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Monday, February 25, 2002

Outside workday today, as although it was sunny, there was enough cloud cover at times to allow me to be outside. I avoid the midday sun, after my experience with solar keratoses; also the diuretics I take increase the skin's sensitivity to ultraviolet. After my compulsory morning email and daynotes check, I dug out the water-blaster and cleaned off the layers of thick moss on the bricks which form the front boundary garden. I carried then on with an annual chore: cleaning the green algae off the plastic rain guttering. For some reason, this proliferates, always bright green and mixed up with grime. The water blaster shifts most of it, but it still has to have a good brush scrub with detergent and another rinse.

Also I had to clean a section of gutter which is along the upstairs roof line; for this, I use a triple-extension brush whose handle will telescope out to about 5 metres. It's a bit whippy and hard to handle, but the only thing which does the job. I also clean the upstairs windows while it's in action. I knocked off in the middle of the day when the sun suddenly came out full strength, and resumed again at 4.30 pm. So that job is done, and all I have to water blast now, is the lower piece of the side fence which got left when the fence was stained. At the end of the day, I'm weary and my arms are letting me know I've been wrestling that long brush about, so I think it's bedime.

I must draw your attention to an excellent article in the NZ Herald which talks about the need to retain a Monarchy, in the face of background mumblings about having a republic. You should remember that the Queen is, in addition to the U.K., also officially Queen of New Zealand; and there is still a preponderance of Kiwis who vehemently reject any idea of republicanism. No matter what our Aussie cousins across the water think.

Tuesday, February 26, 2002

An interesting email from Don Axxx in Australia:

Subject: Stable government versus republic

I don't know whether you were watching at the time or not, but enough loud mouths made enough noise that Australia actually held a referendum on whether or not we should have a republic, and the majority opted on the side of good sense. This of course is normal in Australia; but I was personally rather concerned about the younger generation, who have been taught by increasingly larger proportions of idiots as time went by. I worry for the future.

However, I think the side of good sense was helped in this case by the fact that the BEST republican state was being run by Bill Clinton's cigars at the time, and other notable presidencies were exemplified by France, Italy, North Korea, China, Russia, Argentina, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Ethiopia, South Africa, and so forth. I also suspect that Belgian, Swedish, and even Dutch and Spanish and Tongan constitutional monarchies looked good by comparision.

Thanks, Don; always gratifies me to find that there are live, thinking humans out there that actually read what I post ;-]

A little outside work again this morning; finishing off the water blasting after mowing that piece of lawn BEFORE I got it wet... A certain amount of difficulty doing physical activity: stiff after yesterday, but also a 'crick in the neck' showed up on waking this morning. This made it difficult to turn the head to the left, so I resorted to topical anti-inflammatory gel which eased the discomfort.

Then a quick bite of lunch before driving over to our hair salon for routine maintenance. The hairdresser commented that, since I had been receiving a no. 2 cut for some months, my hair had definitely started to thicken. I wonder whether a razor job would restore the entire thatch in its former glory? Oh well, can't grow new bristles on old brooms, they say.

Finished mowing the lawn after tea, also changed the gate bolt on the front side gate for a simple latch, as Joan has had difficulty in moving the bolt in and out. What didn't help matters was the tendency of the gate to drop its outer edge; I've put cross-braces on it to try and maintain its shape but it was rather crudely made by our landscaper using butt joints.

Wednesday, February 27, 2002

By common consent, a quieter day today -- to get over some aches and pains. I had plenty of bookwork to catch up on, anyway. I did spend some time retrieving material I'd saved regarding Cascading Style Sheets; we've decided that it's about time to go that way (seeing everyone else seems to have <g>), and I'll be converting the main site pages over bit by bit. There probably won't be any drastic visible changes, but one has to learn somehow.

I've found a very useful add-on for Internet Explorer: it's called IE Booster and provides additions to the right-click flyout menu whereby you can display all sorts of useful info about a web page -- such as the style sheet (hence my interest); show forms and applets; show images and names etc etc. Also undertaken was a backup of both boxes to Linley. Amazing that in the last week or so, it found about 330 MB on Milly to back up. Mind you, I think I moved some folders around, which might account for it.

