Wednesday, 4/15/2020

The CV2 rate is definitely softening. The worldwide count doubled between 3/22 and 3/29 (7 days), then to 1.4M on 4/6 (8 days), and now after 9 days it is stuck at 2M, not the 2.4M I predicted. The softening of the curve is visible even in a very compressed graph.

I’m looking at [SwissInfo.ch](https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng) for an idea of what’s happening in Switzerland, with regard to my booked tour in mid-June (and when Road Scholar will cancel it). It appears they will re-open schools on June 8. But will they allow foreign tourists to gather in a tour group and stay in hotels?

I started with a run, which was fine. Then I had an hour to do the grocery order task, before time to move the car. I go to gather up the grocery order forms that my neighbors should have left on the clipboard in the lounge. Except… there was only one form. I asked a couple of people, “Yeah, I left mine and there were 2-3 there at that time…” Where have my forms gone?!? Then I notice that next to my clipboard in the lounge, is the manila folder for shopping orders for the Channing House shopping system that was recently set up. Staff person James takes orders for pharmacy and such items and shops them once a week. But my order form looks completely, drastically different from his. Still… I go downstairs and find James, who happens to be on the front desk. I persuade him to check his in-box. He goes away and comes back laughing, with four of my filled-out forms. Somebody, probably a cleaning lady, gathered up my forms along with his.

Now I’ve used up a bunch of time but I still manage to assemble my order and put it in via the Edgewood Market online form, requesting delivery, not pick-up as we did before. I just don’t want the exposure of sitting around outside a store, people coming and going, waiting for my order. Even though they do charge $15 for delivery.

Then it’s time to release the Prius! Downstairs and out the door at 10:45. It’s just pure pleasure to drive freely down Middlefield to the gas station. I top up the tank–and completely forget to put on the latex glove I brought for handling the pump nozzle! So I put on the glove before getting back in the car, to protect the steering wheel from my now-contaminated hand. One more errand, stop at the credit union to deposit a couple of checks, and then back to the garage. They make us walk around to the front, the single entry, where I can wash that contaminated hand (and the other one) before going in. I will have this wild and crazy hour of auto freedom every Wednesday from now on.

About 2pm I get a phone call from the desk: my grocery order is here! I look at the phone: two missed calls. Why? I didn’t have the ringer disabled. What up, phone? Anyway, I bring the stuff up, do the now-routine process of wiping everything down with bleach solution and deliver to five neighbors.

The only things not available? Tissues and paper towels. Everything else was included.

In the afternoon I do some coding on the Crafting Interpreters project. Writing code is just the most satisfying hobby of all. I never tire of it.

 

Tuesday, 4/14/2020

Somehow, I never got out of the building today. Just busy busy. Quite a bit of time I put into trying to repair the little metronome. My aim was to replace the neon light it used to flash on the beat, which had been crushed, with a jumbo yellow LED. The device had only raw 120VAC power, no chips or transistors to supply low voltage DC that LEDs need. But, the internet to the rescue, and I found a circuit to power an LED off line voltage. I’d ordered the components a few days ago and they came yesterday. So I put together a little circuit, soldered it up, and mounted it inside the box.

And it worked.

Which was pleasing but then I realized it wasn’t working very well. Most speeds didn’t run at all. I had done something wrong in assembling it, perhaps, or maladjusted the tricky little drive train. I fiddled with the mechanical parts for a couple of hours. Then I thought, maybe I can find some hints online, although that seemed a faint hope.

Well, you can find the Franz Metronome model LM-FB5 online. There are quite a few of them for sale on eBay, clean, original, claimed to be working 100%, starting at $13 and going up to $40. So, not a highly valuable item, and if a person wanted one, easy to come by. I almost bought one, just to have a look inside one that worked, but decided not to.

Later, one of my neighbors asked if I was doing a grocery order this week. Since I don’t need anything, I had hoped nobody else would. But no. So I put out order forms and tomorrow will put in an order. Back to Edgewood market because Molly Stone’s fruit didn’t please.

At 5pm we had our first 6th floor meeting since… January? A while. No real news. Evening I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’ The Gene.

