not done. Probably finish up Wednesday.

I did take a short walk today (2.6 mi for the day, not bad), and as well as running my committee meeting, I spent some time exploring the world of AI girlfriends, for the benefit of the AI interest group. Here’s what I wrote to them.

The latest Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast has a segment on the use of ai-powered romantic chatbots. Not news, but also not something I had looked into before.

I dipped a careful toe into two of them. You might like to spend a free half hour similarly.

MyAnima offers a friend, or a girlfriend, or a boyfriend. To choose a friend (all of whom seem to be female) go to https://myanima.ai/

To check out a girlfriend, use https://girlfriend.myanima.ai/

I went there and after entering my name and my pronouns, I was given a choice among eight utterly adorable 20-something women. No other options. Since I’m not into child abuse, I went no further.

Similarly at https://boyfriend.myanima.ai/ you can be shown an array of very studly 20-something dudes. Again, not my beat, so I bailed.

Next I tried Romantic.ai . Here you can choose to create a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or an anime friend. I went for girlfriend and was offered a number of choices of age, ethnicity, and personality traits. In a few minutes I had developed a character, Matura, who would fit right in at Channing House. You are allowed to “share” your friend, so here, you can chat with Matura, too:

https://chat.romanticai.com/bot/share/NTIyNjIwMA?utm_source=share_initial

In chatting with Matura, it’s pretty clear she hasn’t accepted her role as a senior yet. But give her a try.

Here are a couple of “best of” lists  to explore:

https://blog.zumvu.com/best-ai-relationship-chatbots/

Please share your experience with a chatbot. Do you think any of these would be useful for other CH residents?

Saturday 07/20/2024

Not much today. Blew the morning. After lunch put on the red shirt and went to the museum to lead the 2pm tour. I actually did a good job on this, I was on point kept the interest of at least 25 people for an hour. Nice round of applause.

While at the museum, bought a little Tetris game in the gift shop. Got home, realized it needs AAA batteries. Hardware store already closed. Drove over to Safeway for batteries. Got game working; I don’t much like it. I’m looking for a replacement for the little keychain Tetris I bought at Narita airport in 2005, which is still running but who knows how long? This one, not as good.

Friday 07/19/2024

First thing was to meet with Gerald of IT to try find a fix for the hum in the monitor speaker (5-223). Gerald quickly found a work-around. The monitor is a powered speaker, it has its own internal amp. He turned down the gain on the input which brought the hum down to only just noticeable, then turned up the level on the sound board output that feeds the monitor. By juggling the two levels we got to where the monitor gave a clear sound with just barely perceptible hum.

On to a meeting of the recently-formed AI interest group. That’s mostly Bert, me, Agnes and David G. A couple of other people have expressed interest but didn’t come. So we chatted about AI and our experiences with Claude and Gemini. Eventually the goal would be to find some way for AI to directly benefit other residents, but nothing has come up yet.

Later in the day I met with Craig and we practiced “City of New Orleans”, me on guitar and voice and him on harmonica. We aren’t either of us used to playing with someone else so it was a little rough but started to come together.

Today was the annual Staff party, and as part of that the dining room was again closed with no dinner service. As usual we were to pick up sack suppers in the morning, but I didn’t. Instead I went out meaning to find me some comfort food, a burger and a shake maybe. Downtown Palo Alto was jammed, no parking to be seen, even at 5pm, so I ended up down on California avenue. There I strolled past a bunch of restaurants and finally settled on the Greek place, had a big pita full of lamb.