| Last Week | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Next Week | BACK TO ARCHIVES

Monday, December 25, 2000

Out at 8 am and have a quick cup of tea; sure enough the phone goes at 8:20 and a small voice asks when Gran and Grandad are coming to open the presents. We all drive over to Lisa Crescent and the adults settle in their chairs; then the mayhem starts. Eli is supposed to hand the presents around -- but as usual gets so excited and starts opening his own that Don takes over the chore. We open our gifts and oooh and aaaah like we're supposed to. They all grumble about buying for Grandad (the Man who has Everything Already) but there are books by authors I like, folding chairs for the camper trailer, and lots of goodies.

Don had spotted a whole bin of action figures going out at $NZ2 each -- mostly Star Wars characters, and the kids were delighted. I was pleased also, to get a Babylon-5 character Vir Cotto. As a long time fan of the series, I am waiting patiently for reruns to start here. Unfortunately, although it had a good cult following in New Zealand (as elsewhere) the idiot TV programmers scheduled the series to show at one of the worst graveyard times -- 2 pm on a Saturday afternoon -- so we had to be vigilant in setting the video recorder.

Then the adults retired to the kitchen for a leisurely breakfast; croissants followed by pinwheel confections (recipe from Martha Stewart) which Jo had prepared -- filled with apple, sour cream, pecan nuts, and a brown syrup over all. Maxed out with sugar hits. Back home by 11.15 am; a welcome phone call from son Ross in London at 1 pm; and then at 4 pm the gang all came over to our house for a Christmas feast -- glazed ham, potatoes from Joan's garden, fresh asparagus, kumara (NZ sweet potato), peas etc etc. Steamed pudding with thick brandied cream and/or fresh fruit salad to finish. Obligatory crackers with silly hats and jokes. Nice rose wine (Californian Zinfandel and an Australian rose).

I have been busy rejigging the navbar and, I think, have it looking reasonable -- although no doubt it will metamorphose into something else in due course. Time now to change the Life in NZ page -- although I haven't had anyone brave enough to shoot their mouth off yet :-[

Tuesday, December 26, 2000

Boxing Day. So called in historic times because on this day the common people were accustomed to stuffing unwanted gifts back into their boxes, making a clumsy attempt at rewrapping, then trying to persuade a hapless shopkeeper that it had been purchased there. This was before the introduction of restocking fees, return authorisation, and refusal if the shrinkwrap was broken. The rich, of course, merely threw the lot on the floor and let the servants deal with it.

A quiet day in the Icarus household; leftovers for lunch, and put the feet up. After lunch, Sue and Jeremy drove out to one of the spectacular thermal areas called Tikitere or Hell's Gate. They went from there to the Buried Village, scene of devastation when Mt Tarawera erupted in the 1870's. Jeremy works in Te Papa, the Museum of NZ, and had scanned a number of photos of the buried village taken after the eruption; he was interested to see what remained.

I spent most of the day fiddling with Linley, attempting to get some sort of Linux working -- in the august company I now find myself in, I need to increase my expertise to understand what they are writing about ;-]

I found a magazine distro of Mandrake V7.1 which had the advantage of occupying the whole CDRom, so I could easily boot from it. Linley has an 800 MB Windows partition, 2 GB for Programs, and 3 GB as a Linux partition. I had set it up using PartitionMagic and BootMagic, and could boot into Windows easily.

The Mandrake install took an hour, but refused to ignite on the reboot. It had nuked the BootMagic stuff and substituted iits own boot manager. I got almost to the end of the Linux boot and the screen blanked -- which I ascribed to an injudicious choice of monitor and resolution. There was nothing for it but another go; after another hour I was rewarded with the KDE desktop. This looks much better than the installation I attempted last year, which was Red Hat 6.0, using Gnome as a GUI. The unfortunate thing was that, when I tried to access my Win98 installation by selecting Windows at the boot screen, I got an A> prompt requesting the location of Command.com. No amount of entering C:\Command.com worked. I suppose I should be mounting the hard drive or something first. Anyone got any ideas?

I'd had enough fiddling by this time, and returned to my Christmas paperback: Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign -- the latest in the Miles Vorkosigan series, and an absolute stunner (as I find all her books). She has such a neat turn of phrase, and must have a highly developed sense of humour because it shows in her writing. It's not easy to be gently humorous in the right place while sustaining the manic impetus of a well-polished plot.

