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Monday March 12, 2001

Joan was up before me, bright and early this morning as there were two kids to get ready for school by 8.15 am. We dropped Rebeccah at her High School, then took Eli to Aorangi School which is some distance in the opposite direction. Ethan and Jo had arrived with all their gear for the week's camp; we stayed with them for a few minutes while things were sorted out, then went round to our bookseller to lick up this week's magazines.

Friends from Wanganui - Lesley and Vince - arrived about 10.15 am on their way back from a small town called Paeroa, which had hosted an annual street motorcycling race. Vince had spent the weekend scrutineering motorcycles and sidecars to check that they complied with the rules (he is a qualified vehicle inspector, and has been involved with motobikes since youth). We had an enjoyable morning tea, then I got Vince to help me with a small problem I had encountered with the telescope: the finder scope was not firm in its mounting. I expected a complicated job involving the lathe, but Vince decided the best solution was a strip of electrical tape round the barrel of the finder scope to take up the play. Sorted.

I have been preparing for the job of changing over all my old ethernet coax to cat-5 cable and RJ45 plugs. After picking up Eli and Rebeccah after school and dropping them back home, I drove into town to DSE, our radio parts place and picked up a network cabling kit and 40 metre drum of cable. Sounds like a lot of cable, but I will be doing Don's home network as well as mine -- and he has one run which will be quite long. The cabling kit has the loopback cable testers, crimping tool, and insulation stripper.

I had downloaded the colour coding for the plug; so wrestled with getting the wires in the correct order and into the lil bitty plug. Finally managed it, then realised I didn't know whether it numbered left to right on the flat side, or on the catch side. I can hear echoes of distant laughter from all you dudes who had cat-5 cable strung across the crib and cut your teeth on the crimping tool. Shaddap.

Back on the 'net to find a tutorial from some college course which actually showed the plug cross-section and nice diagrams in colour. Fine -- I *did* get it right, see. Put the plug on the other cable end, and fired up the tester: all pairs OK. In between all this, I was helping Rebeccah with her mythical island project and printing the pages on the colour printer. Then it was time to get Rebeccah off to her ballet class at 6.15 pm. Joan, Eli and I had a Delia Smith Macaroni Cheese dish for tea, then Don came in with Rebeccah after the class and ate with us as well. Don took Eli back home for the night, as he will be taking Eli to school in the morning. Joan has a doctor's appointment at 8.30 am tomorrow; we'll just have time to drop Rebeccah at school and zip into town. Life sure gets complicated when you have grandchildren who DO THINGS -- tomorrow, both children have piano lessons after school.

The ADSL installer comes tomorrow; can't wait to get rid of the dial-up.

Tuesday, March 13, 2001

Up bright and early and breakfast over, getting Rebeccah's books together, into the car at 8.10 am. Dropped her at school, then into town for Joan's appointment with the ENT specialist about her sinuses. He looked at the scans, peered into her nose, and decided that, although the sinuses were reasonably clear, there was still a lot of swollen tissue that needs tidying up. So she is booked in to a private hospital on March 25th for the surgeon to deal to it. I dropped her at the office to help file a huge heap of Don's invoices and paper.

Back into DSE on the way home, to buy some more RJ45 plugs -- I found the ones in the kit were *very* snug in the socket. The Telecom DSL installer finally arrived at 2 pm, and we had a long look at the phone setup. I have a voice line with 4 extensions and an answering machine; this was the line I was going to put the DSL on, but he shied away from that idea -- there are lots of joints in the wiring, and he also didn't think the splitter would like the load. So I'm going to retain my second line and install the DSL on that; the splitter will have the fax plugged in. The next problem was that the exchange has linked the DSLAM to my voice line, and they wouldn't get it changed over until tomorrow.

So it's back to the satellite for another day; I wouldn't moan so much if I didn't have to dial about 12 times to connect in the evening. If you try and leave the connection up, they boot you off. Typical over-extended ISP. Although I read in various daynotes that this problem is universal -- particularly stateside, and after the spate of ISP mergers people are complaining that they can't get any support to fix faulty connects etc etc.

