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Monday July 16, 2001

Joan off with Joanna into town -- again -- on mysterious shopping errands. Actually, the truth is that the kids are back at school for the first day of the term -- so mothers breathe a sigh of relief and seek retail therapy to revive their jaded nerves. I worked at preparing some involved replies to emails, and set off in the car myself at 11.30. I had cream to pick up from the pharmacy, and stuff to post which I did at the main Post Shop in town. (Yes, you overseas readers, we haven't had post offices for years -- not since the Government privatised the postal service). The ladies joined me for lunch, after which I left them to it and drove back home.

Worked on the Asthma Society's newsletter during the afternoon. I get the text sent to me by email these days -- much easier than when the text was rather crudely typed on an old typewriter. I used to OCR each page; but I have to say that the old Textbridge did a great job of recognising letters -- I used to save the training data, so it knew what the 'e' was when its centre was filled with black. I'll extract some of the copy and post it on my old site, which is now a repository for asthma info.

It being school time again, we're back to grandchildren coming and going at various times of the week after school. Tomorrow, I'll have Ethan -- I've promised to get him back onto programming lessons; he hasn't had any since before we went away. Unfortunately, his work files are on the drive which I took out of the box that went to Don's office. That means I'll have to recreate what I can remember of what we were doing. Fortunately, I was writing stuff in a workbook for him, so I do at least know what we were doing.

Tuesday, July 17, 2001

Another wet and unpleasant day; this unsettled weather is forecast to be with us for the rest of the week -- at least it's not too cold. Joanna collected Joan and took her back home; they spent the morning disassembling Eli's old bed from the upstairs bedroom and preparing for me to finish the job tomorrow morning. I spent the morning on the ever-present bank statements and checking my Visa statement.

I was just getting back to the computer after lunch, when my mobile gets a text message from Joan's neice Deirdre. She is working in the area (she is a manufacturers' representative) and is under standing invitation to stay when requiring a bed. I then finished off the Asthma Society newsletter, which I prepare in Ventura.

Later in the afternoon, I had Ethan for his programming lesson -- and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly he came up to speed during revision of what I had covered to date, considering the couple of months since his last lesson. We were able to attempt some new work: breaking a program down into stand-alone subs called from a main program.

I even managed to get the idea of passing parameters to a subroutine, by using the analogy of his mother asking him to set the table. "In effect," I said, "your mother is calling the subroutine 'Ethan' and passing it the parameter 'set the table'. You execute your internal instructions: get the place mats, find the cutlery and lay it out etc. Then, when it's all done, you go to your mother and say 'Finished'. That's what a stand-alone subroutine or function does." So we started to rewrite our program which prints asterisks to the screen. More next week.

Deirdre showed up about 5.30 pm and I went out for Chinese takeaways. Joan always enjoys Deirdre's company, and they have been having a good natter all evening. I've printed the proof of the newsletter and got it ready for posting in the morning.

Wednesday, July 18, 2001

We woke up to steady rain, which broke to intermittent showers later in the day. Over to Lisa Crescent after breakfast, to tackle moving Eli's bed. I took the last of the bed supports off the wall with a crowbar, and carried the parts downstairs to the new bedroom. The boys are in a converted basement carport, so I had trouble with walls and floor not being really square. In addition, the corner of the room had a distinct bulge from top to bottom -- Joan told me that the support was actually a round post that had been built in. That caused all sorts of problems: the bed head support, which should have nailed onto the wall, had to be packed out so it could clear the bulge. The far ends of the centre supports had to be shaped to fit the irregular wall and floor. However, with a bit of cut-and-fit, it all went together, and I cut down the bed head of the other bed and screwed it into place. Then the bed foot end was screwed on, and it was finished.

Back home via the butcher to pick up meat for dinner, and a rest before tackling more office work. Deirdre came back after a reasonably successful sales day, and Joan cooked up some braised steak and a Greek green bean and tomato dish. Afterwards, I had to go out to a Camera Club committee meeting, where we discussed the success of our campaign to revitalise the club competitions. The number of monthly entries has risen dramatically, and the presentation quality is greatly improved.

I have volunteered to organise a field outing for September, suggesting a 'progressive photo shoot' using disposable cameras -- driving to several locations in turn, taking photos, collecting the cameras and having the results processed during the afternoon, and meeting for a dinner together to view the results. Best set of shots to receive a small prize.

Thursday,July 19, 2001

Dierdre vanished off on her day's selling trip, and we got on with some chores. Don brought in a couple of prints to scan. I have been considering a new inkjet printer for some time, as the 1520 is 3 years old. I did some web research and looked through the computer mags on hand, and decided to order an Epson 1290 -- this should be here tomorrow. I looked at mail and daynotes, then suddenly it was lunchtime.

I had Russell, our resident Photographic Society of New Zealand counsellor, come over at 2 pm with some tricky DTP to do. He wanted a completely new poster prepared for the National Touring Exhibition, which is a selection from the top prints winning awards at the NZ national competition this year. He wanted to use a background from one of his own prints -- a very nice study of an eye looking out through white draped fabric. Unfortunately, this was far too big to fit onto my A4 scanner, so I resorted to my Coolpix 990 set to 'fine' resolution. The result was excellent, apart from some distortion of the border -- the zoom lens in the 990 is not exactly a flat-field macro <grin>. I experimented with the distortion correction facilities built into Photoshop, and quickly had the pic looking normal.

We built up the poster in Coreldraw, added the PSNZ logo and appropriate text, and did an A4 proof -- this looked good, but I reserve judgment until we do a full-size A3. (when the new printer arrives). I have another tricky job to do, updating the rough job I did in May on a suitable logo for the PSNZ's 50th anniversary year. The logo is a composite of the first logo from 1950, and the present one. I hadn't had a good printed copy to scan, and the lettering on both looked as if it had been hand-drawn, or put together with Letraset as was the practice then.

