| Last Week | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Next Week

Monday March 26, 2001

Out of bed at the (for us) unearthly hour of 6.30 am. Showered, dressed, and at 7.10 conveyed Joan off to the hospital for her op. I returned for a leisurely breakfast and newspaper read, then up to the computer and the usual Monday cleanup and email etc.

Midmorning, I drove over to Lisa Cresc to check on that Zip drive jumper -- removed it, no change, so went into town and ordered a new one. That defunct Zip was an early IDE model, and we're not preapred to risk any zip disks being munged. I picked up another network card at the same time. I spent a little time on the phone with Wave, my new ISP; as the upload to my new website seems OK, I requested them to set up the virtual hosting and get the DNS changes under way. I'm still maintaining two identical sites, so my dedicated army of fans should not be discommoded in any way. I've put an indicator on the index page on the Wave site; so as soon as that starts coming up when I access icarus.gen.nz, I'll know the DNS change has taken hold.

After lunch, I started work on a competiton rule book for the camera club. The new logo I designed was accepted with great enthusiasm. so we will be using it on all club stuff from now on. Rang Joan at the hospital at 4 pm and found her awake and chirpy, with little discomfort. This wasn't as big a job as the one she had done on the sinuses four years ago.

Heated up a plate of cooked mince etc left for me in the fridge for tea, watched TV for the news, and went over to the hospital at 7 pm, bearing an email printout from an old friend which ran to three pages. Sat and read that to her, then returned home as Coro had started (she has a TV on a cantilevered arm). I'm off to bed shortly, feeling yawny after that early start to the day.

Tuesday, March 27, 2001

The phone rang during breakfast; Madame had been given the OK to leave hospital and was duly collected forthwith. She has not had any great discomfort, but was still feeling the after-effects of the medication. So she had a lazy day on the sofa, reading and watching TV while I made cups of tea -- in between rushing out doing things.

I confirmed that the site change to the new ISP has taken, but had to spend time with their support engineer as my emails are still going to the old ISP and are not yet aliased to the new one. I haven't checked tonight yet, but hope it's been done; at the moment I'm checking seven different accounts. I spent some time setting up Ventura and typing in copy for the new Camera Club Rule Book for competitions

After lunch, I confirmed by phone that the new Zip drive had arrived and drove into town to collect it. Back to Lisa Cresc to install it, all is now OK. I installed the network card in the old gear, but in the time I had available, failed to get the two boxes talking. I made up a simple crossover cable as per instructions. The old box is running Win95a; I wonder whether the networking stuff is not robust enough to sustain the connection -- both NICs are 100s but should be able to go down to 10? More on that tomorrow. I also have to install the modem drivers in the new box and get that set up on a dialup connection.

Back at home in time to take Ethan for another lesson in BASIC. We had a great time working out how to send an asterisk round the screen borders; today he learned about flags, conditional tests, and how to use the PowerBasic development window. Next lesson I'll take him through procedures and get him started on structured programming. After he left, I finished the Rule Book draft and went downstairs to put soup on for tea.

Russell from the Camera Club came in at 7.45 pm to get a poster printed for the upcoming print exhibition, and also to look over the rules. That pretty well killed the evening, so it's finish these Kronikles and off to bed.

Wednesday, March 28, 2001

Morning: it appears that my email transition was not as smooth as I thought. Anything addressed to @icarus.gen.nz was probably bounced for the last 24 hours. I think we've got it sorted now.

I spent a little time this morning on my old web site; I still get 1 MB free, so have decided to use it as a resource site for asthma information that I have on file from all ther asthma newsleters I have prepared over the years. So I did a Thompson Deep Clean™ and just left the basic image files, the index.htm page, and an asthma info index page to access the info that I'll put up later For anyone interested: the site reverts to the old URL: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~mbarkman. The new ISP limits Icarus to 5 MB, so I'll have to delete some of the old images --otherwise I'll be charged for the excess. Although that's only $1.50 per meg per month so it won't break me.

