I've got a Coldplay song stuck in my head, "let's go back to the start", I google, it's "The Scientist".

I start Winamp, find the mp3, plop it in the playlist, play.

"Error: You don't have a soundcard. If you think you do, try installing some drivers".

D'oh. System Properties | Hardware | Device Mangler

Ooh look "PCI Multimedia Device" under "Unknown Devices".

It's ok, I'll just look in the drivers directory on my other machine, that will jog my memory, and the driver will be there, on my other machine.. the other machine with the motherboard that blew up. D'OH!

D'oh. I don't know what this card is, I think it's an ESS 1868 PCI. hmm, I can't find drivers for such a card, maybe it's not.

I give in, pull the side of the computer, get a torch, and a mirror "CT4810" it looks like it says here, but I'm trying to work it out from it being backwards and upside down.

Ok, drivers.. here we go. 5MB?! This'll take hours.

I think I might have to get ADSL installed.

I figure it's costing around $40/month to have this ISDN, between the line rental and the calls of dialling in:

$22/month line rental +
~62 calls/month @ .25/call ($15.50) =
$37.50/month

and quite often the line will drop out more often resulting in more calls.

I've seen unlimited 256k ISDN for around $55/month.

I'll have to see if I can have a chat with the guy I used to do work with, and see if I can get a cheap account out of him. It'll save him money.. I won't be hogging a port on the Tigris all month, and he can have the NetJet card to sell to someone for around $200, that has to be enough to get some discount.

Right now I'm waiting a long long time for the 5mb sound driver to download at 6k/sec over this 64k connection. It should have been finished minutes ago.

I really want to get rid of the bloody unreliable ISDN service, and this crappy NetJet card that refuses to work in linux for some reason. I hate having a windows PC as my Internet gateway, it's slow and annoying and I have to spend so much time mucking around with firewall software and nonsense to stop the machine from getting r00ted over the Internet.

Hurry up and finish driver.