Friday 07/22/2022

Took a walk in the morning but felt sub-par and cut the length by half. Felt off-color the first half of the day. No temperature. After an hour long nap at 1pm I felt better.

During the morning I sent emails related to the A/V committee, scheduling the next meeting. Managing, bleh. I think I am stuck with this gig for another year, since I instigated the Heritage Circle grant request for more equipment. I am informed by a reliable source that the grant request has been, or will be, approved. That won’t be announced officially for months yet, then there will be the process of revising the spec with the vendor and overseeing the installation. Maybe this time in ’23 I will be able to quit.

I also refreshed the exhibit on my picture rails. This has kinda turned into an obligation instead of a pleasure.

Everybody in the Tower has art on their hallway walls. It’s a kind of rule: you own the wall outside your apartment and can post anything you want. Most people hang a few favorite images and then forget about it. When we had to clear out of the 6th floor for the upgrade, there was some hoo-hah about whose pictures were whose, and it turned out that more than a few of the paintings and prints belonged to people who were long dead, nobody ever took them down.

I thought I had a great idea: put up a couple of picture rails and I could put up a changing exhibit of my fave fotos. I’ve got the high-quality printer, and the software and know-how, to make good quality prints. I stocked up on cheap plastic frames and high-quality large-format paper (11×14, 11×17). I got some compliments on the pics, too. There are people who get their exercise by walking all the halls, and they noticed the changing pics.

So the months roll on, and every time I come back to my apartment I’m thinking, how long have these been up, is it time to change them? I’ve changed the selection several times and now it was getting old again. So yesterday and today I printed up six 11×14’s of sculptures. So there’s a theme. They’re good for at least a month. I don’t think I’ll change them until September.

I also masked the parts of the Studebaker that should remain gray, and then sprayed the maroon. Well, first I sprayed clear. I got this great tip from a YT video: after masking, your first coat should be a light clear coat. Then if there are any leaks, anyplace where paint can crawl under your masking tape, it will be clear that does it, and it sets and seals the leaks. So I sprayed clear varnish and then the maroon. Here’s the main body.

The wrinkly rough parts are masking tape. The maroon is not as dark as I hoped, it’s more like a deep cherry red. Well, too bad. I’m going with it. After the paint’s had a day to get hard I will carefully peel the tape off and should have a lovely two-tone paint job. The windshield wipers and door handle are also masked, with a liquid “frisket” product that rubs off.

The paint has a matte finish when dry but that doesn’t matter. After I have put on enough coats and it is hard, I will very lightly sand it, and then it gets about 3 coats of clear gloss. And that gets polished. The car will shine, one day.

Thursday 07/21/2022

I had signed up to work today at the Shustek center in Milpitas. That meant a 9:15 departure. Before that I needed to tidy the apartment ready for Wanda to clean it at 2pm.

I also rearranged some pictures on my picture rails outside. I had been thinking about what to put up there. It’s time-consuming to make nice prints and I hadn’t gotten around to making new ones in some time. But today I decided that I would have time tomorrow to make some new prints, so for now I just put up some old flower pics.

So, off to the East Bay. I got there in good time and settled down in the car to continue listening to a podcast until it would be time to go in. Naturally I looked at my email and found — an 8am note from Rachel, in charge of the Shustek workers, apologizing for waking up sick and calling off the day’s work. So I’d had a 20-mile drive for nothing, and now a drive back. On the other hand, my day was now free.

When I got back there was email from Jessie, who runs the front of house staff at the museum, pleading for docents today and later in the week. So, well, my day was free, why not? So I signed up for the noon tour. I had an hour before I’d have to leave, during which I printed one new picture.

The tour was a bit of a disappointment, I had only 5 people, one of whom had to leave early. I tried out a new sequence of presentation which went ok.

Back home I printed another picture, and began masking parts of the Studebaker for spraying the maroon color.

Wednesday 07/20/2022

Went for the walk. On return, picked up packages for me. One was the spray paint cans I’d ordered for the Studebaker. Later I prepped the parts by wiping them down in alcohol (to get rid of finger grease and other things that will make paint not stick) and a light scrub with fine steel wool (to give the paint some “tooth” to grip). Then I sprayed everything that needs to be gray, two coats. I really like this paint from “Mr. Model”, a Japanese firm. It sprays on nice, levels out quick, immediately opaque. Much nicer to use than the Tamiya spray I used on the T-bird.

The “smoke gray” color has a trace more yellow that I expected, it isn’t a pure gray, but I’m going with it. Anyway, that now dries for a couple of days. Then I will mask the parts to remain gray, and spray the maroon bits.

At 1pm I went to the auditorium to prep the A/V for a talk at 3pm. Yes, two hours ahead, because I’m OCD about this. Doing a zoom simulcast there is just so much to remember. I took some pictures of the setup and mean to use them to further illustrate my how-to guide. The audio part is a snap. Prep a lapel mic for the speaker and a hand-held for the person to introduce them, check the levels, done. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I won’t go on. In the end it all came off, except that I forgot to enable zoom recording, so we don’t have a recording of the presentation. Which the event manager Ann said, was no issue, don’t worry about it.

Tuesday 07/19/2022

Today I have an appointment for an echocardiagram at 11am. I start walking to the Encina street office of PAMF at 10:15. The procedure is routine. I hope the pictures are routine, also, showing a normally operating heart. Have to wait for somebody to read it.

I sit down at my desktop machine and find it has dozens of alerts about not properly ejecting my backup drive. What? I reboot and find that the backup drive has not mounted. I put my ear on it, no sound. It’s slightly warm so the electronics are working, but it sounds as if the disk has quit. Oh no.

I buy another 5TB, $100 drive for delivery tomorrow. I will then take full backups of both machines, so their present contents will be backed up. But I’ve lost the history of backups. That’s the ability to open the Time Machine made and scroll a folder back day by day and month by month. Meh, I don’t care.

There’s a lot of shit I don’t care about any more, you know? I was scrolling through the next two weeks of the PBS channels, looking for things to record, and there was an awful lot of shoes I might once have been interested in, and now don’t care about.

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.