Saturday 08/15/2026

Took a modest walk in the morning. Then settled down to capturing the remaining Beatles videos off the committee’s want-list. I now have them all, plus a couple of extras, 19 in total. Emailed the committee saying when do you want to meet to review these? Concensus seems to be tomorrow at 10.

Had a long call with Scott, as we tried to figure out why Gmail was misbehaving on his system. I wasn’t much help but we finally stumbled into the fix.

Spent the afternoon reading The Maniac. It’s a biography of Johnny von Neumann, who I mention during my docent tours, but about whom I knew little. This book is getting a lot of praise, and deserves it; it is very readable, but not a conventional biography at all. Instead, each chapter is written as an imagiary first person monologue, in the fictional voice of somebody who knew von Neumann: one of his wives, friends, or colleagues; just rambling on about what they thought about him and what he did.

Also played some guitar (first time in a week), took another walk, took another nap. Now I am going to go down and attend the Saturday night movie, Enchanted April.

Change of plan: the movie is clearly something that Joanne would like, and I would like to watch it with her. I checked and it is on Amazon Prime, so I bailed and will watch it another time with her.

Friday 08/14/2026

First thing, I went down to the gym and did the full workout, all reps, that Kris designed for me. Takes about 45 minutes. Not exhausting.

Then I led the noon tour at the Computer History Museum. About 30 people to start, a big crowd for a weekday.

In the afternoon I chose and downloaded some more Beatles videos. I hope to finish that up tomorrow.

Thursday 08/13/2026

Took a longish (3.5 mile) walk in the morning, just city streets. Then I spent the about 5 hours collecting Beatles videos from different sources. Very boring and frustrating. One problem I should have foreseen: a source I’ve been loaned is a Blu-Ray disc, the Beatles “1” album set. It should be a great source, except for one eentsy hitch. It’s a Blu-Ray disc and I don’t have a Blu-Ray disc reader for my computer. I could play it on my TV, I have a nice Sony Blu-Ray disc player on the TV. But that doesn’t get me a computer file that I can edit and splice and so on.

Good quality Blu-Ray disc drives are about $150 on Amazon but do I want to buy one just for this job?

That’s all the day I feel like talking about.

Wednesday 08/12/2026

Took a standard walk in the morning. After, I went to the gym and worked through two sets of my new workout regime. Not painful.

Then I edited song lyrics into a video of the Beatles “All You Need Is Love”. Three down, 14 to go.

I had lunch with Rich. Rich wants me, as a supposed expert in Silicon Valley history, to assist in an upcoming memorial for a friend of his, who ran a consulting firm in Los Altos where Rich worked for decades. So I grilled him on what the firm did and his part in it.

Exchanged emails with Rob who reminded us all that tonight, 2-4am, is supposed to be the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. I worked out that the radiant would be NNE and 40 degrees up, which happens to be just about — well if I stand on my balcony and point up and to my left, that’s it. So I set up the camera on a tripod and chair. And thought about getting up at 3am to see.

Now I’m looking at the weather forecast and it calls for cloudy skies from midnight on. So maybe not.

Ran an AV event, a talk by people from Arts Los Altos, about public art in our neighboring suburb. Nice talk, and Rob, a relatively new 6th floor neighbor, volunteered himself to shadow me and see how a zoom event is run. Nice. He’s smart and energetic, so yay.

Tuesday 08/11/2026

Today is housekeeping day, and laundry day. Which means starting the laundry then tidying the apartment in advance of the housekeeper coming at noon, then attending the writers meeting, then vacating the apartment while she cleans. So I go to start the laundry and I am down to only one sheet of the ecological detergent sheets that I was persuaded to use, by the Channing House Committee to Reduce Plastic Waste, who last year built a giant sculpture of orange Tide bottles in the lobby and shamed everybody for using big plastic jugs of detergent that don’t recycle, so I use sheets of plant-based detergent, one little square of thick papery stuff per load, and now I only have one sheet.

So I start the first load, then take a fast walk the half mile to Whole Foods to buy more. Back in time to start the second load with a newly-bought sheet of detergent. Then back to work to tidy the apartment, then back to fold the first load and start the second drying. I ended up joining the writers meeting Zoom while I was still hanging my shirts, which got me points from the other members.

After lunch and a nap I saw I had an email from Gigi wondering where the video was, for the book talk of August 3rd. Still sitting in Zoom’s cloud storage, is the answer, because I had forgotten all about it. So that was what I worked on in the afternoon, finishing up after dinner.

Monday 08/10/2026

First thing off to FOPAL. Did the post-sale triage, looking at every book on my shelves, and sending the ones that had been exposed in 3 sales, to the bargain room. And rather aggressively marking down the prices of those that had been up for one sale. Got back in time for lunch.

After lunch I did some more work with automatic titling of music videos. I had complained to one site about how it cut off after the first two lines of a song. They politely pointed out that I missed a setting. I can set the app to look for specifically “English (Sung lyrics)”. When I did that, it worked pretty well, capturing all the lyrics and getting about 90% accuracy on the words.

