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Monday, April 15, 2002

I managed some office work this morning, and a site update for a client. We went for a walk in the park at 11 am to get some exercise; the sun was shining and the air mild -- most enjoyable. We have some more anticyclonic weather on the way, so the late mild autumn continues.

Joan went off with Joanna after lunch to visit one of Ethan's friends who is in hospital with meningitis. The family are close friends of the Cox family, and Adam has been with the boys for most of the holidays. Joanna is waiting with breathe held, for one of them to suddenly start feeling sick, getting a headache etc -- but fortunately nothing so far. Apart from Eli, who decided that he *really needed* time home (even though it was only the first day of term...) so pleaded a temperature and headache at school to get his mother to pick him up. Surprising how the temperature had reduced to normal by the time he'd got home and the thermometer was produced. Joan said that Joanna did the same thing at that age.

I got stuck into the iPAQ after tea tonight; I need to get the ISP dialup and email connection sorted and bulletproof before we leave for the UK next month. I have succeeded up to the point of being able to send emails, but at the moment I can't get the wretched Inbox to display the headers it says it's downloaded. I keep sending test emails from my spare ISP dialup for it to receive, but no joy. More work needed -- or RTFM.

Tuesday, April 16, 2002

First up this morning was a phone call to VISA, complaining of an erroneous charge on my account. I could hardly miss it, as it was for $NZ1995 and made at a Placemakers (hardware) shop in Taupo. I've never been to the shop, and I certainly would remember spending almost two grand there :~0 They put an interest stopper on the item, and are writing to Benchmark to get the refund and reversal on my account. Bummer.

Joan went over to Lisa Crescent with Joanna to finish moving our old tin garden shed into place. Oh, btw, there's a photo of the new shed up on the garden page. I awaited our friendly plumber, who showed up a couple of hours late (as tradesmen are wont to do...). I wanted him to look at the storm water soak pit at the rear of the house, as we've had water coming over the guttering in a heavy downpour. I was uncertain as to the condition of the soak pit, as the house has been up for nearly 20 years, and I feared that water was backing up.

He left a helper to lift the pavers and dig down to the soaker. We were amazed when we cleared the lid and removed it -- there were TWO rings stacked vertically, but the water from the inlet pipe had dug a real hole down another ten feet or so. So there must be a blockage in the downpipe; a lot of prodding and poking with an old broom handle, and he fished out a substantial piece of broken plastic that could have been there since the house was built. We tested with water from the hose, and all was well. He filled in the hole and rammed it level for me; I had gone off for a bag of paver sand, and it was now my job to re-lay the pavers.

I tackled this job after lunch, and during the course of the afternoon managed to get about three-quarters of them back into place, before my aching knees and legs made me stop. I'll finish it in the morning.

I wasted another evening on this bloody iPAQ. At first, I couldn't get it to complete a dial-in -- then I tried dialling the phone manually and got a voice message advising of overloading. I'll email the ISP engineer tomorrow and complain -- they need more modems on this line. It's a special line for people dialling in using cellphones, and obviously the usage is going up. I never used to have trouble connecting. Anyway, I'm going to ring the Vodafone guru tomorrow and see if he has any suggestions for getting Pocket Outlook to behave.

I'd have to say that this Pocket Windows 2002 is frustrating. For instance, there's no apparent way to edit some of the ISP connection stuff -- I have to delete and re-enter. I also seem to have to enter setup data in several different places -- then I lose where it was entered and can't go there to check it. And it's no use reading the manual -- that was written for computer-illiterate CEOs and barely gives a quarter of the info. Why is it that these people aim all their literature at dummies? Is it because they've found that 99% of purchasers ARE dummies?

I also find myself poking the reset button far too often to get stuff working: the Bluetooth in particular often tells me it can't initialise its stack, and the only way to get it functioning is to reset. Oh well, I suppose it *was* my decision to sit on the sharp edge of hardware -- but my old Psion 5 and Motorola phone were far less trouble than this MS crap.

Wednesday, April 17, 2002

A follow-up on Monday's infection: both boys are OK, and Adam in hospital apparently has a form of pneumococcal meningitis which is not particularly infectious, and not as life-threatening as the amoebic sort.

I had a long spell on the 'Net this morning researching books for the iPAQ MS Reader, and a converter of text into the .lit format for the reader. I also wanted maps for the version of Pocket Streets supplied with the iPAQ -- but found that most of the posted maps were for different versions. The solution is to buy a copy of MS Autoroute, which will convert its maps to Pocket format; but that's expensive for the limited use of UK and Ireland maps I'll have. I do have a copy of the British AA Milemaster map program on Milly, so will just print out our likely driving routes before we leave. We'll have a road atlas anyway, but the route info is most useful.

After lunch, I went out into the lovely autumn sunshine and laid the remainder of the pavers in place, then had a good sweep-up of surpluis sand etc.

This evening, I've been tangling with the iPAQ and Outlook again. It appears that last night's contretemps was due to Telecom's blundering at the Hamilton phone exchange. Mark at Wave told me that the dial-in line is in fact their major port for Hamilton dialup from several thousand subscribers, so it's not lack of equipment as I suspected. It was OK for a short while tonight, then the same problems started up again; I resorted to manually dialling in and listening: lots of busy signals, sometimes the 'congestion' voice message, sometimes nothing. Bummer. I'm off to bed.

Thursday, April 18, 2002

Back tackling the iPAQ this morning; finally, I connected with the dialup and the email link is working. An interesting discovery: I had the iPAQ in its cradle connected to Sissy, with Outlook running. Somehow I clicked on the 'get messages' icon -- and it dived in through Sissy to the ADSL modem and got the mail. Unfortunately, it wouldn't do that for Internet Explorer! My Wave contact tells me they are having real trouble with that dial-up, and has given me a bunch of other local dial-up numbers to keep at hand -- it doesn't really matter to a cellphone what it dials or where it is.

