Saturday 07/02/2022

First thing I went for a medium walk and came back through the farmers market. Later I glued the last bit on the t-bird and shot some pictures. My desk is clear again. After weeks of having half the L-shaped surface covered with tools and bottles of paint, it’s all cleared out.

I ordered some more display cases but they haven’t come yet. Here’s a couple of shots of the car.

The proportions don’t look quite right from the side. I think it is a little too low in the back. I tried to correct that but then the rear bumper didn’t fit right. The hood opens to show the engine, I didn’t take a picture of that.

At 1:30 I met with Patty and Lois and we drove to the Pear theater (which is practically next door to the Computer History Museum where I will be tomorrow) to see a play, The Piano Teacher. This is mostly a monologue by an elderly woman, a retired piano teacher, reminiscing, and then trying to get in touch with former students, and then gradually finding out that they don’t remember the past they way she does. Who’s right? Who’s in denial, or fabricating? It was too slow for my taste, almost 100 minutes no intermission, and it was nearly an hour in before anything actually happened. I was mentally disagreeing with the plot most of the way through. Oh well it kept me awake.

Friday 07/01/2022

Determined to get some stuff out of the way and go into the weekend clean. First up: polish my shoes, for the first time in probably a year. Well, it needed doing. Next, down to the Auditorium to try out some things regarding doing zoom meetings. They didn’t work but I learned a couple of things. Then, off to FOPAL. The sale weekend is coming up and my section is a mess. Was a mess. Now it’s all tidy.

Back to CH and resumed work on my writeup on how to zoom. It’s 12 pages long, which may seem like a lot but the whole process is ridiculously complicated. That done I distributed it by email to my A/V people, and shortly after it was time for that committee to meet and portion out the events for next month. I got two, which is tolerable.

I was invited to dinner with the Allens. I really need to invite people to dinner. I am accepting invites but never issuing any.

Thursday 06/30/2022

Tidied up the apartment as usual on a Thursday. Then off to Milpitas for a day of work at the Yosemite warehouse. Actually there wasn’t much to do, mostly because everything needing doing, required curator Aurora’s supervision or involvement and there was only one of her, so we volunteers stood around a lot. I left early.

In the news there’s a shocker: USC and UCLA to leave the PAC-12 conference.

Wednesday 06/29/2022

I did not go for a walk this morning because I needed to do laundry. Ordinarily I’d have started a load and gone for the walk, but our washer has been intermittently acting up and I felt the need to stay close to it. So I supervised the laundry from a nearby chair. That took until 11 because for once I ran three loads. The third was my bathrobe and a floor mat from the bathroom. I’ve been wearing the bathrobe for a couple of hours every morning for three-plus years, so I thought I’d wash whether it needed it or not. <jk>

Then, quickly make a sandwich for lunch and drive off to FOPAL. I needed to be back for a haircut at 2:30. And buy some groceries first. So I had to leave there at 1:30 which meant I was not able to finish all the accumulated books. I’ll have to go back, maybe Friday.

So at 2:30 Leah, the house beauty person, cut my hair. Then down to the Auditorium to meet Bert and watch as he experimented using his big fast new Windows laptop with the Dell Dock. As soon as he connected the USB cable, the laptop immediately recognized the Dell Monitor attached to the Dock and made it an external monitor. That’s what the MacBooks will not do. So he worked through what he needed to do, to show slides for an event. He will shadow David M. for a presentation tonight and he will know what is going on.

After supper I went down and watched the setup for the presentation, and some of the presentation.

Tuesday 06/28/2022

Started the day with a frustrating 2 hours in the Auditorium. I wanted to use the cheap little Acer laptop that we keep in a cabinet back of the stage, to test my instructions that I wrote yesterday. It was the only PC I had access to.

Well it is the slowest little slug ever. And old. Some weeks ago, our IT department added a Dell USB Dock and a Dell Monitor to the setup. When they run an event, they connect to the Dock and they are able to see the Monitor as one external screen, and the overhead Projector as another external screen. Actually they mirror those two, with the result that what they put on the Projector is also visible to them on the Monitor. David M. also uses this when he runs events.

