Day 345, paperwork, novel, supper

Tuesday, 11/12/2019

Went for a run. Then took care of some admin. First, scheduled a payment to the BofA credit card. It will go through tomorrow, so from Thursday on it will have a zero balance and I will close it out.

About two weeks ago–I don’t see any mention of it here–I went to the MyMedicare site and did plan comparisons on my health plans. I found that the Anthem/Blue Cross prescription drug plan appeared to be a significantly better deal than the Humana one I’d been using since 2007, so I opted for that. Soon after I got a letter from Medicare saying my application should be processed in ten days, and if I hadn’t heard, to contact the provider. It has been more than ten days, so I did.

Annoyances: I tried to use the Chat facility on the Anthem site. It kept showing me that some person had connected, enter a message, then that they had disconnected, then went back to showing me “a representative will be with you shortly.” Tried two browsers. So called the number shown. Very short menu: 1 to buy a new plan, 2 for an existing plan, 3 for a provider. OK, 2. Thank you, as a member, please call the customer service number on the back of your membership card, goodbye. But… but… OK, try again, this time select 1. Lady takes my name, address, date of birth; says, well you have called the medicare purchase line, but I see you in our system (oh good) let me transfer you to the medicare service line. Which works but of course, that lady also has to take my name, address, date of birth because heaven forfend the info should transfer along with me.

Anyway, yes, my application is in the system, a membership card was mailed to me on 11/5, and a welcome packet should arrive separately but soon. So all good.

After lunch I added 1300 words to the novel.

At 4:30 it was time to attend the 4th floor meeting. Each floor has regular meetings to cover whatever domestic items come up. There’s an elected floor rep who chairs the meeting. (I first attended a 6th floor meeting back on day 156, after I’d signed the contract but before I moved in.) Fourth floor meeting was to be followed by 4th floor eating dinner together, they’d reserved a large table. But Craig, the 6th floor rep had also reserved a table for a 6th-floor-in-exile get-together dinner, so I ate with them.

Day 344, residents meeting, tech, FOPAL

Monday, 11/11/2019

I wanted to attend the monthly residents’ association meeting at 9am, so ate a regular breakfast. These meetings are a reminder that CH is a functioning community with a degree of self-governance. The long-range financial and other decisions are made by a Board, and day to day administration is by a CEO and paid staff; however the residents association has some discretion and input, and the meeting is run formally with a (fairly lengthy) agenda, committee reports, etc. As I’ve frequently noted before, the residents here ain’t no dummies, but retired professionals, most with all of their wits about them.

Following the meeting I met up with Susan who wanted help with her Mac. She has a wee little Macbook 13in, connected to a bit (23in?) monitor. She wanted to not be prompted to log in every time it came out of sleep, and a couple of other tweaks.

Next I went to FOPAL to do the post-sale triage of my Computer section. Before the sale it had 409 books, after it had 299, net 110 books sold. I looked through all the remaining and sent another 70 or so off to the bargain room because they’d sat too long without selling. Reduced the prices on some others. Priced and shelved two boxes of new. Did a little sorting.

In the late afternoon and evening I did more research for a possible London outing. The dates will be Feb 14-23. I made a list of 20 or so museums and galleries I might visit. Since several of them justify a full day of exploration,  obviously I won’t get to all of them. At least the biggest are open every day; the days of museums being closed on Mondays are gone.

 

Day 343, plant stand, house concert

Sunday, 11/10/2019

Walked to Verve or coffee. Afterward, walked by the hardware store to pick up some abrasives and cleaner for the plant stand.

Around 9:30 I drove down to FOPAL to see what kind of mess my section was in after the Saturday sale day. Actually it was quite neat; I think some of the sale-day volunteers must tidy up the shelves. I could see where books had been sold, and not always where I had expected sales. For example I had had four books on various aspects of digital signal processing, and three were now gone. I had about 18 inches of various editions and volumes of Don Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming (with a post-it label calling it out as “Knuth Korner”), and it looked like none had been taken.

I spent an hour starting cleaning the iron plant stand. I cleaned the top tier and sprayed it with rusty-metal primer.

