Thursday 08/15/2024

Used to be, I spent nearly every Thursday at the Shustek center in Milpitas, accessioning donated objects. Back in April they had a problem with the building that put all that on hold. Today I went over there for a meeting where we volunteers were told and shown what had happened, and got a roadmap for the future.

Shustek center is a one-story office building, mostly open-plan with rows of metal racking, plus a few enclosed offices and storage spaces.. Back around Easter there was a day with a lot of rain and wind. The wind apparently blew over a cinderblock wall that was on the roof, masking the HVAC equipment on the roof from the street. The wall fell on a corner of the roof, which partly collapsed. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but it also broke a sprinkler pipe, which dumped a huge amount of water on the floor at that corner. Water moved across the floor, soaking into carpet. At that corner of the building had been a large amount of old computer stuff in a disorganized mass, which was the personal collection of a guy named Al — not museum property; they were kind of letting Al do his work there. A lot of Al’s stuff was on the floor, and got soaked and eventually had to be thrown away.

The museum stuff, rows and rows of shelving with boxes of documents and piles of media, was all raised from the floor, so once they had the humidity under control, it didn’t suffer, but a loty of stuff had to be moved very quickly. Then carpeting had to be pulled up and rather than replace it, they had a contractor scrape all the glue residue, sand down the cement floor and seal it.

The accessioning work area still isn’t usable, being full of stuff relocated from other spaces. Plus Aurora, the lead curator, has some vacation time coming. Likely volunteers won’t be back to work before October.

Back home by 3, when I took a tech squad call to help install a printer for one of my newest neighbors on the 6th floor, Sophia. Bert had started the install and ran into problems. I was able to get the printer going and sort out a couple of other problems she had with her quite new iMac.

Wednesday 08/14/2024

Went for the standard walk (3 miles for the day). Then settled in to a spell of computer work, at my desktop machine.

(The desktop machine is a 27-inch iMac, bought in 2015. Apple discontinued the 27-inch in 2022, and today it can’t be brought up to the current level of the OS. If I want a modern desktop with a big screen, my only option is to buy a big monitor, the Apple Studio Display or comparable from Samsung or LG, and drive it with a Mac Mini. I refuse; I want the elegance of the one-piece iMac. But currently iMacs only come as 24-inch screens. Today I read a rumor that Apple is planning a new, “iMac Pro” model with a thirty-inch screen, ooh boy. When? Oh, 2025, maybe. Or 26. OK, the old one still works, although it is a bit slow. Patience.)

The work was, to clean up a large folder in my Dropbox named Camera Uploads. For the past year plus, whenever I had a photo I thought worth saving in my permanent collection, I’d put it into Camera Uploads. I can do that from any of my machines because the Dropbox is shared among them all. The idea was that “sometime” I would go over these pics, sharpen and crop and tweak them, and put them in sensible topic folders in the Pictures folder. There were about 75 of them.

I spent about 4 hours today doing that: discarding some, improving others, filing them. Very satisfying work. Then I printed two more Thames Bridges pictures and updated the gallery outside my room. Didn’t do much else but it felt productive.

Tuesday 08/13/2024

Decided to walk to Cafe Zoe for breakfast, and to not wear my ear buds and listen to a podcast, but rather to think constructively of something to write for the writers meeting. I took a different route that added half a mile to the walk (3.3mi for the day). It worked, in that I thought of something that more or less fitted the prompt. When I got back about 9:30 I sat down and started writing but ran out of time and had nothing usable when the meeting started at 10:45.

Had lunch with some other writers to celebrate Connie’s birthday. I don’t know which birthday it was, but probably starts with a 9.

After lunch met with Stew to show him how I had used Keynote to make a lyrics file. He had found it extremely tedious. I showed him just a couple of tricks he hadn’t know of, like how to easily duplicate a slide. So now he is in charge of the lyrics file for the folk fest, editing the one that I produced.

At 3pm, met with Craig and we practiced our number for the folk fest, “City of New Orleans”. After three run-throughs we don’t totally suck.

Monday 08/12/2024

I took the standard walk this morning, it felt fine. I went down to FOPAL and did my post-sale triage, sending books that had gone unsold for 4 sale days, off to the bargain room. Only one box of donations waiting to process.

The hummingbirds have suddenly doubled their consumption, or I have double hummers, because where I was filling the feeder once a day, suddenly it needs refilling every 4 hours or so. My feeder is really old and damaged in various small ways. I stopped Petco when I was buying coffee but they don’t carry bird stuff like they used to. I could order another feeder, a pair of feeders identical to mine is just $15 on Amazon. On the other hand, I had been telling myself that I was going to get out of the hummer-feeding game after this season. So, no.

Back home I did some guitar practice. And then ordered tickets for the 2024 Boogie Woogie festival in November. I ordered 5 tickets on a whim. Two for Scott and June, one for me, two to offer around CH if I can get anybody to go with me.

Sunday 08/11/2024

In the morning before lunch, I prepared a Keynote presentation with all the lyrics for the Folk Fest. The committee has set the final list of songs in sequence, so I got the lyrics for each of the songs and put them in white text on a black background, max 6 lines per slide. This will let us project them on the big screen, while the black background means people can be on stage under the screen and not get a sunburn from the bright projector.

