Wednesday 06/21/2023

Went for the usual walk, no problem. At 11 I went over to Stanford to once again help check in campers, this time to Tara’s “elite” (high school age) camp. However I had misunderstood the time requirements. I thought it would be wrapping up by 1pm so I could come back and be not too late to the monthly zoom meeting of FOPAL volunteers.

In fact registration was to start at 1pm, so I begged off and came home. Then at 1pm the FOPAL meeting didn’t start, or at 1:05 or 1:10, and at 1:15 came an email, meeting canceled for “technical difficulties”. Which Frank, another volunteer, opined probably meant, “the person with the password wasn’t available.” So a big nothing day. Well, I got some reading done.

Tuesday 06/20/2023

Got up a little earlier than usual so as to be on the Stanford campus by 7:15, where I assisted with registering campers for Tara’s junior basketball camp. One of 6 fans manning three tables, registering a bunch of grade- and middle-school girls. Nothing much to it. Job done I was back in time for the 10:45 meeting of the writers group. Afterward I did some set-up work for the A/V committee meeting, reserving the auditorium, and persuading IT manager Gerald to come talk to us about the auditorium upgrade. That was about it for the day.

Monday 6/19/2023

Went for the benchmark walk first thing. Felt fine. Foot is back to normal, yay.

At 10:30 it was time for the monthly Event Coordinators meeting, to settle the calendar of events for July. It went fine, no big surprises.

Following lunch I went down to FOPAL and processed 5 boxes of donations. Some interesting things to sell. Hopcroft and Ullman, Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata is a well-known college textbook on computer science, and a first edition of that from 1969 showed up. According to Bookfinder it isn’t valuable, but I think anyone shopping the Computer section at the FOPAL sale will appreciate it. The same box had other textbooks from that period. Besides those, none of which are especially valuable, I turned up half a dozen other books valued over $30 for the “high value” box.

Back home, entered all the events from the draft July calendar in the Google sheet shared by the A/V team, and sent an email suggesting times we can meet. Then it was time for Rhonda’s open meeting, where the CEO talks to the residents. I was going to join it on Zoom, but the IT STAFF running the zoom had screwed up the audio. I could see exactly what they had done wrong, but no way to tell them. So I went down to the physical meeting.

Rhonda’s main concern is a bill in committee at the State Assembly which would raise the minimum wage for “health care workers” to $25/hour. Unfortunately as written, it defines “health care worker” as anyone who works in a facility with skilled nursing. Not just nurses, everybody, dining services, janitorial, housekeeping, every position. Rhonda estimates that if passed as currently written this will increase Channing House costs by $600,000 per year, or a 3-5% increase in our monthly fees. She points out that a lot of elder facilities outside of Silicon Valley and LA, depend on MediCal reimbursement for their payroll and that is set at $19/hour. Without a corresponding increase in MediCal a number of elder facilities would be forced out of business.

She had written a letter to the Assembly members on resident’s behalf, and read it off the screen for us. There was some debate from the floor about whether Channing House could or should claim to be speaking for all residents. Rhonda agreed and said, how about if I change it to “the below-signed residents” and if you agree, you can sign it at the front desk. So after the meeting there was a line of us at the desk, signing the letter.

Sunday 06/18/2023

Usual Sunday morning habitual activities. Then I spent half an hour pitting cherries and sectioning apricots for a nice fruit compote.

Next up, a pending project in the A/V world. We’ve had requests from certain performers to have monitor speakers, speakers on stage pointing at the performer, so they get a direct hit with the sound they are making. We have a couple of powered speakers that could be used this way, but we have lacked the cables to get audio from the sound board to them. Also actually working out how to do it. A week ago I ordered the cables from Amazon. Today I wanted to try it out, so I did. And I wrote up my results in a poop sheet for my A/V team. I’m kind of proud of it and I will stick it at the end.

Lunch today was fairly spectacular, they laid on three entrees, and wine, and a pick your own dessert table. Dinner of course was to be a sack lunch.

At 3:30 it was time to go set up for Pru’s talk in the Sunday@Home series. She talked about her self-published book and the process of self-publishing. My main concern was that my team member Kass was being the zoom host. We worked through my 3 page checklist and everything worked fine. I hope her confidence is up. Next month maybe she can do one alone.

Only ten of us gathered for the sack supper picnic, various people being away. My compote was favorably received. I still have quite a bit of it left, however, to eat on my own.

