Tuesday 02/13/2024

Yesterday I stopped in the Activity room to check out what Ian had reported as a problem with the assistive listening device. The Activity room has a “t-loop”, which transmits the audio from the microphone and zoom room box, to some hearing aids. And there are a couple of little receivers, about the size of an old-fashioned pocket transistor radio, with attached ear-pieces, that can also pick up the t-loop audio. Except one of them didn’t work. It was easy to figure out the problem; it uses a 9-volt battery and the two little springy metal tabs that contact the battery terminals, were badly corroded. Fine, except as I was scratching at one of them with a fingernail and trying to bend the springy contact to have more spring pressure — it broke off.

I took it back to my room and considered. I could see how the little tabs could be pried out and un-soldered from their wires, but what could I replace them with? Among the Youtube channels I watch is the series by Randi Rain, where she repairs old electric toys, and I’ve seen her replace corroded battery tabs. I can do this, I thought. So this morning I headed out at 8am to Ace Hardware where I bought a strip of thin springy brass metal, just the width of the tabs in the receiver. (I was very pleased to find Ace had a nice selection of brass sheet in various sizes, including exactly what I could use with minimal cutting and shaping.) Got out my soldering iron and other tools, and I did successfully replace the two contact tabs in the t-loop receiver, and it worked. I had that all done and tidied up by 9:30am.

Then came the writers meeting. The theme was “road taken or not taken” and several people wrote very touching and interesting essays on points in life where they had made choices. I had no contribution. Thinking about it before, it seemed to me that almost everything I did was determined, me just flopping into whatever came my way with little direction. Now I think, no, there was one point when I actually made a decision to apply to IBM, with life-changing results. So I should have written about that. Oh well.

After lunch it was the second and final rehearsal for the Strollin into the Sixties show. Everything went pretty well.

I wasn’t pleased with the dinner menu and didn’t see anybody around to eat with, so I got in the car and went out. Had pulled pork at Armadillo Willy’s.

Monday 02/12/2024

First up was the monthly resident association meeting. This one went two hours with lengthy discussions of the new dining services rules (day 5.059). The changes that seemed like common sense to me, and certainly wouldn’t affect my habits, have turned out to be very upsetting to some people. In particular a rule that food can’t be taken from the dining room has turned up a bunch of people who apparently make it a habit to carry away food to eat later. They want to be able to get a box of milk at dinner and take it to their rooms so they can have dry cereal in their room for breakfast. When pointed out that they can order anything they want for breakfast including milk and dry cereal, as carry-out, they say that’s not the same, they would have to come downstairs in the morning to get the carry-out tray. I guess they want breakfast in their jammies. Others apparently regularly take away some portion of their dinner to eat for lunch. I don’t do these things so I would not be inconvenienced but it is turning into a major crisis for some. I thought the language used by some (“destroying the sense of community”, “shows lack of trust”, etc) was highly overblown.

After the meeting I met briefly with Jeb who is going to help me sing my bit for the Strollin show. Then down to FOPAL for the post-sale triage day. All books unsold after 4 sale days, out, three boxes of them.

Met at 4 with Peter who is writing a newsletter article about the AV team. Had dinner later with Peter and his wife, and with Craig Allen. Diane Allen is in quarantine, finishing up with the Covid that she got from Craig. Craig is going to have surgery Wednesday to remove a small cancerous tumor from his salivary gland.

Sunday 02/11/2024

Didn’t do much today. Went out to buy a few groceries. Set up the 11th floor for game-watching, turning on the tv, lowering the blinds, moving in extra chairs. I watched some of the game up there, then wandered off to read.

Saturday 02/10/2024

Two big activities today. First was a house concert in Oakland. Left about noon, driving alone. Originally neighbor Sandy was going, but she went and had a foot operation a couple of weeks ago and isn’t mobile enough yet, so dropped out. Excellent concert by a cute couple who perform under the name The St. Louis Steady Grinders. Blues and ragtime of the early 20th century.

Back to CH in time for a quick nap before supper, and then met with Susan P in the lobby at 7 to go to the Bus Barn for a play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning. This was an impressive display of acting, two hours of heavy dialog, long speeches, complicated blocking, lots of emotional displays. The play itself… we agreed on the way back that it had problems. A close, sympathetic look at the problems and fears facing devout, young, modern Catholics. Well, youngish and modern, but maybe not devout and maybe not even Catholic? Doctrine is a tricky thing.

Friday 02/09/2024

Took the standard walk first thing, yay. Finished updating the video for Strollin. This involves compressing the video and installing the chapter titles, then copying it to the old macbook from which it will be played.

After lunch drove to the museum to lead the 2pm tour. By arrangement, Leah met me there, she had indicated interest in the museum and asked to come along next time I had a tour. Small group, really only 6 with Leah at the end.

That was about it for the day.

