Friday 12/15/2023

Right big toe got sore in the night, onset of typical gout. At 8:50 I went down and checked and the zoom rooms were still inop. Gerald of IT wasn’t in yet, so I wrote him an email while waiting for the bus to load. That would be the bus to the De Young museum to see the De Young Open exhibit, where the museum invites every artist in the 9 Bay Area counties to submit a work. They ended up hanging over 800 pieces around 4 big rooms. Here’s about 1/4 of it,

Some striking things. I had to admire this photograph.

According to the notes in the program, the photographer was planning to shoot something in the opposite direction, when he turned around to look toward the bridge and the Marin hills and saw this sun effect, and the pelicans just happened to fly by. A once in a lifetime shot.

I had stupidly not grabbed a couple of ibuprofen before leaving, so it was quite painful walking around the museum.

Anyway, back to CH about 2:30 and the zoom rooms have been fixed, thank you Gerald. Practice guitar, take ibuprofen, have a nap, and it’s time to join the carpool to the SWBB game, v. Portland. Not a contest, really. Stanford jumped out to a 20 point lead early. Then slowed down and Portland came within 10 points, before Stanford woke up and ran their lead out to 30 points again.

Thursday 12/14/2023

Did my usual Thursday morning routine, of tidying up everything and general maintenance, anticipating Wanda’s housekeeping visit in the afternoon. Also processed the video from last night’s chorus performance. I recorded it using Quicktime on my spare laptop, and Quicktime makes a monstrous huge file out of a one-hour concert, 65GB or so. So I put the laptop to work processing it with Handbrake, which reduced it to 5GB. That just finished at 10:20 which is when I needed to leave for the museum to lead a tour at 11.

This was a private tour for a law firm. There was supposed to be ten people but only 6 showed up. Two were very experienced nerds, they’d been in computer hardware before they became lawyers. The others weren’t so techy. Anyway I gave them the bonus 90 minute tour and the seemed to enjoy it.

Back to CH in time to meet at 2pm with Alice who is giving a talk on Sunday. We went over how her slides would be put on the screen and out to zoom. She is quite knowledgeable and also quick (she reminds me of my late sister Joyce: very mentally quick, but very quick to judgement of anything that doesn’t meet her standards). Unfortunately the problem with the Zoom room from yesterday continued, so we couldn’t try anything out.

At 2:30 I left Alice and joined a meeting of the Good Times committee. This is the group that sponsored the 50s sock hop a year ago and the C&W night a few months ago. They are now planning “Strolling into the 60s,” songs of 1959-1963. The name, because The Stroll was a big deal then, and getting people to dance is an objective now. We got the candidate list of songs down to 30. So many many good songs from then.

At 4:30 I had been invited by Joanne L and Erica to a tasting of whiskies, believe it or not. Peanut butter flavor whiskey is actually pretty good, as is red-hot cinnamon whiskey. Even though I was sampling like tiny little splashes, that was more alcohol than I’ve had at one sitting in a long time.

At 7 we had a concert by the Gunn High School Chorus. They were very good, and cute, too.

The director, Bill Liberatore, is friends with several people who live at CH, and jokes that since their first performance here was 1999, he’s been at CH longer than most of us.

Wednesday 12/13/2023

Today was the day the Channing House Chorus presents two musical events, or rather, performs the same program twice, once at 10am and again at 7pm, the latter followed by a reception in the lobby. I was on AV for both. Other than setting up the microphones, my main responsibility was to control the camera to get a good video recording of both shows. Later I will edit them into one video to be posted on Resweb, our internal website.

An additional tech item was that we had planned to put the video and audio on Zoom, not for general consumption — Mary the Chorus Master was very definite that we were not going to encourage people to watch from their rooms, she wanted them in the auditorium — but so that the activity nurse at the Lee center could put it on their big screens for people in AL and SN, who couldn’t come across to the auditorium.

That worked great in the morning, the zoom had just four names in it, me the host, the zoom room PC which provided the camera view, and one for each floor of the Lee center. But when I came back in the auditorium after a quick supper at 6, I found the zoom room hardware complaining about something and it wasn’t usable. And the IT guys had gone home for the day. But I got good recordings of both shows and the audiences were happy, so it was fine.

Tuesday 12/12/2023

Today I managed to squeeze my laundry in between other things, and between other people’s scheduled washdays. (There’s a magnetic whiteboard in the laundry room where we put little magnetic pawns to reserve laundry sessions.)

