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Monday, April 1, 2002

Did you say "White Rabbits" this morning? My mind went back to early schooldays; when the thing to do on the month's beginning was to walk up to an unsuspecting victim, punch him on the arm muscle, pinch him hard, then say " A pinch and a punch for the first of the month ".

A leisurely awakening this morning, breakfast, then over to Lisa Crescent. Joan had gardening tools, I had my water blaster to deal to the house foundations and wall bottoms. These are concrete block, and the paint has deteriorated, so I removed as much as would come off. I had almost finished, when a sudden heavy shower put paid to that. We packed up hastily and drove home; the job will be completed tomorrow.

After lunch, we drove into town. I wanted to look at bandsaws, and found a suitable Ryobi model which should make short work of some jobs I have coming up. We then did some food shopping at the supermarket and returned home. I settled down at the computer to make some progress on my CSS conversion. Readers will notice that links now have a 'hover' background of yellow, when you mouse-over a link. I have been busy playing with page templates, and have done some drastic site reorganisation. I'll have to do some serious link-checking, as Dreamweaver doesn't ALWAYS catch shifted files.

Tuesday, April 2, 2002

My 'messing about' with the page appearance has resulted in some interesting mail from Gary. Anyone else have any comment on text sizes using CSS?

A beautiful clear morning after a really cold night, which got down to 7 degC -- made us snuggle down under the duvet. Out for a quick walk round the block at 10 am, then I worked in the office until lunch. About 2 pm, we drove into town to change library books and picked up meat from the specialty butcher.

A lot of time spent on this CSS thing, so not much else to report. Oh yes -- there are new pix posted on the Garden Page for those interested.

Wednesday, April 3, 2002

More on CSS styling in Mail. The current style sheet seems to have restored the status quo adequately.

Another chilly night, and we are told this spell of weather will continue to the end of the week. We drove over to our doctor at 11.15 am for our 'flu shots and pick up a script for my tablets. I dropped Joan at Lisa Crescent, as she was going into town with Joanna to do clothes shopping for herself, and to help find school shoes for Rebeccah. This latter was apparently accomplished with little teenage angst; the school directs that winter shoes shall be black leather laceups, but they found a pair that she actually approved of....

I, meantime, laboured in the office salt mine until Joan rang to pick her up. After we returned home, I assessed the Camera Club prints and slides from the current competition and got ready for the meeting tonight. This went off OK; I delivered my results, then we looked at a drum of slides that Russell had taken in China several years ago.

The garden shed (kitset) we ordered a couple of weeks ago has arrived and been delivered. The electronic age being here, I received an email from the vendor inquiring if I had looked round the side of the house yet? I had actually heard some odd noises earlier on, but had ignored them on the basis that there are usually some sort of odd noises to be heard at most times in our street. I'll need to stain it tomorrow, and it can dry on Friday. On Saturday, Russell will come over to help me with the assembly.

Thursday, April 4, 2002 ... Happy Birthday, Sue!!!!!

Up and outside smartly today; taking advantage of the fine weather, we dug out the surplus pails of fence stain and got a first coat onto the shed panels. The rear panels will be hard up against the fence, so they needed to be done before assembly. By the end of the day, they were dry enough to stack. I would have liked to get another coat on them, but the instructions said to leave 24 hours.

Anyway, the initial idea was to assemble on Saturday -- which would have allowed another coat tomorrow. But we realised that we were scheduled to drive to Taupo on Saturday to meet up with Sue's in-laws for a family gathering, and this evening's weather forecast told us it would rain on Saturday anyway. I rung Russell to see if he was free tomorrow; he will be, so we'll be assembling the shed tomorrow morning. I should be able to get a second coat on the back panels before we get them into place.

In mid-afternoon, we drove into town to return the keys to the rooms the Camera Club inhabited last night. Joan also wanted some bags of pea-gravel -- she's decided to gravel the front terrace of the left side garden where she's planted a long row of box plants. The bags aren't very large but they must weigh 25 - 30 kilos each; I dumped them from the car onto our small wheeled dolly cart, took them round to the back, then lifted them onto a rubber-tyred wheelbarrow to carry across the bark into position.