At 12:45 I started to a house concert in Castro Valley. The location was one where I’d attended house concerts at least three times, probably four, over the past decade, with Marian. The host recognized me when I came in. The performer was “Mark Hummel and the Deep Basement Shakers”. Mark Hummel has himself introduced as “Emmy Nominated Mark Hummel”; he specializes in blues harmonica. At one point the lady in front of me went to the bathroom, giving me the opportunity to get a brief video. Here’s 40 seconds of Hummel on a solo.

I stuffed myself on the snacks everyone brought. The drive out and back was unremarkable. Generally a nice experience.

Day 342, mostly SWBB

Saturday, 11/9/2019

The big event for today was to attend a SWBB game to be held at the new Chase Center in San Francisco. This was an event arranged by USF, with the USF women versus Stanford at 3pm and the USF men versus Princeton at 6pm.

In the morning I went down to FOPAL just to check my section at the start of Sale Day. Looked fine, but customers hadn’t begun rooting around in it yet. On the way back I stopped at the hardware store to buy a couple of screwdrivers. I wanted to assemble one of the 11×14 picture frames, and it needed a straight screwdriver, and I didn’t have one in my kitchen drawer. When I went to the storage locker in the basement and checked my toolbox, the multi-bit (“six-way” they are called because they feature two sizes of straight bits, two of phillips, and also fit two sizes of nut) screwdriver that I thought I owned, wasn’t there. I assume it got lost in the last or previous Repair Cafe day?(*) Anyway, I wanted a new one, hence the stop at Ace Hardware. I bought a “six-way” or the kitchen drawer and an “eight-way” for the toolbox.

After lunch I met with Patty who wanted a ride to the game, and off we went. The nav. system in the Prius refused to admit that the Chase Center parking at 1800 Owens street existed. Note to self: get GPS updated next time you get service. So Patty set up guidance on her phone. Entry to the parking, like entry to the arena, was controlled by an e-ticket on the phone. It all worked fine. The new Chase arena looks like — any other big commercial arena, and I’ve been in a few. Well, the monster video screen above the court is better than any I’ve seen before. But I can still carp. Big professional TV presumably maintained by professionals, right? And you can stand there and look up at the screen showing the court and the players, and down at the court and the players, and it is very obvious that the color balance is off. The players look like they have a sunburn and the wood floor is pinkish-yellow instead of brownish-yellow. Sheesh. The lighting levels and colors are completely  under their control, how hard is it to tweak the video so it actually resembles the subject it is showing?

Got back to CH in plenty of time for dinner.

(*) Days later, I found it neatly stowed in the case where I keep my power drill. Now I have three.

Day 341, Docent, printing

Friday, 11/8/2019

Went for a run. Do not remember (now, 24 hours later) what I did between then and 11am when I left for the Museum to do the 12pm tour. There was a Go Language conference on the upper floors, and those people had filled the parking lot, but in fact museum attendance proper on the ground floor was very light. My tour group was just six people. But they stuck with me the whole way.

Back at the “land-locked cruise ship” I took a short nap and then (anything to avoid actually writing) made some notes on the next phase of the novel, then spent an hour printing big pictures on my new printer. It does very nice, 11×14 prints. It would do 11×17 if I only had any paper that size.

That was about it; for supper I took one of my cans of beer to drink, big whoop.

 

Day 340, Yosemite, not theater

Thursday, 11/7/2019

Drove to the Yosemite Ave. warehouse for a day of working with artifacts. In the morning I put away some artifacts that had been brought out 3 weeks ago for a researcher. People researching computer history can ask to look at artifacts. When their project is approved, the relevant things are found and moved out to tables in the open area of the warehouse. In this case, the person was researching keyboard technology, and ten or so things with keyboards had been brought out. Aurora the curator said he got really nice photos, but I haven’t seen them.

Anyway, you don’t just put something away any old where. You look up its object number in the database; verify the location it came from (row, block, shelf numbers); walk over to find that location and make sure there is space on the shelf and nothing is in the way of transporting the thing; walk back and pick it up (or for heavy things, put it on a cart); move it to the location and shelve it. With over 110,000 objects, it is imperative that you know where objects are at every point.

Some of the things had been in boxes. In that case you have the additional step of repacking it in its box with other artifacts, then shelve the box where it came from.

