Week of  6th December, 1999

Last Week

Monday, 6th December

Childminders in this country are inspected yearly by the local authority, who have responsibility for ensuring that each registered childminder complies with all relevant laws and local regulations. It's the same inspector each year, and she and Jane both treat it as a chance to chat over coffee. and catch up on the changes both in law, and here at home (new children arriving, others leaving, and other such things)

After that it was a quick dash around the shops, before the school run and, in the evening, the swimming run - which I ended up doing, because Jane was baking cakes for the Christmas Cake Sale at school. This is a fund-raiser, organised by the Parents' Committee, of which Jane is a member, and is usually a great occasion, with some people fighting over home-made cakes and other goodies, plus some shop-bought ones. Jane's products are often in great demand, because she is a good cook, and her creations have personality! This year she did a couple of nativity cakes, very simple, but the angels looking down on the scene in the stable looked as though they had been celebrating beforehand - merry wasn't in it!

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Tuesday, 7th December

Celery still isn't stable enough, and Iomega Ditto 98 seems to clobber the CD Writer, so I've decided to reinstall him again. This ate most of the day, getting the CD-Writer, the Zip drive, and networking sorted properly, plus burning some test CD's with data I want to keep, but not on-line, so to speak. The Zip drive occasionally disappears for no very good reason that I can see, but it's becoming less needed by the day, since the home network is running well. The CD Writer is working again. Now to reinstall his apps.


Webstripper still recreates Web sites on your hard disc, but the update process isn't as slick as the original download - it seems to want to redo the entire site again, rather than just checking the file dates and grabbing only the changed ones. I'd dearly love to get this properly sorted, because trying to read a Web page of 60 or 70kB with a 5 minute inactivity timeout is difficult, since when the "Warning, you will be disconnected in 20 sec" box comes up, you have to do something quick. Maybe I should start using an auto ping program. Freeware, of course.

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Wednesday, 8th December

Reading Bob Thompsons's Daynotes and seeing his references to Saturnalia piqued my curiosity. He seemed to be referring to celebrations of some kind which occur at or about Christmastide. Knowing the old Christians' propensity for grabbing non-Christian celebrations and putting their own spin on them, I decided to look it up. Google handed me this site as about the 6th reference in a search on "saturnalia". It 's one of a series of pages about ancient practices and beliefs. Saturnalia (aka Brumalia) is a pagan Winter Solstice festival, and the early Christians probably tried to "embrace and extend" (now where have I heard that before?) it and apply their own interpretation (shades of modern spin-doctoring!).

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Thursday, 9th December

The next stage in the replacement of the old equipment at work was completed today, with the startup of the off-air logging recorders upstairs.

It is a legal requirement that we log all transmissions to tape for post-mortem analysis (did this commercial go out? or else, WTF happened?) and so that the licencing authority can study our output at leisure to see if we are doing what we are supposed to be doing.

We used to use domestic recorders, recording, by timer, in 8 hour segments on E240 tapes at long play. The resultant recordings were nothing to write home about as regards quality, especially with a burnt-in clock display, but it's the content that counts. It was part of my job to reload the recorders in timely fashion, so that we didn't miss any output. For historical reasons, the sticky labels we use to identify the tapes are also generated by me, using a PAL (Paradox Application Language) script running in Paradox 3.5 for DOS. I inherited this, I didn't write it.

Comes now the new logging system, still using E240 tapes, but at standard play, for 6 tapes per day per channel. For our current six channels that's 36 tapes a day! This obviously requires more labels, so I spent an hour modifying the PAL script appropriately. I haven't finished with this yet, since there seems to be a problem with year handling - it barfs if I try to print beyond year-end. Still, the basic script has been in use for about 8 years now, so I shouldn't complain.

The new recorders have three transports in each machine, with an autoloader mechanism on the front, so you can put a day's worth of tapes in at a time, although I suspect we'll reload every 12 hours. Each deck is supposed to trigger sequentially, and to date it seems to work, although it's very early days. I just hope the e-mail I sent yesterday is understandable to all. We should perhaps have started next week, so I could fully check all the procedures.

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Friday, 10th December

More Christmas shopping today - not for me, dammit!

I've finally added the remainder of the digicam images to the trefoil ceremony page.

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Saturday, 11th December

To date I've been a little paranoid about Internet access for the children (what children? Sarah is 16 now, Katy 13 - they're young adults, although you wouldn't think it sometimes from their behaviour)

So today I finally yielded to persuasion and let Katy do some surfing on her own. She spent an hour wandering around various Babylon 5 related websites, notably The Station. As is her wont, she was vocal in her enthusiasm, to the extent that, after about the 500th repetition of "cool"  in a loud voice, I was forced from the room.

I let her have an hour, until the inactivity timeout dropped the line as she was reading a long web page. I'd warned her about this, but she wasn't quick enough on the uptake. When that warning dialogue pops up, you have 20 seconds to click "stay online" or the line drops. Trouble is, I've now made another rod for my back - she keeps asking to "go on the Internet" at 3 minute intervals when she's bored.

In the evening, Jenny had her turn, after I'd found a couple of sites relating to her current favourite reading matter - the "Chalet School" books, by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. There are two fan clubs,  here and here, with links to old bookshops that stock the books, both hard- and soft-back. One shop even had a couple of first editions, way out of my price league, of course. I've ordered, by e-mail, a couple of books Jenny doesn't have, or at least hasn't read yet. These can stand as Christmas presents.

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Sunday, 12th December

I reinstalled all the applications on Celery today, not all of them, only the ones that are used. This has also been a chance to clean out some junk, and apps we no longer use.

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