Wednesday 07/14/2021

Started the day with a walk; felt fine.

Then for a couple of hours before lunch I played catch-up. Paid a couple of bills. Filed some papers. Mainly, read and editing texts from my critiquing group in preparation for meeting them Friday.

Afternoon, had a couple of meetings regarding the ERF. The Event Reservation Form is how anybody wanting to host an “event” reserves a time and a place and any necessary support. The organizer fills out an ERF requesting the room, on the date and time, and any arrangement of chairs, any catering, any A/V support.

The ERF has been a paper form, a bit more complicated and about as readable as a 1040A, forever. A few months back a couple of people put together an online ERF, a fillable form that when submitted, generates PDFs that it emails to whoever is concerned. Today I met with Lennie and Pam to talk about finishing that project, bringing out of “beta” status. We identified some problems with it.

Fortunately, and only very recently, Lennie has gained write access to the platform where the ERF was built. This milestone meant that she had gained the trust of the staff IT people. (Justifiably so, as when Lennie retired she was managing the IT department for all the Stanford Libraries. Think she can handle a WordPress site?)

One problem was the list of people who receive a PDF when an ERF is submitted. It was badly out of date. I took that as a task, and went to my favorite staff person, Kim The HR, who was able quickly to identify the proper addressees for the various things. If the form requests chairs and tables to be arranged, for example, that goes to Housekeeping. And so on.

In the evening I spent some time with STIP-IP. I am just finishing up one of its more complicated programs, executing it for the first time and picking off the initial bugs. Rather to my surprise, the first bug I found was not mine, but one that has existed in this widely respected textbook since 1981. I found a bug in Brian Kernighan’s code, hahaha.

Tuesday 07/13/2021

Did the cardio class. Then worked on STIP-IP until time for the writers group. The cue was “In which I go shopping.” This was an easy one because just a few days ago I had had a shopping experience. I will put the piece at the end here. I read it well and was interrupted by laughter several times.

From there I went to FOPAL where about 7 boxes of computer books awaited, of which I ended up shelving half a box, the rest off to the $1 room.

In which Mister Grumpy goes to Macy’s for the last time ever…

A simple need for a simple man: due to normal attrition in the underwear drawer, I am one brief shy of a 14-day laundry cycle. I need a three-pack (because that’s how they come) of Jockey standard briefs, 36 waist. And by long habit I know just where to get them: second floor of Macy’s Men’s Store in the Stanford Shopping Center. So on a bright Wednesday morning I go over there.

And of course it isn’t there any more. What was Macy’s Men’s is now a construction site. I cross back to the main Macy’s, where “men’s” is now a mere department, and indeed one that is not called out on the store directory sign inside the door. I wander through the glittering bright maze of the Macy’s ground floor. A distant glimpse of a Tommy Hilfiger sign gives me direction and I stumble into an island of men’s wear.

There are no clerks or customer service people of any kind visible in this quarter of the huge store. I circle around until, quite by chance, I find the underwear display. There! A small rack of Jockey briefs. The three-packs are in disarray, with all styles and sizes jumbled. The packs are taller than the shelves in the display case, so they have to be forced in, bent double. I spend five minutes putting Macy’s display into a semblance of order until, on the third shelf, I find my prize, a three-pack of standard briefs, 36 waist. Success!

Or is it? I need to pay for it, but where? I look around; then I walk around the core of the vast, eye-dazzling sales floor. The only human beings I see are a few other customers. I see a distant exit door and briefly consider leaving with the goods, but the package has a fink tag attached and would raise an alarm. It is about this point when the thought first arises: “You could have ordered this from Amazon, you know.”

At length, near the perfumery, I see two women behind a counter, chatting with two women on my side. Each pair is having an engrossing talk, it seems. After a long minute I begin to follow. I’m not sure what the nearer pair is on about but several times the store lady asserts, “Well, I will be here on the 15th.” The third time she says this, I think, “Great, but are you here today?”

As these conversations are apparently interminable, I wander off, still looking for assistance. After another half circuit of the floor I spot a person behind a counter busy doing something obscure, and interrupt them to ask, “Can you check me out?” And they can! No, I don’t have a Macy’s card. No, I don’t want to have a Macy’s card. Just do the thing so I can hold my phone by the machine and let it pay you, thanks so much.

