Didn't go to work today.

I woke up, and there was just no way today was going to happen.

I felt awful, I was freezing, and it was a crappy day outside.

I kept thinking, "just another 1/2 hour". "I'll just be a bit late to work".

I finally got out of bed about 11am.

I thought about making some real use of the day, going down to the wholesaler, and buying a couple of new cases (it's the same price as buying spare power supplies, might as well get a free case with it). But I didn't get there.

Some of the reason for that, was that I remembered the machine that I pilfered the power supply out of the other day.

It has memory issues, which I think are caused by the motherboard, because swapping the memory all around (and using known good memory) still results in a truckload of memtest86 errors.

I had the revelation that I could pinch the cpu off the dodgy mobo, and put it on to the mobo I bought to run the 667 cpu (that turned out to be dead), and it would all be sweet.

When I checked the possibility of doing this.. d'oh, the machine with the dodgy mobo has a slot1 cpu, and the mobo I bought is a socket 670 or whatever it is. No dice.

I bummed around for a while.

I went to the mike mechanic, and I bought some oil and a stupid plastic tag thing to put my rego sticker in.

My card didn't work in their reader, neither did my other card, or the mechanic's card.

He rebooted the card processing machine, and swiped my dodgy card again, still no good, so he typed it in.

This card is getting really annoying now. They charged me $10 for a replacement card, it took them a week, it had a new number on it, and it only lasted a month before being stuffed again.

I think I need to find a new bank.

Anyway, I bought my oil, and I came home again.

I worked out how I was going to drain the oil.. with great difficulty, without spilling it everywhere, because nothing will fit under the bike to drain it into.

I went out again, and went to some cheap auto parts place, and bought a drain tray for $7. I didn't have enough cash (only $5) so I had to use my bastard card again. a whole bunch of swiping later, it worked.

I came home, I drained the oil, it wasn't terribly difficult, things just worked for once, the sump plug wasn't done up impossibly tight, and the drain tray fitted without issue.

I drained all the oil, a bit less than 2L of really gunky looking oil came out. I haven't changed my oil for about 20000km.

I put the new oil in, 2.6L like you're supposed to, when you just do a "periodic oil change". I couldn't see the level, but I guess it's right, based on the amount I poured in.

I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning all the muck off my bike.

I put the rego sticker in the holder, and screwed it on.

I didn't notice any loose bolts this time, a good sign.

I went to find the drill to have a go a drilling the exhaust out again, but I couldn't find it, so I just picked up all the tools, and tidied up where I was working.

I went up to dinner, made it for once.

I went back to my mate's place after that. His automatic garage door opener wouldn't activate, and neither would the next door neighbours. I suspected there was something causing interference in the frequency range that the openers were operating on, and it was causing the remotes to be ignored.

He had a machine there that he was having issues with, I found a bios update for it, and applied it, no issues.

I was about to install windows, when I decided to check the partitioning of the disk first.

Somehow my mate had managed to create an extended partition with a logicial partition on it first, and then a primary partition after it. Hmm. I deleted all that, and started again.

I made up a boot disk, and started the win2000 install. It went through the first bit, and then had to reboot, but it wouldn't boot off the hard drive, something about "failure booting from previous device".

I thought perhaps the cd was stuffed, so I installed it again, from a different cd. Still no luck.

I thought perhaps the fact that the primary partition went past the 1024 cylinder on the disk was causing it to not boot.

I repartitioned the disk with a primary partition that ended before 1024 cylinders, and tried again, still no good.

Hmm, perhaps it's still not liking such a big partition, because I put it just inside the 1024 cylinder boundary.

As I was in partition magic, about to resize the partition, smaller again, I realised my error. When I deleted the back to front extended partition and primary partition, and recreated them, I didn't set an active partiton. D'oh!

I set an active partition, rebooted, and windows install booted from the hard drive. What a miracle.

I spent a little while puching some drivers on, and a copy of avast from my usb memory thing.

There were no video drivers for the video card strangely (considering it's some ancient card), so I left my mate to sort that out.

I left his place about 10.30pm, and got home just in time to go to bed.