Tuesday 06/13/2023

Did the gym round in the morning. At 10:45 we had the usual writers meeting. The cue this time was, if you had your life to live over. I had nothing to say. Others did, quite heartfelt and poignant recollections, like, wouldn’t have married that guy. So it goes.

My left big toe is still gouty. I tried to go for a walk in the afternoon but had to turn back after four blocks; too painful and too slow.

I took a tech squad call, to a guy whose grasp on things is maybe getting a little shaky? He clicked on something he shouldn’t have, and got infected with something that makes these little pop-up ads keep appearing at random times offering penis enlargers or offers to repair his mac. I looked at it a couple weeks ago and didn’t fix anything. This time I had done some research on malware scanners for Macs. Afterward I wrote up the tech report:

“A very successful session. Main achievement was, I downloaded the Bitdefender free malware scanner from the app store and ran it. The scan took 30 minutes and deleted a couple dozen items. I think probably his little pop-up porn ads are now gone. We will see.

“He had dug up an old iPhone 6 from a drawer and wanted to verify it worked. It does work, he dialed his house phone and it rang. We played some residual voice mails, two were robocalls but one was from someone he knew.

“He had a number of texts piled up, and we practiced deleting them. I think it very likely that he won’t remember how to do any of this stuff tomorrow, but at least he will likely remember that there does exist some way to read and delete texts and voicemails.

“He was curious about QR codes, especially how they are used as tickets. Apparently someone took him to a ball game lately and showed a QR code on the phone as their ticket. I said, yes, I did exactly that to attend the Stanford game yesterday. So how do you get them? That led to a discussion of the Apple Wallet app. Then we put his main credit card into his Apple Wallet and talked about how he could now pay for a latte at Peets with the phone.

“That led to me asking, wait, it will ask for touch id, does it know your fingerprint? So we verified that his finger does work to unlock the phone. At some time in the past he had trained that phone to his fingerprint.

“He asked which of the many little app icons on the phone I use, and I mentioned Lyft. Then he wanted to get Lyft working. So I used his iMac to go to Lyft.com (the virus scanner was still plugging away) and it asks for your phone#. When I put in the number of his iPhone, it said, “Is that you, Joseph?” So he has had a Lyft account for some time. Which he didn’t remember getting.

“Then Lyft asks for his email. It doesn’t recognize his current email. I ask, did you ever have a different email. Yes, years ago. I put in that years-ago email and bingo, now Lyft knows him. So I edit his Lyft account to show his current email, and his current credit card number.

“So in principle he is set up to use Lyft. I would not expect him to be able to actually use the Lyft app without guidance, but the mechanism is there.”

Such is tech squad life.

Monday 06/12/2023

Have a bit of gout in my left big toe, limping all day. At 9am it was time for the Resident Association meeting. David G did his usual good job of running a hybrid zoom meeting. There were maybe 60 people in the auditorium, and he reported, 40 on zoom. In the open discussion period, David G vented about how so many people like to watch on zoom “in their jammies” instead of coming to the real meeting. This provoked quite a bit of discussion on email later in the day.

Drove down to FOPAL and did the usual post-sale triage, sending all the books in my section that had survived four sale days, to the bargain room.

Hacked a little at the novel. Geez, fiction is hard. I remember when I discovered that for the first time, about 1985, when I spent a year trying to be a professional fiction writer. As various people have said in various words, writing is easy, you just sit down at a keyboard and open a vein.

Sunday 06/11/2023

Nothing much today. At 11 I went down to the museum and led the noon public tour. About 15 people. They were appreciative. One guy in particular buttonholed me after and said he found my talk fascinating. Nice.

I could have gone to the Stanford baseball game but did not, still pissed at them giving the game away last night. I’m watching it instead on ESPN2, where I see that in the 6th Stanford is up 5-2, exactly like last night. We’ll see if they can hold it this time.

Oh, I tried out that briliant idea I had during the game yesterday, to improve the novel. It wasn’t brilliant after all, didn’t work.

