Monday 07/31/2023

Took the standard walk. At 10:30 I met with Peter to discuss A/V requirements for a lecture series he plans for October and November. Then I went to FOPAL. No computer books to process, reasonable since I was just there on Saturday, so I did a bit of sorting.

After supper I picked up a large package from the mail room. A big flat pack about 4 foot by 3 foot by 5 inches. This was the $90 lectern I bought of Amazon. I spent an hour assembling it. Afterward I was disappointed. The whole point of changing out the lectern we have, is that because it doesn’t have locking casters, it wouldn’t support anyone who leaned on it. Well, this $90 piece of … furniture has locking casters. However they are very small, like 2-inch diameter wheels, and hard plastic. So even with the back two casters locked, it slides quite easily. And it tends to tip. If you lean on it from the back it likes to tilt forward. Not a good pulpit for a revival preacher for sure.

So I have wasted $90 plus tax. Of my own money because no way will I ask for reimbursement on this thing we can’t use. At least because it was covered by Amazon Prime the shipping of the 40-pound pack was free.

Oh and I now have the problem of how to dispose of it. I’m thinking put it on the curb (well away from Channing House) with a “free” sign on it.

Sunday 07/30/2023

For fun I walked over to California Avenue. I have no imagination. A bunch of my neighbors went off to see Oppenheimer. A bunch of my neighbors went to a concert in the Music at Menlo summer series. Me? I went for a walk.

Lennie had done some googling and found that my new neighbor, Brian, had a sufficiently big career in computers that the CHM had done an oral history video. They have a large collection of oral histories. Anyway, I listened to his this afternoon. Interesting guy with an impressive resumé.

That reminded me, didn’t I write up a history of my career in tech? LIttle searching finds, yes I did, in 1995 just after I started at SGI. So I started reading that and obviously I had to edit it and bring it up to date. (Not much to add as my professional career finished with SGI.) But that killed another two hours.

Saturday 07/29/2023

A lovely wide-open Saturday. So of course by 8:30 I’m wondering what to do with myself. I call up Dennis and make a lunch date. Then I go to FOPAL and clear up four boxes of computer books and do a little sorting to take me to 11:30. Then off to San Jose to pick up Dennis and have lunch at the Pruneyard. When was I last at the Pruneyard? Why, it was the end of 2019, Day 363 (would be 0.363 by the current scheme) when we saw the movie Ford vs. Ferrari.

Back at CH Patty suggested we take our new neighbor, Brian, who just moved in two doors from me yesterday, to dinner. Which we did, along with Leon and Margaret. Learned a bit about him. Nice guy, he’ll be a good neighbor.

Friday 07/28/2023

Went for the standard walk; all good. Then it was time to join Edie on a shopping trip. I had helped her buy and install a new iMac. Then we learned that her 2010-era HP printer wasn’t supported. The latest driver download you could get for it was for MacOS 10.4, circa 2012 and still 32-bit. The new iMac came with MacOS 13.4, a 64-bit OS. So she needed a new printer. She doesn’t drive so I offered to go on a shopping trip to Office Depot and Best Buy.

There are some insane bargains in printer tech these days. You can get a nice Epson all in one (scanner printer fax) for $65. Unfortunately that one is butt-ugly and also only feeds from the rear tray, so she vetoed that. She picked an HP, it is small and cute and looked like it would work, although I mistrust HP software.

Late in the afternoon we met again to try to install it. The “HP Smart” app will flatly not initialize a printer connected by USB. It must use wifi. And although it could connect to the printer and start the initialization, it couldn’t complete it. Multiple times through the process, it hung on the final step. We’ll have another go at it tomorrow or Sunday.

I ate dinner alone, at a table for one. Not what I usually do; I usually sit at a “Community table”. But I didn’t feel like being sociable.

Thursday 07/27/2023

First thing I drove up to PAMF and had that blood draw taken. Then I found IT manager Gerald and got the word on when the auditorium upgrade would actually start. The rest of the morning was taken up with writing two carefully crafted emails. One, to the AV committee and several others, giving the state of the upgrade and its schedule. Thanking people and just being as pleasantly political as heck. Second a detailed email to Gerald and Tom listing issues related to the upgrade I hope they will address. Also with a positive tone and constructive.

With that out of the way I gave myself the afternoon off.

Wednesday 07/26/2023

Started the laundry early, but still didn’t have it wrapped up by 10am. Which is when I met with our CEO Rhonda, to get clarity on the status of the auditorium upgrade project and its funding. The results were good. I had seen an issue in the source of the funding, the Heritage Circle, given the plan is no longer to do all the things that the grant authorized, but still to spend all the grant money. She didn’t see that as an issue at all, so OK, if she’s good with it, I am too. Next question: I really want the center camera replaced, but that will push the total $12,000 over the granted amount. Would she be willing to pay the overage out of the IT department budget? Yes she would! So we parted on good terms.