 

 

 

 

Monday, 4/13/2020

Went for a run. The outside temp was over 60, so for the first time this year I didn’t wear any kind of jacket or my hoodie, just t-shirt and shorts. Later in the day, with the temp still 65 or so, I put on my hoodie and sat out in my recliner on the deck for an hour. So, spring is here.

Last night instead of watching TV I wrote up how I understood the Visitor Pattern. Today I edited it and put it into my growing Crafting Interpreters code base here. I also adapted an example from the wikipedia entry on the Visitor Pattern into a test program and ran it. Now I feel ready to return to the book and start reproducing some of Nystrom’s code.

In the afternoon, the daily status email from the management contains this paragraph:

The Tower and Lee Center garages will open for residents to take their cars out for a drive to keep them charged and “exercised” every Wednesday from 11-11:30 AM. Please note that the garage will open only for 30 minutes, so if you are not back by 11:30 AM, you will need to park in the Webster lot or on the street.

A staff person will be assigned to monitor garage gates during this time. Please note that Channing House staff will not be jump-starting cars or providing any other mechanic services. If you need to jump-start your vehicle, you would need to call your roadside service provider. Social distancing protocol still applies, so plan accordingly. No more than 1 in an elevator and keep your 6-feet distance.

The restriction that if you take your car from the garage, you will have to leave it on the street, is the one feature of our sequestration that has caused steady complaints. People really want to come and go in their cars, and kvetched loudly when they no longer could (Day 110 was the announcement, so just 3 weeks now). So this concession, that we’ll man the gates for one half-hour so you can charge your battery, is a big deal. I certainly put it in my schedule. 10:45 Wednesday I head for the garage and out the door at 11. I probably won’t stay out more than 15 minutes, just long enough to get the engine warm.

Notice the warning that if you need a jump-start, you’re on your own? I’m glad I went down on Day 1.120 and ran the engine. Soon after that, the rule came down that running the engine inside the garage couldn’t be allowed any more; fumes got into the building somehow.

In the evening I picked up a package, my electronics parts from Jameco. So tomorrow I can try to make an LED flasher for the little metronome. That will be stressful. I just known I am going to reverse-bias the LED and blow it up.

 

 

Sunday, 4/12/2020

…and Friday and Thursday… Actually I’m very comfortable and under no stress at all. (The CH Writers’ Group “writing prompt” for the next meeting is, “what are you afraid of?” and I have to think a while. Aside from obvious things like “getting cancer” I don’t think I have any on-going fears. For which I try to remember to be grateful.) I do miss all sorts of ordinary things, like going for drives, my volunteer gigs, and eating at restaurants. But as solitary confinements go, this is pretty plush.

So by 10am I had read the paper, done the big puzzle, watered the plants and tidied the room. There was a new video from one of the youtubers I follow. I did some programming and really got on top of the Visitor Pattern. I went for a 3-mile walk, up into the Stanford campus.

Channing House is trying to keep spirits up. About 4pm there was a knock on the door; it was servers from the kitchen with bottles of white wine and easter-themed chocolates. Nice. Had a phone call from Dennis, an email from Scott, and (yesterday) a text from SWBB friend Nancy. So, connected.

Games. Yesterday I tried out and eliminated Everything and Gnog. The first is just weird. You are dumped into a cartoonish landscape populated with animal figures that move in a very peculiar way. You can apparently become any other living thing you bump into, so you just keep moving from avatar to avatar. But why? The second is an attractive puzzle game, in which you manipulate crazy objects to make them do things. I don’t like puzzle games, it turns out. They make me feel stupid. After I’ve poked and clicked and dragged every which way on a thing and it doesn’t do anything, I get bored and want an answer. Oh, if you click this and drag that in the right sequence, it turns over and there’s other stuff. Don’t care.

Today I tried out A good snowman is hard to build. It’s a puzzle game. Your little avatar builds a snowman by rolling balls of snow to make them the right size, then stacks them. Problem is, the field is limited. If you get a snowball up against a wall, you can’t move it more, except sideways. So you have to figure the exact sequence of rolls that will let you get the three balls to the right size, and stack them, without getting any ball stuck. The reward is you get to move on to another puzzle. See above; it made me feel stupid.

