Monday, November 27, 2000

Out early to take the completed web pages file in to Don at the office, then off to the supermarket for food replenishment. I spent the greater part of the afternoon dredging up stuff on Rotorua to put on a locality page, as some overseas viewers have asked just where in NZ we are. I put a few links in for local attractions -- might just help the tourist industry!

Posted a help request on the hardwareguys.com forum to see if anyone can provide a remedy for my video driver error message. So far I've had one reply suggesting that I take care to remove all vestiges of previous card drivers from WIndows. I did what I could, but drivers have such enigmatic names that there could be some still lurking hidden that are being loaded in spite of my best efforts. Probably due for YAWI [yet another windows install].

Tuesday, November 28, 2000

Helping-in-the-garden-morning: cleaning up some old boards from the demolished side trellis; chainsawing the ragged stumps of tree that I had hand-sawed off a couple of weeks ago; waterblasting the dirty cobblestones out in the patio. We also scrubbed and washed down the sloping top of the conservatory. Consequently I now have an aching shoulder and stiff hand from overuse of the waterblaster wand.

The value of a day journal was brought home to me tonight: I tried installing a driver download for my Conexant modem. This turned to custard on reboot, with Blue Screens of Death and no stability. Sooooo ... back to the last Drive Image, 15th Nov. and restore the C:\ partition. BUT, I *know* I did an upgrade to the satellite drivers some time back -- was it after this image? Ah, check the journal for last week -- and there it was. Did the upgrade again and everything sweet as.

Wednesday, November 29, 2000

Into town in the morning for Joan to do some shopping. My Photoshop 6 upgrade arrived by courier, so duly installed it and had a short play: very impressed. As we didn't upgrade to V5 or 5.5, there is a big jump up to this version. The web graphics handling is excellent -- I have redone some of the garden pix and saved them all as smaller files. This will improve download speed when web conditions are bad.

Don has just had Jetstream DSL installed at the office and is blown away with the sheer speed-- he was sending files off to an out-of-town printer in seconds. But he did a download speed check with the MSN site [in USA], and found he had the same throughput as my satellite feed.

We've had a steady rain through most of today -- the gardener is pleased! It's still much colder than usual for this time of year; I've only had shorts on for a couple of days.

Thursday, November 30, 2000

Thanks to Sue for some 'quality control' on web pages; I fixed all the problems during the morning. I spent some time in the afternoon looking at the possibilities of using Corel Ventura to export HTML-coded text. I have the Sparling book, Joan's McGrail family, and Leola's Johnstons in book format with indexes. I had to go through the tag list and change fonts, indenting and size etc; but I was astonished at the result and will continue testing.

The afternoon being sunny, I whipped outside with the Nikon Coolpix and rattled off some shots of the 'Memorial Roses' round the property. Joan has, over a period, planted a number of roses as memorials to various deceased family members. In some cases, these are replicas of the marker roses on their plot in the Rose Garden in the Wanganui Cemetery. Others have just been designated as memorials. It's a nice idea, and we refer to 'Leola's rose' or 'Bruce's tree'.

All the family here for a birthday tea (mine!),Lots of pressies including a vacuum wine cork from daughter Sue (pressed into service straight away) and a nice coffee-table photo book from Don.

Friday, December 1, 2000

A visit this morning from Joan's cousin, Eris Nimmo, who lives in Wanganui. The morning being sunny, Jo came over for coffee and a chat. While they talked, I did some surfing and now have the method by which one can force pages to load without being saved in the local cache -- thus avoiding the need to manually refresh. Check the Techie page for links to useful sites and forums. More cleanup work done on my web pages as I learn more about navigation, and the behaviour of pages as they are viewed in various browsers.

The news tonight said that last month was 2 degrees cooler than average, and it was the coolest November since 1942. However, it got rather warm in the afternoon, and I decided it was time to inquire about some means of cooling the office. I'm not convinced that a fancy air conditioner will be much use, as my office is round the wrong way for air conditioning -- all the cool air will go straight down the stairs. I should be downstairs! Perhaps one of those evaporative coolers might do the job. Anyway, an expert will come on Monday and attempt to baffle me.

Saturday, December 2, 2000

This was a fixit morning; Joan had been complaining that the toaster was not functioning on one side. I duly dismembered it, only to find that all elements were OK, probably just a dirty contact. Reassembled and tested. Next job was to refurbish an old desk lamp that Jo wanted for Rebeccah's desk; cleaned off years of dirt and fluff, replaced a faulty switch, attached plug, ... sorted.

The airconditioning expert rang, and came round to have a looksee -- a good day for it, being sunny and hot. We looked at all the alternatives, and decided that the only approach was to put a fan unit on the inside office wall, connected by pipes to a condenser unit on the other side of the house. This was because the pipe run could go down to and through the garage, where it could be conveniently be put into position. The other site for the unit was on the side wall in the middle of the stone path, with difficult access for pipes to go up to the office wall. I'll know the bad news (price) on Monday. It will make life far more pleasant in the summer, and of course will act as a heater in winter. The other benefit is for guests in hot weather -- the upstairs bedroom will also share in the cooling.

Sue rang at 3 pm to say she had just returned from a sale in the Wellington Kathmandu ship [outdoor clothing and gear] and had remembered we had one in Rotorua. We piled into the car and went into town; sure enough they had the sale on too. We bought a pile of stuff for use in the camper and also while overseas -- most items were 50% off.

Back home and onto the waterblasting again -- this time across the back cobblestones, which hadn't been done for a couple of years. One is really empowered with a waterblaster -- like a chainsaw -- a very manly implement to wield. Much better than fiddling around with wimpy hoses; 1700 psi will rip out *everything* -- including the flesh of your foot, I am told.

One of the Winmag.com columnists has an interesting tale to tell about Netscape 6: he's had so many complaints about it that the advice now is to de-install and go back to V4.x. Also, another bunch of people seem to be advocating reverting IE5.5 to V5.01, saying that doing so has fixed their instability problems. So, as I write [on Milly], Sissy is having a makeover in the browser department. Maybe what I have been blaming on video cards has been another M$ shambles. More on this later.

Sunday, December 3, 2000

Outside at 9.30 am to make more progress on the waterblasting; finished the back and went right up the side of the house towards the street. Also cleaned up the logs which are the wall for the raised garden. I'll take a shot of this side when it's all clean and tidy -- had to be left to dry out before it can be swept. Down to the local hardware emporium in the late morning to pick up some fence stain and a bag of the special sand which you brush down into the cracks between the cobblestones. The waterblaster blows most of it out, especially when cleaning out all the moss growing there.

Met the rest of the family (minus Joanna -- she was out the back, helping with makeup etc) at the Civic auditorium at 2.30 pm for Rebeccah's ballet class recital. This year it was loosely based on 'Beauty and the Beast' and ran for about 1½ hours. The teacher takes jazz dancing as well as classical, so we got a mixture of styles which all seemed to go together really well. The costuming was really good; each parent pays a levy and the costumes are all made together by the same group of sewers, thus avoiding the rather odd assortment of costume interpretation that occurs when it's left to the parents to do.

Much to do this coming week: the air conditioning installation will be obstructed by lots of ply sheet offcuts and wood leaning against the garage wall, which has been waiting for two years to make drawers under my workbench and shelving. So I guess it's time to bite the bullet and get onto it. I think I'll also have to do a clean reinstall of Win98 in Milly; changing IE back to 5.01 did little for stability. I'll have to pick my time carefully, in case Don gets a rush job while I'm busy re-installing all the software.

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