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Monday, February 12, 2001

It poured with rain all day -- a dollop of tropical air laden with moisture which sat over the top and middle of the island and piddled on everybody. Fortunately, we didn't need to be out until after lunch.

I caught up with daynotes, and had a phone conversation with my friendly computer pusher about the kit needed for an upgrade to Don's home computer. It looks like we'll use one of the latest Asus m/boards with as fast a Celeron as we can afford up to 800 MHz. I've specified a Matrox G450 (same as in Milly) as it has been excellent; a 30 GB Seagate 7400 drive; and an AOC 17 inch monitor. I've had one of these for some time and, although a cheapie compared to others, has proved to be sharp, bright, and have good colour. If we get a new tower case and floppy, the old box will be more than adequate for the childrens' homework and play their games. We'll put a couple of NICs in for ethernet; they can probably share a modem in the meantime; anyway I don't think it will be long before Don has a DSL line in at the house as well as the office.

Into town for Joan to visit her beauty consultant, and me to retrieve our toaster from the appliance repair. Joan complained it wasn't toasting one side of the bread; it turned out that she has been toasting only one slice, and the centre element gets hotter than when there is another piece of bread in the other slot. Older model toasters apparently have two centre elements with a metal divider, which stops this happening. <grump mode> Another case of bean-counting taking precedence over good functionality. Altering the design probably made them a lot more profit, but produced a disgruntled user. And the stupid thing is that there *is* a market for quality -- but no-one seems to cater for it any more; at least not round here. </grump>

The boys came in for tea while Rebeccah attended her ballet lesson; we heard Eli's spelling and had a book read to us for homework. And *that* takes me back a few years....

Tuesday, February 13, 2001

The weather took a turn for the better this morning; the cloud lifted in the afternoon and let some sun through. Because everything was so wet, it got sticky very quickly. I'm still having trouble with my satellite feed; the serviceman came during tea last night and replaced the receiver module; this seemed to cut the bit error rate to zero and gave me a better download. However, this morning when I fired up Sissy, the error rate was way up and the AGC signal strength was down on yesterday. Bugger! [we're allowed to say that publicly in NZ -- we had a very successful TV ad selling trucks to farmers, which had the typical Kiwi farmer getting himself into various predicaments because his ute was so powerful. The word was used freely -- surprisingly with minimal disapproval from the public -- and has even been heard from the lips of politicians. The ad, BTW received a prestigeous overseas advertising award.

All of which hassle with the dish is slowly firming my resolve to install DSL; it would also mean moving to another ISP and re-hosting the site -- none of which is undertaken lightly. We'll see.

I joined Joan in town at 2 pm to go in with her to the ENT specialist to hear his assessment of the xray scan. He says there is congestion in one sinus cavity, and it's probably caused by an allergy. So she's got a chit to take to the lab for allergy tests, and some antibacterial for the clogged sinus. If that doesn't work, he'll consider another operation.

Ethan joined me after school while Eli went with Rebeccah for his very first piano lesson. Ethan desperately wants to become a programmer of games and I'm using this time each week to give him an introduction to computers and programming. When he's absorbed enough background stuff, I'll start him on BASIC as I have the PowerBasic DOS compiler to hand. Todays lesson started with binary and the idea of hexadecimal numbers, then finished with a diagram of a motherboard with processor, memory, hard drive etc as boxes. We also had a Life in NZ on the display screen, pixels, and RGB colour. Not too bad for an 11 year-old; but I'll review it all next week and see what he has retained.

Joan went off with the family to the baths, while I fired up the motor mower and attacked the long grass on the lawns. Actually, it wasn't too bad -- not as long as it gets in spring, anyway. We had a good TV night; after The Bill episode there was the millennium episode of Black Adder, travelling through time in a wooden time machine constructed to Da Vinci's plans by Baldrick. Most enjoyable -- and an extra delight was a short doco afterwards on the making of the show, complete with outtakes. Then upstairs to change all the feature stuff, and upload to the server.

