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Monday, August 20, 2001

Up and off to Auckland at 9.30 am; but before we left I had to pay an account, and also go into the Libray to get some audio book tapes to keep us amused on the journey. We stopped for an early lunch in Matamata, and arrived at our motel by 12.45 pm -- the journey had not been pleasant driving because of frequent showers of rain. Fortunately these mostly cleared up by the time we reached to motel.

Joan found she had left her makeup behind, so we drove down the road to Newmarket ; this is one of Auckland's busiest shopping areas. I wandered down to Techbooks to find something on Apple QuickTime -- we are getting requests from motels to put Virtual Rooms on their web sites, and I needed to come up to speed on that one. I can shoot a maximum of 80 seconds QuickTime movie on the Nikon CP990, which should be sufficient to produce a 360 deg panorama for the VR.

Joan's neice Deirdre showed up at 6.10 pm, and we made haste to drive back up onto the motorway and off again on the other side of the Central Business District to go to a Chinese restaurant. We had arranged to meet my sister-in-law Priscilla there for a meal; we ended up sharing several delicious dishes and really enjoyed the food and the chatter.

Back to the motel by 9 pm, and I am finishing these Kronikles early. We have to be out of the motel by 9 am to get across to the North Shore of Auckland harbour for the financial briefing -- this is the purpose of the trip.

Tuesday, August 21, 2001

I had a talk with the motel owner while checking out; he needs a new computer for the office, and I will get him some prices tomorrow. We left the motel at 8.45 am; the traffic wasn't too bad at that hour. Once we were on the motorway heading across the harbour, the traffic had thinned as most people going to work are there at that hour. We had no trouble finding the venue for the financial client briefing; it looked as though every well-heeled superannuitant on the North Shore had turned up. I didn't hear a lot I didn't know already, but it never hurts to look over the basics eveyr now and then. the main thing was to show our faces; particularly as I don't get up to Auckland that often -- most of my investing is done by email or phone anyway.

We had a pleasant trip back home; went down almost to Hamilton then turned off at Taupiri to take some back roads to Cambridge and then home. I's nice to have a change of route every now and then. The rain held off, but we were constantly going through stretches of wet tarmac where it had just rained before we got there.

Caught up on last night's episode of The Bill, before switching from video to TV for tonights episode. Then upstairs to do this Kronikle before heading for bed.

Wednesday, August 22, 2001

I was reminded by an email from Alex in Wanganui, that entries for the Festival of Photography will close on Friday next. Instant panic, as I had not done anything towards getting prints ready -- apart from doing some selecting. I fired up Photoshop and spent the rest of the morning preparing three images and getting them printed on A3 glossy paper in the Epson 1290. I was pleased with the results; they are all from our Greece trip.

We hastened out after lunch; I dropped Joan at the supermarket and went on to our friendly printer to get some heavy cardboard to back up the mount board mattes. The bad news: they had used up all their stock of the one I bought earlier in the year. The good news: there was a rep. in the office taking an order, so Roger the boss checked with the rep's samples and ordered me a packet on the spot. It's a much heavier grade of card which is all to the better; but I'll probably have to take the packet of 36 sheets if Roger doesn't want to keep any in stock. I can always flog it off to other Camera Club members. The courier will bring it tomorrow by noon.

I met Joan inside the supermarket, we completed the shopping and returned home. I then spent a couple of hours cutting the three mattes for the prints, before getting back onto my book indexing. I managed to get 5 pages done all told; managed some after my TV finished for the evening at 10 pm.

Thursday, August 23, 2001

Joan went off with Joanna to help her with more wallpapering. I cleared emails and had a quick whizz through daynoters, before firing up the laptop and contacting my ISP. I had tried to connect on my dialup account (which is separate from the DSL account to avoid confusing the server) while in Auckland and had been unable to connect. I have three other ISPs where I have accounts, so got onto one and accessed my web site from there. Anyway, I needed to get this sorted, and after speaking with the techie and him checking that there was nothing wrong with the login and password, I was passed to accounts.

There, the lady checked and informed me that the account had been suspended in July because it hadn't been properly set up. The tech that originally did it has now gone from the ISP -- for good reason. SO she reinstated my access, and all is sweet. I don't need the dialup THAT often, but it is there for access when we're away from base -- they are fairly paranoid about hackers (with good reason) and the mail server won't permit remote POP access. It's a good thing she hadn't pulled the plug on me when I was in Greece earlier in the year -- I depended on that account for remote contact via my cellphone.

After calling through town and banking cheques, I went to the printery to collect my packet of cardboard sheets (just about as heavy as I can lift!) and went home to get the prints finished. I was pleased with the final result, and hurried to get them wrapped and down to the courier.

I managed to get some more book indexing done before bed.

