Tuesday 11/08/2022

Went down to the gym first thing. It only takes about 25 minutes to do all the automated round of things. The new gym equipment is all computerized, it adjusts the resistance per your program and prompts you through the reps.

In the hour before the writers meeting I threw together something. The prompt was, “a cultural experience that changed your attitude”. I wrote about our visit to Malawi, how weird it was to be standing around with an expensive SLR talking to people who lived in a grass hut, cultivated cassava with hoes, and cooked over an open fire. Others in the group had similar things. Nancy wrote about her time working for the state dept. (?) in Yemen, how everybody regularly had parties where they sat around chewing khat. Which I had never heard of before today.

At three, Jan’s Hearing Support Group was to meet in the Training Room, which has only recently been restored to usability after being converted into a Covid isolation ward back in 2020. Ian had volunteered to handle the event, thinking it only required a couple of mics. Then Jan had emailed saying the speaker wanted to show powerpoints. Could that be done?

I was to meet Ian there at 2 but I went there directly after lunch. What I found was a big (85-inch?) Sharp TV on the wall. Off to the side was a small podium with an HDMI port on the side. Now I remembered standing at that podium, showing some pictures, when I was asked to introduce myself to the Men’s Group back in 2019. The Men’s Group hasn’t since 2019 I think. Maybe time to revive it?

Anyway that HDMI port did nothing. I found the remote for the TV in a drawer. The TV responded in flaky ways to it but I managed to get its Source menu and try every source. None of them had anything but “no signal”. Then I got my iPhone flashlight out and looked behind. No bloody wonder. None of the input jacks had anything plugged into them. I had an HDMI cable with me and I plugged my computer into HDMI 4 and there we were. So that part was solved. Ian and I were congratulating ourselves when he remembered they would also need sound amplification. Where had that equipment gone?

In a closet behind a pile of tables we found a cart on which was an amplifier and speaker, and in the bottom of the cart, a wireless base station and a mic. Hauled all that out and plugged things in and together and ha ha! An amplified mic! Just as people were coming in for their meeting.

Didn’t do much else, but hey. Two accomplishments is enough for a day.

Monday 11/07/2022

My main concern this morning was that I was to run an event in the Auditorium, a speaker with slides and a zoom component. Should be straightforward, but of course, my motto is, “there’s always something” — and there was. I went down there at 9, 2 hours before the event.

First off, the automatic scheduling of the zoom meeting didn’t work. Theoretically, when I scheduled the meeting two days ago and “invited” the auditorium equipment with an email to its address, the scheduled meeting should have showed up on a little iPad used to control the equipment. It didn’t. Not critical, I can work around it.

Second, the projector that puts the speaker’s slides on the big screen — wasn’t getting a signal. Check all the cables, unplug and replug — no signal. Gerald the staff IT guy came in and unplugged and replugged. No signal. No need to go into details. The projector was not going to work. Gerald and Paul very cleverly then brought in the large rolling TV and set it up at the front of the room, and magically made it appear to be the projector. I really don’t know how they achieved that.

The speaker, Robin Chapman, a nice woman, author of several books about the history of silicon valley, came in and was chill about all the failures going on. Then it turned out that Gloria, the person who was to introduce her, wasn’t around. Turned out she had thought the event was in the evening. But I called her and luckily found her in her room and she came right down. So in the end the talk came off just fine.

So off to FOPAL to finish up stocking my section before the sale this coming weekend. That took until 2. I stopped at the grocery store for some stuff, then back to CH pretty much on time for a 3pm meeting. A real meeting, not on Zoom.

This is the nominating committee, charged with finding a slate of willing victims excuse me, candidates, for Resident Association offices, for the election next February. Starting early? A bit. Committee of five went over a lot of names and I found out about various people’s problems that I hadn’t known. People kept bringing up names and other people saying, oh no, she has serious health problems, he’s getting forgetful, etc. I learned that I am completely out of the loop on local gossip.

Time for a short nap and then downstairs at 5 for early supper. Then meet the usual car-pool at 6:15 and off to a SWBB game. This was with San Diego State, a division I team and a bit more of a challenge than Vanguard. But only a bit; we still ended up doubling their score, 80-40 or something like that. Never mind, nobody got hurt and everybody got to play.

Sunday 11/06/2022

“Fall back” day. So of course I wake up at the same time as yesterday, only now that is 5:05am. I have three clocks, no four, that need manual setting. Marian’s gold retirement clock on my desk; my Seiko watch; the microwave; and oh yes, the house phone.

