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Monday, November 5, 2001

Well, the carpet is down, most of the boxes are reconnected, there is stuff everywhere, and I am exhausted. Just enough strength in my palsied fingers to tap out the day's update...

I was up smartly at 7.30 am; Joan had had a bad night with a virus -- she was out in the bathroom whooping her cookies at 2.30 am and had a wretched night with a headache as well. She spent the day in bed and recovered quickly; enough to have a little food at teatime.

The carpet layer came at 8.30 am and I stripped out our storage room ready for his attention. He did the guest room first, then lifted the stair carpet to allow me to check on loose treads that might be causing the loud squeaking when using the stairs. Not a sign of anything amiss; then I had an idea and went under the stairs -- it's actually our hot water cupboard. To my amazement, the side bearers oif the stairs were unsupported; there had been plaster board between the wood and the studs, which had been removed to find a water leak at one time. I fashioned some wood packers and screwed through the stair sides, packer, into the stud. Four of these in place, then I tested the stairs -- dead quiet :-] I think the stair sides must have been flexing up and down as you walked on them, and rubbing against other surfaces.

Russell arrived at 1.30 pm to help shift stuff, and we soon finished stripping the storage room. Then we started on the office; this took some time to shift, but the carpet went down and all was finished by 5.30 pm. I've spent the time after tea moving things back into place, wiping off all the bench surfaces and connecting up gear. Now it's bedtime, and a couple of paracetamol tabs for my aches.

Tuesday, November 6, 2001

The first job today was tackling the cupboard and shelf unit. These came as a flatpack made in Indonesia; and surprisingly, the instructions were well set out and reasonably easy to follow. But I do pity anyone who tackles these, armed only with the pitiful Allen key the supply and perhaps a screwdriver. I had to drill some holes that had only been superficially marked and not completed. A power screwdriver made things easier; I used a measuring tape to get the cupboard carcase square.

I had a breather in mid-afternoon while we drove into the supermarket to stock up on things; my cell phone rang to let me know that the man buying my old display units was on his way out to collect them. We hastily finished shopping, zipped through the checkout and beat him home by five minutes. I can put the car away in the garage tonight :-]

I finished the assembly and put the units against the wall; moved the filing cabinet into place and stacked one of the old ones on top. The computer that will go over on the same wall (Linley) is on a wheeled console. I took the opportunity of running some Cat5 cable from the Nokia DSL/router position right round the floor edge to this position before the carpet went down in place. That means no trailing cables across the floor for me to trip over.

Finally finished tonight by stacking files and books on shelves; I'm amazed at how much room I've gained in the office with the alterations.

Wednesday, November 7, 2001

Joan wanted to go into town to get Joanna's birthday present, and I needed to go to Don's office to collect three of my prints from his wall for club entries. So we drove into town early, did the chores, and came back via Lisa Cresc for me to look at the childrens' deceased computer. I quickly established it wouldn't even boot from a floppy, so loaded it and the monitor into the back of the CR-V to take back home.

The box went through the POST routine OK, but stopped with the usual "Non-system disk ..." etc. I was suspicious of the m/b drive controller, but some patient detective work involving changing the floppy drive [no go] and then another hard drive [yay, it booted] let me determine that it was the hard drive at fault. At this point, I started looking through the BIOS settings and found that Don (in a vain attempt to coax it into life) had set the boot to "C drive only" -- no wonder I couldn't boot from a floppy <groan>. That corrected, I used a boot floppy and found I could examine all the files on the hard drive. That suggested some trouble with the MBR; so tried the usual < fdisk c: /mbr > to no avail. Partition Magic was no help, either -- but I did notice that it was the old FAT and not FAT32, so I realised that it had Win 95 installed.

So I stripped off the files that Joanna uses for tax and cashbook purposes and some other bits'n'pieces, onto a floppy. Tomorrow, it's the Thompson Deep Clean® treatment; I'll first strip out all the partitions (it's only a 4.6 GB drive), repartition, reformat, and do a clean install. All the kids' games will go down the bit-bucket, but it will be a good learning experience for Ethan to replace the software they want to use. I hope that sorts the MBR problem -- otherwise I'll have to replace the drive.

After that, it was off to Camera Club with my six prints for the end-of-year exhibition. We had a good attendance; and after the print assessment of last month's entries, we had two excellent slide-sound lectures from the Photographic Society of NZ. One was by a lady who has specialised in producing print collages, mostly of outdoor subjects such as flowers and gardens -- some quite stunning work.

Thursday, November 8, 2001 -- Joanna's Birthday

Joan off to town with Joanna to do some leisurely shopping, and sit with a latte watching the crowds go by. While I beaver away at home, moving stuff between rooms. The problem with this job, is that I keep finding things I had totally forgotten about. That means a sit-down-and-read session between bouts of activity; well, I have to read the material in case I need to keep it, don't I???