As I make my way to the far-distant exit door, which turns out to be the one on the side of the building opposite to where I would like to be — but I don’t mind as long as it gets me out — as I exit, I think with iron certainty, I will never enter this place again. If Amazon doesn’t sell it (and what do they not?) I will do without.

Monday 07/12/2021

Most interesting thing today was that instead of a walk, I took a ride on the Cyber Cycle, which I attended a demo of a couple weeks ago (2.193). It’s fun, although my cycling legs are only a memory. I think I will do it more.

Thanks to the beta blockers I take, my heart doesn’t go much over 70 bpm even when I’m breaking a sweat. I sent a query on that to my cardiologist who said, no, the meds are fine, and no harm if your rate is low.

Spent quite a bit of time working over the current chapter of Software Tools (No Longer) In Pascal. I’m finding a fair amount to criticize in the work of author Brian Kernighan, which is rather presumptuous of me given he is one of the original developers of UNIX and a respected professor of comp. sci. at Princeton. Same age as me, FWIW. Well, he’s welcome to work over one of my books, I’m sure he’d find plenty to criticize.

Tried out the new online meal ordering system, ordering my supper to take out and eat in my room. I have to say somewhat ashamedly that I rather like eating by myself.

Sunday 07/11/2021

After my usual Sunday morning activities I decided to walk to the California Ave. Market. I did that a week ago and was disappointed to find no market. Well, duh, that was the Fourth of July. They took a holiday! So it should be back, and it was. I had a tasty breakfast of pastry and a bottle of apple-pomegranate juice and walked home. A total of just over 4 miles for the day.

I spent a lot of time working on Software Tools in Python. Coding is such fun. I also spent some time with the Chrysler model. I said it was insanely detailed? Here’s how detailed it is. This picture shows a cylinder head and its matching rocker cover. The cover is going to be glued on to the cylinder head, right?

However, they molded the rocker arms into the cylinder head. They will be permanently covered when the cover is glued on. Boggle.

If they’re insane, I am too. I actually spent some time thinking how I could paint that cylinder head, with dark brown gloss to make it look oily, and then maybe rub the rocker arms and shafts to make them a lighter color so they would stand out. Right. Just before gluing the rocker cover on to hide it forever.

There is a problem, though. The back side of each cylinder head has a couple of hefty molded projections. They do not match any hole in the cylinder block, and are not shown in the assembly drawings. So maybe I’m supposed to cut them off. But they’re bigger than the usual flashing.

It almost looks as if the cylinders should have been open, and those pegs would slide into the #1 and #4 cylinders. But they won’t. Strange.

Saturday 07/10/2021

Went for a short walk, then spent most of the day in my room, alternating among my various hobby projects. I actually opened up the boxes of two car models. One, the 1957 Cadillac coupe deVille, was quite disappointing. No engine; not many chrome parts (and that car has a lot of chrome parts), the tires are not rubber but cast plastic.

The other, a 1956 Chrysler 300b, turned out to be insanely detailed, there must be 50 little pieces to the engine alone. A very good kit indeed. So I started on that one. It will take a lot of work and time but should be rewarding.

Friday 07/09/2021

Went for the walk; it was good.

Today I had set myself the task of completing the upload of Pelajis, in 600-1000 word chunks, complete to the Kindle Vella system. Which I did; and marked the first 20 episodes as “published”. Vella is designed as a platform for publishing serials. It isn’t clear to me if there is a benefit in holding back the remaining episodes, releasing them at intervals as if they were being created fresh, or if I should just dump the whole thing out there. Sooner or later all the episodes will have been published, either way.

Vella is supposed to go live next week. At that time the story will have a public URL and readers searching Amazon will be able to find it. Readers will be able to “favorite” stories they enjoy, and the most-favorited ones will be featured in the “Vella store”, or so Amazon tells us.

Anyway by early afternoon I had finished the clerical clicky-clicky tasks to create all the episodes and publish the first 20.

At lunch I sat with Pru and Bob. I like talking to both of them. For supper, though, I decided to walk to Whole Foods and buy a smoothie. That was a modest supper Marian and I used to get once in a while. I walked but Whole Foods didn’t respond; their smoothie counter was clearly not in operation. Walked on to the Creamery instead.

I am thinking that tomorrow I may break out a new car model…

Thursday 07/08/2021

I was the morning cardio class, the only person with leader AJ on the 11th floor. However there was also one person on Zoom.

