Thursday 08/03/2023

Did the gym round first thing. Then at 9am, met with Susan P. to review using her phone to send music through the speakers. Had an early lunch and headed down to FOPAL. Today was the day to load up the 12 boxes of books and stuff to sell at the Vintage Computer Fest, and take it down to CHM.

Met Frank and Nikole. Frank is a long-time FOPAL volunteer and a mainstay of the whole program. Nikole is a summer intern. First up was to load the boxes, and a hand-truck, into my car and Nikole’s. Then we went to the opposite side of the Cubberly complex, to the building that houses the Children’s room and the FOPAL offices, for training in the new portable terminal. And there ahead of us was Dennis, who is volunteering to help part of the weekend. We learned how to use the cute little terminals that handle cards and phones etc. A big improvement from last year when we had an iPad with a Square card reader.

Now I and Frank drove down to CHM, Nikole following, and we schlepped our boxes into the museum. Unfortunately there was another event using the space assigned to us, so we had to stack our boxes. Tomorrow morning we will carry them across and set up our tables.

Back to CH. At 5:30 the young theater people from G. I. F. T. showed up. They were here a few weeks ago, presenting the Addams Family musical. Today they were back with a shortened version of Singin’ in the Rain. As before I turned the AV on, put batteries in all of our wireless mics, and basically turned the system over to them. They come in and in 20 minutes have mastered our sound and light systems, and at 7:30 they presented the show, with all the light cues and music cues — music off an iPhone by Bluetooth into our system, just as I was teaching Susan to do — like they used our stage every day.

Wednesday 08/02/2023

Did the standard walk. Then at 10, met with Susan in the auditorium. There are a lot of Susans around here, nearly as many as Mary Anns. The Susan in the writers group is Susan H. Today I met with Susan P.

Susan and Joanne (there are a lot of those, as well; this is Joanne L) are going to be leading three rehearsal days when people can practice the Country 2-step and the Country Line Dance. They will do it in the auditorium and they want body mics. At first I was going to ask for AV volunteers for this three additional events in the month (grrrrr….) but then Ian said, why not train them to do their own mics? Well, Susan was open to the idea.

Susan is smart and capable. She taught English Lit at College of San Mateo for a zillion years. I walked her through the process of turning our system on, preparing two mics, putting them away, and shutting down. She went through it twice and I deemed her “trained”. The I raised the issue of music: how were they planning to have music during these dance lessons? Then I showed her how the audio board had a Bluetooth input, and how easy it was to sync a phone to it, and play music right out through the speakers in the ceiling.

Later in the day I was listening to a podcast when the speaker, a writer, was asked about his writing tools, and said he always composed in a web app, 4thewords.com, which is a great help, he said, at motivating you to write. So I took a look. It’s bizarre at first, but you know? I’m gonna give it a try, maybe it will un-stall my novel. It turns writing into an adventure game. If you’ve played any of the adventure games, Zelda or anything, it would be familiar, except to advance you don’t do fake combat. You conquer monsters and earn loot by writing. 250 words kills a small monster.

At supper I was eating with Patty and the Allens when Susan P stopped by our table. She had been down to the auditorium on her own to practice (gotta love an enthusiastic student!) and couldn’t make the Bluetooth thing work. So we’ll meet again tomorrow at 9. Tomorrow is going to be an “extra value” day.

08/01/2023

Did the machine round in the gym. Other than that the day was pretty blah. Writers meeting at 10:30. The assignment was, a letter from a future relative written in 2123. I did not write because I didn’t feel like writing gloomy predictions and couldn’t think of any other kind. Others wrote pretty dark stuff. For example, one recounted how they were really lucky to have gotten a place in the Sierras above 10,000 feet, where it often dipped below 100º at night.

One writer surprised me: she’d used ChatGPT to write her first draft, then edited it. She sent it out (we send our writings to the group by email so we can read along as the writer reads their essay aloud) in two forms, one with the parts from ChatGPT highlighted. Susan’s 90 (plus or minus a year or two) but obviously still running on all cylinders.

