I got woken up about 8.30am. I got up about 8.45am.

It was freezing cold, I had a really long shower to try to warm up.

Some woman tried calling me to get me to fix her computer, while I was in the shower, she left a message. No time to get back her now.

About 9.15am, I realised it was probably a good idea to actually do a bit research into the subject I was going to talk about this morning, at the seniors club, of the history of the internet.

I googled around, found a couple of good timelines, started reading them. I realised I would probably need to make some notes, or I wouldn't remember if ethernet was invented in 1975 or 1976.

I scribbled down some notes (scribbled being the operative word).

I ate breakfast, got dressed, and left about 10am. I have to be at the club about 10.30, I should be ok.

I noticed the serial cables I'm supposed to send out today.. Oops, I don't have the addresses or anything, and there's no time now.

I rode there uneventfully, it was freezing cold though. I got to the bowling club about 10.25am.

I got there just as the guy I did the cabling for ages ago (on the Monday just before the Tuesday when all the passwords were changed) and his wife did. I had to park in the other carpark, so I did that, and got to the entry just as they did.

We went in together, I had to get signed in, the woman behind the desk asked where I was from, and before I could say Queensland (which is where my ID says), the others piped up where I do live. I filled out the slip and went in.

Oh well, I can't play the pokies now, because if I win anything substantial, they'll get out of it (although I do still have ID with my real address on it, I could probably use that).

I went in, most of the people were already there.

My phone rang, it was the guy from the place I'm going to tomorrow, to install a network. Apparently he's having issues with his laptop, and I still haven't fixed his other pc. He seems to think he has a virus on his laptop or something, and was there anything I could do. Not much right at this minute. I suggested he try to download his email before the connection drops out, and I'll have a look at it tomorrow when I'm down at his office.

I put my phone on silent, that's all I need.

I went into the next room, where all the club members were.

After a few minutes, one of the guys who helps organise the club (who I've known for a long time from the other computer club I used to go to, back in 96/97), started to introduce me.

There was a problem with the microphone they had, a wireless one, the batteries were flat.

Good, I hate using microphones, I much prefer to just speak loudly.

The woman who mainly organises the club got up after that, and finished introducing me. She mentioned that I was starting an ISP, something I wasn't going to mention, or perhaps would have made a small mention of at the end, but anyway.

I went up, and started talking about the history of the internet.

About 5 minutes in, the guy who had got up first, had gone to speak to someone from the club, and he'd got another microphone, a normal corded one, so they gave that to me. Great. I ended up holding it far enough away from my face that I was just able to continue speaking loudly, which I much prefer.

It might have been a good idea if I had tried doing a bit of research a bit earlier then about 5 minutes before. While I knew about ARPANET, and all that stuff, I wasn't sure of the timeline of stuff, and where everything fit together. As a result, there were a few umms and arrs as I looked at my notes to jog my memory about what I wanted to talk about.

My notes were scribbled.. to the point where I couldn't even make out my own writing, so I ended up omitting a few bits, but in general I think it was ok.

I had intended to give non technical descriptions of how things like packet switching and dns work, but at the end, I couldn't bothered, and just general gabbing had taken a lot longer than I expected.

I remember having to write speeches in school, and being hard pressed to come up with 5 minutes worth, and ended up reading the whole thing off cards.

I thought I have about 20 minutes worth of "the history of the internet" as such, and then I was going to pad out my time with explanations.

I started the speech about 10.40am, and I went through until about 11.15am, when I started asking for questions, to provide answers to.

I received questions about virii, and spam, hackers, internet ads, and a few other things, mainly related to basic functions of the internet.

Someone asked me why I wanted to start an ISP, and also some strategic questions to find out if I knew what I was talking about.

I seemed to hold the interest of all the members (there were about 50 there), and after all the questions were asked, I noticed it was 11.35am. Not bad, nearly an hour.

Now I can answer my phone that's been vibrating for the last hour.

The woman who organises the club came over, and gave me a bottle of wine. Pretty cool.

We all started to filter out, but I wasn't getting away that easily.. next thing I knew, I had a line of people waiting to ask me questions.

I went through and answered all their questions, luckily most of them wanted to know the same things, since I had made recommendations of software to use, like AVG, and Ad-Aware, Thunderbird etc, they all wanted to know where they could get them from.

If I can find 5 minutes, I might type up a quick fact sheet or similar, and email it over to the woman who organises the club to hand out to the people that were interested.

We moved out, and into the dining area, the paid for my lunch, I had a half a baked chicken, it was pretty good.

I checked my phone, 10 missed calls. 8 of them were my message service.

I had one call from my mate I play snooker with, he wanted to know what was going on, and to let me know he'd got himself a temporary internet account, instead of using mine, he'd got it from the colo guy.

There was another missed call, from Mum. I called her back, she wanted to know where was a good place to get a cheap keyboard, and a power cord, for my cousin. The wholesaler at Berowra is the best place.. I said I might be able to chase one down.

