Monday 02/08/2021

Took my walk, getting back in plenty of time to get ready for the monthly Residents’ Association meeting. Delivered the treasurer’s report in two sentences. Nothing much of interest.

I happened on two very similar articles, one from Germany and one from Alaska, in which there had been an outbreak of Covid in a rest home immediately after the second vaccine shot, or between the first and second. The good news was identical in both cases: no serious illness, only minor symptoms. It would appear that the two RNA vaccines are extremely effective in preventing serious illness. The bad news was that a number of people could test positive despite having had one or both shots. This makes it pretty clear that (a) with enough exposure you can still get it and (b) very likely, if you get it, you can transmit it. So having the vaccine isn’t a magic passport to freedom. Still need to take precautions, wear the mask, distance, yadda yadda.

Tomorrow is the writer’s group and I haven’t written anything. The prompt this time is a poem by Kay Ryan, entitled Relief:

We know it is close
to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick
or finding lost property
has in it the leap,
the purge, the quick humility
of witnessing a birth—
how love seeps up
and retakes the earth.
There is a dreamy
wading feeling to your walk
inside the current
of restored riches,
clocks set back,
disasters averted.

Not getting much from that. Don’t think she adds anything to the word “relief” by itself. Guess I won’t write anything.

Sunday 02/07/2021

Contrary to my usual, I did not leave the apartment all day. Shocking, I know.

I futzed around with experiments with air-brushing and ended with more frustration than before. I watched five minutes of the Superb Owl and turned it off. I had no feel for the teams or the game, or the commercials.

Boring. I’m bored with myself.

Saturday 02/06/2021

Well, what shall I do today? Gonna get out of the room but where? How about the Dish walk? Parking is impossible near the trailhead, but I can use Lyft. Which I did, Lyfting to and from the Dish walk.

According to the map at the entrance, the Dish loop is 3.6 miles. I’m peeved with the Health app in the iPhone, which only credited me with 2.9 miles for the full circuit, and only 7 flights climbed. One prominent characteristic of the walk is that it climbs, and climbs and climbs.

And then when you think you’ve peaked, it goes down and climbs again.

After lunch I got in my car and drove to J&J Hobby House in San Carlos. Here I picked up a second bottle of the red paint I used on the MG. The original bottle is nearly empty. I have determined to strip the four parts I’ve been using to experiment with clear coats. I will have to repaint them red.

I also picked up advice on clear coating. The advice was, if you started with Tamiya paint (which I had, the red was Tamiya) then use only Tamiya clear coat. I need to thin that, right? Yes sure, for airbrush it needs to be the texture of nonfat milk. So I have some acrylic thinner… Tamiya? No, it’s from Testors. Nope, don’t mix your manufacturers, here (hands me a bottle of Tamiya thinner) use the same stuff.

Well, ok, maybe this is going to get me the smooth, level, clear coat I want. I hope so. I will find out tomorrow.

Friday 02/05/2021

Went for a shorter walk this morning, after my long walk yesterday. Did not much during the day, other than a couple of experiments with spraying clear. The first time, many little pukas opened in the coat. While it was still wet I held it under the tap and washed it off. I washed the parts with mild hand soap, dried them, and tried again. Better but not good texture, I think owing to my handling of the brush. Didn’t wash it off soon enough so I will have to sand the part for the next try.

At Rhonda’s 4pm meeting she opened with good news,

I am very pleased to announce that for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, we are not monitoring any residents or any staff for Covid-related symptoms or situations. Most weeks we have had anywhere from 10 to 20 people who we are monitoring. … So, having zero on the list is a huge milestone. … really gives us hope that things are improving.

But also, last night the security cameras caught a person on a bike who rolled down the drive and apparently had a garage clicker, because the garage doors on the Tower side opened for him. After three minutes, he came out and rode away. Today everyone who parks on that side (I park on the Lee side) was called and had to bring their garage clickers to the desk to have them programmed with a new code.

We had a more sophisticated system, where every car had a fob on the windshield that the garage doors recognized. I asked during the meeting, why we changed away from that system. They were unreliable, Rhonda said, and made by only one company that was not responsive to our service calls. So that explains that.

For dinner I, Patty, and Florrie had opted to get Palo Alto Creamery shakes and sandwiches. I placed the order at 4, and at 6, Patty drove us the quarter mile and waited while I went in to pick up the food. Grilled cheese and bacon, and a chocolate shake, num.