Joan spent the day on the couch in the lounge, alternately watching TV, reading, and sleeping. I got stuck into the Asthma Society newsletter and had that finished by tea time. The text is written by a retired doctor of advancing years, and he has courageously come to grips with operating his computer. That means he can email me the copy as MSWord file attachments, and thus I can cut'n'paste straight into Ventura. I use the last issue as a template, strip out the text and illustrations, change the date and go to it. I used to get his copy hand-typed, and then had to OCR it. I use Textbridge, and must say that, using the training file, I could get about 95% of the text. the rest had to be edited in.

I'd better go get the Nikon Coolpix 990 ready for the morning; if the weather is reasonable, I have to go out and shoot the process of tree pruning. More on this after I've taken the pix.

Thursday, March 29, 2001

The day dawned with overcast and hints of drizzle. I rang our forest client and left a message to defer the photoshoot as I needed sun. Slipped up to the office to check email and had NO INTERNET CONNECTION... WTF?? I soon found I couldn't ping out; rang up Wave's support desk and we eventually tracked the problem to their old, shonky DNS server -- which had been replaced -- but which they had left running to service clients with the old IP addresses. After I changed my DNS address, the DSL burst into life.

About this time, the sky cleared and the sun came out. I rang the client and drove straight to their office at the head of Lake Rotorua. We drove (in their 4-wheel-drive Subaru) out about 17 km or so to a farm where the pruning gang was working. we bumped over paddocks with a grazing deer herd, then up into the hilly bits on a very rough farm track and through the pine plantation. By now, the cloud had closed in again, to the extent I donned my parka against the spits of rain, trying to keep the camera dry. I shot a bunch of shots in indifferent light as insurance shots in case rain did set it; however it suddenly cleared for a useful period, and I repeated the shots with sunlight helping the modelling. We bumped back up the rough track; I was on gate duty and must have got out of car, opened gate, closed gate, got back into car about 12 times.

Back to their office by 1.15 pm and went home for a delayed lunch. I was settling in to finish the Asthma Society newsletter, when Don shot a file through by email for me to print in a hurry. This was a proof of labelling for a drink made from honey and deer velvet -- much prized by Japanese and Koreans for its invigorating properties. This had to be in the mail for Japan by the end of the day, so I finished the print and took it straight into Don. He then handed another job to me: a new client, who is a Kiwi living in Japan, is the Japanese representative of a chain of language schools in NZ. We are keenly sought-after for English language training -- not the least because of our weak dollar, but also because of general excellence. Anyway, this client has a website mostly in English, and he needs to have a parallel site totally in Japanese done in two weeks. As it happens, we do have a local Japanese man who does out translations -- but it turns out he is booked for a holiday trip to Australia on April 6th, so the deadline is very tight.

My job this evening, has been to display and save every page of the existing site using IE. After that, I have been consolidating the mess of duplicated files which resulted. This was not the best way of doing it -- there are site grabbing programs which are more efficient, but I haven't got time to find and evaluate them. Anyway, a couple of hours work later and I've made a big dent in the work. Unfortunately, the original designer used frames, an animated heading, and dinky nav bars with changing images on mouseover. Equally unfortunately, IE didn't save any of these mouseover images, so I have to devise a way of extracting them from the site.

Life sure isn't slow and tedious, that's for sure....

Friday, March 30, 2001

Nice sunny morning, so after checking mail and some daynoters, I phoned the forestry client and set up the final photoshoot. I again drove to Ngongotaha at the head of the lake, parked the car at their office, and was transported off about 15 km to another farm. This had a block of mature trees, and was owned by a family member of one of the partners, so they had access. My brief this time was to take some shots of the two principals with a map and photo on the bonnet of the car with the trees as a backdrop.

