Day 331, teeth, book, A/V, SWBB

Tuesday, 10/29/2019

First thing this morning was to walk to the dentist’s office for dental hygiene. Times past, I would allow 30 minutes for this walk, starting at Tasso street. Now it’s four blocks. Good news, my gums have not receded any further, and Dr. Kono couldn’t find anything to complain about, no decay or anything.

The A/V committee meeting is scheduled for this afternoon, and I’ll likely be assigned an event. It has been weeks since Ian walked me through the various features of running all the stuff in the auditorium, the lights, the screen, the projector, the mics. Lots of details, seen once. I’d been telling myself often, I should go down and poke around again. So today I did that. I went into the auditorium and turned stuff on, dropped the screen, played with the lights (of which there are quite a few, house lights, stage spots), turned on a mic and talked through it, hooked up my laptop and played a youtube video.

After lunch I added some more words to the book. When time came around for the A/V meeting I walked down to the third floor lounge. I got assigned just one show, a talk on Monday morning at 10. Only issue is the presenter, on the ERF (event request form) has stated he needs to show PowerPoint off his Windows laptop. I need a few more details, like, does the laptop have an HDMI port or what?

I had seen a message on the house email list, Lenny (woman who moved in just after me) wanted a ride to tonights SWBB game. I offered. So I got a quick dinner at 5:45 and met Lenny in the basement at 6:15. This was the first time I’d gone from CH to Maples, and I made a botch of it, ending up taking the wrong way, and then turning too soon and having to loop around for a second pass at the Maples parking lot.

The game was fine: the Cardinal beat Beijing Normal 100 to 58. Three of the freshmen played and all looked strong and capable. A returning junior, Alyssa Jerome, looked vastly improved, and the usual good players all looked good.

I am glad I can still enjoy SWBB on my own. Several times during the game I pictured Marian there with me, how much she’d have enjoyed it, and my eyes prickled and my throat closed up. But that didn’t dominate the experience, and there were a lot of moments when I was honestly and enthusiastically cheering for good play and high skills by Stanford.

Day 325, FOPAL, theft, theater

Wednesday, 10/23/2019

Went for a run, sans sweatshirt as the weather has warmed up again. After that I wrote another long detailed note to the CHBB for MacOS users. Yesterday’s email had made the point about “your old 32-bit apps won’t run under the next release,” but that just raised the question, “which of my apps are 32-bit ones?”

Turns out it is quite simple to find out, but not obvious. So I wrote up how to do that: how to get your mac to list the 32-bit apps, so you could go down the list and decide which ones you actually use, so you can start trying to get upgraded 64-bit versions of them.

The big issue here is Adobe software. When Adobe went to the ~~highway robbery~~ excuse me, subscription model, a lot of people didn’t bother to subscribe. They just kept using the last version of Photoshop, InDesign, LightRoom that they had actually purchased on CD, which is the “CS5” edition. They work perfectly well. Unfortunately they are all 32-bit apps and will quit working when you next upgrade your OS. So you have the choice of paying Adobe an annual subscription, after which you can download the latest versions (and learn their modified UIs); or you can look for alternative products and learn a whole new app. I didn’t cover all that in the email; just how to find out what your 32-bit apps are.

About 10 I went to FOPAL. Well, first to the grocery store next door, where I bought about $15 worth, including some grapes and the sugar-free drinks I like to stock. I put them in the fancy canvas shopping bag that I had brought back as a souvenir from Mykonos, on the front seat of the car. And left the windows open.

I worked the computer section and then sorted until about 12, when I went back out to the car to have some lunch and chill out for a while. And guess what? My bag of groceries was gone. Some creep had reached in and taken my bag. I hope they were disappointed with what they got. I hope they choke on a grape. I really miss that bag, it was well-made and had a trendy hotel name on it.

After a while I went back in and did sorting during the 2-4pm open hours. Then back to CH to relax for an hour before dinner. I finished eating at 6:15 and left for the theater. I had tickets to TheaterWorks’ Mark Twain’s River of Song at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. It’s basically a concert of early American music, around the theme of a trip down the Mississipi, conducted by Mark Twain remembering his riverboat days.

This was not very good, and I left at intermission. There were several problems. The first was that the performers really weren’t very good, either as singers or musicians; just average living room performers, mostly. They played banjo, guitar and fiddle, but at no point did anybody try to solo on an instrument; the kind of musicianship you get in any bluegrass group was absent. With one exception their voices were average to weak; the exception being Valisia LeKae, who has an excellent alto voice and can really act.

