Sunday 10/19/2025

Usual Sunday morning stuff. Spent some time reading, trying to finish Mary Roach’s Bonk so as to give it back to J. At 2pm I, Joanne, and Sandy met up and got in Sandy’s car to go to a house concert in San Mateo. The performers were Bob Beach and David Jacobs-Strain. Nice stuff, slide guitar and harmonica, blues and country style, mostly original material.

Back at CH around 5:30. Not hungry, had a few snacks at the show, so being a hermit in my room tonight. Big day tomorrow.

Saturday 10/18/2025

Big event today was to join the No Kings demo. At 11:30 I joined Joanne and also Diana, a friend of hers, and we walked to the Town & Country shopping center where a couple of hundred people were gathering. At 12 we all started walking down Embarcadero toward Rinconada park. Except we three broke off before the park and returned to CH. Diana got in her car and went home. Joanne and I had a very quick lunch, then went up to the 11th floor at 1:30 for the Celebration of Life for our friend Pam, who died a couple of weeks ago.

I mentioned Pam several times earlier this year. When she started declining and moved to The Forum for rehab, and then when she moved back here to enter hospice care. I didn’t know her all that well before, just as a smart and sensible and witty neighbor and committee chair. You learn all kinds of things about someone at their memorial. She had a math degree and taught “information science” before it was called “computer science”. Then her father died of an inherited neuropathy, and then her sister died of it, and she realized she had it. She had married early but divorced and determined never to remarry or have children, for fear of passing the disease on. She worked for various high-tech companies in Australia and then California before retiring and moving to CH. She made it to age 78, an achievement, considering.

From the memorial we headed back down Webster street to Embarcadero and walked around the “democracy faire” that had been organized, along with the march, by Indivisible Palo Alto. Signed a couple of petitions. Walked back. Joanne then went off for dinner with old friends from her previous life. I had dinner with my 6th floor neighbor Bob and his visiting son-in-law and grandson.

Friday 10/17/2025

Took our morning muffin ramble, Joanne and I. Talked about various things, including her intention to get a trainer and start working out. She’s been reading Peter Attia’s book Outlive, which emphasizes among other keys, lean muscle mass as critical “long healthspan”.

Well dammit if she can, I can. We talked about how difficult it is to be regular in exercising. I had a thing for a while, 7:30am in the gym, but dropped it in part because that early hour suits the schedules of a surprising number of people. Isn’t there another regular time you could use, she asks. So I looked over my typical week and I do see where I could block out M-W-F after lunch. Will experiment with that next week. Hold me to it.

Spent the afternoon reading more of Bill Gates’ book Source Code, and realizing when I read it before, I didn’t finish it. Some of the most interesting parts, 1975-76 when he and Paul Allen were implementing BASIC for the Altair, were new to me.

At 4pm, big deal in the Auditorium. Must have been most of the 190 residents there for the big reveal of our new satellite campus. I had been under NDA for a week because I was on a focus panel on the naming. Anyway, now it can be told: the buildings at 430-436 Forest Ave., 13 units, mostly 2bed-2bath, are now the property of Channing House, deal closed yesterday. Existing tenants have been asked to be out by 12/31; we will start taking new residents early next year. Management is very confident that the market exists to fill this building in the first year with people paying $1.5M to $2M to move in. It’s like downsizing to a nice condo with the added benefit of being a CCRC.

The staff and the Resident Association executive board have begun preparing plans to integrate the newcomers into our resident-driven culture. There is to be a panel of residents working on this, selected by the RA exec (my neighbors Sally and Donna) and staff. I have a feeling I will be asked to serve on this. Well, that’s why I unloaded the AV chair, so I could do other volunteer things.

Thursday 10/16/2025

Got a lot of shit done today. The big storage tubs I ordered came so I installed them in the Green Room. I had ordered 2-inch dry erase tape, and it worked slick as could be.

There is room for eight more of these. We’ll see if there is need.

Then I finished editing the video of the App Fund Kickoff. Then I learned of two other event videos that were sitting in the Zoom cloud. I investigated with the sponsors of those events — one from last June — were they supposed to be made available? Yes. So I spent the hours from 1 to 5 editing two hour-long videos. But it was satisfying work.

Wednesday 10/15/2025

Catching up on deferred chores and old mistakes. A couple days ago, Gigi, in charge of the Book Talk series, asked if we had video of the most recent one, which was a very nice presentation by Agnes and Ian on the book, The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, pioneering AI researcher and Stanford professor. Agnes, herself a child of Chinese immigrants, spoke for 20 minutes on the part of the book where Dr. Li talks about her immigrant childhood. Ian, retired Cambridge physicist, talked for 20 minutes on the technical side of AI, then both answered questions for another 20 minutes.

Weeks previous we had the Broadway musical show. I hope I noted then that, owing to a literal slip of the finger, there was no video recording of it. But now, when Gigi asked about the video of the book talk, my brain mushed around and mixed them up, and I said no, that’s the show I didn’t record. No video. Now follows a flurry of emails between Gigi, Agnes, and Ian about whether they could reconstruct their talk, or at least put their scripts up on Resweb, etc. I’m feeling terrible for causing all this.