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Saturday 06/17/2023

My big toe is very nearly back to normal. I took a walk over to the farmers market. Tomorrow will be another picnic supper day, when the dining services crew prepare brown-bag meals to be picked up after lunch, and leave early. On the 6th floor, most people meet in the floor dining room at 5:30 for a group picnic. Last year (I think it was) I prepared a bowl of pitted cherries for one of these occasions. I think I will do the same, since the market is full of delicious looking ripe fruit. I got cherries, apricots, and seedless mandarins. Tomorrow I will do that.

At noon I went up to 11 and set up the sound system for a meeting. The presenter, who turned out to be a professor of engineering, had already connected his laptop to the TV, so I didn’t have to help with that. Love “helping” techy people.

Spent the afternoon preparing the video recording of the drama scenes show. I described this on Wednesday. 40 minute show of a short scenes, extracts from various plays and movies. I had video’d both performances but in the end I only used the evening show. Split out each scene with a little flip-flop video transition between them. It looks ok.

I also made a start at collecting the videos for the C&W event planned for September, now the committee has selected what they promise is the “final” list of numbers. Lots of time to work on that.

Friday 06/16/2023

Today was the big day for the drama crew that rehearsed last Wednesday. Two performances, 10am and 7:30pm. I set them up with microphones and I recorded the video of both performances. So that was a good part of the day.

In the middle, before lunch, I walked over to the Apple store and purchased a Lightning to HDMI adapter. This because we have a request from Mary Ann, who wants to hold a party on the 11th floor, and have her kids show photos from an iPhone on the big TV. The big TV is set up for that. I prepared detailed instructions, although simple, clear, and illustrated with photos, on how to turn the TV on, how to watch Comcast video, Roku video, play DVDs, or connect any device to HDMI input. Only problem, iPhones don’t have HDMI, you need an adapter. It’s a little thing. I tucked it into the pocket in the back of the instruction binder. It has “Please return when done” written both sides of it in indelible sharpie. Wonder how long it will last…

Also, at 3:30, we had a request to set up the portable speaker and microphone on the patio outside the dining room. This was because the 7th floor was conducting the monthly TGIF party in that location. They didn’t have many announcements to make but they needed a mic for the one, which was for John to be surprised by his wife Francis celebrating his 80th birthday. So I rolled the portable speaker out there at 3:30 and rolled it back and put it away at 5.

So a busy day of AV tech, and there’s another event tomorrow and one on Sunday.

Thursday 06/15/2023

I had to call off going to Shustek today because of an AV thing. In theory, all resident run events are scheduled a month in advance. There’s a process, an online form that gets filled out, so the event will be on the monthly calendar, and so the A/V team will know about it and schedule somebody at our month-end meeting to do the tech. So this event, a memorial, excuse me celebration of life, for a recently deceased resident, got scheduled late and owing to some errors (not by me) the notification didn’t get to me until the end of last week. And nobody was available to do it. So I am the AV of last resort, and I canceled going to Shustek to turn on the mics and tv for this 1pm event.

Did the gym round in the morning. My big toe is better, still a bit tender but I can walk without limping. Anyway, got the event going. Then what to do with the rest of the day? I got in the car and went first to the hardware store where I got some CA glue which I needed, and also a new bottle of Tide, ditto. Then to FOPAL where there were three boxes of computer books, out of which nearly a dozen turned out to be “high value” i.e. over $25. So yay.

The CA glue? Silly thing. Way back in 2020 when we were all eating in our rooms, Dining Services (then Sodexo) offered everybody their own salt and pepper shakers. Plastic ones. I kept mine on my dining table and over the 2+ years since, it has gotten nearly empty. So I thought I would replace it. A couple days ago I went by the grocery store and in the spice area they had little salt&pepper sets, made of cardboard, $4.69. But down below, they had 16-oz Morton’s salt containers, $2.40. Well, hell, thinks I, I will get a lifetime supply and be able to refill my plastic shaker 30, 40 times for half the price of one.

Got home and went to pry the bottom off the plastic shaker and, oh dear. It didn’t snap in or screw in; it was glued in. The plastic shaker was never meant to be refilled. Well ok I will refill it and glue it back. So I put masking tape over the holes in the top, and fill it up, and try to glue in the base using model car glue. Nope, it wouldn’t hold on this kind of plastic. Only answer obvs. was CA (“super”) glue. So I got that today and completed the repair. Ready for another couple years of eating in my room.

Wednesday 06/14/2023

First thing I got the laundry going. My left foot was still too painful for a long walk. The rest of the day was mostly A/V tech in various forms. First off, I updated and modified my checklist for running a hybrid zoom event, and sent a copy to Kass who is going to assist me — she doesn’t know it but she’s going to run it with my assistance, heh heh — running the Sunday @ Home this coming Sunday. And scheduled that in the zoom room software.

