Wednesday 04/17/2024

Did the laundry. In among the loads I had a phone consultation with Kass. She is staying with a daughter (granddaughter?) on the East Coast somewhere, I don’t know, somewhere on the right edge of the map. But she wants to run a meeting of a Channing House committee that she chairs, so naturally over zoom. Since she’s on our AV committee, she is tech-literate, but hadn’t done this so I walked her through scheduling a zoom meeting.

At 1pm it was time for the monthly post-sale zoom meeting of FOPAL volunteers. The sale netted $18.5K, not bad. However the fire department is about to preempt most of our parking lot for a temporary (months) fire station while another fire station is remodeled. Since that lot is often full of people attending various events in the Community Center next door, parking is gonna get a bit squeezy for the rest of the year.

At 4 I set up a mic for the monthly birthday dinner. Then at 6:30 I set up the auditorium for a lecture. This was an unusual event in this way. Two of my friends and neighbors are Peter and his wife Juthica. She is of Indian derivation. Thirty years ago she set up the Shadhika Foundation, furthering empowerment of women and girls in India. Today we had a talk from board chair of the foundation, Teena Sebastian, herself US-born of Indian parents. It’s a worthy charity (and rated 100% by Charity Navigator).

I had opted to do the AV for this event because I knew it was important to Peter, whom I like. Not to say that three other people couldn’t have done it as well, but he asked me. And afterward I was pleased that Teena said “It went so smoothly, smoother than any other presentation I’ve given.” Hah. Pat pat on my back.

Tuesday 04/16/2024

In the morning I took a moderate walk across the creek to Cafe Zoe in Menlo Park. There and on the way back I worked out something for the writers group. The prompt was, “If I was a bird, what kind of bird would I be.” I will append my little piece below.

In the afternoon I met with Sandy who wanted to know how to hold a zoom meeting in the Activity room. I had shown Ian a few weeks ago, and he had told it was easy, but she didn’t believe it until she did it. It really was easy.

Had lunch with Patty and we talked about the org change Rhonda had announced yesterday.

Little guitar practice, little reading, that was about the day.

Oh, here’s the silly thing I wrote. The first two pics are legitimate from the internet. The third picture was created by gemini.google.com with a prompt like “The burrowing owl visits a disco club late at night”.

Monday 04/15/2024

Took the standard walk, felt fine. Went to the monthly Event Coordinator’s meeting. Was able to announce we would get our added cameras in the auditorium.

Then off to FOPAL for the post-sale cleanup, two hours. I edited the video of a lecture from last Wednesday, on Silicon Valley Architecture. Need to get it uploaded to Vimeo.

Today Rhonda announced that our building facilities, housekeeping, and a couple of other functions were to be handed over to a management company. About 5 staff members will become employees of the contracting company, retaining seniority. I don’t understand the point of this, or see how it will save Channing House money.

Got an email announcing the dates for VCF West, August 1-3. With volunteer Frank at FOPAL we have accumulated at least 20 boxes of books of the sort that should sell to vintage computer nuts. There will be more by August. See last August.

Sunday 04/14/2024

Today was a long-planned excursion over the Coast Range to the San Gregorio General Store to hear a concert by the Keller Sisters. This would be the 4th time I’ve heard them: first at a house concert in Menlo Park a couple of years ago, then two previous times at the General Store.

For this there were a total of 8 of us, two cars. Joanne and Erica drove with David and Helen, and Lynne, Mary and Martha in my car. Very pleasant excursion, two hours of good music. Everybody thanked me for my careful driving (guess I don’t have to give up my car just yet).

Had dinner with Mary and Andrew, and Lynne, and Ian and Bob, a convivial table. Nice people around here.

Saturday 04/13/2024

Quiet day, mostly. At 10 I went and set up microphones for a birthday party on the 11th floor. At 3pm I went up and put them away again, and had a piece of birthday cake as my reward.

About 1 Lou called me from the activity room. He was trying to get the screen of his phone (an Android one not an iPhone) to appear on the big screen using the ZoomRoom hardware. I had never done that either so I went and joined him and we brainstormed it. Finally I concluded that the usual fast share just wasn’t going to work, you would actually have to start a zoom meeting and join it from the phone. So we worked through how to do that. Neither of us had paper, so Lou made notes on the whiteboard and we could photograph it afterward.

Ah, technology. Making lives simpler since 1890.

Friday 04/12/2024

Took the standard walk, first time this week, tsk tsk. Then prepped for my big deal meeting with Rhonda and staff. I wanted approval to finish our AV system by installing two more video cameras and integrating them into the system properly. During a wakeful spell in the night, it occurred to me that I should start by asking if anybody had any objections to that? Because if it was uncontroversial, I could skip over most of the slides in my deck, which were all about establishing the usefulness and value of having the extra cameras. If everybody was for it, we could move on to implementation details.