I had it save the result in an SRT file. Then I opened the video in Davinci Resolve, and imported the SRT file and like magic, my timeline was populated with subtitles. I still had to read them, correct a handful of errors, and split some long titles into two shorter titles. But it was at least somewhat faster than entering the titles manually.

Then I met with our Channing House new Fitness Director, Kris. Kris is a very nice, affable, helpful guy, something of a giant physically, ex-marine but with a great manner dealing with us old folks. This was to get me set with a fitness routine using the machines in our gym, one I can work on my own time. He walked me through a set of exercises and promised to send me an email with pictures and numbers.

Then went out for a mile walk around downtown.

Sunday 08/09/2026

Pretty boring day. Did my usual Sunday morning, although I flubbed the Sunday crossword, didn’t finish.

Explored the automatic creation of SRT files. There are numerous web sites and App Store apps that promise to scan a video, extract the spoken text, and write an SRT file which defines each subtitle with a time code for where it should appear on the screen. The two I tried might work for spoken dialog but they certainly failed at detecting sung lyrics.

Mostly I read and napped. Took like, three naps.

Finally it was 5:30 and time to meet Joanne coming back from her book club, and we headed out as planned to eat at Buck’s in Woodside. Funky place with a museum of random stuff hanging off the ceiling. Next to our table, a display of bronzed baby shoes and some currency from Zimbabwe. That kind of a place. Comfort food, well prepared.

Joanne is off for the great Pacific Northwest tomorrow, so I look forward to a boring week.

Saturday 08/08/2026

Started with a slightly shortened standard walk. Then took a tech squad dispatch again to Susan who had some password problems.

Later I settled down to address this issue of Beatles videos. We will want 15 or so of them. The exact list and order is TBS but I know some numbers that will definitely be included. In the past I have assembled videos for showing at Good Times events by downloading YouTube videos and splicing them up with the iMovie app. But this time the committee definitely wants subtitles, so people can sing along if they don’t remember the lyrics.

And not just subtitles. This year the Channing House movie committee has been showing movies with supertitles, that is, dialog text at the top of the image, not on the bottom margin of the screen. This has been very, very popular, because in our auditorium, if you aren’t in the front 2 rows, peoples’ heads block your view of the bottom of the screen, where the usual closed captions run.

Jerry has worked out a way to move the subtitles to the top of the screen, so this how the Good Times committee wants song lyrics to appear on a music video, top of the screen. Jerry uses the Final Cut Pro app in a fairly complicated way. I don’t want to do that because (a) it’s an Adobe app and I refuse to get into paying Adobe subscription fees, and (b) it’s a complicated app. So I looked around and there is DaVinci Resolve, an equally capable video editing app which has a free version that can do what I want.

So this afternoon I was learning DaVinci Resolve, or at least one little corner of it. I was able to pull a Beatles performance off a DVD, edit it down to just one song, and put the lyrics on the top of the screen. Check it out (that link will not be good more than a week or so).

I entered those title texts manually. But I also learned that subtitles or closed captions can be prepared in a type of text file called an SRT file, with a particular format. There are multiple web sites and apps that claim they can scan a video, convert the dialog to text, and write an SRT file. Which I could then import into DaVinci Resolve and it would generate the actual titles automatically. I need to investigate this further. Whether one of the scanning apps can handle sung lyrics as opposed to speech. But that was the day’s work, anyway.

Friday 08/07/2026

Took a walk with Joanne in the morning. Did a little desk work in the mid day. At 2pm I met with Lou, Stew, and DG to plan the next Good Times show, now 6 weeks off. It will be a Beatles sing-along, with original videos. DG provided from his immense collection of DVDs, discs with original videos, like all four Ed Sullivan appearances. I am tasked with collecting and editing videos for the 15 or so songs that Stew and Lou put in the program, and for adding lyric captions to them. It will take a few hours.

I got a bit of a start on it later, playing some of the DVD from the “Get Back” documentary that ends with the famous Rooftop Concert.

After supper I attended a concert in the auditorium: jazz singer Thu Ho, with a guest star, pianist Aimee Nolte, who is apparently a YouTube phenom. She did play some excellent piano during this.

Thursday 08/06/2026

Walked out to Zoe’s in the morning. On return, called the SJ Mercury customer service line. Spoke to a lady with a distinct Hindi accent about how I was unhappy with their bill (see 7.245 for details). She offered to reduce it to $730 (the price it was the previous quarter) and then to $630 (price of the quarter before) but I refused. Finally we agreed that I would go to Sunday delivery only, with an electronic subscription for the other days, $80 per quarter. This will mean having to change some of my oldest routines, which does not please me, but so it goes.

I spent a lot of the rest of the day with those donated gadgets and finally finished it all off. This was stuff from the turn of the century, for example an Apple Newton that thought the date was 1/4/1994, and an external hard drive from 2002, several still in the original factory packaging, mint condition, never used. Figure out what they are, when they were made, what is the model number; find it on eBay to get an idea what they might bring. It was all time-consuming but I got it done.

That was about the day.