This shoot went well, and we had a mob of cattle as interested spectators. They are most inquisitive, but kept their distance. Back to their office, and into the car and home for lunch. I transferred the images to my hard drive, and found that the total pix shot for this client is in excess of 300. This is the beauty of the digital camera: you are encouraged to take heaps of shots and don't have to consider the processing charge. And I can just dump the images onto a CDRom and give it to them for looking at. Think of the cost of two sets of 300 prints saved.

Don dropped another problem on me after lunch: the printer with whom we maintain a close liason, had received some CDRoms with a print job. Unfortunately, they had been prepared on a Mac and he had trouble opening the files. This we were able to do for him -- Adobe InDesign seems to open most of that stuff OK. But one CD had filenames with a forward slash in the middle, and this produced a file read error every time we tried to copy them. In the past, we had received similar files on a Zip disk, and were able to use a disk editor to go into the directory and overwrite the offending character. But we can't DO that on a CDRom. Any suggestions that will enable us to copy the files off will be gratefully received. I sent a 'help' request to the Daynotes backchannel -- but it bounced, so Tom must have removed my address from the mailer after getting some bounces during my transition between ISPs.

Finished the Asthma Society newsletter after TV time, and printed a proof off to send to the author for checking. And that's today finished with...

Saturday, March 31, 2001

Whoops -- somehow Saturday vanished into limbo; I did a post which didn't 'take' and somehow synchronised backwards and replaced it with Friday's...

We went into town in the morning to pick up some meat from our favourite butcher -- yes we still have old-fashioned butchers' shops, but they're getting harder and harder to find these days. This is a specialty shop which prepares all sorts of dishes ready to cook, in addition to the usual meat cuts -- these are always trimmed to minimum fat.

I spent some time with the accursed Mac CDRom <hawk, spit>; tried all suggestions, and finally decided that it was only going to be read on a Mac. Don will deal with that on Monday. Then outside with the mower to deal to the grass front and back. Didn't do the edges as they were done last time. John Dominik commenting on my hoping the grass would stop growing. I informed him that we sometimes get 3 inches of grass growth in a week, and he wanted to know if we topdressed it with steroids. Certainly not, I replied, it grows fast enough without encouraging it.

That's why NZ does so well at dairying -- the average farm supports one cow per acre, and only feeds out hay for two or three months in the middle of winter. And no wintering-over in barns as they do in Europe and UK.

Sunday, April 1, 2001

This morning I tackled Ace the laptop: installed my new PCM ethernet card (a D-Link fast ethernet card DFE-650TX for those who like to know). Carefully reconfigured ther TCP/IP settings and arrived back on the network OK. BUT then I tried to connect to the Internet - zilch. So I turned to Sissy and clicked on IE - zilch. The DSL light was going on the modem, but there wasn't anybody home. I messed about checking settings; I could ping the modem, but nothing outside it. I connected via dial-up and cleared mail etc without any problem, so it wasn't a DNS outage.

I finally left it to do other things; came past it half an hour later and clicked on Refresh -- lo and behold the page came straight up. I checked Ace again and found it was on the 'net as well. I'm suspicious that there was a glitch in the ISP somewhere, that someone quietly corrected. The bummer is that they don't have a 7-day support desk, so you can't ring up and check. I'm going to make noises at them tomorrow and find out.

After lunch I burned a couple of CDs of the Forestry shoot -- one for Don and the other for the client's reference. Also, my latest copy of PC Plus from the UK has a cover DVD with Mandrake 7.2 as a couple of iso images, so I burned them as well.

Tonight I have finished the Camera Club Competition Rulebook, and transferred a couple of articles over to my old/new asthma site. I'll have to get more of them up, and then I'll start marketing it to the search engines. You can't have too many sources of asthma education; the articles were written or edited by a retired doctor. He goes through the medical journals looking for good stuff, then abstracts from them and dumbs it down a little.

Tomorrow, daughter Sue flies up from Wellington for an overnight visit, so we're looking forward to her company.