For the writers group, with the topic of “Shoes”, I wrote about brake shoes. Found pictures of brake shoes through the ages.

Bert asked me to complete the installation of an Epson printer for Ann C. I failed to do this. Crazy weird stuff. Run the Epson installer package, it says it was successful, but it has created no files anywhere. Other odd things. Connect the printer by USB; but the Mac OS system report doesn’t show it as a connected USB device. I kicked it back. Maybe somebody else on the tech squad can figure it out.

Monday 12/11/2023

First thing was a call from David G in the auditorium. Trying to set up for the resident association meeting and the projector was not showing what it was supposed to show. I had no idea. He got hold of Paul the IT guy who reset something or rebooted something and the projector was working again — but the microphones were dead. A few minutes later he had everything online again. I have no idea what was wrong or what fixed it.

Anyway now time for the Resident Association meeting. No big news. Immediately after I left for FOPAL to do my day-after-the-sale cleanup. Two and a half boxes of books that had seen 4 sale weekends without selling, off to the bargain room. No donations to process, for which I was pleased.

After an hour break it was time to go downstairs to support the full tech rehearsal of the chorus, prior to their concerts on the Wednesday. I practiced zooming the concert, which I will do on the day for the benefit of the Lee center. And I practiced controlling the camera to get all the action, as I will do on the day to get a decent recording. After that it will be up to me to edit a final video from the two concerts, but that can wait for the weekend.

That all lasted nearly to dinner time. Shared a table with Pru and the Morrisons.

Sunday 12/10/2023

Quiet day, which is good as tomorrow is a “full-value day” as Bill Pawek used to say. After watering the plants and doing the puzzle, I drove down to FOPAL to put my shelves in order. I haven’t been doing this lately, tidying up after the first day of a book sale weekend. Some other volunteer goes around doing it, but without any feeling for the subject matter, so just moves books around to make the shelves look balanced.

With that out of the way I had a large cinnamon roll for breakfast and headed home again. During the day I practiced some guitar and fiddled with the 240Z.

Some time ago one of my neighbors tried to get some penpal relations going between CH residents and some students at St. Ignatius HS in the City. I had one note from a Joelle, and replied to it, and then nothing for a long time. But finally the first reply has come just today. And it is very chatty and asks lots of questions about what I had said. What fun, an opportunity to talk about myself. No, I won’t give her the URL to this blog. Hah, if she’s any good she can find it herself, if she thinks of it.

At dinner I sat with Mary R., the person putting together the music show on 12/27 that I have committed to performing in. And I learned the very good news that she wants only two songs from me, not three as I had thought. Keep it under 7 minutes, she says. That’s dandy.

Saturday 12/09/2023

My main self-assigned task today was to refresh my picture gallery in the hall. It has been displaying a collection of scenic landscapes for several months now. I had it in mind to put up a collection of “people” shots, candid portraits of strangers. Over the morning hours I searched my collection of digitized slides and selected a bunch of striking faces. I ran each one through the near-miraculous Topaz Photo AI, best value in an app I know of, and printed them off on good paper, 11×14 or 8×11.

The lower left one I have shown before, every holiday season. It was taken with a Nikon SLR using Ektachrome film, in 1979. We were walking around downtown San Francisco looking at the fancy window displays. Outside Gumps I looked down and there was this girl, looking at the Fabergé Eggs. Click. Difficult lighting but it came out. The girl in the red coat drinking from a fountain? The fountain is the Barcaccio, the boat fountain, in Rome, at the foot of the Spanish steps. That was taken some time in the 80s. The redhead upper right is sitting outside the city library in Melbourne, AU.

Other than that, I took a pleasant walk across the creek into Menlo Park for coffee at café Zoe. Practiced guitar chords. Worked on the 240z body.

Friday 12/08/2023

Took a slightly shorter walk in the morning. On return, picked up my “sack supper” because this is one of those nights when the Dining Services crew is off. The reason is, this afternoon is the Staff Holiday Party. The staff get together in the dining room, have a party, and receive their Appreciation Fund bonus checks.

Practiced music. Then dressed in my docent clothes in preparation for the 2pm tour. I had claimed that tour by arrangement with my neighbors Jerry and Betty, who wanted to show two of their friends, Dick and Maureen, the museum. They arrived about 1:15 and we had a walk around the 1401 lab, the PDP-1 lab, and the Software display, before the 2pm tour time. There were no other visitors, so it was just us 5. Since they weren’t pressed for time, we spent nearly 90 minutes on the walk around.

