I accomplished pretty much nothing today.

I spent the afternoon making up 3 tivo serial cables to send out on Monday.

I tested them, they worked.

Dad came in, asked if I wanted to come in for a chat. I said I would in a bit. He asked if I had got my mail from yesterday, no.

I went in, grabbed my mail. Some official looking letter, what's this, another fine of some decription for something? it's not a redirected mail from QLD, it can't be.

I opened it, it was just some government spam about the new superannuation donation thing they've got going on. Like I care. I've got superannuation, it's a waste of time, the fees just eat up all my contributions anyway, by the time I can actually use it, I'll end up owing money to pay fees. I hate superannuation, I have money management skills, I don't need the government to force me to save money.

Why don't they do something useful, like establish a fund where you can put money and you don't have to pay fees. I wouldn't give a shit if the thing returned no interest whatsoever, it would just be a way for me to humour them, with their stupid compulsory superannuation.

Also, why couldn't they just send me an email I could delete, why did they have to waste this possibly useful paper on sending me spam.

The other letter, a registered mail envelope, I had no idea what it was. It felt like it had a card (like a credit card) of some description in it. I opened it, pulled out the contents.. concert tickets, ah, to The Who, I'd almost forgotten I'd ordered these.

We chatted. Dad just asked me a bunch of questions about the billing for the ISP.

I got a bit fed up, because it was just asking me questions about things that are the default behaviour of freeside.

He asked me if I got anywhere last night. I told him how we didn't get anywhere, I have to build a new radius server for the colo guy, and that I'll have to find some time in the week to do it.

Mum asked me if I was going out tonight. I said I had no idea, possibly. She asked if I wanted to take an extra person, I guessed my cousin who is staying with my grandma. I said I had no idea if I was going out, and that chances were I would not be, because I didn't go out last night, and no one rang me (although I always have to ring people and find out what is going on anyway, no one bothers to tell me anything unless I chase them).

I said if I was going out, then we would work something out.

I was in there for about an hour, some of the time spent playing with my brother with some lego he wasy playing with, and then I had to leave because the air or the cat around started attacking my head and I couldn't breathe.

While sitting watching tv, I thought about the fact I had not done anything about the hardware control lines in the tivo serial cables I had just made up.

Undoubtedly some weenie will try to use one of this cables with winblows xp, and it won't work, because xp apparently refuses to work properly with serial cables that leave the hardware control lines floating (while every sane OS on the planet can work out for itself what's going on).

I pulled the cables apart again (well, took the backshells off), and I spent about 45 minutes tying all the hardware control lines together in the three cables I had just made up.

I didn't bother to test them again, as long as the rx/tx/gnd lines work, who cares.

I think I need to change my prices on the tivo twiki page. I expected to have about 3 people in total ask me to make cables for me, but now it's turning into a part time job almost, and I'm not making a cent out of these cables, in some cases they cost me money, and it's not like they take 2 minutes to make and test.

I also have to go to the post office to mail these out, I should be charging $20 just to go to the post office alone, the pain that causes. I hate the post office.

The telephone rang, it was the guy I play snooker with, (and I'm supposed to be at his place fixing the alignment of his sat dish). I chatted with him for a bit, said I wasn't coming up, because I felt a bit crappy today (true, my nose hasn't stopped running all day, I porbably have some contagion, and I don't want to ge spreading it around). He said his tv wasn't mucking arounfd too much anyway.

He complained that he couldn't get to the mail server, and I told him that that was because the mail server was not currently routable, because when the ups ran out, and the gear went down, it wiped out my static routes I have to add in manually, and I haven't got around to putting them back yet.

I said I was going in to see the gear tomorrow, I am moving the subnet the equipment is on again, to fix the routing/subnetting issues, and perhaps reconfigure radius and get it working.

I looked at some cisco docs last night, you can have multiple radius servers defined, but it doesn't appear that you can specify to use a different radius server based on the telephone number someone connects to the nas on.