I disassembled the crap lectern and had facilities take it away along with its packing materials. What a waste.

At 4pm was the third presentation in the series, levels of care at Channing House. This one on the services and care provided in our third-floor AL units. There are 11, of which 7 are currently occupied, which surprised me.

Did I say, a few days ago, how I started to watch Return of the Jedi? I had this package of the first three Star Wars movies on Blu-Ray and I had watched the first two. Return of the Jedi is the one on Endor, with the Ewoks. Well, I got bored and turned it off and put the disk away. Partly it was seeing Carrie Fisher in her prime. But mostly it was that the movie wasn’t very good.

Anyway I don’t feel very good about myself or the world today.

Monday 07/31/2023

Took the standard walk. At 10:30 I met with Peter to discuss A/V requirements for a lecture series he plans for October and November. Then I went to FOPAL. No computer books to process, reasonable since I was just there on Saturday, so I did a bit of sorting.

After supper I picked up a large package from the mail room. A big flat pack about 4 foot by 3 foot by 5 inches. This was the $90 lectern I bought of Amazon. I spent an hour assembling it. Afterward I was disappointed. The whole point of changing out the lectern we have, is that because it doesn’t have locking casters, it wouldn’t support anyone who leaned on it. Well, this $90 piece of … furniture has locking casters. However they are very small, like 2-inch diameter wheels, and hard plastic. So even with the back two casters locked, it slides quite easily. And it tends to tip. If you lean on it from the back it likes to tilt forward. Not a good pulpit for a revival preacher for sure.

So I have wasted $90 plus tax. Of my own money because no way will I ask for reimbursement on this thing we can’t use. At least because it was covered by Amazon Prime the shipping of the 40-pound pack was free.

Oh and I now have the problem of how to dispose of it. I’m thinking put it on the curb (well away from Channing House) with a “free” sign on it.

Sunday 07/30/2023

For fun I walked over to California Avenue. I have no imagination. A bunch of my neighbors went off to see Oppenheimer. A bunch of my neighbors went to a concert in the Music at Menlo summer series. Me? I went for a walk.

Lennie had done some googling and found that my new neighbor, Brian, had a sufficiently big career in computers that the CHM had done an oral history video. They have a large collection of oral histories. Anyway, I listened to his this afternoon. Interesting guy with an impressive resumé.

That reminded me, didn’t I write up a history of my career in tech? LIttle searching finds, yes I did, in 1995 just after I started at SGI. So I started reading that and obviously I had to edit it and bring it up to date. (Not much to add as my professional career finished with SGI.) But that killed another two hours.

Saturday 07/29/2023

A lovely wide-open Saturday. So of course by 8:30 I’m wondering what to do with myself. I call up Dennis and make a lunch date. Then I go to FOPAL and clear up four boxes of computer books and do a little sorting to take me to 11:30. Then off to San Jose to pick up Dennis and have lunch at the Pruneyard. When was I last at the Pruneyard? Why, it was the end of 2019, Day 363 (would be 0.363 by the current scheme) when we saw the movie Ford vs. Ferrari.

Back at CH Patty suggested we take our new neighbor, Brian, who just moved in two doors from me yesterday, to dinner. Which we did, along with Leon and Margaret. Learned a bit about him. Nice guy, he’ll be a good neighbor.

Friday 07/28/2023

Went for the standard walk; all good. Then it was time to join Edie on a shopping trip. I had helped her buy and install a new iMac. Then we learned that her 2010-era HP printer wasn’t supported. The latest driver download you could get for it was for MacOS 10.4, circa 2012 and still 32-bit. The new iMac came with MacOS 13.4, a 64-bit OS. So she needed a new printer. She doesn’t drive so I offered to go on a shopping trip to Office Depot and Best Buy.

