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Monday, December 3, 2001

I spent some time this morning updating parts of my website, such as the Techie page with details of my hardware. This was prompted by my finding the manilla folder with the spec sheets for each box. I fill these out as I assemble a box, so that I can remember what stuff has been installed, and special notes like motherboard drivers needed, etc. Google aims quite a few people at this page <grin>.

During the afternoon, I spent some time ratting through various software sites looking for a useable program to back up my various data partitions over to Linley, who is sitting waiting with a nice 40 GB drive largely empty. I tried six different programs; some of which were pathetic, or very obscure to use. Two had no facilities to use the network. After a Google search, I hit upon a utility called GRBack-Pro from GRSoftware who appears to be in California. I've used it to backup all the data on Sissy, which it did without pain in about 35 minutes (I've only got the slower ethernet). The evaluation copy has the most infuriating nag screens I've ever encountered; but I've perservered because, so far, it's doing what I want. I need to copy stuff; I don't want to compress it; I want to only back up new or changed files; and I want easy selection of folders, sub-folders or files. If any reader has a recommendation, I'll be happy to try it.

After tea, I matted the ballet girl picture for Rebeccah to give to her teacher tomorrow night at the show party.

Tuesday, December 4, 2001

We went over to Lisa Crescent in the morning. Joan helped Joanna, while I went to the hardware store to get some course grit belts for my sander -- the floor in Jo's kitchen where her old cupboards had been was caked with lino glue, and she needed it varnished to match the rest. That done, I completed mounting the Camera Club certificates on light card ready for tomorrow.

I spent some time preparing a programme for my photography summer school to be held late in January. This will be a full-on long weekend, and I will be surprised if I get more than half a dozen participants. We'll have a lot of fun, anyway.

Don phoned up about 6 pm with a call for help: the office computers had been infected with a solid dose of SirCam and he was having trouble getting it out. He picked me up after tea, and we worked carefully at the job, using the SirCam remover that my daughter had sent up during the last outbreak. Finally, we got both boxes clean and both checked out OK. He doesn't know quite how it got through the virus scanners, but he has had two part-timers working at the moment and one of them might have just checked their own email on the second computer. I haven't seen SirCam for a while -- mostly BadTrans.

Wednesday, December 5, 2001

A late post; I was tired last night after the Camera Club meeting, and the update got overlooked. Another humid day with an odd shower here and there. A morning spent on odd jobs; I photocopied the above photo programme and enrolment slips to give out this evening. While viewing Daynoters, Dan Seto has been playing with a new-look site page and solicited comments. I thought I should see how his test page looked in Konqueror, so fired up Linley into Linux, only to find that KDE had decided not to talk to my wheel mouse properly. There must have been some weird dialogue between them, as the button-click functions seemed to have reversed sides -- but not consistently. This is the major problem of relying on a GUI <g>. I resorted to ALT-letter commands to get myself back out to logoff.

Out in mid-afternoon to deliver the other chair to the upholsterer for refurbishing; through town to send my annual Christmas post of NZ calendars to friends in the UK, then out to the otherside of town for Joan to look for a means of paving a 3 metre circle around the magnolia tree in the back lawn. We looked at various lumps of concrete with tapered sides (which produce curves), but they were all intended for building walls and were overkill for a mowing strip. Rectangular cobbles set in a circle leave a v-shaped gap, which either fills up with grass, or has to be filled with mortar which doesn't match the colour of the cobbles. So we eventually concluded that a plastic border strip would be the best solution; I can't mow over it, but will have to use the string trimmer.

We had inadvertently produced a clash of social engagements this night: there was a show on involving Ten Tenors singing. Joan is very partial to good singing, so we'd booked seats -- only to realise a few days ago that this was the Camera Club End-of-Year evening and I was providing most of the programme. So Joanna scored my seat, and dropped Rebeccah for me to take to the evening (I will be giving her and a friend some photo tuition over the school vacation). The evening went off really well; the judge/assessor of the competition was in Tauranga and had not been able to come over, sending his written comments back with the prints. Unfortunately, we had not instructed him to comment on all the prints, so he only mentioned the winners. So the President asked me to comment on the individual entries -- not assess them -- and as most people had entered prints (we were allowed up to six), I talked solidly for about one and a quarter hours; as I had prints entered, when I came to them I told members how and where they were taken, instead of comments. The President handed out certificates (my print of the priest in Hania was Print of the Year, and the belltower was third).

We were home by 10.45 pm; I spent a little time sorting out Linley's mouse problem, send Dan an email with results, and went to bed.

