More nightmares about this decoder.

There must be a way to get it working.

I mucked around with it again, trying different emulators, and clients, still no good.

The guy who was going to turn up to get his computer rang, he was running late, and would be here about midday. No worries.

I went back to cleaning and sorting that I started yesterday.

Dad came in to ask if I wanted my guitar. I told him that it would distract me from concentrating on getting the decoder working, and that I'll get it after I've spent a week on this (until Tuesday) and then I will give up, and get the guitar.

I was just vacumming when the guy turned up.

I told him he could leave it and come back in an hour or so. He wanted to stay, hmm, ok.

I forgot I lent out my spare monitor, I grabbed one that was hanging around, then found the vertical hold doesn't work, so it just draws a very bright horizontal line in the middle of the monitor. I grabbed of my monitors.. only vga, d'oh. I grabbed another one, the refresh rate was wrong. doh again.

I ended up plugging it into my 17" monitor. Then I realised the right mouse button didn't work.

I got a working mouse, removed mcaffee nonsense.

The network card wouldn't autodetect. Hmm, I tried another one, same thing.

I found the intel drivers, downloaded them. My machine refused to copy the file, without locking up.

I put the monitor back on my pc, then after trying to copy the file, I remembered the floppy drive in this machine doesn't work.

Argh, I put one of the monitors back on it's pc, and used that to copy the file.

Then I tried to copy the drivers on to the guy's pc.. the floppy disk was stuffed. I went back and copied the file again, onto another disk, it worked.

I loaded the drivers, rebooted, the network was working. It only took 50 minutes of his 1 hour I quoted him to get it working to this point.

I installed AVG, updated it, updated AdAware, machine looks fairly clean. I found the drivers for the modem.

I shutdown, installed the modem, not detected, hmm. I tried to install the drivers, nope, for win2000, and there's 98 on here.

I went and found more drivers, on gateway's site. They wouldn't download in IE. I ftp'd in and downloaded them.

I tried to install the drivers, windows locked up.

Rebooted, I installed the drivers, is the modem on com1 or the parallel port windows asks, uh, where's the "neither" option.

I installed it as being on com1, even though it's not. Oh look, it doesn't work.

I think it's stuffed, it should have detected.

I put thunderbird on for him, and downloaded his mail.

He went through and got some details he needed (I don't have a printer).

I told him he would need a new modem, this one doesn't seem to work. I'll ship him one in the morning.

So, he got 2 1/2 hours work for 1 hours pay, not too bad, for him.

I went back to mucking around with the decoder.

I know what the problem is. The client software doesn't respond to the cam fast enough, when I use a gold card to answer the reset, it gets one step closer. I theorise that if there was a gold card that basically just bootstrapped the decoder, answered all the nanos the client is too slow to do, that it would work.

I managed to get on the sat forum (heavily overloaded atm) and I posted my theory, noone has commented on it yet.

Oh yeah, I went to check that phone number auction yesterday, it's been deleted.

So now I'm back to listening to music, watching the shopping channel, and drinking.