The Icarus Kronikles - Mike Barkman

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

Monday April 9, 2001

Another beautiful Autumn day; chilly (12 degC) to start, then warm and sunny for the rest. Joan went straight outside after breakfast to continue her cleanup, while I settled down to tidy up my bank statements into Quicken. Joanna brought the boys over in the mid-morning, as they had volunteered to 'help Gran in the garden'. I was reminded of the old saying "one boy is one boy; two boys are half a boy; three boys are no boy at all." [I think that sounds like Mark Twain]. In this case, the two boys skylarked all round the garden and lawn, until Ethan was banished inside. Eli then set about the helping -- he actually does enjoy the garden and did manage a useful hour's work.

We dropped the boys back home before lunch, picked up our magazines from the bookseller, and called into the supermarket for a top-up. After lunch I continued on with financial matters, then had a break by updating the garden pages on the website, also the usual Monday shuffling of files into archives etc.

After TV time tonight, I finished updating the pages, checked links, and did a massive site synchronise -- Dreamweaver makes this such an easy process. And things go fast with DSL <g>

Oh yes -- a warm welcome for another new Daynoter: Mat Lemmings. I've been reading his posts for a couple of weeks, and he is entertaining and informative. Takes pikshers too. Arohanui Mat -- keep the pages going.

Tuesday, April 10, 2001

A cloudy day; the weatherman tonight informed us that there is a tropical cyclone on the way for Easter, and the barometer has been dropping steadily all day. Joan was outside smartly again to get some gardening done before the rain comes. I cleared the emails and looked at some daynotes before joining her outside for lawn mowing. The grass wasn't too long, so the mowing went through smartly.

I spent time on book work in the afternoon; most of the pre-tax stuff is done for the two trusts and my late wife's estate. Just got to get my own end-of-year stuff attended too, now. I'll be pleased when it's all out of the way -- there's a lot of other stuff needs doing. Genealogy in particular; I need to get some Barkman family work done to take over to London with me and discuss with Kay.

Don dropped in a zip disk with a brochure proof to print; it's for the macadamia nut people. Readers will remember I took a bunch of product shots earlier in the year, and some of them have now been used. It's nice to see your work come up in print, as it were. I've been re-reading the Nikon Coolpix 990 manual again -- my routine for a new camera is to read through the manual thoroughly, then put it aside and go and take lots of pix. Then go back to the manual and find out the things you had forgotten to do -- or couldn't remember how to. I also prepare a couple of 5 x 3 file cards with the essential details written down with a fine ballpoint. Those cards stay in the camera bag, and work as memory ticklers when you're out in the field and can't remember something.

Wednesday, April 11, 2001

Joan up early, and away with Joanna and Rebeccah to Auckland for the day. Rebeccah needs some ballet shoes, and the others are buying winter clothes. I had another fruitful morning in the office; then Don rang in late morning to see if I could do a photoshoot at short notice. This I was pleased to do and arranged to be at the client's place at 2 pm. Polynesian Spa sends us a lot of work and pay promptly -- so they got instant attention. I spent an hour and a half there, shooting pix of their refurbished public areas and also in the massage rooms -- about 30 shots altogether.

I went back home and spent some time preparing the pix for a proof print -- eight shots per page in colour on the Epson. This chore was finished by 6 pm, and I hastened downstairs to hot up the dinner that Joan had thoughtfully left for me in the fridge.

I changed into tidy clothes and went back out at 7.30 pm to the Rotorua Convention Centre for an official function. The Camera Club is displaying the top prints from the Photographic Society of NZ's last year's competitions; and as well as that we had a presentation to make to the museum and other repositories of a very carefully conducted photoshoot that we did last November. This was undertaken at the request of a local historian, who was concerned that the archives had practically nothing to show of modern Rotorua. He worked out all the choice spots, marked up a map, and secured funds from a local charitable trust to pay for the job. So we had the Mayor, various members of the trust board, some PSNZ people, and a number of club members. Drinks and nibbles, of course -- can't run these affairs without them. Back home at 9.45 pm

Thursday,April 12, 2001

The remnants of a tropical cyclone are heading for NZ, and we are in for a wet Good Friday. We drove into town in the mid-morning. I dropped the photo proofs off to the client; they liked them and wanted a CDRom cut for their use pronto. We went to the Library to change books (good idea with a wet weekend coming!); then did some pre-Easter food shopping.

After lunch, I assembled the pix images for the CD, burned it, and drove back into town with it in time for the client meeting with Don at 3 pm. Back at the computer, I checked my DSL bandwidth usage: 435 MB since March 14th. I've paid for 600 MB, so with 2 days to go I'll be well within the allowance. I can even do a little software download <g>. In fact, I just downloaded the latest Opera 5.1 and installed it; this looks much better than V4. I might use it for a while and see if it's better than IE.

Also downloaded a password database program; I keep a notebook for computer notes, and the password pages are filled. This program (Cute Password 2000) stores passwords (under password protection of course), has an icon in the tray, and after activation you just drag'n'drop the username and password into the application or browser field. But I'll still keep them written down; never trust a bloody computer, that's my motto. Like mail programs that don't have any facility to print out your address list, and/or store the data in proprietory format that's unreadable. At least Eudora keeps its data in plain text files; you can always get at them with a text editor.