Stanford is back home after playing on the road since late November, playing Colorado, who handed them a defeat just two weeks ago. Colorado had lost a couple of starters to injury, and Stanford appeared to be handling them well, taking a 25-point lead in the third quarter. They they went to sleep and allowed Colorado a 15-0 run, making the last four minutes of the game more exciting. Stanford finally won by a handful.

Thursday 02/04/2021

About the only thing of note today was that I got the Prius serviced. And for an additional $400, I had a catalytic converter anti-theft plate installed on the bottom of the car. Although I park in a secure garage, there will be times when I go somewhere and park on the street, maybe during a concert — yes, someday I expect to attend concerts and plays again — and I don’t have to worry about coming back to the car and having the sound of an open exhaust. And although I do carry comprehensive insurance with a $100 deductible, so it wouldn’t cost me $3000, a stolen “cat” still takes the car out of service for a day or two and is just very angering.

I thought about taking a fat sharpie and writing something rude on the shiny new plate that runs across between the frame rails. Like “suck it, asshole”. But that might be misunderstood by legitimate mechanics. Or it might inspire a frustrated cat thief to key the car as he left.

I measured the distance to the dealer on google maps; it was 3.6 miles. So I drove down and walked back. There was a nice almost 4 miles (by the end of the day), done. At 2pm when Wanda came to do my room, I called up a Lyft for the return trip. This was the first Lyft I’d had in a year.

I took a look at the current Prius Prime (the equivalent of my plug-in, with 20 miles of battery before the ICE kicks in). A very friendly salesman said he would get me an estimate on the trade-in value of my (very clean, low-mileage) 2012 Plug-in. Later he called me to say that his manager actually was the salesman who sold us the 2012, and remembers it and us. I don’t know if that’s baloney; it was one of the first Plug-ins they handled so maybe he remembers it. More likely he just looked it up in the dealership sales file. Type the license plate into his computer, boom.

Anyway, said manager now thinks it would be worth $7500 for trade-in. That’s rubbish. I know they are going for $9000 and up. I told the friendly salesman I would probably not be buying until the pandemic was over and I could actually drive anywhere. “Call me around Thanksgiving,” I said, and he said he would.

Weddnesday 02/03/2021

Went for the usual walk which felt fine. After a bit of lounging around and tidying up my room, I went to Stanford Shopping Center. All I did there was go into Macy’s and buy a belt to replace the current one. I had shortened this belt back in December, to fit the new waist I got when I lost 10 pounds over the aorta hospital period. But then, being made of a fairly stiff leather, it had started to break at the new hole I was using.

Today I found a similar, reversible belt in the new length (34), and in a more softer, more flexible leather. So that was good.

At 2pm we had the RA Executive Committee meting. Nothing much to report here. The primary discussion was about the plans, by the editors of the monthly resident newsletter, to have a special issue devoted to resident reactions to the plan to take over dining services from Sodexo. We decided it wasn’t awfully wise to have a lot of uninformed comment on a plan that hasn’t been done yet, but it was a matter of press freedom so we couldn’t tell them not to do it.

Tuesday 02/02/2021

Today was the 14th day after my 2nd vaccination shot, and the day I decided I would begin doing a few things I would not have done before. I had collected quite a list and started out about 9am to do some of them.

I went to Piazza’s market and bought some things that, before, I would have ordered through Instacart. Then I went to BevMo! in Menlo Park, because the Rogue Brewing Co. website said, they stocked my favorite beer, Dead Guy Ale. It’s an amber ale that is on the opposite end of the bitterness scale from an IPA, mellow, a bit sweet. Also quite potent. I had a can for dinner, but drank about half before the tray arrived, and felt quite the little buzz for an hour afterward.

That ran the time close to 11am when the writers’ group met. I had written for this week so I didn’t want to miss it. The prompt was, write about someone you remember who taught you something. I wrote a somewhat fictionalized account of a moment early in my IBM career. Fictionalized because I can’t remember the name of the guy I’m remembering, although I am clear on the details of the problem and the punchline. See below.

Yesterday, I didn’t mention, I had declined dinner (didn’t care for the selections) and instead made myself a lovely cheese, salami and mayo sandwich. Today I had declined the lunch selections, so I made myself a lovely open-face PBJ. I am such a sophisticated gourmet.

