Monday 12/01/2025

In the morning I had to run AV for a book talk. Here’s how Gigi described it,

Stanford Professor of Economics and co-director of Stanford’s Center for China’s Economy and Institutions will talk about his book, The Highest Examination: How the Gaokao Shapes China.

What is the gaokao? It is the college entrance examination given by the Ministry of Education throughout China. It is the modern version of  the 1,400 year-old Imperial Examination that Chinese emperors gave to choose their bureaucrats.

Professor Li had some interesting slides, unfortunately his English was hard to follow. I fear the video recording will be less than good. Anyway, the gaokao might be the single biggest difference between Chinese and American culture. Far older than the similar British exam, a young person’s score determines their future educational path and much of their life.

Right after the talk I headed FOPAL where I didn’t get everything fixed like I want, but I had to break off and head back for the 4pm Poetry Out Loud. My contribution was to read Billy Collins’s “Questions About Angels“.

After supper I practiced “Feliz Navidad” again. Earlier I did a little more furniture rearranging, moving my leather Ekorns lounger to a corner. This is why so many people follow this blog, for gripping news like that.

Sunday 11/30/2025

Lazed around much of the day. At 1pm I boarded the bus for the Pear Theater to see Ada and the Engine, a play about the life of Ada Lovelace, darling of the Computer History folks. The play was pretty good, excellent performances by most of the cast. A good portrait of the original computer nerd, Charles Babbage.

Saturday 11/29/2025

Nothing on the google calendar for today. In the morning I set out early and walked to Midtown for coffee-and. (3 miles for the day)

Practiced some music. Spent 2+ hours looking for a poem to read at the Poetry Aloud meeting on Monday, without success. Contemporary poetry… some of it is good but not suitable for reading aloud. I think tomorrow I’ll dig up some Byron or something from the 18th century, with solid meter and rhymes.

Friday 11/28/2025

Took a nice walk with Joanne in the morning. For coffee we stopped at a new place. We’d noticed that a new coffee bar had opened just a couple of doors away from Verve, a well-established place, and across the street from Starbucks. Pretty nervy, so we stopped in to check it out.

Turns out, this is a Yummy robot cafe. There were a couple of people behind the counter who took our orders and money, but the actual coffees were made by a robotic mechanism — actually a small mechanized assembly line, dispensing a cup, holding it under a spout, etc. Then the cashier calls your name and you go get it. We both commented that they should finish the design with delivery robots like we have in our dining room.

The coffees were not great. They don’t have different sizes, no small or large cappuccino, just one about 10 oz. No asking for a “dry” cap. My cappuccino was indistinguishable from a small latte at any other shop. If the robot assembly line can’t be set up to do different sizes of drinks, and drinks with different amounts of foam, milk, and coffee, and can’t deliver to a table, what’s the point? We’ll probably go back to Verve.

We stopped at the Little Sky bakery pop-up store as usual on a Friday, and at Ace hardware because I wanted some superglue.

At 11 I met with Peter in the auditorium and we worked out a problem he had with projecting a Netflix movie on our big screen.

Then it was time to leave for the Museum to lead the noon tour, or actually the 12:15 tour because, anticipating a big post-holiday crowd, they’d booked two docents for each scheduled tour. There were about 35 or 40 people ready at 12, so I took half on a side trip around the other areas of the museum while the other docent, Larry, took his half into the main space. So I ended up talking to these people for almost two hours. They seemed pleased and I kept their attention the whole time. I feel pretty pleased about that performance.

Back home I practiced Feliz Navidad a bit.

Thursday 11/27/2025

Started the day with a nice walk. Joanne and I walked to Cafe Zoe, just for the heck of it. In the last block she said, “Are you sure they’ll be open?” and of course, they weren’t. So we started walking home and diverted slightly to pass a block away from Mme. Collette’s and we could see people going in and out, so yay, it was open. So we could have a cup ‘n a cake after all. Even though the schedule posted on the shop door said, “Thanksgiving: closed”. I could see why they were open, they were doing a heavy business in doordash and other carryout trade.

Later in the day I tried to subscribe to the Chronicle, but their ##$% web interface fell over and give an error message, so I don’t know if I subscribed or not. Why the #$% can’t businesses get this shit right?

And worked out the right chords and timing to “Feliz Navidad”, now all I have to do is remember to practice it a few times before the first rehearsal which is barely a week away.

Dining Services put on a very elaborate lunch buffet. I came in right at 12. There must have been 20 reserved tables. At least half the total tables in the big dining room. You can tell when someone has reserved a table, there’s a sign with their name on it.

Took another walk alone in the afternoon, 10K steps and 4 miles for the day.

Sack supper in the 6th floor dining room with just Jerry and Betty. Apparently everyone else on the floor has a relative to visit. But it’s ok.

Fooled around with Netflix, looking for some old films I might want to watch and was kind of disappointed in how few there seem to be. Maybe I’m not doing it right.

Wednesday 11/26/2025

Wednesdays Joanne likes to organize a hike, and today the plan was to walk the Arastradero Preserve, yet again as we have been there often. Joanne L and her partner Erica came along. It was a very nice day, cool and clear with nice mists setting the hills off.

