Half way through the day.

Woke up at 9am, it started teaming down with rain. Great.

I got up, had a shower, breakfast, and got ready to leave, the rain had stopped for the moment, so it was OK.

I took my tools to replace the phone connector. I was just about to leave, when I realised I needed a CD with AVG to install.

I burned one (took all of a minute with the DVDR drive).

I took off, rode down to the woman's place.

On the way, I pulled up to some lights, in a left turn lane, to go straight and overtake the traffic in the main lane. There was another bike out, he came up behind me. As the light went green, I went to take off, and my bike stalled. Stupid thing. Must have been from the cold or the rain or something, because it wouldn't idle properly when I first started this morning either.

The last 2 or 3 days of torrential rain has probably not done it any favours.

Anyway, I started it up again, pulled the throttle on a fair way, dropped the clutch, and did a massive wheel spin. Oops.

The bike did a huge fishtail back and forth, almost in front of the 4 wheel drive I was trying to overtake, someone beeped their horn, it sounded like the other bike.

I didn't pay attention, and just took off the down the hill, and kept going, left them behind.

Maybe I need new tyres, I think these are getting a bit bald, I've had them since last May, I had them put on a week or so before I went to Brisbane and changed my rego/license etc over.

I just checked the paper work, I can't find the invoice for the 2 new tyres (about $400 for 2 tyres, and fitting) I had them put on after the rego check failed (obviously) the odometer was on about 40700 at the check, and when I got my bike inspected in Queensland, the odo was on about 42700, so I probably had the tyres fitted about 41000km, since I had them for a bit before I went the ~1100km to Brisbane.

Anyway, after all that, my bike is now on around 58000km, so I got 17000km out of them, not too bad, and they are still fine in the dry :-)

I had just got there, when my mate who does the plastering (who I've worked for before)'s wife turned up.

We had a chat, while I looked at the computer.

Hmm, click on the user to login as, and it does nothing, just sits there, saying "Loading your Personal Settings", and won't do anything. It's not locked up, the mouse still moves, just won't do anything. Alt+Tab didn't help either, no hidden errors.

I thought maybe there was something in startup buggering it. I rebooted, eventually worked out F8 brings up the boot menu (nice of them to take away the last known good message and stuff). Booted in safe mode.

Logged in as admin, disabled all the startup items, tried again, no good. Went into safe mode again, as the user, there were more items, disabled them, still no good.

I tried running System File Checker (SFC) no good, won't run in safe mode, useful. There were no system restore points to use either.

The woman had mentioned that she had installed Norton AntiVirus, and then it didn't work properly. Maybe that's the problem.

I went to uninstall Norton.. no option in the add remove. Argh.

I went into the settings, of Norton, and disabled the automatic start. Woohoo! fixed.

I then went about ripping the rest of it out, since there was no uninstall. Could get everything but the shell extension dll. Ended up having to kill explorer, and delete it, then restart explorer. What a pile.

The woman and my mate's wife went out, to get the car inspected to renew the rego/insurance.

I grabbed the AVG disc out of my bike, that I needed for the next job. I installed it, did a "quick" update.

I downloaded Adaware, since I noticed the machine was full of junk.

By the time the files had finished, they were back.

Installed Adaware, ran it, cleaned out 200 something pieces of spyware. No virii found.

Did a full update of AVG, that was going to take like 40 minutes, we all sat outside, and chatted, mucked around with the dogs.

After about 45 minutes, my mate's wife went home, I checked, the download/update was finished, so I ran a full scan, 25 minutes later (and after deleting 400mb of Temporary Internet Files it was taking forever to scan), it was finished, clean. Cool.

I collected my money, and I left, heading for the next job. I was there for over 2 1/2 hours, but because it wasn't all that hard, mainly just time waiting for downloads, I just charged for an hour.

I stopped in at the electrical wholesaler on the way, to get a new phone end, they don't have ones the same as was on the cord, with a tension relief throat thing, so I went to the hardware nearby, they didn't have them either, so I just got a wall mount one.

I went to the woman's place, she was there this time. I put the new phone end on, tested it, it was all fine.

Collected my payment (charged an hour, for yesterday, today, and the new phone end inclusive). I installed the virus scanner, but I wasn't waiting around for another hour for the update to download again, once a day is painful enough.

I left, went to McDonalds, got some lunch (about 2pm) and read the paper for a while.

I came home, uh oh, it must be 2.30pm, and the school around the corner has just finished (I thought it was the school holidays). There were kids in the middle of the road up the back of the school, where I can avoid all the hell, but I have to go the wrong way up a one way street to get to the house, so I decided to avoid that, in case it was busy at this time of day.

I went around the front of the school, through hell. Kids, Mum's taxis, Busses everywhere, it was a nightmare.

I got through it all, and came home. I'm not going through that school zone again, damn busses nearly running me off the road.

OK, time to make some phone calls, get my stuff together to go back out and install that hard drive, later tonight.