Last night had to be the worst night's sleep ever.

I went to bed just after 1am, I had just put my Radiohead playlist on again.

I looked at the clock at the following times:

1am
1.30am
2.10am
2.40am
3.20am

I think I fell asleep at this point, but sort of a "conscious sleep" where I thought I was still awake. I thought the clock would say about 4am when I looked, it said 5.15am.

I fell asleep at this point, and slept until 8.30am when the alarm went off.

I got up at that point, had a shower, got ready.

The dvd had finished rendering, so I started dvd shrink running against it, to get it down to a size that would fit on a dvdr.

I was leaving about 9.20am, to get to the car service place for 9.30am to pick up my mate.

When I went down, I noticed my blinker (that I keep taping on) looking really sad, so I retaped it.

Dad turned up from somewhere, I spoke to him for a couple of minutes, he mentioned something about getting bank accounts sorted out.

I took off, went around to the car place. My mate came out, apparently he'd only got there about 5 minutes before, good timing.

He jumped on, and we went to the club. On the way, I felt my phone ringing. When we got there, I checked it, it was the guy with the colo where my gear is.

I tried calling him back, no answer. It must not have been important, because he didn't leave me a message.

We went in, and I checked my card to see if it was activated to get free lunches. It wasn't, so they sorted that out. While doing it, a line formed at the machine to collect the tickets.

We wandered around to the other machine, someone was just in front of us, so while I waited for them, I played the poker machine nearby, won nothing.

My mate claimed by lunch ticket for me, and then we went up to the snooker room.

We played 3 games, my skill was appalling today, and I got beaten by at least 50 on all 3 games.

During the games, my mate got called up a couple of times, some guy he helps out with pc stuff, it seems like the guy's hard drive is stuffed. We worked out finding out about getting him a new one.

The phone reminded me, I tried calling the colo guy back, and I spoke to him for a few minutes. I todl him I was having issues, and that the call routing was being a pain in the ass.

He said he would investigate something from his side, so we could get something sorted out. I said I would call him a bit later.

We finished up playing, and headed downstairs.

We got in the line for lunch.

Took a few minutes, but we got through, and got our food.

We sat and ate lunch. The food wasn't great, but what do you expect for free.

We left the club, and I took my mate to pickup his car, from a different place, but near where I picked him up.

They were doing the transmission at the place I picked him up from, and then they took it to another place ( a service station), where a hose was getting replaced, and the coolant was getting changed.

I dropped him off there. (It was now about 12.30 I think).

I was just about to wander over to where he was speaking to the mechanic, when a car beeped it's horn. I looked around, and it was the guy who owns the aircon business I used to work for.

I wandered over, and had a chat with him, he wanted to know how the ISP was going, and I said I hoped to have something sorted today.

He introduced me to the guy he's got working for him now.

We would have kept chatting, but the van was blocking someone, so we said we would talk later.

I wandered back over, saw my mate, he was chatting with the mechanic, I said I would speak to him later.

The service station was right near the place where I helped my friend put up a 15m telescopic mast last year, for a wireless access point, I wanted to speak to the guy who owns the place.

He came into the Cafe a few weeks ago, and they told him that I didn't work there anymore, and I wanted to have a chat with him.

I called in there a few weeks ago, but he wasn't there at the time, and he didn't get back to me.

I thought I would have another go and having a chat with him, since I was nearby.

I went there, wandered in, asked if the guy was in, apparently he's overseas at the moment, coming back in a few days, so I said I would come back next week.

I decided to go and see the colo guy, and see if we could work something out.

I rode out to his place, got there right on 1pm. I went to do into his shop, found the door locked, and noticed that it said closed between 12.30pm and 1.30pm for lunch.

I'm not waiting around here for 1/2 hour, so I went back to the colo.

I fiddled around with the ras again, trying to see if I could get the radius stuff working, one way or the other.

after mucking around with some routing stuff, in desperation, i decided to see what would happen if I connected our networks together, taking the issue of subnetting and routing tables out of the picture.

I took the cat5 that went from the ras to the other guys network, and I plugged it into my switch. No link came up. Maybe I need to use the uplink port since I'm trying to connect 2 switches together.

I tried that, it still didn't work.

Uh oh, I hope I'm not trying to plug an E1 into the swtich.. I checked.. yep.. I had taken the length of cat5 I ran from the first WAN port on the ras around to the telco termination. Luckily, the other end (where it goes to the telco termination) was not plugged in.

I put that cable back, found the one coming from the second ethernet port on the ras, and put that in the switch, in the uplink, and the link came up.

I still could not get any radius stuff working though. It was weird, I ran tcpdump on my radius server, and on the other guys, and after resetting the ras a few times, I never saw any traffic from the ras to the radius servers, it just complained they were down, without ever trying to connect to them, dumb.

At about 1.40pm, I gave up, put it all back, locked up and left, I rode back out to the shop again.

The guy was there, I had a chat to him for a bit, we decided to stuff the setup we were trying to achive, with call routing etc, and just get something that works. That way I can get some customers, get my service running, and sort out these issues down the track a bit, perhaps getting my own E1 with a different hunt group etc.

He hadn't looked into setting anything up, I said I was having issues with getting the ras going, and I was sick of it, so it's probably easier to just configure his stuff, and get some ports off there (I would have had to do that anyway, without reconfiguring the hunt group).

He couldn't remember the password to his ras, he said he would look at it a bit later, and that he had to leave, because it was his day to play golf.

I left a bit after that, and I came home.

My mate I had played snooker with this morning had tried to call me while I was riding home, he had left a message, he wanted to know if I could help out a guy connect up his tv/vcrs because they had been moved or something.

I tried calling him back about 6 times, but it complained his phone was off or out of range.

I checked my sat box, and the new software, still running nicely, good.

I went in my parents' place to check their sat box, it was complaining "insert smartcard". I had a look at the new software, it should work.

I could see the powered interface I made flash when I put the dummy card in, like the software was trying to bootstrap the box, but it just wasn't working. I fiddled around with the settings a bit, in desperation I set it to "humax", even though it's a uec decoder, went back, and jiggled the card again, and it booted up first go. Weird.

I came back out to my place. There was a letter on the floor inside the door, uh oh, Amex bill.

I came inside, opened the bill, D'oh, it's got all The Who tickets I bought on in. Now I need to chase up payment for those tickets in the next 2 weeks, before the due date.

I did a bit more dvd archiving, burned a dvd from the result of dvdshrink I had run this morning.

I watched a bit of tv.

My mate called me back, he wanted to know about me plugging the tv/vcrs in again. I said I may be able to have a look at it tomorrow. he gave me the guy's number.

I didn't hear back from him, so I'll call the guy tomorrow.

I went back to watching tv.

I was too lazy to make any dinner, so I ate what was left of a box of corn flakes.

I played solitaire on the palm for about 4 hours. I think I need to find a new game.

I poured myself a drink, had a bit of it, and about halfway through got shocking indigestion.

I had an antacid, but it didn't really do anything, I thought maybe I was hungry, so I started making some food.

I had to do the washing up, no plates left.

I got my food a few minutes ago, and now I am really not hungry, and I feel all yucky again after eating most of it.

Maybe I needed that acid I just neutralised.