In the afternoon Steve and I worked over inventorying more boxes. Lucky us, the boxes we took down from the shelf turned out to be part of the big collection of slide rules that the museum received in 2005. You do a database search on the box number; that turns up records for all the objects supposedly in the box. You verify that there are that many objects in the box (one box had 35 rules, one had 54). You go through the list of object numbers, finding each object, verifying that its database record is complete (often it isn’t) and that it has a photograph (often it doesn’t). If anything needs photographing, the box moves to the to-be-photographed cart. Or if it needs repacking (as the box of 54 rules did, they could be much better arranged) it goes on the repacking cart. Or rarely, the box goes on the “reshelve” cart so Aurora can figure out a more efficient place to put it. The box’s location record gets updated for each of these moves, of course.

Coming back, I stopped at FOPAL to hang up a cute picture in my computer section.

anime with three books

This came from a wonderful collection that Frank found, of pictures of anime characters holding computer books. I mean, the internet is a wonderful and bizarre place. Somebody has created and curated a large collection of pictures of anime characters holding computer books. Just specifically that.

Back home to rest. Then at 6:30, out to attend a play at The Pear. This turned into a fiasco. I thought to just buzz down 101 to Shoreline. Hah! When I hit 101 it was bumper to bumper creeping. I got off at San Antonio with fifteen minutes until start time. Went up to Middlefield and started South with ten minutes to go. Somehow — and I don’t like the implications of this — I missed the left turn onto Shoreline and found myself too far down Middlefield, at Ellis. Back under 101 and north to Shoreline, by which time it was 7:10 and no possible way to make the curtain. So I headed back home, but retracing my steps back to Shoreline and Middlefield. Yes, I know this intersection. Yes, I am positive I came down Middlefield 20 minutes ago, through here. And I didn’t see it. Was I distracted? I don’t know. But I don’t like it.

 

Day 339, FOPAL, Docent, papers

Wednesday, 11/5/2019

Today I had a docent tour to run starting at 11:30, but it is also Wednesday before book sale at FOPAL, the day that section managers should have their sections in final shape for the sale. I could do that before or after the museum; I opted for before. So I had breakfast at CH. Carrying my red docent shirt for later, I headed out for FOPAL at 8am.

There were only two boxes of boooks waiting for me, and I ended up shelving only 8 additional. Then I did an hour of sorting which brought me to 10am. I took a break and had coffee and a scone at the local Peet’s Coffee before heading to the museum.

There I met a group of 22 undergrads from the University of Toronto. They are so cute, just adorable. Lucky for them, Pat, docent of the 1401 lab, was available and offered to do them a 1401 demo. So I gave them a short tour and turned them over to him. They had a good experience, I think. The professor said they were going to the Intel museum that afternoon. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I bet they didn’t get as good a show there.

Stopped at the car wash to get the car cleaned up on the way home. Looking forward to driving at least one other person to the SWBB game in the city on Saturday. I’d have paid for an external detail job if it could be done in a reasonable amount of time, but the lady at the entrance barely spoke english and seemed to think they didn’t do polishing. Which they certainly do, but I asked a more informed employee while my car was going through the regular wash. Detailing would be near $200 and take half a day. I seem to recall they once did a quick polish operation in less time, but that was probably long ago. Anyway, if I’m going to spend $200 on a polish, I’ll do it at a “real” detailing shop, not a shed attached to the car wash.

In the afternoon I spent an hour answering an email from Katie The Tax Accountant regarding the ongoing effort to complete an IRS form 7-oh-whatever, to recover I forget what part of Marian’s estate tax exemption. Lots of small questions to finish the job, like “Did Marian have an interest in any other trust?” and so forth. All easy to answer except one.

Back in August they said they would file for an extension past the 9-month cutoff for this filing. I said fine. This email asks, did I receive approval of the extension from the IRS? Um, no. The email makes reference to maybe having given the IRS my old address. Despite the fact that in the email exchange of August, I gave them the Channing House address. (OK, I probably never logged into the tax accountant’s website and updated my info there.)

Two days ago I got an email from Richard, the gardener, saying his invoice for August work had been returned by the PO, and could he have my current address. So very possibly the PO is no longer forwarding mail to the Tasso address. However, they were doing so very reliably, back in September and October.

So I sent off my detailed reply to all Katie’s questions, but with a bad feeling that maybe the extension had been botched; that the whole exercise would be a failure; and I would end up paying for a lot of accountant hours with no benefit. The benefit had never been that clear to me anyway, but whatever.