More left-overs for tea, then we all went out for a walk through our green belt area. I should explain that the whole Rotorua Basin is an ancient caldera (see aerial photo) and we are high up on the west wall. There are many streams winding down towards the lake, and they have cut down into the soil to form gullies. These have been wisely left, totally surrounded by housing, and the City has put paths along them with small bridges here and there across the water. Where the gully bottom is flat enough, the ground is grassed and kept mown, and at intervals there are access ways down from the streets between houses. It is possible to walk some distance through these parks, but we tend to do a circuit through a couple of connecting parks up to an arterial road, then walk back home -- takes about 40 minutes or so.

Wednesday, December 27, 2000

Spent a large part of the morning answering email and checking my site counters, before having morning tea and seeing Sue and Jeremy off back to Wellington -- a good six-hour drive without food stops and traffic holdups. The weather has kept up the cloud cover, with some drizzle patches in the morning -- must be some ice in the cloud, as the satellite icon in the tray has had a big red X across it from time to time. When this happens, I have to connect with copper both ways.

We spent some time in the garden about 4 pm, hammering staples in the big pergola to tie up the grape vine and rampant wisteria. Sue expressed astonishment at the wisteria growth during the three days they have been here -- it would make a good subject for single-frame nature photography. The one where you see the tendrils reach out and wrap themselves round any support they touch. A shoot probably grows 100 mm or so each day if it gets enough water.

Otherwise a quiet day of rest after the Christmas hurly-burly; we caught up on some recorded video programs that had been put aside.

Thursday, December 28, 2000

Another physio appointment for Joan while I headed down to the bank to deposit cheques. After I collected her, we went off to the Library then on to the supermarket, where I promptly spent the thick end of my deposit.

Lots of mail and help from daynoters on the question of frames/no frames (see mail). I've taken the bull by the horns and attacked the main page [voice in head: "Use the Force, Luke, beware of the Dark Side"]. The colour choice might be a little startling, but it certainly stands out, and the dreaded frames have been excised, scotched, drawn, dismembered and hung on poles as a lesson to other newbies. I've doubled up on the text navbars -- got one at the top as well as the foot of pages. There, now, does that make everyone happy? <bg>

I haven't got back to Linley (see Tuesday), with all this site re-jigging going on, but it seems I should boot from a DOS floppy then run FDISK /MBR which will rediscover Win98 and allow me to reinstall BootMagic. It then appears that I should boot to Mandrake by floppy and reinstall LILO -- but on its own partition. I'll report on this later.

[late addition, or more accurately, early - as it's now 7.40 am on Friday NZDT. I couldn't connect to my ISP properly on Milly last night to update, so have just done so. Had to chop the modem from V90 to V34 to get a reliable connection. Or the modem's gone erratic]

Friday, December 29, 2000

The modem has functioned happily today as V34 -- I might just leave it there at the moment. I attacked Linley as outlined yesterday, but nothing I did would revive Windows. However, a closer look with Partition Magic showed that Linux had walked all over the second Win partition with hobnailed boots, so deleted all the existing partitions, set up an 800 MB partition for Win98, 2GB of FAT32 for programs and stuff, then a new primary partition of 2 GB as Linux Ext2 and used what was left as a Linus Swap File. I then installed Win98SE -- and then it was lunch. I'll get back to it over the weekend.

Jo and the children had arrived, as Don was spraying the inside of their house with insecticide to combat flies and spiders. After lunch, we took the children into town to the movies. The film was the latest English animated epic called Chicken Run. The story revolved round a chicken farm which bore a remarkable resemblance to Stalag Luft 3, and a rapacious lady owner who made Cruella DeVille look like Mary Poppins. She wants to turn the chickens into pies, using a nightmarish automated machine. All of them are modelled to a high standard in Plasticine, a modelling clay much beloved of English (and NZ) children. The hero is an American rooster (voiced by Mel Gibson) who saves the day in the end. Highly recommended viewing. I don't know if has been released in North America, but it is a 'must-see' if you like wry comedy with black undertones.

I had difficulty in explaining to Ethan, while walking back to the car, how a good English film - although ostensibly for children - had a rich vein of adult humour running through it. He just couldn't see that he needed years of life experience before he could appreciate the nuances. One example I gave him was when all the chickens were sitting plunged into gloom in contemplation of execution. One chicken, who was always busy knitting, looked down in horror and suddenly realised she had knitted a hangman's noose -- Ethan had no idea what it was until I explained it to him. The innocence of the young -- but they really enjoyed it on their level.