I tried to call my mate back, to find out if he had any keyboards at the moment, but he was on the phone.

I ate my lunch. I chatted for a short while afterwards.

Part of the conversation, was about the projector they were having problems with, that the colour was wrong. The guy had fiddled around with it, and found it was the colour temperature setting doing it, and the factory default setting is to have the picture really bluish.

I left the club, I went back to my bike, and I tried calling my mate again, he was off the phone now. He had one keyboard at the moment, so I said I wanted it. I aksed what he was up to, he was at home, but going out shortly, and would be back after 5pm. I said I might get up there later to get it off him.

I called Mum back, let her know that I had found one, and that I would get it later. She asked where I was, and what I was doing, and I rattled off my plans for the rest of the day.

I took off, thinking I would just go for a nice scenice ride over to see the colo guy. Oops, I forgot that I turned off the main road to come to the club, so I ended up heading out towards a big dead end area. I followed what looked like a main road, thinking I would have to get somewhere, it then turned into this really narrow windy road up a hill, that I expected to come to a dead end, but it went back onto a main road, which I followed, the wrong way, and I ended up right back at the club I had just left, about 15 minutes earlier, realising where I meant to go (and if I had gone the "right" way, where I went the "wrong" way, I would have ended up on that road anyway).

Oh well, it was a fun ride, and I'm not in a rush to get anywhere.

I rode out near the beach, and then back in near where the colo guy's shop is.

I stuck my head in, had a chat for a while. We worked out you can do DNIS with freeradius, so I'll have to work out how to do that. I said I was going into the colo, to reconfigure the network interfaces (I have a skill of trying to do that remotely, buggering something up, and then have a machine sitting out there with no working network configuration). The colo guy mentioned that he was having the 32amp cable put in for the UPS today.

While I was in here, my phone went off again. Oh god, I'm so sick of this phone. I cancelled it, sent the caller to the message service. I'll talk to them later.

I left, I rode to a place that sells electrical stuff, and data cabling gear (where we got the 3 phase stuff when I fitted a cabinet out a few months back), to get the cabling parts I need for the network install tomorrow.

I wanted to find out what they had in rj45 wall mount stuff. They had these small wall mount units, Krone stuff, $12 something for a single port, and $19 something for a double.

The alternative was a punch down socket, the goes into a standard wall plate, but because it's so deep, it would need a mounting block too, so it ends up even more than the wall mount things.

I ended up buying 2 of each, 2 doubles to connect to pcs each, and the singles for the laptop run, one machine will get the switch installed, sitting on it, so it will just plug straight in..

4 units, giving 6 rj45 sockets, enought to connect 3 pcs.. $71 something, ugh. No way around it I suppose, and it's just a parts cost they get.

I rode over to the colo. There was no parking, and I knew I was only going to be here for 5 minutes, so I just parked in some stupid car park near there.

I went up to the colo, as I got up the stairs, there was a guy moving a ladder, I didn't think anything of it.
I went into the colo, noticed the light was on, and some tools on the floor. Oh yeah, the cable is being put in, that would have been the guy doing it.

I noticed a big fat bit of 32amp cable hanging out of the ceiling too.

I went about reconfiguring the network interfaces, everything seemed ok.

While I was doing it, the guy putting the cable in, came in, we had a chat for a while.

He saw me working on the linux machines, and he chatted about that for a while.

Apparently he mainly does stuff working with embedded microcontroller software, and industrial electronics, and stuff like that, he said he rarely does cabling, but he's on a break from his main stuff.

I wasn't really interested in having a great long chat, mainly because I was parked in the wrong place, and I still had a bunch of stuff to do today.

I ended up chatting to the guy on and on, as I tried to get out the door. I mentioned the network cabling I was supposed to do later in the week, and he asked me if I'm Austel approved. Heh, yeah, well, that doesn't really matter, I don't charge these people anything for doing it.

He said that if I ever wanted a hand doing that, or needed something done Austel approved, to let him know. Yeah, that sounds ok. He offered me a card, but then he didn't have any, they were in the car.

We went down to get one, he gave me on, and we continued chatting for a bit.

I noticed a couple of cards mucking around in the carpark where I was parked, but I couldn't see exactly what was going on.

I eventually managed to finish chatting to the guy, and I went back to my bike.

Some idiot had gone out of there way to park at a stupid angle so I couldn't get out of the car park. Obviously I was in his spot.

There was a chick sitting in the passenger seat of the car, so I couldn't do anything. I sat on my bike to wait for the guy to come back.

He came out about a minute later (just as I was thinking about riding through the building he had gone into, since it only had a crappy looking screen door on the back, and a straight hall to out the front where the door was open).

He said something about "You got my spot" or something, somewhat jokingly, luckily for him, and I just said "yeah, well I was only going to be here for 5 minutes", "always the way" he replied, got in his stupidly parked car, and took off.

