Rather than a walk, I just went to FOPAL to work on my section. I had started a general triage on Tuesday but need to finish it before next week, which is pre-sale week when I have to send in a definite count of the books on my shelves. Plus I wanted to clean out a lot of cruft that hadn’t sold in a year and wasn’t likely to. And I wanted to rearrange some of the shelves.
I got all that done, it took 4 hours. I’ll tidy up and do the book count next week.
I took a tech call, Kay was having trouble with her TV. Turns out the TV is monster, at least 60 inch diagonal, but somehow showing a standard def image all stretched out. Well, turns out Kay has been interacting at least sometimes with the Comcast box, not using the comcast remote but by hitting the teeny tiny buttons on the box. And at some point she must have hit the “format” button and put the comcast box into 480p. With that fixed it looked right to her.
Kay is one of those people — I hear their TVs as I go down the hall so I know there are several, at least two on our floor — those people who keep their TVs on a news channel, most often MSNBC, all the bleepin’ day long. Kay alternates between CNN and MSNBC. Nothing else, just news. I would go bananas, but whatever floats your boat.
So no aerobics this morning, I need to let my pulled muscles heal. Off to the Yosemite drive warehouse for a day of museum work. I was first tasked with replacing two catalog records. Two items from a large donation had been cataloged by other volunteers. The evidence of that was clear: they had bar-code tags hanging on them, and they had been photographed and stored on shelves. But there were no catalog records in the database. Another mystery of Mimsy, the cataloging software we’ve been using for more than a decade.
Anyway, I spent the morning recreating the catalog records for these two items. After lunch I did something new, because I admitted to knowing PhotoShop. The photos of objects are taken against a white cloth background, but some recent ones have had a lot of shadows and wrinkles. So Aurora the curator had started using PS to drop out the background entirely, leaving the object itself isolated in a pure blank white field. She asked if I wanted to do some of that. Sure, why not. So I spent the afternoon doing that: carefully select just the object; invert the selection; hit delete; check for mistakes; save.
Conversation at dinner was gloomy. Between (a) the fires burning into the Tahoe basin (an area everyone here knows) (b) the flash flooding in New York and New Jersey (c) the hurricane hit on New Orleans (d) the Texas abortion law (e) the withdrawal from Afghanistan (f) the on-going Covid pandemic and the latest variants — everyone is afflicted with a general sense of doom and gloom. We’re all fucked, basically, and we are just waiting for the next catastrophe.
Went for the standard walk. Then sat down to kill some to-do items that have been bugging me.
Emailed Lennie to check progress on the online event planning form.
Inspired by Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast, I went into my T-Mobile account and changed both the password and the PIN. I already made sure my credit scores were frozen, I think I mentioned that a few days ago; but I hadn’t known about the PIN and its importance before. Most of the cell providers have you define a PIN as the primary security for customer service actions. Yes, you have a password to log into your account to do billing stuff and buy more service or whatever. But if you call customer service, there’s no password, just the PIN.
A bad actor who knows your name, address, phone number and PIN — all of which were compromised for 10 million T-mobile customers in the recent security breach — can call T-mobile customer service and have your number directed to a new phone. Service will ask for the name, address, phone # and the PIN. Then he reads them the ID numbers from the SIM card in his phone, and boom, his phone is now attached to your number, and your phone is dead.
Think that’s bad? Well think what he can do with that phone? Every online account you own, has that number as its 2nd factor authentication. Dear Google, I forgot my password. They send an SMS text with a code to “my” phone which is now his. Now he can change the password on your Gmail and can read all your mail. And so on.
Anyway, I did a couple other things that were pending in the form of emails in my inbox. After lunch, at 2:30, I went down to the auditorium where I had called for a meeting of the AV team to try to work out how to do a live event with a zoom extension for people who couldn’t come, e.g. people in skilled nursing or whatever. Yeah, we have people in AL and SN who can zoom into meetings.
This was a frustrating exercise. All we had to do was to get a video image of our stage, onto a window on a laptop. Four high-powered techies and we didn’t manage it. I had wanted to get to where we could actually take a laptop out of the auditorium and check the audio levels. Nope. We barely got a picture from iPhone onto a laptop. I won’t go into details but it was a fiasco.
