Wednesday 02/02/2022

…or 2/2/22 if you leave out the zeros. As somebody pointed out on the house bulletin board list, we won’t have another such day until 3/3/33, I should live so long.

This was the morning of giving a docent tour for people from the Danish Embassy. Scheduled for 8am and we have to be done by 9am. This meant I needed to be out the door by 7:15 or so, to be sure of being early. Well in fact it turns out that it takes 15 minutes to walk from my apartment, to the garage, and drive to CHM, arriving at 7:30.

There I learned some things nobody had bothered to tell us, “us” being me and Chuck, the other docent. On account of Covid, we can’t have more than 10 in a tour group, and there were 20 Embassy people, so, two docents. Chuck had generously volunteered to start his tour in the middle so I could start at my usual start.

I had thought the Danes were arriving, doing a one-hour tour (which is ridiculously short) and going away, hence the 9am cut-off. Not at all how it was. The Danes had rented a conference room for three days, and were doing some kind of off-site training. The 9am cut-off was because a film crew was filming in our exhibit space and they wanted to set up all their equipment and start work at 9am. So the tour groups had to be out to avoid tripping over cables and stuff.

Anyway, the Danish group were prompt; they were every one of them tall, handsome nordic types, mostly men, a couple of women, all 30-somethings. We got going just a bit after 8am and I finished up my tour at 8:55, which is a major win for me. My editing and rehearsals these past few days paid off. Alas, so many interesting tid-bits I had to cut out.

Which brought me home again by 10am with an open day. I had a standing request from neighbor Dr. Margaret to help her with some Mac issues, so after lunch I called her up and she was free so we did that. She has interesting if trivial problems. Like, her Contacts app had somehow doubled up all(?) or most of her contacts. I know zilch about that app, never use it. She pointed out that it had a “find duplicates” function! Which offers a “Merge?” option, which applied multiple times, got rid of all the dups. On her iPhone, the Messages app was stuck in horizontal display, not changing to vertical when you rotate the phone. Remembering the problem with Jean’s phone yesterday, I had her reboot it. Haha, fixed! This is the kind of thing that has people saying I am a tech genius: (a) look up the problem in google, (b) reboot it.

Tuesday 02/01/2022

Went to bed without blogging. Now I don’t remember. Well a bit. I went for a standard walk in the morning, and instead of listening to a podcast, I talked through my docent spiel. Don’t remember what else. This is why I do the blog, because otherwise…

Oh, yeah. Took a tech squad call. Jean (another Jean) had an issue with the Mac Mail app. I think I resolved it by changing the Mail Settings to empty her trash folder more often. She also had a problem with her iPhone, the Mail app on the phone would crash (just disappear from the screen) every time you started it. I did a quick google and the first hit had the eminently practical suggestion, reboot the phone. Which I did, and voila! the Mail app now came up and stayed up. She said, amazing! I said, all I did was google the issue and do what the first hit said. “You know my methods, Watson!” but I don’t think she got the reference.

Monday 01/31/2022

First thing, I rehearsed the docent talk, it ran for just 50 minutes, yay!

Then I went down to FOPAL to do my usual Monday work processing and pricing books. I also bought a few groceries for my stock of snacks.

I knew that only one person had signed up for each of the two lunch shifts. I got back just in time for the second shift, 12:15 and sure enough, only one volunteer, so I filled in for a while until the second person arrived. That was Joanne who offers to fill in whenever needed, and who I had messaged early in the morning.

The rest of the day was quiet.

Sunday 02/31/2022

In the morning, finished editing the docent talk and timing it. If I deliver it as written, it should take under 50 minutes. Of course if I digress a lot, or get a lot of questions…

Met briefly with Marcia to talk about reviving the volunteer newspaper delivery team. Then it was off to the SWBB game vs. Arizona. This was the first rematch since the same two teams played for the national championship at the end of the Final Four last spring, a game Stanford won by 1 point. This time they won by 5 or 6, although the game was close most of the way.

Back home I watched most of the 49ers game against LA, losing in the final minutes.

Saturday 01/29/2022

Sent out the next week’s volunteer sign-up sheet. Went for a moderate walk. Then spent probably 3 hours, before and after lunch, revising and practicing my docent talk. It looks like I can keep my main points and still be well under an hour.

Friday 01/28/2022

Took a short walk in the morning, to Gamble Gardens. The rest of the morning I prepared to post a new sign-up sheet for my tray dispensing volunteers. We had been using 3 volunteers at lunch and supper shifts, but now that everyone knows the job, multiple people have told me that three is a crowd, two can do the job fine. So the signup sheet for the coming week only allows two volunteers in each shift.

Last week I promised some statistics, which meant getting out and dusting off the Python script I wrote a year ago, to collect statistics on volunteers then. It’s a feature of the signup software (slottr.com) that you can export the contents of a sheet as an Excel file. That gives you a spreadsheet with the names and times of people who signed up.

I had written a Python program to open such a spreadsheet, suck all the names out of it, and update a different spreadsheet that just has names and number of times each name has appeared. I can open this “tally” sheet and see that Leon Beeler worked 5 shifts, etc.