And then this morning I realize, wait a bleepin’ minute, it was Broadway I didn’t record. What was funky about the book talk was, that Ian would not let me do a zoom recording, he had to connect his laptop direct to the projector. So indeed there is no Zoom cloud recording, but I think — maybe? — didn’t I? — record it on the local disk. So I go downstairs and check and yes, there’s a nice video waiting for me on the AV hard drive. So I email them all, wait, hold the panic, it’s ok, I have video. Then I get to work and edit and upload the video of their talk. Here it is. There’s one major hack, in that I spaced out at the start and didn’t switch cameras after Gigi introduced Agnes. So the first 10 minutes of Agnes’s talk the video shows the front row of the audience, with Agnes’s voice over. Amateur.

Then I continue with the task I started yesterday, editing the video of the Appreciation Fund kickoff. And quickly find that certain performers (not me this time) screwed up with the microphone, so one whole musical number has no audio. So I drop that. Then I find that a certain other performer, who read a long funny poem, insisted on holding the mic her way, not the way I told her, which ended up with a broken up and mostly inaudible sound track for that. It took several tries through the day to get in touch with her, but I do, and at 4 I go down to her place and have her read the poem into my computer. Tomorrow I will be able to put that audio over her video.

At 4:30 I set up a mic for the birthday dinner entertainers. Six times a year there is a birthday dinner party for everyone with a birthday in that 2-month span. Joanne was in this one, and I was an invited guest at her table, along with Richard and Betsy, both with birthdays, and Roberta, Richard’s spouse. Here’s a panorama that Richard took of Roberta, me, Joanne and Betsy.

At 7:30 there was a talk by, sorry I forget the dude’s name, long-time Palo Alto archivist and historian, about some characters from Palo Alto History.

Tuesday 10/14/2025

What a busy day. To start with, Joanne and I met on the roof at 9am to do a VO2 test. We’ve been reading about longevity and “health-span”, how long you remain in reasonable health. One important measure of general fitness is VO2 max (Wikipedia article), basically a measure of how much oxygen your body can process during sustained physical effort. Normally measured while wearing an oxygen mask and running on a treadmill, but it can be measured more casually using the Rockport Walking Test. Basically you walk a measured mile as fast as you can, and take your pulse rate at the end. Plug your age, gender, pulse rate, and the time to do a mile, into an equation, and read out approximate VO2 max.

I had set up a spreadsheet to do the calculations. What about the measured mile? Years ago residents had measured the walking path around the flat roof of Channing House, and found that six laps of the roof, plus another 200 feet, was a mile. So that’s what we did, walked that mile as fast as we could. Hard enough exercise that we couldn’t keep up a conversation. I kinda thought that I would pull away from Joanne but oh, no. She was maybe 15 feet behind me at the end, so our times were effectively the same. Here’s the result,

You can find many charts of “V02 max by decade” around the web, and no two are identical, plus I haven’t seen one that gave numbers for people over 80. Always the last column in the chart is “age 70-79”. However, for all of them, my 30.5 is at least 75th percentile for men, and her 26.4 is 75th or higher for women (95th percentile on one chart, “Oh, I like that one” she said).

Next was the writers group, supposed to be writing a review of an imaginary book you wish you had written. Prudence had the best one; she “reviewed” a murder mystery set in a senior residence, describing all the suspects and victims as recognizable CH residents.

Lunch. Then at 1:30 to the 8th floor lounge where Debbie’s Vision Support Group had a meeting to hear a speaker whose name I forget. I don’t normally attend this group but she had advertised it as having something to do with AI, so I was curious. That turned out to only be a recommendation to use Google Gemini for questions, ok. But he actually had a lot of interesting stuff about book readers. Did you know the Kindle app is able to read aloud? Its voice doesn’t have a lot of expression, but it will do it. Also Adobe Acrobat will read any PDF aloud.

Then I had an hour free until 3:30. I had committed to putting the Stanford Continuing Education web class “Reimagining Democracy” on the big TV on the 11th floor. So I did that. Originally this was going to be me and Joanne but a bunch of other people expressed an interest, and about 8 people showed up. And a nice little discussion after the class ended.

Then dinner and at 7:30, a jazz concert in the auditorium. Terrigal Burns piano, Tamara Dunn singing. They’ve been here before. Jazz standards well performed.

Can I go to bed now please?

Monday 10/13/2025

The Resident Association meeting was at 9. During the open-comments part at the end, I took the mic and complained about the loss of the binder from the 11th floor.

Then I headed out for FOPAL for the post-sale triage. Sent four boxes of non-selling stuff to the bargain room. There was only one box of donation waiting, so I was back by 1.

At 2pm I went down and started setting up the auditorium for the 4pm Appreciation Fund Kickoff event. Something has gone wrong with the sound board, the controls aren’t working right, or at least not the way they were last week. Part of my job was to get a decent remote experience to the Assisted Living section who would watch on zoom on a big TV. But in the auditorium there was a series of powerpoint slides to accompany the various skits and songs in the event. I knew I couldn’t properly manage the video cameras and also switch the slides at the right time, so I handed that part off to Bert to run while I did the video. Tomorrow I’ll edit the recording and see how well I did.