I've done more fiddling with the site, putting in small improvements. Jonathan Sturm reported that it loaded much faster, so that's good. John Dominik and I have been exchanging mail about counters and things. I'll put this to bed now -- CUL

Saturday, December 30, 2000

Had a disturbed night -- it was hot and sticky; we had achy joints so got up at 2 am for a drink and walk around. Joan watched boring TV while I went upstairs to the computers. Yesterday's Win98SE install on Linley was faulty, so wiped and reinstalled -- same problem. Went back to bed in disgust at 3 am and slept till 10 am.

Joan went off into town with Joanna (this being the Season of Sales), while I dealt with the email and daynotes. I returned to the problem with Linley and the Win98, did a thorough DOS reformat of the C:\ partition in case Partition Magic had not got it quite right, then had another go. At last -- everything went in OK, drivers installed except for my old ISA Soundblaster 16 card which wanted IRQ5 and Windows wouldn't give it anything but IRQ10. Found that the USB drivers were the hogs, so bullied them into sharing their IRQ, as I haven't got any USB devices anyway. Sound card then fired up OK.

While I was having a bite of lunch, Joan came back home with news that a local retailer had a ceramic cooking top with $200 off (reduced from $NZ799 to $599) -- and they would sell the display cabinet it was on for another $40. We had replaced our [deceased] cook top and serviceable oven several months ago, and the old oven has been taking room in the garage -- waiting for a propitious moment to have a free-standing case made and a new cooktop purchased. This is for Joanna, who has been making do with a conventional electric range with only two cooking elements working and a cranky oven. We whipped back into town and closed the deal. I'll have to cut down into the base of the cabinet to take the old oven, as the new ovens are considerably smaller in height. As it transpired, when we carted the cabinet out to the Honda C-RV it disintegrated into panels and a substantial inner base. This will make my job easier -- just a cut-down and reassemble. That will keep me busy tomorrow.

We have had copious intermittent showers now for days -- everything ouside is sopping wet. There was a fine break about 4 pm, so we went out for a walk through the park [see Tuesday above] and back up a long street with a deceptive upwards slope. You may remember I said we lived on the western caldera slope -- this road leads up to where the grade suddenly gets serious and where a belt road goes round the edge of the city on this side. At least it used to be the edge, but housing sites have appeared here and there on the hill side of the road. A pleasant walk, lasting about 50 minutes; the inevitable shower hit us when three-quarters of the way round -- but we had taken umbrellas, and it's not cold. The rain has prevented us from erecting the camper-trailer and cleaning it out in preparation for a break away.

To reassure those of nervous disposition who fear being deprived of my daynotes while we are away, I take Ace, my Acer laptop which has an infrared port. I also have a GSM phone with an infrared port, which is data-enabled; I just set it down at the side of Ace, initiate the link then dial my ISP. The speed is only 9600, but it wasn't *that* long ago that 14400 was blindingly fast. Anyway, it's enough to send pages with, and get email.

Sunday, December 31, 2000

This morning we set out to tackle the cabinet for Jo's cooking top and oven; took the precaution of driving over to her place to measure bench heights and width etc. Nothing like making something and finding out it's too low, or too wide or something. Basically, the main job was cutting down the inside support carcase to accommodate the taller oven; this was not too difficult with a sawbench to do the job with. There was a certain amount of cut-and-fit to be done when the base was married back to the sides and front, but we managed to get it to the stage of 'let's-leave-it-till-the-glue-dries' before breaking for lunch. I have to say that I don't really enjoy carpentry, but I've got all the gear and will use it when circumstances compel.

More rainy weather with heavy showers interspersed with intermittent sunshine; the temperature dropped in mid-afternoon as the wind turned toward the southwest and freshened. You northern hemisphere guys have to remember that when we get a strong southerly, it's come from Antarctica. One of the South Island towns had the temperature drop from 17 degC to 7 degC during the day -- and this is mid-summer! Crazy. Although Rotorua is well inland, so when it's blowing here, somebody is getting flattened.

We completed the cabinet in the mid-afternoon, and went on to fabricate a small tabletop ironing board for Sue, who had admired Joan's one. We bought it from an old hardware shop in a small town that was closing down, so there was little chance of buying one. It's only about 700 mm long and sits on four stubby legs, so is quick to put down and use -- rather than getting the big ironing board out and setting it up.

I managed to get back to Linley this evening, but only whipped the 'DOS games' folder down the network from Sissy and set up some icons to run the old favourites -- Doom, Quake, DukeNukem, Blake Stone etc etc. Eli likes to get into these while Ethan runs some of the modern ones like Age of Empires II on Sissy. This does avoid squabbles about whose turn it is, and who has been on the computer longer.