In scheduling it I found the recording files of a speaker from last week, and that needed to be taken care of. By which I mean, the 5GB of recordings have to be downloaded and deleted from the Zoom cloud storage, so that it won’t interrupt us in the middle of an event and say, sorry, your cloud quota is full, I’m stopping the recording. Like it did once.

But then with the files downloaded it needs to be put together into a video. There are two files, one of the camera on the speaker, and the second file just her slides, of which she had a lot. I put these two together in iMovie, and edit it so it shows each slide briefly when she mentions it, and then goes back to the speaker until the next slide. It’s not difficult but a little tedious. I had that about half done at 12 when it was time to go set up for the next thing.

That was the Channing House Players dress rehearsal. About 8 of my neighbors have been taking weekly classes from Sinjin Jones, who is the artistic director of the Pear Theater. They have worked up a series of short scenes, a program of about 35 minutes in all, to be presented twice this Friday. This was the first time they would rehearse with mics on. Our nice little over-the-ear personal mics. Also I wanted to practice recording the performance. So that all took about 2 hours.

Then I went back to my room and finished editing the speaker video and sent it off to Lenny to upload to Vimeo.

At 5 we had our monthly floor meeting. No exciting news there. And all went to dinner together.

Tuesday 06/13/2023

Did the gym round in the morning. At 10:45 we had the usual writers meeting. The cue this time was, if you had your life to live over. I had nothing to say. Others did, quite heartfelt and poignant recollections, like, wouldn’t have married that guy. So it goes.

My left big toe is still gouty. I tried to go for a walk in the afternoon but had to turn back after four blocks; too painful and too slow.

I took a tech squad call, to a guy whose grasp on things is maybe getting a little shaky? He clicked on something he shouldn’t have, and got infected with something that makes these little pop-up ads keep appearing at random times offering penis enlargers or offers to repair his mac. I looked at it a couple weeks ago and didn’t fix anything. This time I had done some research on malware scanners for Macs. Afterward I wrote up the tech report:

“A very successful session. Main achievement was, I downloaded the Bitdefender free malware scanner from the app store and ran it. The scan took 30 minutes and deleted a couple dozen items. I think probably his little pop-up porn ads are now gone. We will see.

“He had dug up an old iPhone 6 from a drawer and wanted to verify it worked. It does work, he dialed his house phone and it rang. We played some residual voice mails, two were robocalls but one was from someone he knew.

“He had a number of texts piled up, and we practiced deleting them. I think it very likely that he won’t remember how to do any of this stuff tomorrow, but at least he will likely remember that there does exist some way to read and delete texts and voicemails.

“He was curious about QR codes, especially how they are used as tickets. Apparently someone took him to a ball game lately and showed a QR code on the phone as their ticket. I said, yes, I did exactly that to attend the Stanford game yesterday. So how do you get them? That led to a discussion of the Apple Wallet app. Then we put his main credit card into his Apple Wallet and talked about how he could now pay for a latte at Peets with the phone.

“That led to me asking, wait, it will ask for touch id, does it know your fingerprint? So we verified that his finger does work to unlock the phone. At some time in the past he had trained that phone to his fingerprint.

“He asked which of the many little app icons on the phone I use, and I mentioned Lyft. Then he wanted to get Lyft working. So I used his iMac to go to Lyft.com (the virus scanner was still plugging away) and it asks for your phone#. When I put in the number of his iPhone, it said, “Is that you, Joseph?” So he has had a Lyft account for some time. Which he didn’t remember getting.

“Then Lyft asks for his email. It doesn’t recognize his current email. I ask, did you ever have a different email. Yes, years ago. I put in that years-ago email and bingo, now Lyft knows him. So I edit his Lyft account to show his current email, and his current credit card number.

“So in principle he is set up to use Lyft. I would not expect him to be able to actually use the Lyft app without guidance, but the mechanism is there.”

Such is tech squad life.

Monday 06/12/2023

Have a bit of gout in my left big toe, limping all day. At 9am it was time for the Resident Association meeting. David G did his usual good job of running a hybrid zoom meeting. There were maybe 60 people in the auditorium, and he reported, 40 on zoom. In the open discussion period, David G vented about how so many people like to watch on zoom “in their jammies” instead of coming to the real meeting. This provoked quite a bit of discussion on email later in the day.

Drove down to FOPAL and did the usual post-sale triage, sending all the books in my section that had survived four sale days, to the bargain room.

Hacked a little at the novel. Geez, fiction is hard. I remember when I discovered that for the first time, about 1985, when I spent a year trying to be a professional fiction writer. As various people have said in various words, writing is easy, you just sit down at a keyboard and open a vein.