The next job was to check the iPAQ connecting through the GPRS; I'd set it up when it arrived, but not tried it since. Murphy in full swing here: it connected to Vodafone, but not to the 'Net. I looked at the settings, and found most of them vanished. I had to re-enter the DNS addresses and stuff like that. Still no joy; then I checked another page and found that somehow it had set itself up for a proxy server. Zapped that, and the Internet was up and running at last.

It's interesting what happens to web pages on that little screen. The worst sites are framed (hawk, spit); I looked at my ISPs Webmail page and found it has a blank frame which goes 2/3 across the screen, with the text jammed into the other third with scroll bars. I've mailed my contact and suggested they put in a link for PDA webmail: just bring up the login page with no frame, then the webmail page. I hope they do this; new technology keeps arriving and demanding new solutions. There must be quite a number of GPRS-capable phones connected to PDAs who use that ISP -- and we'd cheer if we had the proper facilities.

Three weeks today before we leave for the UK; this is usually when panic mode initiates. Apart from assembling stuff for packing, there's a whole slew of jobs to remember; like putting the cover over the camper for the winter, and making sure all the roof gutters are clear of leaves. The trees lining the street have all been dropping leaves, and the next windy day is going to pile them up in drifts. Our house is built on a concrete slab, and the front door has no doorstep; consequently, if the front door is open, leaves blow straight inside and across the carpet. Joan has a long fence post which she keeps for dropping across the front porch entrance -- this is most effective at keeping leaves at bay, although somewhat of a hazard for callers.

Friday, April 19, 2002

The morning was spent on accounts for one or other of my trusts and estates. I have to get this done before we leave, otherwise I return in mid-June with tax returns to be in on the 7th July. I really don't recommend trying to do this stuff when jet-lagged.

After lunch, we drove to town to bank a cheque and do a supermarket top-up. This evening, I've been busy converting some books from Gutenberg, from text files into .lit files for the Microsoft Reader on the iPAQ. A couple of titles: The Prince by Machiavelli, and The Art of War by SunTsu. I've been using MSWord to format the text, write it out as HTML, then convert it using Readerworks Standard. This process seems to be working well, and the resulting files are sitting on the CF card in the iPAQ.

Saturday, April 20, 2002

Funny how the habit of years keeps coming back: Saturday morning is the time for doing the jobs stacked up all week -- even though when one has been retired for a long time, all the days seem the same. Today started out with making a frost cover for Joan. At least, that was the intention -- but I needed some long wooden battens, and they were in the potting shed rafters (that's the lean-to next to the new lock-up shed). Ah, they were slid into place from the open end, but now we have a shed in the way...

Very well, Plan B in operation: I had intended to remove the potting shed roof at a later stage, to enable the cleaning-out of leaves from the rear guttering (but not right away...). So I took to the roof with trusty Ryobi drill with screwdriver bit, removed all the roofing screws, and thus enabled access to the wood. Cleaned out the gutters, put plastic grille over them to keep out the next lot of leaves, chopped back the rhododendron branches from next door that were causing the problem and cleaned up. The plastic roofing was another problem: when I originally changed the old roofing, I put the clear plastic corrugated sheets on and didn't make enough overhang at the rear. This let water off the roof down into the shed, and so I had to re-fasten the sheets about 50mm further towards the rear. Some holes still managed to position over the roof purlins, but I had to drill new ones for most of the sheets. These are 12mm clearance holes to allow the sheets to expand, so if there's any water coming in through them, I'll have to get busy with silicone. The holes are on the tops of corrugations, but might get rain coming through them in a downpour.

The job didn't get finished until 4.30 pm; so the frost shelter won't get made until tomorrow. At 5.30 pm we drove down to the lakefront to meet up with Joanna and the kids, The spot has a good northern horizon, and we figured this was an ideal place to observe tonight's planetary grouping. Jupiter showed up first with Venus down near the horizon. Mercury wasn't visible, being behind a solid bank of cloud low in the west. Suddenly we found Mars, as the sky got darker; Saturn wouldn't show up until the twilight went fully; it was freezing, with a chilly wind, so we jacked it in and returned home, calling in for takeaways on the way.

Sunday, April 21, 2002

For those who keep asking: a tentative travel itinerary is posted.

We were up bright and early this morning -- mainly because both of us woke at 6.15 am, and decided we'd had enough sleep (because we'd gone to bed exhausted at 9.15 pm last night). After breakfast, we went outside to tackle the frost cover. I ended up ripping a length of Kwila hardwood decking that had been left over from a previous job; this gave me enough long pieces to screw together in a triangle. I put a cleat on the side wall, then bolted another on the side of the garden shed (not the one we've just built -- this is another one. SOme shade cloth doubled and stapled onto the wood finished this job.

I spent some time in the garage cleaning up a few jobs, like repairing the wobbly legs on our wooden kitchen chair. I managed to get the last of the shelves finished in the new shed, and moved more stuff out. Then Don arrived, with one of his hunting rifles and a scope sight which needed fitting. The scope mount and the scope were different brands, and the mount bed needed quite a lot of metal removing before the scope seated properly. We used a Dremel Mototool with a milling cutter for this, which did a good job. Not as clean as a lathe, but serviceable nontheless.

Eli is here to sleep over, as Joanna is going with Ethan on his school trip. This is to the coast as Mount Maunganui; they will be away two nights and back home on Wednesday, and there is to be a lot of looking at the bird, plant and fish life of the estuary and coast. Rebeccah is staying at home tonight with her Dad, but we will have to do the school pickups.