Tuesday 04/19/2022

Nothing much to do in the morning so I was browsing the internet when I stumbled on an essay that resonated with me. It was about “apathy of impotence”, a great phrase that nicely sums up how I feel about the world today. So I wrote a comment, and the comment kind of took on dimension so I pumped it up a little and by 10am I had something to submit to the writers group. I’ll append it below.

After lunch I took a tech squad call: Roku remote not functioning, and we found out it had one good battery and one completely dead. Probably the customer had mixed up the batteries while changing them? Put back one old one along with one new? Anyway, easy fix.

Later in the day I spent a couple of hours converting the official Heritage Circle grant application. It is distributed as a paper form to be filled out, and I don’t want to be trying to edit and re-edit paper forms. So I figured out how to scan it and put its image as the background of a Pages document, so I could “fill it out” by typing into text boxes positioned over the image. Tomorrow I will put some text in those text boxes.

Here’s what I read to the writers group:

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I thought I had nothing to say this week. Then I read an online essay (link below) that I think the author, a professor of Philosophy at Cal State Fresno, intends to be inspiring. In this well-written essay Prof. Fiala decries the “apathy of impotence,” a condition that

grows from the feeling that there is nothing we can do to change a world afflicted by systematic and structural problems.

He concludes that

The vortex of despair is overcome by going out and getting to work. We find hope when we join together with others who are actively working to make change.

I’ve certainly felt the apathy of impotence. From under that personal cloud of doom I look out at my activist neighbors, writing letters and attending rallies — exactly the kinds of action Prof. Fiala advocates — with bemusement. So I wrote the following as a comment on his piece.

Oh yes. “We can make a difference,” the organizers cry. The apathy begins when you simply stop believing them. The practical evidence on the ground that “We can’t” is quite strong. Why? Because none of the available targets for social action — political parties or candidates, particular corporations, etc. — are fundamentally at fault. Each identifiable social villain is but another head on a vast Hydra whose amorphous, ubiquitous body arises from the fetid slime of those basic flaws of human nature: fear, and greed, and stupidity. From the incomprehensibly rich conferring at Davos, to the minimum-wage clerk in Tampa drawing a sense of personal significance from the latest QAnon conspiracy, all are utterly ruled by fear of losing what they have, by greedy compulsion to have more, and by a sullen unwillingness to agree to any change whatever in the routine of their lives.

This Hydra, this looming monster with an uncountable number of devouring heads, will not be affected by social action against any one of its blind noggins; it will roll on, obliviously drowning our social world, until it slams hard into the real limits of the physical world. The society that remains after that shock will be very different, and probably much smaller, than ours.

(*) https://onlysky.media/afiala/apathy-of-impotence/

Monday 04/18/2022

Took a standard walk, which felt ok, better than the prior two times.

At 10:30 it was time for the Events Committee meeting, to review the calendar for May. Lots of events coming.

After a quick bite I went to FOPAL and spent 3 hours working through 4 boxes of contributions. Don’t know why it took longer than usual. Well, the computer I use was acting up and I had to reboot it. I cannot believe how long Windows 10 (or maybe it’s 11?) takes to boot. Compared to MacOS, that is.

At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s open meeting, at which she was to review the separate Resident and Staff satisfaction surveys taken some time ago. Taken early in 2021 actually, so not exactly current news. Whatever, I completely forgot this event was happening and missed it. Nothing earth-shaking anyway.

Had dinner with Patty Craig and DIane. Craig assured me that Rhonda’s meeting was wasted time, owing to how Covid changed everything then and since.

Sunday 04/17/2022

Usual Sunday morning. Took a 1-mile walk. There was a special lunch today, Easter Sunday, but I missed out on it in a fit of pique. I needed to eat early because I had to leave at 1pm, so I went to the dining room at 11:30. Only a few tables active. I sat alone at one of the 8-person “open” tables and waited for someone to take my order. And waited… after ten minutes I decided that I didn’t care that much about the special lunch and went and had a light lunch in my room.