I went into the garage and started attaching the table to my new bandsaw; that's about all the assembly needed. While I was doing this, Joan was on her knees in the front toilet, trying to fit a new toilet seat she had bought. After I found she had fitted one part upside down, and got it round the right way, I had to refit a cover that went from under the cistern and covered up the water pipe. This has to be drastically trimmed to fit the new seat. Oh, Joy!! -- I was able to use my new toy IMMEDIATELY. And an awesome job it did, too; I should have bought a bandsaw years ago. Hoots loudly, and punches vertically in the air in macho mode.

Friday, April 5, 2002

The day dawned overcast, and actually drizzled on and off during the day. Russell arrived at 10 am to help me with the garden shed construction, just as I was starting to clear the shed foundation and check the levels. We decided on using spare paver blocks to sit the shed floor on; I drove down to the local hardware and picked up a bag of bedding sand. It took a couple of hours to get everything level and still leave plenty of room for air to circulate under the floor.

After lunch, we tackled the job of screwing together the shed panels, and getting them square with the floor and in the right place. By 4.45 pm, we nailed the roof beams together and started fiddling with the iron roof sheets and flashings. It had begun to rain lightly, and we were starting to feel a bit beat, so decided to leave the finishing of the roof until later in the weekend. We're off to Taupo after lunch tomorrow to meet up with Sue, Jeremy and the Glydes for a family get-together, but may be able to work in the morning -- weather permitting.

I generated my website stats for March tonight: another small milestone -- 2066 unique IP addresses visited during the month, and 20,329 total hits. Each user averages 1.65 visits -- so how about coming another .35 times and getting it up to an even 2 <grin>.

Saturday, April 6, 2002

We were pleased to wake up, and see some sun this morning. Realising that the weather forecast was not good, I rang Russell and arranged to finish the shed job as soon as convenient. We were under way at 9.30 am, assembled the roof, and had it up sitting on the sides by 10.30. By now, we were dodging intermittent showers, and still had to tackle the job of hanging the door. That got finished just as the real rain started at 12.15 pm, so we hastily bundled all the gear inside and called it a day.

Sue rang from Waiouru at 2.15 pm to let us know that they were making good time; we finished getting tidy and drove off for the run to Taupo. A little rain on the way, but we had a good trip and arrived about 3.30 pm. Jeremy's parents, Jim and Helen were with Sue and Jeremy; we talked until nearly 5 pm, then drove over to the other side of Taupo where Jeremy's brother Jolyon and family were staying. We had a pleasant couple of hours, eating a delicious antipasto, and all sang Happy Birthday for Sue and Jim. We then all drove back to the hotel for dinner, finishing about 9.15 pm and returning to Sue and Jeremy's room to comsume the birthday cake.

We drove Jol and Cath back to their house, then set off for home, arriving at 11 pm. A very pleasant evening.

Sunday, April 7, 2002

It's been a fairly torrid sort of week. Accordingly, we weren't exactly leaping out of bed at dawn this morning <g>. A leisurely breakfast, then set to on a laptop job which belongs to a client. I've been her de facto IT support for some years; and she needed some stuff sorting out. As usual, I failed to reproduce the odd behaviours she reported, so these will have to wait until she shows up, and I can ask her precisely what she was doing. However, there was a lot of other stuff to do, like getting her Norton AV subscription renewed so I could download the latest definitions. A clear-out of temp files and a swag of temp internet stuff, and I was able to do a scandisk and defrag.

She also asked me to look into an alternative data backup method -- she's been backing up onto floppies, and complained that the backup would get to floppy #15 and then crash. I really don't think she's up to coping with an external CD-RW, so I looked at a parallel port Zip drive -- but the local price plus a 3-pack of zips would be the thick end of $NZ500, which would be outside her budget. Then I remembered I had a parallel port Backpack Travan tape drive stashed away unused, plugged that in, and Windows Backup found it and installed the drivers. I had four 400/800 MB tapes for it as well; so that would keep her happy for a long time. We'll negotiate a price.

I finished the day doing site marketing for a client; rather laborious as they have a URL for the main site, plus five variations on the name which all have re-director code on them. Don wanted all six sites placed on the search engines, which made it a very tedious job and took me two and a half hours.