In the morning I walked over to the farmers market, in part to hear the Peninsulaires, the men’s harmony singing group that my neighbor Bert belongs to, who were being the free music act at the market. I also bought a pastry of course, and another one plus some cherries for lunch.
At 3pm I was the AV support for showing a movie in the auditorium. The movie was Cruella, with Emma Stone and Emma Thompson having a diva face-off. (Note, I do not select the movies.) I was all excited thinking the younger one was the Hermoine from Harry Potter, but no that is Emma Watson you dummy. The movie was scheduled for 3pm, so I showed a 1952 MovieTone newsreel at 2:30 followed by a Three Stooges short. (I have no shame.) It’s really easy; takes like 2 minutes to lower the screen and set up the projector to mirror the screen of a laptop. Then you have the whole world of youtube to choose from. I would like to show a Loony Tunes cartoon, but the ones I find on YT are really crap low-res transfers. The movie is a CD from Netflix, which I play from an external CD player.
For supper I walked up to The Creamery and had a sandwich and shake. Completing a very pleasant day.
Went for a walk. Fiddled around with the car model and reading. At 4:30 went to the TGIF. Everybody’s wedding pictures were adorable as expected. Then to the auditorium to turn on the system and supply mics to three entertainers who performed a concert/reading of the Irish immegrant experience at Ellis Island. Too ra loo ra loo ra. They were nice people.
A lightly-scheduled day, yay. I had several hours free and wasn’t sure what to do, other than to start gluing the t-bird windshield into its frame. Then I was reminded by a conversation in the elevator, that there is a TGIF party tomorrow, and as a gimmick the organizers are urging everyone to bring a wedding picture to show. Do I have any wedding pictures? I was pretty sure I did, I could mentally picture one in particular, but when I checked the digital archive of scanned pictures, I couldn’t find it.
Well, ok, I have two bankers boxes of memorabilia preserved from the old house. I pull them out and look. Aha, there is an album. Probably prepared for us by my mother — it looks like her work. Big photo album with thick paper pages. Definitely not archival quality, the pages are already brown and brittle. Well, “already”? It has been almost exactly 50 years since December 1972. The snapshots that were carefully archived in it have suffered a bit from their environment, showing some fading. However, there is the one that I remembered.
There was another very nice shot that I do not remember. Somebody at our reception was shooting black and white. (Possibly the Snows?)
Anyway, I got all these pics scanned. It was easy to restore the faded color of the snapshots. I put the actual pics in a baggy and put them back in the memorabilia box.
And now it was nearly noon. Right on the dot of noon, Scott rolled up in his BMW and we were off to Oakland to have lunch with Tom. Nice lunch talking about old times. We came back the scenic route, through the City and down 280. And that was the day.
Today is laundry day, but I had things coming up in the usual 10-2 slot so I bopped down the hall to the laundry room and yes! nobody has claimed the 8-12 times, so I slid my markers up, and quickly sorted my two loads, and started one going. Then out for a walk.
By the time I’m back that load is long finished and I can start the second. I set a 40 minute timer on the phone and spend the time polishing the damaged windshield on the t-bird. First wet-sanding the clear plastic with 1200 grit to smooth out the pock marks left by the cement that I clumsily smeared on it. That makes the clear windshield all matte finish of course. Then wet-sanding with 2400, then 3200, then 4000, then 6000 and finally 12000-grit. Each one takes off the scratches left by the prior one and leaves a finer and finer matte. After 12000 it is nearly clear.
At this point it turns out I’ve been hit with a washing machine problem. Others have complained about this but I hadn’t seen it. The machine stops with a couple of its LEDs flashing and the only way to clear it is to unplug it, plug it in, and start a new cycle. So I have to reset my 40-minute timer. Fold the dry load, then spend the rest of the time polishing the windshield about 6 times with two grades of model polish to make it clear.
Now I’m running up against the clock. I change from jeans and tee to my CHM Docent red shirt and nice trousers, then pick up the take-out lunch I ordered and eat it while the dryer runs. There’s no time to fold socks or hang shirts, I just pull the dry clothes into the basket and leave for the Museum.
I am to do the 2pm tour but there is a FOPAL zoom meeting at 1pm. I get to the museum at 1pm, and watch most of the meeting on my phone, sitting outside on the patio. At 1:45 I go in and start schmoozing with guests gathering for the tour.
The tour is over at 2:55 and I send them off to see the 3pm demo of the 1400. I head out the door and join another zoom session on the phone. This is a talk back here at CH, by Jim Gibbons, who is the Emeritus Dean of Engineering at Stanford. In 1957 he was a grad student and was tapped to work at Shockley Labs, learning how to make transistors from the people who were just then inventing how to make transistors, and then to set up a solid state device lab at Stanford. This gave him first-person insight into his title, “The Brief but Dramatic History of Shockley Labs”.