Off to collect Eli at 3 pm, then over to Rebeccah's school to get her. Half an hour's respite, then pile them into the car and take them to the music teacher for their lesson. She alternates between the two and gets one to do theory while the other is on the piano. We collect them at 5 pm and go straight to the baths for swimming lessons -- Joan stayed with them. We give Aquajogging a miss today, as we are both tired.

We stuff them into bed at 9.45 pm and collapse for a while, before stirring ourselves. This grandparenting is exhausting <grin>. The kids aren't naughty -- just full-on all the time!

Wednesday, March 14, 2001

Whoop-de-doooo: the DSL is in and working. My connection rate fluctuates from 800 to 1000+ Kbps downstream. At the moment it is 704 upstream, 800 downstream. The modem is a Nokia M1122 with a four ethernet port router. I have succeeded in connecting Milly into the router as well as Sissy, but only by leaving the DHCP server in the router on. I still haven't figured out how to get the Internet and the Ethernet sitting down together, as it appears that the Ethernet under TCP/IP doesn't like DHCP. Don has details of his network settings at the office, and will fax them to me tomorrow morning. I lament the dearth of useful information on the subject; I've been plowing through TCP/IP manuals and reading Windows Resource Kit but none of the stuff seems to cover what I have. And the slim booklet that came with the Nokia is obscure and assumes a level of knowledge at engineer level. I suspect it's a deliberate ploy by network people to featherbed their jobs... I also suspect that chaos is caused by attempts to cater for all sorts of transmission standards which aren't standards -- probably obsolete.

The rest of the time we've been doing the kid-ferrying to this school and that school, and conveying Rebeccah to ballet. I now have to get my office back into place; we had to pull one bench right out to get at the phone sockets and there's stuff piles everywhere. Oh well, another day tomorrow ...

Thursday, March 15, 2001

Another day wasted labouring at the TCP/IP coalface. I've just ended up with a completely unresponsive DSL modem and suspect it may have gone byebyes. Anyway, I've left a message for a local network guru to call me tomorrow; he set up Don's DSL and network so should be able to find out what my problems are. I tried all combinations of DHCP on and off; auto and static IP addresses etc. I could ping Milly from Sissy OK, but not in the reverse direction. And Milly could see the DSL address. At least it could until the modem started sulking. I tried a power reset on the modem, but made no difference.

What complicated matters is the presence of Zone Alarm on both machines. I suspect that somewhere in the config of Zone Alarm I could be blocking the local network; but even turning Zone Alarm off made no difference tonight. That's when I decided to chuck it in and update the site from Milly by putting an extension on the (steampowered) modem cord and plugging into the voice line.

Be aware: I'm going to mirror the site on my new ISP (when I can get DSL back!) and then get them to change the DNS entries. This will be over the next day or so -- so if you can't get the site up, you've been caught in the crack between. As both sites will be mirrored, you *shouldn't* notice any difference. Email to me should be OK as I'll be checking both ISPs. The old site will eventually be reduced in size as a basic account only has 1 MB; I'll probably have a point of presence there anyway, with a re-director. The new site will be hosted in NZ, so overseas viewers may find slower page times.

Apart from these fun and games, it's been kids as usual. Joan went off to a coffee morning with the ladies living in our end of the street; good neighbour relations, as some of them are young mums with small children.

Friday, March 16, 2001

Well, Sissy is heavily festooned with chicken entrails to propitiate the Great God TCP/IP -- and it still can't see the Internet. My guru rang late afternoon to apologise for his non-appearance, due to four catastrophes elsewhere in Rotorua. In giving him the situation by phone, he advised restoring NetBEUI to re-enable File & Printer sharing. Now I had read elsewhere that where TCP/IP was used in a network, that NetBEUI should be removed. As reported above, I messed about with the TCP/IP settings and the DHCP server until everything shut down. Had I but known .... when the ADSL was working OK on both machines, I could have just reinstalled Net BEUI to get file sharing back. Oh well, the best experience is bought dearly, as they say.

I drove Joan over to Aorangi School at 2.30 to meet up with Joanna and Ethan, returned from their five day camp. My daughter Sue advised me tonight that I haven't mentioned anything about the camp. Well, the children at the school go to three camps over the years they attend the school. I should mention that Aorangi is classed as a "decile two" school; this is derived from the average level of parents' incomes and implies that most of these children come from homes with little cash to spare. The childrens' ethnicity is 67% Maori, so there is widespread unemployment or parents in part-time jobs. Parents are asked to pay $50 towards the cost of the trip; but when money is so tight, the school subsidises the cost by fund-raising so no child is denied a trip away because the family can't afford it.

