My alarm went off at 6.30am, and I listened to the news on the radio.

Apparently there was a major accident on the freeway between the road I use to get to work, and the city. It doesn't directly effect me, but it will most likely make the roads a nightmare.

I decided to go a bit later this morning then, I also had to get fuel.

It's somewhat casual dress on Fridays, I found my BSOD shirt I haven't worn for ages, so I decided to wear that, the IT services guys should find it somewhat humerous.

After getting ready, I went down and loaded up my bike.

Oops, nearly forgot the box with the software in it, and I also intended to put some WD40 on my back brake lever that is all gunked up and keeps jamming on. I came back inside and got the box and the WD40, fixed my brake.

I left home, went and filled up the tank.

I got on the freeway a bit after 8am, and had a really good trip down this morning.

The highway between the end of the freeway and where I'm working was pretty good too. After squeezing through a couple of times at the lights, I had the road to myself.

I ended up getting to work a bit after 9am. Too bad I didn't get such a good trip home. (I'll get to that).

I spent some time working on the scripts again.

I missed the coffee trip (going next door to get a coffee) so I just kept working, thinking I would go and get one in a bit.

The IT services manager came to find out how I was going with the project, and I said that I was getting there, that I had successfully managed to extract some files out of the database, and that after we worked out the directory structure, and some other small issues, we should have something useful in the next few days.

I was just about to go for a coffee at this point (about 11am), when my mate (who wants me to start the ISP for him), said that there was a morning tea on.

We went in, and there was a full feed there, it looked great. There were a bunch of krispy kreme doughnuts there, I had one (my first one) gees, they are good.

After a few minutes of eating, a few announcements were made. One guy was leaving after working there for 22 years, so then he spoke for a bit.

The IT services manager who I'd just been speaking with made some announcements too, that we were on schedule for the move to Maitland (probably explaining why he was asking me how I was going with the database work), and he mentioned the server that had gone down on Tuesday afternoon.

One of the major windows servers fell over on Tuesday afternoon, and one of the guys in IT services spent 36 hours straight trying to get it back up, because it ran all the network drives and everything for the normal users that work there.

Heh, I did wear an appropriate shirt :-)

After he finished, his announcements, we got back to eating, and some of the IT services guys noticed my shirt and had a bit of a laugh. Apparently the "Micro$haft" is too subtle on it.

We ate for a little while more, I went next door and got a coffee, and then I got back to work.

I was pretty certain my export script would be working now, with the changes I'd made to it, so I continued on the sorting script, to build the directory structure to put all the files into, once they are exported.

About midday, I got a call from the guy who I'd been speaking to in the carpark in Gosford back in March, apparently the ISP I was looking after before I got screwed had tried to do an upgrade on some equipment, or make some changes to something, had botched it up, and half the customers had not been able to get on for like a week.

The explains why I've been getting phone calls, because the customers are desperately trying to find out what's going on, either not being able to get through to the "support", or not called back.

Ah, I probably would have worked this out earlier, but obviously I'm not connected to their service anymore, so I didn't know what was going on, and why their customers were calling me.

Haha. I said I would find out what I could get sorted out for the guy.

I called up the colo guy, to find out about adding customers on to his equipment temporarily, until I get the radius issues sorted out, he told me how to do it.

I called the guy back, said I could set it up, got the details I needed. I setup his account, and then he tried to login, but it didn't work, he was trying to connect as DOV, but it just didn't work.

I called the colo guy back again, apparently the Cisco 5200 and 5300 he's got don't do DOV, so I'll need to get the Tigris going, or he's got an Ascend Max 4000 with a password in it we don't know (and you have to reload the firmware to reset the password).

I called the guy back, and said that the current production equipment doesn't do DOV, that I might get something sorted out, but that I didn't know when.

He said he would approach one of the other guys he'd seen that offered DOV, and would go there, and when I get my stuff sorted, he'll change to me. Oh well, I tried.

I guess I'll have to try and get the Tigris working again now, perhaps it'll work if I just set it up with a single radius entry, and let freeradius do the proxying.

I've no idea when I'll find time to sort that out however.

I got back to work.

About 1.30pm I got called up by the receptionist at the college again, to see if I could fix their email.
I said I couldn't, because I was going to a birthday dinner. I said I would have to change it to Monday night. She didn't want to accept that, went on for a bit, and I was convinced to go anyway. I said I would try to get there about 5.30pm tonight, but I would only be able to spend a short while there.

I was hoping to be able to get home, and have a shower, get changed, before going to the dinner.

A went back to work.

It was pretty quiet in the office now, since everyone was at the barbeque or the pub for one of the guys that were leaving today.

I finally stopped coding and looked out the window for a minute, while I tried to get my brain around a sorting issue I was having.

