For new readers: welcome to my day journal — of sundry activities and rambling thoughts. There's a mixture of techie stuff and personal doings, so just read the bits you're interested in ;-] You'll find previous Kronikles in the ARCHIVE if you want to catch up.

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Monday July 23, 2001

A fine morning, now that some high-pressure air is moving onto the country. Our snowfields have benefited from the snow dump last week and in the weekend -- all the skiers will be gloating. More office work this morning.

I received the corrected proofs of the asthma newsletter in the mail, so was able to finish it off and post the photocopy masters away. My asthma site badly needed some work on it -- this is the site on my previous ISP, and was rather hastily cobbled up from the old one after I moved my main site in March. I cut'n'pasted some of the articles from the current newsletter and tidied up the home page a bit. I realised I hadn't even put new metatags in the code; so made the alterations and set about marketing the site to Google, Alta Vista et al. It's been getting 5 or 6 visitors a week, but there's good info to be found there (and more to come) and needs a little more exposure.

Jo left the boys with us while Rebeccah had her ballet lesson. She picks them up again after they've had tea with us. As usual, there was some competition to have turns on the computer they're allowed to use (not my graphics work one, I add). I suppose I'll have to cobble up another old box to house Eli's DOS games -- then they can have one each and don't fight.<g>

Tuesday, July 24, 2001

A cracker frost this morning -- air temperature was -2.5 degC, which means the grass temp was probably nearer -5. But the sun was out, and the mid-afternoon temperature was 10 degC. Ethan had a day off school today, and Joanna dropped him off here while she had her hair done. He is currently absorbed in an old MS product -- 3-D Movie Maker for kids. This is a surprisingly sophisticated program; the kids have wide choices of scenery, rooms, characters etc, and there are libraries of dialogue and sound effects. Ethan gets a story line going, and moves the characters step by step through the sets, plugs in dialogue and effects (mostly violent explosions), puts in background music, and then plays the whole thing back. Wonderful for children with imagination.

A trip into town after lunch to change library books, then a call into a joinery company for Joan to have a look at sliding window designs. She wants the 'conservatory window' thing in the kitchen removed, and replaced with a more conventional window. She finds (being vertically challenged) that there is no way she can reach over the sink bench then about 2 feet into this window to clean it. Even I have to stand on a hop-up to clean the inside of the glass. And in the summer, there is a constant accumulation of dead flies and wasps to be cleaned out. I don't know why people ever put these things in; the trouble is, they see them in some 'Home & Garden" magazine and think they're very contemporary -- but totally fail to consider the practicalities.

Ethan returned at 4 pm while Eli went for his piano lesson, and we continued with his programming tuition. Today I went back over the two procedures we worked out last week, and I copied them for him to modify. This took much more brain work than just watching me do it, so he struggled for a bit until he saw what was needed. Great training.

Wednesday, July 25, 2001

More investment work this morning. Got to keep on top of the stuff, otherwise it gets on top of *you*. Out after lunch to pick up a prescription for Joan, collect Rebeccah's ballet gear, then off to her school to view the science fair exhibits.

Rebeccah's effort was tagged "Commendation for Display"; there were a number of others with Excellence awards. But it appears that Rebeccah's science teacher was supposed to hand out guidelines for the work -- and the class didn't get it. So Rebeccah and Carolyn were not told that that they were supposed to have a hypothesis about something and test it. Consequently, the work they did on the telescope was marked for presentation and very little for content. I think some harsh words are to be directed at this teacher, who treated the whole thing so casually and gave no help and guidance. But I do not ascribe to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence, as the saying goes.

We took Rebeccah to her ballet class; I was gratified at the improvement in her work since I last saw her -- which was at the end of year concert. Six months of muscle-building and hard work are paying off. The ballet class was followed immediately by interpretive (modern) dance; we watched that for a while, but it was getting upwards of tea time so we left them to it. Actually, she goes straight from that to an hour of Aikido training -- her ballet training has given her the body control which makes the Aikido training relatively easy.

Thursday, July 26, 2001

Thursday here already, and most of the week gone. Sue mails me with a SirCam virus alert, as it has just gone through her network. Haven't had any suspicious mails myself, although I check with Don and find he has had a batch on the home computer. The kids connect to some shonky sites after school, so I'm not surprised -- Don says he finds all sorts of stuff self-installed in Favourites and other places.

More work of the PSNZ anniversary logo this afternoon; it's now all cleaned up and looking good. All I have to do now is colour it white and place it on a royal blue blob, which is supposed to be a seal. I spent some time after downloading the latest version of Turbonotes ( a good New Zealand product, BTW) in configuring it for TCP/IP transfer of notes between the two computers permanently on my network. It refused to send notes; I muttered nasty things about software, but finally found the cat5 cable plug had worked itself loose from the NIC. Pushed that in, and everything worked fine. This is a very useful feature, as I can cut'n'paste into a note from a Web page, then zap it across to Milly for putting into my web page. I've been using Notepad and saving across onto a folder in Milly, so this will be much faster.

