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Monday September 3, 2001

Packed up and left the motel at 9.15 am, after a long discussion with the lady of the motel about web sites. This motel is a modest establishment called Kings Court Motel, beautifully kept and run; they need more bookings, and are putting their toe in the Web water by putting listings in the big sites like Jasons, AA etc. I talked to her at some length about the need for marketing and how they really needed their own website to increase the chances that someone will get Kings Court on page one of Google, after typing in "accommodation Wanganui". She has registered a domain name but really didn't know how a website came into being -- and nearly had a fit when I told her what Don charges. SO I told her to take one step at a time, and see how she goes.

We did some shopping, then went up to friends Lesley and Vince for a cuppa before heading off on the long drive home at 1.15 pm. Had a stop for an ice cream, but carried on and arrived back in Rotorua just after 5 pm. Cleared the emails and checked Daynoters before having tea and watching some TV.

Readers may remember that I've been having difficulty reading DVDRoms bundled with the English magazine PCPlus. I've posted on their forum a couple of times; one of the staff passed a comment that I might need new drivers. Now, seeing that the DVD drive is ATAPI on the IDE bus, that gets left to Microsoft's tender care -- and I'd be veeery careful about stuffing around with that. BUT, I suddenly thought "What about the firmware?". I opened Device Manager and checked on the version: 1.10. Google turned up a firmware update to V1.4, so downloaded it and all seems to be well after the 'flash'. Unfortunately, I'll have to wait until tomorrow to pick up one of the 'duff' DVDs from my newsagent and give it another try.

Tuesday, September 4, 2001

Hard at it in the office this morning, sorting out bank statements etc. Joan went off with Joanna to help her buy some plants. Spring is sprunging at the moment, and they need to get flowers planted.

We went back out after lunch; I collected the DVD -- and the alternate CD issue -- and went through town to get some pricing on this exhibition I'm supposed to be putting on. I can get an A4 printed (photographically) from digital for $NZ15 -- I don't want to sell a tourist something from my Epson inkjet, and have it fade in a few years. I'll have to look for a cheap frame; the photo place had something suitable for $NZ20 but I might be able to do better than that. I have to allow 25% commission for the Museum, so I think a retail price of about $NZ90 would be reasonable -- that's only about $US40 for a good-quality A4 framed print, and not too big for a tourist to put in the bottom of a case.

Back home and try the DVD -- no change, so the firmware update made no difference. Interestingly, I've had an email from a NZ reader who also has had the same problem; also a forum comment from a guy in the US who has had trouble reading PcPlus DVDs.

I started preparing my video slide program for tomorrow night, broke for tea and TV, and have just finished a selection that should run a reasonable time period and not be too boring. It should give the club a taste of Greece, anyway.

Wednesday, September 5, 2001

First job today was to finish the video image show; I added a few more shots to fill in the thin spots. Morning coffee with Joanna and Anita from across the road. Anita wanted help with a couple of images she was mounting for the competition closing tonight.

We went through town after lunch; I wanted to see the lady at the Museum about the exhibition, but she had gone out. We went into a few places looking for cheap picture frames; as expected, the cheapest was The Warehouse (like KMart) so I can certainly turn out a matted, framed print for $NZ30 - 35.

Some more indexing work before tea, then packed the laptop into the car and back into town by 7.15 pm to the new venue for our club meetings. This is an interesting building: probably built in the early 1900s as an afternoon tea kiosk, with wide verandahs on three sides, and set in the Government Gardens not far from the Museum. It has been very effectively restored in recent years, and is now used mainly as a venue for small wedding receptions in the weekends. It's probably bigger than we need, as it seats 40 at tables; but it will certainly do until our new facilites are finished next year. My image show was well received; apart from the laptop dropping out of IrfanView half-way through the show. I had to change the rest of the images manually. I should probably have used Powerpoint or similar, but IrfanView is easy to set up for a slideshow. The video projector projector was excellent.

Thursday, September 6, 2001

A steady run on the indexing today saw the book indexing finished. I've added so many extra pages, that I cut the type size of the indexes down to 8 points and made the page four columns instead of three.

Took Joan in to see the eye specialist at 2 pm; she has what turned out to be a small fatty cyst under one eye. No problem at the moment, but it can be dealt to if it becomes one. While she was there, I checked with Millennium Computers about the Epson ink carts I need -- only to find that the orders had been stuffed up at the agents and had to be redone. Then we visited the Library and got some new reading material.

