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Monday, July 30, 2001

Joanna took Joan back to Lisa Cresc after breakfast, to tackle preparing a kitchen wall for painting -- I didn't see her back until mid-afternoon. I spent the morning on the usual email and daynoters, before tackling the week's accumulation of financial stuff.

I also rang Telecom Faults, as I was concerned that my DSL speed over the weekend was not anywhere as good as I had previously had. The Telecom DSL guru/installer duly turned up after lunch, having called in at the telephone exchange and getting a line test for faults done. All seemed in order; I check the Nokia reported speed and it was back to normal -- about 768 kbps uplink, and 1054 kbps downlink. This, of course, is not rocket speed; but remember that I am 5+ km from the exchange. Even though I have only 6 dB of noise on the line, there is 61 dB of attenuation in the long length of copper; and they generally recommend a maximum of 50 dB for Jetstream. So I am fortunate that DSL is working at all -- never mind fast. Actually, I have had remarkably few outages so far since March. And I certainly won't go back to V90 modems again...

Joan came home at 3 pm to change and collect her asthma gear, as she was booked into our pharmacy for a consultation with an asthma rep, to check her aerosol inhaling technique. Even though I am perfectly competent to advise her on this, I urged her to attend as there is always something to be learned. He had a dinky machine called a Vitalograph, which had an attached placebo inhaler with various sensors built into the mouthpiece. A few trials with this, soon showed Joan that she was triggering the aerosol a little too early. It has been apparent that Joan has been having trouble triggering the aerosol, due to arthritis in hands and joints making it awkward to hold and press down. They now have an add-on actuator mechanism called a Haleraid™, which surrounds the aerosol puffer and permits triggering by squeezing a lever with the palm of the hand. BUT, that stops the mouthpiece from fully engaging with the hole of the spacer tube, so I think I'll have to do some careful doctoring of this actuator by removing surplus plastic.

The boys came in at 4 pm while Rebeccah went to ballet; Ethan immediately set to work on a new movie. I successfully persuaded him to incorporate some different music, as I was getting tired of the same tune in every episode. After tea, I have done some more updating on this site, as well as the Asthma site.

Tuesday, July 31, 2001

Dealing with estate stuff this morning; letters and bookkeeping. Don dropped in a photo to scan (his scanner at the office is out of action at the moment). We went into town after lunch to pay bills and post letters, call into the bank, then to the supermarket for a food top-up.

I picked up my magazines; the current copy of PCPlus was there, with attached DVDRom. The previous month's DVD failed to initialise, and this one was similarly unresponsive. I checked the drive with earlier discs and found them working. So I am suspicious that either they have changed something in manufacture, or my drive is failing -- or both. I'll take the offending DVD into my computer shop tomorrow and test it.

Ethan came in for his lesson this afternoon, and requested some help with his web site. He has his own folder residing on his father's site and wanted help in putting characters from Dragonball Z onto pages. It turned out that he wanted animated .GIFs, so I eventually located them on the site and downloaded them to my hard drive. We started on the page, but some images ended up in the wrong cells in the table, so he'll have to correct that. I will have to give him some tutorials on using Dreamweaver.

I had an email from a genealogy researcher enquiring about a Barkman ancestor; I went to my genealogy program Family Tree Maker and found I hadn't done any entries that far back. So I spent some time getting a bunch of data loaded, and then I was able to export a descendent chart all nicely formatted as an .rtf file. It certainly makes life easier if you have all the right tools to hand; that report was 6 pages, and I wouldn't have typed it out in such detail from scratch as a letter.

Wednesday, August 1, 2001

Tonight being Camera Club night, I needed to get three prints matted and mounted. Unfortunately, when I opened the door of the spare ('grot') room, I was greeted by the shambles resulting from chucking stuff in there for the last three months. Consequently, it was putting-away time; I have a folding table set up which took some time to clear. Meantime, Joan was making helpful suggestions about dealing with the masses of old mounted photos, and the piles of cartons mostly containing photo stuff. We decided to make better use of the display cabinet in the room, which was originally a doll display in my previous house (my first wife was a collector), and now had a few dolls crowded on the top shelf.

Actually, we have some dolls on display in the lounge. Joan proposed that we pack the remainer safely away, and put extra shelves in the cabinet to take mounted prints. We can also make much better use of the wardrobe, which needs to be properly shelved to take more stuff. This will proceed over the next few days, if all goes well.

We met Don and Joanna at the Blue Baths Cafe for lunch at 1 pm, it being 10 years today since Don commenced business on his own as a graphic artist. The Blue Baths are just that, a beautifully restored relic of the 30s which had been closed up for many years. One of the swimming pools is still fully functional, being thermally heated by underground steam. The upstairs cafe/restaurant has a 20s and 30s theme, and they serve suitable food -- such as little sandwiches and cakes on a silver three-tiered cake stand. Most enjoyable lunch.

Then back home to get on with the mounting job, completed by the end of the afternoon. The two boys came in as usual, while Rebeccah had her ballet lesson. Ethan has been compiling yet another movie -- fortunately I have been able to persuade him to change the background music, and try to avoid blowing everything up every few minutes.

Off to Camera Club after tea, for a surprisingly well-attended meeting considering the cold winter night. the members are getting very enthusiastic about the points aggregate competition -- as I knew they would. I have been given the task of organising a 'field day' in September, and have proposed a progressive photoshoot over four locations in town. I also suggested using disposable cameras to even out the equipment angle, have the photos processed and handed to each person later in the day. They then select what they think is the best shot from each location -- but the killer is that I have stipulated a subject: 'photojournalism', and each shot has to have a suitable caption. My criteria for assessing the result is simple: "would a newspaper print these pictures?". Best set of four gets a prize. Much to my surprise, almost the entire attendance signalled their intention to participate, and the comments centred around 'having a real fun day'. Most gratifying -- all I have to do now is set up the photo processing deal.