This was the first time I executed the schedule I had figured out for Thursdays. Cardio from 8:30 to 9. Then down to my apartment to shower and dress, and down to the car and drive to CHM in the East Bay, either Shustek in Fremont or Yosemite in Milpitas, arriving before 10am. It makes me nervous to schedule things that tight, but of course it worked just fine, arriving in Milpitas with 15 minutes to spare.

Today we did various work related to cataloging and storing items. Too complicated to explain and too boring. On return around 3pm, I took the car for a wash. I used to take it to Lozano’s in Mountain View, but now I go to Ducky’s car wash here in Palo Alto. As much as washing the outside, I wanted to get the inside vacuumed out. Somehow it had picked up a lot of crumbs and trash, I can’t imagine how.

Wednesday 07/08/2021

Yup. Completely missed a day. Went to bed last night without a thought of doing a blog post.

What did I do on Tuesday? I know that I did the aerobics class, and attended the writers group, and went and spent a couple of hours at FOPAL digging through boxes of donated computer books looking for things that might interest the Vintage Computer Fest.

Today, Wednesday, I went for the standard walk. Then I spent some time reviewing the material for the meeting of the Strategic Planning Committee (SPC hereafter). At this point it is all about revising our Mission Statement, which is nearly as boring as it sounds. And list of values.

I also spent a couple of hours continuing to upload segments of Pelajis into Kindle Vella. At the end of the day I had uploaded 42 segments, and had reached the part of the book where I had not given it a close editing on this third, fourth, or maybe it’s the fifth pass. I plan to finish this task and have the whole thing ready to go before the end of this weekend.

Then it was time for the RA Executive Committee meeting. The only point of discussion was the hot news of the day, which had been announced by email a couple of hours prior. A staff member in the Lee Center called in sick, and as normal, Angela went to them at once and gave them a quick Covid test — and they were positive. This staff person has received both vaccine shots so it’s a “break through” case. Anyway they would have had no contact with us IL residents. The AL wing is on modified lock-down pending tests.

Which led up to 4pm and the SPC meeting which was nearly as boring as expected.

Monday 07/05/2021

You know, I think I have been inconsistent with the dates at the head of these entries. Sometimes I use the U.S. convention of mm/dd/yyyy but I notice that at least yesterday I reversed the day and month. No, yesterday was not April 7th.

Today I spent some time preparing the Kindle Vella entry for Pelajis.

In particular they want a piece of art to show at the head of the story. The artwork is to be a square so big, no bigger, and designed so the important bits are in the middle because they will crop it to a circle. After much thinking and looking at, oh, at least 1000 images in google image search, I finally decided to go with a moment early in the story where the kids are looking out of a shuttle window down at Pelajis from space. With that concept in mind it only took an hour or so to cobble up this, from various sources.

At first the Vella web page refused to upload this image. “Something is wrong!” it would say excitedly, “check that your image is the right type and not too large.” Well it was, and it wasn’t; but what was wrong was that it was not exactly square. It was 1266 pixels wide by 1267 pixels high. When I cropped that one row of pixels off the top all was well.

Later I created the first five “episodes” by copying and pasting. It turns out there’s a minimum of 600 words per episode. My first break was a little short. So I had to steal a bit from the next scene, and then from the next, and finally when I got to Episode 5 I was almost 200 words short and at a very definite chapter break. I did not want to pull the top of the next chapter into Ep. 5, so I had to compose 200 words of new story, padding out a scene that I had summarized in a paragraph in the original.

Then I went down to FOPAL and processed a bunch of books, and spent not quite an hour inventorying the books I had thought would be suitable for the Vintage Computer Fest (henceforth VCF). Disappointed to find I’ve got only about 3 boxes, which is not enough to make a good display on an 8-foot table. More on this tomorrow.

04/07/2021

Being Sunday, I watered the plants and did the NYT crossword. Then I walked the 1.5 miles to California Ave, meaning to reward myself with something from the Midwife and the Baker stand at the farmers market, but unfortunately, they have apparently killed that market in favor of filling up the roadway with more restaurant seating. So I took a Lyft back.

Spent a few hours working on hobby projects. At 4:30, I went down to Dennis’s place in SJ and had a good supper and pleasant chatting. Left there in time to get back to CH by 7:20, and set up the A/V for the evening’s party. Which was quite nice. Well organized and fun. At 9pm we adjourned to look at at the fireworks to be seen around the horizon, in about a normal quantity for a 4th.