Tuesday 04/11/2023

Did the round of gym machines. Then killed time until time for the writers meeting. I had not written anything this time, so I just applauded my fellow writers.

At 4pm I went up to 11 to check on the AV setup for the Passover dinner. But Rich had gotten there early and set up everything as we had planned last Saturday morning. The setup for this dinner was impressive, tables with seating for about 50 people it looked like, all white table cloths and bud vases and such, and a catering line. Way to go, people.

Way back when they used to do a monthly dinner service on 11, the “Webster Street Grille” it was called; you had to reserve and pay extra. Be nice to bring that back. Currently they are trying to keep the budget down, so probably not right away.

Anyway, that was that for the day. Caught up on some of my DVR’d tv shows.

Monday 04/10/2023

Well, productive half-day, and half of day of slacking off.

First thing was the monthly Resident Association meeting. I went down early and consulted with David G over some tech issues. He didn’t really have any problems.

Lennie as the newly elected President of the RA, led a brisk meeting. A good time was had by all, by which I mean, there were no arguments and we were out by 10.

Next task was to deal with a tech squad call for Mrs. Gee in assisted living. I’d helped her with her iMac a week or so ago, and she had another problem. When I got there she was able to tell me she had diagnosed the problem herself! It was that her iMac is plugged into a wall outlet which is switched off a light switch by the door. As long as the switch is on, no problem. If it’s off, the iMac is dead. I verified this. Good diagnosing, Mrs. Gee! I stuck my head under her computer desk but couldn’t see any other outlets. It was kind of crowded in there. So I explained the issue to one of the nurses and suggested that she get somebody from facilities to find a better outlet for the computer. For all I know, maybe only the top socket in the dual-socket outlet is switched. Let facilities work it out.

From there I drove to FOPAL and did the post-sale triage of my shelves, sending all the books that had survived four sale days, to the bargain room. Three-plus boxes of them. Then to my surprise there were no incoming computer books to price so I did an hour of sorting, always satisfying.

Chilled the rest of the day. Started to read the monumental history of Watergate that I brought home from Dennis’s book pile. Oh my what a dreary time that was. Haldeman — Erlichman — Kissinger — Deep Throat…

Sunday 04/09/2023

So, funny thing. Yesterday Dennis called to say that he was having quite a bit of the family for dinner, Ted, Josh, Denise, Jeffrey etc, and I was invited. And — mind you this actually happened — I said, “Sounds good. What’s the occasion?”

Slight pause and he says, “…Easter?”

Oh. Right! Easter. I’ve heard of that.

Anyway, on Friday I had put in my order for a sack supper. Channing house as they do for all major holidays, was sending the Dining Services crew home right after lunch, and if you wanted to eat Sunday evening you put in your order for a picnic bag. To be picked up before 3pm. So at 2:30 I head out, stopping to pick up my picnic sack, which eventually made it to my refrigerator to serve as lunch tomorrow. Or some time.

Off to San Jose. Been a while since I was down to Dennis’s. So it was a nice afternoon chatting with the relatives. Good supper. Admire the cute toddler and the cute young girls looking for easter eggs. And all the adults seem reasonably healthy and content. Life goes on.

04/08/2023

Well, not all day. At 9:30 met with Kass, Oscar, and Rich and Bert on the 11th floor to work out what mic support they needed for the Passover Supper they are running on Tuesday night. In the course of which one of the wireless handheld mics died. Anyway, worked all that out.

At 1:30 I met with Chuck in the auditorium to help him show his monthly opera. I again printed out a detailed checklist of things to do. I have had the hope the hope that with a little supervision, eventually he would be able to do this quite simple setup alone. But this is the third time we’ve walked through it in detail, and he just isn’t picking it up. It’s like it’s all new to him, well not quite but kinda. So that’s going to be a monthly task.

The opera he had brought this time was La Bohême, a 1977 DVD with Pavoratti. As with the previous operas, I did not stay, but went away after it was safely begun, and came back 90 minutes later to supervise the shutdown. I noticed that this DVD was clearly made for a standard def frame, but our Blu-Ray player had ignored that and was showing it in 16:9. I was thinking, I know Pavoratti is a hefty guy but was he that big in 77? Hey, everybody else is built like a munchkin, too. Oh, it’s a stretched standard-def picture. But none of the audience seemed to care. I guess it’s all about the music. Oh, spoiler, she dies.

I decided to treat myself to an outside supper. Went down to Indochine looking for red curry duck, but at 5pm they weren’t open yet, so continued on South to Armadillo Willy’s for a plate of pulled pork.

Friday 04/07/2023

Took a short walk. Felt generally down. Spent the day alternately reading, napping, and working on the model. It is nearly complete. Here’s the interior.

