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Monday, November 12, 2001

I drove in to Don's office at 9.30 am to help sort out a minor problem with a program on Don's second office box. He loaded me up with another scanning job, and I departed back home. Then spent the rest of the day catching up with his work -- the job bag I hadn't touched had about 30 prints of all sizes and shapes. This was for our local list MP; we did his election web site a couple of years ago, and have been doing intermittent updates since. But election year is coming up again (we have elections every three years) and he's decided to have another go. He is the Opposition's spokesperson on defence matters and is really the only one they've got with knowledge of it.

Some of the prints I scanned were of Max in camo gear, out in the field with troops and also in the Solomon Islands. NZ has done a lot of peacekeeping work here, and succeeded in bringing the warring parties together and arranging a truce. The images are needed for a big site re-design.

The next job was interesting, as it involved a lot of scans of old prints -- something that I have been working on with the help of an excellent book: Photoshop Restoration and Retouching by Katrin Eismann. Recommended for those who are scanning old photos. The scans are for a book cover to be published by a local writers' group. I finished the last scan, and hurriedly burned a CD-R to give to Don at 5.15 pm as he arrived to drop Ethan off.

Tonight I have done my usual Monday surf to gather material for the home page, and updated the relevent pages. Not much done in the tidying department, but more of that tomorrow.

Tuesday, November 13, 2001

The morning's work was assembly of the third cupboard flatpack; delayed by the discovery that the pack did not contain any hardware. It was suspicious that the flatpack was secured by tape as well as straps -- the other two had straps only. I zipped into the Warehouse Stationery as had them open another pack for the hardware. The assembly was accomplished by lunch time and put into place after lunch. Joan immediately filled it with sewing stuff, then set to clearing out the loft area ready to have shelves put up in there. We drove into town in the mid-afternoon to pick up a six-socket power strip to go behind Linley when things are pushed back into place; then on to the supermarket for a stock-up. I got another lot of stuff back into place on shelves.

But first I had to wire up the Cat5 cable protruding from under the carpet edge. After tea, I dug out the cabling kit and set to, only to defer wiring the plug until the morning when the light's better and I can get my bifocals in the right place. The problems of aging eyes...

Wednesday, November 14, 2001

I completed putting RJ45 connectors on the network cable for Linley this morning, coupling things up, and pushing the cabinet back against the wall. Much tidier, and there is lots of floor room gained. I did the requisite configurations of IP addresses and tweaking Zone Alarm, and Linley was back on the network. At least from Win98SE, anyway. I'm going to put a Mandrake distro on one of the spare partitions; I do have 7.1, but should probably try and get 8.0 or 8.1. This hasn't come through on a magazine CD yet, and downloading an iso would blow my entire month's DSL allowance in one fell swoop. DSL in NZ is paid for by traffic; the plan I have allows 600 MB per month, and it's 20c a MB over that. The other possibility is using dialup; I have 10 hours per month unused, which is there for access by laptop when I'm away from home. I'll think about it.

The rest of the day was spent on the Asthma Newsletter, using Ventura -- I do three of these a year, of about 12 pages. The text comes by email attachment, and it just needs to be flowed through page frames. Another contributor provided information neatly formatted into MSWord tables, but had them in landscape format. I managed to transfer the info into new tables in portrait format, but it did take an hour to get them looking good.

More putting away of junk (no, its REALLY good stuff, it is, it is, I say). And finding more stuff I had forgotten I had.

Thursday, November 15, 2001

Dropped Joan into town for her string of 'beauty' appointments, then returned home to do more office work. Succeeded in getitng sidetracked, looking for a program that will analyse a website to a 'tree' then PRINT it. I downloaded and tried about five of them -- they all gave me pretty tree displays, but not one would put it on paper. This is a problem that has been well solved by the genealogy people; I'm amazed that I can't find something to do what I want. Any help will be appreciated.

I duly ordered the latest distro of Mandrake 8.1 on 3 CDs, which should arrive tomorrow by post, God and NZ Post willing. Hopefully I'll find time to install it over the weekend. I've also got to get some more shelves in place; Sue and Jeremy are coming here for Thankgiving on Thursday, so the bedroom has to be cleared and the beds up well before then...

