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.

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.

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

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.

Funny thing now. Yesterday I had worked out the 11th floor mic setup — or so I thought — to supply a single hand-held mic. I woke up at 1:45am with the thought, “Was that all they wanted? Because I was given a copy of the event request form (ERF), and why the hell have I not actually read it?” So I got up, turned on a light, and read the ERF, and oh crap, they want a lectern with a podium mic plus a hand-held.

I put on some clothes and in the deep quiet of Channing House at 2am, I go up to the 11th floor. Desperate exploration reveals a little podium (brand name “Lecternette”) which appears to consist of just a speaker cabinet on a wheeled cart. The instruction sheet taped to it refers to two wireless mics on channels 3 and 4 and a podium mic, but all I can see is this speaker cabinet.

I go back to my room and compose an email to the other members of the A/V committee asking for some info on this, where are these two mics supposed to be? Then go back to bed.

Wednesday, 12/4/2019

I have a docent tour at 11, so I have to leave at 10. I shower and shave and dress in my nice docent clothes, then go to breakfast, then go to the 11th floor and resume inspecting the A/V gear. After poking and prodding the “speaker cabinet” I finally discover how the top of it opens up to reveal a lectern surface with a light, a nice mic stand, a mic to put in the stand, and in another concealed drawer, two wireless mics. I plug in the power and with only ten minutes of futzing around, I have the podium mic and one wireless hand-held working. No idea why the other one won’t, but there it is.

So I go off to the museum and lead a tour for a group of 22 college students from Mexico, who have, according to my info sheet, “good English”. They better, because I talk fast and have nada de Español. Pat Buder is there, a 1401 docent, getting ready for the Wednesday afternoon 1401 demo, and volunteers to do a private demo for my group. He also suggests that maybe I should do 1401 demos, too. I demur, having plenty of things to do already, although I agree to “sometime” let him show me the ropes.

The tour leader tells me they have “maybe an hour.” Why do groups do this? I get him to agree to an hour and a half. Then I rush through my tour, skipping several points I normally make, and get them to Pat at 12pm. This group was, in Pat’s word, “squirrely”. Of the 22, I don’t think I ever had the full attention of more than 10 at a time. The rest wandered around or gawked at their cell phones, or cracking each other up with jokes in Spanish. Well, some seemed interested anyway.

So, straight back to CH, skipping my usual Wednesday FOPAL stint. Nancy, a CH resident, was already at work setting up the 11th floor for the Canopy party. I moved the podium out to the right location and got it all ready, then helped Nancy move tables and chairs around. Eventually Maika arrived. She was one of Marian’s favorite people ever; Marian adored working with Maika on her Canopy volunteer days. Maika was surprised and pleased to see me, as was Catherine, the Canopy CEO. The two of them had visited Marian a couple of weeks before she died. At that time, I’d asked them for advice on what to do with Beau, the 7-foot ponytail palm. Catherine remembered that and asked about Beau’s fate, and was glad he had a new home.

With the help of a couple of staff from the CH kitchen, they set up a big table of catered goodies and wine and mulled cider. Eventually 30 or so CH residents, and a dozen invited guests, drifted in to nosh and listen to Catherine and three others describe Canopy’s work, and make a low-key pitch for volunteers and donations.

By 5:15 people were drifting away, so I struck the podium and put everything away, and was just in time to join the other 6th floor exiles for the monthly 6th-floor supper. Except I’d eaten so many snacks I didn’t really want supper. But anyway we were joined by future residents Leon and Margaret, I think mentioned them before, and one more person who has bought in but can’t move in until February, and whose name I forgot as usual.

Watched about 3 hours of impeachment proceedings I’d recorded on the DVR. And so to bed, hopefully not to wake in a panic at 2am.