Sunday 08/13/2023

Last night’s play, Happy Pleasant Valley, a Senior Sex Scandal Murder Mystery Musical, was all of that. The playwright, Min Kahng, does a great job with clever lyrics and some fun scenes. The main characters are a 20-something woman who is trying to build a career as an internet influencer, and her 70-something grandma who is a wanna-be amateur sleuth in the style of “Murder, She Wrote.” And the running gags are about how she and other residents of Happy Pleasant Valley are having very active sex lives, but unfortunately grandma’s last two partners dropped dead on her, possibly because someone poisoned their viagra.

As part of a new works festival, the brand new script had only had two weeks of rehearsal. It wasn’t fully staged; the actors were carrying their scripts and standing in a line across the stage reading or singing their parts. There were a lot of laughs and some nice singing performances. It ran about 20 minutes too long and the final resolution of the mystery was too complicated.

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Going back to the trip to the SJ Historical Park, here is a picture of some of the 1940s cars.

OK, that’s a 1926 chevy in front. But the green one is a 1941 chevy, a two-door but otherwise just like the one I drove in high school.

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Today by arrangement four of us drove “over the hill” i.e. west over the coast range to the San Gregorio General Store, which is a kind of general store, bar, bicycle refueling spot and general tourist trap near the beach. The point was to listen to the Keller Sisters. My neighbor Sandy and I had heard them at a house concert a few months ago. She had signed up for their email list so knew about this performance. I drove, and Sandy, Joanne and Erica rode along for the long twisty drive up 84 and down. And the even longer drive back via Alpine and Page Mill.

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And tonight I went out onto the balcony to hang the hummingbird feeder and what do I see but a huge sunset rainbow.

Saturday 08/12/2023

In the morning I did a little desk work, then spent a couple of hours on the video for the upcoming C&W event. Actually what I did was search the internet for pictures of barn doors. I need a static picture of a half-open barn door, or better still a video of a barn door closing, to use as a “bumper card” between each song in the final video. You would think… but no. It’s been very hard to find what I want.

At 2pm I got on the bus with 20 others for a visit to the San Jose History Park, which is what it sounds like, except they were celebrating VJ day, the signing of the Japanese Surrender, ending WWII. They had army people in period uniforms with period equipment, jeeps and artillery and such, in a model encampment. And 20 or more 1940s-era restored cars parked around the square. The park has a restored doctors office and dentist office, and a barn full of period fruit-picking machinery, and stuff like that.

At 7:15 I’m going to head out walking to the Lucy Stern theater for the “Happy Pleasant Valley” musical we had a preview of last Wednesday. I’ll report on that tomorrow.

Friday 08/11/2023

Gettin’ lazy there, with the titles. But really, I just did miscellaneous stuff, and not the stuff that was on my mental to-do list, either.

First off, I took the standard walk, which went ok. I was going to stop for coffee at Verve, when I noticed that Starbucks had opened across the street. Starbucks used to be in a dismal cave a couple of blocks down University. They closed that location, and have now opened in this open, spacious place at University and High. It used to be an organic restaurant but it makes a great coffee shop. Lots of interior space and also a large, shady outdoor patio facing the street.

I did a lot of corresponding with people by email. I’m involved in a couple of on-going email discussions, one about upgrading the computers at FOPAL that is very interesting. I advised Susan P. on downloading music. Actually I told her that I personally didn’t know anything about that and gave her some links to look at.

At 2pm I, David G, and Kass met with IT manager Gerald for a tutorial on using the ZoomRoom on the big mobile TV. Kass had signed up to handle AV for a memorial on 9/7, which is good because that weekend I’m away. Then the organizer decided that they need a zoom session too, which greatly escalates the tech. That’s when I got David G. to join Kass, who is not experienced with Zoom. And all three of us got shown the ropes by Gerald.

Thursday 08/10/2023

Did the gym machine round, tidied the apartment for Wanda’s 2pm cleaning, then headed to Milpitas to work at the Shustek center. In the morning shift, I worked with Dave B. to catalog items from a donation by Len Shustek himself. Shustek has made several appearances in my life lately. Two weeks ago I spent several sessions watching a 12-hour course he recently taught at Stanford on the history of computing. Over the VCF weekend he was hanging around CHM, I saw him go by several times. Now I’m cataloging stuff he has donated from his personal collection.