And that proved to be the case. Spending to buy and install cameras was a done deal from the first minute, so I skipped most of the slides I’d prepared the prior two days.

That was about it for the day. Some music practice, some reading.

Thursday 04/11/2024

Tomorrow is a crucial meeting with staff regarding auditorium upgrades. I spent several hours improving my presentation, and also learning about our own auditorium. I had been thinking we needed a camera controller that supported pre-set shots (camera pan tilt zoom settings to frame particular parts of the stage) but Bert pointed out — we already have one. The box that we (I anyway) have been using as a simple joystick control to aim and zoom the camera, is in fact a full controller capable of managing up to 5 cameras and storing up to 100 presets. Realizing this greatly shortened the list of wants; all we really need is one more camera, and to have two cameras properly mounted and wired.

I spent an hour with Dr. Margaret reviewing her video of her Tanzanian safari. She has some great video and her presentation will be a hit. That’s still more than a week away.

The evening menu looked boring so I walked myself to Peninsula Creamery for a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate shake, the first in a long time.

Wednesday 04/10/2024

Took a shortened walk because I wanted to be sure to be back before 10, when the covid shot clinic was to start. Unfortunately I found out that I had not actually signed the proper form to join the clinic. I thought I had, but apparently I had only entered the clinic time into my calendar but not actually signed the form at the front desk. They said I could come back at 1pm and if they had leftover shots I could have one, but I did and they didn’t.

Meanwhile, I realized, first at 2am and then during my walk, that it is only 2 days until I meet with Rhonda and other staff to pitch for the auditorium improvements I want. So I spent a couple of hours preparing a short presentation on that.

At 2 I put on my docent shirt and went off to the museum to lead a tour, a private tour by some group of tech people, I don’t even know what. They were a good group though, knowledgeable and interested. I was on my way to the parking lot when Jesse, head of the front desk staff, caught up with me to tell me that one of the women from the tour had been raving about what a great tour they got, “best tour she’d ever had” was the quote. So that went well, I guess.

Sixth floor meeting and dinner, no special news, but a nice time with my neighbors.

Tuesday 04/09/2024

So I wanted to do what would surely be at least 2 hours of work at FOPAL. If I attended the writers meeting I would have to do it between noon and 3, where it would barely fit, or after supper. So instead I headed straight down there at 8. And it did take me to 11am to get everything tidied up for the sale weekend coming up.

At 3 I had been asked by Lou to facilitate a meeting that needed to be on zoom, which I did. This was a presentation on the various options for mitigating the three dangerous points in Palo Alto where the CalTrain tracks have grade crossings with regular streets. There are various options, all expensive and argued over.

That was about the day. Little bit of guitar practice. Reading, napping. A little more excitement when I picked up my mail: a flat pack. What did I order? Open it up: my new passport! I mailed the application for it back on 5.109, just 3 weeks ago. It was supposed to take a long time, and I remember signing up for email notifications as the application was processed. No such emails ever came, but here’s the passport. Good until 2034.

Monday 04/08/2024

First up was the Resident Association meeting. Nothing special there. Off to FOPAL. It is the week preceding the sale and I had a bunch of boxes to process. Unfortunately 2 hours in, and only half-done with pricing, the computers all lost DNS service, claiming they couldn’t find Bookfinder.com when just seconds earlier it had come up perfectly. So I had to repack the unpriced books into boxes and leave, meaning to come back tomorrow.

Then down to a lunch date with sister in law Jean. We had sandwiches at Eric’s and chatted. She is in remarkably good shape for a 96-year-old. We compared aches and pains. She is in the process of moving a huge genealogy project — her family, her French ancestors plus, by marriage, some Cortesi’s — from the proprietary Reunion genealogy app, which she has used for years, into Ancestry.com. She wants to make this accessible to her other family members to see and maintain, and wanted me to test the access to it as a non-user of Ancestry.

Well that didn’t go super well. Ancestry won’t let you just wander in and look. They pester you and harass you until you sign up for a free trial membership, and the sign-up process is very lengthy as they try to force you to begin your own personal family tree. But finally when I could do a search, there is a remarkable amount of info. They know a lot more about Emilio Cortesi than I did. Interestingly, he is linked in at least 6 family trees. Who the heck are the Ruth Family that has my father as a leaf in their tree?

Unfortunately for Jean’s work, my searching did not turn up some of the things she is sure she imported from Reunion. So she has more work to do.

Back to CH for a 3pm meeting of the Good Times committee, planning our September event which will be a Hootenanny, i.e. a bunch of folk music. We are near to finalizing the song list.

Ate supper in my room; not feeling sociable.