1.012 many doings, SWVB

Stanford prevailed over Utah, but played very inconsistently, winning the second and third sets by a wide margin, but losing the first and fourth sets by a lot, and squeaking out the fifth. So it’s on for tomorrow night.

Saturday, 12/14/2019

After breakfast sat down at the desk to clear a pile of misc. paper. One item was a bill from Anthem, $20 for the first month of my new Part B drug coverage, covering 1/1 to 2/1/2020, due and payable by 1/1. Oooookay, pay in advance. Try to add it as a new account in SFCU bill-pay; it knows about Anthem but when I fill in my Anthem ID, it says “that isn’t the format that Anthem expects.” Hmm. Oh, also, I try yet again to log in to the Anthem website. I get one step further than before: after entering username and password, then entering the TFA code it sends to my cell (note, the fact that it knows my cell given my name, proves that I have “registered” successfully), it says “gathering your information” as it did before. Then it clears the window and puts up a lock icon saying “you are entering a secure site”; that’s new, yay! But then it says “Hmmm, we can’t complete your login” as before.

I set off on foot to do things. First to the credit union office, where I learn that Bill Pay isn’t their work; it’s a third party that they contract with. They can’t say why it thinks Anthem wants a different format of userid, but they give me the service number of the company; call them M-F 9-5.

Then to CVS on University to look for Famotidine to replace my now-recalled Ranitidine. I note their price, then walk a block to Walgreens. Oooh, Walgreens has a sale, so I buy it there.

Off around the corner to the post office to mail a Christmas tip to my newspaper deliverer, and to buy stamps because putting a stamp on his envelope cleaned me out of them. Around another corner to the Farmer’s Market where a CH resident had said, his barbershop quartet would be performing. But at this time there was a much larger group of singers doing carols. Bah Humbug. I bought a pound of dried apricots and a delish raisin snail and went home.

Then out again because I was determined to go to Macy’s and get one more pack of undershorts. Back on day 0.152 was when I bought a bunch, but didn’t buy quite enough to got two full weeks between laundries. Of course this outing was very stupid, a real brain fart. It’s noon, two weeks before Christmas, and I’m going to the shopping center. Doh! of course the parking lots were jammed with asses insisting on waiting for a car to back out, holding up everyone else. Well, I got parked — there were acres of open space on the second floor, people! — and walked into Macy’s and got my pack of tighty whiteys and hey, there was a nice full-zip sweater on sale at 50%, right there, why not.

Oh, cleaning my desk in the morning I did cancel the Apple Card. So that’s over. I asked the phone rep how to recycle the fine titanium metal card itself. There’s a recycle page on the Apple website, she said, or you can take it to an Apple Store. So I stopped at the Apple store in between drugstore stops, and the guys in the red shirts were completely flummoxed. They consulted with somebody and finally said, only on-line. So in the afternoon I got on the Apple site and with difficulty found where to recycle the card. They emailed me a Fedex label which I printed, and put on an envelope, and now, after Macy’s, I went to a Fedex store and dropped it off.

Back home again I had a nap and watched a couple of YT videos. Watching one of my subscribed videos is a sure way of nodding off for a nap. One of the subscriptions I’ve been following is The Great War, documenting each week of WWI exactly 100 years after. They started, obvs. in 2014. I picked it up in 2018 and had only just now caught up to October 1918 when the Germans are starting to collapse and the Armistice surely must be near. Hearing about that war spread out over (in my case) two years has felt like a real ordeal (imagine what it must have been like to live it). Looking at their website just now to get a link, I see that they are continuing to 1923 (i.e. 2023). The same crew has started a WWII series, week by week 80 years after; I’m not sure I want to watch that simultaneous with the other.

After waking up I thought about the novel for a few minutes, but didn’t actually write.

After an early supper it is out again to the volleyball game.

1.011 Docent, essay, SWVB

Another, but milder, episode of vertigo in the night. No problem in the morning, but it looks as if I just have to stop sleeping on my left side entirely.

Friday, 12/13/2019

Went for a run first thing, and without any breakfast. Whether for that reason or some other, I didn’t feel very good, and although I completed the usual distance, by the time I was back in the room I felt tired and worn-down. Was I sickening for something? By 11am when I left for the museum I felt better, and by afternoon felt normal.

At the museum, I had only four people for the tour. At least two, I felt were putting up with me out of politeness, but the other two were interested. Oh well.

With a few hours to kill before leaving for the women’s volleyball regional, I worked at getting my year-end wrap-up essay incorporated into the blog. This was not easy. I wrote it as a Pages document. From Pages I can export to PDF or some other formats, but not to HTML. The WordPress blog will let me create a “Page” as distinct from a “post” but the only way it will incorporate a PDF document is as a link. I want it to be a Page, which is a section of my “site” — but on the other hand why? Because from the normal site URL, all you see are the blog posts. The “pages” only appear if I put a link to them in the banner line.

