Oh yeah, I checked the tour dates of the band last night when I got home, and they were on last night.

There a few more concerts however, I'll just go to another one.

I slept until after midday.

I got up, got dressed.

I checked, there was a computer fair on today.

I grabbd my bag, and I left.

I went to the ATM, and tried to get some money out, it kept telling me "invalid account type". Terrific.

I went to the computer fair.

I was looking for a socket 370 mobo, so I could use the 667mhz PIII cpu I've got.

I wandered around for a minute, bumped into the people from the neighbourhood centre computer club, and spoke to them.

I chatted to them for a while, and then I kept wandering. I saw the guy I bought all my servers off, and who my friend used to deal with.

I spoke to him for a bit, told him I just had my ISP going now, and some other stuff.

I noticed he had a socket 370 mobo in amongst some other bits and pieces.

I asked him what he wanted for it, and he told me that I shouldn't buy it.

He said it was unstable, just for testing, and that if someone else wanted to buy it, then he would sell it for $10 or $15. heh, at least he's being courteous enough not to sell it to me.

I kept wandering.

I went around again, and I found a $370 mobo, for $49.

I bought it on my credit card, at least that still worked.

I wandered around more, bumped into the people from the club again, and also a guy from the computer club I used to go to ages ago.

I spoke to him for a bit, and then we started wandering again.

I saw one of mates there. I wandered over, he was buying some stuff, and was trying to find a dollar to make the amount for his purchase easier, so I gave it to him.

We chatted briefly, he asked me what I was doing tonight, I said not much, probably just going down the club.

I bought an ATI Radeon 9200 card to put in my "new" machine I bought a few weeks ago.

I bought it from the guy I got my servers from. I could have got it cheaper somewhere else, but it was only a few dollars, so I didn't really care, and he gave me $5 off his normal price anyway.

While I was paying for that, my phone rang, it was my mate (who was in the US recently). I spoke to him, he asked what I was up to tonight, and I said I would probably just go down the club, and that I had just seen one of our mates.

My mate asked me if I wanted to come around his place for a bit first, yeah, sure.

I got off the phone, and finished paying for the card.

I wandered around quite a bit more, and ended up buying a 32mb usb flash card thingy for $35. Everyone else wanted to sell 128mb or 256mb cards. I don't need that much, I only need to carry around a few files, like the install for avast, adaware, and maybe some other utils.

I ended up leaving a bit after 2pm, because all the stalls were starting to pack up.

As I left, I thought I was going to have issues getting past the guard, because I had three bags, with different receipts etc.

He saw a single receipt in one of the bags, and said I was right.

Gee that's really good. You can steal all you want, as long as the stuff is in bags, and you buy at least one thing, and get a reciept.

I wandered over to my bike, some of the people I had been chatting to earlier where near it, and we chatted a bit more.

I loaded my stuff, put my gear on, and took off.

I went to McDonalds, and got some breakfast/lunch, about 2.30pm.

I came home.

I started fiddling around with the board I had bought.

I put the cpu on it, plugged everything in, but it didn't do anything.

While I was fiddling around the other day, one of the wires came off the cpu fan, so I decided to fix that, in case that was an issue.

I soldered that back on, but it made no difference, the board just did nothing.

My theory now, is that the fan (which still did not work) had failed, and the cpu had overheated, and it had somehow caused the other board to fail.

When I tested the other board with the cpu on it a couple of days ago, it blew up a power supply (it now outputs -1.5v on the 12v rail), and the board scorched the cardboard box I had it sitting on.

So, I spent $50 something on a board I now don't need, because the cpu seems to have failed, and I could have bought a board with cpu for about that. Bugger.

Ok, plan B. Lets see if I can fix the original board with my 800 on it, that keep dying.

I came home a few days ago to find it had died again, and it's done nothing since.

I looked at the stuffed board that blew up the psu.

It had 7 1500uF 6.3v caps on it.

I desoldered them, this was pretty difficult, but I got them in the end.

I desoldered 7 of the 9 pretty obviously stuffed (2200 uF) caps from my 800 board.

I soldered the 1500uF caps on in place.

It was difficult to get some in, because the holes weren't clear enough.

I found a sewing pin, and I grabbed it with the pliars, I was then able to use the soldering iron on it, and force it through the board to clear the hole.

I remembered reading somewhere that solder doesn't stick to stainless steel, and I think most sewing pins are stainless, so I should be able to push it through, wiggle it round a bit, leave it in there, and then pull it out after the solder has set, and push the cap through.

This helped on a couple of them.

I got them all in in the end, and put a bit of solder on them, but this wasn't great.

I think I need a hotter soldering iron for this stuff to work properly.

I put the board back, cpu etc back on, plugged it all in.

Bang, it booted up first go, when it had refused to boot for the last week or so.

I pulled one of the stuffed capacitors apart. The paper, or whatever it is in them, was rock hard, totally dry, and mostly brown. Down the bottom, where the legs enter the paper, it was black, and burnt looking.

I left it, and I went inside to speak to my parents, because my brother had come out a bit earlier.

I took a couple of caps in, and showed Dad.

He showed me the 8 track player he had gone and collected from my grandparents holiday house they recently auctioned off.

It's some huge thing, with a reel to reel mechanism on the side of it, and you can do dubbing to/from 8 track to reel to reel.