Did some chores, one of which was the monthly recap of the Nest Egg. This means, looking at the Schwab brokerage statements for my several Schwab accounts (it’s complicated), copying the totals into a spreadsheet. The original spreadsheet was designed by Marian, who greatly enjoyed running the total each month and telling me how much we were worth. I took that over back on Day 56, 1/25/2019, when I wrote,

… Marian had created the first of these annual sheets beginning in 1997(!), using AppleWorks(!).  Then each year she’d copied it, zeroed the data, and started a new one. At some point a decade ago she converted to Numbers, Apple’s current spreadsheet, which caused some oddities in the formulae and formatting. Rather than try to copy the sheet and zero the values for the new year, I elected to make a completely new spreadsheet, following her design but from scratch with no legacy code.

It only takes about 15 minutes to make all the entries. Bottom line, the Nest Egg is up about 8% from the prior month. Unfortunately that still leaves it 9% down from the start of the year. But a nice improvement.

At this point I felt a pang of get-out-of-the-house-itis, so headed out to walk to the California ave. market. There I had a nice coffee and scone. I took a Lyft back (still almost 3 miles for the day) and lounged around working on the software project. Back in ’15 I had prepared a folder full of unit tests, and I started running them.

I didn’t feel like going to supper, so made myself a tuna salad sandwich and sat around watching TV.

Saturday 10/05/2022

First thing to do in the morning was to take a tech squad call to Jerry (a woman) whose iMac, iPhone, and iPad were all supposedly unusable for different reasons. On the iMac, she “can’t read her email.” She gets email via the web from AOL. Firefox is hung up on some kind of AOL error message that can’t be dismissed. I force-quit Firefox and restart it, and all is well. We talk about some issues managing bookmarks etc.

Then to the iPhone. Well darn, now it is working fine. As is the iPad. My intense tech presence has fixed everything.

At 11 I go to the museum to lead my 2nd docent tour of the week. About 15 people, nicely appreciative.

At 4pm I meet with Lennie in the auditorium and she gets fully trained in proving simple microphone support for an event.

I have supper with Patty, Edie and Eva.

Friday 10/04/2022

First day in a long time with no commitments on my Google Calendar. I spent most of it in a blissful haze doing programming on my app. Yeah I know, it’s all wasted effort, but I got a lot done.

I was to meet with Lennie to train her in Microphones 101, so she could do an event on Monday. However when we got in the auditorium we found John and Francis hard at work rehearsing an event they are running, and having some technical issues. I had nothing to contribute to that. So Lennie and I had a verbal training session and will meet again tomorrow, I think.

At 3 I decided I didn’t want a nap after all, and drove down to FOPAL where I found 5 boxes of books to cull and price. Glad I went because if I had waited to my normal Monday visit there would have been a real mountain.

Thursday 11/03/2022

Did the round of strength machines in the gym in the morning. Tidied the apartment anticipating that Wanda would be cleaning it this afternoon. Put on my red docent shirt and at 11, brought the car around to the front, to pick up Dr. Margaret, who wanted to come along to the museum to hear my docent talk.

Led a group of about 16 people including neighbor Margaret on the tour. Got quite a nice hand at the end. Then the two of us had a late lunch at Cucina Venti, across the street. Very pleasant lunch and talk.

Did nothing much else the rest of the day.

Wednesday 11/02/2022

Went for a walk, the first in several days. Did my laundry.

At 2pm I went down to the auditorium and made sure I was ready to record video of the Appreciation Fund Kickoff. This was an elaborately planned event. This picture doesn’t do it justice.

The tables were decorated with fake bills and coins. There was plenty of wine and some really nice snacks from the kitchen (deviled eggs, cheese-stuffed little peppers, shown). There was a sing-along to familiar songs with new lyrics extolling the labors of the staff. Lots of labor and skill went into making it a fun event.

Afterward I had less than an hour until it was time to put on my red Stanford sweatshirt and my red fedora hat and head off to the first game of the SWBB season. I rode with Patty and Martha in Patty’s car. Every year Vanguard U. a small Christian school in Costa Mesa, comes to us for an exhibition game. Offers themselves as sacrificial lambs more like. The final score was 100-20. All 15 on the Stanford roster played, and 14 of them scored.