I had to modify the script to handle the new task, which took an hour to code and test, and then tallied the 3 weeks of volunteers so far. 64 different people have volunteered in that time (i.e. about 1/3 of the population of the tower), most for only 1 or 2 shifts, but several in double-digits. I really like my neighbors here.

After lunch I finally got to what I have been intending for a couple of days, planning a revised and shortened docent talk. Got a good start on that. Also worked on the VW model.

At 5:00 it was time to depart for a SWBB game. Stanford had closed down public access for several weeks but reopened effective today. The Cardinal played Arizona State and out-classed them in every way, leading by 30 at times. Tara put in all the bench-warmers for the fourth quarter and they let ASU come back a little, so we only won by 25.

Thursday 01/27/2022

Took a standard walk in the morning. Started later than usual, so that I could end up at CVS after 9am, when their pharmacy opens. Picked up a prescription.

Now I set to work on a project that’s been pending for weeks: selling some rare books. These were contributions from Allen B. Ordinarily I’d just have found them for sale online, verified they were selling above $25, and passed them on to Nigel of the FOPAL “High Value” committee. But these were rare enough that there were no comparables to be found. So the HV committee wouldn’t take them. I decided (last fall) to try selling them myself. I’d listed one set (a group of manuals all for the IBM 7040, a budget mainframe that IBM sold briefly in the early 1960s) and they’d done nothing. Now I edited the description and re-listed that group. Then another book, a Xerox corporate report by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (two people very famous in computer circles). This paper-bound report was a longer, and earlier, version of a very influential paper they published in 1977 in an IEEE publication.

I took multiple pictures and listed the book with a nice description, and a starting bid of $25 and a “buy it now” price of $50. And had lunch and a nap, and when I woke up, the book had sold! Somebody had “bought it now”. I emailed Nigel who replied that he’d come by and pick it up and see that it got mailed. FOPAL has a whole mailing/fulfillment shop that I’ve never seen, apparently.

Which brought me to 3pm when I had a date for a tech squad appointment with Kathy. She had various issues with her TV and DVD player which we resolved pretty easily.

Which brought me to 4pm when the semi-annual budget meeting was held. This event has our CFO present the FY 2023 budget and generally discuss the financial state of Channing House. Bottom line, we are still overspending our income but with the upgrade project completed, she forecasts a return to profitability over the next few years. Meantime we have 18 million in the bank.

Wednesday 01/26/2022

The main event today was a meeting of volunteers at CHM to prepare for returning to public access, now tentatively scheduled for 2/17. There were 25 or so regular volunteers in the room (plus another 7 or 8 on a big Zoom screen) and we are a very definite demographic, I doubt if anybody in the room was under 75.

The meeting was chaired by Kate McGregor, education (I think) director, from her remote location of… Homer, Alaska. She said a lot of things about how to design a docent tour. Mainly she inspired me to take another look at mine. As I said the other day, reading through the old script took over 1:15 which is just wrong; tours should be comfortably under one hour.

However, I make 6 stops, to make 6 major points about the progress to the “Revolution” of having a supercomputer in one’s pocket. I should not be talking for more than 5-7 minutes at any stop, which comes to 42 minutes plus at most 5 minutes of walking time, i.e. well short of 60 minutes. So my task between now and next Wednesday when I lead my first tour in 2 years(!) is to edit that script down to the essential points, so no stop takes more than 7 minutes to read.

But it was fun seeing all the docents again, two years older, and checking out the PDP-1 and the 1401 systems. One docent, Dave Bennett, lost his wife last fall and confessed to having a hard time since. “So much to do” on the one hand, and “lonely” on the other. I guess I’m fortunate in being less gregarious. I have more than sufficient people interaction just walking the halls here; but I wasn’t particularly lonely in 2019, either, check the early blog days.

Stopped on the way home to buy coffee. Picking up my supper, talked to dining supe Gloria who wanted to tell me that we don’t need 3 volunteers handing out trays, a point I had already come to on my own. Will cut it back to 2 per shift next week.

Tuesday 01/25/2022

Went for a walk this morning, as I hadn’t yesterday. At 10:30 joined the writers group. I hadn’t written anything on the topic of “conversation with an animal, preferably wild”. My neighbors had written some good things. Two stories of dogs were very affecting.

Went down to FOPAL for an hour and completed tidying up my section.

Did a few minutes on the VW model. Scanned the Cal. State 1099-G I received, adding it to the folder of 1099 and similar forms. The last of these won’t be in until near the end of February.

Monday 01/24/2022

I decided to FOPAL work first thing today, so no walk, but was at work at 9:15. Where I found 13 boxes of books. I spent 3:15 clearing them out, and barely got back to CH to pick up my lunch, which fortunately I’d booked for 1pm.

In the afternoon I revised my requirement statement for new mics on the 11th floor, making it a lot less formal and simpler. Then as only one person had signed up for the tray job from 6-7, I went down and worked that shift to help the one lone volunteer. It’s a fun and not at all difficult or pressured job.

Looking forward to Wednesday, when there’s a 6-hour meeting physically at the CHM. However that’s also my usual laundry day, so I rescheduled laundry for tomorrow.