 

Day 338, plant stand, Jean, move, SWBB

Tuesday, 11/5/2019

I had breakfast in the dining room (Tuesday is Belgian waffle day, and when I start getting excited about that? Just shoot me.) and left at 9:15 for the welding shop where I picked up the mended plant stand.

Then to sister in law Jean’s place to supervise updating the phone I lent her months ago. She admits to not using it much, but she’s a photographer and I talked about iPhone photos, and demonstrated using air drop to move pictures to her desktop Mac. That impressed her, so maybe she’ll start carrying it more. Jean is amazing in many ways, at age 90-something still living alone, firing on all cylinders mentally, and has even had a remission of a sciatica-like pain that troubled her all last year.

On the way back to CH I stopped at the hardware store and bought: a 9×12 plastic drop cloth, a wire brush for the drill, and spray cans of rusty-metal primer and satin black. I parked out front to unload the plant stand and bring it up to my balcony. Then took the car around to the garage, and brought up my drill case and the hardware stuff. Then spent an hour beginning the process of cleaning the stand.

This is going to be a long job. Where it isn’t rusty it is caked with gummy dirt. The drill-powered wire brush is effective for the flat bits, but it has many curly bits where the drill brush can’t go, and I will need to use sandpaper or steel wool or something. The rotating wire brush cut through the dirt and black paint to reveal that the stand at one time was painted pale green, or else had a pale green primer coat. Standing in the hardware store I debated whether to use a black finish coat or a green one. Now I need to rethink that.

At 3pm was the monthly Renovation Upgrade Status Meeting. At this one, we 6th floor people got our move-back dates  (January 20-31st) and the 5th floor got their schedule for move-out dates.

Going in to dinner, Dave Golden (the other, other Dave) asked if I was going to SWBB tonight, and offered to drive, so fine. He has a 2016 Camry hybrid. Every time I ride in a newer car, I get antsy to upgrade my 2012. Those newer widgets…

Stanford played Eastern Washington. It’s a division 1 school playing in the Big Sky conference, but they were completely outclassed. Stanford’s defense just shut them out; they scored 15 points in the entire first half, and ended up shooting 11%. Stanford’s freshman “big”, 6-5 Ashton Prechtel, not only had a couple of blocks but also stepped back and shot three, three-pointers. It’s gonna be a fun season.

 

 

Day 337, A/V, welding, novel, photos

Monday, 11/4/2019

Went for a run in the morning. Did not remember to wear a sweatshirt, but the temperature was just high enough — and with the time change, there was enough sun shining on my back — that I didn’t miss it.

Next up was my first assignment running the audio/visual for a performance, in this case a talk by George Marotta. This was nominally a “Book Talk” and a review of Dereliction of Duty by General (Ret.) H.R. McMaster. But George, who was in Viet Nam in 1957 working for the US Aid program, just in time for the Tet Offensive, talked a lot about his own experiences. For example, while working in the State Department under Robert McNamara, George was responsible for administering the program run by the Rand Corporation, including working with a Rand employee named Daniel Ellsberg. He reminisced about how McNamara was insistent that Rand was to keep very good records, which they did, and those documents ultimately were published by Ellsberg as The Pentagon Papers.

Anyway, I got the screen and projector and mics all set up and the presentation went off quite smoothly.

A few days ago, I noticed an object on the balcony outside the common lounge on this 4th floor: a wrought-iron plant stand. It has 6 pot shelves arranged in a climbing spiral around a central pole, the whole being 4’8″ high and a bit under 2′ wide. It’s dirty, rusty, and has two broken welds that make it unstable. I asked around and eventually found the lady who said she owned it, who said I was welcome to it if I wanted to fix it up.

Yesterday I used Yelp to find a local welding shop. Today I brought the car around front, lowered the rear seat, and brought out the stand, which fit in the Prius just fine. And off to Mountain View to a modest little hole in the wall where the guy said, sure, I can fix that, tomorrow morning ok? Which fits my schedule perfectly.

Back to CH where I spent an hour making progress with the novel. Added 700 words, mostly well-chosen.