Funny thing, all that detail is mostly invisible once the car is complete. You can only peek in the side windows. What’s left is to assemble the wheels and tires, put the chassis into the body, and attach the bumpers and taillights.

04/06/2023

Off to the Shustek center in Milpitas for another day of archiving Sandy Fraser’s papers like I did 3 weeks ago (see 4.105). I worked through boxes 9 to 13 (of 49).

Here’s something I found interesting. Jon Bentley, a famous computer scientist (I used to own a couple books of his), was working at Bell Labs apparently, when Fraser was managing it. And he has made a copy of a couple pages of a book by Dijkstra, another famous computer scientist, because it had a mention of Sandy Fraser. So here’s a personal note from Bently to his boss, in 1983.

OK, moving on. Yesterday I did some work on the stingray, putting metal foil on some interior bits. This morning I was tidying the apartment and I noticed the morning sun was shining on my bits of model, so I took a picture..

Also early this week the County of Santa Clara announced new Covid rules including a change that meant, for the first time in three years, our staff at Channing House no longer have to wear masks. To celebrate, Rhonda and others set up a very fancy “ceremonial burning of the masks” display in the lobby. They made up poster boards with pictures from the last three years of Covid restrictions. Remember 2020? When everyone was eating in our rooms, and resident volunteers were delivering the meals?

Wednesday 04/05/2023

Went for a shorter walk while the first load of laundry was running. This was other than laundry, that rarity a completely uncommitted day. I ended up having to think about A/V issues several times. And spent time on the 11th floor trying to make the microphones work up there. On Saturday I meet with the people planning a Passover dinner next Tuesday, to show them the microphones we have.

Recently we lost a neighbor, Lily Loh. This was quite sudden and unexpected, unlike the usual “moves quietly to the Lee center and months later you hear they passed” kind of exit; Lily was a character, busy with various committees and with a loud giggle that you could hear across the dining room. Anyway, her sister, who also lives here, called me up. She is working with a staff person, Caroline, to set up a fancy memorial for Lily. And staff person Caroline had told her to “call Mr. Cortesi to set up the AV”.

This is a precedent I do not want to set. I liked Lily and have no problem with a memorial for her. But they are planning a catered luncheon in the auditorium, with a powerpoint slideshow AND they want zoom so that the relatives in Brazil and in Hong Kong can also attend. No pressure. Oh, and it’s on a Saturday. That, I assume, is why Caroline sent her to me.

Prior resident memorials, the AV has been run by the staff. It isn’t that we couldn’t do it, it’s the assumption by staff that we would do it that bugs me. I’m not sure what to do about this. When I called her, Caroline said if we can’t do it, they could make arrangements for a staff IT person to work the weekend day, but they’d need to know soon.

This is a tough decision for me. Do I want to say we can’t? Because obviously we can. I personally could run the system, or so could David M. or David G. or John M. I consulted with Lennie, who is the new Resident Association president, and her suggestion was to talk to Jaisie, the staff person to whom the IT guys report. Jaisie, it turns out, isn’t in this week.

Anyway, about 2pm I got a call, my Macbook is back to the Apple store, so I went over and got it. They replaced both the display itself, and the sensor that knows when the lid opens. I bet it was the latter, but probably they have to tear it down and remove the display to get at the sensor, so they replaced the display just for drill. I don’t care as it was covered — they said under AppleCare, but I don’t recall paying for AppleCare. Whatever, it was zero dollars to me, nominally $795.

At 7:30 I went down for a talk from a guy who told us about the possibilities of carbon capture and sequestration for fighting climate change. I was unimpressed. The piddling efforts so far are — look, every day enough permafrost melts to release enough CO2 and Methane to negate all the carbon capture that has ever been done.

Tuesday 04/04/2023

Did the gym round of machines first thing. Then took care of some pending business. One was to re-do a diagram I had made of the stage lights in the auditorium. Bert complained (rightly) that it was hard to read, and while fixing that, I noticed it lacked one entire set of lights. So I redid that and taped the new version on the a/v desk. Then I sent some docent stuff to Scott. And finally I wrote a brief thing for the writers group. Which took place at 10:45 as usual.

At last, off to FOPAL. Again I tried the Palo Alto Link, aka homebrew Uber. The ride came fairly promptly. This time instead of giving a destination of Cubberly Community Center, which last time had ended up somewhere random in the boonies, I put in a specific address, 4000 Middlefield Road.

So the driver picked up another rider, which was fine, but then he was going down Middlefield at 35 or so, right past the Cubberly Center with no sign of slowing. I spoke up and said, this is where I’m going, let me out. He seemed surprised. I said, I put in this address, 4000 Middlefield, and he said, “Oh, we don’t go to addresses, it’s not like Uber.” I was upset so I got out of the car without asking the key question, “Then where were you going to drop me?” I didn’t think of that until the car had gone. So I really don’t know where it was going to take me. Not to 4000 Middlefield, for sure.

