Monday, December 11, 2000

A good morning's work on my web site, while Joan was in at the office doing Don's billing. I've sorted out the nav buttons, changed their colour order on mouseover, and added the Life in NZ page. The weather is lousy; periodic heavy showers and cool southerly make it rather wintry -- and only 11 days off the Summer Solstice.

This evening I decided to thoroughly check and defrag all drives, get rid of unused software, clean up the registries etc. The laptop hadn't been updated for ages, so spent a lot of time on that while the other boxes trundled through their defrags. I now use Ontrack's System Suite 2000 exclusively, as I think it does a better job than Norton -- at least in Win98SE. The registry cleaner is especially good; I run that after every major de-install of software, and it's amazing how many orphan registry entries it finds that the de-installer hasn't removed. I am also using Fred Langa's DOS cleanup batch file before defragging -- it does a brutally efficient job of vacuuming up all the temp files, temporary IE cache files etc. Anyone who would like this, just email me and I'll forward a copy, or if you prefer, his site URL.

Tuesday, December 12, 2000

Another day with periodic heavy rain showers. Spent some time tidying up the office wall shelves, above which the air conditioner is to be installed. As usual, found all sorts of goodies I had forgotten -- including a copy of Adobe Acrobat 3 which I had bought very cheap last year. I'm going to install it and have a play; if it proves useful, the idea would be to upgrade to V4 at about quarter of the full-version price. If my reading of the guff is correct, it would appear possible to scan a document into PDF format, then convert directly into HTML for web use. That could be really useful.

Into town after lunch to visit the library and stock up at the supermarket. Christmas is suddenly breaking out -- the trolley was packed with bags of dried fruit, butter, sugar etc etc -- and no doubt the cake baking will commence shortly. The next thing will be the exhumation of our tree and decorations from the depths of the loft. We will erect a Taiwan plastic Christmas tree; no mess and dropped pine needles, just vacuum and put back in the loft in the New Year. Ironically, we live on the edges of the largest man-made forest of Pinus radiata in the world and I put up a plastic one... The only thing I miss is the piney smell of resin and needles. Perhaps I should garner a couple of handfuls to put behind the tree and provide atmosphere. A discreet selection of trimmings will be applied, and a string put up to hang the cards from.A typically laid-back low-key Kiwi approach

Christmas in the Cox household is coloured by Don's American heritage and supported enthusiastically by Jo and the children. They have huge cartons of trimmings, gewgaws, wreaths, candles, musical boxes, cloth things that cling on door knobs, and about 20 km of coloured lighting which festoons everywhere. "Bah, humbug" said Scrooge. But I really don't mind -- as long as I don't have to do it!

Spent the evening completely re-doing the navbar buttons, after I decided that the old beige background looked dull against the cream. Much more readable now.

Wednesday, December 13, 2000

Up and out at 10 am for a photoshoot at one of our best clients - Polynesian Spa. Martin runs a thermal pools and spa complex, and has just completed a massive addition to cater to the luxury tourist who wants premium massage facilities. He is specialising in an applied mixture of geothermal mud and wax. I picked up Don from the office, and we landed in the middle of pandemonium. Another local photographer was setting up for a photo opportunity -- Santa Claus getting a foot massage. We were to take various photos of the mud application and massaging, as well as the lounge area where guests go to relax after their massage. I was using the Nikon Coolpix, as shots were desperately needed by the website developer (it's not one of ours, Don did all the layout and pix for Martin before he started on web sites). The models were provided from among the staff.

In addition, a crew from the local tourist TV station were shooting for a new commercial. We were ducking and diving each other, trying to stay out of shot while getting our own part done. I shot about 70 pix and turned them over to Don for him to select. This took about three hours, and I was rather tired after all the activity and concentration. A couple of samples:

Thursday, December 14, 2000

The airconditioning men cometh -- at 9 am to survey the job. Once they had decided how they were tackling the job, they disappeared off to get tools or something (or may be it was to finish off the previous job?). Joan disappeared off at 11 am to attend Rebeccah's final school assembly for the year, while I made helpful noises at the installer, held the stepladder for him, passed up coils of wire etc. The aircon head is upstairs in my mezzanine office, and the coolant pipes go into a linen closet then up through the ceiling between the rafters. They then go down in an accessible space, straight across the double garage, through the brick wall and into the compressor unit.