Remember my problems with using GPRS on the Ericsson T39 phone to try to connect to the web site FTP server? Well, after a lot of patient detective work with my ISP and the phone provider Vodafone, it turns out that they would have to transfer my GPRS from their normal setup (which is behind a firewall etc) to an unprotected situation. It's probably most unlikely, but I could be liable for traffic generated to and from the phone IP address by malicious attack -- and it's $NZ10 per MB on my charge level. Also, it appears that Vodafone have at last increased the connection speed through GSM to 14.4 kbps. So it appears that I will continue a straight dial-in through the cellphone to my ISP; after all, my Kronikles page rarely exceeds 25KB and it transfers at 14.4 in something like 15 seconds. All I need now is my new iPaq to arrive....

Thursday, February 28, 2002

Today started cloudy, so we hastened outside to tackle putting pavers down the side lawn border. Joan wanted a garden strip left, so I stretched a string and attacked the turf with a spade. This cut a trough out for the pavers to drop into, and she will probably Roundup the residual grass and turn it into a garden. Joanna arrived at 10.30, and they went off shopping together while I scanned and printed out some grandchildren pix that Joan wanted for her Gran's Brag Book.

I drove into town at 2.30 pm for a dental appointment: fixing up a front tooth that a chip had come off earlier in the week. I was fortunate to get a quick appointment -- usually we wait for a couple of weeks. Joan had an examination and tooth scale after me; I left her there while I went down to a local photo store to help a lady who had asked me to help in choosing a digital camera. There was a nice Fuji 2.1 Mpixel with 6 x zoom lens that she had looked at previously; it had $200 off so advised her to go for it.

We came back home, to find one of our neighbours had a problem: her printer ink carts had died, and her son's homework was due in tomorrow. He brought it over for me to print out -- but also needed some clip art to jazz it up, so had to supply that too. Oh well, I don't mind as long as it's part of their education -- I wouldn't print out DragonballZ pix <g>.

I fired up the PowerBook G3 after tea; suddenly got the low battery warning, even though the power was plugged in. I tried my spare power brick -- no different, but also established that the Mac would go on the spare battery, so _it_ wasn't dead. I was sitting figuring where to go next, when I heard the AOL Messenger moo which indicated someone was live -- yup, it was son Ross just logging on in London. He had sold me the Mac in the first place. Some hasty chat back and forward, and his final opinion was a loose power connector. I tried it, and sure enough it wiggles a lot more than it should. Oh dear... and no Mac service centre in Rotorua. Ah, he said, I'll send you a .pdf which sets out in detail how to take a powerbook G3 apart. So the call will go out: "Doctor Kildare, prepare for surgery..." (and how many of you remember THAT radio soap???

If you've landed here looking for G3 Powerbook disassembly instructions, MAIL ME and I'll send them to you

Friday, March 1, 2002

A follow up on Dr Kildare from Mr Sturm:

... was a TV show, I thought. I preferred Maigret and Interpol.

Mike: Now that's led to a Google search and some fascinating info.:
The original books were written by short story author Max Brand.
There were a few films pre-war: one was called "Calling Dr Kildare" starring Len Ayres.
There was a radio series first broadcast in US 1950 - 51: "The Story of Doctor Kildare". It got to NZ several years later and was broadcast as a morning soap. They made 64 thirty-minute episodes -- this is what I remembered. It was very syrupy.
Then came the TV series starring Richard Chamberlain, which is what you remembered.

I prefer to remember Chamberlain as Hamlet <vbg>

As in "very small ham"?????

Rain was threatening when we looked outside after breakfast, so Joan got the stain out and started painting the remainder of the side fence. OOPS -- wrong colour stain... A hasty wash-off, and the correct colour applied. I was summoned outside later, to skim off the rest of the turf and help with the tilling. This has now all been planted with a few things for the winter table: silver beet etc. We also lifted the pavers behind the letterbox, where we had run out of bedding sand. This time, there was plenty left over from the rear, so a bit of sand in the right place, the pavers dropped into line, and all done.

In between all this, I cleaned off my garage workbench and started surgery on the Mac. I had no trouble with the disassembly, using the detailed instructions, and finally removed the sound card with the offending power plug on it. The solder blobs looked OK, but I gave them a touch with a hot soldering iron anyway as one could have lifted away from the trace underneath. A careful retracing of my destruction, bit by careful bit, and it was all back together. JOY!! All working now, and the battery is charging -- who knows whether it was a solder joint or just a bad connection which I've made good during reassembly. Another victory for the forces of light in our relentless fight against evil and the continuance of the Kiwi way of life.

One of our immortal comics, John Clark, had a catch-phrase he used when starting a machine: "Kick 'er in the guts, Trev!" So like a good Kiwi joker, I kicked the Mac in the guts and it went....