I can connect the Dock to a MacBook, and the MacBook sees the Dock as a USB hub. Unfortunately Mac OS does not recognize the Monitor attached to the Dock as an external monitor. It does recognize the Projector as a display, so you can put various content up on the Projector screen, but to see it you have to crane your neck because you see the projector screen from the side.

The dorky little Acer, like a MacBook, could see the Dock as a hub but not the Monitor. So I couldn’t do what I wanted to. Other problems, too. With a MacBook, if you want to show powerpoint slides, you’ve got Keynote built-in. If you want to show PDF slides, you have Preview built-in. With Windows? Not so much. The only PDF viewer is the Edge browser. I tried multiple times to download Adobe Acrobat from the Microsoft Store and it failed every time with an obscure message. To show powerpoints? It seemed like the only choice was to buy a license for Microsoft 365 (aka Office). Well, no; there are free powerpoint viewer apps, but they warn “contain in-app purchases” so will they show ads? No idea.

I contacted Bert who has a better and newer PC and we agreed to meet at 3pm to try his machine. But at 3pm we found the Auditorium in use for a staff meeting.

So that was pretty much a wasted day. I did pay a couple of bills and brought the t-bird to “almost done” state. I also started looking at reference pictures for the next model, a 1953 Studebaker, like the one that Gary Pierce’s dad drove up our road in Washington every day in the late 50s.

Monday 06/27/2022

Took the standard walk in the morning, all good.

Now what? Don’t want to go to FOPAL as I was only there on Saturday and no books will have piled up in a day. If they even do sorting on Sundays. Oh, I know. For some days I have been thinking about writing up clear directions on how to do zoom events from the Auditorium. Three others, David M, David G, and John M, have each worked out their own system for what is an extraordinarily complicated mess of equipment. I need to get more people trained on this, and before I can teach it I need to get what I know, organized. For me, that means, writing it.

So I spent the day, at least 5 hours of it, sitting in my chair doing tech writing, just like in the good old days at Informix or Silicon Graphics. At one point I went down to the Auditorium and worked through a couple of things that I hadn’t understood.

Tomorrow I am going to go down there and set up the whole scenario that I am documenting. I’ll print out what I have, then write notes on the paper copy and be able to do a final version, for the A/V meeting I’m having on Friday. This was very satisfying work.

At one point Patty called and asked to consult with me and Jerry about the H.C. grant request. That is reaching another stage of discussion and she wanted a couple of questions answered. I have no idea what will be happening but I guess we answered her questions.

Sunday 06/26/2022

Did pretty much nothing today. After I’d read the paper, watered the plants, and done the big crossword, I thought, ok, what now. I decided to walk to California avenue — I know, boring, it’s what I’ve done several other times. But I did, and had myself a pastry and a juice, and then, where the last couple of times I took a Lyft back home, this time I consulted with my body and thought heck, I feel fine, and walked home again. Just over 4 miles for the day.

In the afternoon I did some work on the t-bird. One of several things was to make license plates. The kit includes decals for license plates but they aren’t California plates. So I found photos of 1956 Cal plates online. In a photo editor I cloned out its existing letters. I found a font that was pretty close to the letter shapes on Cal plates and typed in “BRD 056”. Then I printed it out at teeny tiny size, and cut them out and glued them to the license plates.

I had a ticket for a jazz concert at 7pm, over on the Stanford campus. At 5pm I drove over there, and found a supper at the student commons. The concert was part of the Stanford Jazz Festival, now in its 50th year, and was a big band of mostly students, or anyway high school and college age musicians. They played a some Miles Davis and Charles Mingus numbers, in other words, not the kind of jazz I like. But they played very skillfully.

Saturday 06/25/2022

My plan today was to get rid of those remaining 12 boxes of books at FOPAL. I started by going to the farmers market and buying a bottle of juice, a giant peanut butter cookie, and some cherries. I hit the FOPAL building about 9 and worked until 12, and did process all the books.

The evening’s activity was to host a small dinner party mainly for basketball friend Harriet, with Jerry and Betty and Gwen from my floor. Very pleasant. I need to host more dinners.

