| Last Week | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Next Week | BACK TO ARCHIVES
I have been dragooned, coerced, shanghaied, coopted, dragged kicking & screaming into the Daynotes Gang -- and my site hasn't even been up for 6 weeks yet. Somebody out there must like what I've been doing; what started out as a little vanity site for family info, takes on a life of its own [Frankensite?]. Still, it keeps children of all ages off the streets, I suppose. Better a keyboard and screen than some other activities.
The electrician came at 1 pm to put a permanent power feed out to the air conditioner. With that finished, I can now go through and sort all the short lengths of wood that were lining the wall [never know when they might come in handy ...], and get the junk back onto shelves.
Took Joan out to her physio appointment at 3.15 pm and sat in the car playing with a neat little gadget I found in London last June. It's a pen scanner: the business end has an array of red diodes and some sort of imaging and OCR. Hold the button down and run along a line of type, and the text comes up on a small LCD display. I was trying to copy some quotations from a book I found in the Library with some success -- until I decided to try the recalibrate mode. Having done so, the pen wouldn't read a damn thing; shoulda known better. I'll sit down and RTFM -- probably didn't save the calibration or something.
I had better finish this and do some site tuning. As the average North American is reputedly a little short on basic geography, and specifically just where New Zealand is in the world, I had better get a map up with a red arrow to show all you guys. All except Jonathan Sturm, who is in the same region but a couple of thousand miles further to the left.
Joan, Joanna and the kids off to Taupo for the day. Taupo a reasonable-sized town about 55 minutes south by car, and is situated on a large lake of the same name. They did some shopping, the kids had a hot pool swim (plenty of geothermal activity down there also) and they returned about 5 pm.
I had another hard day at the coalface ... I nursed a 40 MB download for 1hr 35min this morning, which replaced the missing TextBridge upgrade -- and I am connected with a satellite link for downloads. The originating server must have been busy. You guys in North America are a lot closer to the servers than we are, although the new Pacific cable now in service is _supposed_ to improve the bandwidth. It turns out that this will mainly happen after they buy more terminal gear and install it next year, and the ISPs scrape up enough cash to buy more bandwidth ...
I then started CorelDraw up, and attempted to get a drawing under way for Don. This was for a brochure for Fletcher Forests -- they have a product for floor and rafter trusses like an I beam, which replaces solid wood. Anyway, I have to draw a number of complete rafter trusses in perspective, looking down from the top oblique. This involved doing a cross-section and extruding it on the correct angle, then doing the same for the other side of the truss. Needless to say, I was in and out of the Help file, making a lot of false starts -- until finally I have a rafter truss that looks vaguely like it is supposed to. I now have to duplicate it a few times to show the roof line. I'd have to say that I'm NOT the best draughtsman about, but if I get something going, Don can tweak it how he wants it -- which is lots faster for him than starting from scratch.
I've also done more fiddling with the web site, particularly the parts which were rather slung together in a hurry to get it up. Lots more to do yet. It's most gratifying to watch the hit counter marching steadily upward every time I do a site check.
Joanna came here at 9 this morning for a day's Christmas baking; I prudently staying well clear and getting on with email and web surfing. After morning coffee, I coupled up the camper-trailer to the car and took it over to the testing station for a re-test. I had changed the rejected trailer hitch last week.
[For overseas readers: the camper is about 6'6" wide and 9' long, it has a fibreglass top supported by cantilevered struts at each end. The sides above trailer level at 3 feet are canvas. It has a small transverse bunk at the front, and a larger one at the rear -- this is *supposed* to be a double, but the occupants would have to know each other extremely well! I fill it more than adequately as I am 6'1" and weigh 115 kg. It is wired for electricity, has a built-in bench and cupboards with sink and gas burners, small table, and a wardrobe which is hinged to lie flat in transit. We also have a microwave and a cooler (polystyrene bin with a small but efficient refrigeration unit) -- this travels in the back of our Honda C-RV and plugs into the car power in transit. NZ is well-supplied with good camping grounds; you just back the trailer into a site, pop the roof up, and plug into the power. These sites all have kitchens and ablution blocks; a site costs about $NZ15 - $20 per night ($US6 - 8)]
We will be preparing the camper for use possibly next week after Sue and Jeremy return to Wellington on the 27th -- this depends on the weather at the time. Friends in Wanganui are going over to the east coast at Hawkes Bay during this time, and we may join them for a few nights. We also need to go down to Wanganui soon, to check on Nanna Clay (Mike's mother-in-law who is in care with Alzheimers).