After lunch I went out again, this time to IKEA to buy a pillow. The last two pillows I’ve bought, I got at BedBath&Beyond, but the only standard size firm pillow they have, is a MyPillow. And I will not support that sonofabitch with another dollar. So I remembered that IKEA has pillows, and went there. I will find out tonight if the Lagensrom or whatever it was called, is satisfactory.

From there I went to the big Safeway in Menlo Park, because Piazza’s didn’t have Quilted Northern toilet paper. I keep a personal stock of that because I don’t like the thinner stuff that CH supplies, and I was running low. Aha, Safeway did have it.

There’s another item on my list that I didn’t get to, Macy’s to buy a belt. I’ll do that tomorrow maybe.

Here is the fictionalized account of a memorable moment in early IBM. With an illustration, even.

---

It was 1968 and I was just into my second year as an IBM “field engineer”, a title for we who repaired IBM data processing machines on the customer’s premises.

Every morning I would don my business suit, white shirt and tie, pick up my pager (remember pagers?) and my brown leather briefcase full of tools and spare parts, and drive to the IBM office at 340 Market Street. After a brief team meeting we would pick up our first calls from the girls in the dispatch center, and head out for a day of fixing machines.

I was trained on the card accounting hardware: keypunches, card sorters, and the big gray rhinoceros-sized accounting machines. I was becoming more confident in my ability to diagnose faults in these electro-mechanical beasts, where maintenance might require lubricating a cam shaft or adjusting a spring’s tension as it often as it did changing a vacuum tube or filing the contact points on a relay.

One thing I was not trained on, and feared, was the Selectric typewriter, with its bobbing “golf ball” print head. In IBM’s highly stratified hierarchy, typewriters were part of Office Products Division. OPD had its own band of field engineers that worked out of a different floor at 340 Market. I was in the Data Products Division where we worked on digital stuff, including the real computers like the then-new IBM 360 line.

However, this sharp line was being blurred, because a few DPD machines were using Selectric typewriters as I/O devices. Around the office I’d heard plenty of bad-mouthing of the Selectric as a fussy, touchy, hard to maintain beast, and I was frankly glad I’d not been sent to school to learn it.

One day, my pager went off and when I called the desk, Peggy the dispatcher asked me to take a call to work on a 6400 accounting machine. I only vaguely knew what that was, and said so. “Please, can you go look at it?” Peggy pleaded, “I’ve got nobody else free and the call is two hours old. I’ll get some backup for you as soon as I can.” So I drove to an unfamiliar office somewhere south of Market and faced… my worst nightmare.

The 6400, now long (and deservedly) forgotten, was a “ledger card accounting machine.” Picture a wide formica desk. Set into it is a keyboard and a huge version of a Selectric typewriter. Its platen is over two feet wide, with multiple forms tractors, so it could type on different forms at once. To one side is a smaller desk with a drawer and inside the drawer— is a second Selectric typewriter! This is the ledger card unit; the operator could drop a customer’s ledger card into the drawer, it would index down to the next free row and type a summary entry on the card and spit the card back out.

The problem, the woman who ran the thing explained, was that sometimes when she was typing, the main Selectric would jump a few spaces, or type an extraneous character. She tried to show me the problem but it wouldn’t fail and she didn’t want to set up a real job and let me mess up customer records. She looked at me dubiously and left me to do what I could with this twin-Selectric monster.

I poked ineffectually at the beast for nearly an hour, reading the manual, trying different things, finally getting it to fail but not in any clear pattern. I called Peggy the dispatcher, who said, “Right, Rich is on his way now, that’s his customer.” That was a relief.

In a few minutes Rich, who I had only met in passing before, arrived. He was brisk and cheerful and casually dismissive of my attempts to explain all the things I had tried. I showed him the problem and he pushed me aside. He sat at the keyboard for a minute, then pried up the keyboard cover and rocked the keyboard back. There, stuck in the key levers between the space bar and the shift key, was a large paperclip.

“Needlenose,” he said, and held out his hand. I put my needle nose pliers in his palm. He carefully extracted the paperclip and lowered the keyboard back into the desktop.

“Ya see, Dave,” he said, waving the paperclip under my nose, “Ya gotta think stupid. Don’t complicate it. Think stupid.”

And many times I’ve found that motto a very good diagnostic aid. When faced with a difficult problem, don’t complicate things. Think stupid.

Monday 02/02/2021

Out the door at 7:15 to walk my fecal sample to PAMF. So my morning walk out of the way before 8:30.

