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Monday, October 22, 2001

A busy morning catching up with things left over the weekend -- although today is a public holiday in NZ, when you're retired there are no public holidays 8-P

Don rang to say he was taking Rebeccah out for trout fishing. We went out mid-morning to replenish the store cupboard at the supermarket, had lunch, and worked away. I installed the network card in Linley and configured the TCP/IP and other magic spells, and was gratified to see that Internet Explorer was working normally. I connected to my program archives on Sissy and installed a number of essential utilities, like TweakUI and IrfanView. I was, however, troubled by a recurrence of a very slow network -- initially fast, but slows to a crawl with the 'collision' light on the Nokia modem/hub flashing madly. Not helpful when you're trying to pull a file of several MB over the network to install it. Any bright ideas from gurus?

Rebeccah and Don arrived back about 4.45 pm with a bag of fish -- see photo. She dived into a shower to get rid of the fish smell, had a bite of tea, then I took her on to her ballet lesson at 5.45 pm. Deirdre and the others arrived back from Wanganui about 5 pm, and we all settled down to tea. I had to dash away to collect Rebeccah after her lesson, then Deirdre drove her back home to Lisa Crescent.

Leonie spent some time with the phone and fax, trying to set up a sale of a house property she owns in Perth, Western Australia. I managed to help her with the documents, and all she has to do now is to fax them through to a Perth lawyer. It's a little difficult doing this sort of thing at long distance, but thank goodness I have a fax on line.

Tuesday, October 23, 2001

Today the bug man came... Well, the fly exterminator to be precise. A mad flurry of putting sheets of newspaper over the tops of paintings, the good furniture, china cabinet etc etc. We are plagued by a large nest of ants in the roof; I should explain that this is the gap between the roofing iron and the tongue & groove planked ceiling, which is filled with glass-fibre insulation. A wonderful haven for the ants; albeit about 6 metres off the ground where they presumably get their supplies of food and water. Anyway, when the first sun heat of spring hits, I start getting flights of winged males heading for the skylight immediately above my keyboard. I grab the insect spray (allegedly 30 days potent) and blast the ceiling environs. Consequently, a gentle rain of deceased male ants falls steadily for some time. The flights are periodic at about 10-day intervals; I keep a battery vacuum sucker at hand to keep the gear clear. So hopefully, the application of some noxious chemical will discourage the survivors.

Into town at 2 pm to meet a lady at the Museum, who insists on vetting my one-page exhibition brochure before I photocopy it. As is predictable, she is not there when I call, so I have to leave it with my phone number -- as lesser minions assure me that they do not have the seniority to do such things. We head out (Joan, Graeme and Leonie are with me) to collect a rose which has been ordered from a rose nursery. Also predictably, we return with TWO roses (well, there was this absolutely fabulous....) to town; I drop them for shopping while I go to my friendly computer pusher to collect an Epson printer cart and a sparkling new copy of Windows XP Pro. Yes, I'm trafficking with Satan again (Note: stock up on holy water and garlic) and will attempt an installation tomorrow.

Meantime, I try the "Check your computer for compatibility" wizard, which informs me that I don't have enough disk space for installation. Not surprising, as I formatted the C partition to 1 GB and it already has Win98SE there. I used Partition Magic to rob the next partition of 500 MB and increase the primary to 1.5 GB. That should do it...

Wednesday, October 24, 2001

I got a ring this morning from the Museum lady, OK-ing the exhibition brochure, so printed the masters and photocopied off a 100. We all sat down and folded them; Graeme and Leonie were taking their grandson Michael to the movies, so we were just getting into the car when a serviceman arrived to check out the kitchen oven for Joan. She's been complaining about the oven temperature lately; the guy did a temperature check and found the readings well within spec. I suspect that all the electric ovens she has used for baking over the years have been much hotter that their temperature gauges indicated -- so now things she puts in this oven take much longer to cook. Anyway, she is satisfied now and will make adjustments accordingly.

So we went into town, dropped the others, went to the museum to leave the brochures, then to the bank to deposit a cheque. After lunch, I started work on the Camera Club newsletter in Ventura -- set up a template and style tags for text and frames and tarted up the masthead logo. Once I get it right, I just use that each month and dump in the text. While this was going on, I downloaded the Mac OS 9.1 upgrade - about 71 MB; the pipe from the US (or the server) was bad and it took nearly two hours. So much for DSL being like lightning - it all depends on how fast the data is being poked at you.

I spent some time after tea, loading a few games into Linley's Win98 partition -- so that Eli has something to occupy him when both boys are here and Ethan is monopolising Sissy. I don't allow games on Milly because that box is my graphics work machine and I don't need any extra instability, thank you -- I get enough as it is. It will be interesting to see how Milly fares under WinXP.

Thursday, October 25, 2001

After my morning email and Daynotes checks, we loaded our old cooking oven into the back of the CR-V and took it over to Joanna. All sorts of things are happening at Lisa Cresc: The carpenter was hard at work pulling out the old bath, and was preparing to install the much nicer bath that we removed from our upstairs bathroom two years ago (we put a shower in instead). The electrician is coming tomorrow to wire up the oven and cooktop, and the plumber is lined up to re-plumb the bath. Then the carpenter is making alterations to the kitchen bench and putting on a new sink top. All this to be finished before October 31 -- which is, of course, Halloween. This is a major event in the Cox household (Don being American) and there will be a concomitant party for the adult attenders who have brought children to do the Trick'n'Treating.