On return, I found my satellite connection throughput was virtually nil, so phoned the IHUG help desk and spent 40 minutes going round and round the settings. I had been initially allotted a static IP address, but on Monday IHUG had moved the satellite people to dynamic addresses. Finally I noticed that the action I had taken of restoring the TCP/IP to "get IP address from server" must have nuked the *internal* IP address for the satellite card. Having restored these settings, all was sweet as.
After lunch, I pulled Sissy out from under the desk, opened the case and shoved in the Zip drive that I had taken out of Milly to get the Yamaha burner on an IDE cable. Loaded the Iomega tools suite and everything fired up properly. One thing with these ATAPI devices: they don't have the same fiddly install as the externals hooked into the parallel port. And of course, much faster. Just in time, as Don dropped in a Zip disk with a 40 MB CorelDraw file to print -- four A3 posters in colour on glossy paper for a client. When these are laminated, they last quite well in the light.
I have done some site tweaking tonight, courtesy of some emails pointing out various small points that needed attention. I welcome any constructive help, as I'm still groping my way in HTML. Also, I apologise on behalf of IHUG for the sluggishness of their homepages server. While on the phone, I complained of the slowness of response, using Jerry Pournelle's favourite "sucks dead bunnies" epithet -- this must have hit home, as the response time tonight was much better. They have just put in a new server farm, and apparently it needs some configuring yet.
Back into town at 10.30 am for another physio appointment for Joan -- she has been troubled by a neck stiffness for years and this treatment for aching shoulders has also helped the neck. Then to the hairdresser for our pre-Christmas trim-up.
I spent over an hour in the afternoon inserting meta tags into my main pages, and registering the site with search engines. Don had often complained about this chore, and now I see what he means <g>. I don't expect much for myself, but Don has been able to take local client sites from 3-400 hits up to several thousand per month -- just by careful and methodical search engine placement (and re-placement). He aims to get the client -- say a local fly-fishing lodge -- into the first or second page turned up by a search engine, as most web surfers don't seem to bother going too far into a search.
I also worked on the text navbar, as I am conscious that a framed site needs an alternative for text-based browers -- or even broken framesets [perish the thought!] -- so the site is now reasonably well linked off the bottom of each page. It also is necessary for those people who land on a particular page from a search engine and don't see any frame nav at all. Been there myself, and searched frantically for a Home link ... any link. And so to bed.
Another hard day in the office <snigger>. Well, I *did* spend a couple of hours shuffling paper, and entering financials into Quicken. And I had Ethan beside me killing half the Universe (the other half survived for next time) with accompanying sound effects. The game was Wing Commander, Secret Ops and the canned dialogue started to get very repetitious after an hour --but a 10-year-old doesn't really care, he was too rapt with the new joystick. Jo and Joan had gone to town to pick up the ham, fruit mince pies, croissants and other delectables for Christmas. Rebeccah has dug out my stock of Christmas tree and decorations and spent some time trimming. Joan asked her how she had got on; Rebeccah replied "About as well as I can with what I had to work with". The problem is, we did have a lot of old decorations that got chucked when I moved up to Rotorua, and have not been replaced.
I seemed to get an avalanche of email today; nothing too important, but stuff that had to be dealt with. The cheery tune of Eudora sounded every half-hour and there would be more of it. The other hassle was my ISP -- readers will remember from up above, that the latency/response time of the homepages server has been abominable. I was worrying that everyone outside NZ was going to write my page off, so went into <rant> mode and shot an email at a contact I had garnered in the bowels of IHUG. He is one of the senior tech engineers and answered promptly with the news that the homepages server is actually located in the US to give improved response times over there. Duh. And the poor quality connects I had been having was due to Telecom chopping the Pacific cable out because of tech trouble, and stuffing all the traffic down a very small backup pipe. No wonder I kept having FTP timing out. If ONLY these people would post on their home page when this sort of thing happens -- then we could make allowances.