Second problem was the staging. This was a small show, just six people sitting or standing around, no dancing, little movement. If it were presented in a small theater like the Pear or even Lucy Stern in Palo Alto, it might come across better. But the MVCPA stage is enormous, it’s a huge room, and this little group was kind of huddled in the middle. The big stage emphasized how average (and also static) the performances were.

Day 324, in-house activities

Tuesday, 10/22/2019

Lots of in-Channing-House activities today. I started with a 9am meeting with Patty. She is a former board member and the person who thought up the Heritage Circle, a separate fund, managed by the CH board, that acts as a granting agency to fund projects suggested by residents. The Heritage Circle has funded things like upgrades to the library, a program of day-trips to various attractions, and such. They solicit funds from members.

I started thinking about the Heritage Circle because it is also time to donate to the Appreciation Fund. That’s another thing entirely. There is absolutely no personal tipping allowed from residents to staff. However, residents subscribe to the Appreciation Fund annually, the value of which is equally divided across all staff, so like a year-end bonus. I made out a check to that for $500, because I’ve only been here half a year. For a full year, I expect to give $1000, which at ~$3/day seems little enough for the cheerful service I get in the dining room, from the front desk, and from the facilities guys.

But that brought the Heritage Fund to mind, so I asked Patty about that, thinking she would just tell me how to make out a check, but instead she wanted to meet and explain about the fund, how it is run, what it does. Which she did. So I wrote a check and now am a member of the Heritage Circle.

At 11am, tickets for Eric Johnson at SFJazz went on sale, and I bought one. Then I did some actual writing, yay. First was to write a detailed email to the bulletin board, telling MacOS users how to avoid the automatic upgrade to 10.15 “Catalina”. The internet’s opinion is that it has several annoying bugs and one should wait for the .1 or .2 release; plus also, it is the threatened future release under which all 32-bit apps will no longer run.

Second, I wrote a couple of key scenes for my novel. Back on Sunday, sitting in the classical music concert that I went to as a result of forgetting about the Boogie Woogie one, anyway, sitting there I was pummeling my brain trying to think of the phrase I wanted. And I did. Think up how the people in my future would phrase the idea that all genetically modified organisms must have some crippling flaw so they can’t spread into the environment. Since this is like a fundamental rule of that society (the violation of which is the main plot device), they would not have some labored way of saying it; they’d have a short phrase. And I finally thought it up: “All new things must have a lack.” That’s the snappy sound-bite they teach kids, like “Do unto others…” in our world.

Knowing that, I could write one scene where that gets said, and start another where it will get expounded and expanded on. Painless exposition.

Three PM brought the monthly Tech Squad meeting. My MacOS email was appreciated. Some other issues were discussed.

At 5:30 I met with Mary Ann who had put in a tech squad call about her comcast DVR on Monday, a call which had been assigned to me. We spent an hour, almost, going over all the features of the remote and the various DVR menus, and she gained a lot of confidence in using the device. Hopefully she will remember the simple two-step process that gets you to a reboot of the DVR, in case it gets wedged the way she described on Monday.

Day 318, tech squad, hair, docent, FOPAL

Wednesday, 10/16/2019

First thing was to be an appointment for a haircut at 9am. But at 7am I found an email from last night asking me to look into somebody’s problem with their Comcast TV; they weren’t able to watch the debate because inexplicably their TV had decided it wasn’t authorized for CNN, which is in our building’s contract basic package.

I passed this off to Craig, who said he had seen that problem. Then went and got my hair done, and then down to the museum to lead some Apple employees on a tour. Here I tried something new, that I’d been thinking about doing. I explained I would give them a 45-minute survey of the major technical developments, along with pointing out the different galleries, and then they would be free to explore on their own, except that if they wanted, I would lead them back to look at some specific objects that I like.

The idea was I could include more stuff than the usual “keep it under an hour” tour allows. I’d do a cut-down version of my usual survey, then stroll back to look at the Xerox Alto, the Apollo Guidance Computer, maybe the SAGE system. Great idea, and I may try it again, but this time it definitely didn’t work. They all opted for independent exploration (or more likely, a quick exit) and nobody followed me as I headed back.

Something ridiculous also happened. I had mixed up a 500-calorie meal replacement shake and put it in an insulated shaker cup, which I’d never used before. The plan was to have it for lunch after the tour. But when I parked at the museum I discovered that I had not properly sealed the new shaker top, and it had emptied itself onto the passenger seat, out of sight because it was covered by my shopping bag of museum stuff. About 12 ounces of high-protein drink, half still on the leather seat, the other half down under it on the carpet.

