Friday, 1/3/2020

Went for a run, which felt ok, no issues. I had been told that Paul, the in-house tech guy, wanted to check my wi-fi in preparation for the move back, at 10. Thinking this would involve gathering all the MAC addresses for the new ClearPass system, I made all six internet-connected devices (laptop, desktop, kindle, chromebook, printer, and iphone) cough up their MAC addresses, and printed those out.

In fact, he wasn’t ready to do that, just wanted to check and label the Comcast box. But said if I wanted to email them to him, that would be good, so I did.

Next up, trying to log into the Anthem Medicare drug benefit site, which hadn’t worked previously. Yes it did work now. I was happy to be in, but (of course) when I checked my prescriptions, it knew of none. Naturally they wouldn’t have got that info from Humana… I guess I am not saying that in a sarcastic tone. Not much anyway.

What does deserve sarcasm is: there is no info on the site telling you how to add a prescription. You know, simple stuff like, “tell your provider to send the prescription to…” All they had was, “call the number on the back of your card.”

Which I did, and got the fairly simple info on pharmacy name, address, fax number, and sent that info in a message to my PCP.

I needed a big jar of aspirin. I have 1000-tablet bottles of tylenol and ibuprofen, and my big jar of aspirin, which I take daily, had just run out. So I walked over to CVS on University. Big bottles of all the name-brand pain killers, but only 100s of aspirin.

I’d had an email from Jean saying please stop by to pick up your annual Christmas present of biscotti. The Paweks gave the Cortesis a big package of chocolate-coated biscotti every year for many many years, and I guess she wants to continue that tradition. So I drove down there. Picking up my mail had noted a flyer from the Lamplighters, touting a production of G&S Princess Ida at the MV performing arts. Jean had gone with me to HMS Pinafore there last year (Day 252, August). I asked if she’d like to see another, and she said yes, so later in the day I bought tickets for that.

At the Walmart next to her place I got a bottle of, not 1000 aspirin but 500. Well, that’s a year and half. So, back home, I got an email from Lenny, could she get a ride to the game tonight? Game! I hadn’t looked at the calendar, but of course there was a SWBB game. So i drove to that, taking David G. and Lenny. Stanford played a bit sloppy, but it was good enough to beat WSU by 20. Sunday brings UW which will be a larger challenge.

 

Wednesday, 1/1/2020

Woke with a scritchy throat and feeling not quite. Breakfast downstairs, then ended up taking a post-breakfast nap. Killed time until time for lunch. Helene had invited me to her birthday lunch–she was born on new year’s day. There were about a dozen people at the table. Conversation at my end involved some stories from people who been children in the Philippines at the start of WWII and knew people who had been (or had themselves been? not clear on this) interned in civilian POW camps.

In the afternoon I checked and yes, I had a slight fever, 0.5F over my usual temp. OK. Sat around reading. Today, being a big holiday, there was no supper service. I had picked up my brown bag supper after breakfast. (I think they should call that service, which they do three or four days a year, the “supper sack”.) Mary Beth, the floor rep, put out an email suggesting we all meet in the 4th floor dining room for supper, but (a) I didn’t read it until I had almost finished my sandwich at 5:30, and (b) didn’t want to share my virus. So a very quiet evening.

Tuesday, 12/31/2019

I had nothing planned today except the A/V committee meeting at 5pm. I’m not sure where the time went. I did some writing, yay, played a little computer game, meh. Attended the meeting. There are few January events owing to the auditorium being closed for a month so that the A/V equipment can be upgraded. Except that nobody can seem to get any updates on the progress of that work contract, if any. Mystery. Anyway I was assigned one event, for which I will have to make work the rolling video screen, a large monitor on a rolling stand. Adventure.

Skipped supper because of a New Year’s eve party on the 11th floor, so I could fill up on snacks, which I did. The 2nd floor was sponsoring it, and they had decided to do a game night, setting out tables with a variety of board and other games, with one volunteer at each table who knew the game to act as dealer/teacher/monitor. It worked pretty well, a lot of people were playing, many on games that were new to them. I played a couple of rounds of a word game called one-up, using scrabble-like letter tiles.

And to bed by 10:30. Fireworks, feh.

 

Sunday, 12/29/2019

Did the crossword puzzle at home, then walked out intending coffee at Mme Collette’s, but the mademoiselle was taking the holidays off. Walked instead to Verve. Back home, I spent an hour trying to adjust the TV for a better picture, using youtube adjustment videos. And finally ended up resetting the picture controls to factory defaults. Dunno where I went wrong, but when I had the brightness/contrast perfect to display grayscale bars from 0 to 255, the resulting color images on live channels were flat and too light.

I’d been invited to have lunch with Ian and Jean and Michele.  This was a pleasant occasion. Ian and Jean are a retired nuclear physicist and chemist, respectively. Somehow the issue of the Chinese government came up (not my doing), and Jean, who was born in China, was ardent that I understand there were two sides to the matter of the Uighurs and other minorities there. No doubt. There always are. One side’s separatist terrorists are always the other side’s heroic freedom fighters and vice versa.

