Monday 04/11/2022

Couldn’t go for a walk because there was a Resident Association meeting at 9am and I’m too lazy to get started walking early enough to be back by 9am. The meeting was informative but no bombshells. I was relieved to see CEO Rhonda taking the staff question time; she’s been invisible around here for a couple of weeks and I start to worry, is she on the way out? But apparently not. One of the things she talked about was the difficulty of recruiting new staff to fill in the many resignations we’ve had lately.

After a quick bite I went down to FOPAL for the post-sale processing day. First, count all the books, and report the pre- and post-sale counts. My section moved about 60 books, about 15% of the total stock.

Next, triage. Look at every one of the 350-odd books still on the shelves and decide whether to leave them as is, or reduce the price written in the flyleaf, or to give up on the book and send it to the bargain room. I sent 3 boxes to the bargain room, books that had been on the shelf for at least 3 sale days and been price-reduced to $2.

Finally, process the single box of new donations waiting, pricing and shelving about 10 books.

Back home in time for a nap before the 4:45 Sixth Floor Meeting. Just about all the 6th floor people showed up. We congratulated ourselves on being the best floor in the building, which I think is true, a really nice bunch of people and no duds. Went over a few business items and then all went down to dinner together.

Oh, yesterday’s drip-drip runny nose? All dried up again. So did I have a one-day rhinovirus? Or was there one day of especially heavy pollen, and today’s morning sprinkles washed it all down?

Sunday 04/10/2022

I am not usually affected by pollen, but yesterday and today my nose has just… well if my legs could run as well as my nose, I’d be Usain Bolt. Ruined a lot of kleenex.

At 9am I drove down to FOPAL to tidy up my section, as usual for the Sunday of a sale weekend. People get books from other sections and leave them on my shelves. Why?

On return I brought up from the car, a box of ancient computer manuals. These were books that I didn’t think would sell in my section, and also didn’t fit what I think of as the demographic of the Vintage Computer Fest. And although I think they should be valuable, they are so rare that you can’t find any comparables at Bookfinder.com, so our high value section won’t take them. Which leaves only trying to sell them myself, on EBay.

This box was dropped off at my section with a note from someone named Nancy, and I’m not sure which Nancy it was. And I’ve been dithering over it for weeks. Well today at least I inventoried it. There’s one from 1991, one from 1980, and all the rest are 1970 or earlier. Control Data FORTRAN Reference Manual from 1964 is the earliest. Bunch of IBM manuals from the mid-1960s.

Later on, I took my M1 Macbook Pro to the auditorium and again tried to connect it to the hardware there. And again failed. Well, improved it. From the projector screen going black after two seconds, now I have the image remaining but flickering every 1-2 seconds. Blinkety blink. This is actually progress, because I find quite a few complaints online about M1 Macbooks making external monitors flicker. So I can hope Apple will fix this someday.

Meantime, the way IT has set up the hardware, I can’t use any of my Macs to do a hybrid zoom.

Saturday 04/09/2022

First thing I drove to Sunnyvale to check out the electronics flea market run by a local ham radio organization. The point was, was it a place where FOPAL could sell books? I wrote a note to interested parties after, about the small amount of book selling I saw. Turns out, Allen, a volunteer at FOPAL and also at CHM, was planning to sell some books there himself, but by the time he arrived at 6am, they had already sold all the vendor slots and he couldn’t get in.

From there I went to a Safeway and bought a few groceries, then came home but parked on the street as I meant to go out again. Took a break for lunch then drove over to the Stanford campus for “cardinalpalooza”, a day when several sports were happening and tickets were free. I watched men’s tennis for a while, the first time I’d been in the tennis arena. Then I wandered through the “family-friendly” stuff on the plaza, and to the baseball stadium where I watched part of a game.

That was about it for the day.

Friday 04/08/2022

Went for a walk. Then fiddled around tidying up the taxes. Printed my estimated tax vouchers, and made an addressed stamped envelope for each of the four. Wrote the check for the April one. Put the folder of 2021 tax documents away in the box with the last decade’s folders.

At 2:30 I joined David M in the auditorium where he was experimenting with the setup for a Sunday event. There is a new piece of equipment: the IT staff have added a powered dock that integrates the sound and video. All he has to do is plug in one USB-C and his PC sees two alternative screens. So now you have a three-monitor setup, your laptop’s screen is one; a separate monitor is one; and the projection screen is your third. This makes it possible to manage a Zoom host screen on the laptop, prepare visuals on the monitor, and then slide a selected visual onto the projector screen. Nice and quite a bit simpler than before.

Except when I tried it with my new Macbook Pro, it didn’t work. The same problem I ran into before, the Mac sees the other screens, but after a few seconds, the projector screen goes black. Later in the day I installed an OS update. Tomorrow I will try again; maybe the updated OS (or just the reboot) will have made a difference.

Much emailing back and forth on the issue of whether we should have a resident Vimeo account. Decided not to discuss it at the RA meeting on Monday.

Thursday 04/07/2022

Notice please that on 3.122, one-third of the year was behind us. Just sayin.

Today I went out for a bit of a walk and to deposit a check at the bank. Then I buckled down to a bunch of work. Primarily, creating a new residents-owned Zoom account and passing the information on how to log into it, to the people who will be using it. In the course of this, came my tax filing info from the accountants, so I was saving files in logical places, and doing e-signing of documents and so on. There is still some dumb clerical work for me to do which I put off to tomorrow.

I went out to meet Scott and Tom for lunch at Pro Bono. Unfortunately, Tom didn’t show. I was complaining to Scott that all the complicated stuff I was doing felt like being stuck in a first-line manager job. I really got to work clear of the decision-making processes around here. I want to be busy, but with the kind of practical work I enjoy: sorting books at FOPAL, documenting new acquisitions at CHM. Not trying to get people’s opinions sorted out and making decisions and writing endless emails.