Saturday 06/10/2023

In the morning I walked out to the farmers market and indulged myself, buying a few of what smelled like ripe apricots, a couple of seedless mandarin oranges, a gigantic bran muffin and my favorite, a chocolate hazelnut swirl. Toted all those back and ate portions of each for lunch. (The apricots were only so-so but possibly with a couple of days they may get better.)

Then off to the baseball, this is a “super regional” between Texas and Stanford to see which will go to the CWS. Stanford screwed the pooch. They were cruising along nicely going into the ninth inning leading 5-2. Noticing a few people heading for the exits, I said to the person next to me, “If this was the majors, I’d leave too. But this is the college game and anything can happen.” Stanford proceeded to prove me right. All they had to do was get three outs in the top of the ninth for the win. Instead by some poor pitching and a nightmarish dropped ball in the outfield, they let Texas plate five runs. Then they went down 1-2-3 in the bottom of the ninth, losing 5-7.

Plus, despite using the 20-second pitch clock, it still took 3:30 to play a nine-inning game, and by the time I got home, the dining room was closing. Which was not a problem because I still had all my market goodies, plus the rest of the ciabatta loaf from yesterday.

During the boring moments of the game I was writing bits of dialog for the novel on my phone, and got a hot flash of how to make a dramatic improvement. I think. I will explore tht idea tomorrow. So the game wasn’t a total loss, although it confirmed for me that I will not renew my Stanford baseball season tix next year.

Back home I’m looking at various of the Youtube video channels I follow; one is a guy building a boat in Port Townsend WA. And he was promoting the annual wooden boat festival there in September, the weekend of 9/8-10. And it sounded neat and I decided dang it, I haven’t gone anywhere in three years, I’m going to that. So I did the familiar travel booking round that I haven’t done since 2020, securing a hotel, a rental car, and a flight. Just went ahead and did it, before I could have too many second thoughts.

Friday 06/09/2023

No actual fries were harmed in the filming of this day. I went for the standard walk. Intending to have a cup ‘n a cake at the end, but there was a long line at Verve and none of the other places appealed so I didn’t. So I was watching a YT video and someone on it was having a fresh loaf of bread for supper and I said, yes! that’s lunch!. So back out in the car this time to pick up a few things including a fresh ciabatta loaf from Whole Foods. Also a little melon and some apricots. The apricots were disappointing, and I tossed them, but the melon was tasty and I ate it with about a third of the loaf and butter.

Supper was also in my room. Yesterday’s supper had among its 3 entrees, liver and onions. I was sitting with three neighbors, Edie, Joanne and Sherri. I said, oh boy liver and onions. Edie and Joanne simultaneously wrinkled their noses and said eewwww. Sherri said oh, yeah, that’s what I’m having. So it was 50-50 liver lovers and haters. Anyway the portion was quite large and I didn’t finish so I brought it home in a box and that was supper today. A liver sandwich. I chopped that chunk of liver fine on my cutting board with my chef’s knife, which except for cutting the ciabatta earlier had been in the drawer for months, and made a sandwich with lots of mayo and sriracha sauce for zing and pickle slices. And a beer and the remaining half of the melon. So that was two gourmet meals.

Put in a little work on the novel. Got some difficult dialog that I’ve been stalled on for a couple days, done. This was the chatter among HS students on a bus, speculating ignorantly about the possible alien vessel that’s in the news. I had ChatGPT write some dialog a couple of days ago. What I wrote today is nothing like what the chatbot wrote. But a lot more pungent. Because people tell me that students these days say “fuck” a lot, like really, a lot. ChatGPT didn’t use a single swear word of any kind.

Thursday 06/08/2023

First thing in the morning, reading my email, I see an announcement of an event on the 11th floor for Saturday the 17th. I check the AV calendar — no such event. Because I’ve dealt with a couple of these lately, I write a snarky public reply telling the person to file an event planning form.

