The Icarus Kronikles - Mike Barkman

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Monday, January 22, 2001

Took Joan over to the doctor this morning to get a referral to her Ear,Nose & Throat specialist. Her sinuses have been playing up again, and we want to get them clear before May's aeroplane flights.

Catching up with Daynoters in the afternoon and doing some tidying in the office. Then spent some time rearranging Joan's garden pictures. I had labelled pages in series from old to new, but realised that wasn't a very smart way to go about it. So I moved the oldest to the Archives, and renamed the other pages with the approximate month/year. Now I can link them in order, starting from the most recent -- which is what other garden lovers now want to look at *first*. Suddenly it's teatime and not much else has been done.

More page tidying, after TV finished for me (I'm *very* selective in what I watch). An excellent episode of The Bill tonight, about digging up the wreckage of a Spitfire shot down in the Battle of Britain, and finding the skeleton of a young woman beside it. Great casting and scripting -- truly Best of British. I think we're about 18 months behind Britain in this series.

Tuesday, January 23, 2001

A beautiful hot summer's day, today. Joan arranged for the grandchildren to come over in the morning and bring their teddy bears with them. She had got a cousin to knit suitable sweaters and tassel hats for each one, and this was a surprise. The kids had a Teddy Bears' Picnic in the back yard; a good time was had by all. I certainly enjoyed the fresh hot cheese scones, with our usual morning cup of corpse-reviver-strength coffee (I always think of those Garfield cartoons that show him with spirals in each eye after coffee). There's only one more week or so of the childrens' holidays, and school restarts at the end of the month.

Into town before lunch to pick up some stuff and drop a film into the photo processors. Joan likes taking *real* photos because she complains about waiting forever for me to print the digital variety. I took the opportunity to look over digital video cameras while there; there is a very nice Canon - the small model which only weighs about 400 g. This would be to take to Greece/Crete. They offered it to me at $NZ2500 ($US1100), but I found it after a Web search being sold in Auckland for $2200. I do have a video-8 Sony camcorder, but it's big and heavy and the digital quality is so much better. I'll think about it a bit more.

The heat got to us in the late afternoon, and we didn't get out for a walk like we were supposed to. Oh well, out first thing tomorrow morning instead. My swollen ankles diminish overnight and let me walk much easier.

Wednesday, January 24, 2001

Have a look at John Dominik's brilliant essay on abortion in his daynotes; whether you are pro or anti, he has something for you.

Joan disappeared off with Jo for a physio appointment after coffee this morning, and left me in charge of the empty house. Jo was actually trying to juggle three kids to get their hair cut, without managing consecutive appointments. So we had one or other at various times of the day. They returned about 2.30 pm and dropped Joan; returning later in the afternoon to have a family tea. Joan had found a package of pre-cooked tortillas, and turned out suitable fillings; this went down well with American/Kiwi kids as Jo often cooks TexMex stuff. But not particularly well for their Grandad -- I'm just not used to the flavours -- but I picked out what I could cope with. And the kids hooted when I ate my tortilla flat on the plate with a knife and fork; much easier when your bite's reduced. I read somewhere that the functionality of dentures is only about 30% of natural teeth, and it shows up when you try to bite something as big as a burrito.

I printed off a stack of logo/letterhead variants in colour, for Don to take to a client, but couldn't resist having a fiddle with the design after I finished. As it happened, one print had misaligned type, so Don took a little of my design and came up with a composite which we hastily printed; the clients loved it. I really don't have much of a bent for original design, but I suppose the experience from years of striving to get good photo images looking right, is useful when tweaking something that he's done. And two sets of eyes are always better than one for proofing.

Thursday, January 25, 2001

Into town this morning to pick up a stick of memory. I had taken notice of comments from various Daynoters about how the price of memory had fallen sharply; this was indeed true, so I now have 128 MB of 133 MHz RAM for $176 = $US70 for those who like to comparison-shop. My friendly computer pusher knows naught about the joys of being able to buy branded memory -- this RAM has a sticker that announces itself as "Nova" and that's what you get. I suppose if I dug around in Auckland I *might* find someone who sold better than generic, but I doubt it. It seems to work OK -- and that's the main thing.

Don dropped a Zip disk off for me with files ready to tackle a web site. This client wants to start up a site to promote the collecting of older and vintage commercial trucks -- with some sort of accompanying club/society. An interesting and challenging task for the weekend.