The barometer is still dropping at a serious rate; at the moment it's 1008 millibars -- or HektoPascals as we're supposed to call them these days. I keep it normalised to sea level, because we're up over 300 metres in Rotorua.

Friday, April 13, 2001 - Good Friday

It did pour during the night off and on, but surprise! In the morning the skies cleared and the sun came out, so Cyclone Sose was a bit of a fizzer by the time it got to us. The barometer did get down to 995, and even at the moment is still only 1001 millibars; but the TV forecast was for a sunny rest of Easter.

It did look a bit threatening about 11.30 am; we wanted to go for a walk so hastened out round our quick road circuit just in case. After lunch, we drove over to Lisa Cresc to get the modem going in Lisa (the new box) and sort out why the network wasn't working. I found the modem problem was due to a crappy CDRom that took an age to deliver up all the driver components that were required. After repeated attempts, it suddenly read the CD and all was well.

The network was baffling -- after all, it was only a box-to-box crossover cat-5 cable setup. I had installed netBEUI on both machines and all seemed well -- but then thought to check the hardware in Device manager and the ethernet card had the dreaded yellow exclamation showing. So I uninstalled everything, rebooted, reinstalled everything, rebooted, and that was the network sorted.

We brought Rebeccah back with us to sleep over -- she needs some R & R every now and then to recharge batteries. She settled down with Age of Empires II on Sissy, while I fired up Milly and got stuck into some Photoshop exercises from a very good book I found a couple of months ago in Auckland: Photoshop 6 Web Magic. There are some real kewl tools in 6 that I haven't come to grips with yet.

Continued after tea, but broke at 8.30 pm to watch the video on Greece which I had found in the Library. It was produced by Fodor, so was authoritative and quite well done. Gave us a good look at the various regions we'll be visiting, and plenty of people stuff as well. That's one of the things I want to concentrate on -- people shots; to which end I've got a Greek phrase book and cassette tape to try and get a little courtesy stuff sorted -- "Please may I take your photo?" "Thank you" etc. I think its very rude to thrust a camera into people's faces without some sort of approach first -- unless you can snipe from a distance with a telephoto.

Saturday, April 14, 2001

Arose leisurely -- as befits Easter Saturday -- and dealt with the Daynoters' spate of emails. Speaking of which, there is a new home page site to be on line next week; my links page has been updated accordingly. There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes turmoil which I have deliberately not been referring to. Suffice to say, it has apparently subsided and a somewhat depleted Daynotes Gang is back in business. 'Nuff said.

Joan requested some woodworking activity this mornnig, so I hauled out my trusty power saw and produced a couple of shelves for Joanna's new kitchen cabinet. They make these things with great deep shelves which do not cater for small articles, so the two 300mm deep shelves will take all the little packets and tins. We drove over and fitted them into the cabinet, which involved drilling a couple of holes for the studs that the shelves rest on. As well as this, I cut a couple of shelves for Joan's linen cupboard which was suffering from piles -- piles of sheets, piles of towels etc. Two extra half-depth shelves made all the difference for access.

Rebeccah's friend Nicole spent the afternoon and evening with us; the girls elbowed me off both computers in the office; 'Bec was back onto Age of Empires and Nicole was playing various games of Patience/Solitaire. I have a suite called Pretty Good Solitaire which has a wealth of different games -- well worth the download. I reloaded Baldur's Gate for Rebeccah when she got tired of AoE II; they stopped playing it when I was having troubles with the old video card -- games kept locking up. Thankfully, those problems now seem to be resolved. I was banished to Linley, which being on the network allowed me to surf through the DSL link.

Sunday, April 15, 2001 - Easter Sunday

[On Monday morning: Oops again -- I was working late last night, got weary, and just shut down without doing a Kronikles update]

Well, our mission for today was to put the camper-trailer to bed for the winter. Which meant getting out the water blaster and giving it a good wash; drying off; then opening it and removing foodstuffs from the cupboards. Then closing up and roping on a large waterproof cover; a two-person job -- particularly if there's a breeze. That done, we did some more chores before going over to Lisa Cresc for a late Sunday Roast with Joanna and Don. She had also prepared a disgustingly unhealthy custard trifle confection [it was more than just pudding] from Delia Smith, which maxed us all out. Took Rebeccah home, and came back with Ethan for his turn on the sleepover bit.

Ethan was delighted to see Baldur's Gate again and only came up for air now and then for essentials like food and drink. I have been tidying up the office and came to the pile of paper that I had gathered at the Johnston family get-together in February. I fired up Family Tree Maker and entered all the additions and corrections. Then opened Corel Ventura with the draft narrative version that I had distributed at the get-together, and repeated the work. Well, mostly -- as I said above, I started going cross-eyed about 11.30 pm and jacked it in. Not much more to do, though, and I'll get another draft done for proof-reading. Ventura does a very good job of publishing a complex document in HTML -- even copes with multiple indexes very elegantly -- so it will be on the site as well. I actually have a version there already, but as it was only preliminary, I didn't link it.

Damn ... for some unknown reason Milly is not connecting to the network, and hence not to the router. I'll have to send this via steam-powered modem.