I woke up abouit 11.20am.

I got up, started watching tv. Tivo has about 2 hours of free space left, other than recordings set to not delete (that I intend to dvd archive).

I think it will run out of space in a couple of days.

I watched the couple of episodes of the Simpsons it had.

A delivery van turned up, and the guy put something in the letterbox. I'm not expecting and couriered packages.

When he left, I went to go down and see what was in the box, I assumed a card saying that delivery was not possible, because no one was at home (they never knock on my door, because of where it is).

I opened the door to go down to the letterbox, saw Dad in the room of their house near the door to outside to get to mine, so I thought buger it, he can go and get it, and I cam back inside. I left the door open a little bit.

A bit after midday I called the guy I'm going into the colo with, to find out about getting the keys, so I can put the gear in, since it's getting close to ready. He said he would get the key cut tomorrow, and I could get it sometime after that, so I said I might pick up tomorrow afternoon, or perhaps Friday, when I might be putting the gear in.

He told me the other guy in there was moving all his gear out (or so it seemed), so there might be a rack afterall, and I don't need to take mine in there. We'll see what happens.

I meant to ask him about the IP addresses, so I could start setting firewall rules etc up. Oh well, I might call him tomorrow, get the keys sorted out, and find out about the IPs then.

I watched a bit more tv, about 12.30pm the phone rang, it was a guy who had been given my details, and wanted to know if I could setup some wireless networking gear for him, ah, this will be the guy my mate asked me about yesterday, as we were on our way to dinner, if this guy had called me.

I spoke to him for a few minutes, and worked out that I would come and sort it out for him, and I would just charge him for an hour. I said I could be there about 2pm.

From what he told me, I thought it sounded like a limited range issue.

I looked up in the street directory where he was, and how to get there, not too hard, maybe half an hour away.

While I was sitting around, the huge cat my parents got recently came in, because I had left the door open. He wandered around, under the desk, past me. I patted him. He looked under the bed, behind the chair, and then wandered out again.

I didn't have any allergic reactions, even after putting my hand I had patted him with near my face (that decreases the amount of time it takes for me to feel awful when I am in my parent's house). Maybe it's just my parent's house in general, and not the animals that causes me to be allergic.

I thought about taking my access points with me, to see if they had stronger transmission signals, and if that was the point. The power supply for them was stuffed though, and the only one that runs them properly is the one I'm using on my phoenix programmer on the card server.

A bit after 1pm, I decided to get ready and leave, so I would be there for 2pm. I got in the shower, just after I had got out, and before I came out of the bathroom, Dad came in to my room, we had a quick conversation through the bathroom door. Dad had to turn some power off for some reason, and wanted to know if it would effect any of my gear. Probably.

I finished in the bathroom, got dressed. I had to leave basically now to get there on time. Instead, I went about shutting everything down.

Since everything was shutdown, I might as well take the power supply now (I was just going to take the access points, and hope that the power supply for guy's adsl router/wifi ap would be suitable). So I unplugged it, grabbed it, along with the access points, my mp3 player and bike gear I needed.

I started loading the stuff into the bike (it was about 1.45 now, I'll be a bit late, not too bad). Then I noticed the stupid little adapter that goes in the end of the cable from the power supply that adapts it to fit into the socket on different devices was missing. Damn. It's fallen out somewhere between the PC and my bike. I went back looking, all up and down the stairs, inside, across the floor, near the pc, nowhere.

I looked for about 20 minutes, and gave up. I knew I had a compatible plug on the adapter that died, it was only twisted on, so I just ripped it off, and took off. I can shove the wires into the end of the cable where the missing adapter is supposed to be.

I rode up to the guys place, I got there about 2.30pm.

He came out, said my bike was "a nice machine", and asked if I wanted to put it in the garage. Heh.

I went in, and started looking at the setup.

The guy had an alcatel adsl router, with wifi built in. It has no external aerial.

The guy had set it up successfully on his upstairs pc (right next to the router) but he couldn't get it working.

I removed and reinstalled the drivers for the wireless device on the pc. I installed the usb wireless dongle thing, it detected it.

When I did a site scan, it could see the AP upstairs, but I couldn't connect to it, it just kept scanning around and around. Strangely, the AP had a null SSID.