Thursday, August 2, 2001

An interesting post from John Dominik about Boy Scouts, and the current court rulings in USA which bar homosexuals from being scoutmasters.

I went off this morning to Russell on the other side of Rotorua, who was having grave problems after attempting to install his new Epson 1290 printer. He had experienced lockups and all sorts of funny business, leading to inability to get anything up on the desktop. On power-up, Scandisk went through the usual performance then the load paused before the Windows screen showed. The disk activity light was going -- and going -- for at least 5 minutes before it moved on to the next phase. Eventually, we reached the Desktop -- but very slowly -- and I finally managed to get My Computer to open and select Printers. The 1290 was definitely installed, and I managed to get a test page printed. Then Russell wanted me to re-install his HP inkjet, as he had uninstalled it while attempting to get the Epson going. I did this; but on reboot we went through the slow snail-pace load with frequent pauses before an eventual lockup. Power off and reboot; this time the load went quickly through to where it had stopped, ground on slowly for some time, then locked up again.

To cut the story short, it needed four reboots in total to get a clean desktop loaded. I quickly used MSConfig to shut off all sorts of stuff that was running from the Start folder (he had an installation of Lotus SmartSuite with its objectionable toolbar). The next re-boot was sweet, and everything was back to normal. A lesson in patience, as my first impulse was to reinstall Win98. I have no idea just why the hard disk was thrashing madly for up to 10 minutes as a stretch; but obviously Windows was busy sorting itself out.

Back into town to do banking and post letters, then pick Joan up from her beautician appointment. We have to pick the children up from school tomorrow, as Jo and Don are heading for Auckland.

Friday, August 3, 2001

I have lots of daily journal sites (known as 'Bloggers", from webloggers) that I visit on a regular basis. One of these is by Pattianne Justis, and she often comes up with thought-provoking ideas. Here's a clip, and my emailed comment:

<snip>
I drop in and out of other lives other places and I'm telling myself that is what living life is all about. Coming around into the circles of other peoples lives and places, joining their circle and entering the circles of still others. All the while, I maintain the circle that is my life.
</snip>

Have you read any of Desmond Morris, the naturalist and anthropologist? He has insights into our tribal behaviour, and how that has transferred from our recent, tribal-nomadic heritage into our urban/city existence. After all, it's only a couple of thousand years back and basically we're still the same people.

He says that the tribe -- which starts from a couple, then their children, then their partners and their children -- becomes unstable at about 18 members; and this seems to be the number of close interpersonal relationships that our brains can handle. Over this limit, the tribe splits into two sub-tribes -- still closely linked, but containing closer bonds within each. By extension, this tribal setup has transplanted itself into our society by us becoming members of multiple tribes outside the family circle. Thus we have our office tribe, our school tribe, our sports team tribe, our hobby tribe etc. We are tribal members while in the environs of that tribe; when we leave those environs, we cease to be that tribe's member, and move on to the next. It has been my personal experience that the 16 - 18 member limit applies within clubs. Once the membership rises over that number, the club does split into two sub-tribes which maintain closer ties within their grouping.

So your circles are just another expression of this: you are participating in a circle, then withdrawing to move to the next. All the time, you are maintaining your personal identity as a member of your base tribe; but only sharing that part of yourself which relates to the particular circle that you find yourself in at any given time. And that's how we keep ourselves sane -- we all have our circle of up to 18 people to whom we relate deeply, and exclude all others from that deep personal contact.

Joanna dropped in the childrens' stuff for their sleepover; and Don showed up with some web work to keep me busy. I did some maintenance on my own computers; stuff like updating Acrobat Reader to v.5 and getting the latest virus definitions.

At 2.40 pm, it was into the car to pick up the two boys from school, and Rebeccah from High School. As usual the house was in a constant uproar until tea time, with one child or another trekking upstairs to play games on the computer while I worked on the website updates. The others had two TV/videos going in separate rooms -- it was rather like musical chairs.

Saturday, August 4, 2001

Surprisingly, the grandchildren all slept in this morning, so we didn't get roused until 8.30. There was a good deal of push and shove to have turns on the computer; so we decided that what they needed was a good walk. We had a frost this morning but a lovely sunny day to follow; got everyone into the car and drove over to the Forest Research Institute. There is a wonderful grove of redwoods (yes, the genuine US variety) which were planted back in the early part of last century, and are now a respectable height. It was a little chilly under the trees. but we walked briskly. It takes 30 minutes to go in a circle through the grove, so it is surprisingly large.

Back home, and I got going on entering a huge heap of genealogy stuff into Family Tree Maker, a task which has occupied me right through tea time, and now until time for bed. I didn't realise how much stuff I've got filed. I can now do a massive print and see what info is missing. Eventually this will surface as my lastest book -- this time on the Barkman saga.

Sunday, August 5, 2001

Went back to Russell's this morning to try checking his box for viruses. Took the latest PC-Cillin rescue set and ran it, with no results. It seemed that he has seriously munged Win98 somehow. I tried an install-over -- this made some improvement, but on trying Internet Explorer, the screen locked up. So, it was YAWI time, and we did a clean install. But now he has to find all the drivers for lots of gear: two printers and two scanners -- as well as load all the software. So we decided to leave it at that point, and continue tomorrow morning. He will bring the box over to my office, and we'll get it sorted out.

I spent the evening tidying up some of the office -- amazing what you find among the piles of paper!