Saturday, 4/10/2020

Sludged around until 10, when I went for a 2.5-mile walk. The route was basically south on Webster to Page Mill, and back on Waverley. This brought me within half a block of my old house on Tasso street. I considered turning in to look, and instantly vetoed it. I have strong and somewhat conflicting emotions about revisiting that old life that basically ended with Marian’s death. There was six months of tidying up loose ends (documented here about 300 posts back) and then settling in to a new life here. While walking the familiar blocks of Webster, Oregon, and Waverley circling the old home I felt the first flashes of grief I’ve had for months. Not so much grieving the lost partner so much as the lost life in general.

I’ve been reading the poems of one of my neighbors, Elizabeth. She just published a “chapbook” (I’d’a called it a pamphlet, 30 pages in 4×5 size) of poems. They comprise a  scrapbook of vignettes, flashes of her memories of a year centering on the death of her long-time partner. People grieve in different ways and about different things. I suppose I could recall a few vignettes of Marian but I couldn’t make poetry of them. Well, I never claimed to be a poet.

Back at home, I started into chapter 5 of Crafting Interpreters and immediately slammed into something new to me. In his Java code, Nystrom is making use of the “Visitor Pattern“, a fairly sophisticated software engineering technique. I’d maybe barely heard of it; here I am faced with understanding it well enough to reproduce his Java code in Python. The first time I’m having to learn something new for this project, and I welcome it. I backed off to do some reading. Later thought, maybe I should just read ahead in the book and Nystrom might talk about it.

 

Friday, 4/10/2020

In the morning rather than running I tuned in on zoom to Veronica’s balance and fitness class. It’s 45 minutes, a little slower-paced than the 20-minute video I worked out to earlier in the week. I am ridiculously uncoordinated. A lot of these exercises have you doing one thing with your feet and another with your arms. I have a lot of trouble doing them. I can walk and chew gum at the same time, but I can’t simultaneously kick forward with alternate legs while reaching out and then up with my arms.

Spent maybe 3 hours all told finishing up the code for chapter 4 of Crafting Interpreters. After picking off the usual dozen syntax errors, my code ran all the tests in the test bucket the author provided. On to chapter 4, where we’ll be parsing the tokens and building a syntax tree, I believe.

Spent half an hour on the phone with Connie trying to make her macbook air behave. It is really hard working with people over the phone. “So just click there and you will see…” and they say, “No, actually it is showing me this totally different thing.”

Missed the first part of Rhonda’s 4pm Friday phone meeting. Apparently she said that there was a delay getting the DIY vacuums. I want my vacuum so much. It has been 6 weeks, I think, since my carpets were vacuumed. I made a list of all the surfaces to be dusted, wiped down, swept or vacuumed. Cleaning day could take 3-4 hours. Fine, I’m eager to get started. My hard floor has little gritty bits I feel with my bare feet, too. Well, you know, I do have a broom. I could sweep that. Maybe I will.

 

Thursday, 4/9/2020

Somehow today I felt busy all the time. But I hardly left my unit.

Ran that 20 minute exercise video in the morning. Tomorrow I think i will try the in-house “strength and balance” stream at 9:15.

Worked through a couple more sections of  Crafting Interpreters. This is being a great and enjoyable exercise in refreshing my knowledge of Python.

The exciting activity was that today my 6th floor InstaCart order was shopped and delivered. A few substitutions, but not too bad. I was on the app exchanging texts with the shopper as he worked. He rolled up outside about 2pm and I had everything wiped down with bleach and delivered by 3pm.

My bag of fresh linens wasn’t quite right. I guess Wanda, my usual housekeeper, is off being a nurse’s assistant. The bottom sheet was for a twin bed, so didn’t fit, and the top sheet was also a twin I think, but worked. And no pillowcase. I am not going to complain. I just reversed the old bottom sheet and made do.

With a fresh 9V battery I could check and indeed the bulb in the metronome was toast, but not because it was a burned-out incandescent. It was a neon bulb that had been smashed. And the little plastic dome that had been over it. Pretty clearly the thing had been dropped on its head. I couldn’t see the broken bulb because it was under the cracked and crushed plastic dome. Now they are both off and I am wondering what to do.

