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Monday,March 5, 2001

A bright new week with better weather to start it. Spent some time this morning once more looking into changing to DSL insterad of the satellite, and also to a new ISP and site host. I think I've got a good deal here, from an ISP called Wave; by the time I drop one phone line and do the sums, it will work out much the same money-wise as at present -- and I won't have the aggro of satellite connections going slow, stopping altogether, etc etc. And the DSL will be faster, most of the time anyway -- when the satellite got a good pipe and the server at the other end wasn't too loaded, stuff would really scream down. But that was rare.

Spent some time tidying the site and putting more into my camera page. Got some more images to put up, too (but not tonight). After lunch I joined camera club friends (Annette has bought my Coolpix 800) in the Government Gardens to help her come to grips with the digital camera, and to get some shots for myself. I had some macro failures, should have RTFM'd a bit more studiously. There is a special macro setting that allows getting to 2 cm of a subject -- so tried some flower closeups and stuffed up most of them. When I got home, I read that the zoom has to be at the centre of its range for the macro to function properly; they put a tiny flower pic in the LCD, and when it's OK to shoot, it turns yellow. Sorted.

I did some fiddling around when I got home; Russell had given me a poster (for the upcoming exhibition of PSNZ photographic prints from the last year's national competition) to copy, as there was wording on it that did not apply any more. It was too big to scan on my gear, so took a shot with the 990 and tried working with it in Photoshop. Unfortunately, I had taken it on normal resolution, so it just didn't come up to the standard I wanted. I'll have another shot at it tomorrow morning when the light is right, and take it at maximum res. Lots of office work to get done, too, as tax date looms.

Tuesday, March 6, 2001

Another reasonable day weather-wise. Worked in the office all morning catching up with stuff. After lunch, I worked on the poster for the Photo Exhibition. A full-res shot with the Coolpix was excellent; brought the image into Photoshop, cloned out all the irrelevent text, then added our venue and dates. Did a partial print at full A3+ size to check it, and it looks good; just a little soft on the edges of the old lettering -- this contrasts with the crisper edges of the new. But it will do, and saves a whole heap of work. I now have to get quotes for laser printing; we have a liason with one of the local printers who should be able to give the club a good price for the few that we need.

After tea and TV, I worked on the Camera Club competition Rules so as to have them ready to present to members at the club night tomorrow. Also picked out one of the digital images of the old Museum buildings to take on a floppy, as we are visiting one of the local photofinishers and he has asked that we all bring something to print.

Wednesday, March 7, 2001

Thought it was gonna be a good work day today. But Don came in early with a zip disk file for me to print. It was a brochure to be done on A3+ with all the printer's stuff like crop marks and colour bars. I checked the ink level in the Epson 1520 -- it was in the yellow, and I knew that wouldn't last out a full colour proof. So, dig out my spare colour cartridge (Jet Tec, made in the U.K. and supposed to use Epson inks, not a cheepo local refill job), install and initiate the cleaning cycle, check the ramp printout for missing nozzles. More clean, more check, more clean, more check — and I'd got everything OK but magenta. Missing four nozzles, and that would leave awkward white lines.

Decided it was a faulty cart -- Epson printers are excessively fussy about air locks in the ink supply, which is why 1520 carts are just about impossible to refill successfully with those dinky syringe bottles. Off into town, exchange cart for another, back home. Install cart, iterate clean & check about 10 times, still dropouts in the magenta. Back into town (mumble, mumble) and pick up a geneuwine Epson cartridge. Install, clean & check twice. Mirabilis -- problem sorted. OK OK, I promise not to buy *anything* but Epson carts ever again....

The proof print done, I headed off back to Don to drop it off, as the client is anxious to sign it off and get the printer on the job. By now it was after 1 pm, and the worms were biting. Appeased them with lunch, and got on with financial stuff. Remembered to prepare a draft of a counter brochure promoting the Camera Club, that we can photocopy and leave on photo shop counters. Our next-door neighbour Heather, joined us for tea, as her husband was away in the South Island and his plane back was cancelled.

Off at 7.15 pm to Camera Club, where Russell and I presented our suggestions for updating the competitions. These were well received, and we have the go-ahead to prepare a rule book. The members then all left to go to a local photo processing shop, where we were given a demo of the latest in digital processing technology. Fuji gear, and shockingly expensive. Negative film is processed on a normal chemical line, and is then fed into a scanner which throws up a set of small lo-res images on a screen. Each one is corrected for density and colour, the print button is pressed, and the operator moves along to the next one. Behind us the big digital printer whirred into life, printing each image by laser onto conventional photo paper. This goes off through a processor and is delivered about 4 minutes later. They can, of course, take images from Zip, floppy or CDRom and print them; I am considering editing the travel pix from our next trip and dropping them onto a CD, then getting them printed to 6 x 4. The cost would be much reduced on, say a dozen wallets of conventional prints.

Thursday, March 8, 2001

It's raining again as I type this (10.50 pm) but the day has been fine/cloudy, so not too bad for getting out. Went into town with Joan & Joanna to pick up some laminating pouches and look for a new school bag for Rebeccah. It seems incredible (looking back on my own schooldays) that our schools no longer have any sort of lockers for kids to leave their books and sports gear. Rebeccah and her friends have to cart *everything* to school that might be needed that day. She's been using a backpack, but finds that stuff sinks to the bag bottom (like silt?) and she has to rummage round in it all the time. We looked at bags similar to laptop carriers (too expensive), and finally located a fair-sized one that cost only $NZ25. I suppose that the official outlook now is that school children would only use their lockers for storing drugs and weapons? Or is it that having locked storage means that locker searches are made difficult. But if there is the need, imagine the chaos if every class was told to turn out its bags on the desks.