The show itself was only 25 minutes long, so at 4:30 we broke everything down and put it all away. Then I spent a few minutes in the large reception that was going in the lobby. Didn’t feel hungry, felt tired, went to my room and then napped right through the dinner hour.

Writing this blog the phone rang. It was another resident, living in Independent Living but not much longer, I suspect, as his grasp on things is definitely getting fuzzy. He was asking me for help with his TV. He said he had the book I’d set up for the 11th floor — aha! the thief! — which he thought would help him figure out his entertainment system. Normally his wife is here also, but she is away for a short vacation, and he can’t figure out the rather complicated setup in their apartment. Neither could I figure it out. There are a number of remotes including an extremely complicated universal remote, and I simply could not get his TV to show Comcast.

No matter how often I pointed out that his system was nothing like the one on the 11th floor, he insisted on reading my writeup and trying to apply it to his gear. The combination of a strong masculine personality with failing cognition is… hard to deal with.

Anyway I got the 11th floor book back and put it in its proper place.

Sunday 10/12/2025

Sunday morning, usual. At 9:30 I met with Susan H, responding to a tech squad call. She gets messages from the Chrome browser saying it won’t support her computer. Yup. Her 2016 MacBook Air is four MacOS releases back from the oldest MacOS that Chrome supports. If it were updated to the latest release that supports that machine, it would still be a release back from the one Chrome (and Firefox) will support. We talked about options. She can keep slogging along, it will all keep working, just no security, or other, updates. Or she can buy a new machine, which she is reluctant to do.

After lunch I got on the bus to the Pear Theater. Enough CH residents have subscribed to Sunday Matinee shows at the Pear that it justified hiring a bus. The play was “The Art of Murder” and now I find there are multiple TV shows with that title but this was none of them. Anyway, it is a black comedy about four people double-crossing each other. Somewhat amusing.

At 7:30 a resident called me from the 11th floor, she couldn’t figure out how to show a DVD. Sigh, why don’t you just read the very clear, illustrated instruction book? Turns out, the book that I wrote and carefully formatted and put under the TV, step by baby-step on how to show DVDs and other things — had disappeared. Some asshole has taken it. After I got her going with her DVD I searched the 11th floor carefully. The book is gone. WHY?!? Why would some jerk pick up this very useful 3-ring binder and walk off with it? I am righteously pissed.

Saturday 10/11/2025

Did a little work to get ready for the App. Fund Kickoff Monday. Took the guitar down to the music practice room and played for an hour. Somehow that is better than my bedroom, feels more like real performing.

Read a bit. After lunch, Joanne texted, “how about a power walk” so off we went, walking down Channing to the Edgewood market and back, a couple hours, 4 miles for the day. That was about it, except, later on, Gigi, the mistress of the FIrst Monday Book Talks, emailed querying the title of my book talk next month: “1975, the year everything changed.” Could I explain, please? Here’s what I wrote back.

In 1974, most people had heard of computers, but not many people had seen a computer, fewer still had actually programmed one. In that year Intel released the 8080, a single chip that contained 5,000 transistors organized into a complete CPU: the central logic of a computer that previously would have occupied a refrigerator-size cabinet and cost $10,000, now in a chip smaller than one’s thumb and costing $400.

A small-time entrepreneur, Ed Roberts, realized he could package the Intel 8080 in a breadbox-sized cabinet to make a functional, usable mini-computer priced in reach of a hobbyist. His “Altair 8800” was publicized on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine in January 1975. That magazine story inspired two college students, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to implement a simple programming language to run on the Altair. They sold the rights to their program to Roberts for $50,000 — the first income earned by their new company, Microsoft.

Meanwhile Steve Wozniak, a student of electronic design, then an intern at Hewlett-Packard, also read about the Altair 8800 and was sure that he could design a better hobbyist computer for less money. Before the end of the year, he and his pal Steve Jobs were selling Wozniak’s machine, now called the Apple I.

In 1974, nobody had heard the phrase “home computer”. By 1976, every electronics hobbyist in the country had heard of home computers, and wanted one. Within five years, Apple and Microsoft were major corporations, and millions of people were using home computers from a dozen manufacturers.

Friday 10/10/2025

Friday morning, time for a walk with Joanne. This time to the shopping center, we both wanted to get stuff from Trader Joe’s. Then coffee at Douce France. After lunch I set up the auditorium for the rehearsal of the Appreciation Fund kickoff show. The total show is only 20 minutes. We ran through it twice. An hour to set up before, and half an hour to put away after. Life of the AV tech.

The CH house library’s copy of Bill Gates’ book Source Code has disappeared. I need to study it because I’m to do a book talk on it on 11/6. Libby the library app to the rescue, I checked the e-book out of the Palo Alto library. I plan to steal pictures from it. I’m going to talk about both Gates and Wozniak, and how everything clicked in 1975 to launch the home computer explosion.