Thursday, December 6, 2001

A brighter day this morning; Joan went off into town with Anita, our across-the-street neighbour, to be beautified. I drove in later on, with my box of framed prints to be hung up in my computer dealer's shop. We agreed on a discount for him if he sells any, and I decided that the Museum poster was not satisfactory for them, and would do a new one. Joan arrived, and we went home; I prepared the new poster, printed it, and we had lunch. I sprayed the poster and glued it onto foamcore.

By now, the sun was out, the grass was dryer, so I fired up the string trimmer to do the lawn edges. Then managed to get the lawns cut with some difficulty because of the volume of lush grass I was cutting -- because of all the rain. We have cut our compost bin down to one, and it was jammed full already, so I was reduced to filling black plastic rubbish bags with the clippings. Looks like a trip to the refuse dump (I could do with a visit from Keith -- are you listening?). More heavy rain is due overnight, so I'm pleased that's done.

Spent some more time fiddling with Mandrake Linux. The system sound is an on-board chip which has drivers loaded (as the GUI startup music is present), but I cannot seem to play an audio CD using the CD utility -- just says it can't find the CDRom. Probably because it actually is a burner; there *may* be Linux drivers on the install CD, I'll have to look. I've downloaded Brian & Tom's Linux Book, and I'm printing out the KDE section right now. Btw, I've found an excellent utility for this sort of job: it's called FinePrint, and will print multiple pages on one sheet, duplex print etc. I find it excellent for long HTML docs, like the Linux book.

Friday, December 7, 2001

Don's office Zip drive has acquired the Click of Death; we still use Zip disks a lot, as they are standard for sending files to the printers (although some are accepting CDRs in preference). Don uses Zip disks for transferring files from work to home and vice-versa, and he has a lot of them. I drove into town this morning to Millennium Computers to check out the price and compare it with a CD-RW burner -- not a great difference; but Don would need two burners for the home <-> office file transfers. His call was to go with the new Zip in the meantime, and get the burners in the next upgrade. Millennium, not surprisingly, didn't have an internal Zip IDE drive on the shelf -- as that technology has now largely been passed over by the CD-RW, He'll have to wait until Tuesday.

I came away from the office with a website job: refurbishing one of Don's early sites; removing the frames and substituting tables; scanning a bunch of new photos; and replacing chunks of text. After lunch, I made some progress on this work during the afternoon. I drove back into town at 6 pm to meet Joan and the two boys; they had been to the Harry Potter movie, and I joined them at Burger King for hamburgers. Lots of heavy rain, lightning, and thunder during the afternoon -- my UPS kept squawking every time the voltage dipped, but the power didn't actually go off. Must have been some good surges, though.

Saturday, December 9, 2001

We had a courier calling card in our mailbox from yesterday, so went out in mid-morning to pick up the parcel; then round to Lisa Crescent for me to sort out why the two computers were talking OK on TCP/IP but the second one was not linking to use the modem. It was only a config problem: the main one has a special proxy server, and the second one didn't have the port specified. Once I fixed that, it dialled the Internet without problem.

Back home for lunch; then I spent the rest of the day working on genealogy, getting more families entered, and checking details on existing ones. I had a longer TV night tonight, watched 'Lovejoy' and an Irish dance thing before going back upstairs. As it is my son's birthday, I gave him a ring at 10.45pm; we are on Summer Time, so it was 9.45 am in London. We had a good long talk; mostly about computers, but also about his work and how Madeleine (his partner) was. We finished at 12.05 am -- one of the better features of our local Telco's is that they have 'capped calls' in the weekends; this 1 hour 20 min will only cost me $8 NZ (about $US3.30).

Sunday, December 9, 2001

Out to the supermarket this morning, as all the food had run out - desperation <g>. On return, I busied myself with re-doing the tiling in the front toilet. I've found a tungsten carbide blade for my Makita jigsaw which trims ceramic tiles off most efficiently, so I was able to tidy up some edges before I re-glued the times into place.

I've devoted most of the remaining time today putting more genealogy detail entry into Family Tree Maker. At the moment, I'm entering details of an ancestor family that came to New Zealand about 1840, so that makes us eligible to join the Founders Society -- if I wanted to, or felt the need. This is something similar to the US Mayflower organisations.

More very heavy rain tonight; the soak pits in the garden must be fully saturated as water was swilling around the side path when I looked. Our soil is generally free-draining, being alluvial with a lot of pumice in it; but we've had so much rain it's not funny any more. The storm water from the roof is channeled into these soak pits, as our local Council discourages running storm water into the sewerage system.