Spent the day at the Shustek center, once again sorting through and storing the papers of Sandy Fraser. Here’s my luxurious work space.
That’s box number 19 (of 42) that’s open. I take out the next folder. Copy its label, if it has one, onto the top edge of an archival-quality folder. If it isn’t labeled, look at the contents and try to figure out what they are, and write something on the edge of the folder. Transfer the contents into the new folder and stack in the archival box. That’s new box #15 being filled. It really isn’t boring, it’s kind of fun figuring out what Sandy was up to in 1985 or whenever. He was trying to steer AT&T into the world of the Internet when the Internet was new. Attending conferences and giving talks and publishing papers in the IEEE Communications and so on.
In the evening I worked the AV desk for a concert. This was “Steve Gill and friends.” Steve has performed here a number times. The “friends” are a buddy that plays guitar and a younger woman who sings. (Sings very well, actually.) Tonight they were doing the songs of Johnny Mercer. “I remember you” and “One more for my baby” and so on.
Took the standard walk. On return, I took the car out to Ducky’s Car Wash to get it looking nice for the excursion planned for Saturday. Gonna have 3 women in the car, it has to be clean, right?
After lunch I shot pictures of the completed Sting Ray. I’ll drop a couple in here. Then I started collecting pictures for the next set of exhibits in my hallway gallery. This is going to be pictures of flowers, because why be unconventional when you can be boring, right? Anyway some flower pics from various trips. Over the years I have, with some level of consistency, put keywords on the images that I saved.
I used to do this with Adobe Bridge, a very nice DAM (“digital asset manager”, fancy term for “app to keep track of a bazillion images”). Then Adobe, curse their money-grubbing souls, killed that product. No problem, the app still ran — until MacOS moved up to 64-bit binaries and won’t run 32-bit ones. So Adobe Bridge can’t be run on a modern OS and Adobe won’t upgrade it. And the current equivalent in the Adobe line is only obtained with an annual subscription because Adobe, may their bits all rot, don’t sell software any more, they only rent it.
OK, breathe. In… Out… There now. We don’t need Adobe any more, remember? We have Affinity Photo for image editing, and we have ACDSee for managing the collection. So I brought up ACDSee and told it “find all images with the keyword ‘flower’ or ‘blossom’ please” and it did. Scrolled through a couple hundred candidates and picked 20 that really stood out.
Tonight I’m going to an event at the Computer Museum, the 50th anniversary of the Alto, the first computer with a graphical interface. I’ll write that up tomorrow maybe.
Did the gym machines. Did A/V support work, checking out the new mics and ordering more accessories, also sent reminder email to Gwen, Martha and Jean about our excursion this Saturday. Then it was time for the writers meeting; once again I had nothing. But so did the majority, the cue didn’t resonate with anybody much.
Then down to FOPAL for 2:30 working on my section, processing 5 boxes and rearranging the shelves a bit. In the evening we had a sing-along in the lobby. My voice sucks, I have no range at all.
Took the standard walk for the first time in a while. Stopped on the way to pick up prescriptions at CVS. After a bit of rest I headed out to FOPAL where I found a massive pile of donations. I processed half of them; I’ll have to go back tomorrow.
Got back in time to meet with Bert on the 11 floor to review the new microphone setup. We decided to wait until we use them in an event, before buying more sets. The next event on the 11th floor is on 5/2.
Went to a concert in the auditorium in the evening, classical music with violin and piano. Left early. Not my thing.
After my Sunday religious rituals — i.e. reading the Sunday paper, watering the plants, and doing the NYT crossword — I sat down at my beautifully clean desk to do some video editing.
I have been unhappy with the quality of the videos we make from our lecture series. (They are all available to the public on our Vimeo Channel.) Basically we have taken the recording that Zoom makes by default of the meeting, trimmed off any dead air at the ends, and threw it up on Vimeo.
Recently I found a set of options on Zoom that cause it to save multiple different video streams: one of the speaker alone, and a separate one of any shared content (e.g. powerpoint slides). So this was done for a really interesting talk last week about Artificial Intelligence. The speaker really knew his stuff and presented well, and I thought I could make a good video using the separate streams.
