The Icarus Kronikles
Family and friends have received an intermittent email with the above title for several years. I can now inflict this journal on the world at large -- but it's a great way to keep in touch. I'll start a new one each week, and archive the previous one so latecomers can catch up. Click here to go to the Archive page.
Monday, November 20, 2000
Worked during the morning on the site navigation bar, and slimmed it right down in size. I'm still waiting for a nice sunny day to take a batch of pix of the garden as it is now. It has been cloudy today with a chilly sou-wester wind; but this moderated in the afternoon and I took the opportunity to mow the lawns. After tea, I watched TV for a while and then came upstairs to return to the web page. I now have three photo gallery pages ready to upload to the host.
Still being plagued with lockups and lost work, so rang up my computer pusher and ordered a Matrox G400 video card. Not the latest and greatest -- but the CorelDraw newsgroup agree that it is the most stable for graphics work. The NVidia card I have is notoriously picky about its environs; I have tried several different driver versions.
Tuesday, November 21, 2000
We were out at 9:45 am to go to the hair salon for hair cuts. Our hairdresser is a jolly Maori lass called Lureen who chatters all the time. It's interesting to watch how she unconsciously pitches her conversation to suit the client; ladies get the standard housewifely gossip, but she very quickly found out she could ask me almost anything and get a reasonably sensible answer. So my hair cut is accompanied by a Life in NZ on whatever technical or business topic is exercising her mind at the time. Can't get *too* involved or lengthy though -- as my hair cuts get done very rapidly these days. It won't be long before Lureen will be checking to see *which* hair I want trimmed this month :-[
Spent the afternoon tweaking web pages. Went outside when the sky lightened a bit, to take a quick round of digital shots which you will find on the gardenpages 3 and 4.
Wednesday, November 22, 2000
My satellite downlink has been acting up, so spent most of the morning on the IHUG help line trying various config settings. *Finally*, the techie asked me if I had changed the drivers for the SkyMedia card. No, I said -- but should have thought of that myself. 90% of performance problems in any piece of computer are supposed to be cured by updating the drivers ...
Located the driver page, downloaded the appropriate one. Problem sorted. Just in time, as Don sent me an SOS -- client needed ten copies of a CDRom of images that I had done before. Burning the CD's was the easiest part; the insert art was something Don had done while I was overseas in June. He wanted things changed, so we did that and formatted the inserts to print 3-up on a big sheet of A3+. That done and printed, I had to trim the inside to dimensions, and stick it on the rear of the front panel. Times ten. I didn't get back to finish this chore until 8 pm -- after tea and my TV viewing [The Bill finished at 8]. Back upstairs to finish the glueing, fold, trim stuff.
Then I started on the round CD labels; I had bought an applicator kit a couple of months ago and had not even opened it. There were sheets of pre-cut sticky labels, and a program with matching template. The program was a real hinky job from somewhere in Asia; it was surprisingly full-featured but refused to do what I wanted -- put a GIF of the client's logo with transparent background on top of a photo. It ignored the 'transparent' portion and insisted on displaying the white rectangle round the logo. I spent the next hour or so searching through the inadequate help file and trying various expedients; suddenly realised that I really didn't need to do this in the program anyway. Fired up CorelDraw and had the thing done in a couple of seconds, transferred the image to the label program, and started printing. Finished the last CD at 12.15, and so to bed.
Thursday, November 23, 2000
Joan vanished over to Lisa Cresc to help Jo with the final preparations for Thanksgiving. As the household is half American, she tries to observe the US holidays and customs; they feel it's important that the children have some exposure to American culture and don't just end up Kiwi kids. I busied myself at home getting my accounts up to date.
Still waiting for the Matrox card to arrive; apparently the G400 model is now discontinued and no-one had bothered to phone back or even email. However, the shop got it sorted and a model G450 (with faster RAM than the G400) is on its way.
The Thanksgiving Dinner went off well; we had a smaller attendance than last year but several new faces -- other graphic designers and journalists that Don liases with from time to time. Don does a great job of decorating the Christmas tree; and the children had done one of their own which looked almost as good.
Friday, November 24, 2000
I picked up the Matrox card this afternoon and duly installed it in Milly, my graphics computer. Deinstalled the old drivers, changed the card, installed the new drivers, reboot. Right at the end of Windows start, I got this weird message box informing me "This is not a correct display card". Whaaaat? You mean I've paid out NZ$420 for a counterfeit? Or is it not deemed to be *politically correct*? Whatever, after closing the box and resetting the screen resolution etc, it is working perfectly -- in spite of not being 'correct'. I might email Matrox tech support and seek assistance.
I finally made my mind up and acted -- I'm registering 'icarus.gen.nz' as a domain name. This will take a week or so to get sorted; I'll send out a general email announcement when it's ready. Our email address will change as well: mine will be mike@icarus.gen.nz, and Joan's will be joan@icarus.gen.nz.
Saturday, November 25, 2000
We caught up with some garden chores in the morning. I started into some web site work from Don; this is a client's site that he has completely redesigned. I had previously scanned and OCR'd a whole lot of product information text from their brochures — they produce sheet metal-forming machinery which is highly regarded world-wide. I had a bad attack of the 'tireds' in the evening, went to bed with a book, but was asleep by 10 pm.
Sunday, November 26, 2000
Up bright and early (7 am) and was picked up by the Rotorua Camera Club president to do some photography. Our local historian and the Rotorua Museum have asked the club to take shots of the city area; they have secured a substantial grant for this. The prints will be scanned and archived for future reference — it is the intention that this be done periodically. We had a shot list and map to follow; most of the shots were city streets taken from the centre of the intersections in specified directions. I used my Nikon 801 on a tripod; and we went through one & a half films. There were two teams, and we finished in a couple of hours.
Joan went out with Jo and Rebeccah on a favourite Sunday pastime: visiting various 'open homes' — these are houses for sale that are open to view at nominated times. I finished the last of my web pages and have moved on to this site. I need to do a 'family' section so I can display family photos as grandparents are expected to do. There are the Halloween costumes, Ethan's Aikido grading, and coming up will be Rebeccah's ballet recital and the end-of-year stuff at school.
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