At 4:30 there was a meeting in the penthouse where the Heritage Circle announced its grants for this year. The Heritage Circle is a fund based on contributions from residents, that makes grants for projects that will enhance life at CH. This year they are funding outside bike lockers for resident use, and the cost of buses for excursions like to museums. (CH has a small bus of its own but it is neither big nor comfortable for things like a trip to the city.)
I did the aerobics, but a couple of moves caused my hip or back to hurt, so I will probably skip it on Thursday. It’s weird how I can feel nothing going this way, but going that way causes a pang, which means re-injuring or at least stressing a sore muscle.
Last night, just after writing the blog post, I wrote a little thing for the writers group. The group met at 11 am, and when I read my piece it was very well received. I’ll append it below.
I drove to FOPAL and processed 6 boxes of books. Then I continued triaging some of the existing shelves. I cut the AI/Machine Learning shelf by half.
Back home I organized a meeting of the AV-interested techs for tomorrow in the auditorium, to finalize how we will do “hybrid” meetings, a live event on stage extended to Zoom.
According to a highly authoritative (sounding) website, given the details of my time (3pm), date (2 December 1942) and place (Tacoma, WA) of birth,
my Sign is 10°06′ Sagittarius
my Ascendant is 17°33′ Aries
and this is my absolutely gorgeous chart:
But that’s not a picture of the remote event that truly affected my life from birth. This is:
This is an illustration of the Chicago Pile, the first artificial nuclear reactor. It was designed and assembled by a team led by Enrico Fermi (already in possession of his Nobel prize), and Leo Szilard (the first person to conceive of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, only a few years before, and the author of a letter, co-signed by Albert Einstein, that alerted President Roosevelt to the potential for creating a nuclear bomb). They led a team of a dozen scientists, the youngest of whom was a woman, Leona Woods, who was responsible for designing and implementing the geiger counters used to track the pile’s activity.
The pile was constructed in a squash court located under the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. (By coincidence, Leona Woods had played squash there two years earlier.) It comprised 330 tons of ultra-pure graphite blocks surrounding 5 tons of Uranium metal. Assembly began in early November 1942. Layers of graphite and uranium blocks were laid with Fermi keeping track of the approach to criticality — the moment when the uranium could produce enough neutrons to make the reaction self-sustaining. He called a halt with the 57th layer, on the evening of December 1st, 1942. The next day would see the experiment begin.
At 9:54 AM on the 2nd, the “zip”, an emergency damper rod, was withdrawn. Quoting the quite fascinating wikipedia article, then…
“Norman Hilberry stood ready with an axe to cut the scram line, which would allow the zip to fall under the influence of gravity. While Leona Woods called out the count from the boron trifluoride detector in a loud voice, George Weil, the only one on the floor, withdrew all but one of the control rods. At 10:37 Fermi ordered Weil to remove all but 13 feet of the last control rod. Weil withdrew it 6 inches at a time, measurements being taken at each step.
“The process was abruptly halted by the automatic control rod reinserting itself, due to its trip level being set too low. At 11:25, Fermi ordered the control rods reinserted. He then announced that it was lunch time.
“The experiment resumed at 14:00. Weil worked the final control rod while Fermi carefully monitored the neutron activity. Fermi announced that the pile had gone critical (reached a self-sustaining reaction) at 15:25.”
Two thousand miles and two time zones away, my mother was well into labor, preparing to deliver me into the brand new Atomic Age.
First thing I walked up to PAMF to have a blood draw. The final test the cute endocrinologist wanted was for me to take a single dexamethazone(?) tablet at 8pm, and have a blood draw at 8am. I forget what this is meant to prove; I’m sure she will tell me tomorrow.
One of the blogs I follow had, this morning, a post about the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), the law that lets somebody claim a copyright violation against, say, a youtube video. You file a DMCA claim with the provider that hosts the content, and typically they take it down immediately and let the one who posted it, protest.
Well, that reminded me of when, 4 years or so back, I found somebody had swiped a bunch of my content and reposted it. What happened was, for 15 years or so I maintained a vanity site where I advertised my book Secular Wholeness and also posted the full text of two books I’d published in the 1980s, and two screenplays I had written. Finally I decided it wasn’t worth $25/year just to show off to the internet, so when it was time to renew the domain name, I didn’t, and let it lapse.
Some person unknown immediately bought the domain name. They had apparently scraped the content previously (there is a way to get notified of all domain names that are about to expire), and now they recreated my old site, mostly. They lost a few things so some pages came up 404 not found, but most of it was there.