I spent 2:30 going through the remaining boxes of donations and tidying my section for the sale weekend. Then I pulled up the P.A. Link app to go home. The best it could offer me was “pickup in 24 minutes”. That’s odd, given if you stay under the speed limit you can cross Palo Alto a couple of times in 24 minutes. So I called a Lyft. For the second day in a row the Lyft driver was marginal. The guy picked me up in the Charleston shopping center. To get to me he came in a clearly one-way-in driveway. Then to get back to the street he turned to go out that obviously one-way-in driveway. He ended up facing cars turning in, and had no choice but to turn right to get out of the way, which left him headed away from his destination. By the time his GPS had figured it out, it ended up sending him around up San Antonio and Alma, a couple miles extra. What a maroon. Mind you, I just read a book on my phone, I didn’t tell him my opinion. But I didn’t tip, either.

Evening, reading the different forums I do, there was an item about a new, AI-enabled word processor (see type.ai) Have an AI help you write. I tried it. It’s very impressive. I pasted in two paragraphs of what I wrote for the writers meeting this morning, and clicked the “free write” command. It proceeded to add four paragraphs that extended my story in very reasonable ways, picking up inferences from what I’d said and expanding them. It didn’t sound like me, and it didn’t go in a direction that I would have taken it, but what it added was grammatical, readable, and responsive to what I had put in. This shit is scary.

Monday 04/03/2023

Went for the standard walk, all ok. Soon after it was time to set up for an event. This was a “first Monday book talk”, a series of talks featuring Channing House, or maybe just local, published authors to talk about their books. The speaker was Peter, talking about the story of his early years growing up in Budapest under first the Nazis and then the Soviets (Painted Pebbles).

Gigi, who is now producing this series, had agreed that it would continue to be, as it has always been for nearly a decade, an auditorium event, no Zoom. (Well, in early 2020 at the start of the pandemic, it was zoom-only.) So I was looking forward to an easy setup, just a couple of mics and put Peter’s slides on the projector. But there had been strong requests from certain people that they were shut-ins and wanted to see it, so at least do a recording. So I had to set up to record it as well, video and sound.

And it all came off very well indeed. Or so I thought, until later in the day I went to transfer the .mov file to where Lennie could upload it to Vimeo and publicize it. Then I discovered that the one-hour recording massed sixty gigabytes. What? A gig a minute for a 1080p video? That’s about 500 times more data than I’d expect. Then I discovered that the Mac Finder has an “encoding” function. So I “encoded” the video and the result was a more reasonable 4.5GB file. I don’t understand but that’s ok.

Anyway after lunch, off to FOPAL. For this 3-mile run down Middlefield, I thought I would try the brand new Palo Alto local transport service, Palo Alto Link. It’s basically a copy of Lyft, run by the City, and operating only within the Palo Alto city limits. I installed the app and summoned a ride, which came very quickly. But then it started to go wrong. First off, I discovered that it wasn’t a simple ride but a ride-share deal where the driver gets directed to pick up other people and drop them off, on the way to your destination. And it went quite far out of what should have been my route to pick someone up. Then the driver, following his app’s directions, headed out into the boonies of Palo Alto, west of San Antonio road, and said “here we are.” But I am quite sure I put in the correct destination. It just invented a completely random other destination. He was very apologetic and drove me to the mile and a half to the right place.

At FOPAL I found ten boxes, so I spent a couple hours processing half of them. I’ll go back tomorrow. Then it was time to summon another Link to go home. But the app gave me an error message and kept saying, so sorry, please retry. So I called a Lyft instead, $13 instead of free. Plus, that driver was completely unfamiliar with Palo Alto and as far as I could tell, the rules of the road. So not a great experience. Nothing daunted, I’ll give Link one more try tomorrow, although at the planned price of $1 for a senior ride, for that run is only just cheaper than using my own car.

This was Mixer Monday, when at dinner you take a random table number from a hat when you go into the dining room, and I ended up with a very congenial random group. One of whom is a Texan with relatives still in Austin, and may be able to hook me up with a place to stay for the 2024 eclipse. More on that another time.

Sunday 04/02/2023

At 10 I met with Susan in the auditorium. She has made a powerpoint for her book took (next month) and was unsure how it would look projected on the big screen. I demonstrated how easy it was to share her laptop’s screen onto the projected screen using Zoom Room. Which is fine for auditorium-only, as book talks are.

At 1:30 I drove down to the museum to lead a private tour, 7 guys from SAP. Also Scott joined me to observe. The tour went OK, but I think I need to do better at “reading the room” i.e. judging what a small group like this one wants, and adjusting on the fly. My canned patter is ok for large miscellaneous groups but I think I bored these guys with some of the more obvious stuff.

Worked on the model a bit, and read some cheap science fiction. So life goes.