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Monday, August 13, 2001

Upstairs straight after breakfast to assemble cameras for sale to a camera collector; I contacted him in response to an ad in the local paper. I've sold some stuff to him before, and now is the time to off-load my collection -- or at least, that part which he is interested in. We duly did a deal; I have a cheque for $5000 safely in the bank, and he has a couple of cartons of goodies: three elderly Leicas, a bunch of Leica bits and pieces; a Canon 7s rangefinder camera with f0.95 lens; an Olympus half-frame PenF with six lenses, case, and a bunch of bits. That has depleted my shelves a little, but there is still a huge amount of standard collector's stuff that I have to get rid of somehow. Lots of old folding cameras; a lot of early Kodak folders; most of this stuff would do best in a collector's auction. I'm going to find out when the next big one is to be held, in either Auckland or Wellington.

Off to town after lunch for Joan to pick up bits and pieces. We've decided to re-carpet the upstairs; the old carpet (20 years old) is starting to deteriorate -- the adhesive in the backing has broken down, and loose tufts appear all the time in a sort of moult. That means carpet samples, and choosing, and deciding. Feh.

A request from a motel owner in Auckland (the place where we usually stay) to look at his new web site and send him our opinion. I said I would do this when we stayed there last, so gave it the hard look that I do for Don. The site is attractive at first look, but there are a lot of navigational and other small problems which will need a bit of tweaking.

Tuesday, August 14, 2001

Our garden landscaper (he's more than just a gardener; but has not been well, so likes these small jobs) arrived this morning to carry the garden work a stage further. I'll get out tomorrow and report progress with the camera. The cleanup got serious enough to order a mini-skip, especially when he started thinning excess growth on the back boundary trees.

I spent a day on my genealogy database; at last getting information out from dusty piles of paper and drawers jammed full of family history sheets. It's amazing how lots of small scraps of information gleaned from all over the world can come together and corroborate each other.

Ethan had decided that learning programming is a bit hard for him at the moment; I told him that adults find it very hard too <grin>. He'll be back on it in due course, I'm sure. In the meantime, he's getting valuable skills using this Kids Movie Maker program, an older Microsoft one I got as a bundle with a PC years ago. The programming ideas he's learnt have carried over, and he's looking at what he's doing to see what else the program will do. His first movies were very jerky, because he had trouble placing the characters to walk in a straight line. He's found out that you can edit these and make it smoother, so is revamping all his work.

Joan has been busy repairing the kids' Aikido gi (training suits). It's good to see some wear -- that means that they are not just playing around. Actually, Rebeccah is bursting out of hers -- Joan had to extend the waist considerably to make it last a bit longer. It's about time I attended a class at the Dojo to check on their progress.

Wednesday, August 15, 2001

Guy the Gardener working again this morning. We hopped into town to pick up some shrubs that he recommended, and also for me to visit the electronics shop to pick up the latest version of Family Tree Maker. I was having one or two weeny problems with version 5, and they seem to be gone in this v.8. Plus a great wad of CDRoms for me to have a look at -- when I have time, that is.

I managed to get a lot more data entered; there would still be another day's work to do and then it's cross-checking what I can. The next step is to do a print and farm it out to others to check against their records. The potentiality for a finger-slip is there; also the problems of transcription from other people who may or may not have got it right. The problem with genealogical research is that the best way you can be sure of data is to view the actual certificates -- and even they have been known to be wrong. And they are expensive to obtain. Anyway I'll have to give it a rest for now, as other things are pressing.

Thursday, August 16, 2001

Joan went off with Joanna this morning to continue the wallpapering job at Lisa Cresc, while I got busy filing masses of genealogical papers that I had spread out round the office. That done, it was financials until lunch. Russell came over at 2 pm for me to do another of his exhibition posters -- his computer is still not behaving. He had it in to the guy who sold it to him -- and the usual thing happened: it refused to misbehave until he got it back home and plugged in. I did the poster and saved it to his Zip disk as a .TIF so he could take it straight to the copy place to have posters run off on their colour laser printer.

I've now received three orders for our Sparling genealogical book, and the last one on hand went out a week ago. I have several pages of amendments on hand to put into the main text, so fired up Corel Ventura and got cracking. In the early sections, I was able to just reprint the amended page to replace the old page master; but about page 130, there was extra text to insert that suddenly popped round the corner onto a new inserted page. Oops -- there goes the page numbering for the rest of the book. Fortunately for me, the index can be updated with one click of the mouse; although I suppose I should re-do the older manually-prepared indexes, of which there are several. This would mean me going through the manuscript on the screen, inserting index markers, and entering the index text -- probably a week's work. I'll think about it.