As far as I could tell they didn’t put ads or malware on it; they just kept it. Which pissed me off so I paid a fee to a lawyer specializing in IP issues, to find them and write them a nasty letter. And the domain disappeared. I thought that was it and forgot about it until today. But after reading that blog post, I though, hmmm, I wonder, and I typed in the old URL and … it’s back, baby. I’m not putting the URL here because I don’t want to give them any more clicks.
With some research I found out what provider was hosting them (cloudflare.com, one of the biggest hosting companies there is) and used their DMCA claim form to say, that’s all my stuff used without permission. We’ll see what happens.
That pretty much blew the morning.
At lunch I was sitting with Lennie (Madeline) and mentioned how we still hadn’t tested the hearing aid loop in the auditorium. She said, her hearing aid worked with that. So we agreed to meet at 1pm in the auditorium. I fired up the sound system and talked into a mic. She could hear me in her hearing aid. Test complete, yay.
I brought in the spray booth and put the first coat of primer on the Chrysler. I was going to put a second coat on, but after 3 hours the first coat still felt kind of tender to me and I decided to let it harden over night.
Did the usual Sunday things. Actually what with the warm weather I had to water the plants Thursday and again yesterday, so that didn’t take long.
Decided to walk to California Ave and possibly take a Lyft back. But in fact I felt fine and completed the return trip on foot as well. Almost 4.5 miles for the day, the longest walking in quite a while.
I spent some time thinking about a problem with Software Tools. It’s way too complicated to try to do justice to, here. But I think I came to a good conclusion. However, it means that my version of Kernighan’s programs will have to be somewhat different from his. That’s all right, though. One of the major points of Software Tools is that they couldn’t know what OS their readers had, or what facilities it would offer, so they basically say, if your OS supports this, fine, otherwise do it this other way.
In the evening I had nothing much to watch on TV except America’s Funniest Videos, so I finished reading a book. It was a very satisfying two-volume story that I would like to recommend, but I can’t really. It sucked me in by being about some really nice, appealing characters, and then about 2/3 of the way through the first book, surprised me with explicit sex scenes. Which puts me in a bind. I’d like to write a 5-star Amazon review saying, this is a well-written fantasy about likeable characters having big adventures — but then I’d have to say, but oh by the way, there is so much fucking. It’s as if Tolkien had paused every 3 or 4 chapters to give you a high-def anatomical play-by-play of Aragorn getting it on with Arwen; and then, back to the swords and the sorcery. Well, ok, adult me would probably read that; but who is it for? I don’t think I could have handled it at age 12, which is exactly who the rest of the book is suited to.
Today was the first day of “Silicon with Adam Savage”, a convention of movie and comic book fans at the San Jose Convention Center. I drove down, parked, went in, registered and walked around. Lots of my fellow visitors were in costume, but I am really out of touch with current memes. I could recognize the half-dozen Imperial Storm Troopers who were doing “security” at the entrance, and two or three teenage girls dressed as Harley Quinn. But lots of the costumes I could see were costumes, but I couldn’t name the characters or the movie.
The heart of the con was a large hall filled with vendor booths. I wasn’t inspired to take a lot of pictures, but here’s one to give the flavor.
Art based on Star Wars, on Star Trek, a little bit of Harry Potter, a lot of Anime film characters. At least three vendors selling beautifully crafted light-sabre handles. Like that.
There was a schedule of panels and such, and you could get an autograph from a number of B-list actors. One of the few whose names I recognized was Lou Ferrigno, the original Hulk.
I spent a couple of hours seeing most of the vendor area. I sat down in the Grand Ballroom for the keynote/kickoff talk by Adam Savage with guests astronaut Cady Coleman and SF author Mary Robinette Kowal.
I’m sorry to report that this quickly became quite boring. After half an hour, I left. I looked over the schedule of panels, and except for the 6pm Costume Contest there wasn’t anything I wanted to see. So I came away and had a quiet afternoon at home, reading.
Took the standard walk. Back pain is obnoxious sitting or getting up, but not an issue walking.
Futzed around variously. At 2pm met with Bert in the auditorium to do more with AV equipment. Still did not resolve an on-going problem with the camera, or resolve how to do a Zoom meeting that shows the activity on stage to remote attendees.