After finishing the laundry I walked to PAMF to get some blood drawn, only to find when I got there, that the particular test needed to be taken NPO. It’s the middle of the day of course I am not NPO. So no blood drawn. At least I walked by CVS and picked up three prescriptions.

Tuesday 07/25/2023

Did the gym machines. Worked on my brief presentation to Rhonda. I am scheduled for this rather critical meeting tomorrow at 10.

Then having an hour free before the start of the writer’s meeting, I thought, what could I write? The cue for this week was, “a special gift that you have given or received.” Actually in the middle of the night — my sleep patterns are not that disrupted, this was like 2 minutes of wakefulness around 5am — I had thought about it and concluded that I did not remember any significant gifts I had given or received. That I wanted to tell the writers group about, anyway. Then the phrase “gifts of the holy spirit” popped up. Hmmm.

So at 9:30 I started writing about revival meetings, and how my parents believed in the “Gift of Tongues” and the “Gift of Prophecy”. It came out a bit dark. But at least, at 10:45 when the zoom meeting started, I had something to read.

I took a tech squad call to help Lynn with a couple of Mac questions, nothing difficult. At 4pm it was time for the second of a weekly series presented by our staff, detailing the services offered by CH. This one was about services for the Independent Living tower. They detailed all the things included in your monthly bill, and the things for which you pay extra. For example, Housekeeping takes care of changing and laundering sheets and towels, but if you want something else laundered, that’s a fee. Go to the nurse station on the third floor any time for routine blood pressure or such, but if you need help with eye drops or to put on compression stockings, that’s a fee service. Etc. Security, help with scams, routine wellness checks, etc. There’s a motion sensor in every unit, and if it doesn’t see motion between 5am and 10am, and you haven’t signed out for a vacation, a nurse will come do a wellness check. Quite a long list of included stuff.

Right after the meeting I had to get out the little portable sound system and set it up in the lobby for a sing-along. This was scheduled rather abruptly, it was a “Tony Bennett memorial sing-along”. So nobody on my committee had known about it or was free. It was a nice sing-along anyway.

Monday 07/24/2023

Started for a walk but had stupidly worn my ordinary street shoes instead of my athletic walking shoes. Feet got uncomfortable so I cut the walk short.

Then it was about 9:30 and I realized that I had completely forgotten to go to help with registering campers at Tara’s second basketball camp. I had committed to going, and I had noted it in the calendar last evening. But in the night I had a lengthy spell of obsessing about the auditorium upgrade and what I might say to Rhonda when we meet. Then in the morning i was thinking about that and…

So then I went down to FOPAL as usual on a Monday and found a huge pile of computer books, about 8 boxes, to process. The pricing process took longer than usual because an unusually high percentage of them proved to be “high value”, more than $25. For each of those I have to make out a slip with info and the date. I ended up spending a total of 3 hours there.

In the evening I had dinner with Edie, very comfortable chat.

Sunday 07/23/2023

My main activity today was to shoot Mary. That is, to make a video of my neighbor Mary, who is also our chorus director, singing “Walkin After Midnight”, and make her look good. I’d obsessed about that for a while Saturday night (as noted in 4.233), now it was time to put those obsessively-laid plans to work.

I was in the auditorium setting stuff up about 10am, when of course the actual shoot was scheduled for 1pm. But there were some unknowns, and I was glad to have plenty of time alone with the equipment to work out the kinks.

When Mary and Stew came in at 1, everything went very smoothly. We only shot two takes. The visual quality was excellent. I used my Nikon, taking advantage of its lens and the ability to adjust exposure and so on. I used our stage lights well, I think, and generally made Mary look good.

There was an issue with the sound. Mary sang along with a video of Patsy Cline. Although the audio from that video was loud in the room, in the sound recording I was taking off the sound board into my second Macbook, Mary’s voice was much louder. The two sounded balanced in the room, but not in the recording. I decided that I could “fix it in post” as the movie people say, and we wrapped up.

Back in my room I put my video of Mary, the recorded audio track, and the audio track from the YouTube video, all together in iMovie, and tweaked the levels of the two audio tracks until it sounded like a nice balanced duet. I was pleased with the result and when I mailed it to Mary and the Hoedown planning committee, everybody was pleased.

Let’s see if I can embed that here… no it appears not.

Well, this link will not be good for more than a couple of weeks but here it is. Credit where it’s due, it was Stew who brought the straw hat and talked Mary into wearing it.

Saturday 07/22/2023

Did the gym machine round. Second week of three a week, and I’m already thinking of upping some of the weights.

During the night I had a sleepless spell, obsessing about the details of a video shoot tomorrow. We are going to record Mary singing Patsy Cline’s “Walkin After Midnight” as a duet with an old video of Patsy. It sounds simple but the more I thought about it in the dark at 2am, the more issues I saw. So I sat down and made some notes and I think I have it all figured out.

At 11 I went to the museum and led the 12pm tour. Started with a monster group, 25 or more, ended with 15.

Back home I spent a couple hours making the video of the healthy diet talk from 4.230 and uploaded it.