| LAST WEEK | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | NEXT WEEK |

Monday August 6, 2001

Joan in bed today, with a recurrance of the vertigo she periodically gets when her sinuses have been infected. I filled her with anti nausea stuff, and she kept lying down all day. Moved out to the couch in the lounge, so she could watch Sky -- which isn't connected to the bedroom TV.

Russell rang to tell me his box was no better; he brought it over here at 10 am and I fiddled around with it for a while with no improvement. Just wouldn't boot into Windows and kept coming up with error messages. So he took it back to the guy who built it, to check whether there was any harware problem, This guy suddenly noticed that Russell had loaded the original Win98 and not the SE version. Russell then brought it back to me to scrub and reinstall with Win98SE. Everything went like clockwork; I was then able to do some repartitioning of the hard drive into a better scheme of things -- still without problems.

After tea, I loaded the video card driver and a couple of utilities, when the reboots started to come unstuck. It gets half-way through the Windows load, then stops while the drive keeps churning. It's got a rhythmical patter to it, and just keeps repeating it over and over. Eventually, I power off and leave it. I've just turned it back on -- and get a normal boot-up, no sweat. Weird; I suspected that the processor (it's an Athlon running at 800 Mhz) might be overheating, but the guy checked that and the temperature was normal. Oh well, I'll return to it in the morning.

Tuesday, August 7, 2001

Joan's better this morning, but still not right. She decides to hit the couch again, and complains bitterly about the appalling morning TV. TV: not so much a window on the world, as a pane in the neck. Can't remember who said that, but he was right.

I continue with Russell's recalcitrant Win98 box through most of the day. Through trial and error, and scrutiny of Bootlog.txt, I decide that the problem with the Windows boot stopping is occurring when the LPT port is being set up. Aha! I remember that he has a scanner working into a card; I bet Windows finds it and tries to load a driver. Some of those cheap quasi-SCSI scanners masqueraded as a parallel port device by software that fooled the computer.

Anyway, I work around the problem by avoiding a 'hot boot' -- whenever I install something that requires a re-boot, I hit the power button just as the boot process starts to turn everything back on. I wait a couple of minutes (probably for the capacitors to discharge) and power up again to a normal Windows boot.

By this means I manage to load the modem drivers, the CR-RW drivers, and some software -- and everything works. The next step is to take the box back to his house, plug in the scanner and load the driver software. My bet is that this will solve the boot problem. Or it may not; in which case he just has to follow my example. Hopefully, everything will work and I can get back to my own work...

Wednesday, August 8, 2001

Office work in the morning. After lunch, into town to do some stuff at the bank, change library books, visit the supermarket and the stationery store. Just another day at the coalface...

The centenary of Ansel Adams is being marked by an exhibit which opened Aug. 4, 2001, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to celebrate the centennial of Adam's birth. Those of you who are photographers will know him as one of the great workers in the art of the black-and-white print. If you are a serious worker in this medium, you will have studied his methods of looking at a landscape, visualising in your head how it will translate into a print, then meticulously exposing the film, processing it, and producing a print which matches your vision.

To see one of his 16 x 20 inch prints is a revelation; to see an entire exhibition is mind-blowing. I was fortunate enough to view his 'Museum Series' in Wellington some years ago. One of the great museums once had requested a set of prints representative of his work; the nature of print-making being what it is, it was very little extra trouble to produce several prints from each negative he selected -- thus producing a number of sets which now circulate throughout the world. If you ever see an ad for a photographic exhibition containing his work, make sure you go there.

Thursday, August 9, 2001

Joan went off with Joanna this morning to help with papering at Lisa Cresc. She is still a little wonky, but OK as long as she keeps her head level. This vertigo is really disabling; I had a bout myself some time ago, and didn't like it at all.

More bookwork for me for the morning; In the afternoon, we walked down our park walking track to meet Ethan -- Jo had dropped him at the other end of the path on the way to ballet. He walked back home with us, then set to work on the computer with another feature-length movie epic. Now he has a working microphone, he puts his own dialogue in -- but this film has a zombie who eats people. Complete with disgusting Ethan gobbling noises. An 11-year-old has little refined cultural sensitivity...

After tea and TV, I set to work with my latest Photoshop book: Photoshop Restoration and Retouching by Katrin Eismann -- highly recommended. After two hours of working through the images, I realise just how little I knew about the fine arts of tuning images for contrast, brightness etc. That lack has certainly been remedied by only two chapters of this book.