3.5 miles; back to CH at 11:45, I went in for an early lunch while Joanne took Fred for some errands. After lunch I took Fred and drove to FOPAL to deal with the 8 boxes of priced books from the big donation. The job was to figure out where to put them on my shelves. I got permission to use one of the rolling red display carts that are extra shelf space for special sales. This I loaded up with shelf of all Ruby/Rails books, and a shelf of books all about designing or debugging embedded systems (computers built into appliances) which was apparently a specialty of the donor. Moving some other sections around got me shelf space for the rest. Three hours and I had it all cleaned up and off the floor. More to do on Monday, but at least it’s tidy.

Time to chill for an hour and then we met with Lou and Alice for a planned dinner. Lou had invited us to dine with them a week ago. He is one of my more impressive neighbors, both of them had important roles with various NGOs, the World Bank, stuff like that, he was on the board of the California high speed rail project for a while; but also very pleasant, smart people.

Tuesday 11/25/2025

Started the day most pleasantly with a walk to the shopping center with Joanne. At 10:30 CH had arranged for a talk about Medicare and such with an expert, I believe he was here last year as well. Intellectual interest to me, as I am content with the IBM/UHC PPO.

However a big thing happened. I have been looking for someone I can train to edit event videos. One possibility I had in mind was a new resident, Jean Yao, who is very energetic and seems to want to be into everything going on. So I asked her about computer use, yes, she is comfortable with computers, she was an “analyst”, I don’t know what kind. So would she like to learn this new skill? Sure, she’d be happy too. Her son is giving her a new laptop, so we’ll start after the holidays.

After lunch spent some time trying to nail down the chords for “Feliz Navidad”. Jose Feliciano in the official recordings that I’ve heard, plays it at such a fast tempo I can’t get the rhythm right. I have to slow it down, and change the key so I can sing it. Oh well.

At 3:30 it was time for the quarterly meeting of the Tech Squad, the volunteer team who provide first-line IT support for residents. The big news here from our organizer, Bert, was that according to his spreadsheet, the number of calls has been dropping. Last year he was averaging 3 point something calls a day, now it is down to 2 point something. Nobody could think of a reason why. My guess is it will shoot up again after the holidays when everybody gets electronic gifts from their kids.

Following that it was the monthly meeting of the AV team. December is a relatively light month. I signed up for only a book talk and the holiday music show. I need to enlist somebody to relieve me running the cameras for that, too.

Supper followed by at 7pm, a monthly sing-along. Except they had a typo in the elevator sign this time, “Come to the Song-along” and everybody thought that was cute, plus some people attend just to listen, not sing; so Song-along is what we are going to have from now on.

Monday 11/24/2025

I went early to FOPAL, got there at 8:30, got home at 3:30. Processed all 20+ remaining boxes of that massive donation. Now I have a much smaller pile of 9 boxes of books that have been price-marked. But not organized. I need to organize them, separate them out into categories. Like, I know there is just a bunch of books on the Ruby scripting language and its web platform, Rails. But they are scattered through all 9 boxes. I need to get them together, maybe find some duplicates, and decide how to display them on my shelves. Similarly a couple of other categories. I’m planning to do all that on Wednesday afternoon.

Quiet afternoon, now to watch a bit of TV.

Here’s a picture from last night’s concert, taken by another CH resident who had a clear shot for pictures (I did not).

Sunday 11/23/2025

Yesterday afternoon Frank texted a picture of a wall of donations at my section. Clearly some computer dude had died and his widow donated his library. So I decided to go down there and get some work done today. This is what I found.

That’s 29 boxes, 5 stacks of five and one of four. I put in 3 hours and processed 9 of them. Based on the pub dates, the anonymous donor was really busy with programming in the mid-teens. Hardly anything pre-2000, or post-2015.

Finished tweaking my passkeys writeup and sent it to the tech squad mailing list. The rest of the day I didn’t do much. Read, watched YT videos. Did not practice guitar.

Saturday 11/22/2025

A completely unscheduled day. When I said that yesterday, Joanne said, facetiously, “Oh what will you do with yourself?” Well, I walked to the local farmers market. Walking back I was thinking about maybe trying to use an AI to do some coding. I’ve been reading about programming with AIs.

Then I got to thinking about another issue, passkeys. Lately web sites have begun bugging you, when you log in with a passWORD, to create a passKEY. Various residents have asked me if they should do that or ignore it and I’ve had to say, I don’t recommend it because I don’t understand it. Well, how about I get to understand it? That’ll fill some time.

I started by having a long chat with Claude.ai, and that was very helpful. (You can read our convo here.) Then I read some of the docs Claude referenced. Then, being a compulsive tech writer, I drafted a summary intended for my colleagues on the Tech Squad. That still needs tidying up, but that filled the afternoon rather well.

At 4 I went down the hall and had a cup of tea with Dr. Margaret. Then went downstairs for an early supper. At 6:30 Joanne found me in the lobby and we walked 4 blocks to the 1st Presbyterian Church, for a concert. Weeks ago we had walked past 1st Pres. and noticed a poster, for a free concert by their “musician in residence”, a Kurdish guy skilled in the instruments of that part of the world. Here’s the description.

It was a nice event. The place was filled, a couple hundred people easily, and at least ten of our neighbors from CH. The music was very much middle-eastern, twangy stringed instruments playing repetitive patterns that reminded me of Indian sitar sounds, and very skilled drumming like Indian tabla drumming but different. The high point was when a lovely woman in a flowing white gown came out and did a Sufi whirling dance. For at least ten minutes she spun slow and fast and slow, making various arm postures as she went. It was hypnotic for everybody. Afterwards people were looking at each other and saying, “how does she not fall down with vertigo after that?”