Monday 07/18/2022

Went for the walk in the morning. Back in plenty of time for the 10:30 Event Committee meeting to go over the August calendar. Long meeting.

Grabbed a bite and headed out to FOPAL where I processed 5 boxes of books. They didn’t look promising to me, but in fact I found quite a stack, 7 or 8, that priced out over $25 and went to the High Value group. Another 15 or so onto the shelves.

At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s Open Meeting. She had a staff person go over some of the more common internet scams. We’ve had a couple of people who lost significant money to scams, so this was to alert us all. Like: no government agency or commercial company will ever ask you to buy gift cards.

Sunday 07/17/2022

Three things were on the schedule for today. Two ended up canceled.

I was signed up to lead a private tour at 1:30, 30 students from Santa Clara U, split between me and curator Dag Spicer. Then at 4:30, neighbor Gloria is giving a talk about her grandfather, Thomas Foon Chew, who founded and ran a large and successful fruit canning business in this area around the turn of the 20th century. Finally, I had a ticket for a TheatreWorks show in Mountain View at 7:30.

So I put on my red shirt and off to the Museum around 12 with a stop to pick up some drinks for my fridge. When I go in around 1pm, I find some confusion. There’s a group of college-looking people hanging around the lobby and their leader asks me, would I know where their docent is? Probably me, I say, are you from Santa Clara?

Yes, it turns out. They are early, ready to go at 1pm, and not 30 but fewer than 20. So fine, I’ll take the tour and Dag can have the afternoon off. Just let me find him. He is not visible and the front desk staff know he’s around but not where. I get myself ready to lead a tour, with my little loudspeaker on my belt and so forth, and Dag shows up along with a different docent, Lowell. For some reason, Lowell had decided to work this tour, and he and Dag had been having lunch together. Now, I had signed up to do the tour, and Lowell had not. I’m not at all sure how he got involved, or why he hadn’t signed up properly. If he had signed up, I’d not have, the sign-up system would have told me the slot was filled. But, he and Dag seemed to have things well in hand, so without making any visible display of my annoyance, I cheerily said “looks like you have it covered then,” and I left.

David G was the lead on the 4:30 talk. As a demonstration of just how insanely complicated it is to do a hybrid zoom, even though we’ve done it a number of times, he started setting up before 3:30 and at 4:15 we were still fucking around with getting stuff working. Today it was the ceiling camera that didn’t work. The one piece of the system that has always just worked, took a holiday today. So we couldn’t use that to show Gloria talking to the zoom audience. Instead we set up David’s iPhone on a stand, signed it in to Zoom, and pointed it at the podium. Oh and Gloria came in at 4:10 with a revised set of powerpoint slides on a memory stick, “can we use this one please”. I like and respect this Stanford Economics Professor Emerita, but really…

Anyway, Gloria’s talk mostly went off smoothly. The slide clicker that works via USB didn’t work right, or seemed to fail, occasionally. Not sure if that was hardware or operator error. Since the clicker’s USB dongle that you plug into the computer just emulates left and right arrow keys, it could be that the keyboard focus wasn’t in the powerpoint window. One more weak link in the chain.

The play, I learned yesterday evening from Patty, was canceled. I just about remember getting an email to that effect weeks ago, but I never took the event off my google calendar or took the ticket out of the Events folder in my desk. So instead, dinner with Stew (who organizes this series of talks) and wife Kathy, Gloria, Tom and Nancy.

Saturday 7/16/2022

Went out for a bit of a walk and to buy my usual Saturday indulgent pastry at the market.

At 3pm I was to project a movie, which I did using my newer MacBook. That almost turned into a disaster when I messed up something just as the movie was starting. But I recovered.

The movie that Karen (the movie event manager) had chosen was The Father, Anthony Hopkins playing an old man whose memory is going all wonky and Olivia Coleman as his desperate daughter. We experience what he does, a life in which things keep changing, and nothing is quite the same from yesterday to today. It was very affecting and Hopkins’ performance is stunning.

Friday 07/15/2022

Went for the standard walk first thing, all good. Then at 10am I met David G. in the auditorium with all our computers. We set up the all the computers as we had them for the RA meeting last Monday, when we were fighting nasty feedback the whole time.

David G worked on the problem we had switching between multiple different PowerPoint files, from the meeting agenda, to the Gift Shop presentation, back to the agenda, to another presenter’s slides etc. I suggested combining all the slides into one file. David G who knows PowerPoint better than I, had a different plan, using links between files. He was able to demonstrate that working, so good.