I have been periodically working on the computer from the petrol station that I mentioned on Dec 10th, and today got it fired up and software installed. No sound card, and the on-board video is only 1 meg -- so the children will have to put up with old DOS games with the sound off -- better than nothing. The parents have little money, so I've done the best I can. The worst job was cleaning the dirt off the keyboard, mouse, monitor etc. Grimy mechanics and forecourt attendants pawing at it for at least two years. I used a strong detergent mixed with a small amount of water, which eventually shifted the gunge. Finished at 10 pm, so can return the stuff tomorrow and get it off my workbench.

Friday, December 15, 2000

Tim, the aircon installer came at 8.15 am to complete the installation. I let him work on while I tidied the office and started in on Milly, the Pentium 550. I have the new Yamaha CD burner to hand, and it was time to get it in place and start the big reinstall of Win98SE I've been threatening to do. My previous burner was an HP7100 external drive, about three years old; it will go down to the office for backup duties.

The first job was to remove the internal Zip drive, which was occupying the slave position on the second IDE channel. I'll put it into Sissy tomorrow. The Yamaha slipped into place and connected, I closed up the side panels and nuked C:\Windows with deltree. This took an age, but I decided against a reformat as there was a lot of odd stuff in folders that I would have had to backup and restore. With the Win98SE cabs on one of the upstream partitions, it was a breeze to do the Win installation. Put the Matrox drivers in place, changed the display to the Panasonic SL90i, loaded the Yamaha software (Adaptec V4), and we were in business. Apart from the chore of reinstalling all my working software. I managed to get a fair bit done before stopping for the night.

We had the boys in and out during the day; school has now finished for the year. They all returned for tea, as Don and Jo went off to the end-of-year wind-up of Aorangi School staff and teachers (for those who don't know: Jo is chairperson of the School Board of Trustees). They returned to pick up the kids at 8 pm, and quiet descended once more in Icarus Place.

Saturday, December 16, 2000

We went over to Jo and Don's house about 10.30 am to finish drilling the hole for the front door bolt. I disassembled the kitchen door lock and took it into the locksmith in town. It transpired that all that was wrong with it was a stuck pin in the cylinder. We came back via Icarus Place to retrieve the Christmas cakes from the oven, returned to Lisa Cresc and reassembled the lock.

I had a merry afternoon and evening reinstalling software; finding the correct disk, version, and service pack often takes some time. The system seems nice and stable so far, and I have done a couple of Drive Images as a precaution. I was annoyed to find that a lengthy and expensive download of Textbridge upgrade that I did in October has disappeared. Probably deleted in mistake for something else -- I may have forgotten to rename it sensibly. Why these people still name important files with cryptic letters & numbers is beyond me. I emailed the company quoting the date of my Visa charge, and pleaded piteously for another download authorisation.

The weather has not really been hot enough to appreciate my air conditioner, but it did warm up in the late afternoon and I switched it on. The grandchildren are sleeping over tonight so Jo and Don can go out to another end-of-year party; lots of stupid nonsense going on and on. Finally Eli ran out of steam and was put to bed after a few grizzles. Which is where I'm off to now :-]

Sunday, December 17, 2000

Jobs day: The gate into the front garden area was a hasty construction by the landscape gardner, and has been sagging. I removed it, hammered in a lot more nails, and put a couple of diagonal braces on. Much better. Then I tacked Joanna's elderly upright vacuum cleaner -- a Panasonic, on which the bottom unit should have locked in an upright position, but had gone floppy. Disassembly disclosed the fact that a whole piece of plastic case has broken away. As it still worked OK, we cleaned it out thoroughly (which improved the operation no end ;-] ), reassembled and left well alone. Jo came over and reclaimed the children in mid-morning.

I caught up with email, daynoters and newsgroups in the afternoon, and the rest of the day just slipped by.

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