Later at 5:30 I joined them at Jerry and Betty’s apartment for drinks and chat. Then they went off to eat at the Green Elephant. I begged off, and had a nice supper alone.

Thursday 12/07/2023

Tidied up the apartment and before I left, tried to call one Edlyn but she wasn’t at her desk yet. Here’s the tedious story on that. A resident here, Paul P, has a lifetime of bird photos and likes to show them. He plans to show bird pics next Monday in the AL activity room at the Lee Center. That’s a big common living room shared by the AL residents. There’s a big tv screen.

Paul is quite disabled, he gets around in a powered chair, and has a paid aide named Franko. I helped Franko connect his computer to the tv to show videos on the 11th floor for Paul’s 80th birthday party. I wrote about that but don’t feel like finding the day number. So last week Franko called me to ask for my support running Paul’s bird show next Monday. Well, (a) I don’t like being treated as a personal assistant, (b) they should have filed an EPF request a month ago and we could have planned for this, and (c) I’ve never done anything in that building, and (4) anyway I need to be supporting the Chorus tech rehearsal next Monday. But yesterday I went over to the AL floor and checked things out. It will be easy to connect the computer to the tv, the HDMI cable is there and the tv remote all ready. But Franko wants also a microphone so Paul can narrate his slides. The nurse on duty didn’t know about that but referred me to Edlyn who is the Activities lead. She wasn’t in so I left a message, but she didn’t call. So now I tried again but no dice.

Off across the bay to Shustek where I worked with Sherman to catalog a bunch of stuff that the curators have rounded up to show in a special exhibit this summer. The theme seems to be robots, because the collection included a Teddy Ruxpin, a Furby, a Hello Barbie (a version of Barbie that could talk), and several varieties of Golem statues. Did you know there was a Pokemon Golem? Me neither.

To my surprise, Hello Barbie is still a thing, here she is looking just like I saw her today. She is battery powered, and so has to be charged up before use. Oddly enough that web site doesn’t show the charging cable. It’s part of that sleek “charging stand”. It terminates in a skinny silver tip that you insert into Barbie’s back just below her belt. We had some dirty old man chuckles about basically penetrating Barbie with an anal dildo.

On the way home stopped to pick up a pound of coffee at Peet’s, then went straight to the Lee center, and this time found Edlyn in. She assured me she had talked to Paul, she had a microphone he could use, and she would be around on Monday. So I went to my room and called Franko and told him that. One job off my hands.

A couple people have gone out of their way to ask what happened that I missed yesterday’s meeting. Which is nice and makes me feel better. No explanation of why nobody knocked on my door, or maybe somebody did but not loud enough?

Wednesday 12/06/2023

Took the good old standard walk, no problem. Then sat down to do month-end numbers, copying all the Schwab account totals into the “Codger Accounts” spreadsheet that I first created based on a design by Marian, back on Day 31. Bottom line, the nest egg is still healthy

Next job up, was to make a video out of the recording of Mary M.’s First Monday book talk. This was a matter of taking the raw video recording from the camera in the auditorium, editing out some pauses and awkward moments, then cutting in the images from her powerpoint slides. It took about 2 and a half hours, 10 to about 12:30, to do this. I uploaded it to Vimeo and sent a link to Mary M. for approval. Later I got back this email,

Oh. My. God. Dave.  You did an absolutely masterful job!  Really.  The way you cut what needed to be omitted, the way you went back & forth between the speaker and the slides, the timing…. I mean it was truly professional.  Thanks so much!

I’ll take that as a sincere compliment, considering that Mary taught business communications for thirty years at Dartmouth and Stanford graduate business school. Here’s the video.

I spent another hour plus late in the day, applying chrome to the window frames of the 240Z using Real Metal foil. Much better results than the metal leaf foil (compare to yesterday).

Unfortunately I got absorbed in this and completely forgot about the 6th Floor meeting at 4:30. When I set the Z aside and started down for dinner at 5:30 I saw the sign-up sheet by the elevator and remembered the meeting, which was now clearly over, and everyone had presumably gone down to dinner already. I went down anyway and, yup, three tables were occupied by my neighbors happily chowing down. I am seriously bummed out by this. Other floor meetings I’ve attended, people look around and say, “Where’s Gwen? Where’s Phil? Somebody go knock on their door.” Apparently nobody thought to say, “Where’s Dave, go knock on his door” at 4:30. Or at 5:15 when they all went down to eat together. I didn’t go into the dining room to eat. I just moped back to my room to mope.