Anyway, I watched some more tv, I ate the last of the frozen food from the freezer.

Dad came in a while later, to tell me that HHGTTG was going to be on in a bit, and I said "yeah, and it's on DVD in the shelf there".

I was watching some of the music channel tivo had recorded at the time, after the song finished I was watching, I ended up fast forwarding the rest of the hour of the tivo recording at tripple speed, because all the songs were shit.

I setup tivo to record HHGTTG, and I watched the first half of the episode of the Benny Hill show I watched the second half of last night, after tivo went back to live tv because I left it idle in the menu for 15 minutes of however long it takes.

I then watched HHGTTG.

I browsed around the net, downloaded some new binaries on the tivo, top, lsof etc. I put a new version of the telnet daemon on, because when I portscanned my tivo, it caused tnlited (the telnet daemon on tivo) to crash, and I had to reboot to get it back.

The replacement one I found, has a wrapper to respawn tnlited if it crashes, so I won't need to reboot the tivo.

I pulled out the paper work from the contracting work I did a little while ago (at the place that wants to get me in again), I checked my details.. yeah, I put the correct bank account details on there, they just must not have processed my payment.

I'll have to go to the bank on Monday afternoon, and get another interim statement to check, and see if I was paid, otherwise I'll chase it up on Monday afternoon (if there is time) or at some point on Tuesday.

About 11.30pm, I decided to watch Reservoir Dogs.

I fiddled around behind the tv, getting some a/v leads so I could plug my "new" computer in.

I set it up, and kicked it off, lets see how long the divx will play before the machine crashes..

It got all the way through. The issues I had with divx before, must have been caused by that dodgy board with the stuff capacitors on it, and the CPU load of playing a divx must have pushed the tolerances of those stuffed caps.

I paused the movie halfway through, to make my second drink of the night, containing shots 5 - 8 of Scotch.

I thought about my Missed Connection (craigslist reference) from 2001.

While I was at TAFE in 2001, I used to get a coffee from Starbucks every morning, immediately after getting off the train. A bit before halfway through the course (maybe 7 or 8 weeks in) a cute chick that worked in Starbucks started trying to crack on to me.

I was too naive to notice, the fact that when she would give me my change, she would sort of caress my hand. I thought it was weird at first to be honest.

I remember mentioning it to one of the guys I was at TAFE with, a couple of weeks later. He said that he had gone in one morning too, after I had been in there, because he said that a couple of the chicks in there (including the one that kept serving me) were talking, and mentioned "The latte guy", assumedly me, because I ordered a large soy latte everyday, and how he was "cute and funny".

This conversation took place in the last week of TAFE before the break, and the chick who served me only worked a few days/week, and wasn't working in the couple of days after this, before the end of the week.

During the week after the holiday week (I didn't realise we only had a single week break) I went on a holiday up in QLD with a couple of my mates, the guy who works at ABC, my mate's ex gf (she was his gf at the time) her mum, and my mate's parents (who own the aircon business I used to work for).

During the holiday, I decided I would ask the chick out when I got back.

When we came back, and I started back at TAFE the week after, I went in to get my latte as usual, the chick wasn't there, hmm, she's usually in on Mondays I thought. Oh well, maybe she's off sick, or the roster changed or something.

Days went by, I didn't see her in that week, or the next week, or the rest of the 7 weeks or so that was left of the course.

I never saw here again. Oh well.

My Missed Connection.

I finshed pouring my drink, went back and finished watching the movie.

I noticed the machine that got dropped off here ages ago I'm supposed to fix, oh yeah, that's one of the things I'm supposed to be doing this weekend isn't it. Too bad, I'm too close to having a nervous breakdown. It can wait, I already said I'm not going to charge for the work when it eventually gets done.

It's 2 am again.

I'm depressed. I need to finish this drink (nearly there), so I can make the next one, containing shots 9 - 12 of Scotch, and then I will perhaps not be so depressed.