I woke up early for once this morning.

Watched some Simpsons, then realised I was going to be late, I had said I would be at the Cafe for 10:30, and I didn't get out of bed until after 10. ugh.

I quickly ate some breakfast, and I got dressed as quickly as I could, which is not terribly quickly with my skin as it is.

My brother came in, "A big package has arrived", he went back and lugged it in. I checked the customs slip. Hooray! It's my 8 track player. I had to open it and have a look, I've waited 4 months for it. D'oh, it was packed with rca audio leads plugged in, the box has got knocked around a bit, and the audio sockets are broken away from the plastic on the back.

I grabbed a screwdriver, popped off the top, had a quick look, realised I couldn't get to the back of the sockets to make the cable any longer to replace the broken sockets, decided I didn't have time for this, and put the thing down. It was now about 10:25. Oops.

I got on the bike, and took off. About halfway there, I came across tar spraying. Great. The traffic was stopped, and far off in the distance I could see smoke rising. This is stuffed, I'll be here all day. I turned around, went back, took the detour route (which had been setup a couple of days earlier, I came back along this road last night, it was fine, or I would have avoided it altogether), went up the other way, and got to the Cafe about 11am.

The guy I was there to fix his PC was there, I had a quick chat, realised he had a virus, I grabbed a couple of cleaning tools, shoved them on a floppy, scanned his pc, cleaned it, put a network card in, installed a new virus scanner, updated it, deleted all the email error messages flying in of virus infected emails he had tried to send being rejected, pulled the nic out again.

45 minutes work, charged him for that, rushed out, (ooh, I need to pay my Amex bill, I'll do it when I come back), jumped back on my bike, and went down to the club where I had to fix their internet (in return for lunch).

On the way, I thought about the payment situation. If I can do a single hours work in a day, then that almost pays my salary for the day, and if I can do 6 hours work (in 5 days), then for what I want to earn, it will only cost the business $10 to have me there all week. Maybe we can make this business work.

I got to the club, fiddled around, found their password corrupt on the server for some reason, fixed that, it dialled on fine. Cool, easy. Oops, no that easy, their silly liitle uClinux based firewall router thing keeps rebooting, that's why the connection keeps going up and down.

I told them the story, the thing is probably out of warranty (yep), so I'll just setup an old pc to run LRP (Linux Router Project) off a floppy to do NAT/DHCP for them, instead of wasting hundreds of dollars replacing that silly firewall thing.

We observed a minutes silence for my friend, during this time the woman at Wahroonga where the dialin pop used to be tried calling me, I sent it to voicemail. I left after that, to head back to the Cafe, I tried calling her back, she'd gone out, ok, ring me back in 20 (when I'm back at the Cafe).

I jumped back on the bike, and went back to the Cafe. Ran out of fuel on the way back, so I had to pull in and refill. Forgot to pay my Amex bill again. Forgot what I was supposed to be doing back here again.

The woman rang me back again, their internet access is broken. Damn, it's that crappy server down there with issues I wanted to replace months ago. I told her I am working voluntarily and I can't afford to be travelling down there to spend hours fixing some server for free, which only provides free internet access to her anyway. She can get a modem setup and use that.

I decided to organise the email. Having support email for 3 different ISPs, along with invoice enquires etc, all going into one account is dumb. You don't know what you're doing. I ended up fiddling around for hours sorting that out, creating proper accounts on the servers, disabling redirections, getting things organised.

The tech support woman started looking up award rates, if we are "office clarks" we should be getting $14.75/hr, I would have been happy with $10/hr. Now, we will get that, which means we have to reduce our hours worked in order to keep afloat, a win win situation I think, more money and less work.

Thunderbird is a very buggy mail client. You can't add similar mail accounts to it, it claims they are already there, and if you try deleting them, you can't readd them. Dumb. I don't know what I'll do about this. Oh, and the password manager is crappy, what part of "Remember this password" do you not understand?

We had sorted out the pay a bit earlier, I actually got some money, now I can buy some food, cool.

I was left on my own at this point, everyone else had left, one of the cleaners from the centre came in for a chat, he'd been chatting to my friend a bit, about his plane etc. It turns out that my friend had listened to us all, he had taken the plane to a mechanic, apparently there was a problem with the spark, and the mechanic fixed it, or told my friend how to fix it. He had not charged my friend, because that would make him liable if something went wrong (how ironic), and also because my friend did not have a pilot's license. He'd also been chatting to one of the other cleaners, who told him he should put an electronic starter on it so he could restart it. My friend must not have got around to doing that.

I locked up the shop, and went around to my mate's place, he wanted to chat to me.

We had a chat, I was worried about having to relocate the equipment in Gosford, apparently he'd been speaking to the guy who had the missing server, and he's offered to let us move the equipment in there for free.

I drew a bunch of diagrams to illustrate the equipment and network links etc, to work out what's involved in moving it all, maybe it won't be that hard. there's incoming phone lines, incoming data, and a few servers. there's a couple of sdsl links, if I can find out where they are linked to, we can find out about moving them too. Maybe we can do it, and moving the stuff into a proper colo facility would be nice, instead of where it is now. It all depends on what it costs to get the E1s relocated, that will dictate if it can be done. I suppose, at the least, the servers can be relocated, and the dial in equipment left where it is, I'll have to diagram that.

I called my friend's De Facto to tell her about what I had heard from the cleaners, we chatted for a bit.

I got off the phone, and went back to chatting with my mate, I started talking about the equipment in Melbourne, and what a waste of money it is sitting there doing nothing. We decided to go down and remove it all, pending agreement for coverage of costs involved.

I had dinner with my mate and his wife, we told her about possibly going to Melbourne.

I then went in with my mate to his computer, and we sorted some accounts out, my mate with the new hard drive called me, I intended to go and see him tonight, to apologise for being busy and forgetting to ring him back a few days before, so I told him, and he said he see me soon.

I left there not long after, I took my mate's broken phone with me, I want to go and see the guy who runs an electronics place tomorrow anyway.

I went and saw my mate with the new hard drive, told him some of what has been going on the last few days, and then had a look at his computer. It seems stuffed, I pulled the cpu out, and it looks like it's blown, one edge of the chip on the top is really rough looking, and there is material all over the top of the cpu.

I tried mucking around booting it with nothing but cpu/mem/vid like I did with my machine recently, but it didn't work, it must be stuffed. I'll sort something out next week when I'm in Sydney going here there and everywhere getting 600 other things sorted out.

He paid me back the rest of the money I lent him a while ago to build a server, that was cool. Now I have some real money back.

I came home, and started playing with my 8 track again. I put the top back on, took the bottom off, bingo, here's what I wanted, direct access to the cables to the broken sockets, I pulled them a bit longer, now I can easily replace the busted sockets. I put the bottom back on, and attached a speaker I have hanging around.

I found my stepdown transformer, plugged it in, jammed in a cartridge (Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy) I bought on eBay a few months ago, the program light came on, I couldn't hear anything.

I fiddled around with the speaker leads, then I could _just_ hear it, seems I need a preamp for this thing.

I plugged it into the video monitor I use for video editing, it has an amp in it, and I've just spent the last hour listening to the whole cartidge around twice, on the third run now :-)

Time to go look on eBay for more.

Oh yeah, I managed to arrange to get tomorrow off, so I don't get overloaded.

Tomorrow I will pay my Amex bill :-)