Anyway, out at 1pm to the museum where I led a tour. About 25 people and I kept most of them to the end.

As usual on holidays, supper was a brown bag special. I picked up my bag on the way back in, and at 6pm some of us 6th floor people met in our dining room for a picnic. That was nice.

Saturday 04/16/2022

In the morning I drove over to Safeway and bought some items to support the diet I’m on. I haven’t mentioned dieting. Well, not a big serious thing, but I had put on 5 points since last fall and I want them off. So I’m doing low-carb (aka sloppy keto). Breakfast and lunch are low-carb snacks in my room. When I go to the dining room I have just the protein and salad, like tonight there was chicken, rice, and cooked spinach, and ordered just the chicken and spinach.

At 11 I talked to Patty about the A/V Heritage Circle grant proposal. Good news, the deadline is not 4/30 but 5/24, so much more available time. She knew as did I that the IT manager Vanessa was duty weekend manager, and she shamed me into actually going to the front desk to make an appointment. Vanessa herself was at the desk doing something and we agreed to meet at 2pm.

I spent some time preparing more EBay listings for FOPAL. Here’s one of the three I posted today: https://www.ebay.com/itm/284770277532

Some of my technically challenged neighbors had asked me to turn on the 11th floor TV for the Warrior’s game at 5pm, which I did. Then went down for dinner (aforementioned chicken and spinach) and back to blow my carb quota on crackers and cheese which the Warriors fans had laid out.

Friday 04/15/2022

I made notes on what I did as the day went on because I had a feeling it was going to be busy.

• First up I worked on the letter to Wells Fargo. Yesterday I sent a draft to Joanne, stupidly as a PDF because I was using Pages on the Mac and she has an old PC. So she had sent me back an email with corrections. I entered all the corrections she wanted, then I exported the letter to .doc form and sent it to her. Hopefully she can open it and she is in charge of it now.
• Next it was 8:30 and time for my appointment with our CFO Jaisie. There was a mixup, she wasn’t in today, and had expected a telephone appointment. No problem, I called her. I learned a lot about what I wanted to know, namely, how does the Gift Shop do its banking.
• I wrote an email to Joanne summarizing what I had learned, and how sadly nothing about how the Gift Shop does banking is of any use to the Resident Association after all.
• I called Bert, mainly to find out why he hadn’t responded to my call for suggestions on what to ask the Heritage Circle Fund for. Well, he’s recuperating from a small operation and is behind in email. We chatted about several things and I learned some useful things.
• I called David M. about the speaker on Monday. I had told Harry, the event manager, that I would provide Zoom support, not realizing that David M. intended to do the A/V and had advertised the event has having no Zoom. I was pleased about that as it meant I was off the hook for doing A/V on Monday evening. David M. is a smart volunteer and extremely generous with his time so I am not going to complain about anything he does.
• Now it was time for a walk. Standard walk, and like the previous time, I felt more tired than I recall from earlier. I doubt if I could walk more than 3 miles now.
• Lunch.
• Realized I had received the powerpoint file from the presenter for Monday, when I thought I was doing the A/V. Emailed them on to David M.
• Talked to Jerry about his proposal for the Heritage Circle grant. We decided what to do next, mainly that I would write an email to IT manager Vanessa. We need her approval and support before going on. Later he called with the news that Vanessa is the duty manager this weekend (the staff managers rotate weekend duty) so she will certainly read her email and might even reply or meet in person this weekend.
• Spent an hour composing a fine email describing the project that we want to do and think the Heritage fund would certainly approve and pay for. Sent it to Vanessa. Then made an abbreviated version and shared it with Jerry, Lennie, Bert and David M, so whoever talks to Vanessa first will know what she has been told.

And that was the bulk of the day. This is what I call manager shit. I will get free of it I swear. It all started when Ian’s wife died and in the aftermath he asked me to take the A/V committee from him, and how could I say no to that? Now Ian goes about free as a bird…

Thursday 04/14/2022

It’s housecleaning day, so before I left for Shustek across the Bay, I tidied up for the cleaning lady. I also worked on the letter wanted by Wells Fargo, and sent it to Joanne for checking. And also sent an email to my AV team list, asking for suggestions on what we might ask for a Heritage Circle grant.