I wondered if perhaps the wireless dongle was not working correctly. I went and got the dongle from upstairs, where it was working, plugged it in downstairs, no good. Maybe it's the signal strength.

I moved the adsl router downstairs, and plugged it in outside the room where the PC was I was trying to connect. Still no good.

I went upstairs and looked at the working config (put the original dongle back). It worked fine from upstairs, with the router downstairs. I went into the web interface to the router, and saw that it had an Access List, with only one MAC address listed in it. It must have limited connectivity based on this, and the machine downstairs is not in the list.

I started the procedure to add another machine, the one downstairs was still scanning around, it should just add in here, no such luck.

I looked in the config, and saw it had the SSID specified, and it wasn't null. Maybe it has a stealth SSID that you need to type in.

When I set it to automatic, it wouldn't connect. When I typed it in, it connected straight on. Hmm, I think that proves that theory.

I went back downstairs, typed in the SSID, it connected straight on.

Still couldn't get and connectivity from the router. I got the install CD that came with the router, and went about installing it.

I had a wizard that came up, and asked for the SSID of the AP, ok, I think that's even more proof it requires the SSID to be specified. It also asked for the details of the internet account, that seems strange for the client setup, and the email address.

I got past that with the settings.

The next step specified to press the big red "register" button on the back of the router/AP. I thought it would require something like that. The install went on, activating 128 bit WEP, which seemed strange, seeing as the AP did not have WEP on, and then it complained that the install had failed.

I got out of it, disabled the WEP settings (to match the AP), and it was on, and working.

So there it was, I had to specify the SSID in order to be able to connect, and the MAC address of the device had to be registered in the AP before it would reply to any packets.

I went into the web interface, saw the new entry in the Access List. Ok, that's all fine, working everywhere.

I took the router/AP back upstairs and put it back where it came from.

I wanted to install AdAware from the machine downstairs where I had just downloaded it to, but I couldn't see the downstairs machine from the upstairs one.

Uh oh, this must be a limited range issue.

I tried the AP upstairs in a different room. Still no good.

Put it downstairs, in a different room, still no good.

As we were installing it in the 4th place we tried, the guy told me he didn't expect me to do all this for the amount of money I had said on the phone. I said it wouldn't be much more, because it wasn't like this was hard work, it was just fiddling around.

The upstairs machine was working regardless of where we put it. We tried moving the wireless dongle all around to get a better signal, no good.

Put it back upstairs again, back near the upstairs pc, but near the stairs, away from the computer directly. It still did not work downstairs. Maybe the machine has dropped out of the Access List again.. I looked in the web interface from the upstairs machine.

Bingo. Only 1 MAC address in the list. Clicked on "register" to add a new one. 2 seconds later, the machine downstairs was in the list, and had it's settings, and I was able to ping it. That was a lot of wasted time.

it was now about 4pm. My mate (where my other motorbike is parked, and he was going to reregister today) called me. He asked if I was at home, what I was doing etc. I said I would probably be home shortly, he said he would drop in at my place about 4.45pm.

I got back to work, it was now all working again.

I forced the AP to save all it's settings. Shouldn't have the issue of the machine dropping out of the Access List again now.

Went back upstairs to try installing AdAware, couldn't access the files from downstairs, the share I setup isn't working.

I had to run the "Home/Small Office Networking Wizard" or whatever it was, on both machines, and then the Shared Folders nonsense was working across the network. Why does M$ have to make everything so painful?

I finally managed to get the file sharing working and install AdAware upstairs at about 4.30pm. (BTW, it found about 100 items on the machine downstairs, it stopped all the popups and garbage). There were only 4 items on the upstairs machine after all that.

I realised I was not going to be home in 15 minutes, so I sent an SMS to my mate telling him I would be late, and would call him.

I had a look at the guys email for him, it kept prompting to dialup to the internet to check mail. That was just caused by having an "always connect to this account using" setting on the PC. So that was easily fixed. Nasty LookOut. No other email clients have stupid errors like that.

It was now just before 5pm, the guy paid me, he paid me double what I had asked for. I didn't want to take that much, but he said it was fine. I told him that if he had any problems he could call me, and I would help him, or come back and have a look, since he had paid the extra.

Just before I left, I had a look at the email problem on the machine downstairs, same problem as upstairs, with an "always connect to this account using" setting, so I told him how to fix it, and then I left.

