Monday, February 26, 2001

I was out and about reasonably early this morning, as I needed to put some documents on the courier to Auckland which left at 10 am. On the way back, I called into the Honda dealer to let the service manager look at my windscreen. This had encountered *another* large stone travelling the other way at high velocity; the previous windscreen had been replaced only a few months ago for the same reason. My car insurance policy permits one windscreen replacement each year without affecting my no-claim rebate, so I wasn't keen to repeat the exercise. We decided that the "star" in the glass would be able to be stabilised by the plastic injection treatment. Why do we get so many chipped windscreens in NZ? Because most of our roads are surfaced with a "chip seal"; they spread hot bitumen on the road and cover it with a layer of crushed rock. Most of this is pea-sized, and loose chips can be fired from the side of another car's tyre at some speed. The chips have sharp angular points as well -- imagine what this does to paintwork, let alone the glass.

We went out after lunch to the recommended glass repair shop, and they have booked me in tomorrow at 10.30; the repair will take an hour and cost me $NZ45. Joan wanted some garden plants, so we called in at her favourite garden centre to pick up what she needed. I spent the rest of the afternoon, and indeed this evening, on financial stuff which needs to be attended to. The end of NZ's tax year is 31st March, and I have a *lot* of bookwork to do before then.

Tuesday, February 27, 2001

Off to the glass repair place at 10.30 as mentioned yesterday. They had told me it would take an hour to do the repair, so I took the laptop with me and put in some useful time editing the Camera Club newsletter. This had been prepared in MSWord 98 <hawk -- spit> by the secretary, and emailed to me for refurbishing. I struggled manfully, getting the text into frames, redoing the masthead etc. It really is a rotten program for DTP — after one is accustomed to Ventura. This is still my no. 1 DTP program, and I have PageMaker 6.5 and InDesign 1.5 to compare it with. But I have to persevere with it, as she will have to do the newsletter when I am absent overseas. The windscreen turned out really well — the star is still visible, but greatly reduced; and it is now sealed against water ingress.

An afternoon on the financials; getting through the stuff fairly quickly. A break when Ethan came in after school for his computer lesson. Today we discussed the motherboard, the BIOS, bootstrapping, and a brief look at operating systems. Not bad for 11 years old; although he plaintively asked at first, was it necessary to actually know all this boring stuff? After I had covered a lot more boring stuff, he suddenly saw the advantages of understanding even a little of what goes on in the engineroom. Next week, it's into PowerBasic and a walk around the IDE and compiler.

THEN, I was coerced and shanghaied into accompanying Joan, Joanna and the kids down to the local swimming centre to actually get in the water. Joan had gone last week and insisted I try the Aqua Jogging. This requires a bulky foam pad strapped up your back and around the waist with a strong strap. This contraption provided considerable buoyancy in the water, and permits an upright posture with the head out of the water. You then engage in vigorous arm and leg movements in whatever swimming mode you feel like -- sort of a dog paddle on steroids. They set aside a couple of lanes for this activity, and most of the participants are oldies. We had a good half-hour and stopped before terminal exhaustion set in. It was interesting to walk up the steps, emerge from the buoyant water, and realise just how much weight you're carrying. The water is deep, so you can't touch the bottom; and is kept at a good tepid temperature. We need to do this twice a week, I reckon. The only thing I'm not keen on is the chlorine; even after a hot shower in the changing room, you still smell it.

Wednesday, February 28, 2001

A very busy day today. Routine email and stuff until 10.30 am, when Russell and Annette came to visit. Russell is a fellow Camera Club member, and in addition is a Photographic Society of NZ councillor. We have been tasked with completely rejigging the competition rules for the club, as the existing ones were drawn up in the 60s. Photography has evolved since those days, and we need a new approach. But, of course, we spent some time looking through old prints of mine, and discussing various old cameras from what remains of my collection. Annette has bought my Nikon Coolpix 800, so I gave her a quick run over that. We had lunch, then got down to work on the rules for a couple of hours.

After they left, I started work on a web page for Don: a page of recipes for making goodies with macadamia nuts. I had to reformat and tidy it up. Struggled along for half an hour with the page doing strange things; I dropped down from the WYSIWYG to the HTML and found out why: the code was full of weird stuff -- spans everywhere, and lots of redundant font formatting tags. I did some massive deleting via the search facility, and things went much smoother after that. Later, I found out that Don had cut'n'pasted the recipes into some other page format and mailed me the wreckage.....

The next email check brought another job: two A3+ prints in colour of an updated brochure for a client. This had to be done with all the crop marks, colour bars etc ready for the printer. Each print takes up to 20 minutes in the Epson 1520 at full res, but the result is excellent. We would have to spend a fortune to get a colour laser proofing that size -- and from what I've seen, the colour reproduction still doesn't come quite up to the humble inkjet.