Dr Jim, whose Daynotes I like reading, has an interesting glimpse at the dilemmas of American medical insurance:

In my business, we are seeing medical insurance companies pulling out of this area leaving patients without any local doctor to see since the insurance companies have not renewed contracts with local doctors. Their contract with the employer runs six months longer than their contract with local doctors so they tell the patients they can go to doctors they have under contract still in Portland, which is 45 miles away, until the six months is up. Meanwhile, the employer is left trying to find a new insurance company to continue the medical insurance coverage he is under contract to provide to his employees.

A new insurance company means the local doctors have to once again sign new contracts so there is negotiation once again as the clock is ticking. With this happening every year there is no stability either for the patients or the physicians. In particular, one company just found out two weeks ago that their employees, which number somewhere around 500, will not have any local physician to go to at the end of this month but their contract with the insurance company will be enforced until it ends at the end of June. Those patients will now have to find a new physician in Portland for six months and then find out what their options are at the end of the six months or pay out of their pockets to see the physician locally that they have been seeing, in some cases, for years.

For us, if we don't have a pretty good idea from year to year about how many patients will be coming to us for medical care, how do we plan how many physicians we need in the group. If the demand outstrips the supply then we will alienate patients with long waits to see their physician and take the chance of overworking the physicians. If, on the other hand, the supply exceeds the demand then our group can go broke and/or splinter apart before it has a chance to go broke. At the end of January 2001 we honestly do not know how many patients we will have needing medical care by our group three months from now. It looks like it could be a wild ride for our family and my group.

We should be thankful in New Zealand that we don't -- as yet -- have to cope with this sort of runaround. There is medical insurance (in fact we have it ourselves) but it is mainly to cover expensive operations and elective surgery. The public hospital waiting list for such as a hernia operation can be two years or more. But if you are an acute case you are seen and dealt with promptly in the public system. The service is not as good as it used to be, but it is at least *there*.

Friday, January 26, 2001

Took Joan into town and left her to do shopping and attend her physio. I returned home and attended to email and daynotes, before starting work on the truck site. As usual, I had only Don's preliminary graphics and colour selection plus a template page for working on. I fiddled with the graphics and saved them to .GIFs before placing them into position. I had a bite of lunch, then Joan rang for me to pick her up.

Back on the site work later in the afternoon. The client wishes to show off his collection of old commercial vehicles and attract like-minded fans to set up a buy-sell-swap. When I get something to a stage it can be looked at, I'll put it on my site and link to it for comment. I haven't received any content yet, so we're just dummying things up.

The weather today has been drizzly and humid; the air conditioner has been making life much more tolerable by dehumidifying the office air. If the sky clears tomorrow, we intend to spend the day at a genuine country A & P Show; I'll take the Nikon with me and put up a page of pictures. It also runs on Sunday, so one or other of the days should be fine.

I had a client phone me in a panic: she runs a lakeside retreat, and a guest had been using her laptop to clear mail. He had wiped his folder from Outlook before leaving, and when she wanted to check her own email, Outlook wouldn't let her because it had lost its link to the personal mail box. I am almost totally ignorant of Outlook, having only used O-Express briefly before changing to Eudora, but I managed to restore her stuff by deleting the existing personal mail box completely, then re-adding it and pointing Outlook to the .pst file. Sorted. Just as well I somehow remembered that Outlook uses a .pst suffix -- not at all intuitive, that one.

Saturday, January 27, 2001

The day started with broken cloud and sun, so we loaded up with cameras, sun cream, hats etc and drove a few miles north out of town to a small place called Ngongotaha. Here is situated, in the middle of farms, a building called the Agrodome which puts on a fantastic tourist show involving trained sheep who parade on a stage to demonstrate the various breeds. Each year the Agricultural and Pastoral Association hold their Show Day here in the grounds, and farmers compete with cows, horses, dogs etc. But that's only a small part of the activities: we saw displays of working stationary engines, vintage restored tractors and cars, a police dog display, wood-chopping contests, Archery Club display etc etc. The nearest equivalent I know of in the US would be the county fairs -- but this is on a much smaller scale, as you can guess from our small population base (NZ has 3.8 million people - total). The attendance would be about 2-3000 people when we were there, a bit hard to judge as it was very spread out and people were coming and going. I've found a shot of the area on the 'Net -- the Show area is on the far side of the road.

