Wednesday 04/24/2024

In the morning I went to the museum to lead a private tour, “25 seniors Menlo Park Rec”. Nice bunch of folks, near my age. Afternoon I did a couple of minor AV things. I felt a little bit under the weather later, and have a sore throat and an ache in my left ear. I haven’t had an ear-ache since decades. I used to get bad sinus headaches with ear pain back when I lived in the City or Daly City. Anyway, no fever. Think I’ll go to bed early-ish.

Tuesday 04/23/2024

After breakfast I finished editing Margaret’s video and did the things you have to do: make iMovie write it out; process it through Handbrake to reduce its size, upload it to Vimeo. Here it is, actually it’s a pretty fun travelogue.

I did all that and still had time to write something for the writers group. This week’s cue was “one of my favorite things” and I am looking all around the apartment for anything I can call a favorite, and I saw it. I’ll put the thing at the end.

After supper I had to set up the auditorium for a concert by a five-piece jazz ensemble. I had talked Sandy in being a trainee. The concert was IMHO pretty so-so, but it wasn’t a kind of jazz I like, no strong rhythms or singable tunes. Too subtle for this country boy.

Monday 04/22/2024

Took my standard walk. At 11 I met with Lynne to practice the song we will do together at the music fest on 5/10.

After lunch I went to FOPAL and did an hour of processing computer books, and a second hour of sorting.

After a lazy afternoon I flogged myself into action and edited the video of Margaret’s talk. That was a job, made difficult by the fact that I had forgotten to start the Zoom recording. Her screen display was a video, which she often manually paused to explain something. The zoom cloud recording would have given me the exact stream of her projected video with the pauses intact, all synced to her voice.

Instead, I had only the video from our camera showing her at the podium — and lucky to have that, thanks to Bert for turning that recorder on at all — and also her original video. I could put these together, but I had to guess where she had stopped the video to talk, and put in manual break points. There were other difficulties. But I persevered and it will look alright.

Sunday 04/21/2024

Nice Sunday morning. Drove to the coffee shop in Midtown at 8am to sit and do the big crossword. Back home, played some guitar.

At 3 I set up the auditorium for Dr. Margaret’s travelogue from her trip to Tanzania back in February. She has done a good job of editing her video and is a practiced public speaker so the whole event came off very well.

Except for the fact that Ace A/V Person, me, forgot to click Record so the zoom recording wasn’t made. Fortunately, Bert had been a busybody and turned on the AJA video recorder that I never use. So later I was able to go back and retrieve the video from there. So I will be able to make an integrated video presentation out of it.

Saturday 04/20/2024

Spent 8-9am finishing editing of the lecture video from Wednesday night, and uploading it to Vimeo. The took Margaret’s Macbook and had iMovie output her Tanzania movie, which she has been obsessively editing for a few weeks, as an .mp4 file. This will make it much easier to show it tomorrow, I hope. I set up a quick zoom meeting on one computer, and from another I shared the video and it looked ok.

At 6 I went to help Bert set up for a concert. This was an unusual one, a first of a kind for us: the Top Shelf Big Band, a 20-piece orchestra. Previous concerts have had at most five musicians — string quartets plus piano, or piano, bass, guitar, like that. Lemme tell ya, when a real big band cuts loose, the are LOUD. Sitting just off stage left as we were, my ears were ringing afterward like I’d been to a Grateful Dead show.

This gave us AV guys some real problems, mostly in providing mics for the vocalists. They had three singers who performed on different numbers. The problem was getting a singer’s voice to be heard over the volume of the band. If Bert turned the mic up far enough when the band was in full voice, then when the band got quiet the mic would start to feed back. We just don’t have the problems normally but tonight we looked like rank amateurs. Which we are, amateurs, at least, and tonight pretty rank. But the audience was pleased in general.

Friday 04/19/2024

Took a shorter than usual walk so as to be back in time to set up the auditorium for Margaret’s rehearsal. This was to practice showing her videos on Sunday. Some glitches I’d never seen before so it was good to work through them in advance.