Meanwhile the feedback was back and I found the cause. Actually re-discovered it, because when I found it, I remembered having made the same discovery months ago. That was, that on a Mac at least, the Zoom app overrides the mute key on the keyboard. Just hitting the mute key normally mutes sound output, but Zoom ignores it. To make a Mac on Zoom silent, you have to go into the Zoom audio settings and stifle it there. When I did that on all the three Macs we were using, the feedback disappeared.

It was a great relief to understand the problem that stumped everybody (see 3.221). Later in the day, working alone, I solved another long-standing problem. It has been a disappointment that my expensive new MacBook Pro with the Apple M1 silicon, couldn’t talk to the projector in the auditorium. Actually, it could, but after three seconds, the projector would go black. Googling around for ideas it occurred to me to connect to the projector, not using the built-in HDMI jack as seems natural, but through a USB port via a USB-to-HDMI adapter. Why put two hardware conversions in the path? It isn’t sensible, but I hoped it would make the MacOS software do something (anything!) different. And it did! Going through USB-to-HDMI, the Mac drove the projector perfectly, no flicker, no going black, just a nice steady image.

At 4pm I went to a “Tech Parliament” that Bert, head of the Tech Squad, had called to discuss various issues. We talked about what to do with the 10th floor computer room. This is an open room with a couple of PCs, a couple of iMacs, and various printers. Bert services this room daily, putting paper and ink in the printers and cleaning up computer desktops, and is frustrated by the lack of care residents show. There was a tentative offer from IT staff that they take it over. Although the assembled nerds were all very dubious that IT staff has the bandwidth to do this right, we voted to let them try.

There were a couple of other issues but they were confidential until officially announced so I won’t put them here. Had a pleasant dinner with the Allens and the Beelers.

Thursday 07/14/2022

Out the door at 8 for a medical appointment: a routine “wellness checkup” as the social security codes it, formerly a “physical”. Dr. Marx was as nice as ever, and was very pleased with my condition. The kidney cyst seems to be stable in the last couple of scans I’ve had so that is not an issue. She recommended a dermatology checkup, my last was in 2019.

Back home and then out again for a run to the City. I took Caltrain and Lyft to get to SFJazz at Hayes and Franklin. I have tickets to concerts on two successive nights, July 29 and 30 and wanted to check out the parking options and the eating options. My old favorite casual eating place has closed, but there are numerous other decent-looking places that will be open. And the Performing Arts garage is convenient. On previous trips to SFJazz I have parked in an on-street lot, but with car break-ins becoming so common in SF, I would rather park in an enclosed garage.

Back home by 3:30 and I got a tech squad dispatch. Ann turned on her 10-year-old Samsung TV and heard a loud “pop” noise, and the screen stayed black. Pop is not a good noise. I looked at it an gave it last rites. The TV had some working electronics, its pilot light glowed and flickered when you gave it a command from the remote, but it didn’t do anything. No menu, no picture, nothing. So I helped her measure the hutch she keeps the TV in, it is barely big enough for a 40-inch one, and told her to shop best buy.

Wednesday 07/13/2022

This turned out to be a less busy day than I expected. I had been booked to lead a private tour at the museum at 1:30. So I started the laundry, went for a walk, came back and finished the laundry around 10:30. Changed in to my red docent shirt and got my stuff together for that. Then I got an email: sorry, the Facebook group have canceled their tour at the last minute, sorry for the late notice. So I got my afternoon back.

Had lunch and puttered around. Went over the body and hood pieces of the Studebaker, filing and sanding off mold marks and trimming edges so everything fits nicely. Puttered in my garden for a bit.

At 4:30 it was time for the 6th floor monthly meeting. This time we had CEO Rhonda as a guest. She has been attending floor meetings for the past two months, has two floors to go. The purpose is to review the several items off the last satisfaction survey that scored low, where people on average were not satisfied with Channing House. Some of us had heard that she had a rather rough time on another floor, and several of us resolved that we’d treat her nicely on the 6th floor. Which we did, although serious issues were addressed quite freely.

Every floor meeting the floor reps (who are now Carolyn and Edie, replacing Jerry) reserve tables in the dining room, so we moved on to dinner as a group. I had to eat quickly because I wanted to leave at 6:30 for a concert on the campus.

This was the annual Ruth Davies Blues Night for the Stanford summer jazz festival, this year with Shemekia Copeland. It was a fun concert, very good musicians, just solid blues and soul. It seemed to short at just over an hour, and to my surprise, no encore.