Apparently one channel is stuffed on it, and it only works in mono.

There was a box of 8 tracks too, some stuff I've never heard of. There was a Doobie Brothers 8 track Dad pulled out, apparently he bought that one, when my grandad had an 8 track player in the car.

He asked me what was going on with the ISP, and I told him I got it working Thursday night, but then I stuffed up the routing, and broke it again, but that I'll fix it on Monday (well, it's already fixed, but put the radius settings back), test it all Monday, and if it's fine, then I'll change the other nas over to proxy through freeradius, and I can start people dialling in on Tuesday.

I had a chat with my parents for a while, we discussed billing, and telephone support etc.

There was a letter for me that had arrived a couple of days ago, it was my pay slip for the contracting I did about 6 weeks ago.

I came back in.

I shut the machine down (I left it running testing it). I had to hold the power button for 4 seconds to get it to go off. Hmm, not a good sign.

I booted the machine back up, and it came straight up.

I shut it off again, had to hold the power. hmm.

I went to connect the hard disk, to see if windows would run properly.

I noticed the board was pretty warm near the memory.

I checked the underside of the board, warm. The DVD case I had it sitting on was even warmer.

I checked the power supply side, it was hot.

Hmm..
I pulled it up, and had a look at it. I think the fan has ceased up.

I pushed it around with a screwdriver a bit, and then I shorted the ATX power connector pins to make it run, and the fan spun.

It started pushing the hot air out, and cooling the whole thing down.

I plugged it back to the board, and put the hard disk on, and the network card in.

I tried to boot the machine up. No good.

I pulled the disk off, still no good. I took the network card out, still no good.

Crap. Board is dead again. Oh well.

It was now about 8pm.

The phone rang, it was the guy I play snooker with.

He wants to know if I'm coming up to a barbeque tomorrow, and if I cand take his wife around there, because they all won't fit in the car. I said that was fine.

He wants me to go up there a bit earlier, so I can adjust the satellite dish (I never "fixed" it, because the signal issues he was having went away), and to try to work out why the sensor light that's stopped working has stopped.

I said I would come up and have a look at that stuff.

I had arranged to go up to his place on Monday or Tuesday to build a couple of computers for him he's been contracted to do for one of the computer clubs, I said that may have to change, because I'm going to see my mate again on Monday night, so I won't be getting back until late, and depending on what happens there, I may go back again on Tuesday night, stay there, and go to the funeral on Wednesday, and then come back up Wednesday afternoon, and build the pcs then.

I mucked around with my memory key thing. It said USB 2.0 on it, but I only have usb 1.1 in this machine (on a board I bought in about 1998). I decided to try it anyway.

Windows found it, installed the drivers, and an extra drive popped up.

I copied some stuff on it, it seemed fine.

This should be handly. I can carry it around now, and it's got adaware and avast and stuff on it, so I can clean up machines without having to deal with waiting 1/2 hour for stuff to download (just have to do quick updates), and dealing with machines that have lsass crash and the machine want to reboot (which they don't seem to do without an internet connection).

I had a shower, got dressed, and I left about 8.45pm.

I went to my mates place.

I had a couple of drinks, a few of our other mates were there.

They were waiting on a pizza, that turned up, so I pinched a few bits when my mate was finished with it.

One of my mates who was there went and lay down on the lounge, and went to sleep.

They called a taxi, and when it turned up, 4 of us jumped in and went down to the club. (I don't know what happened to my other mate).

As we were getting in, a couple of my mates started pissing about, I thought they were all in the taxi, and so did the taxi driver, because he started to drive off, but one of my mates was still out of the taxi, and the door was open. He got in, and we went to the club.

We wandered in, had a few drinks, and sat around bored for a few hours.

About 1.20am, I went to play the pokies. I started with $5, won up to about $9, lost it back to $5.

Just as I did so, my mate called me to tell me they were leaving.

I changed my coins, and I left.

We were looking for a 5 seater taxi to get back, and then we decided to go in 2 groups, of 4 and 1, because one of my mates was going home, and so he just went on his own.

The rest of us went back to my mates place.

We sat in and chatted for a while. My mate who went to sleep got up, and we told him he didn't miss anything.

He went home.

My mate put on Reservoir Dogs. Heh, I just watched that a few days ago.

I started watching it, abut then realise it was going to be about 3.30am before it finished, and then I'd have to get home, and I'd spend too long blogging, and wouldn't have time to get any sleep.

I left, I went to the service station around the corner, and I got some chocolate, because I'm hungry, and all I've eaten today was some McDonalds, a couple of bits of pizza, and I had a microwave pie down at the club (and the crappy vending machine ripped me off, because it didn't give me my sauce I paid extra for).

I came home.

I started blogging.

I just tried booting the stuffed/fixed/stuffed board up again.

Still no good.

Perhaps the 2 2200uF caps I didn't replace (because I didn't have any more "good" caps to replace them with) have totally failed because the others are now good.

I think I'll have to chase down some more, and try replacing the rest of them.

Great, it's 4.30am. It's taken me 45 minutes to write this entry.

I would think about getting some voice dictation software, to make blogging a bit faster, but I would end up with things like "we suck young blood" and "kicking squealing gucci little piggy" written in the middle of all my blog entries

I'm going to bed.