I went across the street to the 7-11 and bought a roll of paper towels and some wipes, and got a lot of it up. Fortunately it was “pumpkin spice” flavor and now the car has a delicate cinnamon aroma. But I suspect soon I will be paying somebody to steam clean my carpets.

In the afternoon I went to my usual 2-4pm sorting job at FOPAL, which makes three times this week. Not what I want to do on a regular basis.

Day 315, walk, tech call, tv

Sunday, 10/13/2019

Started with the usual crossword puzzle and coffee at Mme. Collette’s. Then, it only being 9am I thought I would go for a walk around the Dish. That early on a Sunday, surely there would be parking up there, right? Nunh-unh, all the local walkers had already filled up the limited parking by the trail entrance. Plan B, I went down to the Baylands and did a walk there. There were lots of water-birds, including three different pods of white pelicans. Lots of ducks. Marian used to like to use her binoculars and pick out the different species of duck; and she doted on the white pelicans. I didn’t have binoculars with me, so I couldn’t tell a shoveler from a mallard. Actually I think I could have recognized the mallards, and there weren’t any.

I went the three miles from Byxbee park around to the foot of San Antonio road, but rather than close the loop with two miles on pavement, I just called a Lyft to get back to the parking lot where I’d left the car. Back at CH I had a snack lunch in my room and a nap; then went out again. First to FOPAL where the sale weekend was winding down.

Then down to sister-in-law Jean’s to help her with a software problem. She uses the Photos app to manage her huge collection of images, and she had somehow lost a bunch of them. I personally detest the Photos app because it takes possession of your images and stores them in its own proprietary “Library” files. Contrast that to comparable image managers like Adobe Bridge or Lightroom, which leave the images safe in the hands of the OS’s file system, each image a file that you can copy, back up, open with another app, etc. Those managers have their own catalogs, but they don’t hide the images in massive opaque globs where the only access to the image is through Photos itself.

But there it was: Jean had a Library of hundreds images taken in her work in the local diocese and sometime in the past month, most of the images in it had disappeared. Photos helpfully displayed the image names still, but only little blank rectangles to show they weren’t there.

Fortunately when I helped her set up her system, back in 2015 after her husband died, I set up a backup drive for use by the Mac’s Time Machine backup system. So now we just started the cool “Time Machine” effect and went back a week and restored that Library, all 27GB of it. One file, 27 gigabytes, contents only accessible through Photos. Unfortunately that version was still missing the images. So we restored a copy from two weeks back. Nope. Each restore cycle taking about 10 minutes for Time Machine to copy the file and then Photos to “recover” its catalog data, whatever that meant. Finally went back a month, and that version, when restored, was 51GB. That’s promising, we said; and when Photos had finished munging it, yes, there were all her pictures up through that backup date. She hadn’t lost a lot of work. So that made me a hero, yay me. I had gone into this assuming it was likely user error (e.g. she meant to delete one picture but accidentally selected a bunch of them), but now I think it equally likely that Photos has a bug where its database gets corrupted. Well.

Back home again, I had a nice supper sitting with Craig, Diane and Patti. Then watched more TV. Before heading off to Greece I had set up the DVR to record three new series that sounded good. One was Carol’s Second Act, Patricia Heaton as an older woman trying to have a second career as an intern. I gave up on this halfway through the second episode. The writing is pretty bad and the jokes are labored.

One was Stumptown, and this I’m kind of enjoying after two episodes. It’s basically a noir detective show, could be from the pen of Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane, except that the broke detective with the complicated past, the alcohol problem, and the propensity for getting beaten up, is a handsome woman, and instead of New York or L.A. the setting is Portland, Oregon.

Third is In a Man’s World, where women, with the help of Hollywood makeup artists, go undercover as men, to prove that they were unfairly held back. The first episode was entertaining, although it’s not clear what Emily proves, in the end.

Plus, a new season of Mom has started, and a new season of Bitchin’ Rides, and I have at least three eps of Austin City Limits, and … life is rich, I guess.

Day 296, meetings, waiting

Tuesday, 9/24/2019

Today was the special kind of day, the getting-ready-for-a-trip day. Or as it usually works out for me, the already-set-to-go-burning-down-time day.

First thing, 6:20, 24 hours before departure, I went through the KLM info page to check in for my flight. Ooops, it says, online check-in not available, use a kiosk at the airport. Oh well. Ten minutes later, I get an email from Delta, “Hello, David, time to check in for your flight.” I use that link and no problem, print boarding passes, good to go.