The first trip is a few days at the beach -- great for the kids that haven't even seen the sea, much less swum in it. On the second trip, they go to Auckland (pop. 1 million) and see the city sights and do lots of museum visits and fun things. The third trip (which Ethan went on) is to a camp in the centre of the North Island on the volcanic plateau. An old school which closed down in the 60s was kept maintained, and converted into a camp centre for participating schools. My children both went in the 70s from Wanganui (remember, Ross??) so a wide area is catered for. They visit old battlegrounds, and do a 7-hour walk up Mt Tongariro, across the top and down the other side. There are hot baths to swim in as well. Joanna went as a parent helper, and also the medical orderly -- as she was a nurse before marriage. She arrived back exhausted, but Ethan said it was really, really, really, really good.

Saturday, March 17, 2001

Sapriste nurkles!! The entrails have been removed; the TCP/IP was flogged at the gratings; all is now well with the world. Simon arrived at 10.30 am, and after about an hour of configuring, we suddenly got the Nokia DSL modem up and the rest fell into place. With the possible exception of my laptop -- the PCMCIA combined modem and ethernet card (Psion Dacom) which functioned reasonably well on coax, has spat the dummy when confronted with cat-5. It did work -- sort of -- but the collision light on the DSL router/modem was flashing madly when it tried to do anything on the network. I've added it to my list of things for replacement. In the post-mortem, I think I actually had all the pieces of the puzzle -- but didn't get them together at the same time; coupled with the fact that I had turned the DHCP server off in the Nokia and then couldn't access it to correct matters.

But the rest of the network seems fine. I could open a browser window on three different computers and surf simultaneously to three different websites if I wanted to... Thank goodness that little lot is sorted. I've wasted half the week, and there's heaps to do.

Out at 5 pm for a half-hour of Aqua-jogging, which we haven't had time for this week. Then we picked up a takeaway roast meal each and had a quick tea. I've got a Camera Club photoshoot tomorrow morning early, so had better get cracking and dig out my tripod and bits'n'pieces. More on this tomorrow.

Sunday, March 18, 2001

I've been on the go all day, flat stick. Started last night by mistaking the direction to set the clocks as we come off daylight saving time. Yup, I set them one hour forward instead of back. Woke up 15 minutes after getting into bed and realised what I'd done. Set my own watch 2 hours back, then went back to sleep. Caught up all the other clocks in the morning.

Out at 8.30 for the Camera Club photo shoot. The venue was actually about 300 metres down Pukehangi Road from us -- an old farm with woolshed and outbuildings. Amazing to find this rural stuff on the very outskirts of the city -- of course it's been there for a very long time, and the housing has caught up with it. Lots of peeling paint and rough-sawn wood to shoot -- and one member arranged for his two granddaughters to come along and act as models. I'll try and get some shots on a page tomorrow.

Back home about 11 am; cup of coffee, then into town for supermarket top-up. We'll be away on Tuesday for a couple of days up north, so really didn't need to do any stocking up with food. After lunch, I had a call from Don, who needed some product shot for the Macadamia Nut website and brochure. It was a good opportunity to get out the flash bracket and off-camera flash setup for the Coolpix. More chocolate macadamia nuts in bags -- they changed the packaging from the ones I did before, so we needed new ones.

Then Russell, the local Photographic Society of NZ Councillor came round for help with picture pages to go in a submission he needs to drum up sponsors for the touring print exhibition. I scanned four slides, massaged them in Photoshop, did a page layout with captions, then printed six pages in colour on the Epson 1520, By the time I finished, it was time for tea.

After tea, I went straight back to work on a new logo for the Camera Club. I'm pleased with the final version - it has our Museum in the centre which is one of the most photographed buildings in NZ.

I also spent some time working on a counter brochure for the club: a three-fold with blurb and pictures inside, and a map and contact phone numbers on the outside. All to be approved at the next Committee meeting. The idea is to have supplies of the brochure in camera shops and anywhere else suitable.

That's about the day for me -- I'm off to bed after this is uploaded.