Thursday 02/08/2024

Main activity today was to drive over to Milpitas and do some archiving work at the Shustek center. Now that archivist Gretta has moved on, the schedule has changed. Aurora, Gretta’s supervisor, normally managed one group of volunteers at the Yosemite warehouse while Gretta managed another group at Shustek. Now, until a replacement for Gretta can be hired, Aurora has asked the volunteers to come on alternate weeks and only to Shustek. I was off last week, on this week. There wasn’t a lot for me to do. She wanted everyone to work through a refresher course on the use of Mimsy, the database we use to record all artifacts. So I did that, which took a couple of hours. I was reminded of a few things I’d forgotten, and learned a couple of things, plus I discovered something about the database that Aurora hadn’t known. Then I headed for home at 3pm.

Practiced some guitar, had a nice supper with nice neighbors.

Wednesday 02/07/2024

Didn’t even think about a walk, though I should have. Did my laundry and while that was running, edited the Strollin video to have the right order of songs. And had an appointment with Leah, the in-house hairdresser.

In the evening we had a lecture by Prof Emerita Myra Strober, who says she has “flunked retirement three times,” meaning she keeps getting dragged into other projects, most recently a book, Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions. She gives a good talk, amusing with lots of good stories from her own life.

One of her stories sounded exactly like stories we heard during the End of Life lecture series. Her second husband had Parkinson’s and was deteriorating; she got an urgent call to come to the hospital, where she was told the doctor wanted to insert a feeding tube. She said, he has a POLST that explicitly rules that out; the doctor said that the electronic copy in the records wouldn’t do, he needed a physical copy. She has to rush home and get the form in order to prevent unwanted care. Soon after she observed the problem, her husband didn’t have a blockage, he was actively spitting the food out: voluntarily not eating. They moved him to hospice care and he died soon after.

But that’s not the sort of decision her book is mainly about. Anyway, the event came off without any A/V hitches, so another one done.

Tuesday 02/06/2024

Took the standard walk, since I couldn’t yesterday. Then sat down at 9:30 to write something for the writers group that started at 10:45. The cue was “write about a color.” I wrote about “Beige”. I’ll put it at the end.

After a quick lunch I warmed up the auditorium for the full rehearsal of the Strollin’ into the 60s event. And quickly found out that, without telling me, the other organizers had changed the order of some of the songs. So my video didn’t match the program. So I have to remake the video tomorrow. Not that big a deal, but annoying. Anyway, various aspects of rehearsing ran until nearly 4pm. I did my bit to general applause, so that was good.

Here’s “Beige”. And yes I know the 3270 terminal case was… metal? I think? So it doesn’t really count. I should have used a Wyse or Tektronix terminal from the early 70s.

Monday 02/05/2024

A day of accomplishments. First off I solved the vexing issue where the sound from the new Blu-Ray player came out but the video did not. I knew it had to do with the fact that the player was hooked up to a big-ass Yamaha receiver, which in turn drives the TV and speaker system. Last night I downloaded and read the manual for the receiver, which kinda indicated that you could hook anything to its HDMI inputs but only the formats that suited the TV hooked to the output would get through. So I realized, OK, the player shakes hands with the receiver and the receiver says, I can take anything, whatta ya got? and the player says, I’m a super modern player I can send anything, and they settle on the max, 4K resolution. But then the receiver says, 4K won’t suit my old TV, it only does 1080p, and doesn’t pass the video through.

So the answer was to hook the player directly to the TV so I could see its output (because when the player shakes hands with the TV they agree on whatever the TV can handle) and then use its setup menu to set it to output a max resolution of 1080p.

Now when I connect it to the receiver again, the receiver gets a 1080p video signal and passes it right along to the TV. It worked and I was very pleased with myself. This was all before 9am, mind you.

Then at 9am I had a date with Lois for a tech squad call, and was able to resolve three problems with Gmail and MacOS for her. No bugs, just using things the wrong way.

Which led to 10am when I went to the auditorium to set up for Oscar’s book talk. This was the deal where he is talking about the book Passing and showing clips from the movie. But the video clips had been prepared and were shown by his buddy David Richardson, so all I had to do was turn the system on and set things up, then hand over to Richardson to run the video.

Right after lunch at 1pm I went up to 11 to help Alice set up the mics for a 3pm Chinese New Year party. She had had a problem yesterday trying it out, but she had now solved her own problem before I got there, so we just went over a couple of things and I could leave.

I went to FOPAL. I had set up my section ready for the sale, on Saturday. But I neglected to put up the “HOLD” flag so I was afraid the sorters would have put some donations out for me. As it happened there was only one box, which I quickly disposed of. Set the Hold flag so nothing more would be put out, and came home. Spent a nice remainder of the afternoon napping and playing the guitar. I really have a nice life.

Sunday 02/04/2024

Remade the Strollin video as requested during rehearsal, shortening the intro to “California Girls”. The Beach Boys really had a long slow intro; I cut 18 seconds off it. That’s so the singers who are lip-syncing to it don’t have to stand there mute for 20+ seconds before the song starts, which is an eternity on stage.

The SWBB carpool was down to just me and Patty. David G was off to some family thing in the City, and Lenny said she had been exposed to Covid and was isolating for a couple of days. Stanford trounced UCLA quite handily.