Thursday 11/30/2023

Tidied up, watered the plants, and headed out to Shustek. We are filing the papers of Bert Sutherland. This means going through the boxes donated by his family, and putting each document in an archival manila folder, with cataloging information written on the tab. This isn’t the actual cataloging step. That happens later, probably much later. This just gets things identified and into archival storage material. Today among other things I noted a memo to Sutherland from Bob Taylor. Just a stapled memo made in 1965 on a typewriter but Sutherland had written across the top, “ARPA genesis” and indeed when I looked, the bulk of the memo was Taylor laying out at a high level how a network of connected computers would work, complete with the acronym IMP (Interface Message Processor). IMPs were the earliest form of router, we have one of the first IMPs on display at the museum. So this was a memo laying out how to build the internet, before there was an internet.

During the day I got an email dispatch from the tech squad. Ilse had a problem with her password. After I got back I checked her out. Ilse is quite old and as far from being a techie as it is possible to get. Here’s what I wrote when I closed the call,

Ilse has a Chromebook made by Acer. It is working fine.

She had somehow managed to hide the web page with her gmail inbox and was looking at a google search page. It wanted her to sign in to Google. Which she didn’t know how to do, but didn’t need to, anyway.

I shut the Chromebook down and restarted it. It comes up showing her name and asking for her password, which she knows (it’s on a sticker on the keyboard). I entered it, and Chrome said, should I restore your apps as they were? Sure, do that. So up comes the Chrome browser.

I notice that there are about 25 tabs open all to the same thing, her mailbox. I close them all except one, and there is her email inbox. So she is good to go.

Just another day on the tech squad.

Wednesday 11/29/2023

Did the laundry. Took the standard walk, but in the afternoon.

At 3pm there was an information session on Medicare and related topics. This was motivated because Sutter Health, the corporation that owns the Palo Alto Medical Facility, is changing its policy on what insurance plans it will accept. Several people received notice that their plans would no longer be accepted. My plan, which I share with two other retired IBMers here, is one of the many plans that are shown on the Sutter website as “Under negotiation”. So will my IBM-provided United Health Care Group PPO be accepted next year? The majority of the people in the room are patients of PAMF, plus a few with Kaiser.

The person giving the info was a nice and well-informed guy who is an independent health insurance broker and advisor, not a Sutter employee. He gave a clear rundown on the different kinds of plans, Medicare part A and B, and supplemental plans, and part D plans, and Medicare Advantage plans.

Bottom line, for 2024 Sutter is no longer accepting ANY medicare advantage plans except its own. Medicare A and B and supplemental plans for those are still good with them, but not Advantage plans. Except for the exceptions. On the Sutter website, a ton of plans from United, and Blue Cross, and other big outfits, are shown as “under negotiation”. The consultant was not able to answer the question, “when will these negotiations be complete, is there a deadline?” Nope. No deadline. Can’t say.

What will happen if UHC and Sutter don’t agree? Will I have to change plans, or keep the plan and change doctors? If I changed plans, would IBM still pay for it? The consultant could only say that all such questions are between “your corporate benefits administrator and Sutter.” (There was one guy with a similar issue regarding his Hewlett-Packard retirement benefit.) Craig Allen later contacted an IBM benefits person who could only say “it’s under negotiation.”

Tuesday 11/28/2023

Writers group at 10:45. In my copious free time before that, I sprayed a coat of orange on the 240Z, third coat with my airbrush, it’s starting to look like a real paint job. Then I set up my camera on a tripod and shot videos of myself, performing two of the songs I propose to do for the upcoming event on the 27th. I cut them down to under a minute, i.e. one chorus, each and sent them to Mary R, the producer of the event. I personally thought I looked and sounded… well, not like shit, maybe, but not like entertainment, either. She wrote back later that she “loved them”. So no easy-out that way. Committed. Must practice harder. Later in the day I practiced and I was forgetting lyrics, forgetting chord changes, just…

After the writers meeting (I had nothing to contribute) I helped Dr. Margaret work through applying for a visa to visit Tanzania. She has signed up for a Road Scholar tour but apparently each person has to get their own visa. Man, after working through that process, I would not go to Tanzania if you paid me. Not only do they want you to upload a passport photo, they want you to upload a picture of your passport, and a PDF (specifically PDF) of your return flight ticket. And pay $100. Plus a $1.50 “handling fee”. Here, handle this, Tanzania.

Felt like a change so I walked out to eat at a restaurant on University. Came back and participated in a sing-along in the lobby.

Monday 11/27/2023

Took the standard walk. Then at 10 contacted Jeb who had requested help running the 11th floor TV. Met with him at 11 on 11 and hopefully resolved his issues.

Then off to FOPAL to process a relatively small three boxes of donations. Back to CH with time for a nap before my next job, to meet with Mary M. (there are a lot of Marys around here, almost as many as there are Davids). She is giving the first monday book talk next month, i.e. a week from now. We fiddled around a lot in order to get her computer showing properly on the projector.

Dinner with Peter and Juthica, talking about the AV committee and other local issues.

