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Monday, April 22, 2002

Another week under way. We were up early to get Eli dressed, breakfasted, and off to school in good time. I worked on financials this morning; Don came for lunch, which gave us an opportunity to discuss the latest new client proposals.

We picked Eli up after school, then drove over to Rebeccah's school to collect her; drove back to Lisa Crescent to get her ballet gear, then back home. Eli occupied himself with Joan's old bicycle, which he is now big enough to ride; while Joan and I did the lawns. That will hold them until I mow them just before we leave. I dropped Rebeccah at ballet at 7.30 pm, then returned for her at 8.30 pm and drove her back to Lisa Crescent.

The latest Visa saga unfolds: I rang the Placemakers store in Taupo this afternoon and left the details of my $NZ1999 spurious charge with the office lady. She rang back to my mobile phone later in the afternoon to say they had no record of any sale of that amount on or about the 15th March. I'll ring her again in the morning, then ring Visa and see what they've done. It's interesting that almost a week has gone by since I rang Visa, and this office had had no contact from either them or the Placemakers head office.

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

A further resolution of my Visa problem: it has turned out to be a double charge for the same amount from the Vodafone shop in New Plymouth. Profuse apologies from all round -- a proliferating chain of errors that should have been caught and weren't.

Up and out early, as Eli had to be in town at the dentists at 8.30 am. He had some minor tooth damage to be attended to. We dropped him at school afterwards, and then came back home. A steady day's work on end-of year accounts for my several trusts and estates. By the time we go away, I'll have taken them as far as I can go, given that there is still some documentation that often doesn't arrive until May.

I'm going to make an appointment with a local chartered accountant tomorrow, as there are a few book-keeping questions that I need answers for. I can manage the routine stuff OK, but every now and then I get into a tangle. When my brother was alive, I used to ring him up from time to time with stupid questions, so I need a replacement. I remember him saying once, "You're not too bad at book-keeping -- for a pharmacist!"

Wednesday, April 24, 2002

We were up early, getting Eli off to school; we were just about to leave when Adam came with his father (Adam is Ethan's friend who is convalescing after meningitis, he is staying with us this morning). Eddy volunteered to take Eli as he was going past the school anyway, so that saved us a trip. Adam is very quiet, but relaxed after a good session on the computer, playing shoot-em-ups.

I had another productive morning on tax accounts, and have arranged to meet the accountant lady on Thursday next week. I was able to clarify a couple of points about tax liabilities of deceased estates, while she was on the phone. I'm going to propose that I pay her a retainer, to enable me to ring her with my 'stupid questions' apart from actual time spent at her office.

I finished the day by preparing the Camera Club May newsletter in Ventura. I exported it as a postscrpt file, and used Acrobat Distiller to convert it to a PDF format. I then forwarded it by email to all the members on our Yahoo Group; the several that have no computer will get a printed copy in the mail.

Thursday, April 25, 2002 - ANZAC Day

A day of remembrance for Kiwis and Aussies. Our family remembrance of those passed on:

Wyndham Loftus Barkman 1895 - 1972. No. 31207, 19th Reinforcements, NZ Expeditionary Force in France, WW I, 1916 - 1919. Served 2 years & 212 days, mostly about Messines.
David Bruce Barkman 1924 - 2000. LAC NZ432306 RNZAF WW II 1943 - 1945. Served in Solomon Islands 1 year; total service 2 years & 282 days.

And, of course, the other family members with war service are very much with us: my sister, who served in the WAAF section of the RNZAF on radar duties in WWII; and my brother-in-law Bill -- last year's readers will remember our trip to Greece and Crete to revisit the battlefields.

But I must confess to not attending the traditional Dawn Service, it was bitterly cold and wet here. After breakfast, I set to on swapping over Sissy and Linley. This was accomplished by removing and swapping hard drives and video cards; also an IDE Zip drive and the CDRW burner which stays in the new Linley as a backup burner.

The hardware swap was without incident; apart from the Barracuda drive in Sissy being in a 5 1/4 inch mount to keep it running cooler. The different-sized tower case meant that the IDE cable plugs were positioned too close to reach from the top bay to the bottom bay; but a rake around in the spares box found a cable with better plug spacing. I've noted that some of the cables supplied with motherboards these days are skinned down a bit -- I suppose a few centimetres here and there add up in quantity.

Having changed the m/b drastically, I didn't really expect to drop the drives into the case and boot up as usual. Anyway, I wanted to increase the C partition size a bit, so booted from floppies into Partition Magic 4 and cribbed some more space from 'upstream' partitions. I made it 1.5 GB, and decided to give WindowsXP another try. Much to my surprise (after my previous experience with almost identical hardware on Milly), the install went like a dream with the minimum of intervention on my part. The network was set up for me; all I really had to do was change from DHCP to a fixed IP address. All hardware seems to have been identified, and drivers installed -- I know they're probably not the best available (and I will be on the 'Net looking), but IT ALL WORKS :~]

Impressions after installing stuff: Sissy now has a Celeron 850 MHz with 256 MB PC133 RAM. Under WinXP, it's flying. Most of my essential utilities went in OK; I only had to upgrade one or two: FinePrint was no-charge, and Printkey 2000 needed the later version which I'll have to pay for. System Suite 4 went in OK and promptly got used to clean out the Registry shambles which always happens after an O/S install -- lots of dead keys and things.