After tea, it was straight into the Camera Club's newsletter, to get that tidied up and emailed to the secretary for last-minute additions of field trip times. I managed to cope with MSWord and its quirky frame handling; I inserted a couple of articles I wrote some years ago for another club mag., and actually got the text into two justified columns with heading in Word Art.

Thursday, March 1, 2001

Up bright and early; because I woke at 6.30 am remembering I hadn't done yesterday's Kronikles as I was too tired. Got the update done before breakfast, packed up the car, then left for Auckland at 8.30. Had an uneventful run, and pulled into a park at Money Managers (my financial adviser) on the North Shore at 11.30. Sorted out the things I came to do, then we went up the road a little way to get lunch. This office is set in a recently built industrial/office park, so there are small lunch bars scattered here and there. The one we went to was run by a couple of Chinese; we had a delicious meal -- lasagne and fried potatoes (not chips) for me, and Joan had sweet & sour meat balls. We'll remember that place for subsequent use.

Back down the motorway, over the Harbour Bridge, and straight down to Mangere via the motel we usually stay at. Here I went to a specialist second-hand camera shop and disposed of a Leica camera which I no longer use. This will help pay for the Nikon Coolpix 990 and ancillary gear which I subsequently picked up from the NZ distributors. I am fortunate enough to still have access at wholesale level, and saved about $2000 on retail prices. We then came back to Newmarket (not far from our motel), parked the car, and Joan wandered around the shops while I visited a favourite stop -- a bookstore which specialises in computer books.

We returned to our motel to await Joan's neice Deirdre; we had arranged to have dinner with her. Sat for a while talking, then went down to a local Italian restaurant that I have been visiting off-and-on for at least 25 years. Deirdre's friend Kevin joined us, and we had a nice evening with delicious food -- this place does a pretty authentic job.

Friday, March 2, 2001

We left the motel about 9.30 am and went down into Newmarket; I parked the car and waited for Joan to return some stuff to a shop. We then went through Parnell to the Nikon people -- I had decided to get the AC power pack and the 3 X teleconverter for the Coolpix 990, and also a good padded Lowepro waist bag to keep things safe while travelling. A quick test showed that the teleconverter is much superior to the 2 X, and with the camera zoomed to full will produce the equivalent of a 345 mm tele on a conventional SLR. This is an awesome camera -- it has all of the features of my trusty Nikon 801, and lots more of purely digital stuff. I had downloaded a comprehensive review of the camera feature set, but reading about it doesn't match up to getting the thing in your hands and doing it <grin>.

We stopped at our favourite motorway service area on the way out of the city, had a coffee and sandwiches, then went on our way back home. Arrived at 3 pm, unpacked the car, and got ourselves organised. I caught up with daynoters, then settled down to work on the Camera Club competition format and rules through to teatime. Our usual return home meal -- poached eggs on toast -- and they went down a treat.

Back onto the rules and got them finished, before getting onto the Kronikles. Quick download, and off to bed.

Saturday, March 3, 2001

The weather was gloomy when we woke, and strated to drizzle after breakfast. Don was going with Eli to cricket, and we thought it would be abandoned. Joan went off into town with Joanna and Rebeccah on a clothes-buying errand. I remained home catching up with jobs; Don rang to say that most of the cricket teams didn't turn up, but one other school did -- and they ignored the rain to play a game against Aorangi (Eli's school). Don and Eli arrived hoem soaked, but Eli was ecstatic; he'd been waiting all week for the game and managed to bowl one guy out as well as get some runs. That's a big deal when you're seven. They are actually playing Kiwi cricket, which has much-modified rules to make sure every child gets to bowl and bat.

I met Joan at the library to return books; I found a treatise on TCP/IP which will keep me busy for a while. We visited the supermarket for a stock-up then returned home for lunch. I got busy assembling another batch of my family history book and packed up four copies to meet the orders on hand. I've had more interest in the book since I linked my site to a Sparling name site. I did some daynoting and surfing, then we gathered up swimming gear and towels and went down to the aquatic centre for some more Aqua-jogging. Put in half an hour, working sufficiently hard to make me huff and puff -- good aerobic workout.

Had a delicious fish pie for tea, a Delia Smith recipe made with freshly-smoked trout which I had been given. Watched a little TV, then the end of a local rugby football game, then upstairs to do these notes. And so the day went....

Sunday, March 4, 2001

Lots of small jobs done in the morning; it rained heavily in the night but cleared during the day. I took the opportunity to take some garden pictures. After lunch, I picked up Peter the Camera Club president and we drove over to Russell's house to go over our draft competition suggestions. We had a very fruitful Life in NZ, and now have a good set of recommendations to put to members on Wednesday night.

I spent some time after tea on the website. There's now a Camera Talk page which gives some details of the Nikon Coolpix 990. Haven't got much more tonight, as that took a bit of time. CUL