I'm assembling photo pages with the aid of Photoshop 6 and its instant web page producer; but I'll tell you about the show before I give you the link. We first looked at small ponies, bred purely for showing - there's a shot of Joan smooching up to one. Then I tried my hand at shooting arrows with the Archery Club -- the first one went clean over the top!

There were several trade displays -- mostly cars and agricultural implements, and a small fun-fair for children. One of the main attractions was wood-chopping -- this has a strong following in New Zealand and Australia and is very competitive. The choppers today were all veterans, as the main event was a chop relay between a Kiwi team and Aussie team. The youngest competitor was 60 years of age and the oldest was 73. They were still very fit men and of course had vast experience -- the 73 y.o. was in a test team in 1960. I've also tried an action sequence of 40 frames which I'll try to turn into an .avi file tomorrow.

We had an ethnic dish for lunch, I've forgotten the name but it had barbecued chicken pieces and rice in a sort of pastry/bread wrap -- a bit like a tortilla, but no spice. Later we had the traditional Kiwi version of a hot dog -- a sausage on a stick, dipped in batter and fried, then dipped into tomato sauce. We've been eating these at shows and sports events since we were old enough to go; I won't say they are delicious as the sausages in NZ definitely leave something to be desired. [We have to go to England to get good sausages]. There are a number of food stalls set up by voluntary organisations as fund-raisers. I've included a shot of one such stall.

The police dog teams from Rotorua, Hamilton and Tauranga put on a good display of running an obstacle course, then dealing with several "villains" with padded arms, who came on firing blanks from guns and were speedily pulled to the ground. theye were a bit far away from us to get action photos, but I took a shot of them lined up. We managed to catch the judging of the calves; some adult exhibitors, but most would be farm children with beautifully groomed animals. There is also a shot of some sheep being brought in for shearing demos -- just to prove that we do still have them! I also noticed quarter-horses being paraded, and a pen of alpacas.

We had seen enough and were getting tired by by mid-afternoon, and drove off home. The Show will be on again tomorrow, but we won't be going out, even though there are a different set of activities on the second day. Here's the LINK to the photo pages.

Sunday, January 28, 2001

Wow, another week slipped past; time flies when you're having fun ....

I installed the 128 MB memory stick in Sissy; and transferred the existing 64 MB stick to Milly to help out with the voracious demands of Photoshop6. Sissy seemed to be very much better; I fired up Crimson Skies and was unable to lock up the box even after repeated crashes -- which hitherto had meant a total reboot. I guess I was asking a bit much to expect games running on top of all the tray stuff; the usual free memory was only about 10 MB and has now gone up to 40 MB. A further test will have to wait until Ethan comes over next and starts lengthy games sessions.

A visit today for lunch, from old friends from Wanganui, Ian and Jill. Ian wanted some photos of a particular old Kodak rollfilm camera, and he remembered that I had a collection of old cameras. I do have, but most of them were still in cartons in my storage loft. However, a scrabble about in the loft soon turned up what he was looking for. We took a series of front, back, rear etc for Ian to use in a multimedia thing he's playing round with. He is currently working for a multimedia company in Hamilton, producing on-line and CDR First Aid lessons for the local Red Cross.

After they left, I spent some time with an early version (5) of a genealogy program I found in a sale: Family Tree Maker. This had been well reviewed, but I had never bought it as there are other excellent shareware programs at a fraction of the price. However, I must say that I was surprised and gratified at the ease of use and sophistication of it. Having done my fair share of programming over the years, I am inclined to be a bit sniffy at clumsy data entry screens or difficulty in changing from family to family. Also a lot of programs don't have sufficient versatility to cope with the complicated relationships that today's generations produce. For example, I have a cousin who has three children by three different de facto partners -- and lives with none of them. Try stuffing *that* into a traditional genealogy program -- you have to "marry" them off to get any entry, and often the surnames the children end up with are different again.

The program has excellent print facilities, which is also important. We will be attending a get-together next month of the family of my late wife, and I will need to do a massive print-out for the wall charts. The charts produced by FTM will be excellent for the purpose. I suppose that having taken a program to (latest version) 8, the company must have considerably refined and debugged it, as there are lots of very thoughtful touches that speak of considerable feedback from users being implemented. I suspect that I will be upgrading in due course.