At 5pm, went to Peter & Juthica’s room as invited, for drinks before dinner. Janet was also there. Pleasant conversation then and through dinner which Pru joined.
Did the aerobics. Buzzed off to Shustek for a day of cataloging. Left early so I could attend the annual Trustee-Resident meeting via Zoom. The meat of this is the financial report. Bottom line, Channing House is solvent.
Some on-going things. I have a couple of what should be quite valuable early books from Xerox PARC, that came in a box of donations. Both were published in 1976. One is Personal Dynamic Media and is basically a manifesto for the use of computers in education. Although the author is given as the “Learning Research Group”, I believe that was basically Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg who in the early 70s developed a lot of fundamental concepts at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, including little things like the whole idea of a graphical user interface with overlapping windows.
The second is Smalltalk-72 Instruction Manual by Adele Goldberg and Alan Kay. Now you can find lots of copies of the Smalltalk-80 Instruction Manual in the used book market, selling on eBay etc. for like $10. But this is an earlier version from eight years before and there are no, zero, zippity doo copies of this book anywhere. Either of the books. That’s great, it means they are rare. But without comparables, what are they worth? We usually set used book prices based on what the same books are selling for on Amazon or eBay. But here we got no guidance. This has been the subject of lots of emails between me and other FOPAL people.
Another on-going thing is, lower back pain. I’ve been bothered by a nasty pain around my left hip and up into my lower back for several days. Only very particular movements bring it on, and fortunately it doesn’t happen when walking. But certain specific movements when sitting or in bed bring an ouch. I expect it will go away like this kind of shit does. But I wanted to note it here.
Today is the day for which I bought tickets to the exhibit “Last Supper in Pompeii” at the Legion of Honor in the city. Initially I proposed this outing to Jean, Darlene and Jessea, but D&J had already seen it, so it came down to just Jean and me. Which worked out fine.
She drove up and parked in our lot at 9:30, and we took my car on up to The City. There were two special exhibits there. The Pompeii one had lots of small domestic items from Pompeii, utensils, cups and bowls, wall frescoes and floor mosaics, to illustrate how the Romans were living pretty comfortably until the town was wiped out in a few hours by hot ash flows from Vesuvius.
A special treat was cooked dormouse, “either as a savoury appetizer or as a dessert (dipped in honey and poppy seeds)”. The exhibit included an actual Glirarium, a big pottery cage used to keep and fatten dormice, and also a special small pottery oven used to roast them. Not clear to me how they were prepared; did they skin them? Need a small sharp knife for that. And at the table, how do you eat one? Probably put the whole thing in our mouth and suck the meat off the bones. They didn’t say that; I’m speculating.
The other exhibit was a number of large pieces by “Afro-fusion” sculptor Wangechi Mutu (do an image search on her name). Really striking stuff, I thought; made me want to take pictures. Here’s a couple.
Anyway, we entered the museum at 10:30, and by 11:30 we had seen all we wanted so started back. At Channing House Jean headed off in her car, and I grabbed a sandwich from the grab-and-go for a quick lunch before my first meeting at 1pm.
Oh, also, I started my laundry.
This was a zoom meeting for volunteers of FOPAL. The first open sale weekend in two years, two weeks back, netted about $17,000, or about half what we got in the old days. There were about half as many people. On the upside, that meant that nobody felt crowded or unsafe. Everyone conformed to the mask rules and generally a good time was had by all.
Next meeting was at 3pm. Continuing my laundry, I watched the start of this in the laundry room folding my underwear. This was a talk by Dr. Sarah Cody, the Public Health Officer for Santa Clara County, who was the first public health official in the country to implement a shelter in place order, March 2020. She described the days leading up to that, getting hold of their first testing kits, starting a program where anyone who came to a county hospital with respiratory issues, and who tested negative for flu, was tested for Covid. After two weeks of that, she looked at the numbers, and compared them to numbers from Italy, and realized that we were on the exact same curve, but just two weeks behind the Italians. So with other regional public health officers, they authored the shelter in place and announced it.
Unfortunately I had to leave that program to join my 4pm meeting, the Channing House Strategic Planning Committee. I have mixed feelings about this committee but it is starting to feel like maybe it will do something productive. This one left a better taste in my mouth than the last one.
Bumped into Craig and Diane and Jerry going down to supper so ate with them.
Codgerville 