Wednesday, February 14, 2001

Printed up some client proofs for Don straight after breakfast, then headed into town to drop them off at the office. Yesterday, I discovered that an important bit of paper was missing: as part of our vehicle licensing in NZ, we have to obtain a Warrant of Fitness every six months — this is a certificate that the vehicle was inspected for mechanical soundness and good tyres etc. This WOF was on my camper-trailer (which is on the right of the pic) in a small plastic holder screwed on the side — at least it should have been. Whether it became detached through vibration, or whether someone helped it off is a matter for conjecture, but it wasn't there. Fortunately, I had retained the inspection checklist with the details, and was able to drive over to the testing place and ask for a duplicate to be issued and to buy a new plastic holder.

I thought to myself, "Hah, I'll buy some security screws and make sure no-one with a screwdriver can whip the new one off." So, when I drove Joan into town after lunch, I went down to the local mechanical emporium -- the toy shop for grease monkeys. Nah — they don't actually sell security screws, but were happy to sell me $80 screwdrivers that fit them. So I just screwed the new holder on with a large tight screw -- and at Joan's suggestion, replaced the actual WOF sticker with a photocopy and put the original in the car glove-box against possible interrogation by the Law. Sorted. I also replaced the trailer wheel, the tyre on which had committed suicide on our Raglan Trip. The repaired wheel had been sitting in the garage waiting for a couple of weeks.

Before we left town, I whipped into the City Library and collected a stock of cassette book tapes. We are away on Friday for a few days, and these are brilliant to listen to in the car when driving for long distances.

Thursday, February 15, 2001

Another hot, humid day again. The weather people tell us that it's tropical air come all the way down from Fiji. At least today it's not raining as well -- which kicks the humidity up to the max. We spent some time gathering stuff to take away tomorrow; the camper is pretty well self-contained now, so basically it's bedding, clothes and food. I attack my bank statements and shuffle paper -- boooring.

After lunch I took the Honda C-RV into the dealer to have its six-month service done; they dropped me back home and I picked up on the genealogy stuff I hadn't printed to take down to the get-together. Printing pages, sorting and filing them into a clear-page file took the rest of the afternoon. I also printed out a large descendant chart which spread over eight A4 pages. These had to be trimmed on two margins, glued and matched up to the adjoining sheet; took some time but the result was impressive.

After TV-time tonight, I returned to the computer to finish assembling the family photos I had scanned previously. I used Ventura to place them onto an A3-plus sheet, added some captions, then printed the matt sheet out on my Epson 1520 in black, as they were all monochrome. The result exceeded my expectations; I had massaged them quite a bit in Photoshop to increase contrast, sharpened them etc.

I'll be filing the Kronikles by laptop and GSM phone as usual.

Friday, February 16, 2001

We packed up our stuff into the C-RV after breakfast and managed to get ourselves organsed and away by 10 am. The day was humid and cloudy -- as is usual at the moment -- but as we drove south, the clouds thinned a bit. The car's aircon kept us comfortable, though. We stopped at Turangi for our usual Burger King and coffee lunch, then over the Saddle and through the central plateau; catching a bit of drizzle up on the heights.

An uneventful run right through to Wanganui; we arrived at 3 pm and went straight up to the Aramoho Motor Camp (Pic from last trip; this time we're further down towards the kitchen block). After the camper was uncoupled and set up, we drove into town to visit a couple of second-hand book shops. I picked up a suitable paperback for our Greece trip: Mitchener's "Caribbean". This is thick and meaty, and being only $NZ6 I can drop it in a bin without a guilty conscience, after I finish it. We stopped at the supermarket to pick up some extra food and returned to the camp. Joan warmd up our (precooked - last night's leftovers) dinner in the microwave, while I connected up the various pieces of our little TV. This is a little complicated, as I have a flat disc antenna in a plastic case, mounted on a 2 metre pole stuck into a socket on the trailer bar front. It has an integral transistor booster which is powered from a plugpack at the terminal splitter. So I have at the moment a 4-way power strip into which is plugged the kettle, the plugpack, the interior light with the TV power plugged in the back of its plug, and the laptop power into the fourth socket. The net result is that we usually get reasonable TV reception, unless we are in some isolated community that hasn't got a local transmitter.