I rode towards home, I stopped in at my mates place who wanted to see me, he wasn't there.

I called him, told him I was at his place, he told me to go home, and he would be there shortly.

I went home. I had just got inside, when he turned up.

We had a chat for a bit, he gave me the money he was going to use to get the blue slip/pink slip/rego/insurance sorted on my other bike.

He had tried to get it sorted out properly earlier in the day, but the bike won't start for some reason. Hmm. Maybe there's a dodgy connection with the fuse or something, I vaguely recall that.

He told me that the power was on, but it wouldn't kick over. The fuel has probably gone shit, it's been in the thing for ages and ages.

I said I would have a look tomorrow, since I wasn't planning to do much, and see if I could get it sorted.

I'll probably just drain all the shit out of the tank, siphon some good fuel out of my 650, and put it in the 250 to see if I can get it started.

He didn't have the key on him, so he said he would leave it in his letterbox in the morning, and I can get it when I get there.

he left.

I started booting everything back up.

My brother came in complaining could I fix the pay tv (I had removed the power supply from the phoenix programmer, and the machine that runs the card sharing software was off). I said I was fixing it.

I decided to put the new power supply in this machine, instead of having 2 running it.

I started putting the power supply in, I was nearly finished, when Dad came in.

I finished installing the power supply, tried to boot the machine, it wouldn't work. Great. Doesn't boot.

I tried a few times, put the old PSU in, still no good.

Dad asked if he could have the card, to stop Mum whinging. I ripped it out of the phoenix programmer, and gave it to him, and he left.

I went back to screwing around with the machine. Couldn't get it working.

I ended up pulling the motherboard out to see if I could work out what was going on.

I can't see what's wrong with this damn thing, it should just work. It's doing it's trick again, like around Christmas, when it refused to work, until I arranged to get the motherboard replaced, and then it started working again.

I gave up. I started watching an episode of the Simpsons on free to air, and eating the easter egg my grandma gave me.

My sister came in, with a pizza box, and asked if I wanted some pizza. Sure, put it there. She dumped the box and left.

I grabbed it, opened in, 3 bits in here. I started eating a slice, stone cold. Lovely.

I ate it anyway.

I mucked around with the machine a bit more. Still couldn't get it working.

The phone rang. I answered it, it was a long distance call (it bipped when I answered it). It was a woman, she claimed I had fixed their adsl connection recently, at the seniors centre. I thought about it for a second, then it clicked, ah, I remember. Apparently she is having problems with it again. It was 7.45pm, I assumed she was not at the centre now, and said that, no, she was at home, I thought maybe I could help her over the phone having seen the config.

She said she would be at the centre between 9am and about 4pm tomorrow, was I available.

I said I would come down there about 9.30am. She said she could go earlier if I wanted (heh, no, 9.30am is early enough :-), but I said 9.30 was fine. Cool, I'll probably get paid this time, but if it's something as simple and dumb as last time, a disabled interface, I won't charge.

I tried running the CPU with no heatsink, it didn't even get hot.

I cleaned all the heatsink paste off, using a ton of WD40 and some paper towel (as far as I know, this thing is stuffed, so what does it matter?), it looks like the die on the chip has the corner chipped off. The CPU is probably stuffed.

What will I do now? I want a drink, there's no Coke.

I rode down to the supermarket, bought some Coke, and came home again.

I had a drink, ahh.

I looked at the CPU. I thought about.

I remembered that my mate has an "old" Athlon PC in bits, maybe I can test my CPU on his mobo to see if it's the mobo or the CPU.

I called him, he's still got it, an athlon 1800. I said I might come around tomorrow, and test it.

I got off the phone, and then realised I've got a brand new mobo in the box here, from the webserver I haven't built yet. Duh.

I got it, put my cpu/heatsink on it. Put the ddr ram on it, plugged it all in (to the dodgy 400w psu) tried to boot it.. bang, it just booted straight up. There we go, it is a stuffed mobo then. Great.

I think I'll buy a new mobo/cpu/ram on the weekend anyway. As I was thinking about buying a new one, an ad came on the tv for the computer fair. Convenient.

I put the stuff all away again.

I put the phoenix programmer on a different machine, and ran up the software. it looks like it will work, I just hope the machine is fast enough, there are issues trying to run it on slow machines. I'll have to go and get the card back in a bit.