I was woken up at some point before 9am this morning.

It was Mum knocking on the door, "What?", "I've locked myself out of the house", "So? do you want my keys or something?", "No, I'm going out. If you go out, unlock the door and leave it unlocked so I can get in when I come back from..." And she continued, but I went back to sleep.

I woke up again about 10am, started watching a documentary on the Titanic Tivo had recorded.

I started working on the server again, got it downloading the files it nearly finished getting last night.

It failed trying to install a couple of packages, because they all relied on each other. Oops.. I never did the network configuration when I debootstrapped this disk, like it says in the documentation, so I have no /etc/hosts, and exim refuses to configure, because it can't find itself.

I fixed that, and updated everything. I forced lilo again.

I rebooted.. it booted! then I realised, d'uh, of course it did, I didn't disable the IDE disk. I rebooted again, went into the BIOS, disabled the IDE disk for about the 20th time, and booted. I got carried away, and looked at something else. When I looked back, I noticed the machine was booting, so just being dumb and saying "LI".

HOORAY! It's only taken me about 5 days to get to this point.

I had to leave it, I have to fix one of the PCs I've got here to fix.

I booted the machine to fix up.. so slow. No nic.

I found a nic on the shelf, I've used all my intel nics now (I had a stack of them, where are they all?). I found the realtek drivers for the chip on the 100mbit card I wanted to use, eventually found a working floppy, loaded the drivers.

I put the card in, booted up. not found, hmm, maybe it's just an ME "feature". I forced the drivers from the floppy in. It then complained that it couldn't read them. Argh, I hate floppy disks.

I copied them onto the disk again, 5 times, in different directories, one of these will have to work.

I loaded the drivers, it accepted them, but didn't claim to have found the adapter, and after a reboot, still no nic.

Now, whenever I rebooted, the BIOS complained the nic was causing a conflict.

Oh yeah.. It's this crappy Compex card isn't it? that's why it's on the shelf, because it always conflicts with everything.

I tried disabling the ports/sound everything I could, resetting the PNP settings etc, but still could not get past it. I ignored it. Windows booted, found it, but claimed the drivers on the floppy were not correct.

I went to get the compex drivers, I didn't know what adapter it was. I shut the machine down, pulled the card. No ID whatsoever on the card. I made a guess from memory, downloaded the drivers, put them on the floppy, and tried again. It accepted the drivers, but the card didn't show up.

My mate I go to dinner with turned up, he dropped off a couple of 486 machines that have been rattling around that no one wants. I'll setup freesco on them, stick a nic in them (ooh, they've both already got 3com Etherlinks in them, groovy) and sell them as dialup routers for $50 or something.

I'd now spent close to 2 hours trying to get the NIC working in this machine.

I chatted to my mate for a while. He asked me if I was coming up for dinner tonight, oh yeah, it's Tuesday isn't it? I said I would go up about 6pm. He asked how the ISP setup was going, and I told him the guy I spoke to about getting colo and stuff didn't call me back yesterday, I'll call him in a bit (I forgot, I'll call in the morning).

We chatted a bit more and then he took off, he wanted to get some lunch, and then go to another job he had.

I gave up. I ripped the shitty compex card out, left it on the floor. I checked the machine my mate (who I installed the new PC for last Monday) gave me. tons of memory errors again, one of the memory sticks must be stuffed, because I swapped them around, and now the errors are the same, but at different locations.

I shut if off, and grabbed the intel nic out, I put it into the machine I was trying to fix, booted it, windows found it, I rebooted, all done. Why did I waste over 2 hours trying to get this shit compex card working?

I backed up all the files to one of my machines. This was a task in itself, after getting the network adapter in, I had to share the disk. Foe some reason, this machine is incredibly slow. I lot my patience and threw the keyboard away several times.

It was so slow, it took me several minutes to kill off all the processes running in the background, it then became almost usable, I shared the disk, and backed up all the files.

I rebooted it, repartitioned it, formatted it, and started installing 2000.

Oh shit, I didn't back up the mail settings or anything. Bugger. I'll have to try and work them out from the headers of some mail, once I load it back in.

I ran an update on the accesslog of my blog, looking for interesting search terms people use to find my site, since someone in IRC mentioned a doozie they found in theirs. The best few in my accesslog for this blog are:

air matress in sydney supermarket

foxtel left the satellite on my roof what can i do with it

my computer sizzling noise

and the classic:

bogans

There's a whole bunch about sat tv as well.

Anyway, I went back to working on the PC.. I finished installing it, moved all the data back, (oh look, a bunch of virii here, including some of the programs making the machine so slow when I was trying to share the disk). I imported the mail back, then I decided to install Thunderbird, and import all the mail in there too, I'd rather they didn't use Lookout and keep getting the machine infected with virii.

My mate I go to dinner with called me, it's after 6pm, am I coming up? I told him to give me a couple of rings when his wife was getting near the station, then I would go straight to the club.

I got fed up with the machine, had a shower, and left a few minutes later.

When I got close, I checked my phone, a couple of missed calls, it must have been my mate. I went around to the club. I didn't see his car. I tried calling him, no answer.

I checked the missed call, A number I didn't recognise. I tried calling my mate again. No answer. My message service called me, the missed call was the woman who owns the PC I was fixing. She forgot to give Mum the CDs of software she wanted installed, how was I going etc. I called her back, spoke to her young (about 5 or 6 year old I think) daughter for a bit, until the woman got the phone, then I told her I was nearly finished. She said she would come and get it about 9 or 9.30, pm I assumed, but after confirming that, she said she would see me in the morning. Oh, 9 or 9.30am she meant, whatever.

Makes no difference I suppose, but I'll have to get up early, and probably tidy up a bit, it looks like a computer factory spewed in here. I am literally surrounded by computers sitting here.

Anyway.. I got off the phone with her, and I tried to call my mate again, still no answer. This is wierd. I decided to go around to his place and find out if he was there or what. I got around to his place, no one there, I noticed another missed call. Argh, just as I rode around to his place. My message service called me back, it was my mate, when I get there, they've paid, so I just need to go in. Oh, for god's sake.

I rode back around to the club again. I went in. The woman at the door was busy, so I walked past, she yelled at me. I went back, and she complained that I wasn't going to say hello, and did I want a dinner ticket, no, I don't need one, I've been paid for apparently. I went in, the people at the front of the food area said I had been paid for, and took me to the table where my mate was. The chick then said she needed my card. I showed her my membership card, "No, your dinner ticket". Argh, so that's why the woman on the door asked if I wanted one.

I went back out to the door again, to get the dinner ticket. The woman was all smug, expecting me to apologise for not listening to her before. I do not have the patience. She wouldn't give me the ticket "What do you say?" I wasn't giving it. "I know what I have to say, but I'm not going to say it" "You're supposed to apologise" she gave me the ticket, I said thanks, and walked away, she then continued on something about being a "know all male".

I went back into the dinner area, and gave the chick the dinner ticket.

I've had enough, and I want to go home now. I ate my dinner, rather quickly, since everyone else had almost finished by now.

I found I had a dollar, so I played the pokies, I nearly won it up to $2, but lost it all.

My mate's wife played the pokies for the first time, she won a dollar, and gambled back to the dollar she started with, took it out, and went home. Heh.

I came out, and came straight home.

I got back to fixing the PC.. I imported the Address Book in, but no addresses turned up. WTF? I tried importing it into Thunderbird, it got nothing either. I ran up the address book again, imported it again, and it seemed to work. I imported into Thunderbird again, and it worked.

Now I just need to get the modem back in the machine, create the dialup networking connection, and it's done.