Friday 06/24/2022

I had a commitment to a docent tour at noon, and decided to give myself a lazy morning before. So I hung around fiddling with this and that, including scheduling a meeting of the A/V committee, until 11. Then off to the Museum to lead a small group. It started at 10, but was only 6 at the end.

After the tour at 1pm I drove up Middlefield to FOPAL. Ate some lunch in the parking lot, then went in and processed another 3 boxes of computer books. Despite having done 7 in the last two days there are still 12 left.

About 4pm I decided that I wanted to eat at Casa Lupe on Castro street. I called Patty to see if she wanted to go, and she answered but told me sorry, I’m in Ashland just now. So I went by myself. This turned into a little adventure when I found (as I should have known, actually) that Castro street is closed at Alma street. Like every restaurant district around it converted to street eating and parklets two years ago. But if you are going South on Alma, and can’t turn onto Castro, your next opportunity to turn right is a couple of miles on, at Mary avenue. But from there you can come back along Evelyn, and turn into the parking areas near Castro. Which were almost all full; the street was jumping. However I parked quite close to the back door of the restaurant and had a very satisfactory plate of Chile Verde.

Thursday 06/23/2022

What a productive day this was. First off, out at 7:10 to once again register campers at Tara’s basketball camp. The “day camp”, for younger girls, was Tuesday and Wednesday, except on Wednesday, the Stanford campus suffered a major power outage. Besides basketball camp there were camps for every sport going on, and all of them had to be canceled. It wasn’t certain that today’s camp, the “elite camp” for older girls, would be held at all. However, there was minimal lighting inside Maples, and they decided to go ahead. So once again I was operating a table, this time for names A-E, along with a young woman named Cipria (?).

These older campers were a little spooky to me. These tended to be girls who had legit aspirations to be recruited by a college, and quite a few were tall, over 6 foot, taller than their parents. The thing is, they are very young, maybe 15-16? And they have these delicate child-like faces and child-like body-language, but tall wispy bodies… it must be very strange to be a parent to one of these. Look up some morning and realize your 15-year old is taller than her father…

By 9 they were all checked in. Back to CH where at 10am, Bert and I were scheduled to go into a resident’s apartment and break into her computer. Well, not exactly. But Janet had a stroke and is now recovering (and said to be quite talkative and cheerful) over at the SNF. Her daughter Lesley lives in Ohio. Lesley came out to visit last week, and wasn’t able to get into Janet’s Macbook Air. Janet, unfortunately, doesn’t remember what the password was. Facilities let us into Janet’s unit. Bert got Lesley on a speaker-phone whileI fumbled around with the Mac.

This was an interesting challenge. Janet had been quite tidy and organized, as shown by the notes and receipts she’d kept in a folder labeled “Macbook”. But none of the passwords listed in there worked to login to her Mac. When you can’t remember your login password, your Mac will prompt you to enter you Apple ID and its password. Your Apple ID is for Apple generally, apart from any device password.

We had Janet’s Apple ID, her normal email address. Unfortunately it seems that she’d changed its password, also, not too long ago. I bashed away at the Macbook, trying different variations of the passwords from Janet’s notes alternately on the login screen and the Apple ID screen. Did that one end in Ell Eye ess or Ell ell ess? or Ell ell Ess?

Finally it dawned on me to try the Apple ID on the Apple website instead, using my own laptop. Hah. Apple.com offers a very clear method to reset the password for your Apple ID; you only need the ID (which we had) and the phone number she’d used when she set up the account, which we hoped was her regular apartment phone. And it was. Apple’s computer rang the phone and read out a verification code to be typed in to the web page. And boom, we could define a new password for the Apple ID. That done, I could go back to the Macbook and enter the Apple ID and its new password. The Macbook contacted Apple which again called Janet’s phone with a new verification code. Enter that in the Macbook and it happily let us set a new login password. Job done!

With a major tech challenge conquered, I headed out to FOPAL. I didn’t mention on Tuesday that during that day, FOPAL had received a major donation from the library of Carnegie Mellon U’s Silicon Valley campus. Of which quite a bit was computer-related books. And now there were 17 boxes of computer books stacked up in my section. I processed 6 of them today, and figure to go back tomorrow and probably Saturday.