Sunday 06/30/2024

Did my usual Sunday morning things — recently somebody said to me, “you’re really a creature of habit, aren’t you,” and I had to admit it was true. At 11, put on my red shirt and drove to the museum to lead a tour. It went OK.

Back home to practice some music. Only a few days until I have to play for the Lee Center AL crowd, but that is about the least demanding audience ever. Still, for no obvious reason I decided I wanted to sing “Swimming to the Other Side” so I need to memorize the chords and lyrics in a few days.

(Somehow neglected to hit the “Publish” button on this one)

Saturday 06/29/2024

Well, an uncommitted day, whatever shall I do? I walked to the downtown farmers and bought some ripe blenheim apricots. Then I decided to visit the San Jose museum of art, which I last visited in January 2020 — Day 1.060, also the day that I moved back into #621 after its upgrade. (Click the link for pictures – nothing has changed except the TV is newer.)

At that time I found the SJ museum moderately interesting. Today, not so much. There really isn’t much, just two large rooms, each dedicated to a single artist, and I wasn’t much interested in the works of either one. The best thing they had was the sculpture in the lobby, thousands of little metal pieces in a 3-D cloud.

But that trip was pretty much a bust. Plus two, $30 Lyfts.

Later on, after listening to an interview with a guy who was the touring sound man for a list of rock celebrities (Tina Turner, Prince, Van Halen, Jeff Beck, the Stones…) I was motivated to go down to the auditorium and check out all our microphones and try to adjust the sound as much as I could with our limited facilities.

Friday 06/28/2024

Took the standard walk (3.5 mi for the day) starting bright and early, back by 9. Then at 10 drove across Palo Alto to Gryphon Stringed Instruments where I had an appointment to do a little work on the guitar. I asked them to lower the “action”, the distance between the strings and the fretboard, just a little, which meant lowering the “saddle”, the hard strip at the bottom of the strings. This turned out to be a 20-minute job, and I was very happy with the result. It’s only a difference of maybe 1/32nd of an inch, but somehow it is easier to play every chord.

At 1pm I met with Mary R to practice another duet. Our first one was well-received, now she wants to do “You’ve Got a Friend” (see 5.206) and this was the first time we tried singing it together. We don’t have a date to perform so we left it that she would figure out when we would perform, and once we had a firm date, we would get serious about practicing.

From there I had a 2pm tech squad call, helping Nancy with an error message from Mac Mail. Too complicated to describe and anyway I didn’t fix it, though I think we can later. But in general 90 year olds have problems when they need to know their Xfinity password and their Gmail password and also the admin password for their macs, and all the passwords are jotted down, in a little paper notebook, and crossed out and revised over and over. Sheesh.

Thursday 05/27/2024

Had a meeting with Gerald of IT and Rhonda re various auditorium improvements. The added cameras will cost $17K and are “in-plan” and should happen soon. Two different approaches to the sight-line problem, where the closed captions on the bottom of a movie screen are blocked by the heads of the people in the front rows, are way too expensive and probably won’t happen.

Several people accosted me yesterday and today asking would I be sure to turn on the big tv on the 11th floor for the debate. It is not rocket science, people. But I did that about 2pm. Went back to check at 3:45 and some helpful person had turned it off again. Sigh. Oh, I suppose now (8:30) I should go turn it off. Probably somebody already did.

At 4pm I met with my AV committee to assign events for July. We chatted about this and that. Shared the news about the cameras.

Watched as much of the debate as I could stand in my room. Bottom line: Biden is too old, and Trump is a dangerous lunatic.

Wednesday 06/26/2024

Well today we had a scheduled power outage, from 9 to 2, in order to rewire stuff for the new emergency generator. As of now it should be functional, meaning among other things the elevators will continue to operate in a utility outage.

But that meant I couldn’t do my laundry at the usual time. I went for a standard walk instead. I managed to pass the time and did the laundry after the power came back. Nothing much else to say. Spent time trying to get an arrangement of “Swimming to the Other Side” in a key I can sing in.

There was a lecture in the evening, AV run by one of our more experienced volunteers, but there were issues, plus the speaker was, frankly, unprepared and disorganized. Fortunately I sat at the back so could quietly slip out after 20 minutes.

Tuesday 06/25/2024

Spent some time trying to make the 11th floor tv system show DVDs. I won’t bother trying to explain the problems. But I got Paul the IT guy to come help and he worked out something. Not a satisfactory fix IMHO but, what can you do. It means I get to modify my super simple and clear manual yet again.

Writers meeting. Not many contributions on the theme of “favorite movie”. I don’t have a favorite movie. At 3pm we had a Tech Squad meeting. This was all of us who take trouble calls for other residents. We discussed various issues.