Tuesday 07/12/2022

First thing this morning I walked over to University ave and picked up a prescription at CVS. The first planned activity this morning was the writers meeting at 10:45, but about 10 Rich, one of my AV volunteers, called from the auditorium, needing a bit of a consult on an upcoming meeting. I was able to resolve his issue. Then the writers meeting was fun, several entertaining little essays.

Next up I drove to Safeway and bought a 10 pound sack of sugar for the hummingbirds. After months of refilling a single feeder every 3-4 days, we are now at the peak with half a dozen birds emptying two feeders in less than a day.

On to FOPAL where I finished culling old books out of my section and processed another two boxes.

Next was what I was looking forward to: a trip to a hobby store. After spending at least three hours online over the last couple of days, I have figured out which spray paints most closely match my memory of Gary Pierce’s father’s 1953 Studebaker. I’m convinced it was two-tone maroon and gray. It looked like this,

…except imagine the pistachio green on that car is maroon instead. Months ago I picked up a 53 studebaker kit and I’m going to build it next.

Parenthetically, that is going to be a bitch of a kit to build well. There are so many little details… Look at the top of the rear fender, see that chrome rail? On the model, that is cast into the fender, just a little raised ridge about 1/16 of an inch high. How to make that look like chrome is a major issue. Or the chrome trim around the rear window or the drip rail.

Anyway the first step is to paint the body shell, and that means, finding the right color of spray paint. There is a great online resource where you can see the actual Studebaker paint chips. All I have to do is find a match to “Coral Red” and “Olympic Gray”. After 3+ hours of online research as I said, I settled on two colors from a japanese hobby paint company, Mr. Color, which are sold by a local retailer in Redwood City. Which is where I went, but alas! Their door was locked and they say they are only doing business over the web. Their web page doesn’t say that, but what can you do.

Tomorrow will be just as busy but in a different way.

Monday 07/11/2022

First up this morning was the monthly Resident Association meeting. Since I’d written document on how to do a zoom simulcast, David G. who usually manages this event, asked me to come along and help. And between us we managed to botch things up pretty good. Somehow we had a nasty audio feedback thing happening that we couldn’t tame until half way through the event. Paul and Gerald from the IT department tried to help, even Vanessa the IT manager, and it was a bit reassuring that they couldn’t figure it out either.

Anyway, after that fiasco was over, I went down to FOPAL for the usual post-sale triage. Pretty much have to look at every book, and decide if its price should be reduced, or if it has been there through enough sales to give up on it. I got about halfway through and ran out of steam. I’ll go back tomorrow to finish.

Had a nice evening meal at a table for 6 with some of my favorite neighbors, just a pick-up group. Eva just back from her birth city of Prague, told us about that, etc.

Sunday 07/10/2022

After watering the plants and doing the Sunday puzzle I decided that (a) I needed a walk and (b) needed to check my section at FOPAL, to tidy it up before the second day of the sale weekend. Per Google maps it is 3.3 miles walking from here to there. So I took a Lyft down there. My section was surprisingly neat, not the usual disorder left by shoppers. Which doesn’t speak well for the sale weekend.

Then I walked back. I stopped in Midtown about 10am and had a protein (mostly) breakfast, ham omelet and OJ. So fair amount of exercise, and a filling brunch, so I skipped lunch.

At 1:30 I joined Patty who drove us to the Pear theater to see Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. It was, um, interesting. In the first act, a 92-year old woman who is not all there mentally, reminisces about her life to a caretaker and a young legal aid. Although she’s mixed up about a lot of things, you get a fairly clear outline of her biography. Albee, and the actress, are mercilessly exact in perfectly reproducing the quarrelsome, crochety speech patterns of a once-powerful woman with failing faculties.

In the second act the old woman has had a stroke and is a comatose dummy in bed, while the same three actors now take on her persona at ages 26, 52, and 78, and argue over the phases of her life, when she was happiest, or if she was every happy at all. The actors were excellent in what must be very demanding roles. Not a comfortable play to sit through.

Saturday 07/09/2022

Pretty much all I did today was to go to the Museum and lead the noon tour. Started with about 30 people, still had more than 20 at the end, and got a nice round of applause. The rest of the day I just lazed around, reading and watching youtube videos.

Not eating bonbons, though. I’m off carbs. Again. A couple of months ago I dieted my way down to below 163. (June 1, 161.8, I have it right there in my vitals spreadsheet.) Then I stopped dieting and over the following month, day by day creep creep creep, my weight went up again (July 9, 167.2). Was I indulging in candy and cookies and beer and stuff? Not really, although several times I did have ice cream for dessert after dinner. So anyway, I’m not exactly dieting, but I am eschewing carbolicious food, trying to eat just fats and protein and veg.