In the afternoon I spent some time writing on the novel, and straightened out some of the tangle that was causing me distress last time. I also looked back to an earlier scene to clarify some dialog that set up a clue for later. Then I read a bit of it and was (again) really pleased. I very much like what I’m creating. I like the people and I like the incidents and words they’re experiencing. Back in the 80s when I was writing, I came up with the phrase “a sense of gift”, meaning, the feeling that I had something other people would enjoy, and I had the power to give it to them. That feeling carried me through the tedium of a lot of writing, and I’m starting to get it back now. Maybe I can drive through and finish this damn thing soon.

A bit before six I took my hat, coat and umbrella and went to the dining room for a quick supper, and then walked the quarter mile to the Lucy Stern center to attend the new musical version of Pride and Prejudice. It seems that Palo Alto Players have produced the world premier now of four of the musicals written by Paul Gordon, who seems to specialize in musicals based on classic novels: Jane Eyre, Emma, Daddy Long Legs, and now, Pride and Prejudice.

I enjoyed this production a lot. All the actors were very skilled at acting, had good voices, danced well; the lyrics were clever and appropriate; the set design and staging were good; the sound augmentation was just right, natural and intelligible. I didn’t remember the novel well enough to know how it all worked out in the end, so at intermission I was really curious how in the world they would bring these people back together. But they did, sniff.

 

Saturday, 12/28/2019

I had a date with Peter to suss out the 11th floor sound system at 10, but while I was sitting around after breakfast, Craig called, asking me to take a tech call with Margret whose Mac was acting up. He and she thought she had the MyWay browser malware. I read up on that before looking at her machine. I’m not sure she did have it, at least, I couldn’t find any executables or any browser plug-ins by that name. But in the course of looking I needed her admin password, which she was sure was a certain string, but it wasn’t. So after trying all the passwords in her text file of old passwords and failing to get in, I got to learn how to reset the admin password on a Macbook Pro. It isn’t hard; but I’d never done it before.

Then up to the penthouse and Peter and I futzed around with the electronics there, in preparation for a party he is hosting on the 5th. There is a host of electronics there, including a humongous TV, a 4K job (i.e. 3840px across) and at least 75-inch, maybe 90-inch wide. It is driven off a Yamaha receiver with inputs from a Comcast DVR, a Roku, a Chromecast, a Blu-Ray, and a computer plugged in to an HDMI port on the front.

Funny thing about that; the Comcast box on the TV has only the basic subscription, so you couldn’t play from Netflix or any sports channel, and at the moment it seems to not play any channels at all, owing to a problem with Comcast. Don’t know if the Roku works or for what channels.

Peter wanted to drive the TV from a Macbook. That’s supposed to work but didn’t. So we worked out how to plug his Macbook into a spare HDMI on the back of the big TV. Then the question was, how to provide nice background music from an iPhone, using a different amplifier that drives other speakers. So we fiddled with that for a while and got that working.

At lunch I sat with John, who was going to the BB game, so I cadged a ride with him and his wife Eve. The game was with UC Davis and was an unexpectedly hard challenge. The Aggies, well, both teams really, were playing very aggressive, intense defensive games and Stanford struggled against what should have been a weaker opponent. They trailed 30-32 at the half, and only gained a lead with two minutes to play in the third quarter. The final score of 67-55 does not reflect the difficulty of the game. Freshman Haley Jones had a breakout game.

 

 

Friday, 12/27/2019

Not a vivid day in my recollection. Breakfast in the dining room. Had been thinking I had nothing scheduled and would perhaps wander down to FOPAL and sort, but then I actually checked my calendar and I had in fact signed up to lead a tour today. Oh, right; I originally signed up for the Friday, then they asked for help covering Thursday at the last minute, so I did that — and ended up doing two tours that day. Well, off to do my third tour of the week.

In the afternoon I looked at a couple of tutorial videos on how to play Surviving Mars. I’m just about ready to start building my own colony for real.

 

Thursday, 12/26/2019

Last week, the museum put out a request for somebody to please cover the public tours on the day after Christmas, and I signed up for the 12:00 one. So after taking a nice run this morning, I got in my red docent shirt and went down there.

The place was jumping, lots of visitors coming in. When I started the tour I had a crowd of about 40, which is too many for anyone’s comfort. I told them at the start, all the exhibits are well signed and informative, I don’t mind a bit if you just wander off. Quite a few did, but I still ended up with 20 or so that stuck with me.

There were still lots of people coming in. I checked the schedule and there was only one docent scheduled for the 2pm tour, so I stuck around. That was The Other Dave, and he was pleased to be able to split the crowd. He took the first 25 or so, and I kept the rest, another 15-20. I stalled for ten minutes by leading them to the 1401 lab and riffing on computing in the 60s. Then took them around and it all worked out nicely.

Chilled out the rest of the evening. My DVR is only 4% full, which is pathetic. What happened to all the shows I used to subscribe to? To fill the last hour before bed, I went to Amazon and browsed around and discovered that my fave actress of all time, Xena Lucy Lawless, has her own mystery series on the Acorn channel. So I watched one ep of that. Not bad. She looks great, the writing was pretty good.