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Monday April 2, 2001

Joanna came over early, and we all went over to the airport in drizzle to meet Sue off the plane from Wellington. We detoured through town on the way home, to pick up some absolutely delicious hot cross buns from a particular bakery, which is actually a Patisserie and does lots of French goodies. We had a good chatter over coffee and the HC buns, before I had a call from Don who relayed a request from the Forestry clients for a copy of their CDRom. I ran it out to Ngongotaha in pouring rain; they wanted it pronto as the guy who is doing the site and brochure text is returning from Australia today.

Sue spent some time on the phone to her work, sorting out a major problem with a client: the familiar IT professional groans in the middle of her 'time off ' break. She really appreciated my having a fully equipped office with DSL email, phone and fax right there. More pouring rain -- actually it's been like that all day, and quite stormy at times. Considering we are well inland and protected by high hills, that means that some other poor beggars are getting flattened and hosed down at the same time. The barometer is still dropping at 10.30 pm, so there's lots more to come yet.

Joanna took Sue off to Rebeccah's ballet class, while the rest of us got things ready for her surprise birthday party (she's 39 tomorrow). I shot out to Ngongotaha (for the second time today) to pick up a pre-ordered Chinese takeaway. Why a 15-minute car ride when there's one about 3 minutes away? They make the BEST -- and are also known to Joanna, as their daughter was at ballet with Rebeccah for a while. They always put heaps more in the dinners than normal as well.

So Sue had her pre-birthday party, with balloons, paper hats, fizzy raspberry drink, and raspberry jelly and ice cream -- a good time being had by all, especially the children. We talked for a while, until the family departed at 8 pm. Then Joan, Sue and I watched the video'd episode of The Bill, and afterwards I came upstairs to prepare this edition of the Kronikles.

Tuesday, April 3, 2001

We rose and breakfasted leisurely, as Sue didn't sleep in very late and we chattered. Joanna came in for morning coffee and we kept talking until 11 am discussing all sorts of things -- business, what Sue had been doing etc; we had plans to meet at Trelawney's garden cafe for lunch. Jo went off, and we eventually drove over to the garden centre well after 12.30. Jo and Don were already there, and we had a pleasant lunch together.

The children came after school; Ethan for his programming lesson, then the other two went off for their piano lessons. Today, I took Ethan through variable typing and we discussed procedures and passing parameters as an intro to structured programming. It's quite hard to get things down to an 11-year-old level, but if I take a little time and use plenty of analogies to things he knows about, he cottons on quickly.

For example: I described a procedure as like being on an island with a whole list of instructions to do stuff; then a bottle washes up with a message. The message contains a whole list of information. You take that information and use it according to the instructions, put the answers, if any, back in the bottle and send it off again. You can't see any other island or people, so the only contact is through that bottle. Sue's comment was that he'll have to learn a whole new way of working when I eventually get him onto event-driven programming!

I drove Sue over to the plane, arriving just in time for her boarding call so it was as well we had little traffic delay. It was good to see her; we talk regularly on the phone, but we always seem to get much more out of talking in person.

I managed to get a couple of prints fiddled with, and outputed on nice glossy paper after TV time. Also some additions to other pages -- see the home page.

Wednesday, April 4, 2001

Into the office for a giant cleanup, sort and prioritise. Received my first site log from Wave. my new ISP; found all sorts of things in it that my previous ISP didn't deliver. I was intrigued with the list of search terms that had been used in search engines to end up on my site. The most unbelievable was "inflatable bridges". Now that must have linked on a 'bridge' keyword -- because I can't remember ever writing about anything inflatable ;-] (Actually we were just good friends, but her cover was blown.)

Organised myself for the Camera Club meeting tonight, gathered all the stuff together. I never got time to mount the prints I did last night, but they're not going out-of-town, so the competition secretary will accept them by Friday. Don dropped a whole lot of site work in to me; we maintain a site for a local charitable trust. They put out a (paper) newsletter, and we take the text and drop it into their web site as an archive. It's dead easy, as all I have to do is copy previous pages as a template, clean out the content, and drop the text in as supplied. The photos are supplied as well, but of course have to be re-sized and cut down to 72 dpi for the web.

Off to Camera Club at 7.15 pm, taking Anita our across-the-road neighbour who is very interested in photography. She came along for a couple of visits last year, but found the demands of a toddler and older girl was overpowering her time for photo-taking. In the mean time, she bought herself a decent Canon SLR and has been taking a steady flow of pix; mostly of the children, but a lot of scenic stuff as well. We hope to attract a lot more members like her to build up membership.

I spoke for some time to members about the new competition rule concepts, and how we hoped to lift the standards up from an average club level, to produce work that has some chance of being accepted at national level. I then gave my assessment of the prints and slides submitted for competition last month. We had a very relaxed time, and I welcomed Life in NZ from the floor. They all agreed that my assessment was tough but fair, as I gave reasons for every element of criticism. I think it showed them just how far they have to go to get up to a good standard. Of course, Russell and I have to deliver as well, now -- and lead from the front for a while!