Tuesday 11/01/2022

Gym. Then did some desk work, bills, etc. At 10, sat down and dashed off 200 words for the writers group, which started at 10:45.

At lunch I was buttonholed by Florrie who wanted help with an iPad and iPhone. I really don’t want it to be thought that anybody can get a personal consult without going through the tech squad. But Florrie is nice and I gave in. We worked on how to get photos out of texts and into albums, and how to get Netflix on the iPad and such.

At 4:30 I started cleaning up for the evening event, a reception at Stanford for Buck Cardinal contributors to meet Tara Vanderveer. Polished my shoes for the first time in, oh, about a year? Put on slacks and a turtleneck and my sports jacket, also for the first time in, oh, three years? Drove over to Maples to see a practice, and then walked across to the Arillaga center for the reception. Decent snacks and drinks. Tara entertaining as always.

Monday 10/31/2022

First order of business was an 8am video appointment with my doctor. Background: for a long time I’ve had a benign cyst on my kidney. Following the various CTs and ultrasounds I’ve had for other reasons, the radiologist’s report always mentioned it and its diameter in centimeters. Back around the end of 2020 it was up to 15cm in diameter, over 6 inches, and I started noticing its effect, mainly in my appetite, and I had it drained (day 2.238, 8/28/21).

I’ve been noticing similar effects lately so I had requested an appointment. The earliest office appointment was in December but I could get a video one today. Julia and I talked about the cyst and my symptoms, and she ordered an ultrasound. After that I will probably go and talk to the urologist I saw before. It turns out there is a laparoscopic procedure to reduce such cysts. I hadn’t known that; I thought the only surgical option was to open the abdomen, which is more of an operation than I want to get into.

Anyway my appointment for that ultrasound is the 10th. And the instructions are, one hour before I have to drink 24oz of liquid and if possible not pee until after the exam. Oooookay then.

At 9:30 I met with Ian in the auditorium to go over something about projecting a Blu-Ray movie that he hadn’t known. Between that and the doctor I completely forgot to go for the usual walk.

I went down to FOPAL and processed three boxes of book — computer book donations are rather light this month so far — and did some sorting too by way of penance for not walking.

Sunday 10/30/2022

After watering the plants and doing the puzzle… actually not doing the puzzle, it was extremely tricky and I had to look at the solution to finish it … it was nine-ish. I had received a Tech Squad dispatch in the night. Carol with a printer jam. I like Carol a lot and knew she was the type to be up early on a Sunday, so I called her and she said, come on up. She had an old-ish HP laserjet with a broken paper tray (“but it works”) however she regards it with suspicion because “It was Ray’s printer” (her late husband). Anyway, she claimed it had started printing multiple pages from what should have been a one-page file. So not knowing how to cancel a job, she turned power off, and then it had a piece of paper jammed in it.

I pulled the paper out, and — only because I’d checked a youtube video before calling her — I knew to pull out the toner cartridge and check for more jams. There weren’t. Then we tested it and it was fine, actually it prints really fast and cleanly. I pointed to a button on top with a red X in a circle and I hypothesized that was the cancel button, so we printed a two-page file and hit the red X and sure enough, it canceled the second page.

My guess would be that the unexpected multiple pages were because she had accidentally printed the wrong file, or had accidentally set the print dialog to multiple copies. Anyway, problem solved.

At 10 I went to the Auditorium to join Bert as he was setting up for the big Appreciation Fund kick-off party coming Wednesday. (There is No Tipping at Channing House, but each year the residents (not the staff) run an Appreciation Fund drive, encouraging contributions from everyone to a Fund which is then disbursed to staff members at Christmas. Recommended donation, well, however much you feel you want to tip on one day, times 365.) Anyway, we worked through a couple of problems he was having projecting slides and a video.

He had a video of a dance group doing a very clever and amusing routine to “Stayin’ Alive” (here it is) except, the YT version has several inexplicable freeze-frame gaps in it. So I took it from him on a USB stick, and fired up iMovie and edited out the gaps and gave it back to him later.

At 2pm I met with David G. He had gotten a lesson from Gerald on Friday and thought he knew how to schedule meetings in the zoom room. Well, we tried several times and it didn’t work. But that killed an hour.

I’ve written about the miraculous Topaz AI for photos (3.278) so I downloaded the trial copy of Topaz AI for videos and tried it on the dance video. However it didn’t make any detectable difference that I could see.