Shustek got a physics doctorate from Stanford, then worked for a while at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the electron-smashing place in the hills west of Stanford. Then he founded not one but two successful Silicon Valley companies, Nestar and Network General. He did that along with another Stanford physicist, Harry Saal, who for several years was a star researcher at IBM San Jose. I believe I met him one time back in the 70s. Shustek married Donna Dubinsky who herself was founder of Palm (remember the Palm Pilot, the first real PDA?) and another company.

So what he had donated that we cataloged today was a “Sniffer”, which was a portable Compaq PC set up to do network traffic analysis. It was Network General’s first big product. But the other was the real prize, as far as I and Dave B. were concerned. It was an Altair 8800, the first real home computer. Just an Altair would not be such a big deal, we already have several, and in my docent tour I always stop at the one on display and talk about it. But this one was different. It had a SLAC property sticker, and it had been heavily modified, and was just stuffed full of boards, many of them hand wire-wrapped.

We got out the donor letter and found out that this had been ordered in 1975, so it was an early one. It was used in the experimental physics lab at SLAC, for various kinds of experimental measurements. That makes it very much one of a kind.

After lunch I worked on de-duping documents. We have piles of documents, mostly manuals from early computer companies, in a big donation. Some of them exist in the collection already. The game is to pick up a document, and try using various searches to find the same document in the collection. The records aren’t perfect, so sometimes to be certain you have to down the long aisles in the document storage area and pull out a box and look in it to find the match, or not. Non-dups go in a pile to be cataloged. Dups go in the recycle box.

Wednesday 08/09/2023

Started the laundry. But before that I took a poop sample, before my upcoming wellness exam (next week). I sealed the little sample bottle in its bag and in its stiff cardboard mailing envelope. It was addressed to the lab at PAMF, so I thought instead of mailing it I would walk it up there. So once the first load was started, I put the envelope in my hip pocket and set off for a brisk mile walk to PAMF. When I got there, went down in the elevator to level A and turned toward the lab. Put my hand on my back pocket and — no envelope.

Clearly it must have fallen out. So now I walked briskly back the way I’d come, looking for the envelope on the sidewalk. There it was, about half a block from CH. So I carried it back into the building and put it in the outgoing mail slot.

Finished the laundry. Spent what seemed like most of the rest of the morning emailing people and calling people about one thing and another. There’s an even scheduled on 9/8, which was a simple event, and then the organizers decided it needed to be a zoom event, in an unusual location. Lots of emails back and forth.

At 6:30 I went to set up for a Wednesday Night Lecture. Standard event, only unusual because for once, the presenter had no visuals, didn’t want any projection. Fine, makes my life easier. Except not, because the Zoom Room equipment expects the projector to be used. I had to make one change in its settings, but it wanted a password I didn’t know. I called several people and eventually Bert, who was at Tahoe, answered and he knew the password.

The presenter was Giovanna Sardelli, the new artistic director of Theaterworks, along with the playwright and a singer from a new play. Mainly asking for money because it seems that regional theater is in trouble everywhere, and they are launching a new “save theaterworks” funding campaign.

Tuesday 08/08/2023

Pretty quiet day. At the writers meeting, where the topic was “crisis averted or endured”, and I had nothing, several people had really dramatic stories to tell. Like one person was doing charity work in South Sudan when a cease-fire broke and a revolution resumed and she had to get out of the country somehow.

At 4pm was the third, or is it 4th? in a series of talks detailing levels of care at CH. This was about the Assisted and Skilled care in the Lee Center. After the usual bullet points by staff, they had three current IL residents talk about how their spouses were cared for. All three were women talking about how the Lee Center staff cared for their husbands in their final year or so. All were very specific about the ways the staff were caring, and flexible, and creative in making their spouses comfortable. I know two men whose wives are in the Lee Center now, so it isn’t always women with failing husbands. But bottom line, at this meeting and multiple other times I’ve heard the staff praised.

Monday 08/07/2023

Back to work day. At 10 I set up the auditorium for a First Monday Book Talk. The speaker was Prof. Ran Abramitzky, talking about his book, Streets of Gold, research into the facts of the immigrant experience in America. Quite an interesting talk. I recorded it on my laptop and in the evening finished editing the video.