I could get a neon bulb, but a bare neon bulb wouldn’t look good. How to get a neon with a finished-looking dome over it? I spent some time on electronics websites like Jameco and Digikey. There are plenty of attractive panel lights but they are all at least an inch deep behind the panel. Unfortunately this light is right on top of the little motor, with less than a quarter inch of clearance. The old one had a couple of wires snaking through a hole and the neon bulb lay sideways on the top of the wood under its little dome.

There are nice looking orange LEDs that have no depth, the leads come right out of the bulb. But the available power is 120VAC. LEDs want low voltage DC. OK, google some more. In fact you can drive an LED from 120VAC, if you provide in effect a voltage divider and a diode. So I ordered a handful of parts and I will see if I can make that work. Been a while since I had to solder resistors and diodes and shit.

Helped another person, Judy, whose Mac had suddenly said, you are not connected to the internet. In fact, she wasn’t. Somehow she had managed to turn the wi-fi off. Telephone technical help is not fun. You try to talk somebody through finding the wi-fi icon in the upper left corner of their mac screen, and open its menu, and select “turn wi-fi on”, when you can’t just point and say, there, click that.

 

Wednesday, 4/8/2020

Went for a run. Felt good.

At two points today, other residents called me up for assistance using Zoom on a Mac. I spent an hour on the phone with Connie walking her through the process of creating and hosting a meeting. Later in the day she told me that it was working and she felt ready to host the Floor Reps meeting tomorrow, which I guess she had been asked to do.

Another resident, Kiki, has a lot of trouble using her iPad, in part because her hands are very shaky so it is hard to tap on things accurately. Anyway I managed to talk her through joining a meeting.

I really wish people would put in proper tech help requests. They’d probably end up referred to me anyway, though, being Mac users. When we get back to normal I will have to try to fix that.

I did a little more with Crafting Interpreters. Then it was suppertime and the evening’s meal was a dud, almost inedible. Well, salad and dessert were acceptable. With it, I drank my last Pepsi. Hopefully I will get more with the grocery order promised for tomorrow.

The evening’s communication from Channing House had two new restrictions based on advice from the County health department. One, all residents of senior facilities are to have their temperature taken daily and be surveyed for symptoms. CH is allowing us to self-report if we have the means for taking our own temps, and I do. They didn’t specify any particular time of day.

Then there is this, which rules out attendance at church for any reason, among other meetings.

Residents are not to leave the facility to celebrate holidays. The order states: “Gathering with people who do not live in your residence, even to celebrate a religious holiday, poses severe risk of COVID-19 transmission. The risk is especially high for those who live in congregate settings such as long-term care facilities. Additionally, under the Public Health Officer’s Order of March 31, 2020, any non-essential gathering between people who do not live in the same household is legally prohibited.”

A Channing House apartment is a household/residence. So, gatherings of people who do not live in your apartment is also prohibited.

If you attend gatherings, we have been directed to either prohibit your entry back into the building or have you isolated for 14 days. To have the Public Health Department authorize us to prohibit your return is shocking and speaks to how important they see this issue. We would opt to have you isolated. But, we hope you will just stay home this holiday season.

Note the management’s use of “shocking”. Kind of agree. Not being able to go to church is no issue for me. And I already wasn’t attending any other sort of “gathering”. But this also formalizes what we all were pretty much observing before, not going to someone else’s apartment.

Tuesday, 4/7/2020

(I’m actually writing this on Wednesday afternoon, because I was sure I had done a blog post yesterday. But I hadn’t. I was remembering the blog post of Monday. The days are all alike in Sequesterville.)

In the morning I did 20 minutes of exercise, using a video that one of my neighbors had passed around weeks ago, when fitness classes were canceled here. It was pretty good, 20 minutes had me sweating anyway.

An email went out today from Angela, saying that due to problems people had experienced holding the door to get their meal distribution, they would be sending someone from facilities to every upgraded unit (floors 6-10) to “adjust” the door closer. That would be the hydraulic door closer that I was fiddling with on Saturday, because it pushed too hard. I can well imagine that some of the feebler people might have had trouble holding against it while reaching for their meal box.