Following on from my Ansel Adams paragraph above, I had a mail from fellow Daynoter Dan Seto in Hawaii. He also is a worshipper at the Adams shrine, and has pointed me to the Ansel Adams Gallery. Here, you can view a selection of the famous images, and purchase a print - most average out at $US150. The print-making is done by a guy who worked under Adams before his death, and learned how to achieve the high print quality from the original negatives. I will have to treat myself to one of these.

Friday, August 10, 2001

Up smartly this morning, as I have to take the car in to the Honda agents for servicing. I decide to fill in the time by going to Don's office to sort out the spare office box, which has not been well since I threw it in there, just before leaving for overseas in May. I also needed to install a SCSI card and enliven the flatbed scanner. Five minutes with the box convinced me it was back to bare metal and YAWI [for those who came late: Yet Another Windows Install]. Format c:\ drive and get the Win98 load under way.

Clients came in to see Don; they run a fishing lodge near one of our remoter rivers (an hour's drive from Rotorua) and we do their website and marketing. They want us to do a full makeover; I am to go out there soon and do interior pix. Later in the year when the trees are in leaf, I am to take aerial shots from a helicopter; then shots of fishing and other local activities. They are getting widely known, and I like to think this has been helped by the website (linked above) which we did for them a couple of years ago.

I beavered on during the morning, getting drivers installed, and then doing a Drive Image on the clean install before I started adding the tricky stuff. This makes it easy to get functional quickly after an install problem. But everything went well -- for a change -- and we broke for lunch. I installed our usual software, before going home at 4 pm. One more job to do: install the old HP CD burner -- probably do that tomorrow.

Saturday, August 11, 2001

Into town after breakfast to Don's office, where I was to install drivers and software for the HP CD burner. The ASPI drivers went in OK, but I had thought that the Adaptec software was stashed in the hard drive -- NO. So that has to wait... Don handed me the fishing site [above] to convert from frames to plain pages. He did this one fairly early in the piece, before we found out that frames are yuk. Later, we'll look at a complkete re-design

Back home, picking up fish & chips for Joan and a hamburger for myself, in good time to watch the All Blacks being beaten by Australia in the rugby Bledisloe Cup match. A fairly dour struggle, with occasional flashes of brilliance. Rugby on this level has got to the stage where the defence is so good on both sides, that it takes some error of judgment to allow the backs to get away for a try -- and these lapses aren't coming very often.

After the rugby finished, I discovered I'd left my computer glasses at the office. Joan had wanted to go to a Home and Garden display, so we went straight there to get in about 45 minutes before they closed at 5 pm. Then pick up the glasses and back home for tea.

This evening I've been hammering the keyboard entering more of the family sheets into my genealogy program, as I've had a request for info about my mother's lineage -- and this is the easiest way to assemble it. Tomorrow is Joan's birthday, and she has requested a trip to the War Museum at Waiouru. This is at the old army base in the middle of the island, about 2 hours drive away. We leave at 9, so I'd better put the Kronikles to bed and get there myself.

Sunday, August 12, 2001

Up early (for a Sunday!) and away by 9.30 am for our family trip to Waiouru. The morning was perfect; clear sky and bright sun. We enjoyed the drive around Lake Taupo, but were concerned to see how much the water level has dropped. There were shingle beaches where the water usually comes right up by the road. This is because we have not had decent prolonged rainfall for some time, and the low water storage in the lakes is because of the demands of the hydro power generation.

The three volcanoes up on the plateau were a real picture in the morning light, although there was little enough snow on them to feed the rivers in spring. We arrived at Waiouru after a 2 hr 15 min drive, and it being 11.45 am -- and a bracing cold wind -- we set about making hot drinks from the thermos bottles. Joan went over to a roadside cafe when they do their own baking, and brought back seven piping hot meat pies, pastry bottoms with mashed potato and cheese on top. Went down a treat.

The Army Museum is a fascinating place, and well worth more than a cursory look on the way through from Auckland to Wellington. We have often gone past, saying we must pay a visit, and this is why Joan decided to make this her birthday outing. The exhibits were well executed and full of interest; I can compare it most favourably with the Imperial War Museum in London in all but extent. There was a lot of material on the Battle of Crete, and I bought a recently-published soft-covered book recounting the personal stories of a number of survivors. To read of the battle when you have stood on the ground, brings a whole new depth of meaning. The children, in general, also found it interesting -- although Eli got a bit restive towards the end of our stay. It's hard to keep a 7 year-old interested in anything for more than a short time -- especially when he's active and wants to do things.

A pleasant run back home, arriving about 6.15 pm. A quick tea, and I have been busy upstairs doing a preliminary rework of the fly-fishing lodge web site, duplicating the frame layout by using tables and moving the text and pix over.