The phone rings: it is the Camera Club COmpetitions Secretary telling me that one of the prints I've entered has a nasty scrape in a prominent piece of sky. I spent a little while locating the image, massaging it in Photoshop and reprinting it ready to take overm as a replacement. I also realise that it's a while since I caught up with my bank accounts and hastily summon up the online banking. Urk -- my current account is down to $500 so I need to transfer money. That's the trouble with plastic -- it just gnaws away at the bank balance unobtrusively and runs it down to nothing. These are debit cards, btw for US readers; NZ has a very high usage of what is called here EFT-POS (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale). Just about all but the smallest places -- even offices, dentists, and similar places have a terminal. With these, the money transaction is done on the fly -- out of your account into theirs. Of course, we also use credit cards as well.

We drove over to the other side of the city to fix my print; this was easily done -- I just slit the matte away from the backing card, taped the replacement print in place, applied more adhesive and closed the mount up. For those interested: I use something put out by Scotch called 'transfer adhesive'. It comes as a roll with the adhesive film carried on brown paper, and is applied using a 'gun' type holder which dispenses the adhesive and winds the brown paper up as it's used. The adhesive is similar to that on double-sided tape -- without the tape, just the sticky. That makes a less bulky join between the two boards.

AT 6.30 pm, off to a restaurant for Joanna's birthday treat; this was called 'Sizzlers', and according to Don is modelled on similar operations in the US. The menu is varied: Mexican; seafood; steaks; pork ribs; chicken etc served with salads. We all returned home to tackle the Cake: rather like a cheesecake on a solid base and filled with Irish Cream cream with a piped Happy Birthday on white chocolate wafers. Adults consumed a beautiful sweet late-harvest riesling from Cloudy Bay (one of our best vineyards) and plunger coffee. The call was for music, so I dug out some Irish Chieftains CDs and had the kids dancing round to some good 'iddly-diddly' music. They went off to Lisa Crescent at 9.45 pm, leaving us a little shattered after a full day.

Friday, November 9, 2001

Took Joan into town for a physio appointment; her asthma has deteriorated a little lately, so we felt a bit of postural drainage would clear some of the mucous from her lungs. It certainly did the job, and I will be doing some of the percussive massage technique when she needs it. Then to Millennium Computers to pick up a CPU fan for the kids' box -- the existing one was on its last legs. Also collected a cheap AGP video card to replace the old cirrus/voodoo combination that I can't get good drivers for.

I worked on the computer with indifferent success -- the new video card drivers seemed to be clashing with the old ones. I ended up installing an old Drive Image of a clean install, this being quicker than going through the whole routine. That got the box back on course, and I was able to get a proper display going.

At that point, I realised the afternoon was slipping away; it was fine outside, and rain is forecast. So I donned gumboots and grabbed the mower to reduce the lush grass to something more tidy-looking. After tea, I returned to my computer labours and tackled the recalcitrant network card. I may not have had the correct driver disk for that particular one; but a look in my spares box produced an ISA card which installed properly and put me on the network. That's about the lot for the night -- I'm off to bed.

Saturday, November 10, 2001

It was supposed to be wet today, but the weather gods decided to delay the cold front, and it actually wasn't too bad. Joan went off to the garden centre with Joanna and came back with a selection of chemical warfare bottles to attack bugs and stuff. I put a lot more stuff back into the office area. In between times, I loaded a heap of software into the Kidzbox, and by the end of the afternoon had it going really well -- for a socket 7 AMD 300 MHz with 64 MB RAM. I loaded it into the car and we took it back to Lisa Cresc to restore to its accustomed place. I had been using an ordinary PS2 mouse; Don had originally put a cordless MS wheel mouse on. So I connected the mouse to the serial port,and booted; Win98 found the mouse OK and installed the driver -- but somehow it insisted on re-installing every last hardware driver as well. And restored them to the default settings I had carefully tweaked...

The network card is incommunicado as well -- and of course I had omitted to bring the driver floppy, because it was working fine, wasn't it. So I have to go over one morning this comign week and sort it out.

Apart from that, nothing of much interest. We collected Chinese takeaways on the way back home, consumed them, and had an enjoyable hour watching 'Lovejoy'. I checked on the 'Net after it finished and turned up the webn site with details. It turns out that there were six series made; we are on the third episode of the second series (made in 1991) so there's lots more to come.

Sunday, November 11, 2001

The first job this morning was to assemble another cupboard from flatpack; this occupied me for an hour or two. Then I made room in the spare bedroom to take the cupboard and we got it into place. A lot more putting stuff away happened then, but I still really haven't got things really sorted as to their final destination.

Daughter Sue rang during the afternoon to let us know they had returned from their three weeks overseas; sounding quite good in spite of jetlag, and complaining of LAX doing away with the transit lounge for Air New Zealand passengers en route from London. Stupid, really: they had to collect their hold luggage from a carousel, take it to another counter and put it through to go back on the plane. No visible X-ray process; which made her wonder why they bothered to get passengers to bring the luggage from carousel to counter. If the Customs have been x-raying the cases, they really didn't need the passengers to accompany the bags -- they could have just hauled it off the plane, x-rayed it, and shoved it back in the hold. Maybe it's because they have to be SEEN to be doing SOMETHING -- even if it really doesn't do a lot. They enjoyed their holiday in England and Greece, anyway.