I spent some time today organizing the list of things that I intend to do starting tomorrow, the 14th day after my 2nd vaccine shot. Several of them took planning. One was, scheduling the car for service. I could have set the “60K mile service) up on the Toyota Palo Alto website, but I wanted something extra, so I called them up. Spoke to a service writer named Tony and asked, “Do you install catalytic converter anti-theft plates?” That item was not on the website. “Sure do,” says Tony, so I booked that, for Thursday.

I want to get back to managing the Computer section at FOPAL so I sent an email to Janette, the manager, CC my stand-in Chuck. Got emails back from both later. My section can be worked Tuesday afternoons and Thursday mornings, under their plan to minimize people in the space. Probably won’t go this week, as I also need a pass card for their new door locks, which Janette is mailing to me.

I booked teeth cleaning a couple days ago, for next week. But I would also like a full eye exam; I think it is time to update my prescription. As near as I can tell from my history at PAMF, it was 2011 when I did that last. But I don’t really trust their website. There’s another “opthalmology” item from 2017 but it doesn’t say it was an exam.

Anyway, it appears that PAMF no longer has its eye clinic that it used to run down on Mathilda avenue. And there is no way to make a specific appointment for an exam, using the MyHealth website. I need to follow this up through my PCP, I think.

I also wrote humbly to my cardio, Dibiase, saying that since I started taking my BP in the recommended way (sit erect with my arm supported on a table), I am getting much lower readings. I gave her the average and max values, and said that I had accordingly not implemented her suggestion to add a third Metoprolol pill per day.

My 13-inch LED light bar arrived from Amazon and I spent an hour installing it in the spray box. Here is how it looks. Note the color difference from the bathroom lighting.

This worked out very well because the box has a 12-volt supply. All I had to do was tap into it, bring the wires out to the front, and connect them to the light bar.

My neighbor Doctor Margaret writes she has found yet another series of English canal boat shows on Prime video. So now I’ll watch one. Hope its as good as Travels by Narrowboat, which I have used up.

Sunday 01/31/2021

Did the usual Sunday things. Well, watering the plants is pretty easy this time of year, with everything cut back or half dormant. Stick in the meter, say “you’re fine”, move on.

In the bathroom, on the spur of the moment, I decided to take the fecal sample for the FIT test that I was given back on Wednesday (2.056). Then I would, for my morning walk, walk the sample up to PAMF and turn it in at the lab. Haha. The lab in the PAMF main building isn’t open on Sunday.

The sample says turn it in in 24 hours. Lab will be open at 6:30 tomorrow. 24 hours will be about 8am. Oh-kayyyy I guess I need to walk early tomorrow.

Later in the day, preparing for the arrival of the lighting strip for my spray box (which Amazon says will arrive today), I checked my tool box and inventoried my electrical stuff and realized I don’t have any butt connectors or wire nuts. So for a second walk, I went to Ace Hardware and went right inside and search for stuff. Got what I needed. Getting very bold as a vaccinated person, although my two weeks aren’t up until Tuesday.

In the afternoon, I wrote a piece for the writers’ group, based on the prompt, “…choose a person whom you find rewarding to think about. … This might be someone who guided you at a certain time, or who taught you.” I’ll put it here on Tuesday after I read it there.

The lighting strip package was delivered but only after 6pm. I’ll work on that tomorrow. After my early walk.

Saturday 01/30/2021

I moved my little spray booth (see Day 1.279) back indoors, to the bathroom, which is a practical location in most ways. I sprayed a little more test clear coat, verifying a failure really. But I became very aware of a problem: because of the location of the lights in the bathroom, there is a shadow in the spray box. I need to keep the work inside the open front of the box so the fan will pull the overspray into the filter. But that puts it in shadow, which means I can’t well see the color or density of the spray I’m laying down.

Obviously the booth needs a light. “LED strip” I thought, and went to Amazon, and found a 14-inch by 1-inch, 12-volt LED light bar. It will fit perfectly under the front top of the box. All I will have to do is get 12 volts to it. The box itself runs on 12v from a wall adapter. So all I have to do is open up the box and find where the 12v wires are, tap into them, extend them to the front and connect to the light bar which arrives tomorrow.

That turned out to not be as easy as one might think. The back end of the spray box containing a fan and a filter and the switch with the 12v supply, turned out to be quite difficult to open up. But half an hour of unscrewing things and swearing did the job. So tomorrow I’ll have the fun of modding the box with a light bar.

Other than that not much happened. On my walks I saw two birds, I’ll put pictures of them here.