The alarm went off, and I lay in bed listening to the radio for a bit.

They had a stupid thing on the radio with some sound you have to work out what it is.

I've been hearing it for over a week now, and it's worth more than $5000.

I'm sure it's windscreen wipers going up and down again.

I decided to try ringing in this morning, the last few days I've not been bothered, but I'm sick of hearing it, and the dumb things that people reckon it is.

I got up, tried ringing a bunch of times, but the number was busy as usual, so I went back to bed again for a bit.

I got up, got ready.

Last Friday, a guy had been wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and got bagged out a bit, I almost wore one last week, and when I saw him wearing one, I said that I would wear one this week, so I picked out the loudest nice looking Hawaiian shirt I've got (not the bright orange one), and I put that on.

A couple of days ago, it occurred to me that my rego is due for renewal soon.

While I was down loading my bike, I checked the tag, yep, May 28th. Crap, I haven't been told of a renewal letter turning up either, I'll have to call Queensland Transport today, and see if I can get my mailing address changed, and reissue of the renewal letter, or an "out of state kit" or something.

I took off, I couldn't be bothered with mp3s again this morning, my ear is sore again. It probably doesn't help that I'm just jamming the earbuds in my ears, and they don't have the crappy rubber bits on them anymore, because they stretched, and went all hard, and fell off. I was forcing them back on for a while, but now they're gone, they must have come out of my pocket at some point.

I bought new earbuds a while ago, when I forgot to bring the proper ones, but they didn't work, I could barely hear the music with it turned up full, letalone while riding at 140km/h. Maybe it was just the crappy ones I bought, and I should try a few different ones.

I got down there just after 9am.

The technical guy I work for, and the tivo guy from yesterday were outside, having a smoke.

They told me not to rush in, because a circuit breaker had blown in the datacentre, and everthing was down.

I hung around outside chatting for a while, they got their coffees and went in.

I ordered a coffee and hung around in the coffee shop waiting for it. One of the guys from the department I'm sitting in was in there, and also a chick from the department both my mate and I are working in, in there. I chatted to them for a bit, and came in to get to work as soon as my coffee was ready.

The stuff I needed was up, so there was no issues there.

I checked the export from last night.. Argh! it fell over at about 8.30pm, and half that time, it was having issues. Only 150 documents came out. So I sat in here until 7pm last night for nothing!

I dumped the other table out (which I hadn't been able to do last night, because the database was down), but the format it came out in was even worse than the format I got when I just did a "select *" and piped it to a file.

I decided to work out how to process the select * export, since it at least has all the fields in the correct order.

We had a meeting, and went over what point we were up to.

I went through some of the issues I'd had, and what was going on, stuff is taking longer than I thought, but nothing has been terribly hard.

After that, I got back to working on the table export. The whole project is basically waiting on this now, once I have this table sorted, then I setup the prototype of the database running off the filesystem, and how the web indexing software works with it.

It took me hours, but I worked out what I had to do to fix the file format up.

It's the most hideous sed script ever, but it works, and it sorts everything out, nicely.

Right in the middle of working it out, my cousin called me, he wanted to know if I was going to the Superjesus concert tomorrow night, I said I had forgotten about it, didn't have a ticket, and I couldn't really be bothered, I'd rather just have a somewhat relaxing weekend of doing nothing.

I reached the point where I was able to process the whole database export (until then I had just been working on a few hundred lines of it, instead of all 100M of it), and tried to run it.

Oops. sed keeps segfaulting.

Maybe it doesn't like working with a single line, 100M long (the result of removing all the linefeeds from the moddle of the records).

I found a different version of sed on the machine, and started running it against that, it was now about 3.20pm.

It ran, and ran, and ran.

They had to take the server I was working on down at 4.30pm.

After 4pm, it was still going.

I think I need to find a smarter way to do this, than expecting sed to grok a 100M long line, breaking the file into chunks, and rebuilding it again or something.

I set up some cron jobs to start the sed script again at 9am tomorrow morning, and also to start the document exports over the weekend.