After lunch I went to the Museum to lead a tour that I had been told was a group of 25 students from UC, but in fact was only a professor and 7 students, which was a nice size of group. All barely 20 years old, and some stunningly cute girls. So nice tour.

In the afternoon it was the monthly TGIF, this time sponsored by the 4th floor, with the theme, wear a hat. There were some truly strange hats, I must say. I wore my fine cashmere fedora I bought in Paris, which would look good with a tuxedo, but I wore jeans and a t-shirt.

Thursday 04/18/2024

Ordinarily I would spend a Thursday at one of the CHM locations, but volunteering has been suspended owing to a problem with the building where the Shustek center is. I don’t feel like going back to see if I mentioned this — a part of the roof collapsed and there was some water intrusion, no damage to the artifacts but the carpet has to be replaced.

So I gave an hour of time to help my neighbor Dr. Margaret with her various tech toys. I solved several problems for her.

At yesterday’s FOPAL zoom meeting, I heard about a “40 box donation” that had come in, so today I went down there and spent 3 hours mostly sorting. Good exercise.

Frittered the afternoon away in a lazy fashion.

Wednesday 04/17/2024

Did the laundry. In among the loads I had a phone consultation with Kass. She is staying with a daughter (granddaughter?) on the East Coast somewhere, I don’t know, somewhere on the right edge of the map. But she wants to run a meeting of a Channing House committee that she chairs, so naturally over zoom. Since she’s on our AV committee, she is tech-literate, but hadn’t done this so I walked her through scheduling a zoom meeting.

At 1pm it was time for the monthly post-sale zoom meeting of FOPAL volunteers. The sale netted $18.5K, not bad. However the fire department is about to preempt most of our parking lot for a temporary (months) fire station while another fire station is remodeled. Since that lot is often full of people attending various events in the Community Center next door, parking is gonna get a bit squeezy for the rest of the year.

At 4 I set up a mic for the monthly birthday dinner. Then at 6:30 I set up the auditorium for a lecture. This was an unusual event in this way. Two of my friends and neighbors are Peter and his wife Juthica. She is of Indian derivation. Thirty years ago she set up the Shadhika Foundation, furthering empowerment of women and girls in India. Today we had a talk from board chair of the foundation, Teena Sebastian, herself US-born of Indian parents. It’s a worthy charity (and rated 100% by Charity Navigator).

I had opted to do the AV for this event because I knew it was important to Peter, whom I like. Not to say that three other people couldn’t have done it as well, but he asked me. And afterward I was pleased that Teena said “It went so smoothly, smoother than any other presentation I’ve given.” Hah. Pat pat on my back.

Tuesday 04/16/2024

In the morning I took a moderate walk across the creek to Cafe Zoe in Menlo Park. There and on the way back I worked out something for the writers group. The prompt was, “If I was a bird, what kind of bird would I be.” I will append my little piece below.

In the afternoon I met with Sandy who wanted to know how to hold a zoom meeting in the Activity room. I had shown Ian a few weeks ago, and he had told it was easy, but she didn’t believe it until she did it. It really was easy.

Had lunch with Patty and we talked about the org change Rhonda had announced yesterday.

Little guitar practice, little reading, that was about the day.

Oh, here’s the silly thing I wrote. The first two pics are legitimate from the internet. The third picture was created by gemini.google.com with a prompt like “The burrowing owl visits a disco club late at night”.

Monday 04/15/2024

Took the standard walk, felt fine. Went to the monthly Event Coordinator’s meeting. Was able to announce we would get our added cameras in the auditorium.

Then off to FOPAL for the post-sale cleanup, two hours. I edited the video of a lecture from last Wednesday, on Silicon Valley Architecture. Need to get it uploaded to Vimeo.

Today Rhonda announced that our building facilities, housekeeping, and a couple of other functions were to be handed over to a management company. About 5 staff members will become employees of the contracting company, retaining seniority. I don’t understand the point of this, or see how it will save Channing House money.

Got an email announcing the dates for VCF West, August 1-3. With volunteer Frank at FOPAL we have accumulated at least 20 boxes of books of the sort that should sell to vintage computer nuts. There will be more by August. See last August.