Well. The essay “My First Year as a Bachelor” is, well, that’s the link. It mostly consists of quotes from this blog, but there’s some added value in the editorial comments around the quotes.

Off to the volleyball.

1.010 vertigo? Yosemite, concert

During the night I turned over in bed to my left, and immediately had a moment of vertigo. When I got up to pee, I had to reach for the walls for stability. I spent the rest of the night sleeping on my back with my head propped up, and in the morning was pretty much ok again.

Thursday, 12/12/2019

Spent the day at the Yosemite warehouse, including a couple hours scraping degraded foam out of the inside of a Cray 1.

The Cray was recently ousted from the museum’s lobby and sent to Yosemite for long term storage. It has six, pie-slice-shaped, power supply boxes that surrounded its base. These had been detached for shipment. Aurora wanted them opened and vacuumed out; she could see dust and crud inside.

The machine has been badly treated over the years. I believe it was actually used as Los Alamos, but it has been an inoperative exhibit for a long time, and not handled nicely. The covers of the power supplies, for example, are held on with eight flat-head philips screws, and none of the six boxes had more than three screws remaining, others being broken off or just lost. Anyway, I opened the first and groaned. The top and front panel were lined with that abominable black foam that we’ve had to scrape out of so many old machines. It gets soft, then brittle, and rains down into the machine as a toxic, acidic black snow. The stuff in the Cray had just reached the squishy state and had started to drop crumbs down; that’s what the boss saw, black crumbs of foam. I wore gloves and a breathing mask for this. Alan, who did more of it after lunch, disdained the mask. OK, your lungs.

We also played “museum tetris” moving the 1401 “study collection” (two 1403 printers and a 1402 reader/punch all partly cannibalized for parts, plus many cartons of SMS cards and cables, all from the 1401 restoration project) into a more compact arrangement to help make room for the Cray.

Back home, I had to prepare for my second A/V committee assignment of the month. This was a concert by the Silicon Valley Boy Choir. I fussed with the position of the Steinway on the stage, and the lighting. Then I contacted Florrie, who was in charge of the event, and she had me change some things. Then we waited for the performers to arrive. They were supposed to come at 6:30 and of course didn’t actually arrive until 6:50. Then they wanted the piano moved and could the mic be on a stand instead of hand-held? Well, no, mainly because I didn’t know where the mic stand was and it was time to start. Had they come on time there would have been time to find the mic stand (I know where it is now, I looked after the concert). Feh. Talent. What’r’ya gonna do.

1.009 haircut, FOPAL

Wednesday, 12/11/2019

I had a haircut appointment for 9:30, so wanted an early run. Just to keep it short, I ran on the treadmill in the basement. 32 minutes of running there feels like more exertion than actually running on the street. I’m not sure why.

Actually could have had time for breakfast in the dining room, but instead had a Sated RTD on the way to Chris’s place.

From my haircut to FOPAL where I got the Computer section ready for the upcoming sale weekend. That includes counting the books on the shelves and generally arranging things for a pleasing layout.

I walked over to the grocery store for snacks and took a break in the car; then went back in for two hours of sorting.

A few days ago I think I mentioned that my anti-acid-reflux med, Ranitidine, had mysteriously disappeared from drugstores and online. This morning I messaged Dr. Julia about this, and she replied that Ranitidine had been recalled because of possible contamination with a cancer cause — but unlikely and don’t be concerned. Meantime, use Famotidine 20mg. So I need to get some of that.

Before supper I gave my wrap-up essay a final editing pass. I would like to get it read by Susan, who I know is a good editor, but I am a little afraid to do so. It’s pretty raw and open about emotions and it might be uncomfortable to expose myself this way to somebody here. On the other hand, why not? Well, think about it.

After supper (where I sat at an empty table and was quickly joined by Craig and Diane, which was nice) it was time for the Channing House Chorus to perform. I had bowed out of the Chorus back on day 326 (or 0.326 as it would be, by the new numbering scheme). Since then they’ve done a lot of work and did a pretty good performance. Most successful was a number in which two spirituals, Amen and Go Tell It were woven together; they actually swung it. There was drinks and cookies after, so very nice.

1.008 mostly writing

Had breakfast in the dining hall and then spent several hours finishing up the year-end essay. I want to go over it one more time, then will post it as a “page” of the site.

Later in the day I worked with ACDSee Photo Manager for Mac, and satisfied myself it would do everything that I have used Adobe Bridge for. It lets me organize image files in folders, retaining the Mac OS file structure; and I can edit image metadata with it. That was important for organizing our many scanned slides. They don’t automatically have a GPS location like iPhone pictures. Just the same, because they’ve all been keyworded by me, I could search for, e.g., “Toronto” and find all images taken there. Or all images created in 1993, or that are pictures of a bridge, etc.