I spent some time ruminating about my entire site makeup; and deciding that, as elegant as frames are, and however dinky the mouseover nav buttons appear, they all still take heaps of time to load on a slow connection. I would appreciate feedback from knowledgeable readers on the subject. It wouldn't take a great deal of work to convert the pages over, and I should do this before the site gets too large.
Up bright and early at 7 am, sun shining, did some tidying up of code before breakfast. After cereal, I engaged <Santa's Helper> mode and took the vacuum cleaner upstairs. Intruded the nozzle into all sorts of places that haven't been cleaned for some time -- like the carpet underneath my main desk ... I even remembered to keep looking *upwards* to catch the long streamers of cobweb/dust. Finished by running over the spare bedroom, ready for daughter Sue and son-in-law Jeremy tomorrow. Rebeccah slept over last night; she was babysitting for a neighbour across the road until late. We made good use of her before her father whipped her off to town in mid-morning for presents buying.
She was dropped back in the mid-afternoon, just before we went out to visit an old friend and his mother. We detoured through town to pick up more Christmas decorations, which Rebeccah installed on returning. She had tea with us before her mother came to collect her, and the pile of wrapped presents to go under the tree.
The site counter is whizzing round, with all the extra attention. I've slowed down the redirector page, and also put a back link to enable people to bookmark it (like JHR does). This will permit a direct access to the daynotes if you haven't got time to check the home page. I discussed my site redesign with Don, and he advised deciding up-front on a set of co-ordinated colours so that backgrounds, text, links etc are consistent through the site. I now have to sit down with the colour palette and see what goes with which.
I did some experimenting with the new Yamaha burner; I've just bought a CD of Celtic guitar music, so tried out the direct CD-CD copy onto a bog-standard Mitsubishi blank at 8X. Went through like a charm in 7 mins, and the copy proved playable in several different machines round the house. I will take advantage of Jeremy's expertise [i.e. he's done it before!] over the next few days, to try getting some of my old vinyl onto CD and doing some signal processing to get rid of noise. I haven't got the Adaptec program for that, but I think there's something on the multitude of magazine CDs on my shelf that does the job.
This morning I resumed my tidy-up in the garage; I had to jigsaw around two shelves to fit the airconditioner trunking. Most of the stuff from the shelves had been put there when we moved over three years ago, so I had to sort and dispose of junk as I worked. A quick dash down to the supermarket for last-minute purchases, and then a quick bite of lunch.
I spent the afternoon fiddling with a plain-jane tabled web page, selecting and discarding colour combinations. I am still undecided about gining up the frames -- I find the freedom to expand or contract for different screen resolutions is more flexible. With a table, I either have fixed pixels or percents. The fixed width is fine for the navbar, but not for the main page. Percent widths on a wider screen gave me a wide navbar column. I think I may settle on frames, but get rid of the mouseover navbar and use a plain script. Meantime, Joan had been manufacturing a big pile of fancy sandwiches for tonight
 |
|
Sue and Jeremy arrived about 5 pm and settled themselves in before we went over to Don and Jo's house for Christmas Eve food. Don, being American, is really into Christmas -- and his tree trimming is painstaking work. A quick shot of the main tree for the record. We had our sandwiches, savoury eggs, small pastry pies, and two of Jo's special desserts: a tall glass filled with a sort of custardy, clotted cream with strong espresso coffee poured over it, and strawberries in a jelly mould made from rose wine. We are off to bed early, as we return to Lisa Crescent for breakfast and the Christmas present opening -- the kids can't wait too long. A Merry Christmas to all Daynoters and readers |
|
Last Week | Monday
| Tuesday | Wednesday
| Thursday | Friday | Saturday
| Sunday | Next Week
| BACK TO ARCHIVES
If
I have said anything that you would like to comment on, your contributions
-- or just a 'hello' email -- are welcome.
Click here to start email.
| HOME | Kronikles | Garden | Family | Art | Archives | Genealogy | PhotoGallery | PhotoTalk | TechieStuff | IcarusLinks | Current Mail | Asthma Help | Life in NZ | EMAIL ME!