The project manager for the database project came down, and asked if I was looking for inspiration, heh, I explained I had been staring at the screen all day, and had to stop for a minute.

I explained to him the directory structure I was working to, and the filename standard I was using to move the files, and sort the table entries into.

I said I was getting reasonably far into the sorting script, and it was fairly close to being done.

He said he leave me to it, and went back upstairs.

The guys that work in the area I was sitting in started filtering back in from the pub a little while later.

I'd heard them mentioning tivo a couple of days before, and remained fairly quiet, though I had mentioned I had one.

One of them started talking about the tivo, so I made a couple of comments about it.

I asked if they were on the mailing list, and they said they were, and they talked about that for a bit.
One of them complained about the amount of mail they get some days, and I said that I was probably responsible for that.

I was asked who I post as, and when I told them who I was, they got a bit excited (before they started slagging me :-) to find out I was one of the noisy guys off the tivo mailing list.

We sat and chatted about tivo for about 45 minutes, (oops, waste of time, and I needed that time). I got told to shutup by one of the guys in that area, he doesn't have a tivo, and is sick to death of hearing about it.

One of the guys found some pictures on the internet of the crash on the freeway this morning. Wow, doesn't look good at all. If you weren't told, you could hardly recognise it was a car. Apparently a truck behind it went on to it, and crushed it, and it burst into flames. Didn't look good at all.

Someone brought some sandwiches in, what was left from a lunch of one of the guys who was leaving, so I ate a few of those, since I hadn't gone to lunch.

I went upstairs to test my updated export script about 4.30pm. I had a couple of issues, I'd just done a couple of dumb things like forgotten to change a variable in a couple of places, not made one of my scripts executable, and forgotten to copy and modify one of the standard scripts, to avoid it logging into the production logs.

I had all these silly issues sorted in a few minutes, and I kicked off an extract of 184 images.

Fairly shortly after, we had a bunch of files exporting, and the logs going in the right place. Woohoo, it's all working.

Uh oh.. there's too many files appearing in the export directory, what have I done wrong?

Ah, nothing.. I had forgotten about the multipage images, which get extracted as multiple files. A couple of the documents I had exported had up to 77 pages attached to them, so that explained why almost 600 images ended up being extracted.

I ran my verification script against the export, but it claimed that every file exported had failed. Hmm, more dumb logic I'll bet. Yep.. I hadn't put the final file name format into the verification script, I had one I had stuck in there temporarily, not knowing the file name format when I wrote this script on Wednesday night, or yesterday morning.

I quickly made a couple of changes, but it still didn't work exactly right. It was now a couple of minutes after 5pm. Bugger it, I'll look at this at home over the weekend.

I ftpd my updated scripts out (since I'd made a couple of changes in production), put them on my memory key thing, and took off.

I went back downstairs, grabbed my stuff, and I left DMR at 5.20pm, somehow I don't think I'll get to Hornsby (where the college is) in 10 minutes..

It took me an 70 minutes to get there, and as I expected, they'd all gone home by the time I got there.

As I waited at the traffic lights just past the entry to the freeway, I noticed I had some missed calls on my phone, I couldn't be bothered to pull over, get my helmet (and balaclava, neck warmer, earbuds) all off, and wait for my message service to call me, so I just went the few minutes around to the college anyway.

I went back, got on the freeway, headed towards home. I got off the freeway, and headed straight to the place where the dinner was. (I received a call from my mate, earlier in the day, to let me know the venue had changed).

I got there about 7.12pm, parked up near the restaurant, and ripped all my head gear off.

The dinner was supposed to start at 7.30, and it was byo, so I decided to wander over to the nearby bottle shop.

As I was waiting to cross the road, at about 7.15pm, my phone rang, it was my message service calling me back. I finally got the message left on my phone at 5.37pm, by the receptionist, wanting to know if I was coming. Argh.

I went over to the bottle shop, bought a couple of bottles of Becks, and a 700mL bottle of Beam for my mate for his birthday. I didn't get a chance to get those thongs for him.

I went back over to the restaurant, my mate who works at the ABC had just turned up, so we went in together.

Quite a few people were in there at this point, I gave my mate the bottle of Beam.

We chatted for quite a while, a couple of the people coming were playing soccer tonight (where I used to play with them), an 8pm game, so it would be finishing at 8.30pm, and they would be here a bit after that.

One of our other mates turned up, and gave the birthday boy his gift, an LP. It was some obscure album, "The Coombe Boys present a TV cover version of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club" or some other weird thing, and our mate had jokingly "autographed" it on at the back as Ringo Starr.

My mate received another LP like this a couple of years ago, from his Dad, complete with a dodgy autograph. I think it's a running gag now.

We ordered some garlic bread and stuff, to eat while we waited for the others.

We ordered our food about 8.15pm, the others could order when they got here.

