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Monday, January 21, 2002

Office tidy-up this morning. I found that Ace the laptop had emails on it that never made the refresh on Sissy when I came home. Very strange; one of them was my stats file from the ISP -- I suppose that could have been a direct mail that wasn't on the POP server. Anyway I printed out the important ones, then transferred the stats file over to Sissy and ran stats for the month to date. I was intrigued to find that on Jan 11th, I apparently only got 66 hits -- and my norm is about 500. I emailed a friendly engineer at the ISP, and was informed (with some embarassment) that on that date, the site server had run out of log space. Doh.

We went to town in the mid-afternoon to post some family-history books to purchasers, and change our library books. Then we were off to the aquatic centre to get back into Aquajogging and lick our flabby muscles into shape. Aquajogging (for those readers who came here after our sessions last year) is done with the aid of a substantial shaped slab of foam plastic fastened to your back with a strap round the waist. This supports the body with positive buoyancy, and enables one to move the arms and legs as if one were jogging under water, without the necessity of actually swimming to keep up. The pool is tepid (headed by geothermal steam) and pleasant once you are in the water. Joan managed 20 minutes, and I did an extra circuit after she got out. We'll be stiff tomorrow -- I feel my back muscles twitching already... No gain without pain, they say.

I installed my backup program (GRBackupPro) on Ace tonight, while I had it connected; and transferred what data files are on there to Linley's 40 GB storage drive. I would like to do a DriveImage -- but there doesn't seem a way to do this unless I can install DOS drivers for the PCM Network card. Drive Image won't permit an image on the same drive as is being imaged, of course.

Tuesday, January 22, 2002

This morning was devoted to putting the tiles on the ensuite window ledge. Not a big job, but I had to cut a notch in one tile for the window catch to operate into -- I used a tungsten carbide blade in my Makita jogsaw. Then a couple of careful cuts with the tile-cutter for the two end pieces which fortunately went OK; they were rather close to the side which doesn't make for easy cutting. I spread the glue, put the tiles in place, and cleaned up. All over bar the grouting.

Our landscaper, Guy, came in after lunch to look at the side garden wall; Joan wants to put a run of trellis on top to hide the rather ugly lean-to and plastic guttering which is on the side of next-door's garage. We sorted him out on what was necessary, and he will be here tomorrow. I finished the afternoon by mowing the lawns; grass growth has been phenomenal with the abundant rain. My leg muscles are still tender from yesterday's water exercise, so I was pleased to make the last cuts and return the mower to the shed.

My reading at the moment is a re-reading of Elizabeth Moon's excellent Serrano series; good readable space-opera for those so inclined. Recommended.

Wednesday, January 23, 2002

Lance, the young man from across the road, presented himself at 9.30 am this morning (under orders from Joan) to start a clean-up of the boundary fences and a coat of stain. He's a very presentable lad, who starts uni this year and thus needs money (like all students). I fired up the Ryobi water-blaster for him; but later in the morning he called out to me with a problem. The on-off switch had packed it in; I dismantled the water-blaster and extracted the switch.

This is the second time it has failed -- the first time I had it replaced under warranty; so three years on, it was up to me. Fortunately, the switch cover was only held on with plastic catches so I soon had it exposed. Just as I thought: plastic crap innards. I managed to restore operation and re-assembled the water-blaster; but we decided to leave the switch on, and just pull the plug out to turn it off. He completed the day without further incident.

It does infuriate me that a machine that cost $NZ700 (=$US300) and is ostensibly better-made than the cheap consumer models at half the price, depends for its operation on the durability of a small plastic pin (about the diameter of a real pin head and moulded onto the switch lever) which runs around a nylon track when the lever is pushed. This pin has worn just enough to jump out of its track every so often, and jam up the works. Obviously made just good enough to hopefully last past the warranty period, but not good enough to see out the life of the machine.

Guy rushed in just before lunch to deliver the timber for the new trellis work. He won't be back until tomorrow morning, being engaged sorting out some other emergency. We did a supermarket shop in the late afternoon; unpacked the stuff, had tea, and have settled down for a quiet evening. I'm tired, so I think it will be more Elizabeth Moon reading.

Thursday, January 24, 2002

All systems go this morning; with Lance painting stain on the fence, and Guy busy with carpentry on the side fence. The fence was a bigger job that Guy had anticipated, because the actual fence had been shoved out of vertical by the loads of firewood that the previous owners had stacked in the lean-to. He ended up clamping the fence posts to the existing lean-to posts, then wiring them together. They beavered away all day. I finished the white grout on the bathroom tiles before lunch.

I went into town to bank some cheques and call into Don to pick up some work. This kept me busy for most of the afternoon: one of our clients sells roll-forming machinery, and is getting interest from Turkey. They are keen to get their site listed on Turkish search engines, so I spent some time with Google hunting down likely prospects. Of course, they were in Turkish -- Babelfish doesn't have Turkish in its library, so I spent time with an on-line Turkish-English dictionary trying to make sense of the words. As is usual with these things, the words in the dictionary didn't match up with the text; this was heavily inflected, with lots of modifying endings that weren't in the dictionary. However, I made sufficient progress to see that it is possible to get a site listing on these engines. We need to have a Turkish translation for the site text, anyway -- and we'll get suitable keywords done at the same time.

