Well there was a fair on.

I went over there, I half there wasn't once I got there, they had "Computer Fair Parramatta Town Hall Today" stuck up on the window, there were no Hiaces, and the only people milling about were wearing basketball uniforms.

I stuck my head, there was a few stalls in there, so I went back and locked my helmet, went and paid, and wandered in.

Very poor turnout, about 1/4 of the usual number of sellers there.

I'm glad I didn't plan on buying a pc there today, I would have been hard pressed to get all the bits.

I went around a couple of times, looking at prices, I was just there to find prices, maybe buy another hard disk for more space for the tivo files, and some blank dvds.

I bumped into a mate, chatted to him for a bit, then I went around the fair another couple of times. 3 stalls had Maxtor disks, I got another 120gb ata133 with 8mb buffer (only wanted 2mb, oh well) for $155.

The dvds were expensive, I paid $26 for 10 Ricohs a few weeks ago, they wanted $28 or $30 this time. I've still got 8 (oops, 7 now, I'm just burning another one), so I don't need the desperately.

I couldn't get many prices for pc bits, and I forgot to get a pamphlet with the dates on it, so I had nothing to write them down on.

I saw another guy, I used to go to a computer club with, chatted to him for about 1/2 hour, then I left.

I went to Worldwide Appliances, where I bought my crappy Philips player, looked at the Pioneer (DV-355). $299 they wanted, I asked the guy his best price.. he said he'd check.

The display one was the last one, so he'd do it for $249, $4 less than cost. Not going to argue with that. Had to find the box, instructions, and a power cord, which took a few minutes, but I wasn't in a hurry.

While he was away looking for the box etc, I had a very close inspection of the unit, a couple of grubby marks on it, and a little mark in the plastic above the drawer on the front, but when I'm saving $70 from the other place, and getting it for less than cost, who gives a shit?

I also extended the warranty to 5 years for $25, that was necessary I thought, especially since I had the display one.

Oh, and it was the pre region modded one too, good, I don't have to fiddle around with that.

I paid for it with my Amex (which I can't sign, so I had to show a different card), got them to hold it for my while I got some lunch (I'm sure it would have lasted a long time strapped to my bike in the carpark).

I had some lunch, a salad, while I was waiting, the chick at the salad place started chatting to me, she saw my Queensland license, and I told her about getting one, and how they are cheaper etc. Her mum turned up while I was waiting, with a bag, it was a new phone the chick had bought, and she showed it to me, some Sony Ericsson picture phone thing.

I got my salad and left.

I ate it, went back over to the Appliance place, when I picked up my dvd player, the woman at the counter asked if I was the Amex customer, "uh, yeah", and then she went on to tell me that apparantly there is a strip on the back of the Amex you have to pull off before you can sign it. Whatever, I've had the thing for 3 years now, and not needed to sign it.

I strapped the player on, and took off. I noticed one of my mates had just pulled up, I beeped my horn, waved, and kept going. I probably should have stopped and had a chat, but it was far too hot out there.

I came home, unloaded the bike, dumped everything inside the door.

I was stinking hot (and stinking in general too), I jumped in the cold shower, the water coming off me was black, it's been at least a week since my last shower, if not two, it's just too cold.

I braved the cold, felt a bit better when I got out.

I setup my dvd player, and had a quick play with it, played an mp3 disc, groovy, put a region 1 disc in, played it, cool. Put my Sabrina DVDR in I made, played it, excellent. I tried putting the half burnt dvdr in from when windows crashed, but it wouldn't play it, I didn't really expect it to.

Oh yeah, I setup the dvd player, with all the audio options set to the best (digital out, AC3, Dolby Digital, MPEG out, 96khz etc) and my receiver supports everything but MPEG out, I had to go and set that back to PCM, so my Sabrina DVD would work.

Then I went back to watching more Robot Wars.

I've just finished copying Finding Nemo for my brother (can't really trust 7 year olds with DVDs), so now I'm about to check if it works.

I've done nothing with the hard drive yet, I'll probably play with that tomorrow, since I can see myself spending a lot of time moving data on to the new disk, repartioning the other disk, and swapping them around, since my current partitions are really dumb, and rather than just throwing more disk space at the problem, I might as well take the chance to make it more efficiently used too.