So I downloaded them to my big screen iMac and opened iMovie and set to work. Immediately hit a snag: I didn’t know how to get iMovie to cut back and forth between two streams. I knew this is something people do. You shoot the same interview with two (or more) cameras, and there has to be a way to smoothly cut from one camera to another, without losing sync with the sound.
Well, if you don’t know how to do something, there is only one place to go. No, not ChatGPT, not yet. I refer to YouTube. It took a little searching but I found a good YT tutorial on how to do exactly what I wanted. Then over a couple of hours, I made a video that mostly shows the speaker talking, but cuts smoothly to his slide whenever that is needed to let the viewer read the details. It isn’t up on the Vimeo channel as I write, but soon will be.
At 1:30 it was time to join the carpool of Channing House fans of the Pear Theater, to attend the Sunday matinee of “Pear Slices”. That’s an annual festival of short, new dramatic works by local authors. Not a skit show, these are serious one-acts. Of the ten (ten!) short plays, several were funny or thought-provoking. Some were duds, but that’s how it goes.
First activity today was to unbox and try out the new microphone system that I ordered after that shopping frenzy of 4.139. I ordered it on Wednesday and it arrived Friday morning. It turned out to be quite nice, very respectable build quality and decent sound. I plugged it into our portable amplifier and it worked immediately. I have to order a couple of more cables and doo-dads to have a complete system, and I need to try it out in another location. If all is good I may order two more copies.
At 10 I went down to set up the auditorium for a major event, the memorial for Lily Loh. Lily and her sister Helen moved in about the time I did. Lily especially was a well-known character, always bubbly-cheerful with a loud and frequent laugh. She died quite suddenly and two weeks ago. Helen and Lily’s son Derek had set up quite an impressive memorial. They had reserved the whole auditorium and had it set up with tables to seat, oh, I guess close to 100 people. Our Facilities people can do this kind of thing, completely rearrange the place and make a dozen large tables appear, if given enough warning. And Dining Services set up a whole service with hot trays of Chinese food — I’m pretty sure it was done in our kitchen, not brought in — fried rice, broccoli beef, garlic chicken, etc., plus drinks including wine. Well, I imagine they charged the family for the wine. There was probably a charge for all of it, but point being, it was all set up and executed in-house.
My small part in this was to turn on the system and set up microphones, and help Derek connect his laptop to the system to show a very nice slide show he had put together on a loop, with Spotify playing a collection of Lily’s favorite songs, mostly 50s R&R. A niece of Lily’s was the emcee and did an excellent job, keeping people on point and moving along.
It all finally wrapped up around 1:30 and I could put all my gear away. About 12 my phone had popped up an alert. Because I have my tickets in my “wallet” app, it wanted to tell me that I had a Stanford Baseball game at 2:05. Well heck, why not. Their season is well under way and I haven’t been to a game yet, and it was a beautiful day outside. So, off to the ball park.
Stanford wasn’t doing very well, down 0-3 after 3 innings against UW, And I started yawning, I came on home for a nap. For supper I had the remains of my fish and chips that I had brought home after Friday’s outing.
At 7:15 I picked up Patty and we went to a play. I have maintained my two-seat season ticket to the Bus Barn theater. I put out a notice last week on email, “anyone want to go with me to Harold and Maude?” and Patty was first to reply. While we were sitting down there was a tap on my shoulder and there were Scott and June! I had no idea they were Bus Barn patrons.
We debated about H&M on the way home. Maude is the distillation of the 60s and teaches depressed young Harold how to really live his life. It was very well acted by all parties and pretty funny in spots. We thought it went on a bit too long. I thought there were gaping holes in Maude’s philosophy that made it impractical without a very special combination of virtues, but Patty thought it worked.
I had to kill time until 10am so I cleaned up the desk, putting away all my model-making crap in the closet, then I got out the spray cleaner and the Lemon Pledge and made it all nice again.
I have a plastic display case coming for the Corvette.
The big event today was to go for a drive with some neighbors. Neighbor Phil had an out of town visitor, an old buddy named Ken, and he wanted to take him for lunch at a favorite seafood place, Barbara’s Fish Trap in Princeton-by-the-Sea, over by Half Moon Bay. But Phil gave up his car some time ago. He’d asked Patty to drive them but she didn’t want to and asked me to do it. So, Phil and Ken and Patty and I went off in the Prius.