I rode off too. I decided to go to the bank, to find out why I have no money. I must not have been paid for that contracting work I did about 6 weeks ago.

I ended up riding around the block, and basically parking out the front of the building I was just thinking about riding through.

I started walking back towards the bank. There were some charity beggers in the middle of the route as usual.

The first one could see I was going somewhere, and left me alone. Not good enough for the second one, he came into have a go "how are you" and all the rubbish.

I was just going to ignore him, but I thought I would have some fun this time.

I let him rattle on for a few minutes, then when he got to the end, obviously begging for money, I asked if he had any pamphlets, "no, they're a waste of money", fine, don't expect to get any money out of me.. I'm just on my way to the bank over there to find out why I have none. "oh".

And then I walked away.

I went down to the bank. I got an interim statement from the beginning of March (the contract days were 16/17th March), until now.

I had a quick look on it, couldn't see any deposits/transfers of the correct amount of money.

The charisy beggers were sitting outside the bank as I came out. I just ignored them and went back to my bike.

I rode home, hoping to have enough time to get the addresses for the serial cables, go back to the post office, and mail them.

No such luck, I got home about 3.45pm. I'm not getting sorted and back to the post office in 15 minutes.

I went through the bank statement. Definately no pay for that work here.

I dug out all the paper work from the job. I had put my details on the forms correctly.

I rang to speak to the woman at the temping agency I dealt with, and left a message.

I tried to call back the woman from this morning, but her phone was busy, and she didn't answer the call waiting. Oh well, I tried.

A few minutes later, someone else from the place called me back. I said I wanted to speak to the other woman, but this woman said that she deals with the timesheets and pay for the work the other woman arranges.

I explained my situation, how I had done the work, but received no pay, and no payslip.

She said she would find out and get back to me.

She called me back again a few minutes later, and claimed that a "data entry error" was responsible for me not getting paid, thanked me for calling them (oh yeah, like, don't worry about it), and thanked me for being so easy going about it. Well, it's not like I can really argue or anything, I'll probably have some difficulty getting that month of contract work that may be on offer.

Apparently I will get my money on Wednesday.

I called back the woman from the neighbourhood centre, who called while I was in with the colo guy. She wanted to know if I had forgotten about them (since I was supposed to go out there like Monday or Tuesday _last week_). I told her I hadn't forgotten her, but just didn't have any time.

I told her I had spoken to the telco guy the other day, and had a CD to fix up their setup, hopefully getting rid of the stability issues they keep having (and are having again).

I told her that I would call her as soon as I had some time.

I thought I would take a power cord with me, then when I come back from my mate's place, I can drop the keyboard and cord off, in case my cousin is waiting to use his computer.

I sat and did some email, I remembered I had to redo all the DNS zone files, because I'd changed the IPs on all my servers.

I tried to ssh in, uh oh. I could ssh to the gateway machine, but then I can't get past it into my gear. I must have screwed up something really good. No amount of fiddling with the routing table on the gateway machine helped. I'll have to go back in there and have a look. I might go in later tonight.

I left again, about 5pm. I rode up to my mate's place, to get the keyboard. The batteries in my cd player ran out on the way. Bugger, I forgot to bring a power cord. I got one off my mate though, I'll have to give him one next time I see him.

I was up there for a few hours, I helped install winblows 2000 on someone's machine, it wouldn't shutdown properly, someone had fiddled in the bios, and set the power button to 4 second delay.

There were no modem drivers, we would deal with this later.

We had dinner, all his Chinese relatives are still there, they had made a ton of dumplings, that we had for dinner.

After that, I helped my mate setup his temporary internet account on his pc, and we found the drivers for the modem. They were too big to fit on a floppy, so I showed him how to use winzip to span a file across disks.

Most of the time I don't have the patience to go through this basic stuff.

I left his place about 9pm, it was freezing cold. I rode back, and went over to my grandma's place where my cousin is staying. It was about 9.40pm when I got there, it looked like they were still up.

I went in, dropped the stuff off, I was planning on just leaving, and coming home, and going to bed, since I have to be up to install the network early tomorrow, but I decided to sit down for a minute. My grandma made a pot of tea, and brought out some cake, so I sat and relaxed for a bit.

We started chatting, and next thing I knew, it was nearly 2 am (1.45am).

I had to get some sleep, because my stuffed up sleep cycle doesn't work with getting up early.

I left, I rolled my bike almost all of the way out of the retirement village, luckily it's all downhill or flat, so I was able to just ride out in neutral with the engine off, having to give a bit of a kick with my leg every now and then.

There's a little bridg right near the exit, so I just clicked it into gear, and dumped the clutch as I went over the bridge, and sped off, I thought it was really cool.

I rode home, and got home at 2.02am.

I went to bed. I put the electric blanket on it was so cold.