Among the emails was another bombshell from staff: would the residents like to have their own Vimeo account on the same basis as the Zoom account? That is, that they’d reimburse us for the first year if we could commit to funding it from then on. More decisions: who would pay, who would manage the account and upload shit to it? More emails to compose and send to a different set of people.

Wednesday 04/06/2022

Today I had organized an outing for four of us: me, sister in law Jean, and 6th floor neighbors Patty and Carolyn. I was going to drive us in the Prius, but since Carolyn has a new Chevy Bolt, we took that. I drove part of the way, my first experience driving and all electric car. The Bolt is nice, a small somewhat hard-riding little sedan. Or I guess, mini-SUV or hatchback. Anyway it was fully charged when we started, showing 260 miles of range, and still had over 50 left on return.

Where we went was to Point Reyes National Seashore, in northern Marin County. The original plan was to go for a walk on some trail near the visitor center, then find lunch and return. However we got a bit lost — how do you get lost in this day and age? The car didn’t have GPS so we were using phones, and around Bolinas there was no phone service. So we took one wrong turn. Anyway by the time we got to Point Reyes there were enough hungry people that we went for lunch first. Then we found that all the restaurants and delis in Point Reyes were closed on Wednesdays, so we ended up getting our walkies going up and down the one main street. Finally found the bakery was selling pizza and calzones.

Then back to the very nice visitor center, and two of us, me and Patty, went for a walk on their shortest loop trail. Jean poked around in her usual fashion finding weeds and Carolyn chilled in the center. Then back home.

Tomorrow I have a lunch date with Scott and Tom, and a list of things to accomplish in the morning.

Tuesday 04/05/2022

I haven’t done any work at Zooniverse for a while so this morning I did an hour of that. At 10:45 was the writers meeting. I had no contribution but there were several striking essays by my neighbors on the theme, “out of the blue”.

In the afternoon I worked with Joanne on passing the Treasurer info. We are both highly annoyed with our supposed personal banker at Wells Fargo who appears to have gone completely silent. I tried to call him but the number on his card seems to be a general number for that branch. Nobody picked up and the call went to a message, “None of the bankers at this branch can help you at this time” and suggesting to call the general WF customer service number. Don’t. It leads to menu-tree hell and when I got through to a live person, they were “in the call center” (where?) and had no idea how to reach anyone. We just have to get away from that bank.

I am further annoyed with Joanne’s laptop, although I didn’t say so to her. I had made a nice spreadsheet, a cash journal, and it had three “sheets”, for the transactions in each of three calendar years. This was in Numbers, the MacOS app. Joanne of course has a quite old HP laptop running I don’t know what version of Windows. What I know is, the exported version of the workbook shows only the first of three sheets and we could not find how to make it display the other two, assuming they had even survived through the export process. I personally think that she is running a very old and flaky version of Excel but that’s not my problem. She requests that I print the three pages. Ohhhh-kaaaay, fine.

Monday 04/04/2022

Final results from the crossword puzzle tournament were posted and I came in 180th out of 283 participants, or about 63rd of 100. So back of the middle of the pack, slightly better than last year. I did very well on the 7th puzzle which helped to recover from the disastrous fifth puzzle, which I turned in with more than half the letters blank.

Went for a walk in the morning. Then got the car washed and bought some groceries to restock my refrigerator. Lazed away the afternoon like a couch potato. Going to bed early. I just can’t find a balance between feeling stressed and overcommitted, and being bored having nothing to do.

Sunday 04/03/2022

In the morning I did the big NYT puzzle first to warm up my brain. Then I did the 7th and last puzzle from the Tournament. This one I just buzzed through in what should be a good time. In the current standings I’m at #203 or 250 or so. Similar back-of-the-pack to last year.

Then it was off to the Computer History Museum to lead a docent tour. Big crowd, at least 30 people at the start, and still over 20 at the end.

Later in the day I worked with Joanne, the incoming Treasurer, to transfer the checkbook and file of papers to her. I have been using a nice spreadsheet as my cash journal. Unfortunately it is in Numbers, the Mac OS spreadsheet, and she uses an old HP laptop running Windows. So I had Numbers export the file to supposedly compatible .xls format. Unfortunately, her version of Excel won’t open it, claims it is incompatible or something.

I sent the converted .xls to Peter who has Excel on his Macbook. He was able to open it fine. So I had him do a save-as to make a new .xls file written by a version of Excel. And sent that to Joanne to try. Maybe an Excel file written by Excel will be acceptable.

Saturday 04/02/2022

Today I had blocked out the whole morning for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. I’d paid $70 a month ago, for the right to participate virtually. There was supposed to be a live stream from the real tournament site in Connecticut starting at 8am, but in fact they had some kind of technical difficulties and didn’t. The puzzles were released on schedule though, about one per hour. I was disappointed with the general amateurishness of it and decided to let the puzzles just accumulate — when I read the rules I realized there was no benefit for doing them as they were released; you basically have until Monday night to finish them.

So what to do with this block of time? I realized that this is the week before a FOPAL sale weekend. Ordinarily I would go prepare my section and take my pre-sale count on Monday, but why not today? So I did.

In the afternoon I sat down and did all six of the tournament puzzles. I ripped through five of them in good time, finished well within the allotted time and with no, or few, errors. One puzzle, #5, was an absolute demon, I couldn’t make any headway with it. I finally gave up and submitted what I had, which was pathetic. It was mostly blank squares. I got only 22 of the 100+ words in it. Anyway, sometime Monday they will post the results. Last year I was #743 of about 1200 online entrants.

Started planning a day-trip for flowers with Jean and Patty.