A busy day

I was going to post some photos of Sally today, but for reasons which will become apparent, couldn't face the  thought – maybe tomorrow…

Instead, we've had a busy day both out and about and at the terminal face. First thing, I decided to switch the Mastervolt over from "charge only" to "invert/charge". Normally whilst on the mooring, I leave it on charge only, so that when Sheila is running the washing machine it's not a disaster if the shoreline power goes off. All that happens is that we lose the AC supply around the boat; the washing machine stops if it's running, and my Mac Mini falls over. If it was on invert/charge, we'd not know until the battery bank was wiped out trying to keep the washing machine going.

But just recently the main circuit breaker on our power pole has been tripping out, and it gets a bit tedious having to restart the Mac every time. It happened twice over the weekend, so, as Sheila wasn't planning to do any washing, I thought I'd have a day of guaranteed stable computing. (If the shoreline dies whilst the Mastervolt is on invert/charge, it switches into invert mode so quickly you're not even aware of the change.)

The process of switching caused the breaker to trip out again, so I went into the office and reported the problem; Stuart the handyman changed the breaker this afternoon. The theory is that the old one had become a bit too sensitive to switching spikes, and with all four boats connected to the pole actively using power, it was seeing too many of them.

Later in the morning, we had a walk into the village for bread and some fresh veg. On the way up the pontoon, we bumped into that extremely helpful chap Lloyd, who not only agreed to give us a lift into Alrewas next week for our dental appointments, he also said he'd use his chain saw to cut up the big chunks of timber Elanor had got from her work for us to burn on the fire.

What a man.

/hihi

This afternoon, we've designed and printed the proofs of the Napier Family calendar and of this year's Christmas card. As usual, the bits that might have been tricky went quite well, and we had a sudden problem with something trivial but irritating.

Sheila does the real grunt work, changing the grid on last year's effort to next year's dates. I then replace the photos with the ones we've chosen for this year (I'll let everyone see them in the New Year, once the family have got their calendars).

Then we print and check the proofs. Similarly, I produce a new version of the card. All went well, except that Sheila, working in Numbers, the Mac equivalent of Excel, surrounds the bank holiday dates with red rather than black dotted lines, and although these looked OK on screen, they just wouldn't ruddy well print in red, but came out black, mostly.

Those with spreadsheet experience can imagine the endless attempts to make the thing behave, deleting the old borders from not just the relevant cell but from its neighbours too, replacing them, creating a completely fresh sheet with just a cell with right borders and copying and pasting the style and so forth.

It was made even more of a hassle because it looked just fine on screen every time, even in  print preview. It was only when we actually printed a proof that the failure became apparent.

Gibber, gibber.

/floor

In the end, I switched all the lines back to black and coloured the cell background with red at 20% opacity.

Heigh ho, at least they are done; all that remains is to print the calendars and cards onto the proper stock and get them in the post. But you can see why I didn't fancy doing anything more with iPhoto today...