I wanted to hear this talk because this was a first-person account of the start of every damn thing, transistors, silicon valley, computers, all of it sprang from that one place and time. I got the very beginning of the talk on the phone and listened as I drove home. The audio broke up a little bit as I was walking through the basement. Then through the lobby, paused outside the door of the auditorium to end the zoom on the phone, and walked in and sat down to hear the rest in person. Slick! David M. was running the sound and zoom.
The talk was over at 4:15 so I could go upstairs, hang up my nice Docent clothes and change back to jeans. A few minutes to rest then I had to go back to the auditorium to hustle David M. out, where he was methodically putting everything away, so I could set up a couple of mics for the people who were doing the monthly Birthday Dinner at 5:15. They were having a sing-along with flute and ukulele accompaniment and wanted mics. I set them up, then up to my room to fold and hang my dry laundry and have a PBJ for my supper. At 6 I went down and put that equipment away, and my day was finally done.
Went for a shortish walk first thing. Then paid a bill and worked on the t-bird model for a bit. And screwed up the model, so annoying. I was assembling the windshield, molded from clear plastic, into its frame of chromed plastic. Had carefully dry-fitted, all checked out. So put on cement on the frame and tried to drop the window in, and missed, and got cement on the clear plastic. The cement melts the plastic so now there’s a big smear on the window. I set it aside to harden. Tomorrow I will use my set of graded fine sandpapers to sand it smooth and clear again. I hope.
Then I placed a call to a stranger, which I hate doing. Two neighbors, Patty and Lennie, had talked to this guy Dan at a Pear Theater gala party. He’s an AV and stage lighting guru and also the guy who plans and directs the fireworks display at Shoreline each year. And he has some history with Channing House. So Patty insists I should contact him for A/V advice. I called him and he was super nice and friendly and we had a good tech talk for about 20 minutes. I’ve booked him to come have lunch here and meet a few other of the AV group, in July. More when that happens.
Then I was late for an appointment with Lynn on the 10th floor, a tech squad call. Her problem was with her phone, she had replaced the house phone with Panasonic wireless phones. I couldn’t make any headway, I didn’t even know what to look for. Later Bert went and reported a real problem so at least I hadn’t missed anything obvious.
Then it was time for the 10:45 writers group. I had nothing to read. There were a couple of nice contributions.
I had lunch in the dining room and then drove to FOPAL where I found only two boxes of books to my surprise. Processed them and headed back. Was relaxing and almost asleep when neighbor Caroline called to remind me that we were scheduled to have dinner tonight. Ended up a party of five, very pleasant.
The monthly Residents Association meeting was scheduled for 9am today, and David G. had asked for my help running it, so no walk today. The meeting went off all right. Then I drove to FOPAL. This is the Monday after a sale weekend, and I expected to find a bunch of books to price, but they hadn’t brought out the sorted boxes that had been held the week before the sale. So all I had to do, and it was quite enough, was to clean up the shelves, count the books (84 sold) and check the remaining 300+ books to pick out ones that had been on the shelf for more than 5 sales, to send them to the bargain room. I then bought some groceries to stock my refrigerator.
Talking to Dennis later we set dates for a road trip, for mid-August.
Two events today. For the first I left at noon and drove to San Jose for a baby shower, for my niece Denise. Met with lots of relatives I don’t see often enough. Denise is probably the most competent and grounded member of the family, which is good.
From there I drove to Menlo Park for a house concert which I thought started at 3:30 but in fact didn’t start until 4, so I was early. I had not been to this house before, a very pleasant back yard surrounded by trees. The music was by Dirty Cello, which is really Rebecca Roudman and her husband. Rebecca plays cello, classic-style with local symphonies, and as Dirty Cello does rock, bluegrass and klesmer music. I took a really nice video of them doing “Orange Blossom Special”.
I first heard these two play on the street at a Palo Alto World Music Day back around 2014 or so, and I’ve seen them maybe five times since. (Sorry for the blurry picture. WordPress “optimized” the video down from 1080p to something like half that.)
Had a good lunch at the baby shower, and a couple snacks at the concert, so skipped supper.
Went out for coffee in the morning. Then put in a couple of hours on the 56 t-bird. It is getting close to done. Here is a dry fit of the main parts together.
I am very pleased with the quality of the decals they included in this kit. The dashboard detail is very good.
About 2:30 it was time to go and set up for an event, specifically a lecture by Steve Liston. He’s the son of two residents, and a former employee of the State Department, now working for an NGO. He had just attended the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and told us all about US policy (or lack of) toward South American states, and how vigorously the Chinese are cultivating commercial and diplomatic ties with those states.
My job was to run a zoom simulcast. This is really complicated and I almost screwed it up but did not, and it all came off very well in the end. Here’s the boring description.
I sit at the A/V desk to the right of the stage (technically it’s stage left but whatever). I have set up the room audio, I have put a lapel mic on the speaker and have two hand-held mics going, one for David G. to take around the room during question time, and one for me. The room audio also comes out of a monitor jack to a USB adapter.