Sunday 11/26/2023

Typical Sunday. I should have gone to a SWBB game at 1, and completely forgot. Somehow I got into a Saturday schedule and thought, where can I go to get out of the house? And on impulse head off to Coyote Hills Regional Park at the other end of the Dumbarton bridge. I was walking around on the boardwalk in the reeds, looking for birds of which there were none, when my phone pops up “Stanford Athletics 1pm”. Oh. It is now 12:55. So I didn’t go. It was not an important game, U. of Albany (NY), Stanford won 79-35. So no loss. But annoying. I remember thinking about my computer calendar and thinking, there’s nothing on today. If I had just looked at it…

Saturday 11/25/2023

Well I dunno. I was pretty busy all day and I don’t remember doing what. Main activity was to attend a play at The Pear. I did not like it. It was William Shakespeare’s the Land of the Dead and it was a supposed comedy, Shakespeare with zombies. Although the cast as usual worked very hard and professionally, the script in my opinion was a mess. There were some bad directorial decisions, as well. An important character is the actor Wil Kemp, the guy who played Falstaff and other of Shakespeare’s comedy roles. The play makes him a manic, nonstop comic, constantly horsing around and bothering everybody (which he might well have been). Fine, but for some bizarre reason they gave that role to a a rather petite woman. She worked her butt off but just couldn’t be a convincing slapstick comedian, she didn’t have the physical presence for it. Anyway, not good.

Sanded the primer coat on the 240Z and then gave it a 2nd prime coat.

Friday 11/24/2023

Took a shorter walk down around Pardee Park. Somehow walking toward 101 and the bay is “down”. Strange, since the terrain is dead flat. Oh well.

Did some little things. Practiced guitar, sprayed the 240Z with gray primer. Felt busy. Sometime I am going to keep an accurate log of what I do on such a day. Oh well.

After lunch set up the auditorium for the AV meeting, to which only 5 came. Presented the new head-worn microphone. I saw this on the priest at the Kelleher mass, and bought one for $29 bucks off Amazon. We have head-worn mics which are basically a loop that hangs over one ear. To be secure you need a dab of surgical tape to keep it against your cheek. This mic has two loops, so it goes over both ears, and has a wire that circles around the back of your neck. This gives a solid base for the microphone that sticks out alongside your cheek. Everybody tried it and agreed that it would work for most but dubious for anyone with long hair.

We also talked about showing DVDs from laptops instead of using the Blu-Ray player in the equipment rack. We have a Macbook Air that works with an Apple DVD player for this. But we also have a little Acer PC. Later I took that upstairs with me and installed the driver for the Apple DVD player so now we can use either it or the Macbook.

Thursday 11/23/2023

Did a lot of minor things this morning, watering plants, tidying the apartment, and editing a document. What? Well, yesterday somebody asked on the email BB for help showing the Macy’s parade on the big TV on 11. And I replied by email saying, there’s a nice binder with illustrated directions right by the TV. Bert on the other hand actually went and met with the people, and told me that my directions left out a key step. So I brought down the binder and edited the instructions to include the missing step and of course, you can’t edit a document without checking everything, so that took an hour. I saw Edie by the elevator and got her to agree to test my directions. She’s smart but not at all technical, so a good tester.

Picked up my sack supper. Figured out how to make my new doorbell button stick. What? When I moved in I was equipped with a wireless doorbell button and a battery operated base station to make the ding-dong. Unfortunately the base station doesn’t give any indication when its three(!) C(!) batteries run down. Somebody who visited said, your doorbell doesn’t work. Well, crap, what a waste to buy more C-cells. So from Amazon I ordered a wireless doorbell whose base station plugs into a wall outlet, hello, no batteries and always working. Except the button didn’t want to stick to the old double-sided tape on the door frame. Found it on the floor 10 feet down the hall. So today I figured it out, some sticky stuff I’ve had a long time for hanging posters.

Lunch in the dining room which was in fancy mode, greeting you at the door with a selection of wine, salads, lobster stuff on a puff pastry. People already at the table said the turkey entree was all white meat, so I ordered the ham, which was fine.

In the afternoon, just to get out of the building, I put the 500mm lens on the Nikon and went down for a walk in the Baylands. Low tide, boring birds, no good pictures resulted.

Had dinner with 5 other stay-at-homes, brown bags in the floor dining room.

Wednesday 11/22/2023

Took a walk. Practiced guitar. Lounged around a lot. Assembled the first two pieces of the 240Z.

Tuesday 11/21/2023

Bit of guitar practice. Paid a bill. Then in the hour before the writers group I threw together a couple of paragraphs to the cue, “describe a minute in enough detail so we can see it.” So I described the start of guitar practice, tuning and playing one chord.

After the meeting at 12 it was time to rush off for an IBM reunion lunch with Tom Daniell, Scott, and someone I hadn’t spoken to since 1979 or so, Zoe Lepturgeos. Pleasant lunch and reminiscing. Tom and I agreed that our memories are jumbled, whereas Scott has the whole history of that era of the 70s and 80s in detail.

From there to FOPAL to process the other 5 boxes of computer books that I didn’t finish yesterday. And then home. Unsurprisingly after a major Mexican lunch, I had no appetitie for supper.