Rechecked my bag, reviewed my plans, done. Took the car out and had it washed. Killed some time. At 3pm it was the monthly meeting of the Tech Squad. Some issues with the new style of house phones that are being given to residents who request a wireless, carry-around handset. Some issues with coverage for wifi in the refurbished floors and what they will do about weak spots. This was of interest to me because when I move back to #621, which is in the corner of the building, coverage may be weak.

At 4:30 it was time for the monthly A/V committee meeting. Assignments for events in October were passed out, none to me. I’m to pick a couple and shadow the operator, which I will do after the trip.

Finally I requested a wake-up call from the desk, picked up my mail, and left my mailbox key for Craig who will check the box from time to time for me. And went to bed early, anticipating a 3:00 alarm.

(Edited at SFO because I couldn’t be bothered to do a post last night.)

Day 290, haircut, book, FOPAL, A/V

Wednesday, 9/18/2019

This morning I was scheduled for a haircut at 9am, so, as with the prior morning’s 9am flu shot, I wasn’t able to go for a run and instead did exercises in my room. Then out to have Chris cut my hair as she’s been doing since the 1970s (when I had a lot more hair to cut). Back to C.H. for an hour working on the novel. Then to FOPAL where I found seven or eight boxes of books waiting for the Computer section, and spent three hours in total culling, pricing and shelving.

Got back to C.H. just in time for a 4:15 appointment with Ian to be shown the A/V equipment, which is quite extensive. I learned where pretty much everything is. Since there was a lecture at 7, I ate a quick supper then joined Bert, who was doing the A/V for the lecture, and shadowed him — learning several things about the systems that Ian hadn’t thought to tell me.

In fact we the A/V team had a fairly public screw-up. The speaker, a very affable and easy-going (fortunately) Stanford history prof, wanted to start his show with a short video from Vimeo. The prof was supposed to have arrived well in advance of the 7pm start so we could set him up. You need to get the lapel mic and transmitter on him, and you need to connect his laptop to our video projector, and get it ready to show the video, followed by a smooth transition to his power-point slides. On a laptop you’ve not seen before.

He didn’t arrive until 6:55, when a fair number of people had already filtered in and sat down. So we had to set up his stuff with lots of people watching and under time pressure. We set up the video easily enough, although this was one of the new Macbooks that has no old-school USB, and no HDMI, just a selection of identical USB-3s (“lightning” connectors). Bert had a dongle for this that broke out an HDMI and an old-style USB from a lightning port. Right away the Mac found the HDMI, and here my experience with Macs was a help, Bert is a Windows guy and didn’t know how to make the Mac mirror the displays instead of treating the external projector as a second screen. That set, we verified the power point (actual Power Point, not Mac Keynote) worked. And cued up the video full-screen ready to start.

UN-fortunately in the rush, neither Bert nor I thought to check whether we were getting any audio. And we weren’t. Without audio, the video wasn’t much help, so the speaker just said, forget it, let’s go to the slides. I still don’t know what the problem was, although I’m pretty sure we could have worked it out had the guy actually showed up when asked.

I think Friday I’ll take my laptop down and see if I can make things work.

Day 284, Yosemite, traffic, tech call

Thursday, 9/12/2019

Did some exercises, had breakfast, and off to Milpitas for a day’s work cataloging. Just toward the end of it I did a stupid thing with the database that will take Aurora, the curator, at least an hour of time to fix. Agghhh.

Left Milpitas at ten to four and thanks to traffic backups on 101 and Middlefield, didn’t shut down at C.H. until 5pm, about twice the normal time.

In the morning I’d had an email from Bert, the tech squad leader, referring me to a problem Bob S. was having with Apple Mail. I googled it; it’s not a common problem, but one that other people have had, so I emailed some suggestions (forgetting his problem was with email). Anyway that hadn’t helped and I futzed around with his computer for a while and declared myself stumped. I recommended the Genius Bar at the Apple store, and fortunately he had taken the Mini there before so he thought that was an OK idea.

Day 275, many small doings

Tuesday, 9/3/2019

First thing, went for a run. All normal. On return I tidied up then sat down to organize the info about the Tasso street sale. Made a little spreadsheet showing the gross sale price and all the things that could be charged against it, commissions, taxes, and all the various contractors who were employed in preparing it for sale. Bottom line, it appears the net proceeds are just a shade under the appraised value as of December 2018. So there probably won’t be any capital gains charged; maybe a bit of a capital loss.