I did all that keywording and searching with Adobe Bridge, but I can’t get an updated version since I dropped my Adobe subscription; and the old (pre-subscription era) version I’ve been using is a 32-bit app which won’t run in the next Mac OS. Hence the search for a replacement, and ACDSee’s product worked, had a usable interface, and could do the metadata management and searching. It has some added functions Bridge didn’t have as well. So I paid $80 to have a legit copy that I can use forever, and suck it, Adobe. With that and Affinity Photo I have good replacements for all Adobe stuff.

On the way to supper I was invited by Carolyn to sit with her, shortly joined by John and then by Lennie. We all had some degree of computer backgrounds (John especially from many years at DEC and then Google). Carolyn wrote a book about Silicon Valley and during the writing of it, interviewed Steve Jobs.

1.007 FOPAL, writing

Monday, 12/9/2019

I started the day with a run, out the door at 7:20, a bit earlier than usual, so that I could be back and showered and dressed in time for the monthly Residents’ meeting. Nothing too exciting there.

Immediately after I went to FOPAL to manage my Computer section, and found only one box of books waiting by it. However the yield from the one box was unusually good; I priced and shelved about 8 books, and found two high-value ones. Then I did sorting until 1pm.

Back home I had a nap, then spent another hour working on my year-end summary essay. Hopefully can finish that tomorrow.

About 4:30 Patty called, asking me to join a dinner party, which I was happy to do. Patty and Mildred and Craig and Diane and one other person whose name I didn’t get in the first place, so don’t have to confess to forgetting it.

1.006 blog tidy, year summary

Sunday, 12/8/2019

An uncommitted Sunday, per my Google Calendar. What shall I do? I think that I will use this day to get caught up on computer-based things. One, finish reviewing the first year of this blog, and tidy up the use of tags. Two, use the tag system to get a numerical summary of my activities. Three, start drafting an essay on my experience of this transitional year. Four, research a replacement for the Adobe Bridge app (since I’ve found an adequate replacement for Photoshop in Affinity). Five, explore the use of a different browser, the Brave browser, to possibly replace Chrome. Eventually I’ll report on the last two items to the tech squad.

By lunch I have finished the review and tagging. By 2pm I have cleaned up the tag usage and can offer the following

authoritative summary of activities

for this first year of Codger-dom. First, regarding difficult emotions,

Days on which I reported feelings of Grief: 46 (most, but not all, in the first half).
Days on which I reported feelings of Anxiety: 13 (all in the first half).

More detail on those emotions in the essay, later.

One goal I set for myself was to get the F out of the house and attend performances of various kinds, and visit museums and galleries. At this I succeeded, reporting

Days I attended a musical concert: 14.
Days I attended another kind of performance: 33. This includes theatrical performances, lectures, baseball games, and a day at the Scottish Games.
Days I visited some type of art museum or gallery: 14. Includes two visits to SFMOMA, and a morning wandering around Carmel looking at galleries.
Days I viewed a movie: 12. Four were at home on TV, the others in theaters.

I used volunteer work as a way to structure the week and see other people. In the year I counted

Days of artifact conservation at the Computer History Museum: 43.
Days when I led tours at the CHM: 58. Wow, more than one a week.
Days that I put in hours at Friends of the PA Library: 84. Once a week in the first few months, but after I was asked to manage the Computer section, twice a week.

I gratefully noted meeting with a friend or friends on 36 days (thanks, Scott!) and with family members on 35 days (thanks, Dennis, Jean, and Darlene!).

Meanwhile I did amuse myself with some hobbies, reporting

23 days when I did some creative writing, mostly on my novel in progress.
36 days when I did some kind of handicraft work, restoring tables or a plant-stand or repairing something.

I was away from home traveling for 21 days, in two trips, one to Las Vegas, one to Greece.

On 18 days I reported some kind of medical/dental item, an appointment or procedure, mostly routine.

On 65 days I reported something to do with selling my house: meeting with agents or contractors or paying bills or signing papers or making phone calls. Thankfully that is all over and done!

And I went for a morning run on 104 days. That’s twice a week, less than my goal; but I also reported “Exercise” on 58 other days. (A regular exercise routine is an ongoing issue.)

As planned, I got 500 words or so into my wrap-up essay, then spent an hour looking at alternatives to Adobe Bridge. And now at 5pm I am settling down for a quiet watch of some youtube videos. A new episode of Project Binkie is in!

1.005 Laundry, Docent, images, SWVB

Saturday, 12/7/2019

I was scheduled for the noon tour, which meant leaving at 11am in my red docent shirt, which needed washing. So I started the laundry before 7am, in order to get both loads done and the shirt ironed in time.