We carried on across town to an outdoors shop which carries a large range of good-quality merchandise; I need a hat with a much larger brim than the ones I have. This is to keep the sun off more parts of my face and neck -- to which end, the model I selected has a neck flap (Foreign Legion type) which is normally concealed in the hat crown, so one doesn't look too dorkish when it's not necessary. I've mentioned the ultra-violet level before; but for those overseas who have 'come aboard' since last year, the summer burn-time in New Zealand can be as short as TEN MINUTES on fair, unprotected skin. And, as I have just had a painful course of cream to munch off the abnormal skin cells which are a precursor to skin cancer, I am most conscious of the need for protection. And use a high-factor UV skin cream as well.

I dropped the others in town to do some shopping and came back home for lunch and a go at clearing the mound of paper in the office. We are having the whole upstairs area re-carpeted in two weeks time, so I have to clear a lot of stuff to facilitate the process.

For those interested: I have been looking for a good replacement for the abominable Windows Explorer for some time. The choice for the last year or two has been Ontrack's PowerDesk -- also attractive by the fact that it comes free with their System Suite Utilities. These, btw, are well worth a look; I find them far better than Norton and very reasonably priced, and are a 43 MB download. Anyway, I've happened upon a product called Servant Salamander which comes from Czechoslovakia. It doesn't have a left-hand tree pane, but displays the traditional two panes which can have different folders/drives. It's far faster than the others, even when navigating across the network, and reminds me very much of the old DOS Norton Commander of blessed memory. The best recommendation I have, is that after an evening's use finding and moving stuff around, I went straight back to the website and coughed up my $US24 for registration.

Friday, October 26, 2001

Not too bad a day today; cloudy with the sun breaking through every now and then. We took Graeme and Leonie down to the Lakefront after coffee, as they wanted to get a particular postcard of a sandblasted window in the Maori church there. We dropped them and went off to a local stationery warehouse to order new shelves and cupboard units for the upstairs and office. Surprisingly cheap: the units are about 600mm x 1750mm high, and I got one bookshelf unit, three cupboard units and a file cabinet unit for $NZ 720 = $US 295. These are flatpack (not assembled) from Indonesia, and materials alone would have come to half that here. They are not the most upmarket, but serve the purpose admirably.

We returned to the Lakefront and picked up the others, to return back home. They finished packing to leave, while I beavered away on bank statements and other boring stuff until Deirdre and a friend, Kevin, arrived at 3.30 pm to pick them up and take them up to Auckland. We drove over to Lisa Cresc to check on the refurbishment; Jo had indicated that there had been some problems with the oven unit. It has a top plate which is hitting against the bench top, and I will have to do some remedial work tomorrow. At least the wiring has been completed -- and everything works. The bathroom is proceeding; the bath is in place and the walls are to be lined for a shower next week.

We came back home and relaxed until a quick tea, and watched a little TV until an early bed. We enjoy having people to stay, but we do seem to get tired much easier than we used to!

Saturday, October 27, 2001

We drove over to Lisa Crescent after breakfast; but first to the hardware emporium to get a couple of jars of screws suitable for screwing down our squeaking upstairs floors. I'll be pulling the carpet up the next week, and getting the screws in before the carpet layers come on the 5th Nov. Then round to the tile shop to buy more adhesive, and a tile cutter so I don't have to keep going there to hire one. At Joanna's, I measured carefully for the packers I need to make to go at each side of the oven.

Back home, we have lunch and decide that the afternoon is hot and humid, so a rest is in order. Joan then did some ironing while I went outside to attack the lawns. String-trim the edges, then out with the trusty Honda rotary lawnmower and do the business. I was just finishing the last bits under black skies when the first rain drops fell and sped my way back to the garden shed and inside.

After tea, we watched an episode of 'Lovejoy', then the finish of the NZ - Oz netball game -- a loss, I'm afraid. But the Kiwis gave a pretty good account of themselves; it's going to be a blood match at the next Commonwealth Games.

Sunday, October 28, 2001

Busy, busy, all day. I tackled the garage work bench in the morning, it took some time to clean up and put stuff in the proper place, then I pulled out the saw bench to cut the packers for Joanna's oven. By now, it was belting down outside; we had a depression with three centres pass over the North Island and if we get rain like that, someone else is getting drowned.

We drove over to Lisa Crescent to install the packers, but ran into a few problems so decided to postpone final fitting until tomorrow. Off home via the supermarket to stock up. Chris in France has been complaining about not being able to buy stuff after normal hours or on Sunday. Fortunately in NZ we are more civilised, and our supermarkets are open for long hours -- indeed in the main cities they run 24/7. A nice rotisserie chicken for tea, then I went upstairs and started on the WinXP install in Milly.

I took the precaution of cleaning up the C:/ partition and taking a Drive Image, before scrubbing it clean and booting off the CD. The install went without incident; everything seemed to be correctly identified and that lovely green hillside came up on the screen. I've re-installed Dreamweaver (so I can update this Kronikle), Corel Graphics stuff, and then Photoshop 6. All went smoothly and appear to be functioning correctly. Lastly, I attemped to install my trusty HP LaserJet 4MP PS; went through the wizard -- no test page printed. I went back and forth through the Troubleshooter to no avail -- all I get is a message telling me the printer is "Out of Paper", which I interpret to mean that something is getting through the port, back from the printer, but nothing going through the other way. Oh well, tomorrow I'll try a vanilla LaserJet III install and see if that works.