Friday, August 25, 2001

Late post -- this is actually Saturday am. last night sort of slipped away...

Haircutting at 10.45 am for both of us; then we went back into town. Joan met up with Joanna for shopping, while I picked up a tube of heatsink paste from DSE (our equivalent of Fry's or Tandy) and went to Don's office. The second box there (which regular readers will remember has been causing problems) has acted up again. Once more, the system boots up OK in the morning; when Chris our trainee comes in after school, the system freezes. On reboot the startup tries to find unusual things like the floppy drive, and the mouse...

I remembered that the heat sink and fan were a sloppy fit on the processor (AMD K6-350). It had never caused problems with I had the box at home -- but then, I didn't run it for that long, either. So, I pulled the case and manoevered the heat sink out from under the drive ribbons. Ah -- my suspicions were correct; dry as a bone. I applied the rare unguents from the magic tube, reassembled, tested. Still throwing a wobbly, but I suspected something else as well: the parallel port CD burner had only been half-installed. I had forgotten that I had only installed the basic drivers and no Adaptec stuff -- could it be this as well? I reverted the C: drive to a previous DriveImage and got a clean boot-up. I had to re-install Photoshop, the scanner, and some other bits and pieces, but ended up with a reasonably stable box. Didn't hear from Don later in the day, so assume that all was well.

Spent some time sorting out Ace the Acer Laptop; the network performance was painfully slow and lots of collisions were showing up on the Nokia DSL modem ethernet lights. I remembered that Sissy had also spat the dummy when I inadvertently permitted a program to mess with the MTU setting; so dived into Ace's Registry -- sure enough, the MTU had been somehow set to about 2000 instead of the default of 8192. Reset and rebooted; up came the network with normal speed. Goodness knows what had done that; if I'd set the MTU manually I would have gone up to 32,768 which is supposed to improve download speed using modems. Don't do that now I'm using TCP/IP for everything.

Finished the evening by downloading and installing the latest Fix-It Utilities V4. I have been using System Suite 3 for some time as my utility of choice; and was offered a cheap upgrade from Ontrack. The 20 MB download came through in 11 minutes -- the US must have been quiet -- and I got that installed and configured on all three boxes.

Saturday, August 25, 2001

We woke to a gloomy morning, just to remind us that spring is not really here yet -- even if the magnolia has half a dozen flowers on it. We had showers all day, then a bitter southerly at the end.

I went in to Don's office at 11.30 am to get the CD burner going. After a lot of struggle with the HP drivers (it is an old parallel port job) I fould I couldn't get the Adaptec Easy CD update to V3.5 to work; then I realised why: The original disk has V2 on it, and the upgrade probably wanted V3.0. I finally threw in the towel and downloaded Nero. This worked splendidly, so we'll stick with it. I burned a CD and verified it (took a whole hour, as the old HP can only do 2x speed), then took the disc home to do the copy on my Yamaha at 12 x. The office box didn't fall over with all my machinations, so I think I've got it fixed -- at least at the moment.

Back in my own office, I used FixIt Utilities to do a lot of disk housekeeping on both boxes, and took a couple of DriveImages. This evening I've managed another six pages of indexing.

Sunday, August 26, 2001

Another gloomy morning to match yesterday's, although it did lighten up for a while during the middle part of the day. I spent an hour or so working on my site; there is now a "Life in NZ" link on the menu bar instead on Discussion. I used Homesite 4 to do a cut'n'paste over the whole site; there are something like 130 pages with top and bottom text menus on each. Took a little sorting out, but eventually the link tester in Dreamweaver grudgingly admitted that all was well, and I did a synchronise on the whole site. I did my usual start-of-the-week update to the home page early, as we have to do a quick trip to Auckland tomorrow to pick up Deirdre, Joan's niece, who has has a cyst removed during the week. She is now back home with no-one to look after her, so we'll bring her back here for a few days of convalescence.

The family came over for Sunday Dinner -- actually pickled pork and salad with hot oven-roasted potatoes.After eating, Don and I did a product shot for our deer velvet people: a bowl filled with the granules of extract they sell for making a drink. This is supposed to have medicinal properties btw, but I haven't seen any clinical trials <grin>.

I received an email from my Wanganui Camera Club contact with an attached list of entries for the Festival of Photography. I got it into the format I required, opened up Ventura and loaded the ready-to-go empty catalogue. All I had to do was flow the text into the frames and apply the style tags. After an hour's work, I simply faxed a proof down to him; he rang back with corrections of typos etc; I made the alterations, and printed the proof copies on heavy paper for photocopying. Certainly beats the old days of having to do the text entry manually.

We watched a little TV, then I came back upstairs to do this Kronikle and tidt up for an early start.