I spent a couple of hours getting started on the Crafting Interpreters project. It looks to be quite fun, basically re-doing in Python what the author displays in the book, written in Java. Java’s an ugly language; I’m glad I never had to use it. But now I have to learn something about it, because I have to figure out what he’s doing and reproduce it. Then I can critique his code, heh heh.

In the evening I put in our 6th floor grocery order, via Instacart to be shopped at Molly Stone. Only three others participated. Maybe we don’t need to do it weekly. Anyway I have to say I am pleased with the Instacart web UI. It is quite easy to find products, to know if they are in stock, to put them in my virtual cart, etc. The order is to be shopped and delivered on Thursday. I installed the Instacart app on my phone so I’ll get timely updates from the shopper.

Late in the day, Mary R. offered an old metronome on the bulletin board. “Sound works, light doesn’t.” I wrote back, if a real musician wants it fine, otherwise, I’d like to try fixing it. Later in the day it appeared outside my door. I went and got my tool box and opened it up. I expected to find a circuit board, maybe discrete transistors. Nope: it’s all analog, based on a nice little spinning A/C motor that rotates a conical drive wheel. Adjusting the rate dial on the front moves a driven wheel along the cone to change its speed. The driven wheel has a lever that tightens and releases a little spring, so every revolution a little metal hammer goes whock against the back of the box. The wheel also has a janky little contact that bridges two copper springs to light a little incandescent bulb on the top.

First job after I got it disassembled was to check continuity through the little bulb. I got out my VOM, which Scott gave me last year and… it was dead. I opened it up, it needs a 9V battery. Of course I don’t have one. So I hustled back to Instacart and added a package of 9V batteries to my grocery order!

 

Monday 4/6/2020

Well, CV may be slowing down. Back on Day 1.118, Sunday 3/29, the world count was 700K, having doubled in 7 days. I predicted 1.4M on Saturday, but it only reached 1.37M today, so doubling in a shade over 8 days. Next double, 2.8M, would be expected on a week from Tuesday, 4/14. We’ll see.

Today I went for a run after breakfast, between rain showers. It felt good. Spent the morning in an old occupation: cleaning up and upgrading my Python programming environment. It’s been more than a year, maybe two, since I had to fiddle with environment variables and versions of stuff. I had to google some things to remember how to accomplish stuff in the terminal command line.

The point here is that I’ve decided to go through the new online textbook, Crafting Interpreters. I read a blog post by the author, describing the four-year saga of writing it. He walks through writing an interpreter, coding it first in Java and then in C. Now one might think that interpreters are old hat to me, since I worked on a team building one, APL\360, more than forty years ago (1975-7, about). However the challenge here is to repeat his Java code, approximately line by line, in Python instead. It could be of interest to others; anyway it will be fun to do.

Does this mean I’ve given up studying Lisp, as I mentioned several times last year? Yeah, Lisp just isn’t fun.

After supper I tried another game from the bundle, Europa Universalis IV. It turns out to be one of those games in which are you are a ruler trying to grow your province in a medieval Europe, to quote from Wikipedia,

The gameplay requires the player to lead a nation by finding a balance of military, diplomacy and economy. The player does so through their choices as sovereign of their nation, and through the spending of resources available to them: Prestige, Stability, Gold (Ducats), Manpower, Legitimacy for Monarchies, Republican Tradition for Republics, Devotion for Theocracies, Horde Unity for Hordes and Monarch Power (Administrative, Diplomatic, Military).

Very complicated. I started through the tutorial. The Pale province of Ireland has risen in rebellion. Select your army in London, make them hike over to Wales, get them to board your fleet, direct the fleet across the Irish sea, direct the army to attach the peasants. Watch as little toy soldiers exchange blows. I can see where this is going. Meanwhile there will be some other disaster in Essex or Yorkshire, and you’ve got to build forts and farms, and it will get more and more complicated. The graphics are fairly cute, the gameplay UI is usable, but it’s too thinky. I have another game, Galactica, that is similar in overall concept except it’s about planets, not provinces. I’ve played that a couple of hours and could play more. This one I don’t want to continue in.