Wednesday 05/07/2025

Today was the day for the Channing House Spring Concert. We’d rehearsed yesterday afternoon and I had left the stage set up, so there was little to do to prepare for the 10am show. The earlier performance is specifically so that the aides can wheel people across from the AL floor to attend; plus some people from the IL tower prefer to attend then. There were about 60 people in the audience for that show. Everybody did their parts well. My little 2-song set went down well.

Between then and 6pm when I went to set up for the evening show at 7pm, I did my laundry, and then lounged around and napped. The evening show was SRO, at least 90 people. Everybody did well, and I got some nice “you were great” comments during the reception afterward. So that was nice.

I got video of both shows, and sometime soon — Friday maybe — I will edit a final version using the best performances from each show.

Tuesday 05/06/2025

The writers meeting cue was “my father”. It happens that I wrote a very short summary of the main points of my father’s life for this group, back in 2020, after I had OCR’d his autobiography. So I had that to read if it was appropriate, and the group did want to hear it so I read it again.

Prior to the writers meeting I worked on editing a video of a talk from a week, or two weeks ago. I finished that just after lunch. Then I went down and set up the auditorium for the Musicale tech rehearsal which was to be at 3pm. At 2pm, completely alone, I got on stage and ran through my two songs and did them perfectly. In the actual rehearsal, with 20 or so people watching, I did one ok, but had made some guitar mistakes in the second and got nervous. So a C+ at best for that effort.

Monday 05/05/2025

In the morning I had to do the AV for the First Monday Book Talk. The speaker was Albert Camarillo, a professor emiritus of history at Stanford. He talked about his book, Compton in My Soul about growing up Latino in LA in the 60s. Prof Camarillo was a pain for me trying to get a video recording. He gave an energetic and enthusiastic talk but he wouldn’t stay put. His computer was on the podium stage right, but he seemed to want to speak from the corner stage left. Every time he wanted to go to the next slide he would walk across the stage to the podium, talk from there for a minute, then cross back to the other side. Hell for a camera man. Aimed one camera at the podium and one at stage left, and then I just cut between them. Didn’t try to pan to follow him as he zoomed across the stage.

Then down to FOPAL to set up my section for the sale next weekend. Only one box of donations, so that took less than an hour.

At 4 was the monthly meeting of Poetry Out Loud, where a group organized and chaired by Joanne meet to each read one poem out loud. I had picked Ellen Bass’s poem, “Gate C22”. It is fun to read.

Sunday 05/04/2025

Sunday morning things. Then somehow I was busy the rest of the morning, I can’t remember with what. After lunch at 1:30 I met with Joanne and we walked over to the Stanford campus and looked at some of the outdoor sculpture, like “The Angel of Grief”.

We ended up at the cafe on the terrace over the Rodin sculpture garden where we had an excellent heart-to-heart talk. We really clarified our relationship, which we agree is: best friends. We are besties, but for good reasons we are not a “couple” in the usual sense of that word.

After supper I went to the auditorium for a showing of the movie Conclave which had been arranged in haste to take advantage of current events. Excellent movie. By sheer coincidence my pal Joanne showed up and sat next to me. She’d seen it in the theater but enjoyed seeing it again.

Saturday 05/03/2025

For the first time in weeks, I walked to Cafe Zoe for breakfast. Walking back I realized it was nearly 10, and the Palo Alto May Day Parade would be finishing up at the park just down the block from CH. Lots of community booths, and a display of old hot rods and classic cars. Nice. I didn’t take any pictures.

Lounged around lazily most of the day. But spent another hour with Claude on fiction writing. The new prompt is helping, they are much less effusive than before, and actually had a couple of good suggestions. One of their questions led me to understand a major reason I’m stuck on this book. We’ll see.

What pronoun should we use for an AI? Certainly not going to refer to Claude or ChatGPT as “he” or “she”. I used “they” above; that feels better, but we need a unique pronoun for a non-human voice in a conversation. Maybe a normal pronoun with “AI” inserted?

I asked Claude and thai said… hai said… thair suggestion was helpful… I took hais advice…

Friday 05/02/2025

Had a 10am private tour at the museum. This was great fun. The group was 14 technical people from Promon, a Norwegian company that develops security software for mobile devices. So, geeks. Nice mix of ages, a few old enough to know what slide rule is. They understood all the stuff, they paid attention, they were interested and responsive and gave me a nice round of applause at the end. Great tour.

At 1pm I set up the auditorium for a rehearsal for the upcoming concert. 12 different performers or groups of performers. This was a “free” rehearsal, just getting used to the stage. Next Tuesday we do a “tech” rehearsal where we try to get the actual time and flow of events right. And the concert is Wednesday. Today I was OK, I fluffed a couple of chords but sang ok.

And looking ahead I have a completely free weekend, which is nice. Wonder what I will do with it?