After I finished the amendments and additions, I started a continuous reprint from where the page numbers altered. The paper stock I use is fairly heavy; it's probably about 150 gsm and has a slight gloss to the surface which takes a laser print beautifully. It's very good for repeated photocopying as it stands up to handling much better than the ordinary copy paper would do. The only downside is that it's too thick and slippery to let the printer feed sheets itself, so I have to manually feed it. As the venerable HP4MP can only manage about 5 pages a minute, the book takes several hours to do a full print. However, a reprieve in sight, as I'm low on paper -- I'll have to visit my friendly printer tomorrow and get him to cut me up another ream.

Friday, August 17, 2001

In the car at 9.30 am with camera and tripod, and off to the engineering company for their photoshoot. I did some office shots using the Nikon SB22 flash on an expension cord to bounce light off the walls for fill-in -- this worked well. The factory shots had plenty of diffused natural light from skylight panels in the roof, so fill was not necessary. The machines they make are big -- rollformers for sheet metal, and are sold all over the world.

After the shoot, I met Joan and Joanna in town for lunch, then went to the printers to get more proof paper. I found out it's 130 gsm art paper, for those who like to know. Then a bit more shopping before going back home for a welcome cup of tea. I worked on the images until tea; the upright-format ones need rotating, and they all need the levels correcting and colour balance tweaked. I've just finished that chore; there's a total of 45 pix, and I'll write them out to a CDRom for Don to get tomorrow.

Saturday, August 18, 2001

The week nearly gone already, and as usual I don't semm to have accomplished as much as I would have liked. Joan went out with Joanna to pick up some plants, leaving Ethan with me out of the cold, He had a bad night with asthma; June, July and August are his bad months which is probably tied in with pollen. Joanna took him in to the clinic this morning and was given more Ventolin (salbutamol) aerosol. We are trying to get him to a paediatrician; he has been waiting several months for his turn to come up at the hospital. Like hospitals the world over, our local one is short of money and has about half the staff it should have. Still, I suppose we're lucky to have that much compared to some other countries. Our doctor is trying to find out where Ethan is on the list; if it's too far away, we'll get him seen privately.

I spent most of today working on our Genealogical book. Kay (the book compiler) had done a lengthy job setting up indexes completely by hand -- these reference the descent coding she devised, and are most useful. I have felt the need for extra indexes which reference names direct to the page number. Ventura has very extensive facilities for generating multiple indexes, which can be updated at any time -- say, after pages are inserted with extra text. I have to go through the text and insert a marker by each name, and indicate just what index it is to be inserted into; this is a painstaking job, but I've managed to get up to page 30 today. Only another 170 to go....

Sunday, August 19, 2001

The day started out fine, but got progressively worse until a front came through with some heavy showers this evening. We did manage to get out for a short walk this morning while the sun was still out.

I spent some time this morning fixing the lid of our bread making machine. A few weeks ago, Joan was testing a new mix which rose so well it stuck dough all over the lid. I unscrewed the hinge block, and we were able to wash the dough off. The lid appeared to screw back on OK, but unfortunately, it detached itself yesterday -- and an ominous clatter meant that something had come adrift inside the double wall. I ended up dismantling most of it, to find the reinforcing plate for the screws and get it back into place. In the process, I found that the lid actually slips out of the hinge assembly without the necessity to remove the screws in the first place. I also found that the plate itself was too thin and the screws had stripped -- that's why the hinge came off. Some bigger self-tappers fixed that smartly.

I managed to get some more book indexing done in the afternoon, but tonight has mostly been taken up with watching a TV movie starring Judie Dench: The Blonde Bombshells. A wonderfully-acted film about an all-girl swing band who played in London during the Blitz but went their separate ways; the saxophonist is Judi and she conceives the idea of having a band reunion and showing her granddaughter what their playing was like. Unfortunately, it's 60 years on, and some of the band are dead, one in prison, one is an alcoholic, and one's got religion and plays in the Salvation Army. But they get it together, somehow, and who should their singer be, but Cleo Laine -- one of the best in the business. Recommended.