Sunday 11/24/2024

Usual Sunday morning things. When watering the plants I found another infestation of whitefly.

Hate them little buggers. I spray them with “neem oil”, a sorta organic bug spray, and today I found my sprayer was nearly empty. So I headed out to the nursery to buy a bottle of it. Then to Ace hardware to buy some real poison, Sevin. That’s for another plant, my daphne, which got badly damaged by some kind of insect, not the white fly, but has a lot of new growth leaves starting and actually a few blossoms, yay. So I sprayed it good with the Sevin in hopes its new leaves can actually make it to size.

Then I went to the Apple store and bought a pair of Airpod Pro earbuds. I’ve been wanting these because, one, my old regular Airpods fall out of my ears, which is awkward when out on a walk. The Pro type have squishy fitted rubber tips so should stay in. Two, they have active noise cancellation which seems very effective. Three, these are the ones that Apple has released a hearing test for. So later in the afternoon I put on the new buds and ran the hearing test. And yay, Apple says I do not have significant hearing loss. My ears roll off pretty hard above 6Khz, yes, so I’m definitely missing out on the highs, but not enough to be missing conversations.

From there I drove down to San Jose to a big lighting store, Lamps Plus, and walked the aisles looking for a good bedside lamp. No luck. I’ve been trying to find one ever since my old one died a few weeks (months?) ago.

That was about it. Little music practice. Little reading.

Saturday 11/23/2024

In the morning I completed the light edit of Pelajis and got the format properly laid out in the Kindle Create app. I need to find some art work for at least the cover, but otherwise it is ready to be uploaded to Kindle. Sent a copy to Prue, our one published author of middle-grade books, for her opinion.

Then down to CHM to lead the 2pm tour. This went exceptionally well. I started with about 25 people and I managed to keep them all with me for the full hour, ending up with a very nice round of applause at the end.

Tried to practice singing RATCT and my voice had gone away somewhere. I guess an hour of lecturing did that? I don’t know; anyway I couldn’t sing worth, as someone I used to know long ago—John Snow?—would say, not worth sour owl shit. Why owl shit, I dunno.

Friday 11/22/2024

Took the usual walk. The weather people claimed the “atmospheric river” that has brought multiple inches to the north bay was finally coming to the south bay, but I could tell from the radar map at 8am, there would be no rain on us for at least a couple of hours. So my walk was nice and dry. The rain finally did arrive after lunch. On the walk I saw a spectacular tree.

At 11 I met with Alice and we practiced singing RATCT, getting to sound pretty decent.

Then I sat down to do some work on a project that dates back to July, 2021 (day 2.214 and prior). That was when I “published” my children’s (actually middle-grade if you want to be technical) SF novel, Pelajis, on the then-new Kindle Vella platform. Where it sat with nobody reading it for 3+ years. Recently Amazon announced they were taking Kindle Vella down. They advised all authors that they could download their work and were welcome to re-publish it as a Kindle ebook. So I started that process today. Downloaded the book, imported it into the Amazon proprietary Kindle Create app, and began a light editing pass. It’s a darn good little story if I do say so. Anyway I need to finish editing it, also find something to use for cover art and maybe a couple of interior illustrations. The whole Generative AI thing has happened since then! I will try using Midjourney or maybe Gemini to generate art for it.

I saw where SFJazz was streaming a concert by Jake Shimabukuro tonight. Whoopee I thought, he’s great, and I announced on CHBB I would put it on the 11th floor TV. Only a few people turned up, which was a good thing, as Jake was not up to the level of virtuosity I remembered. The first half of the show was pretty boring, in fact. But he did perform one song I’d never heard but think I should probably learn, “Grateful“.

Thursday 11/21/2024

Yay, an uncommitted day. I ended up doing all sorts of things. Paid a couple of bills, tidying up my desk. Took a tech call, user with a Mac couldn’t send email. Wrote various emails and talked to people about AV scheduling. Read some from the book I’m working through Yuval Harari’s Nexus. Met with the Good Times committee to finalize the song selection for the February show. It appears I am down to perform “Annie’s Song” by John Denver. Not sure about that one. I checked the music and I will definitely not be playing it on the guitar. Anyway, somehow the uncommitted day went by with no gaps.

There is severe weather all up and down the West Coast (Laurel, in Kent, is hunkered down with no power; I-5 is closed at the Oregon border; heavy rains and flooding in Santa Rosa and so on. So I had the weather radar map open all day, and the picture was quite remarkable: all the green and yellow precip keeps streaming in and across the North Bay, sometimes sprinkling on San Francisco, but our streets stayed dry all day. Supposedly we will get an inch of rain tomorrow, excuse me but I’ll believe it when it happens. Planning on a normal morning walk but I will carry an umbrella.

Wednesday 11/20/2024

I had planned to go on a group walk led by Joanne, but at 8am she emailed the group calling it off because of the forecast rain. There is heavy rain north of the Golden Gate, the southern fringe of a major storm in the Pacific Northwest, but in fact there’s been not a drop south of the city. I looked out and decided to chance it, so I took an umbrella and headed out on the usual route, and all was fine. Gusty winds but dry.

At 1pm it was the monthly FOPAL zoom meeting. The sale this month netted over $19K. Some other info about procedures and rules, whatevs. At 2:30 I went to the Activity Room to set up for the Car-Free group, an interest group that shares info on getting around after, or in some cases if and when, you get rid of your car. Today they wanted to have a presentation by a person from Waymo, zoomed in on the big TV there. I set that up, then I had to stay around because I was nervous. Rachel, the Waymo rep, planned to show a video. That can be a fraught thing when sharing a screen on Zoom.