Then I headed out to FOPAL where I spent 2 hours setting up my section for the coming sale weekend. Back home by 3, had a quiet sit and a nap until supper time. Bumped into Craig and Edie in the hall and had dinner with those two and the Beelers and Florrie. Talk about the lecture in the morning led to everyone comparing their ancestors’ immigrant experiences.

08/06/2023

Relaxing day getting caught up on things left pending after the VCF. I did the month-end record of the Nest Egg status. I’m still wealthy.

Next I edited the video I made of the G.I.F.T. kids performance Thursday night. Unfortunately the audio balance came out wrong, the musical accompaniment is too low so the singers’ voices are too loud. Still, I tidied it up and passed it on to the people who sponsored it, to send on to the director for his use. Well, anybody can see it for a while until I get around to deleting it. (Skip to the 3:00 minute mark to get over the intro.)

Then I started on a project that took most of the rest of the day. Back in ’19 I bought a cheap HP Chromebook, to take along when traveling instead of my expensive Macbook. A Chromebook runs a cut-down Google-modified form of Linux. It’s basically an Android phone in the shape of a laptop. The thing is, Chromebooks have an expiration date. About three years after purchase, the announce to you that you’ve had your last update and there won’t be any further software updates, security or otherwise. This is currently a major issue for local schools, who bought these things by the truckload to give to students so they could study remotely during the pandemic. Now the schools have literal truckloads of chromebooks that can’t be upgraded or have new apps added.

It seemed to me that there ought to be a way to get the Chromebook to boot plain old Linux. It is an Intel-based system, just cheap PC hardware, why not? Well it turns out the Google had gone out of their way to make that difficult. The firmware that runs the boot operation (what we used to call the BIOS back in the last century) is designed so it can’t be used for a general OS boot, but only Google’s software.

After much searching however, I found Chrultrabook which documents how to do it. It involves a rather complex series of operations ending with completely rewriting the boot ROM, but after that, you have a normal laptop that can boot anything, even Windows.

And I am very pleased to say that I got through that whole process — including disassembling the laptop to remove the “write protect screw” from the motherboard! — and re-flashing the boot ROM, and installing a Linux system, which boots, and runs, and the wifi works and everything. Which made me feel like I AM TEH KING NERD. Bow before me. And now I have a slow, but functional, cheap laptop to take traveling. If I ever travel.

Saturday 08/05/2023

Up and out early, first to make a quick stop at the FOPAL main room where I picked up another box of books I thought would sell. Then to pick up Frank and on to the Museum, arriving at 8:30 to set up for the day. We brought in a total of six boxes of books to freshen up our tables, because the first day had left them very depleted. Here’s how it looked.

It was another long day, some of it quite boring sitting around reading a book on my phone when no customers were coming by. However in the end it was a real success. We took a total of 18 boxes of books down. We brought five boxes back. Total receipts just over $1400 for the weekend.

All the volunteers helped, including Dennis. But I have to say Nikole, whom I hadn’t met before this weekend, was just a joy to have around; smart, thoughtful, pleasant and cheerful with everyone, and a good planner. I thanked her and told her how good it was to have worked with her. I hope she stays on as a FOPAL volunteer. It would be ideal if there were some way to get her a paid position, but I doubt the library budget would extend to that.

I got back to CHM in time to have supper in the dining room. Early to bed, and taking a day off tomorrow.

Friday 08/04/2023

Up and out at 8, picked up Frank at 8:25, over to CHM. Moved our 12 boxes of books out and arrayed them on our table. There was barely room for everything. Here’s the table with Frank and a few shoppers.

Dennis arrived pretty soon and stayed to noon. He’s behind the table where the arrow points. Nikole had done a great job of getting more volunteers so we had 2-5 FOPAL people there all the time.

Business was good. Lots of people bought one book, but two guys really loaded up. One bought something like 25 books. By the end of the day we had taken in close to $800. The table was looking a bit thin, and everything left had been picked-over multiple times so probably wasn’t going to sell.

So at 6pm closing time, Frank and I drove back to FOPAL and hit up the Bargain Room and the towering stacks of boxes behind it, and found another 3 or 4 boxes of books that might sell to this crowd. That will freshen up the table for tomorrow.

What with that and then dropping Frank off at his place, I didn’t get home until 8. Tomorrow I get to do it again.