Friday, November 16, 2001

Joan, Joanna, and Joan's cousin Eris set out at 10 am to spend the day on an arranged Garden Tour. I don't know how many gardens they got to, but the list filled a formidable A4 booklet and the gardens were situated all round the district as well as in town. Meantime, I busied myself with setting up my smallish Aiwa stereo in an appropriate position. This actually took a little juggling, as I've moved the main unit from one wall to another and the speakers are on top of the filing cabinet stack and a cupboard. This was necessary, as the power strip is now on that wall to feed Linley and her bits. All in place, and sounding quite good; not, of course, as good as the Denon kit and Kef speakers downstairs, but more than adequate for the purpose. Especially as I had bought the powered sub-woofer which was an extra. Also another stack of papers and files sorted and put onto shelves. My Mandrake distro duly arrived in the mail -- amazing service, seeing that it came from Dunedin at the other end of the country, overnight. Sometimes, Fast Post actually is fast.

Joanna being on the garden trip, I was deputed for child collection duty and arrived at Aorangi School at the appointed time. I had two extra -- Joanna picks up Adam and Catherine (Adam is Ethan's close friend, and Catherine is practically welded to Eli) on Fridays; eventually rounded them up and delivered them to Lisa Crescent. The next job was to drive over to collect Rebeccah from High School, where she waits patiently for someone to turn up. I dropped her back home to be the official child minder, then returned home. Joan arrived back at 4 pm, very tired but pleased with the day's outing. I managed to get more financial stuff attended to before tea. Some time spent reading up on Linux installations; then Russell phoned to let me know he was available tomorrow to help with shelving. I'll have to get busy now, and measure up.

Saturday, November 17, 2001 Happy birthday, Icarus

Well, this site has been up one year today. Of course, when I first posted the home page and the first on-line Icarus Kronikles, it was just a family page, and a means of gaining experience with web design. It was pretty raw, but I perservered -- and started expanding the pages. In December, I would have been lucky to clock four visitors in a day -- and that was boosted by me a couple of times, and my daughter in Wellington, who faithfully visits the Kronikles most days to see what her Dad is up to.

After some contact with members of the Daynotes Gang (mostly questions about web code and things technical), I suddenly was invited to join this august body. It appears they liked my daily drivel, the leavening of techie stuff, and the occasional foray into photography. Once listed on the Daynotes Page, my global popularity increased by leaps and bounds.

The stats I've put together for the last 12 months: 20,409 visiting users; 7508 unique IPs; 156,474 hits. I'm quite humbled by this attention, and am gratified that there are so many good people out there who are happy to read about life and works in a small city in New Zealand. I look forward to the next year with interest and enthusiasm.

Today? Well, Russell arrived at 10 am with a box of tools. I had spent time since 9 am moving boxes out of the loft area, and sketching shelf diagrams on a pad. We worked out how much board we would need, and drove down to the hardware outlet to get it. For the rest of the day, we sawed and screwed shelves into place -- and now the loft has three sturdy shelves at each end to take cartons of stuff. A good day's work, and very rewarding.

We went over to Lisa Crescent for Rebeccah's birthday tea; nice roast chicken and roast veg with asparagus and broccoli cheese -- a sensible choice (it's traditional in the Cox household that the birthday person gets to specify exactly what they would like for the meal). Back home, I slipped the Linux boot diskette into Linley and installed Mandrake 8.1. All went smoothly for the most part. I specified KDE on the way through, but it insisted on booting up in Gnome. The other hassle is that it will not respond to the root password (and I DID SO write it down). It appears that I can remedy this by booting up with the floppy and editing the password file with an editor. I'm leaving that to the morning, and now today's Kronikle is drawing to an end, I'm off to bed.

Sunday, November 18, 2001

Another week in the life of, is finished. We did a little carton shuffling in the morning, but not very enthusiastically as my back was sore from stooping yesterday. The clearance in the loft only permits a back-straighten in the tallest bit next to the interior wall, and the roof slopes at about 40 deg from there. This means I have to adopt the 'crash position' beloved of the airlines, to get stuff back and forth.

I moved more stuff out of the upstairs bathroom; piles of manilla folders that needed going through before filing or junking. I drove Joan to the garden centre in mid-afternoon, to stock up (= fritter away money on) on a couple of roses and more bedding plants. I've got more garden pix to process and put on the garden page; hopefully tomorrow. Back home, I set to work on the asthma newsletter and have finally got that put to bed and proofs printed ready to post tomorrow. I didn't get back to Linley, either, so Mandrake will have to wait another day or so.