I was woken up this morning by a large bang followed by a sizzling noise. I know that sound, that's the power station blowing up.

Yep, no power, wonder how long it's been out. It's about 8.30am, and it's raining heavily outside, ugh. I go back to sleep.

I think at about 9am I heard a loud pop, and some of my equipment came on for a second before going off again.

I woke up again about 10.10, by another loud pop, and everything coming back on.

I got up, starting fixing things up, default routes etc.

I ate some breakfast, bummed around, I'm supposed to be going to the Cafe today, I really don't want to.

I noticed the Tivo had been recording something, I checked it.. it was trying to record "Whose Line is it Anyway?", but when the power came back on, the Sat decoder locked on to the wrong set of channels, so it was recording the fashion channel instead of the comedy channel. delete. Oh, and here's half a Simpsons episode that started recording when the power came back on, think again.. the Sat decoder came back on on the wrong channel, so it was some of an episode of "Murder She Wrote". Delete.

And here's another Simpsons episode from this morning, from 7.50am, and it only goes for 17 minutes.. the power must have gone off at 8.07am.

I watched a full episode that was on here, I was waiting for the rain to let up. Just as it finished, my phone rang, the tech support woman, am I coming in today? "yeah, I suppose, be there in half an hour or so".

I got my stuff together, put my dry suit on, and left a couple of minutes later.

My shoe starting filling with water almost immediately. A couple of kilometres later, I felt really cold, I was getting wet in a certain area. hmm. Another couple of kilometres down the road, the traffic became very slow.

I rode along in first gear dragging my foot for about 3 kilometres, ah.. there's been an accident. People seem to forget how to drive when it rains. They've done a good job, there's some bogan spec station wagon thing here, it's destroyed, already got a flat tyre and everything.

Glass and plastic all over my side of the road, looks like boxes and clothes and stuff on the other side, I managed to avoid running over any of the junk on the road, and kept going.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful.

I got to the Cafe, wandered inside, took my "dry" suit off, discovered that I looked like I'd had an accident in my pants, and also that my shoe was completely full of water.

I am very not impressed at this point.

I sit down for 2 minutes, some woman comes in "is my computer fixed yet?". Jesus, I only got here 2 minutes ago. What computer? where? what's wrong with it?

I told her I would have to look at it, does she want to come back in an hour. "Just ring me when it's done" "I've had to bring this thing back 5 times now". Well, that's not my fault, I wasn't even here. People give me the shits.

Hmm. This machine looks very familiar. It's a trade in that I received before I stopped working in the Cafe a few months ago, I got the thing all setup and ready to sell, and said I wanted some of the cost when it was sold. I was never paid that, when I was in the Cafe before the accident, I noticed it wasn't where I left it anymore, I assumed it was just moved.

I booted it up, "Non System Disk or Disk Error" ok, the boot sector is stuffed, a quick "sys c:" will fix this. Uh, wrong.

After I managed to find a boot disk, I found the hard drive contents all corrupted. I also noticed it claimed it had a 1284MB drive in it, I know this machine had a bigger disk in it when I set it up.

Hmm, maybe SpinRite or Norton can fix this, where are they? I can't find them on the network drives.

Maybe they are on my PC out the back.. it won't boot. I disabled a bunch of startup crap and fixed that. Why is Lookout on here?, let me guess, there'll be virii on here too. I'll update the virus scanner.. uh, no ip adress.. ah.. no network cable.

I managed to find a network cable (I will need to bring my crimping tool up and make some cables I think), plugged it in, tried to get an IP, and keep getting "IP address conflict" errors when I try to get an ip off the dhcp server.

I decided to disable the dhcp server on the adsl router, in case that is causing issues. I had intended to do this anyway.

Still getting the same conflict error.

I reconfigured dhcp on the server, to issue the new gateway ip address, and restarted it.

Still getting the same conflict error. Getting annoyed.

It's now I find that there are far too many manually configured tcp stacks around the place. I went around and changed everything back to automatic like it is supposed to be. While doing this, I find one machine with a static IP assigned that is supposed to be on my machine. aha. changed the machine to automatic, groovy, now I've got an IP. I updated the virus scanner, rebooted to it would take effect, updated again, ran the scanner. Oh look, Klez on the machine. Only 2 infected files surprisingly.

I found and downloaded SpinRite again, ran it on the broken machine (it's only taken me an hour of pissing about to actually be able to start on this machine). It's happily reading the disk. What about the fact the data is all corrupt? it must just deal with hardware errors.

I found Norton Disk Doctor, ran that, it fixed a few errors on the disk, the Partition Table, the File Allocation Tables, and something else. Dodgy Directories, 4000 something lost chains, it runs through all those, asks me if I want to fix it, and then crashes. Hmm.

I tried running it again, crashes. Put himem.sys on and loaded it, still crashes, tried mucking around with config.sys settings, still crashes. Decide I'll have to fix this some other way.
I started googling for disk recovery software came across a page listing a few different products, went and looked at details of all of them, some appear to not exist anymore, PowerQuest's Lost+Found has disappeared since PowerQuest has been bought by Symantec "use Norton" they'll say.

I found something called "Stellar Phoenix", I want the dos version so I can fix it on the machine, I found a crack for it, but it was for the windows version, oh well. I downloaded the demo of the windows version, installed it, applied the crack, pulled the corrupted disk out, plugged it in, booted up, ran the software, followed the tips, and it found everything on the disk.

At this point the woman rang to find out what was happening, "I'm working on it".

I then recovered all the lost files to my hard drive, formatted the corrupted one, moved all the files back, tried to get it to boot, but all the files are corrupt after all that. 5 hours wasted. Oh well, I know good software and the method for doing this the next time I need to recover files.

I tried to call her back to tell her the hard disk is stuffed and that it will need a windows reinstall to fix, but she'd gone out. I left a message that it will be fixed next Tuesday or something.

I talked to the other tech guy, he reckons it's come in corrupted before, and he's reinstalled windows to fix it. Looks like it needs that again. She was charged last time, I don't think I can charge again, maybe it's her fault, but it could be a hardware fault.

I decided to replace the disk, install windows on it, and she can take it away. If it screws up again, she's paying.

I went back to my mates place, ended up staying for dinner, got home about 9pm. I rang my adsl mate, he wants a 4 port adsl router now. I'll get one on Monday.

I watched Jackass while writing this, that's a funny show.

Ok, I'm going to bed I think, I'll play with my DVDR drive tomorrow, only bought it a week ago.