There are some insane bargains in printer tech these days. You can get a nice Epson all in one (scanner printer fax) for $65. Unfortunately that one is butt-ugly and also only feeds from the rear tray, so she vetoed that. She picked an HP, it is small and cute and looked like it would work, although I mistrust HP software.

Late in the afternoon we met again to try to install it. The “HP Smart” app will flatly not initialize a printer connected by USB. It must use wifi. And although it could connect to the printer and start the initialization, it couldn’t complete it. Multiple times through the process, it hung on the final step. We’ll have another go at it tomorrow or Sunday.

I ate dinner alone, at a table for one. Not what I usually do; I usually sit at a “Community table”. But I didn’t feel like being sociable.

Thursday 07/27/2023

First thing I drove up to PAMF and had that blood draw taken. Then I found IT manager Gerald and got the word on when the auditorium upgrade would actually start. The rest of the morning was taken up with writing two carefully crafted emails. One, to the AV committee and several others, giving the state of the upgrade and its schedule. Thanking people and just being as pleasantly political as heck. Second a detailed email to Gerald and Tom listing issues related to the upgrade I hope they will address. Also with a positive tone and constructive.

With that out of the way I gave myself the afternoon off.

Wednesday 07/26/2023

Started the laundry early, but still didn’t have it wrapped up by 10am. Which is when I met with our CEO Rhonda, to get clarity on the status of the auditorium upgrade project and its funding. The results were good. I had seen an issue in the source of the funding, the Heritage Circle, given the plan is no longer to do all the things that the grant authorized, but still to spend all the grant money. She didn’t see that as an issue at all, so OK, if she’s good with it, I am too. Next question: I really want the center camera replaced, but that will push the total $12,000 over the granted amount. Would she be willing to pay the overage out of the IT department budget? Yes she would! So we parted on good terms.

After finishing the laundry I walked to PAMF to get some blood drawn, only to find when I got there, that the particular test needed to be taken NPO. It’s the middle of the day of course I am not NPO. So no blood drawn. At least I walked by CVS and picked up three prescriptions.

Tuesday 07/25/2023

Did the gym machines. Worked on my brief presentation to Rhonda. I am scheduled for this rather critical meeting tomorrow at 10.

Then having an hour free before the start of the writer’s meeting, I thought, what could I write? The cue for this week was, “a special gift that you have given or received.” Actually in the middle of the night — my sleep patterns are not that disrupted, this was like 2 minutes of wakefulness around 5am — I had thought about it and concluded that I did not remember any significant gifts I had given or received. That I wanted to tell the writers group about, anyway. Then the phrase “gifts of the holy spirit” popped up. Hmmm.

So at 9:30 I started writing about revival meetings, and how my parents believed in the “Gift of Tongues” and the “Gift of Prophecy”. It came out a bit dark. But at least, at 10:45 when the zoom meeting started, I had something to read.

I took a tech squad call to help Lynn with a couple of Mac questions, nothing difficult. At 4pm it was time for the second of a weekly series presented by our staff, detailing the services offered by CH. This one was about services for the Independent Living tower. They detailed all the things included in your monthly bill, and the things for which you pay extra. For example, Housekeeping takes care of changing and laundering sheets and towels, but if you want something else laundered, that’s a fee. Go to the nurse station on the third floor any time for routine blood pressure or such, but if you need help with eye drops or to put on compression stockings, that’s a fee service. Etc. Security, help with scams, routine wellness checks, etc. There’s a motion sensor in every unit, and if it doesn’t see motion between 5am and 10am, and you haven’t signed out for a vacation, a nurse will come do a wellness check. Quite a long list of included stuff.

Right after the meeting I had to get out the little portable sound system and set it up in the lobby for a sing-along. This was scheduled rather abruptly, it was a “Tony Bennett memorial sing-along”. So nobody on my committee had known about it or was free. It was a nice sing-along anyway.