Later she replies, she did file one weeks ago. I check later and, um, yeah, she had. Back in the period when all the EPFs were going in my spam folder. Oh dear. I publish a sincere apology.

Tidy the apartment and off to Shustek for one more full day of organizing Sandy Fraser’s papers. The stuff I was filing today was memos and correspondence and long technical memoranda as he was trying to bring AT&T into the internet age. He was pushing a scheme for delivering telephone service over data lines, and a lot of abortive attempts to design hardware and software protocols for “home networking”. It looks like I can probably finish the last boxes of those papers in one more day of work, next week.

Thanks to WordPress’s horrible editor eating my schoolwork, I didn’t get to mention that yesterday evening, I showed myself the first Star Wars film (“Episode IV: A New Hope” is the official title). I have it in mind that when we get our promised new projector and screen, I will show the first three films. So I bought off eBay a set of those three in Ultra 4K Blu-Ray format. Turns out my DVD player can’t load the Ultra version, but it also came with a standard Blu-Ray version and that, on my new LG TV, looked absolutely great. I turned up the sound and watched the whole thing, I think for the first time since I saw it in a theater in London in 1978. What a great movie. And so many little bits of dialog have made their way into everyday use. Not just “Use the Force, Luke” but phrases like “These are not the Droids you are looking for,” and “Let the Wookie win.”

Wednesday 06/07/2023

Nothing on the calendar today. Took the Benchmark Walk in the morning, felt fine.

Paid a couple of bills and did the end-of-month entries in the Nest Egg spreadsheet. I’m down about 5% on the year. This is not an issue in any way, merely an observation.

Also did a little actual writing on the novel. Getting a little momentum, although there is a huge fog bank ahead that my plot runs into and I can’t see where it will come out.

I used ChatGPT4 for a little inspiration. I want to write some chatter among students on a schoolbus, to illustrate how excited people get about the sighting of what might be an alien ship entering the solar system, and also to illustrate wrong-headed or silly conceptions they might have. So I gave ChatGPT a paragraph on the situation and told it to pretend to be high school students and talk about this. It was very willing to do that, rambling on for pages. None of it will get in the book but there are some ideas in what it said.

Anyway, what I thought was remarkable came at the end. Just on a whim, I ended the conversation by typing,

ta mate

And it instantly responded, “You are very welcome. Ask any further questions you like.”

I find that remarkable. That wasn’t programmed in; it recognized that UK-ism for “thanks, buddy” and responded appropriately. I can totally see how it makes people think it’s sentient.

Fucking WordPress editor just destroyed a post I spent an hour on. You would have loved it, but it is g.o.n.e. gone. Seriously. 500 words and 6 pictures. Disappeared without a trace.

Below find what I wrote for the writers meeting today. The subject was “my generation.” Click in it and scroll.

Monday 06/05/2023

Took the standard walk; it went fine. Saw a Lucid parked on Alma street, looking a bit dirty and neglected which is odd for a very expensive car.

At 10 I went down to the auditorium to set up for a Book Talk. The speaker was Nancy who is a very smart and together type, and she gave a terrific talk. Really interesting, about her work in enhancing women’s rights (which are human rights, she reminded us).

I had recorded the talk, not via Zoom but just direct from our camera and sound system into my #2 Macbook. After lunch I put together the final version of it which will be available at this link for a few days at least until it is moved to our Vimeo channel.

As an A/V event it came off quite well. I learned a lesson, though. At 10:45, with about 6 people in the room, I set Nancy up with her mic, and set the level to what seemed like plenty loud. But when she actually started talking at 11am, with about 70 people in the seats, people yelled, “Speak up! Can’t hear!”. Human bodies act like acoustic tiles and just soak up sound. So before the event, set the mic levels “too high” to have it come out right when the audience is in their seats.

That was about it for the day.

Sunday 06/04/2023

Didn’t do much today. Decided to get ahead of the game at FOPAL because I’m busy tomorrow morning, so I spent 2:30 there. Back home, lazed about the rest of the day.