I spent a little time after tea preparing for my photoschool which starts tomorrow night.

Friday, January 25, 2002

Lance back painting more fence this morning. Still has the other side boundary fence to go, yet. I'll get some pix up on Joan's garden pages when it's all finished. I have been busy today preparing for my photoschool; doing some more programmes with my altered schedule. I originally intended to have a number of set assignment subjects, and have the people draw one out of the hat; but after reflection, I decided to allot four main subjects: Trees, Patterns, People, and Colours. That way, they can be alert to possible shots in all four categories as they move round, rather than seeing a good shot too late for the previous day's subject. On Monday, I'll get them to present me with their four best shots, to pick a 'best set'.

The school duly convened at 7.30 pm; we have eight people from the Camera Club plus Rebeccah and Gemma. I spent some time outlining my thoughts on the set subjects, then we looked at any problems that people had with their gear. I covered the best ways of holding a camera, and how to avoid camera shake. Finally, I produced a secret weapon: a small mirror with vecro sticky on the back to be attached to the lens hood of my trusty Olympus OM2. I lined up a torch pointed at the mirror, which reflected a spot of light through into my darkened lounge. Then each person in turn took the camera and used it as they would normally to take a shot -- watching the spot of light dance around on the wall. Then I made them hold it properly, snug their elbows in, breathe out, then release the shutter. In each case, the light spot showed how much steadier they were by using the correct technique. We finished at 8.30 pm and they will be back at 9 am tomorrow.

Saturday, January 26, 2002

Up bright and early, breakfasted and ready to go at 9 am. A full muster of ten for my technical discussion on composition, then everybody into their cars with cameras loaded and ready to go by 10am. I took the girls back to the Goverment Gardens -- this was where I took Rebeccah a couple of weeks ago. I let Rebeccah do her own thing, and walked round with Gemma doing the same things that I did with Rebeccah; showing her possible photos and reminding her about the correct camera settings routine.

By 11.45pm they had finished their films; we moved the car into the town centre, got the films in for processing, and stopped at a pizza place for a quick lunch. The photos were ready at 12 50 pm, and we drove back home. The other school members came back in dribs and drabs, and I took their print wallets one by one and laid their prints out on the table for a critique. There were a lot of excellent shots among the 10 lots; and some commented that they were finding the discipline of continually looking for shots from four different assignment subjects was very challenging.

It was interesting how many people had managed to combine two subjects in one: like a child standing in the bole of a tree, or a highly-coloured pattern shot. We were back out on the road again by 2.30 pm; the girls decided they would like to visit the lakefront for more people shots. Rebeccah finished another film, but Gemma was finding it rather hard going. We're keeping the rest of her film for tomorrow morning; I suggested going out to the A & P Show at Ngongotaha (that's where Joan and I had a day out in January last year).

The school reassembled at 7.30 pm, for me to lecture on films, exposure, film latitude, light, and flash. We finished at 8.30 -- just as well, because I was getting pretty tired by this time. I'm into bed soon because we need to be out smartly in the morning.

Sunday, January 27, 2002

It took a little while to get started this morning, because we were all tired from the previous day; however, the girls and I were in the car and on our way to the A & P Show by 10 am. It turned out that an earlier start wouldn't have been much better, as the crowd was only starting to arrive at that time anyway. Rebeccah went off on her own as yesterday, while I helped Gemma along with choice of subjects, viewpoints etc. The weather was good; a high layer of cloud knocking back the sun a bit -- but enough to provide shadows. An overcast day makes photographs rather lifeless because of the lack of contrast; we rely on contrast to give us depth-perception clues, so without it, things look flatter. There were the usual show activities to record: horses, calf judging, wood-chopping, sheep-shearing -- all the things that go to make a traditional Agricultural and Pastoral Show.

We'd had enough by 12.15 pm; and our film had to be in at the photo store by 1 pm to be ready at 2 pm. On the way back into town, Rebeccah found she had a suspiciously short amount of rewinding before the film end went into the cassette. Sure enough, the film was blank; the tongue had slipped out of the takeup slot and she hadn't noticed that the knob didn't rotate as she wound. A pity, as she missed some good shots that she never actually took.

Back home at 2 pm, then the other school members arrived for 'show and tell' time. There were so many wallets of prints to look at that we didn't finish until 4 pm. We resumed after tea, at 7.30 pm, and everybody had to produce their best four prints, one from each category of trees, patterns, people and colour. I was impressed at the good standard of work; and also that the two girls' work was right up there with the experienced members. Actually, Gemma's three films were the first real photos she had ever taken, and she hadn't had the advantage that Rebeccah enjoys of having good photography around her all the time.

A very exhausting weekend for me (especially chasing around after two lively 14-year-olds!) but very rewarding when you get such an enthusiastic team and a positive result.