The day had been fine until we went into town, then we had a brisk shower, just enough to wet the grass I had been planning to mow. Oh well, it's supposed to be fine tomorrow.

Friday, September 7, 2001

They lied about the weather; it rained all night and most of the day. Gave me the chance to print the master pages for the book -- 221 all told -- through the trusty old HP Laserjet 4MP. The next interesting job is to print the book plates; these are all laser printed, as a photocopy sucks -- even off the fine art paper I use for proofing. Fortunately there are only 9 pages in each copy, so it's not too bad. I think I'll have to get another toner cart tomorrow, though -- the test print I just did has lots of banding in the blacks.

Joan was out until mid-afternoon over at Lisa Crescent, helping Joanna clean out the boys' old bedroom prior to redecorating. She is really turning the house totally around; the children are now all downstairs, and she wants to move their bedroom into the current home office -- which will move into the vacated bedroom. It seems that the office is jammed full in the evenings, with Don working and the kids all trying to do homework. The larger room will be more suitable.

We had a TV night tonight, so I haven't got a lot more done. Hope it's fine tomorrow so we can get the outside tidied and the lawns mowed. Then I can take some pix to update the garden pages. I spent some time looking at a fascinating site: this is the result of a massive project of the NZ National Library which has digitised some of their newspaper files and put them on a site in easily retrievable form. The newspapers are from a representative spread through NZ, and the files are of copies from 1850 to 1900. Each page is a big .TIF image (about 800k), and you get a small Java code viewer downloaded which is very efficient at navigating round the page, zooming etc. Lots of interesting stuff for the casual browser, and great for genealogists looking for information.

Saturday, September 8, 2001

Well, waddya know -- fine and sunny morning for a change. I cleared mail and surfed for a while until the grass dried off in the sunshine and brisk breeze. Then found the string trimmer underneath stuff in Joan's garden shed and zapped all the path edges. The mower took a bit of starting as the fuel in the carb had evaporated -- I always forget to shut the fuel off and run the engine dry at the end of the autumn. It's a small four-stroke Honda mower; not much catcher capacity, but serves for our small lawns. The grass still hasn't really got into the spring flush yet, so mowing wasn't difficult.

Into town after lunch to pick up a toner cart from the laser printer, then settled down on our return, to print out the photo plates for the book. I'm doing 20 copies this run and there are 9 pages of plates. The art paper doesn't feed internally in the HP4MP, so I have to manually feed each piece. Managed 6 pages, so only three to go.

Over to Jo and Don's at Lisa Crescent for dinner -- roast loin of pork and veg, with a nice Traminer white and an Aussie red for the hardened drinkers. Back home, and some surfing round the newsgroups before bed.

Sunday, September 9, 2001

Another bright, sunny morning -- which inspired me to go outside with the Nikon CP990 and record the changes in our garden. If you need to see what it was like earlier, you'll find lots of links to previous pages. My neighbour over the road is a Yamaha trail bike collector, and he had purchased a lot of old workshop manuals for classic bikes that he wanted to sell on EBay. So, while I had the camera out, he got me to shoot the front covers of the books and magazines; then came over with me while I massaged them into shape for display. I dropped the images on a Zip disk for him.

We bought a slow cooker yesterday, and filled it up with cheap chicken bones to make stock. That was cooked in the morning, and I helped Joan strain the stock ready for soup. I chopped up the last pumpkin from our autumn hoard and we had soup bubbling gently all day, ready for tea tonight.

After an early lunch, Joan went out with Joanna on a tour of local kitchens, organised by the Rotary Club for charity. they also sneaked a look at the various gardens as they drove from venue to venue. Interestingly, although the houses were very upmarket, she still found her own kitchen to be more home-like and comfortable!

I spent the afternoon finishing printing the photo plates for the book, then went on to print 20 colour covers on the Epson 1290. I just had enough ink left to do it -- hope the carts come soon! Then the job of laminating the covers took up some time. After tea, I have been reorganising the Icarus website to accomodate the latest garden pix. Thank goodness I have Dreamweaver! The chore of moving files around, renaming some, and then sorting out the links is very smoothly handled. And of course, the site synchroniser is invaluable in sorting out the changed files and getting them uploaded to the server.