Oh yes -- one of my jobs was to install Outlook 2002 that wouldn't sit down with the old Win98SE. I re-installed the Active Synch for the iPAQ, and that was most happy now it could synchronise all its folders properly. I guess I'll have to be careful with some of the kids' programs; a prudent measure would be to do a Drive Image before I go any further.

Friday, April 26, 2002

Rain, rain, rain all day. It's eased off a bit at the moment, but we've had another of those stationary fronts with loads of moist air from the tropics sitting right over us. We had plans to go to town today, but it was so inclement that we wimped out and stayed home. Apart from a quick trip to the post, that is.

I paid some attention to the altered Linley this morning; after I got the drivers for the video card and sound loaded, it came up in Win98 quite happily. I then booted into Linux (Mandrake 8.1) to see what it made of a different motherboard. Interestingly, it made far less of a fuss than Win98SE did; a bit longer on starting KDE, but it all came up OK in the end without having to reinstall.

The rest of the day was spent back on Sissy, finding my way around WinXP, and re-installing games for the kids. Also more utilities that I use a lot, like IrfanView. I've really had only one 'XP casualty' -- that's the card reader [ActionTech Camera Connect Pro] for the camera Compact Flash cards. I emailed their support to see if they had produced new drivers, but the reply was to effect that they only supported Win95/98 and NT4. It's a parallel port device with some sort of SCSI driver. Not to worry -- I'll just swap it over to Milly; after all, I use my images on that box and it will avoid having to download them over the LAN.

So, all in all, I've had a real cruisy ride with this WinXP install. I now need to catch up with all the XP hints and tips I've been ignoring in the magazines.

Saturday, April 27, 2002

The rain stopped this morning, apart from intermittent showers during the day. We drove into town to change library books during a finer break. On return home, I got the ladder out and looked at a section of guttering which had been overflowing in yesterday's heavy rain. Sure enough, it was well silted up with leaves; I cleared it right back to the downpipe by hand. The problem is really that whoever installed the guttering didn't put enough fall -- this section actually slopes back the wrong way. I'll have to get a tradesman to give me an opinion: I think it needs another soak pit and downpipe.

Worked this afternoon on my picture of the Greek Orthodox Priest. I went back to the original image (0.6 MB .jpg file)and brought it into Photoshop, cropped, corrected it, and sharpened; and saved in the Genuine Fractals format. I then brought it back into PS using Genuine Fractals, and resized it to A3+. This came off the printer as a much better print than I did last year, comparing the two side-by side. I'll mount this tomorrow for an inter-club competition coming up while I'm away.

This evening, I needed to give my old Hanimex slide projector a workout, as it will be needed next Wednesday night. It has auto-focussing, which usually takes a couple of drums of slides before it fires up and starts working. Joan enjoyed looking at some of my collection of slides taken in the UK and Ireland over the years since 1984. After a couple of hours of slides, we called it a night; I took the projector out to my workbench and pulled the cover off to look at the autofocus.

There was a small light bulb with lens, which cast an image of the filament onto the front surface of the slide, and a photocell angled down to look at it. The idea being, that if the image wasn't in the right place, the photocell told a motor to move the lens carriage until it was. And theoretically, that's where you had focussed the lens beforehand. Thus, when a cold slide was pushed into position, the lens carriage would be moved forward; and when the slide 'popped' with the heat, the carriage moved back to keep the slide in focus. 20 years of dust and grime had coated the light bulb, the lenses and the photocell; I worked them over with a cotton bud and removed as much as possible; so hopefully it will all work OK on the night.

Sunday, April 28, 2002

The clouds came down again this morning, but it didn't prevent us getting out for a one-hour walk at 9 am. The park was rather wet, so we stuck to the pavements and did a road circuit.

I spent the rest of the morning assessing a monthly print competition for the Whakatane Camera Club. Their club night is on Monday week, and we'll drive over in the afternoon for their evening meeting, then drive back afterwards. It's only a one-hour trip, actually. I then did the prints for our own meeting on Wednesday night.

In the afternnon, I spent some time researching suitable bed & breakfast places in the UK: one near Portsmouth, and one near Fishgard in Wales. Both of these are time-critical, so it would be nice to have them sorted before we leave. One is on email so that's no problem; the other I'll have to ring up. I then opened up my travel bag and went through all the consumables -- like the first aid kit needing more plasters etc. Also checked over the stuff that had accumulated during our various internal trips, and reduced it to a minimum.