While we were ordering, my mate who works at the ABC was asked my the Italian waitress if he was Italian, (he is not), and he claimed he'd probably been watching a bit much of The Sopranos recently. The waitress explained she thought he was Italian because of his pronounciation of the menu items.

When she came to take my order, she told me that she was pretty sure I was not Italian, since she has not met a red headed Italian yet. Heh.

My mate (who was in the US not so recently) turned up a bit after 8.30, he'd come off the game at half time, and had a shower, and then turned up.

One of the others, and his girlfriend (my mate who works at the ABC's sister), turned up a little while after that.

The food started to come out a while after that, and we all had dinner.

After we had eaten, the Italian waitress got up, and made some announcements, there were 3 birthday dinners going on, and it was a tradition that the birthday people get up and have a dance. My mate got up and danced with his older sister, it was pretty funny, at times it looked like they were more wresling than dancing. One of the other birthday guys got up and danced with his daughter (assumedly), and the other guy didn't get up at all.

The guys who had come from soccer left, to go and get dressed to go out (somewhat ironically, since they were better dressed than most of us there), after putting in for their dinner.

We sat and chatted for a while after that, and then got the bill, there ended up being 13 of us to dinner, the total bill was $360, not too bad, however there had only been $180 put in. Hmm. Turns out half the table hadn't put in yet (phew), and I put a bit more in to make up some of it.

Some of use headed out to a night club after that, I was out there first.

I went in, wandered around for a bit, and then my mates turned up.

We grabbed drinks, and had a chat.

It was too crowded inside, so we went out on to the verandah, but that was a bit too cold, so we moved back inside.

The band started up, we stood behind where the people were dancing. Some drunk guy came over and started talking to me, asking what I was riding and that sort of thing (since I had my jacket on). I spoke to him briefly, hoping he would go away, he was a bit of a personal space invader.

We found seats at a table near where we were standing. A little while later some people came over, apparently they had been sitting there, so a couple of us got chucked out of our seats.

I stayed sitting.

The drunk guy came back again, and was trying to get the chick who was sitting next to me to dance with him. She wasn't interested, and then he grabbed her arm to try to pull her up to dance.

She got his arm off, and told him to leave her, he stepped back for a second, but then had another go.

I stood up, and pulled him away, and told him to leave it, that she wasn't interested. He returned "yeah, but you've got to try", to which I replied "yeah, you did, and she's not interested, to try someone else", and then he moved away, and I sat down again.

People give me the shits.

We moved outside again, and we stayed out here chatting for ages.

I had a greasy sausage roll and sauce, and a coke. Half the reason I eat that stuff is because the others go on with "how can you eat that?" etc. "Because it's food".

We stood around quoting bits out of "The Olden Days" and "Bargearse" for a bit.

Some weird looking chick came over, and started talking to us. I didn't pay much attention, since she was standing dirctly next to me, where I was slouching on a chair, so without dislocating my head, or moving, I wasn't able to look at her directly.

She asked a couple of my mates how they were going and stuff, and then when my mate (who was in the US non recently) came back from getting a drink, she was introduced to him by one of my mates.

She then latched on to him, and dragged him away for a dance. It just seemed very strange.

My mate came back a few minutes, it turned out she was after getting some speed, and she taken him in to the dancefloor, and was going on with things like "you can frisk me for a wire", and this sort of nonsense.

He got away by saying he had to go to the loo, and she said "you're not going to come back are you?", he just shrugged.

We stayed out here chatting for ages more, and then we went back inside, and up to the R&B room.

There was about 3 people dancing in here, and not many more in the room in general.

It was far too cold outside, but because everyone was smoking they were all outside. I sat inside with one of our mates, who had wanted to come inside for hours, because he didn't have a jacket and was freezing.

One dopey bloke we'd bumped into before (a useless drunk, ie, he becomes a nusance when he's had a bit to drink) came back before, (He was at my mate's birthday a couple of years ago (maybe it was only last year), and got thrown out of the golf club for being drunk.

He said he wondered if our mate (in the US non recently (I need to abbreviate this)), would buy him a drink if he went and sat in his lap.

Hmm, somehow I don't think so, seeing as he's a full homophobic.

We watched him, through the glass door, he did it, and my mate arced up, pushing and shoving went on, I was waiting for fists to start flying, but they both refrained.

A bouncer came rushing over, we expected to go out and sort it out, and throw them out, but instead he went over to the DJ box, and started talking to the DJ through the window, seemingly completely unaware of the nonsense going on outside.

I hung around for a short while more, until about 1am. I was cold, tired, I didn't want to stand outside anymore, and that's where everyone was, so I went out, said bye to everyone, and headed for home.

My mate who's birthday it was told me to come around to his place tomorrow night, and have a few drinks there.

I came home, got home about 1.30am, and went to bed.