If you've landed here looking for G3 Powerbook disassembly instructions, MAIL ME and I'll send them to you

Saturday, March 2, 2002

Wet again this morning; we have a stationary front filled with warm sub-tropical air sitting over us. It didn't move away until mid-afternoon. Don came in later in the morning to get a couple of CDs burned, of client images that I took last year.

After he left, we drove into town to the sports stadium, where the 'Picnic in the Park' had been transferred due to the rain. It was largely filled with stalls and displays from the local voluntary organisations. We went back outside to a food stall; local Lions were selling hamburgers and sausages, so we had some for lunch. At 1.45 pm, Rebeccah's Ballet School put on a display (which was, of course, the reason we were there). Her class is getting really polished now, and looked very professional. I tried a few digital shots, but the light level was very low and consequently the slow shutter speed meant unsharp pix. We dropped into the supermmarket for supplies before returning home.

I spent the rest of the afternoon cobbling together a newsletter for the Camera Club; we should be able to deliver some tomorrow if it's not wet. A quiet evening of TV initially, then I surfed the 'Net looking for accessory prices for the iPaq 3870 (which still hadn't arrived here yet -- it's interesting that US sellers I looked at often showed "out of stock" for the 3870; it must be very popular).

Sunday, March 3, 2002

Interesting comment from Cecil Coupe on Tuesday's reference to republics:

I'm not close enough to the republic/constitutional monarchy debate to offer anything but a knee jerk, learned it in school opinion and I grew up in a different school system. I'm only going to offer a few small comments. <snort>

1. The BEST republican state (according to Don) was being run by Clinton's cigars. Truth be told, facile doubletalk aside, half the republic thought we could do better and half thought it wasn't the end of life as we want it, all things considered. Elevating Clintons cigar habits up (into) the debate on the Queen and State actually weakens Don's argument since it claims that the private life of a leader is of political signifigance. In short I'd argue the best republic continued on *in spite* of Bills cigar problems. No doubt NZ, GB and Aus have noticed that it doesn't really matter geo-policially (or locally), what Charles and Camilla decide to do. If the QMum takes the dirt nap tomorrow, how will you or your country's life change politically?

2. Don then proceeds to state that "presidencies" are bad, and certainly given most of his list of dictatorships to support his argument, you'd have to agree with that simplistic jingoism. Unless you have a brain. Something Don is worried that the future generations may not be aquiring. In the US, there are 645 elected representatives in the Senate and House of Representatives that think they know more that the president of the US and a distressingly large number (to me) are pretending to make international policy on their own. It doesn't matter, we'll replace our president every 4 or 8 years. From the US point of view, President and "Dictator for Life" are quite different positions. Neither of which has anything to do with having a "beloved figure head which may or may not have political influence and may or may not be born to that position of meaningless wealth". I think we have the Kennedys for that role.

3. Is there a chance the concept of "Royalty worship" as apparently practiced in much of the world has turned the US President into a demi-god? That's a convenient explanation and if true, don't worry; we'll replace the SOB (son of a bitch) with another one soon enough and you can start over thinking that he speaks for everything that is/ isn't black, brown, poor, sub-continent (whats that?), yellow, communist, marxist, red-skin, illerate or dead on arrival capitalists. If G.Dub (George W Bush, jr.) rang the door bell tonight I hope the secret service agents bring a case of Lone Star Beer inside. If Clinton rings the door bell, he'd better have a case of Mickey Big Mouths and and a unwrapped cigar (for me). In otherwords, these boys aren't the elected Saviours. We're holding out for something better, Saviour-wise.

I spent some time this morning looking at a venerable Luxman cassette deck which had refused to work. It's all of 20 years old; but Luxman was/is in the top gear class of stereo, and this still performs most creditably if I want to dub a cassette. It has a sophisticated method for determining the correct bias for any given tape, which is most useful. The problem is that the drive and head mechanism is solenoid-operated from big press-switches, and they are not being activated. The boards all have discrete componentry (yes, it's THAT old) so I suspect a switching transistor has blown. Anyway, I pulled and re-seated each of the many connecting plugs; checked the four fuses, and tested for voltage -- without result. There's a guy working from home who advertises his services for electronic work, stereos, TVs, computers etc, so I think I'll take the chance and turn it over to him to look at. With a price/time ceiling, of course.

Oh yes, a very interesting new Blog [short for Weblog]I was directed to, off another site. This guy calls himself Limited Pie and basically talks about his life and times as a hot-shot share trader. But this current blog discusses why he is committing his thoughts to public scrutiny -- as do all of us who keep a daily on-line diary. Have a read.