We drove up Page Mill and down Alpine Road and Pescadero Road, and then up the coast on 1. The lunch was fine. We came back by 92, and Cañada road. There, just because, we stopped at the Pulgas Water Temple.
After we returned there was just time for a nap and then it was time to help out with the 6th floor TGIF. As I’ve mentioned each month a different floor hosts a TGIF party and this was our turn. It came off very nicely. Lots of people crowded into the 11th floor penthouse drinking wine and eating snacks and talking. I was supposed to be a host and circulate, which I did, and completely forgot to take a picture.
At 10 this morning I was to lead a private tour. The group was, from the volunteer job website, “14 students from the University of Georgia Black Business Student Association & CHM donor Greg Gretsch.” They were mostly college soph and junior levels, and various majors, not all business, as their leader Greg told me. Greg also told me that this was the second year he had brought such a group, and said “Last year the docent they gave us, I forget his name, was fan-tastic.”
Way to set the expectation level, Greg. I don’t know if I was fan-tastic but I don’t think I bored anybody.
Then I didn’t have much to do until 4pm when I had scheduled the monthly A/V team meeting. Which went off smoothly.
Oh, yeah, finished the Corvette model. I will take some pictures tomorrow, I don’t want to disturb it until the glue under the door handles has hardened. No, not tomorrow; tomorrow gonna be killer busy. Saturday.
So busy I didn’t even have time to work on the model. Started the laundry and went for a short walk during the first load. Then finished the laundry while reading email.
Bert had written about the illegal microphones. The wireless mics we use on the 11th floor are 20 years old and are actually illegal by FCC rules. Plus one broke down a couple weeks ago. Wireless mics have two parts, the mic itself which is a transmitter, and a little base station receiver. Bert’d been looking online and yes, you can get a nice Shure base station with two mics for around $700 but there are also a slew of Chinese-made knock-offs at around $100. So we could have new, legal, mics for under $300 total, which is a sum that we can definitely come up with, from the gift shop or the resident association funds.
But that sent me into a major web rabbit-hole trying to find the “right” cheap mic setups. The ones he’d found had a couple of issues I didn’t like. So at least 2 hours of the day, off and on, went into browsing Amazon and B&H and such.
In between I took two tech calls, one to Florrie which turned out to be a wireless keyboard that was disabled. The other was to Pam, who wants to get the PBS Passport streaming service on her Samsung smart TV. We wasted a good 45 minutes in the miserable Samsung user interface proving that her 2017 model TV did not support the PBS app. Then I had to spend 20 minutes with my own brand new TV, ending up learning that PBS doesn’t have an app for the LG sets although they plan to someday.
Then it was time to go down and set up a microphone for the people to use who were running the monthly birthday dinner. A little bit of time free and then it was 6pm and I had been invited by Gloria to have dinner with her and tonight’s lecture speaker, Kirk Hanson. (Follow the link for his very impressive resume.) Also there were Edie, who had served with Kirk on some Santa Clara County committees, and Joan, who was a classmate of his in 5th-7th grades in Houston, back in the early 50s.
Hanson’s talk, on the ethics of artificial intelligence, was really quite well done. He is very up on the subject, knows all the players and the problems, and presented it well.
Did the gym machine round. Had the writers meeting. I didn’t contribute anything.
At 1pm I met with Derek Loh, son of my late neighbor Lily Loh, about A/V for his mother’s memorial this coming Saturday. It turned out, to my relief, that they don’t want to do a Zoom meeting after all. He wants to put a slide show up on the big screen from his laptop. We practiced that, it is a very simple process. And they need a couple of mics so people can reminisce about Lily. He plans to record the proceedings on a GoPro camera of his own.
I treated myself to supper out at a local restaurant: Red Curry Duck at Indochine, one of my favorite dishes. Naturally one order is enough for two so I brought home enough for another meal.
Before and after supper I put some finishing bits on the stingray. All that is left to do is to install the windshield wipers and the door handles, and give it a final polish.