After lunch, I set up the auditorium and helped my neighbors Roberta and Richard rehearse their presentation for next week. That will be a “Sunday@Home”, where residents show their recent travels or other accomplishments. They went on a photography workshop tour of Paris, taking street photos. They are good photographers and have some really wow! pics to show.

Later I took a tech squad call to help a resident who thought she had lost her Apple password, only very fortunately it turned out she hadn’t, she had just mis-typed the password, from the grimy little slip of paper on which somebody had written it. So many people around have these handfuls of little slips of paper with old passwords, crossed out and re-written. The Apple ID ones are the worst, because you so rarely have to enter them, and the procedure for recovering a lost password is really complex.

Saturday 08/10/2024

Started the day by walking to Midtown for coffee-and. I also walked back, for a day’s total of not quite 4 miles.

11am, left the museum, to lead the noon tour. Big crowd, 30+, and as there was a 1401 demo at 1pm, I moved things right along so as to finish by 12:50. Urged those who hadn’t seen the 11am demo, to go see the 1pm one. Then led the remainder back to talk about Xerox Park, the Lisa and the Mac.

At 4pm had tea with Dr. Margaret, thinking I would move her photos to an external drive, but when we actually looked the photos database was only (only!) 7GB, which was much less than I expected, and not worth the trouble to move it.

Friday 08/09/2024

First thing today was a meeting in the auditorium at 9am, to be shown the details of our new camera systems. We now have 3 cameras, and a slick console for switching between them. Lots to learn. I kind of want to dig in and write a how-to manual for them.

From there I went to my 10am meeting with Lou and Stew, to select all the Youtube videos for the folk festival. The lineup of songs is set, so we auditioned like, 10 versions of “Blowin in the Wind” and 10 of “This Land Is Your Land” and so on for 23 songs, selecting the ones to use. That took to 11:30. I filled the time to lunch by pasting the URLs of the selected videos into the spreadsheet of songs, and sending it back to Lou.

After lunch I fought with the Xfinity web site trying to get a printable version of my bill. Then it was time to meet with Mary and John to rehearse “You’ve Got a Friend”. This is going to be good. John is a very competent piano player and seemed to enjoy playing along with us. Mary and I worked out which lines or phrases are hers and which mine and which both. Then I made a fresh copy of the music and marked it with colored hiliter pens.

I had an hour break and then it was time for the 3pm meeting with the whole Good Times committee, to decide on the final sequence of the 23 songs. After which we looked at different ways to display lyrics on the big screen in the auditorium.

Then a quick nap and down for dinner with some of my neighbors.

Thursday 08/08/2024

Took a shorter walk in the morning. Left in the car to pick up some groceries and drive down to Jean’s place for lunch with her and Marc, our nephew. Well, Marian’s nephew. He’s a senior radiologist with a group practice in Seattle. He was stopping off on his way to join a group of people for an 8-day backpacking hike out of Tuolumne Meadows. He looks great, fit and upbeat. He filled us in on all the doings of his sons and of Quinn, the son of his late brother Paul.

Evening, I did a technical thing, preparing a soundtrack for Mary to sing to, practicing for the folk fest next month. I found a website that does an incredible job of separating out the voice from an audio track, leaving just the accompaniment. Mary is leading a group who will sing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” in the style of the Carter Sisters. I took the audio track from the YT video she prefers, separated the voices out of it, and sent her the accompaniment track.

Bored with the CH menu, I went out to eat at a place I hadn’t tried before, Curry Up Now, Indian with a California twist. It was pretty good food, but the restaurant was almost entirely empty, and the cashier and cook were Latinx and argued with each other in Spanish the whole time.

Wednesday 08/07/2024

Did the laundry in the morning. Played the guitar. After lunch, met with Mary to work on You’ve Got a Friend. Later, figured out how to do something on the Mac, for the benefit of Dr. Margaret. Had dinner with the Mary and Andrew and Martha.

Evening, changed out my bedding. This is a semi-annual, no, tri-ennial? job, changing the blankets I have on my bed. Went from the big beige one to the smaller blue wool one. I have three different colorful crocheted throws, and I rotated the one from the bed to the couch, couch one to the closet, closet one to the bed. Exciting times around here.

Tuesday 08/06/2024

Worked up something for the writers group on the theme of “someone’s leaving home”. Since I had already written about my moving to CH, and couldn’t think of anything else except the 1967 Beatles song “She’s Leaving Home”, I wrote about that, and read the lyrics as a poem.

Edited the video from Gigi’s book talk of yesterday. Late in the day I get an email from her requesting some changes. So that’s to do tomorrow.

Met with Peter to be interviewed; he is starting a series for the newsletter on people’s outside volunteer activities, with me as the first example among many.

Met with Dr. Margaret about various Mac issues. We had a fun time getting rid of files to help relieve her over-full hard drive.

Listened to the Philadelphia speeches by Harris and Walz. Good stuff. “Mind your own damn business,” indeed.