Even more interesting: I have downloaded a special server from their site which will enable me to send notes direct to Don in town. As the notes can have a file attachment, this might be a quick way of sending work files back and forward, rather than sending email and going through two servers. I'll report back on this one, after I've installed it on his gear.

Our friendly furniture maker turned up after lunch with the cabinet to go above the downstairs vanity wash basin. I had put up a plastic cabinet there for medicines and plasters, but it was a pain to slide open. Joan decided a painted set of small drawers with shelves above would be better; we moved all the medical stuff into the drawers, and she put up a small collection of wooden bears that have come as family heirlooms. OK, I know I should have taken a photo -- but it's 11 pm and I'mm off to bed. Do it tomorrow...

Friday, July 27, 2001

Joan went off into town with Joanna. The morning for me was 'devoured by locusts' -- I did a lot, but afterwards couldn't see any trace of what I'd done. Some of it was hard disk housekeeping; these digital cameras sneak bundles of megabytes onto your drives and then I start getting 'disk full' warnings. A spot of CDRom writing, then deletion of the files helps a lot.

I finished the PSNZ logo -- after I phoned Don to find out how to make a black bitmap into a white one with a transparent background. If you're interested, it's done in CorelDraw and involves making the outline white, and removing the fill completely. Just a couple of clicks did it; Don said he stumbled on this technique by accident, and it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. Russell came in later in the afternoon to pick up the PSNZ logo sticker file, and was pleased with the result.

This evening, I've been busy with both web sites -- changing my Google search to a version which searches the site as well as the web. I thought of putting a separate site search on, but the combined one is more compact. A bit of panel-beating made it suitable for the asthma site as well.

Saturday, July 28, 2001

After breakfast, Joan had me outside helping her with sundry garden things, like re-potting a large plant that lives by the front door. She also needed help with her new strawberry pot -- this has apertures cut in the sides with the lower lip pulled out, a bit like miniature balconies -- where the strawberry plants hang out. She wanted me to make a watering mechanism for the pot: I started with a piece of 80 mm plastic pipe, about 300 mm long. I found that the cap of a paint spray can fitted neatly over one end; cemented that in place, then drilled small holes in a spiral up the pipe. This was buried in the pot; and the idea is that you fill the pipe with water, which slowly dribbles into the surrounding soil to water the strawberries. I did a few more 'helping' jobs like making up a new piece of hose pipe and fittings for both front and back taps.

After lunch, I got stuck into my Icarus site and firstly removed all the copied newspaper articles in the archives. I'm more aware of copyright implications, now the site has become more popular -- and Google in particular is dropping in with search results for all sorts of odd stuff. I then reorganised the Kronikles archives into new month folders within a year folder, for ease in finding stuff in the future. I may also rationalise some of the photo pages, too.

I then started on a project I'd had in mind ever since the site started -- to transfer the text from the daily Kronikles into narrative form. So I opened a new publication in Ventura and set to work. The cut'n'pasting was tedious, but quicker than alternatives such as stripping the HTML tags out of the code.

We went out in the late afternoon to the supermarket to do a top-up of milk and things, plus some goodies for tea. That being so, I also dug out a couple of bottles of wine; so we had a three-course meal in style -- including a nice chunk of fillet steak.

Afterwards, I watched some TV for a while before returning to the Kronikles project, and managed to get to May 7th before becoming tired. That amounts to 75 A4 pages, folks -- amazing how this daily drivel piles up....

Sunday, July 29, 2001

Thick cloud this morning, so I guess it's rain coming. Joan wanted to get another tree to fill in the large hole that has developed on our rear boundary -- due to trees and shrubs dying or removed. So we drove over to the garden centre and selected a flowering cherry; the label assures us it will eventually be 5 metres x 6 metres, so that should fill something. Of course, that's not all she gets <grin> -- a lilac tree to replace the one coming out, and some more plants.

Afterwards I help with pruning the gooseberry bushes. They had no fruit on this last summer, and the books say to beware of a blight/mite/scourge thing which attacks the little buds. So it will be chemical warfare after the rain goes; we'll probably spray the whole garden, especially the roses.

I retire to my mezzanine, and set about finishing the Kronikles text copy. The next job was to go through and prepare an index of things I might want to refer to. Ventura has awesome index facilities -- you can index to multiple levels, as well as cross-reference. You can also prepare separate indexes; in my genealogy book, I have multiple indexes for surnames, first names, wifes' maiden names etc. which can be instantly updated after page insertion or changes. Now if I'd used InDesign, I'd be up for a very expensive plug-in to do that. If Corel had put a fraction of the resources it lavished on Linux or WordPerfect into updating and promoting Ventura, it would be right up on the DTP front line -- instead of languishing in obscurity. Oh well, one can still hope....