Friday 09/24/2021

Went for the morning walk, although I took the shorter route, losing a half mile. No reason, just felt like indulging myself on a Friday.

Caught up with an ongoing project, the “online ERF”. Someday I will describe it. When it’s finished, if ever.

In the afternoon I met with Bert in the Auditorium and we worked for an hour trying to get audio out of the system into a computer or a camera. Without success. At length we proved to our satisfaction that although the audio system has phone jacks labeled, “CTL ROOM L/R”, “PHONES”, “AUX MON1” and “AUX MON2”, none, zero of these jacks has any audio coming out of them. You might think at least one of these would carry the mixed audio that is going to the house speakers, but nunh-unh.

Repeated emails between me and Stew about Connie’s upcoming poetry reading. Stew is the event coordinator for this, and he wants some kind of Zoom simulcast because he thinks there will be more than 50 people, the current Covid-limit on auditorium seating, who want to attend in some fashion.

Connie is one of my favorite people and I want to help make her reading a success, but this whole simulcast thing while obvious in principle, is just very difficult.

The least of the reasons is because we can’t figure out how to get stinkin’ audio out of the system into a computer — which means that the audio track of a Zoom session will not be same as what’s coming out of her lapel mic. It will be whatever the mic in the laptop that is hosting the Zoom session, can pick up, there in the auditorium. Which means a blend of the speaker’s voice and the sound coming over the house speakers. If that sounds like a great recipe for echo, if not for squealing feedback, hey, welcome to A/V Hell.

Thursday 09/23/2021

Joined the aerobics class — ha. I was the aerobics class, none of my usual classmates showed up. After which I tidied the apartment and filled the hummer feeders

I hadn’t had the usual email from Gretta saying which venue the various CHM volunteers should go to for the usual Thursday stint, and was debating whether to go at all. But decided to go to Shustek and see. Then as I was walking to the garage at 9:30 I received a group text saying which place: same as last week, so, Shustek.

Spent the day there photographing things. Cataloging has three big parts. One, creating the catalog record, itself a multi-step process involving a complicated form. Two, photographing. Three, transport from the catalog workspace at Shustek, to the Yosemite warehouse and storing.

The catalog crews had gotten well ahead, so today I and Sherman formed a photo assembly line and got probably 50 items done. The photos have to be taken a certain way and then the image files renamed to have the object’s catalog number in them. For lunch we all went to a new sandwich shop, Crusts, where the sandwiches all cost the same, $11, and all are made with sourdough bread made on the premises.

That’s all the news. For tomorrow I have made myself a short but beefy to-do list.

Wednesday 09/22/2021

Went for The Walk. Pretty much all the hip/back pane is gone. That’s nice.

Did some housekeeping. I have a wastebasket for non-recyclable stuff, and a flat basket for newspaper, a taller basket for bottles and cans, and then various bit like receipts and shipping cartons and six-pack carriers pile up. How can one person, living alone, no cooking, taking almost all meals out of the room, produce so much crapola? Got that all gone, then sorted the laundry and started it. And refreshed the hummingbird feeders. And mixed up breakfast shakes for the next week.

Lunch with Kent and Jean and Bob. This was at Kent’s invite from earlier in the week, I don’t even know what he was celebrating. But he wanted to reminisce about the Sacramento Jazz Festival, which apparently he was attending after he graduated from Stanford in 1960. I graduated from high school in 1960, but I didn’t bring that up.

Anyway, finished up the laundry and then went and spent an hour in the auditorium trying to understand/debug some of the systems. Had a minor success in figuring out why part of the console was getting no power. Well, didn’t actually figure it out, just turned switches at random and the power came back.

I have a sock missing. Hopefully it will turn up stuck by static cling inside one of my shirts. I know I checked the inside of washer and dryer both.

Tuesday 09/21/2021

For the first time in weeks, the Tuesday/Thursday 8:30am aerobics is back on the 11th floor. And for the first time in a couple of weeks, I didn’t have any significant back pain. So I went up for the aerobics.

I spent an hour researching blog sites. This made me very disappointed. There are several sites that purport to let you build a “free blog” (wix, medium, wordpress where this is hosted). But they put so much crap on the free page, it is really hard to see how to make a simple, technical blog, with a few diagrams but a lot of text and code. OK, I managed to tame wordpress to make this blog look old-fashioned enough to suit me. But the wordpress editor is just abominable. It works well enough for what I do here, but for serious editing… yechhh. And the others weren’t any better.

At 12 I took a sandwich from the grab-n-go service and went to FOPAL. Here I met with a total of twelve boxes of books for the computer section. It took four hours to process them all.

Monday 09/20/2021

After my walk I should have gone to the meeting of the event planning committee at 10. It was in my calendar and I was aware of it, but the time just went flitting by and I didn’t go. Another memory lapse.

Lennie intercepted me at lunch. She had been at the meeting and knew there were questions about A/V support issues that I could have answered. Mostly about the question of showing movies in the auditorium. We were joined at the table by John who was also interested in that along with his wife Francis. I was explaining about what could be done, and finally said, let’s go in the auditorium and experiment.

So Lennie went to get DVD player and John went to get a DVD, and I went to get a cable, and we met in the auditorium and had a very productive hour trying out different things. It turns out that the Blu-Ray player in the equipment rack, is also internet connected and has apps for Netflix and Amazon Prime. So I went back to my room and wrote up a brief account for the various event managers, and an email to the A/V committee.

About 4 I got an email from the tech squad, could I take a call from Lynn. She had a weird problem with Safari, where when she went to some websites, the page would be replaced with a big plain block of text, losing all its buttons and interactive features.