Not much else to impart; except to say that GSM phone reception here is poor, so to post this I have to drive about a mile towards town to get a line-of sight to the Vodaphone cell tower -- which is behind a large hill (looking from the camp). I can then snuggle the phone up to the IR port on the laptop and we're in business -- but at 9600 bps. If I've got a full charge in the phone battery, the link is surprisingly robust.

Saturday, February 17, 2001

We were in bed asleep at 10.30 pm last night, and awoke at 7.45 am this morning -- a good sleep which we both needed. After breakfast we set off for Brunswick, a farming area about 10 miles from Wanganui where the Johnston get-together was to take place. The Brunswick Hall is typical of the community centre for the surrounding district. It was built in 1895 and is still as sturdy as the day it was put up. There is an adjacent country primary school which uses it for their annual concert/show; and it is the traditional gathering place for all the family occasions: 21st birthdays, wedding receptions, and probably still the occasional dance evening -- it still has a large playing card symbol in each corner for the "Monte Carlo" elimination waltz.

There were about 40 - 50 people attending, and we had arranged family tree sheets around the walls for people to update their details. A good deal of talking and catching-up took place; all-in-all a very successful gathering. We all brought plates of food and drink and had a communal lunch in traditional manner. I've got a big heap of family details to enter in my database, and can then update the family record booklet I've done a draft of.

We came back into town at 5 pm, and headed for Pizza Hut and had a couple of pizzas for tea before heading back to the camp and a quiet evening. It now only remains to drive down the road to cellphone range, and upload this to my site. We're off tomorrow for a three hour trip to the east coast southern part of the island called Masterton. I'll post some pix and a map tomorrow night.

Sunday, February 18, 2001

We had a reasonably relaxed start to the day; it was sopping outside the camper as there had been some light drizzle overnight. But by the time we had breakfast and packed stuff up to move, the canvas was much drier. Away by 10.15 am and drove south and across to Palmerston North before going through the Manawatu Gorge. This is one of our mildly spectacular sights -- not as grand as the trip through the Canadian Rockies, but about 8 km of road hanging onto the side of rock cliffs about 50 metres above a not-very-big river. Curiously enough, the river runs from the east coast, through the gorge, and out to the sea at the west coast. It appears that there was a slow land uplift, and the river just kept cutting down. We came out the other side, then turned south again at Woodville towards the Wairarapa.

The Wairarapa is a long flattish valley plain, hemmed in by the Tararua Range on one side (peaks high enough to have snow in winter) and rows of hills toward the sea. We arrived in Masterton about 3 pm, found the camping ground and got ourselves set up. It started to drizzle as we drove back out of the camp and into the town area. We stopped at The Warehouse ( a miniature NZ equivalent of Walmart or KMart -- a large barn-type building jammed full of mostly cheap junky stuff, but which also has quite good things). As it happened, we had been looking for a particular suitcase for our trip to Greece, and our Rotorua Warehouse hadn't received stock. But here it was, just what we wanted: reasonably large cases with loads of zipped pockets and laundry pockets etc etc. They also have wheels, of course, and a sturdy handle which locks at any extension -- and all for $NZ175 ($US72) each. So we took two; they fill up the back of the C-RV, but we'll be able to stick things inside them for the trip home on Tuesday.

Stopped at the hotel restaurant recommended to us by the camp owner; had a nice meal of battered fish, chips and salad. We walked round the lower end of the business district before returning to camp and a quiet evening. Tomorrow we'll be doing the sightseeing circuit, so I should have some pix.