One is, tomorrow we have a 3-hour scheduled power shutoff, while they rewire the building to use the new emergency generator whose installation has been going on for months. Why a tech squad issue? Well, following a power outage, all the house phones forget the date and day of the week. It’s easy for a tech-literate person to reset them. We have some residents who are not that. Something that affects fewer, but more difficult to solve is: following a power outage, there are people with Mac desktop machines that reboot, which haven’t been rebooted in weeks or months, and they will be asking for their admin password. We have people who won’t know, or will have lost, their admin password.. Well, no problem, you can recover and log in to your iMac by using your Apple ID and your iCloud password. Yeah, like they remember that.

In the evening we had a concert by a string quartet. Four guys, twenty-somethings, all students at Julliard, who are here for the week attending a big-deal music conference at Stanford. They played music they wrote, and some Dvorak, and they actually improvised some on the spot. Give us a word, they asked, and Lennie hollered “Bananas” and they improvised on the them of bananas for a couple of minutes. Fun.

Monday 06/24/2024

Took the standard walk and am delighted to say that my hip problem is completely resolved. My gait is back to normal, and there’s no funny sensation in joint movement. So hopefully whatever I did two (3?) weeks ago, was an injury and not the onset of something chronic like arthritis. For now, anyway. Every pain-free day is a gift.

Spent 2:30 at FOPAL processing a ton of computer books. Then back for a quiet afternoon.

Yesterday at lunch Mary R was talking about needing to work up some kind of song for the Appreciation Fund show this winter. This is a show put on by residents to get other residents to contribute to the fund that is disbursed to employees, in lieu of the tips that they don’t get because tipping is not allowed.

Last night, watching a PBS special on Carole King and James Taylor singing duets, I realized that their duet on Carole’s song “You’ve Got a Friend”(*) would be just the kind of thing that Mary was looking for. I sent the above link to her. So this afternoon I get back and find the sheet music to that song slid under my door. I guess we are going to sing that together at some point in the future.

(*) No, not the chirpy little song by Randy Newman, “You’ve Got a Friend In Me” from the Toy Story movie. The one in the video.

Sunday 06/23/2024

Walked a couple miles to Cafe Zoe for breakfast and do the puzzle. Then did a bunch of little things I’d been meaning to do, but not worth describing. Played some guitar. Wrote some emails. Dozed for an hour. Yeah, exciting day.

Saturday 06/22/2024

Took care of a few things in the morning, especially testing access to Ancestry.com from an invitation by Jean. She is nearly done assembling the Lacrampe family tree and wants to make it available to all and sundry, but wanted to know if the invitation worked. It does, kind of. But Ancestry is a money-grubbing ogre of a site, and even though their “invitation” promises to give you “guest access”, in fact there is no way forward but to open a free account. There is no “guest”, in the sense of anonymous drop-in viewing. That’s a shuck. But once you sign in with Google or Apple or give them an email, you can see what Jean’s created. Of course Ancestry will now pester you to sign up for a paid membership, but everyone these days knows how to deal with that sort of thing.

After lunch I put on the red shirt and went off to lead a tour at CHM. It was a busy day and I had 25 people or so. It went ok, not great.

At 6 I drove over to the Stanford campus for a 7:30pm concert. Had a Jamba Juice smoothie thing and sat around the plaza until time to go it. The doors of DInkelspiel aud were open and I could hear the band rehearsing. This was the Tommy Igoe band; Igoe is a moderately famous drummer and band leader. And the program was hits by Steely Dan. Amazing how many of those there were, and they were just part of the atmosphere in the 70s and 80s. The band would start a number and, oh yeah, I know that one.

All the musicians were first-rate. The guitarist there had toured as part of Steely Dan. The woman with the trombone, Jennie Geiger is her name I believe, was credited as the arranger of some of the numbers and had several solos. Altogether a very enjoyable concert.

Friday 06/21/2024

Took the standard walk, all ok.

Some time ago I wrote a “user manual” for the 11th floor TV/media setup with its 85-inch screen. Using my very best tech writer simple-simple English and lots of pictures, I told how to turn the system on, and show live TV from Comcast, or use the Roku for streaming, or play a DVD, or connect a computer to the big screen.

Recently the Sharp TV died, and was replaced with a new Samsung. Of course several details of operation have changed. So today I updated my book, printed new pages and rearranged the 3-ring binder it’s in.

At 11am Bert convened the first meeting of a new AI interest group. Just four of us, talked about what AI features we had used. Bert connected his laptop to the screen in the conference room and we did a few things. Agreed to meet monthly.