Went to the museum and led a tour that started with about 15 people. Picked up another ten or so on the way, then they evaporated and I ended up with 12 at the end. They seemed interested.

Back home, I spent some time learning the ins and outs of Affinity, the app I am starting to use to edit my old photos and print them out large on the new printer. The standard for decades has been Adobe Photoshop but as I wrote before, they changed their business model a few years ago, from selling software to renting it. When I finished converting all the old slides, I dropped my Adobe subscription. Affinity is a replacement. It cost only $40, but it has just about every feature that PhotoShop had, and a user interface that is pretty close to it. At least, a number of the PhotoShop keystrokes in my muscle memory do the same thing in Affinity. But as was true with PhotoShop, there is no bottom to the depths of things you can do with it. I ran onto a big set of free tutorial videos for using Affinity, and watched several and then immediately went and applied them to a picture.

It doesn’t show well at this resolution, but the picture on the right is improved in several ways, and the point is that each component was improved separately. The wall and the people were separated from the distant hill so it could be made darker and greener. Then I selected the man and child–including the wisps of their hair–from the masonry wall. The wall got a little darker and bluer. The faces and flesh tones got subtly brighter and easier to see. I see that their shirts should get more saturated; since they are on a separate layer now, that will be easy to do without affecting anything else.

day 5 – boat ride to malcesine

Soon it was 5pm and time to call for a Lyft to Maples and the second round of the NCAA for women’s volleyball. Stanford had no difficulty in disposing of Cal Poly in three sets. The dining room wasn’t open when I left, and it was closed when I got back, so once again I had a salami and cheese sandwich and a beer in my room.

1.004 FOPAL, tech squad, SWVB

Friday, 12/6/2019

Today I wanted to put in some time at FOPAL, since I was unable to go on Wednesday. I pictured many boxes of computer books piling up. However, I began the day with an indoor run, 32 minutes on the treadmill. Last time I did an actual run, I timed the main “legs” of my route, and it came out to (roughly) 16 minutes, 8, and 8. The two breaks are bridges where I slow down and walk for a short distance over the bridge. So that’s what I did on the treadmill, and on the Health app it came to very similar step counts to a real run.

Then to FOPAL where I found… only two boxes of computer books. And mostly dreck; I ended up shelving only 5 books. Then I started sorting, and was shortly joined by two new volunteers, a couple, Andrew and … damn, can’t remember her name, starts with a C and isn’t Clarice or Cordelia… This was another instance where completely new volunteers showed up at 10am when, had I not been there unscheduled, nobody would have been able to welcome them and show them the ropes. Well, it worked out.

Approaching 12, I left, picking up a few grocery items and then back to CH for lunch. At 1 I. was to meet Craig to install a printer on the 10th floor. This is an upgraded floor, and hence all wi-fi work goes through the ClearPass system (which I wrote about way back in June, Day 183). Craig had already gotten the Epson printer to report its MAC address, and input that to ClearPass as being part of the subnet for that apartment. Now we got the printer to join the wi-fi net. Next up, grab Barbara’s MacBook and tell it to forget its old default printer and look for a new one. At first, the printer didn’t show up, but then we checked and the Mac was logged into the building wi-fi, not the proper ClearPass one. As soon as we logged in to that network, the printer popped up instantly in the add printer dialog.

In a glow of accomplishment I left to take a nap. At 4pm I went via Lyft to Maples Pavilion. Mark and Susan, friends from SGI days and from Canopy, had invited me to join them for the NCAA first round of women’s volleyball. The first game, Georgia vs. Cal Poly, was close. Georgia won the first two sets. Then Cal Poly rallied to win two sets. In the fifth set, Cal Poly took a quick lead and won the match.

The second match, Stanford vs Denver (who?), went to Stanford in three sets. Tomorrow I will return to see Stanford/Cal Poly.

1.003 Shustek mostly

Thursday, 12/5/2019

Pretty much a quiet day. Drove to the Shustek center and spent the day photographing. By the end of the day I and Tom had completely cleared the “to be photographed” shelves.

Two interesting new donations. One was a military computer. Alan did the online searching to figure out it was a Data General Nova minicomputer inside, but it was packaged in a long black box shaped like avionics, suitable to rack into a helicopter or something, with mil-spec cable connectors, and it weighed 90 pounds. The other was a TV Typewriter, a home-brew box with a keyboard and amateur-looking toggle switches. The design for a circuit that would put 16, 32-character lines on a TV screen was published in 1973, and was used as the primary user interface to many home-brew computers in the 1974-1979 era.

That was about it. Back to CH, had a short nap, then went to dinner. Decided I didn’t like anything on offer, so ate a sandwich in my room.