I set up my older MacBook on the desk. It is the Zoom host machine. I connect its HDMI output to a jack for the big projector in the ceiling. So whatever is on the screen of the laptop is mirrored on the big projection screen at the back of the stage. What that will be is, the Zoom meeting window. Thus the local audience is basically looking at the zoom window, and also at the speaker who is standing at the podium stage right.
The output of the camera in the ceiling is brought to a USB adapter and plugs in to the laptop. In Zoom, I select this as my video. Thus the host’s thumbnail in Zoom is what the camera sees, and I operate the pan and zoom controls so it nicely frames the speaker’s podium. So zoom attendees can see the speaker. I change the name of this zoom user to “Speaker Cam” and I spotlight this user so that image is always at the top left for everybody.
I set the MacBook audio to output through the HDMI port, which means any audio out of the host machine will be heard in the room audio. I connect the room audio stream from the USB adapter to the MacBook, and in Zoom, select that as my mic input. Thus anything on room audio goes to Zoom as the “voice” of the host, AKA Speaker Cam. That will of course usually be the voice of our speaker over his lapel mic.
I put my iPhone in a holder on a tripod stage left, turned so its camera looks at the audience. I log in to Zoom from the phone and join the meeting, and change that user’s name to “Audience Cam”. Back at the zoom host machine, I spotlight that image, a wide-angle view of the audience, so it is always up next to the speaker’s image, for zoom users.
On a second MacBook I open the speaker’s slide deck. He’s given us a PDF, fine, open it with the Preview app. On this laptop I log in to zoom and join the meeting, under my own name. I insert into this laptop the USB dongle for the slide clicker, and put the clicker on the podium for the speaker to use. All this setup takes 45 minutes so now I have another hour to kill.
My neighbor Stew is in charge of this speaker series but he is visiting family in Ohio today, so he logs in to the meeting. I spotlight him so his image is next to the speaker’s. At 4:30 he introduces the speaker. By the magic of my setup, his voice in Zoom also comes out of the ceiling speakers in the auditorium. The local audience can see him and hear him. When he’s finished, and Steve is starting to speak, I remove the spotlight from Stew. On the second MacBook I “share my screen” with zoom, selecting the window with the speaker’s slides. The first slide now fills most of the screen for zoom users, and also fills most of the screen on stage.
The speaker talks. He’s a very practiced public speaker, smooth and informative. He uses the clicker to advance the slides, and by the magic of whatever, bluetooth?, the clicks go to the dongle on my 2nd laptop making it advance slides, for zoom and for the local audience.
About 15 minutes into the talk, a little message pops up in the corner of the host computer’s screen, a familiar sight to mac users: “Battery is low. Your Mac will sleep soon unless you attach the power adapter.” Oh. My. God. Mind you I had charged this mac to 100% at 2pm, and it’s a new battery. I assumed it was good for at least 8 hours and didn’t bring the adapter with me! Apparently connecting to all this crap uses battery really fast? No matter, in just minutes, the whole zoom meeting is going to be brutally terminated.
I exit the auditorium at a fast walk, to the elevator, to the 6th floor, jog down the hall to my room, grab the adapter out of the wall socket, jog back to the elevator, race-walk through the lobby to the auditorium, and unobtrusively (I hope) go behind the A/V desk and plug in the adapter. The zoom meeting is still running. The little warning disappears from the screen. Disaster averted!
At 5:10 Steve’s ready for questions so I un-share the slides. Most of the screen is now filled with the speaker cam and audience cam images. David G. carries the mic around the room for questions locally. A few people in the zoom audience (of about 45 people) “raise” their electronic hands, and I unmute each one in turn so they can ask their questions. At 5:35 Stew comes back on to thank the speaker and wrap up. Event over!
It takes ten minutes to tidy everything up and shut down. After I put my gear back in my room, I go down and join the Liston family for dinner.
Another day with no requirements. I went for the walk in the morning. I promised myself I could stop at the Verve coffee shop at the end. Unfortunately when I got there, the line was about 20 people long. I didn’t feel like waiting. Oddly there are no other coffee shops near my route. Well, there is the University avenue Starbucks, but it is a really unpleasant place, dark and literally sticky-looking. Maybe one other; anyway I just walked on home.
Neighbor Florrie asked for advice about some iPhone/mac issues. I helped her and asked her to please keep the fact on the QT. I really don’t want any more people who think of me as their personal Mac consultant.
I was scheduled to see Steel Magnolias at the Bus Barn theater at 8pm. At 7:30 I remembered this, and had to hustle. Fortunately I hit a lot of green lights on Alma and got there in plenty of time. This production was good enough that I stayed past intermission to see the end. The cast acted their butts off and several were really good. The script helps, lots of gags, as well as a tear-jerker ending.
Nothing at all on the calendar today. I loafed around. Printed a couple of pictures and rearranged my gallery. Printing is not as simple as opening and image and hitting cmd-p. There’s some fiddling in Affinity Photo (Photoshop replacement) to make an image that looks good on the screen, come out somewhat as vivid on the printer.
Spent a bit of time on the 56 t-bird. At a home-made sandwich while watching the january 6 hearing.
Codgerville 