I had not seen anything like that. I went up to her apartment and she showed me. Yup, it did that. Firefox did not. I figured it had to be some kind of accessibility aid. So I searched the Safari preferences and there was something called “Reader” which was on. So I turned it off and that was that.

Lynn was very impressed with how fast I figured out the problem. My reputation as a Mac Genius continues to grow ;-p

Sunday 09/19/2021

Watered the plants, fed the birds, did the puzzle. Actually, didn’t finish it; several of the clues were arbitrarily bad (I say) and I didn’t catch on to the puzzle theme until the end.

Walked to California Ave. The market there is booming; it has expanded into two crossing alleys, and was jammed with people enjoying a bright, cool morning. Took a Lyft back to Ace Hardware where I bought a supply of AA batteries and walked the rest of the way.

Didn’t do much else. Well, a couple of hours on STIP where I am basically ripping up and redoing many hours of work.

Saturday 09/18/2021

Did my usual Saturday indulgence, a modest walk ending with picking up a chocolate hazlenut swirl at the farmers market.

I spent a couple of hours in the auditorium getting noplace with trying to set up for — what I have decided to call — a Simulcast. This would be to put the image and sound of an event on the auditorium stage, onto a laptop as a Zoom meeting. For the benefit of people who don’t want to, or can’t, come to the auditorium.

I was asked to set up the 11th floor TV to show the Stanford football game. It was on ESPNU, which the comcast unit there is not authorized for. However if I switch to the Roku box, and go through a whole magical 3-factor authentication dance to activate ESPN access under my personal comcast ID, the Roku can put ESPN on the screen.

I thought, sure 10 minutes is plenty of time for that. So at 4:50 I went up there and — the Roku didn’t work. Obviously not responding to its remote. Pulled the remote batteries; saw that the spring on the minus end of one battery was corroded. Took it down to the workshop on the 5th floor, found some sandpaper, shined up the spring. Back to 11 (and ten minutes is disappearing fast) and it still didn’t work.

Back down to my apartment on 6, look in the drawer for AA batteries — oh no, I meant to get some. I find only 1, of dubious age. Down the hall to Craig’s place and cadge a battery from him. Back to 11. Now the Roku works, yay! After I go through the authentication and activation ritual, it is 4 minutes into the game and Stanford has already scored. Fortunately only one other fan has showed up.

So, tomorrow? Buy AA batteries. Put 2 in the Roku remote.

Friday 09/17/2021

Went for the standard walk. Then diddled around not doing much until lunch. After lunch I met with Pam, who presents movies via zoom. She wasn’t sure her new Macbook Air would support the old Superdrive (USB DVD player) as it doesn’t plug into the USB-C port on the Air. I was pretty sure it would, and brought along a cheap adapter. Yup, it did. So that’s resolved.

She doesn’t want to show movies in the auditorium, though. Too much stress getting everything set up right. So she is looking to recruit someone else to do that, and I’ll train them.

At 4pm it was time for Rhonda’s Covid Q&A meeting. We had one breakthrough case two weeks ago. (Apparently I didn’t write about this.) After contact tracing it turned out that half a dozen people had had “extensive” contact with that person, meaning at least 15 minutes with masks off. At dinner, in fact. So all those people got ten days of quarantine. Two of them were Craig and Diane Allen.

Rhonda was happy to report there have been no further cases. She is going to travel to Colorado to attend a wedding, and she described her decision process, whether to go risking Covid, or not go and offend a “dear friend”. She will go; and on return will work from home for ten days while testing.

Thursday 09/15/2021

Drove to Fremont to work the day in the Shustek center, cataloging. We have a new volunteer, and in the afternoon I taught him to enter catalog data into the Mimsey database.

I received an order from Amazon: an HDMI to USB converter. With it I can put the output of my Nikon DSLR on the screen of the computer. This is a big step toward being able to hold “hybrid” events, live in the auditorium with its limit of 50 people, and simultaneously on Zoom for other people, like those in the Lee center (AL&SN). Will play with that a bit tomorrow.

Wednesday 09/15/2021

Since I did a walk yesterday, what exercise shall I do today? Neighbor Jerry had suggested that to keep back pain from returning, use the two machines in the gym that work one’s core. There’s one for abdominals, which is basically a situp against variable pressure, and one specifically for lower back, which is the opposite: you lean on a pad and force it backward, like leaning back in an office chair.

So I thought I would do that, and did about a dozen reps of each and started feeling it, so stopped. But I will return. Then I thought I’d ride the Cyber Cycle which I’ve done before, but it was inop. There was nobody around to help with it so I went outside and for a moderate walk.

Took care of a few minor chores. After lunch I went out on the balcony and started ripping up and re-doing the STIP project for an hour. The temperature on my balcony was 68, I had to go get a sweater.

For lunch I had a Channing House burger and fries which felt like a big meal, so decided to go out for supper. Driving down Middlefield I noted that Mike’s Cafe was open again for supper, so on impulse I went in there for a beer and a plate of pasta. It was really good. Actually the best part was their dinner rolls, which have a salt glaze, and I could dip them in olive oil. I haven’t dipped bread in oil in a long time.

My neighbor Carolyn who lives in 721, just above me, emailed earlier to say she was going away for ten days. It turns out she has been feeding hummingbirds also. She wanted to warn me that her three feeders would be out of action and I should expect more buzzers. Yeah. At several points today I had six birds on each feeder. The feeders only have 5 holes, but two birds were actually standing side by side on one of the little perches, taking turns at sticking their beaks in the one hole. Potentially I guess I could have ten at a feeder.