Friday 09/29/2023

Took an abbreviated walk, so as to be back by 9:30. Had a nice coffee, and picked up a prescription at CVS.

I had been given a tech squad job to help one of my 6th floor neighbors, Cindy, handle a video doctor call. We worked through it, got the call successfully started, and I left her at it.

The bulk of the day I spent in the auditorium again. Today was allocated for AV teamers to have solo hour-long shots to play with the equipment. I mostly hung out, kibitzing and sometimes helping to figure things out. First the Morse couple, John and Francis, spent two hours rehearsing her upcoming First Monday Book Talk. She practiced her talk while John worked to get all the tech right.

After lunch David M. worked through the process of running a zoom meeting. Then Kass came down and I supervised her as she took the system from cold, to a complete meeting with speaker slides and all. She took lots of notes. One more supervised event and she will be able to solo.

This week, the weekly live stream from SFJazz was The Manhattan Transfer, a famous singing group. I decided this would be good enough to share, so in the middle of the day I put out a note on the bulletin board that I would be running this concert on the 11th floor TV at 7:30 if anyone wanted to stop by.

This turned out to be a success. The music was great, really fun, and the image, streamed on to the 80-inch TV, looked great. About a dozen people showed up and everyone was very pleased and thanked me for doing that.

Thursday 09/28/2023

Today was the day allocated for the auditorium contractor to give our committee 8 hours of training. I had decreed there would be four units of an hour each, two identical walk-through and overview of the system, and two on specific areas. Plus a series of half-hour slots people could sign up for to get solo hands-on time to try things out. I had prepared a sign-up sheet and pretty much all my volunteers had signed up for different parts.

So I spent from 9am to 3pm in the auditorium participating in these activities. It didn’t all go to plan. The first two one-hour units did go as planned. But then we discovered that the sound mixer board was broken. And that the blu-ray player had been disabled accidentally. So there was time spent fiddling around while the contractor guys fixed things or patched around things. But in the end everybody got at least introduced to the system, and quite a bit of useful hands-on experiments were run. But it was quite exhausting, mentally.

Tomorrow is much the same, in that I arranged for one-hour hands-on slots and those have been signed up for, from 11am to 4. So I’ll need to be in the room during most of those, just to brainstorm and help.

09/27/2023

Day of exciting happenings. OK, that’s sarcasm. But some out of the ordinary things.

Went for a walk, short one, because I had a tech call to a lady who said her mac laptop was “racing” and she couldn’t read her mail. I couldn’t imagine what she meant, and I never found out because when I called her, she said it was all better now.

At 10am I got a haircut. Well that only happens every six weeks, so — excitement?

At 3pm it was time for the kitchen tour. I signed up for this weeks ago. They only do small groups. It was finally my turn. We got a good look at the inside of the kitchens and some understanding of how the systems worked. There were only a couple of people at work so there was no sense of how busy it gets during meal service. The tour was led by Gloria, who is now head of dining services, but who started here as a server a number of years ago.

At 5:30 I met Sandy and we went to a house concert. Actually a driveway concert, since the people who run this series set up chairs in their driveway. The music was by a bluegrass group, the Kathy Kallick band. Here is a very short video of them playing in the driveway.

Tuesday 09/26/2023

First thing this morning was to drive 5 miles to Redwood City to the DMV to complete renewal of my drivers license. I had pursued the online renewal process up to a point where it said now you gotta make an appointment. It wasn’t clear whether I would have to take a test or what.

I arrived half an hour ahead of my 09:10 appointment. Went straight in with number F022 and waiting maybe 10 minutes before they called that. Clerk looks at my license and has me read the top line of an eye chart with each eye. Sends me to the photo line. So I guess the point of coming in was a new picture? After the photo, the next guy gave me a temporary paper license. “Your new one will come in the mail in a few weeks.” And that was it; I was back to CH by 9:45.

Writers meeting at 10:45; nothing new. After lunch I talked to Gerald, he had just got an OK from the contractor on our training schedule for the AV team. But now it was time for the Strategic Planning committee to meet with the Consultant Team who are duplicating all our work gathering information from all stake holders. This process is BS, frankly. There are a lot of pie-in-the-sky ideas that people have proposed (like: we should build or buy some housing for employees so it would be easier to get staff) none of which we have money to do. I kept my mouth shut this time.

Now I had the problem of getting my AV team to sign up for training units and choose times when they can use the auditorium. I flashed back to the time-scheduler we used back in ’20 to organize volunteers, Slottr.com, and yes it is still there and remembers me, so I whipped up three different sign-up sheets and sent out links.

Then I went to the back stage area and grabbed the house-owned PC and MacBook which have been hibernating in the cabinet for a year or more. Took them to my room, charged their batteries, and updated their software. Now they will be available for use when trying out the new equipment later in the week. Geez but I’m good.

Monday 09/25/2023

Took a walk. Went to FOPAL and processed books. Came back and had a meeting with Gerald of IT, to spell out how we want to do training on the updated auditorium equipment. Practiced guitar a bit. Explored ways to find sheet music on the internet.

Forgot to click “publish”

Sunday 09/24/2023

Typical Sunday morning, water the plants, do the puzzle, refill the hummingbird feeder. This is about peak hummer season, they are emptying my one feeder in about 3 hours.