Thursday 05/01/2025

An uncommitted day on the calendar. Frittered away much of it. Spent some time with Claude.ai. Back on day 6.108 I mentioned trying out Claude as a writing partner. Claude was so full of chat, comment, and ideas that it was kind of overwhelming, and I set it aside. Since then I have learned a bit about AI prompting. Today I asked Claude to help me write a new set of Project Instructions, aka global prompt, for the writing project, which it did. Then just couldn’t figure out how to proceed. Mental or writer’s block. Frustrating.

At 7 joined Joanne and we walked the half mile to the Lucy Stern theater to see the Palo Alto Players production of Jersey Boys. I was sure I had seen a musical about the formation of a singing group, but that, whatever it was, was not Jersey Boys. This plot was completely unfamiliar to me. But the show was quite good. The production was A+ quality, I can’t imagine a Broadway show being better. Dozens of set changes and costume changes and just endless, skillful, dancing and singing. So much snappy choreography. And of course great songs, “Sherry Baby”, “Dawn”, “Walk Like a Man”.The only thing I’d downrate it for was audio quality. It was loud and I mean, my ears are still ringing like after a rock concert. And one of the main characters was hard to understand, some combination of his joisy accent, his style of delivery, maybe a mic issue? But all told, top notch stuff.

Wednesday 04/30/2025

In the morning I took care of a bunch of little email things, they amounted to nothing but were cluttering up my in-box. I got my lunch as carry-out and at 12, watched most of a webinar from Stanford, presentation of the 2025 Stanford AI Index.

Then down to meet Joanne at 1pm for a walk. This was a weekly group walk she organizes, except this week everybody else was ill or had a conflict, so it was just me and her. Imagine my dismay.

Back by 3, I had time to prepare for 4pm when the AV group had its monthly meeting. I presented on what I’d learned about stage monitor speakers, and Jerry talked about how he had presented his travel video avoiding the laggy response of zoom.

Tuesday 04/29/2025

The writers group prompt this time was “a dialogue”. Any dialogue. Between 9 and 10:30 I cobbled together something, a dialog as an SMS text exchange. Got a couple of laughs. This prompt got some silliness. Peter had a dialog between the dairy products in his refrigerator. Joanne wrote a dialog between a queen termite and her king termite discussing the different kinds of cellulose products they could eat.

After lunch I went to neighbor Phil’s apartment and we packed 8 more boxes of his books. I schlepped them down to the Prius and off to FOPAL. Only three boxes of computer books to process. Then at 3pm when they took donations I gave them Phil’s boxes.

After supper a concert by a local jazz group, an hour of jazz versions based (sometimes rather loosely based) on Beatles songs. Not what I had expected, I’d thought they would be more a Beatles tribute band but no, they completely reworked the songs, changing rhythms and harmonies all over the place.

Here’s my silly dialogue. Read it slow, with pauses between, like actual text messages come.

Monday 04/28/2025

Took an early morning walk. Picked up a prescription at CVS, which turned out to be spironolactone, the drug that I cut back from 1/day to 3/week some time ago. So I still have not only 20 or so still in the working bottle, but discovered that I also had another full bottle in the spare-pills drawer. ‘Scuse me a sec…

switches over to CVS.com and turns off auto-refill for that drug…

Now then. At 11 I went down to the auditorium and set it up for a test of monitor speakers. This was because Bert’s friend Larry was going to come by and give advice at 1pm. The problem at hand was that professional musicians are used to have monitor speakers that point back at them so they can clearly hear what they sound like. When I tried to do that for the Keller Sisters, anytime I got the monitor up loud enough to suit them, I would get feedback.

While setting up I noticed that the feedback frequency was very low. Just short of feedback the sound would get deep and echo-y like talking into a deep well. So ok if it wants to feed back in the low tones, let’s cut the low tones. The sound board has a four-band equalizer for each mic, and I just rolled the 100Hz knob over to zero. Bingo, no feedback.

When he got there, Larry concurred with what I’d done. He had some other suggestions, and told me some great war stories about being sound man for bands. After he left I had Jerry come down and try it out, he’s the one CH performer who wants a monitor. We got it to work for him, too.

Then I put everything away.

At 4pm was the Common Spaces Advisory Group. Patty and I presented our proposal for the 11th floor tv area. Everybody seemed to like it. Rhonda said she would start getting prices.

Mary Beth, head of the Treasure Trove (gift shop) asked me to look at a donated iPad, so now I have to figure out how to reset to factory, an iPad for which the former owner is no longer able to remember anything like a passcode. I looked it up and will do this tomorrow.

Also an old Kodak Carousel slide projector. My goodness, all through the 60s to the early 00s, we used our Carousel a lot. Been 20 years since I touched one. The owner of this one had stashed two spare bulbs in the box. Good thing. The one in the projector burned out as soon as I turned it on. Power switch on, flash, dark. And the first spare was also kaput. But the 2nd spare worked. Bulbs cost $25 for 2, on amazon. The projector sells on eBay for around $30-$40.