Thursday, April 5, 2001

A very curious problem cropped up this morning: I had a phone call from the forestry client about their CDRom of images. It seemed that there was only one of four images of the CEO showing on the CD. Now they were in the first block of images I put on the CD, and there were two further additions. My theory is that, in the process of re-opening the CDRom, writing the new images, then writing the table of contents, the old TOCs were not picked up completely to be rewritten after the last burn. I *know* the images were there before, because I had looked at them. The easiest solution was to burn a new one, all in one go and drop that out to them.

Further paper-shuffling in the office, interrupted by an email from Don with a Coreldraw file he needed to have printed. I did this, and was able to hand it over to Jo to take into town. We went out after lunch to drop the CD out to Ngongotaha, then back into town to do a supermarket run. BTW, another Daynoter has passed a comment about the interesting place names I mention. All of course are Maori; and for your edification I will give some of the street names in the central business district: Amohia Street, Tutanekai Street, Hinemoa Street, Pukuatua Street, Haupapa Street, Hinemaru Street, Amohau Street. Most of these are named after various notables in the local Maori world, many pre-European. I still get some of then confused — and I've been here for four years now.

Had a break from the office grind, to work on the Charitable Trust's newsletter, mentioned above. The publication was prepared in Coreldraw, so all I had to do was set up the pages, and cut'n'paste the text. The images had to be extracted, picked up in Photoshop, converted to RGB from CMYK and prepared for web use. I suppose I could have jumped from Draw into Photopaint and done it there, but Photoshop 6 has all the web goodies.

I've been put onto a NZ listserver for ADSL topics; there's been about a dozen posts so far, and this will prove very useful. I can also ask stupid questions on it if I need to.

Friday, April 6, 2001

Joan went off to town with Joanna, and left me to do the emails and daynoters -- and get some work done. The ADSL listserv is producing some interesting posts; it's obvious that I'm not the only one who has been having the odd break in service. I must admit I haven't had any more interruptions this week.

Broke at 2.10 pm to go over to Aorangi School to watch Eli play his piano piece for his class. The school music teacher is also his private teacher; she takes quite a few of the school pupils. He did quite well, but is aware that he could do much better if he practised at home more <g>. This is the last day of term, and we were presented the other night with the workbooks from the two boys. This now substitutes for written term reports -- you can at least see samples of all the different written and drawing activity that goes on. There are parent-teacher interviews as well, of course. It turns out that Ethan and one or two others have practically finished the year's maths syllabus, and the teacher is in a bit of a spot knowing what to do with them. That's one of the reasons I'm taking Ethan for some computer programming; he needs extending a lot more.

Took Joan into town for her appointment with the nose surgeon, who cleaned out post-op debris and generally made breathing much more comfortable. Picked up Rebeccah from the movies at 3.45 pm -- she finished the term yesterday -- and took her home. I have been spending a little time after tea putting a couple more photos on my Coolpix page and tidying up some pages. Now I think I'll go and look at a Babylon 5 movie video (got a set of 6 in a sale).

Saturday, April 7, 2001

Whoops ... this is a late post, meaning Sunday morning instead of Saturday night. Somehow I finished what I was doing on the computer last night, shut down and went to bed -- and clean forgot to update the Kronikles.

So: Joan vanished into town wih Joanna to do some shopping in the morning while I read daynotes and email. After lunch, we went outside to catch up with some garden things. My services were required to hammer rows of galvanised nails into the side fence and wire them up for the young apple tree. The book tells me this is technically known as an espalier; actually the tree was a bit mature when we bought it, so it has had to have a big prune. We have to train a leader out to each side along the wire next spring. I must do a garden pix series -- it's about time I took the Autumn page.

An interesting doco on TV has finally screened -- a re-creation of the Colditz castle prison in WW II (the rest of the world probably saw it ages ago; NZ is at the bottom of the TV food chain). Some of the original prisoners -- in their 80s -- walked about and showed us where their tunnels and escapes had taken place. Some athletic young men then opened up the sealed and forgotten places and recreated the original workings. I still have in my library somewhere, the original books -- both Allied and German -- that were written after the war. Another episode next week.

Sunday, April 8, 2001

A quiet day today. I mounted up a couple of prints to put into the Camera Club competition, and we drove over to the other side of the lake to deliver them to the competition secretary. Joan had some time in the garden, and assembled a row of nine pumpkins in the process of chopping out the pumpkin patch at the rear of the section.

We both had a quiet afternoon catching up on some reading. Sausages for tea; regular Kronikle readers will recall that I have lamented the dearth of tasty sausages in NZ in general -- such as one finds in the UK. Well, we were recommended to a small butcher's shop and remembered to call in on the way past. The butcher is a Pom, and his sausages are excellent; so we will be stocking up there in the future.

My reply to an email from Keith.

Morning Kiwi, Like being dominated do you?

I have regular appointments with Mistress Spanky.

There was I reading our daily paper, The Daily Mail

aaah - a slip of the keyboard there, I think that should be The Daily Male

on Friday when I comes across this article with the heading "Country Ruled by Women" which now confirms NZ as the land without a glass ceiling as yet another woman has been appointed to one of the country's top jobs- position of governor general. Its says its a nation run by females. Apparently, women make up more than 40 per cent of the MPs. Can I have a quote from you on this?

Unfortunately true. Even the Chief Justice is female. I am uncertain as to how this situation can be changed, as I am of the wrong sex to obtain positive action.