At 4.30pm, I got a call from the technical guy, he was over at the datacentre, and they wanted to take the box down. I checked I had put the cron entries in properly, and killed the sed that was running (over an hour later, still done nothing), and said he could shut it down.

I called the project manager, but he must have already left.

I shutdown my machine, and I left.

The traffic was appalling, I would much rather spend more time at work, and go home later, since I end up getting home about the same time (that's why I leave home about 8am, get to work around 9am, if I leave home at like 7am, I don't get there until about 8.40am anyway).

I went over to the motorcycle place I got an email from last week, telling me about a sale they've got on. I've been intending to get over there all week. I might look for a new helmet.

I went in, started looking in the gear section. Nothing was terribly cheap, there were a couple of bargain bins with gloves and stuff in them, nothing special.

I looked at the helmets, same old stuff, nothing too cheap.

I was completely ignored the whole time I was in there, none of the staff greeted me or offered to help or anything.

I left, headed back up to the main road, and headed up to my mate's place.

On way, I realised I had forgotten to sort out my rego, crap.

This damn PC again.

He'd reinstalled windows on it again, instead of just waiting for me to check that it had a pagefile or whatever, oh well, it was his hours of time he wasted reinstalling it.

I connected the backup disk again, booted up a dos disk, and copied the files across, to avoid windows moving its page file on to the backup disk again. I wished I had knoppix with me.

We stopped and had dinner, my mate picked up some pizzas when he went to get his wife from the train station.

After eating, I got back to the PC again. My mate had backed everything up on CD for them, so I copied some stuff back from the CD.

A couple of the people we go to dinner with turned up, my mate had got them to use a cassette recorder he'd lent them to make up some tapes for him to listen to in the car, so they had brought them around.

"Where's their My Documents directory?" I asked. "Did you put it on the CD?", "probably not" came the reply, argh, then why did you tell me you made a backup cd.

I plugged the hard disk back on again, stuff the consequences, I'm not buggering around with trying to backup and restore all the long file names, and copy the stuff in dos, I'll just use windows, because I've not seen a machine move its swapfile without asking before.

I booted up windows, it didn't make any changes to the virtual memory settings.

I coped the files off the disk, and then I was finished.

I decided to ghost the partition, in case they stuff it up.

Hmm, there's 4gb worth of stuff, and 3gb second partition, the compression in ghost is going to want to work well.

I started it ghosting. It was going to take over an hour to make an image of the 4gb of stuff.

I left it running, and we chatted for a while. After about 50 minutes, it came up and asked to open the next span file.. uhh.. I didn't put any span options. The disk must be full. Crap. That was a waste of time.

I exited it.

Hmm.. the ghost image is only 2gb. Ohh.. Fat32 partition, 2gb maximum file size.. that's why I needed to span, to another file, to overcome the file system limitations. D'oh, it would have fit. Oh well, I'm not wasting another hour.

The people we go to dinner with left.

I set it to defrag, and I left too.

I am so sick of this machine.

Half the problem has been that I haven't been doing the whole job, and my mate keeps doing things that I tell him not to.

"Don't do (whatever), as it will cause (this)", so then he does it anyway, has problems, and I have to fix it, and what pisses me off the most, is that I knew the problem would occur, I didn't want to have to fix it, and that's why I went to the effort of telling him not to do it in the first place.

I just don't care about people with winblows problems anymore, fixing that shit was just pocket money until I could get into a position of doing something useful, like I'm in now, where my effort has some consequence, instead of spending hours fixing up some shitty winblows pc that's going to last 5 seconds before the clown that owns it gets it filled up with virii, worms, spyware, and all sorts of crap, because they don't know what they are doing, and shouldn't be using a computer.

I came home, to discover there is no alcohol left. I poured what was left in all the bottles I've gone through in the last couple of months out, and managed to get about a single shot out of all of it.

I really need to go shopping, there's like nothing at all in the cupboards now. Perhaps I'll go tomorrow.

I sat and started looking at my scripts.

I worked out a lot better way to process the database export, so I sat and wrote a script to do it, and I tested it.

I watched some tv, and I went to bed about 2am.