Thing is, I had scheduled the AV team meeting for the dining room at 3:30. So when at 3:32 Rachel’s video started, and had sound and looked ok, I could scoot off for that. I had assumed we could use Quad IV for our meeting, it is usually deserted between meals, but I had forgotten this was the monthly Birthday Dinner day, and they had already set up all the tables in that Quad with white linen and wine glasses etc. We couldn’t use the auditorium because the drama group was rehearsing. So we squeezed into the Quad 1 area where the Wednesday afternoon coffee hour was going on, for our meeting. Also some of our members were late because they had been in the Dining Services Committee meeting at 3. Somehow, Wednesday afternoon is hectic. Stopped for tea with Dr. Margaret and Gwen to relax.

Tuesday 11/19/2024

In the morning I drove out to buy a few things at the market. Did a little guitar practice. Then the writers meeting. I had nothing to share, but others had interesting takes on the topic “bucket list”. I’d really given it some thought and had nothing. I don’t have a bucket list, any unattained achievements. Shows a lack of ambition, I guess.

I spent the whole afternoon doing something I hadn’t done for years: coding. And installing UNIX software, issuing command lines in the Terminal app to create directories and so forth. All this because I want to try using one of the large language models, Claude, via its programming interface, rather than via the simple web page at claude.ai. Why? I have a vague sort of idea for an application. We’ll see. Anyway I opened an account and then accessed Claude via running simple program I wrote in Python. Took several hours and forced me to recall a lot of UNIX trivia that had moved to the back shelves of my mind.

Monday 11/18/2024

My goodness but the year is ripping along to its close. Anyway, I took the standard walk in the morning, then went to the Event Coordinators’ meeting. Then spent a bit of time updating the AV spreadsheet with the December events, from the draft December calendar. There is a ton of events, but thankfully almost all are concerts of various sorts, lights-and-mics jobs with no zoom complications.

I’ve mentioned the AV spreadsheet before, it’s a Google Doc with one row for each event. The members of the AV committee all have read/write access to it so they can enter their initials on the events they want to run, or check details of events. Because it allows anyone with the URL to edit it, I won’t put the URL here, for fear some nefarious person would do some mischief. But here’s a screen shot of December as it stands now.

See those little dog-ear triangles on the right? They show there’s a “note” attached to that cell. What’s in the note is a copy of the Event Planning Form that was submitted by the producer of that event, which has all the details, like number and placement of mics. If you have access to the real document, you just hover that cell with the mouse pointer and the EPF pops up so you can read it.

From there I grabbed some lunch and went to FOPAL to process 5 boxes of donations. And back in time for a quick nap and then it was Rhonda’s monthly Open Meeting. This time she presented a talk that she had given to, I think, the local chamber of commerce, on “the rewards and drawbacks of managing a retirement facility”. It was quite interesting, in part going over all the different agencies whose jurisdictions CH is under, with their conflicting requirements. (California dept of public health, Santa Clara County dept of public health, Cal/OSHA, Palo Alto City, Palo Alto Fire Dept — and that’s about 1/2 of the list). And the rewards being working with a top-notch dedicated staff and a bunch of smart, creative old fogies.

Sunday 11/17/2024

Just chilled around the apartment much of the day, amusing myself with the internet. Walked over to University avenue to eat lunch in a restaurant. In the afternoon, Ian gave his talk on how AI systems work, sort of. Nice attempt.

Saturday 11/16/2024

Had a rehearsal of RATCT at 10, so I spent the hour before trying to get better with the guitar on that song. We don’t sound terrible, but it needs more work. All right, I need more work. Alice and John are fine.

At 11, I met with Richard R, who is interested in being part of the AV team. We went over all the auditorium systems. He’ll be good.

After lunch I was looking at an open afternoon with nothing to do. At lunch Ian had said he was going to see “Fiddler on the Roof” at Palo Alto Players at 2pm, and I gave that a thought, but no, it’s 2 and a half hours and I just wasn’t that interested. So instead, a walk. Where? Well, I haven’t been down to the Baylands for a while. Alone? Well… On the spur of the moment I dialed Joanne’s room and she was in and said she would be happy to join me. So we drove down to the Baylands and it was a lovely day, the tide was in, and over a thousand Shovelers were sitting in a quarter-mile raft of ducks on the water. I couldn’t remember which duck they were, but a guy with binoculars was happy to identify them for us. I remember Shovelers from Baylands walks with Marian, but always as a scattered few among other ducks. But this was a massive crowd of them.

Friday 11/15/2024

First thing was to take the standard walk, and to my pleasure Joanne joined me for this. Next up, at 10:30, was to meet with Tom G, to review what he’d need to do to set up the microphone for the Birthday Dinner next Wednesday.

Which brings me to 11 am, where our little AI interest group met. Only Bert, me, and David G showed up. Both of them have been doing interesting things with AI sites, especially DG, who has had dozens of interesting chats with Claude and others.

From there I drove down to Mountain View to have lunch with Jean, who is looking very well for just having had her 97th birthday.

That was the planned activities. At 4:30 I went up to 11 for the monthly TGIF, but didn’t see anyone I wanted to talk to and nobody called me to join them, so I came away again. After a good lunch with Jean I wasn’t that hungry so I didn’t go down for dinner, either. Just went down to pick up a package: a new bedside lamp. This was to replace the one I got on day 5.338. Because it had only one setting, supernova bright, it was just very unpleasant when I got up in the morning. I was used to a 3-way bedside lamp that comes up dim when I tap it. This new one, a $35 cheapie from amazon, looks ok and starts dim.