After tea, I got back onto it, and decided that the only way I was going to get a crisp result -- short of completely redoing the logos -- was to edit the bitmap directly. So I've put about three hours in tonight, carefully and laboriously cleaning up each letter with eraser and brush. It's pro bono work, of course -- after all, I am a PSNZ member anyway. I suppose my reward will come in looking at the result...

Friday, July 20, 2001

A wet start to the day, which fortunately eased later in the morning. We drove over to our hairdresser, as I needed a trim (third hair from the left today, please...). Then into town, where I was gratified to find that my new Epson 1290 printer had just arrived by courier at my friendly computer pusher. More of that later...

One of my duties as a trustee of my sister-in-law's trust, is to invest surplus funds. We had just been offered a piece of some choice real estate in Australia, from a very switched-on property syndicate who had some portion of an entitlement that had not been taken up. So I was back into town with the application to the trust's bank, to get a bank draft in Australian dollars. I watched in amusement, while my friendly banker lady wrestled with the bank software and kept getting locked out of entry fields on the screen because she hadn't got some other one right. And the error messages were the usual cryptic sort that TOLD you there was a error of some sort -- but not what it was, nor what was needed. The software was character-based, so it was probably some old mainframe stuff, written before programmers got a bit more enlightened.

Then back home, to assemble the new printer and find that it requires some reorganisation in the office. The old Epson 1520 sat under a shelf and was fed from the front. The new one is fed from a slot in the top rear, so I'm going to have to put the scanner under the shelf and the printer on top. The scanner can be pulled forward to let the lid rise up; I don't use it that much these days, now so much of what we use comes straight out of the digital camera.

Rebeccah and Caroline came in after tea, to do the practical observing part of their telescope project. I checked the sky before they came, and the cloud had rolled away -- but the air was frosty and there was a fair haze about. I would have liked them to look at the moon -- but new moon was today, and there won't be much to see of it for a week or so. So we looked for Mars, as it was the only planet conveniently visible at 8 pm. I had earlier downloaded an excellent sky map program demo: Sky Map Pro v7.

After I had plugged in our latitude and longitude, we did a map for 8 pm and printed it out. The girls were excited to see Mars was right in the middle of Scorpio as indicated. I had set up their telescope on the tallest of my camera tripods, and we tried to get Mars lined up. Unfortunately, it was pretty well on the zenith -- which made it hard to get one's neck bent back far enough. But they managed to see the rather fuzzy blob through it, and that was the main thing. I then brought out the 8cm reflector scope that I reassembled some months ago. With that, we got a good view of Mars as a disc rather than as a point of light like the stars. Click on the picture for a bigger one.

After they went home, I worked on the pix that I had taken during the telescope making, and printed them out on the new printer. Awesome results: the prints were sharp, crisp, and colourful. I'm going to print up an A3+ biggie over the weekend.

Saturday, July 21, 2001

Joan didn't have a very good night -- she has been on antibiotic for a couple of weeks, which has finally upset her tummy. She got up in the small hours and propped herself up on the big couch in the lounge, then looks at all the trashy TV that they show in the early morning.

Today was office cleanup day: specifically to get the new Epson 1290 printer into place. This also entailed a complete vacuum and wash desktop and gear -- the cooking oils from downstairs leave a sticky coating over everything which eventually attracts dust. I only do this Thompson Deep Clean® about twice a year...

I fired up Photoshop and spent another hour on the fuzzy logo mentioned on Thursday, then set to work looking at my trip photos to select something to print. In the Santorini folder, I found a couple of good shots, worked them up a little and printed them on A4 premium glossy paper. Wow! The results were far ahead of my elderly (well, 3 years old!) 1520 printer which has now gone into Don's office in town. This is the result of three more years of Epson R & D, and even the printer noise is so much quieter. The printing speed hasn't improved, though; an A4 must have taken 5 minutes to print at maxumum printer resolution. I'll do some tests to see what difference is discernable from dropping down to 720 from 1440 dpi. It did show up on the 1520; particularly on glossy paper, but didn't make a lot of difference on matt -- probably due to ink wicking in the paper.

I'm now totally satisfied that the combination of Nikon Coolpix 990 and Epson 1290 printer will produce work to any standard that I might reasonably require. Ok, you can always spend an extra bale of money and get something better -- but when you look at bangs for buck, this combination would be hard to beat.

Sunday, July 22, 2001

A cold, grey morning; wet after early morning rain, but no more during the day. We had a leisurely breakfast (Joan had a much better sleep during the night) and went out for a grocery shop in the late morning, after I had checked emails etc. On the way I stopped in at The Warehouse to pick up an aluminium case which was on special. I decided that it would be ideal for the Nikon Coolpix 990 and its various attachments; the bumbag I had been using doesn't hold things like the flash bracket. It has proved to be ideal, and takes everything I might need on a shoot.

I have been printing some more Greece shots; the priest is awesome in A3+ size. I did the harbour as A4 -- looks good.

Don, Rebeccah and Carolyn came over in the mid-afternoon to finish the telescope project display. They had worked long hours yesterday writing material and typing it into CorelDraw -- big panels of text and astronomical photos. It took until 6 pm to get it all finished, including a last-minute photo of the two girls standing in front of the display. I printed this up, and it went on an empty spot on the board, with their names as a caption. They all went off, totally wiped, but with a well-presented science project -- even if the observation was a bit curtailed by a new moon and bad weather.

I spent a little time after tea writing letters for the Clay estate, then moved onto these Kronikles before bed.