Nothing on the schedule, decided to have Dennis over for lunch if he wanted, and he did. Prior to lunch I drove down to the nursery and bought some fungicide to kill a nasty white stuff on one of my big Dragon Wing begonias. White fluffy thready fungus that in this plant likes to grow on the underside of the leaves. All the internet pictures show it growing on top of leaves. Well, copper fungicide should kill it whatever it is. Yes, I wore a mask and gloves while spraying.

Also bought a pot for a jade plant that is over-achieving. Then to Safeway for some groceries especially a 10-pound bag of sugar for the flock.

Nice lunch with Dennis, Larry — who knew Dennis from way back — and my neighbors Edie and Carolyn.

Quiet afternoon. At various times during the day I did short spells with the guitar. I cn tell my fingertips are getting tougher but there’s a way to go. I remember the chords, though.

Saturday 09/23/2023

Two things today. At 1pm, I drove with two of my neighbors, Florrie and Kandace, to the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts — a very big professional auditorium — to see the Smuin Ballet company. A very impressive display of athleticism and flexibility.

Back home for a couple of hours, then drove with neighbor Doctor Margaret to the Bus Barn Theater in Los Altos — a very small theater — to see Significant Other. This was extremely well done. It’s a sad story about a young gay guy who is left progressively more alone as all his girl chums pair off with husbands, and he can’t find a partner for himself. All of the actors were just right, but the lead was especially well-acted.

Friday 09/22/2023

Went for the standard walk, yay me. At 10 met with Peter to go over the a/v requirements for the five-part, End of Life Planning series that he is producing. A series of workshops on all aspects of end of life, one a week through October. About the third own, they want to show the Netflix documentary Extremis. I thought, cool, I will get screen capture software for my laptop and I will use Peter’s Netflix ID to stream it and suck it up right off the screen.

Then I went down to Jean’s place and had lunch. She is planning a trip to SLC to finalize a lot of genealogical research she’s done over the years. She wants to borrow my old MacBook in order to have her existing database to refer to. Unfortunately that database is managed by Reunion for Mac, a genealogical app that… well I don’t like it. Mostly because it has no way to export its data in readable format. So if she is to see all of her saved notes and documents, she needs to have Reunion itself running on the MacBook. At first it looked like the only route was to buy another copy at $145. But I copied the app from her desktop machine to the MacBook using a memory stick. When launched it demanded a user name and activation code. Fortunately Jean is an experienced computer user and was able to dig that info up from her email archives. And we got it running.

So back to CH for the 3pm monthly meeting of the AV team. We got an update on the auditorium upgrade in process and settled a couple of other issues.

After supper I downloaded a screen recording app from the app store, and signed in to Netflix with Peter’s ID, and started Extremis playing. As soon as I clicked Record, the movie window went black. Stop the recording, the image came back. Netflix knows when you are recording your screen. So that’s that for Plan A. I have a plan B and also C.

Thursday 09/21/2023

Tidied up and watered the plants. Spent ten minutes abusing my fingertips on the guitar. I found the most amazing website, chordbase.com, which has chord sequences for hundreds of song and other useful guitar stuff, including an online tuning meter.

At 9 I had to make a choice: to drive to the East Bay and work at one of the two CHM locations, or not to do that. I opted not to go. I spent time printing three more pictures and putting them out on my hallway gallery. Then at 12 I skipped lunch and went down to FOPAL and did two hours of sorting. As I’ve often said, sorting is very satisfying. I skipped lunch because I knew that at 3pm there was to be the monthly ice cream social here at CH. I came back just in time for that and made myself a large and satisfying sundae.

At 5:30 by arrangement, Edie joined me and we went back down Middlefield (seems like Middlefield is the only street I drive these days) to Mike’s Cafe in Midtown. Nice supper and talk.

Wednesday 09/20/2023

Started the laundry early so as to be able to leave at 11am for various things.

Which included first, a stop at FOPAL. On Monday I had found two very valuable donations, things that were going for several hundred dollars on eBay. One was a copy of the Bell System Technical Journal for July 1978. This was the edition that had several articles describing the UNIX system, the first public announcement of UNIX. I had carefully put these in the High Value box, and emailed Nigel, the High Value manager. Yesterday he went by to pick them up and couldn’t find them. So today I stopped down there and searched the HV boxes and none of the books I’d put in were there. I was perturbed. Emails back and forth. Eventually Nigel found that the eBay sales manager had picked them up and was getting ready to sell them. So whew, and all that, but annoying.

On down to CHM where at 1pm my next-door neighbor Carolyn stopped by with her brother Doug, who is visiting from the East coast. Their father worked for IBM back in the pre-computer days. We walked around the parts of the museum we don’t go to on the tour, then they joined the 2pm tour which I led, and then we all watched the 1401 demo at 3pm.

Back home, I had a nap and then set up a mic for the monthly Birthday Dinner. Then up to the 11th floor to set up for a speaker coming at 7:30. This was Brian Neider who manages what used to be CAR, the support organization for developmentally disabled kids. Now it has merged with other agencies and is called Ability Path.

The auditorium equipment is supposedly being upgraded. I was in there to set up the mic for the birthdays and not much is happening. But anyway, events are now on 11, using the mobile TV/Zoom Room setup. This came off ok, although I think I messed up and it didn’t get recorded. So it goes.