I called the woman who I'm supposed to be working for tomorrow, doing the networking. No answer, left a message. She called me back a bit later.

I told her I didn't have any of the gear I needed (network cards/cable/switch etc), so I would come down tomorrow, and just work out what they have (if any PCs have NICs etc), how much cable I will need, all that sort of stuff, then I will sort it out next week, and come back and do all the work (since Friday is a holiday).

That was fine, and she gave me directions.

I got off the phone, and looked at the street directory.. I know where it is, it's right near the college I was at back in 2002, I know the area well, I've even ridden through there a couple of times. No worries.

I tried to call up the woman I have to go and see later, to install her replacement hard disk, to check it was still ok, no answer.

I bummed around for a while.

I tried calling her again, about 5.50pm, got through, confirmed it, said I would be there about 6.30pm.

Literally 3 seconds after hanging up the phone, it started teaming down with rain. Mongrel.

I had some dinner, noodles, there is no other food left in the house. Just as they were nearly ready, and I wanted to put the flavour in, I dropped the open sachet into the bin, and of course, according to murphy's law, the sachet turned upside down, and all the flavour powder or whatever it is poured into the bin.

I opened another packed of noodles, got the flavour out, and put it in with the cooked noodles. What to do with the open packet of raw noodles with no flavour sachet? I ate them. gross, couldn't waste them though. I ate almost all of them, chucked about a mouthful, served the cooked, flavoured noodles, and sat and ate them.

It was now about 6.25pm. The rain had let up a lot.

I was about to leave, and it got heavy, you bastard.

I pulled out my dry pants, pulled them on, and took off. It was a very slow and long trip. I think I need new tyres, or just to avoid riding in the wet.

It stopped raining shortly after I left. I got there, went straight in, got to work. I put the new disk in, used ghost to copy all the files. It was incredibly slow to pull all the data off the original disk, but just the second quarter of the data, the rest was fine.

I ran a quick test across the old disk, Norton Disk Doctor and SpinRite, no obvious problems (besides a single lost chain, but that's not going to do anything).

I put the new disk into the silly mounting bracket (I hate low profile desktop cases), backwards, d'oh, turned it around.

Put the machine all back together, checked it, no issues.

The woman paid me for the disk, I only charged her for 1/2 hour, even though from leaving home to getting home again, it was about 2 1/2 hours, most of the time was just chatting and drinking coffee, waiting for the computer to do things.

I left the old disk, there's probably nothing wrong with it, but if errors were coming up, and since it was very slow to extract the data, I don't think it's great. I've got no use for a possibly suspect 10G disk anyway.

I took her black ink cartridge, it was empty (totally, I've never seen one so empty), I'll look at getting it refilled, or a cheap replacement, instead of the $68 HP want for a new one.

I'll get that sorted, and take it back in the next couple of weeks.

I should go to bed soon, I'm tired, took hours to get to sleep last night. My sleep schedule is so screwed up now, because of a couple of days ago, when I didn't get up properly until after midday.

Have to be up early to go down the freeway to look at getting the details for the network setup. I'm not going if it's pissing down with rain though, not on these bald tyres, after my fun this morning.