Then off to Shustek for a day of cataloging artifacts. One thing that I and Steve Madsen cataloged was a “Data Glove”, a fabric glove with lots of wires, part of a 1980’s research into human input to virtual worlds or something.

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At one point of the morning the people working at Shustek discovered that we were all recent widowers. Well, I guess I’m the oldest in that status, having lost Marian in 2018. Dave Bennett lost his wife just last November; Steve Madsen lost his just recently in I think it was February; and Sherman (forget his last name) also lost his wife recently. The Widower’s club. Statistically unlikely, given that (judging by Channing House) there are lots more widows than widowers, but there we were.

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In the middle of the day we had an indoor picnic lunch, all the volunteers from the other group at Yosemite came over, to hear a talk on the progress in converting the whole artifact database to a new software base, all in the cloud and hyper connected and shit. Another reason for this break was to give a surprise baby shower to Greta, one of the two absolutely stellar women who keep that place organized. We will have to get along without her for a lengthy maternity leave now; I hope she will come back from it.

This was a nice contrast on the two kinds of volunteer work. What I do for CHM and for FOPAL is simple. Although the work requires attention and effort, it is well-defined and bounded in scope and time. You go there, you do the job, you walk away and go home, done.

The other kind is what I’ve been calling “Manager work”. It has no boundaries of time, it is always on my mind. You have to get opinions from other people, you have to get concensus, you don’t do something and dust off your hands, all the tasks hang around pending on something else which relies on something else, etc., with no resolution. It’s what managers do, and I am a natural “member of technical staff”.

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In the evening I got an email from fave artist Carol Aust telling of the Hunters Point Open Studios weekend. I attended this in May 2019 (Day 0.154) and enjoyed it, and ultimately bought two paintings from one of the artists I first saw there. So I marked the calendar for this year, Saturday 4/30. Anyone want to join me?

Wednesday 04/13/2022

Today I spent time before and after lunch, creating Ebay listings for 3 vintage manuals. This involved taking pictures of their covers, title pages, a representative inner pages, processing those pics to look nice and square and readable, and writing the listings.

In between, at 10am I went up to 11 and met with Kass. She is going to do the AV thing for two different events, on this Friday and next. She had not operated the 11th floor stuff before. Just a few months ago I had written to IT manager Vanessa how bad these systems were. Since then the IT people have been busy because stuff is fixed and working again.

After lunch I created a new “Pro” Vimeo account for storing resident videos. I passed the admin duties to Lennie and Jerry, and Jerry said he would get right on it uploading the many videos (recorded Zoom meetings mostly) that haven’t been available.

At 3pm I met with Lennie in the auditorium to try her relatively new Macbook Air using the projector. It failed exactly like my new MacBook Pro fails: fine picture for 2-3 seconds then black. Informative but not helpful. I am going to be doing a zoom session this coming Monday and will have to use my 5-year-old MacBook again, and bypass all the stuff that IT has installed.

Patty is urging me to have the AV committee submit a grant request for something to the Heritage Circle. Think big, she says, not little thousand-dollar projects. Just what I need, another project to manage.

Tuesday 04/12/2022

Since I had no walk yesterday, I took one this morning. Finished without stopping but TBH I have to admit it was more tiring than usual.

The next activity was to walk with Joanne the new Treasurer, to Wells Fargo to try again to get signature authority straightened out. Recall that we went there two weeks ago and were told the kind of letter we would need. I composed the letter and sent a PDF of it to the banker dude. He replied he was passing it up to have the wording approved, and that he would be out of the office until Monday 4/4. All the week of 4/4-8 we got nothing back from him despite me sending two emails.

So yesterday I printed out the letter, which calls for 5 signatures from various current and former officers of the organization, and yesterday evening got those signatures except for Andrew, whom I called this morning and he signed at 9:30 and at 10:30 we were at the bank.