I put an hour into Zooniverse. Then Craig called; the tech squad had a request for help and he wanted me to come along. The caller, Grace, coincidentally lives in the apartment next door to where I’ll be moving at the end of the week. While Craig figured out why her Comcast email wasn’t coming up automatically like it used to, she told me how that next-door apartment was recently fitted with a new toilet, one of the high-efficiency kind that flushes with a great swooshing. Since that bathroom (soon to be my bathroom) backs up to hers, she hears the toilet whenever it is used. Knowing that is going to cramp my style a bit. Whenever I get up in the night to pee, I’ll be maybe waking Grace up. Well, it isn’t essential to flush then. It can wait to the morning.

After that I pursued a couple of items that have been in the back of my mind. One is to get a proper comfy reclining chaise for the deck. Early on I brought back a wicker chair from Cost Plus but it really isn’t comfortable for lounging. Several years back Marian obtained two very comfortable metal chairs for our back yard. Both of us napped in them often. They had deteriorated a bit and I let them go in the sale. Now I wanted one back, but what were they called? I looked at the outdoor furniture on the Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel sites, but their idea of a “chaise” didn’t look right. Browsing Amazon and finally spotted what looked right. Turns out the key phrase is “zero gravity” chair.

A bit more searching; it appears they are stocked at good old Walmart. Well, not at the Walmart in Mountain View. So back to Amazon and just order one already. It’s only $50 and will be here Thursday.

The other items related to the upcoming trip to Greece. I figure to pack light and do my own laundry, which means, quick drying clothes. I have quick-dry casual pants on the way, but I have in my drawer just two quick-dry briefs. Plus, I’d like to have a USB charger with the Euro style plug, and/or a Euro style adapter into which I could plug a USB charger with US prongs. So I went off to the travel store at Stanford Shopping Center. Success there on a couple of pairs of quick-dry briefs, but they didn’t have the ideal adapter/charger combo that I was sure must exist.

So back to Amazon again and of course, there it was: plugs into a Euro wall socket, offers two US style outlets and two USB ports. So I can charge the phone and plug in the adapter for the Macbook, and also the charger for the camera battery, if I decide to carry my Nikon. All in one small cheap device.

There’s a theme here. Both cases, I knew what I wanted, and went looking for it at local merchants, and didn’t find it, so back to Amazon Prime.

At 6 I went downstairs to join Lily and her sister Helen who had invited me to join them for supper. Also invited, Tammy, who moved in the same day I did, and Michael, the newer new guy who moved in a week later. Also Lynn. Turns out, Michael lost his wife last July, and in December Lynn lost her husband and Tammy, her older brother. So we were the bereavement table, for a while.

Day 268, fever, lunch, tech squad, financials

Tuesday 8/27/2019

I had a tossy-turny night, awake for a couple hours from 1am to 3 or so. But then slept right up to 6:10 and really didn’t feel much like getting out of bed. My arm is mildly sore around the vaccine site, nothing serious, but I just didn’t feel 100%. Took my temp: 99.1º, or a full degree above my usual 98.0. So, shingles-shot fever? I decide to take it easy for the day.

In case I had something contagious I got a banana and a bagel from the to-go refrigerator and ate in my room. I canceled my lunch date with Scott. I generally puttered around, although I put in an hour at the main computer starting to organize my notes for the rewrite of my YA novel. Feeling somewhat better around 12, I went to the dining room for soup and bread — they have been setting out really good, dark-brown bread at lunch times, and two slices of that and a bowl of the day’s soup is a good lunch.

At 2:30 there was a meeting of the Tech Squad. The main topic was a presentation from the two principal founders of a startup, park.com. (Website clearly not finished as of now.) They have an app that will supposedly allow re-use of the numbered parking spaces here, for staff and visitors. If I’m going out for the day, I would use the app to say my space is available. I could charge for it, or not. Someone needing to park, staff or visitor, could reserve the use of my spot. Bert pushed them pretty hard on the fact that there are many, many parking-space air-b&b-like apps. But it appears the facilities team is willing to give it a trial.

At 4pm it was the semi-annual Board of Directors Financial Committee update. The auditorium was set up for max capacity, where they open the folding doors into the dining room, and probably 120 or so residents turned up to hear a presentation on the financials for the 2018-19 fiscal year and the status of the current year. Bottom line, CH has plenty of funds, but the operating budget is losing around $1M a year (on a $20M budget) mostly owing to the fact that 20 units have been taken “off-line” to use for temporary locations during the Upgrade. When that finishes in two more years, a return to profitability is expected.

This was followed by a soiree in the courtyard. I sampled a couple of the foods on offer, did not take a glass of wine even though it was free, and went on back to my room where I dined simply on cherries and a PBJ. However by 9pm my temperature was back to normal (for me) of 98.1. So hopefully tomorrow will be ok.