Then I spent an hour going through my collection of pictures and picking out candidates that have enough pixels, and enough photographic quality, that they are worth trying to print at 11×14 or 11×17, with my new printer. Way back in April (Day 149, for one) I started the project of printing my best images for framing. I’ve got a half-dozen of those framed here in the closet now. Just after the estate sale, I found a box of 11×14 frames in the garage — something that Deborah had brought in to sell, I suppose, and left — and appropriated them. Now I have a printer that can do 11×14 or 11×17, and I have some 11×14 photo paper. My eventual aim is to have a photo wall, outside my 6th floor apartment. Each occupant “owns” the hallway wall outside their apartment. People put up all sorts of art. I’ve got it in mind to put up printed photos, a rotating collection of 4 or 6 at a time.

Tomorrow is a busy, busy day. And so to bed.

 

Day 336, coffee, FOPAL, tickets, dinner, plan

Sunday, 11/3/2019

“Fall back” day. Did my usual Sunday morning thing, doing the NYT crossword at home, then going out for coffee. Today I took the car and went to good old Palo Alto Cafe in Midtown. Then, because I have something else to do tomorrow that will interfere with my usual Monday FOPAL stint, I drove on down Middlefield to FOPAL and did the Computer section pricing and shelving. The shelves are pretty full, although I think I will add more on Wednesday. Then we shut down shelving for the upcoming Sale Weekend.

Interesting internet curiosity going on. My favorite tool for book pricing (and others’) is, or was, BookscoutPro.com. This odd little site does (or did) only one thing: given a list of ISBNs, it would present the range of prices for those books, gathered from Amazon and Ebay. It had a brutally simple UI, was blazing fast, and told us just what we needed to know to price used books. And last week it stopped responding. Its server still answers to pings, but it doesn’t respond to HTTP requests any more. Frank, our internet (among other things) expert thinks it was a one-man operation and the one man has either died or lost interest. He and I discussed how we might go about getting the source code of the site and running it ourselves, or recreating its function.

I spent 90 minutes culling, pricing, and shelving, including taking a pre-sale count. Then I spent another 90 minutes sorting. Sorting, by myself, is a highly satisfying occupation. I just blitzed through about 8 boxes of books, creating a nice clear space in the sorting room. Then I bought a few groceries and headed home.

About 2pm I got a call from George, who is giving a talk on Monday. The A/V committee assigned me to run this show and I had emailed him about the details of his laptop earlier. Now he very sensibly wanted to do a trial now, since he  had another commitment that ran right up to his scheduled start time. Excellent idea. We met in the auditorium where I turned on the projector and we connected his laptop. All fine.

And only as I wrote this, I remembered: did I turn off the projector? I zipped down to the auditorium and no, I hadn’t. It’s an expensive projector but it wasn’t shining its light. Hopefully with no input it wasn’t burning itself out over the last 8 hours or so.

Then there was an email from Patty, to a list of several SWBB fans, wondering about the coming game with USF next Saturday. It is to be played at the Chase Center in SF, and we started an email discussion on logistics, is it practical to take Caltrain, etc. (Answer: no.) In the midst of this, it occurred to me, I need a ticket for this. It’s not part of the home season pass of course. Tickets via Ticketmaster, $50. Turns out the event is a double header, women at 3pm, USF men vs. Princeton at 6, one ticket for both events. With the result that many of the good seats have already been bought by (presumably) men’s fans. And parking is $30. Well, got that all bought.

Went down to supper by the stairs, meeting David and Helen on the way. Then Patty said we should sit together. So nice supper with four other people. David worked at SRI and knew Doug Englebart.

After supper I thought about my oft-stated idea of spending a week in London, visiting museums and seeing shows. Quick check of Road Scholar, they have nothing like that. Given I know London fairly well, I don’t need excursions to the well-known places. So, plan it myself? How hard can it be?

First thing is, when? I look at the Google Calendar. Lots of conflicts with SWBB and other pre-purchased tickets. Also, January is when the move back to the 6th floor should happen. However, there’s a nice gap in mid-February, the 9th to the 20th, with no serious conflicts. So I open booking.com and look for hotels. There are several attractive places in Chiswick and around Hyde Park where I can stay for 10 nights for less than £1000. I find officiallondontheater.com, ticket brokerage. Lots of shows one could see with prices around £30-£50. And of course there are the museums, I would use TripAdvisor to refresh my memory of those. But it should not be difficult, the work of a couple afternoons, to plan a 9- or 10-day stay with one museum and one performance a day. So we will see.