Another A3+ printer proof to turn out this afternoon; and I helped Don with a document problem. He had been doing business cards in various languages for a client, and the Korean translator had sent the file through in .PDF format. Normally OK - but the business card was on a large page size, and when it was imported into Photoshop the rasterised file was over 100 MB, even after cropping to the card. Don mailed me the file, as I have Acrobat 3 Exchange. I was able to change the page size to the card size, save, then import into Photoshop. Cropped again to size and saved as a TIFF, the file size came out at 1.2 MB. We needed it hires, as it was to be used as an image because of the Korean characters.

The Register has another spinechilling forecast of the demise of the open-architecture PC and civilisation as we know it. Somehow I think there's too many independent cusses (like Daynoters) in the world that will resist that sort of change, smaller companies will take up the slack (and in doing so will become bigger and more able to operate), and M$, Intel and their ilk will find themselves painted into blind alleys.

Friday, March 9, 2001

It poured all night, and was still raining steadily at lunchtime. I worked solidly in the office on accounts, then we drove into town about 11.30 am for Joan to change her library books, and for me to call into Dick Smith Electrical (rather like a Tandy's) and get a good crimping tool for RJ45 etc plugs. The DSL modem that's being installed on Tuesday has an onboard router with 4 ports, so I have to convert my network from the good old coax. That means I'll be able to talk knowledgeably about Cat5 cable just like the big boys do....

The rain cleared after lunch, and Joan disappeared outside to fiddle in the garden. She asked our landscape developer (who did the side garden for us) to come round and look at replacing the ponga (tree-fern) retaining wall by the rear patio. It's been there for years, and is now going soft and spongy from rot.

Not much more of interest, because of all the bookwork I have to catch up with, but the manager of my friendly computer store and his wife are coming tomorrow morning for coffee, and to look at the niggly problem I've had with the video card in Sissy. More on that tomorrow. I've also ordered a Dreamweaver 4 upgrade; read some very good reviews on this, and the extra functionality over V.3 seems to make it a "must get" for us—lots more web stuff in the pipeline.

Saturday, March 10, 2001

Malcolm and Tania arrived on schedule at 10.30 am; Malcolm brought me another video card as I had been having odd lockups with the NVidia TNT card. This was another of the same, but put out by MSI -- the model is MS8817 GeForce 2MX. This was installed in Sissy and we had a certain amount of trouble convincing Sissy that the video card had changed -- because of the similarity of the drivers -- and it wouldn't even let us change the drivers for some reason. Unfortunately, the new card wouldn't work properly and we had to adopt the alternate course of deleting the card in Device Manager and re-booting. This time it worked, we got the correct drivers installed and everything was sweet. Malcolm fired up Age of Empires II and thrashed it for 30 minutes without a lockup; we changed over to Crimson Skies and had a go. This did need some card tweaking, but in the end was much more stable. I've had some fun flying the plane since.

However, later I tried some streaming audio using Windows Media Player 7, and still had a lockup after 33 minutes. It would be nice to play audio for a reasonable length of time. Malcolm and I discussed the box at length, and came to the conclusion that the motherboard I had used -- an ABIT RAID board -- was unsuited to the work I was giving it. I really had a problem getting it going because the RAID drivers insisted on installing and grabbing an IRQ I needed. It actually has a full house of PCI cards: video on the AGP, a modem, the satellite card, the NIC, and the sound card. I am hoping that when I remove the satellite card and uninstall the software, I'll get a more stable configuration. The ADSL modem will go into the NIC.

The weather has been fine all day; the grass dried out, so we got outside and mowed the lawns. Just enough time to relax for awhile, and then Jo, Don and the kids arrived for dinner -- pickled pork on the menu with mashed potatoes, pumpkin, and peas; followed by peach cobbler with ice cream. Don and I set off for a brisk walk round our park circuit and arrived back home in late dusk -- the nights are drawing in fast. We'll be off daylight saving time in another couple of weeks.

Sunday, March 11, 2001

Another fine morning, which deteriorated to cloudy in the afternoon. I helped Joan with a chair cover she had made; it needed two rows of eyelets in the back for lacing to pull the cover taut on the chair. Jo was back and forth with stuff for the children's week with us. We went over and picked Rebeccah and Eli up at 3.30 pm, brought them back here with more junk, then went into the supermarket to stock up with kid food for lunches etc.

After returning, I dug out the carton with the astronomical telescope I has bought for son Ross in the 70s. Only a cheap Japanese model -- not the magnificence of the Thompson's instrument -- but enough to give the kids a taste of the heavens. It's a 4.5 inch reflector on an equatorial mount; has eyepieces from 20 mm to 6 mm, and a 2 x Barlow extended lens. The whole on a sturdy wooden tripod. Actually Ross spent hours with it in the middle of the night; he used to get up in the small hours and look for double stars he found in the star catalogue. I also remember projecting a sun image when sunspots were at a maximum -- they were clearly visible.

I spent some time attempting to align the finder scope with indifferent success; the adjustable mounting was rather crude. Unfortunately the sky really clouded over and there's no viewing tonight - much to Eli's disappointment.

Rebeccah elbowed me off the main computer to work on a school project; she had to research Pacific islands, and devise and name a mythical island. Write about the history, food, customs etc it might have -- based on the material she had researched. She had the history done; and tonight she wrote a page on the food sources, complete with recipes. We'll not be too long out of bed tonight; it will be all go in the morning, with two different schools to go to.