Well, come to find out that Mr. Padilla had been out of the country all week, was only just back, and only now could tell us that no, the wording wasn’t correct. We needed more banker buzzwords and he hand-wrote a template for the letter we really needed.

Joanne tried to talk him around but to no avail. So we get to do a new letter and get more signatures. And Joanne has a bunch of medical appointments this week so the next time we can go over there will be next week.

Meantime I have made an appointment with the Channing House CFO to learn more about how the Gift Shop does their banking through Channing House. If this works out, then it could be the next thing we do at WFB is close the account entirely. Which would be very satisfying.

I took a tech squad call to Susan, who is one of my favorite neighbors anyway. Her Mac Mail app was behaving very strangely, and when she tried to reboot she would get a message “Restart canceled by Mail.app”. Yeah well I know how to deal with apps like that. I taught her the 3-finger salute, command-option-escape that brings up the app killing dialog. Force-quit Mail, reboot, start Mail, all is well. Strange behaviors gone.

Later I checked out the microphone equipment on the 11th floor because very belatedly we were asked to provide AV support for an event on Friday. This Friday. On Monday. Grump.

Monday 04/11/2022

Couldn’t go for a walk because there was a Resident Association meeting at 9am and I’m too lazy to get started walking early enough to be back by 9am. The meeting was informative but no bombshells. I was relieved to see CEO Rhonda taking the staff question time; she’s been invisible around here for a couple of weeks and I start to worry, is she on the way out? But apparently not. One of the things she talked about was the difficulty of recruiting new staff to fill in the many resignations we’ve had lately.

After a quick bite I went down to FOPAL for the post-sale processing day. First, count all the books, and report the pre- and post-sale counts. My section moved about 60 books, about 15% of the total stock.

Next, triage. Look at every one of the 350-odd books still on the shelves and decide whether to leave them as is, or reduce the price written in the flyleaf, or to give up on the book and send it to the bargain room. I sent 3 boxes to the bargain room, books that had been on the shelf for at least 3 sale days and been price-reduced to $2.

Finally, process the single box of new donations waiting, pricing and shelving about 10 books.

Back home in time for a nap before the 4:45 Sixth Floor Meeting. Just about all the 6th floor people showed up. We congratulated ourselves on being the best floor in the building, which I think is true, a really nice bunch of people and no duds. Went over a few business items and then all went down to dinner together.

Oh, yesterday’s drip-drip runny nose? All dried up again. So did I have a one-day rhinovirus? Or was there one day of especially heavy pollen, and today’s morning sprinkles washed it all down?

Sunday 04/10/2022

I am not usually affected by pollen, but yesterday and today my nose has just… well if my legs could run as well as my nose, I’d be Usain Bolt. Ruined a lot of kleenex.

At 9am I drove down to FOPAL to tidy up my section, as usual for the Sunday of a sale weekend. People get books from other sections and leave them on my shelves. Why?

On return I brought up from the car, a box of ancient computer manuals. These were books that I didn’t think would sell in my section, and also didn’t fit what I think of as the demographic of the Vintage Computer Fest. And although I think they should be valuable, they are so rare that you can’t find any comparables at Bookfinder.com, so our high value section won’t take them. Which leaves only trying to sell them myself, on EBay.

This box was dropped off at my section with a note from someone named Nancy, and I’m not sure which Nancy it was. And I’ve been dithering over it for weeks. Well today at least I inventoried it. There’s one from 1991, one from 1980, and all the rest are 1970 or earlier. Control Data FORTRAN Reference Manual from 1964 is the earliest. Bunch of IBM manuals from the mid-1960s.

Later on, I took my M1 Macbook Pro to the auditorium and again tried to connect it to the hardware there. And again failed. Well, improved it. From the projector screen going black after two seconds, now I have the image remaining but flickering every 1-2 seconds. Blinkety blink. This is actually progress, because I find quite a few complaints online about M1 Macbooks making external monitors flicker. So I can hope Apple will fix this someday.

Meantime, the way IT has set up the hardware, I can’t use any of my Macs to do a hybrid zoom.