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Monday, December 31, 2001

Amazing -- a fine, sunny day. Joan went out for food shopping with Joanna, which left me to get on with computing.

I have half-solved the Linux CDRom problem from last night: I noticed that Mandrake/KDE was taking a much longer time than normal to boot up. I like the way that it displays screen messages to let you know what's happening -- but unfortunately, after one of the 'hangs', the messages went by too fast to read. However, I deduced that something was not reading the CDRW correctly, and therefore delved into the Control Centre. I found that the CDRW was listed as TWO drives, one on IDE and the other on SCSI. Obviously, when Mandrake is being installed, the installer knows what to do and there is no conflict. But after install, I click on the CD-ROM icon on the desktop and get a 'drive busy' or 'already mounted' message. I conclude from this that I am probably trying to access the drive through a nonexistent SCSI. But I haven't yet found the way to delete this superfluous entry. At least M$ gives you a REMOVE button in Device Manager...

Friend Neville and his mother Flo dropped in this afternoon. Neville is trying to learn about PCs, and had a list of curly questions, mostly to do with motherboards, processors and drives. I had saved a couple of cartons of PC magazines from my cleanout for him, so he's got plenty to occupy himself with, now.

We're off to spend the evening at an impromptu get-together of neighbours across the road, so I'm posting this ahead of time.

Happy New Year to you and yours, and may 2002 turn out to be everything you're hoping for -- and nothing of what you fear.

Tuesday, January 1, 2002

Another fine, sunny day, and the temperatures are warming up nicely -- a nice change from the recent run of 15 degC days. Pottered about in the office during the morning; identified the trip photos I printed the other day and put them in an envelope for posting. Joanna had decided to cook a hot midday dinner, so we wandered over to Lisa Crescent about 1.30 (the pork was taking a long time to roast). A pleasant meal, with fruit salad and a meringue with lots of cream for dessert.

We returned home by about 4.30 pm, made a cup of tea and blobbed out for a while before deciding to get the lawns mowed. I wielded the string trimmer on the lawn edges while Joan mowed; by the time I had finished the back lawn she was ready for me to take over the mower. It makes a big difference cutting dry grass, after the wet soggy stuff I've had to deal with lately.

Upstairs after a cold drink, to install Thumbs Plus on Millie; for some reason I had not re-installed it after the last scrub-down. I've moved all my digital pix into a separate partition, and sorted them into appropriate folders. Then I turned ThumbsPlus on them to build up the database of thumbnail images for reference.

Wednesday, January 2, 2002

The CEO has been feeling housebound, and pleaded for remission. We decided to drive over to Tauranga, about an hour's drive away to do some shopping at a mall there. Instead of going the usual way up the eastern side of Lake Rotorua, we went up the west side and took a minor but more direct route. It's scenic, but has a short unsealed section to traverse -- not too much trouble in the Honda CR-V with fat tyres and 4-wheel drive.

We had a leisurely shop at Bayfair Plaza; found some bits'n'pieces in KMart that we don't see over here. Then back in the car for a short drive to Papamoa Beach; where there is, oddly enough, a very small mall which has a bookstore who specialises in remainders and deleted lines. Joan found two copies of Delia Smith's Learning to Cook book 2; Joanna has book 1 and they find it most useful. The idea is that they will leave with Rebeccah when she eventually goes flatting. I found a Learn Mac OS 8.5 in 24 Hours book which had been reduced to $NZ19.95; even though I have OS 9.2 there's still a lot of background info in there for me.

It was about 30 minutes drive from there to Whakatane, where we stopped in at the caravan place we looked at in October. We really don't like any of the caravans larger than 11 or 12 feet long (they still spec them in Imperial!) and even these would take up too much room at the front side of the garage. So it looks as if we'll be sticking with the camper for our summer jaunts away.

Thursday, January 3, 2002

It was again fine and sunny this morning, which was incentive for us to pull the mattresses of the bed and put them out in the sun to 'cook'. Gets rid of house dust mite and other invisible greeblies, plumps the mattresses up, and gives them a wonderful outdoor aired-in-the-sun smell.

I spent the rest of the day shuffling paper and doing ledgers in the office; has to be done, so just have to do it. At least I have the aircon running to make things tolerable. I surfaced at regular intervals for food and drink, while Joan busied herself with domestic activities like ironing and vacuuming.

For those interested: I've been trying a cut-down version of a Photoshop plug-in called "Genuine Fractals". This is supposed to produce a file (after using it to save a scan or digital photo) which will re-load at any designated size and ppi you require. This means that the original file, once saved, becomes independent of the result; thus you don't need to keep several versions of an image for reproduction at various sizes -- you just generate them as required. It is supposed to produce a superior result when enlarging a file beyond its original size. I was playing around with this; after careful examination of two variations of the same image (one resized in Photoshop, the other from a G_Fractals file) I was unable to determine much difference on the screen. However, there may well be a difference when printed -- that's the next step.

Friday, January 4, 2002

I tok Joan into town this morning, for her to do some quiet browse shopping on her own. I called into Millennium Computers to see if there was any sign of my Epson scanner -- but nothing yet. Everything non-essential in New Zealand closes down over the Christmas-New Year holiday period, so it's probably sitting in some warehouse in Auckland, waiting for someone to get back to work and open the cartons. I picked up a likely-looking sound card to try in Linley; the on-board sound does not seem to have any legacy drivers for the old DOS programs, so I thought I would try this X-Wave card which promised DOS and even Linux compatibility. Unfortunately, it got about three-quarters of the way there; in Blake Stone, it would produce the voices, but no sound effects or music. I configured it faithfully, and double-checked settings, but that's as far as it got.

Of course, we're not supposed to be playing the old DOS games -- but the young ones love them, and some of them were good fun too. I even tried Blake Stone in my test DOS partition, installing the DOS drivers, with similar results to that in Win98. I would install an old Soundblaster card -- except that these motherboards no longer have ISA slots.

Saturday, January 5, 2002

A quiet morning doing things in the office; checking email, and setting up my laptop to take away with us next week. Joan went off to a fabric warehouse to pick up some trimmings, while I started work on assembling Barkman family history to take away with me as well -- seeing that my sister and family will be at the wedding in Christchurch.

Kay and Teddy returned about mid-afternoon; we caught up on their doings, then Kay sat with me until 6 pm going through the Barkman material she had collated. We then went out to dinner to a small restaurant, which had scored Best Rotorua Restaurant 2000-1. A delightful meal, beautifully prepared and presented.

Sunday, January 6, 2002

Busy on the 'Net this morning; looking up stuff for my photo course and also calibration methods for monitors. After lunch I continued with the Barkman genealogy narrative through until dinner, Joan had prepared a delicious steak and onion pie, and we washed that down with good wine. This is Kay and Teddie's last night with us.

After tea I went over more Barkman source material with Kay, fleshing out the rather bare-bones skeleton we had previously prepared. That pretty much sums up the day.