I was woken up by the phone at 10.40am.

I t was my mate in Newcastle, who pranged my bike. He wanted to know if we were coming up to the fair, and he'd meet us around there.

I said we were going to be up there about midday, and we see him then, and I got off the phone. Hmm, 10.40am, getting there for midday, I don't think so somehow.

I got up, had a shower, got ready. I was waiting for my mate to call, I gave up, and called his phone at about 11.40am. He didn't answer as usual.

I left a message, asking him to call me back, otherwise I'd have to leave, at about 12.30pm, and go on my own. I didn't really want to, since it was looking very overcast and crappy outside.

D'oh, I realised I hadn't charged my ipod, so I stuck that on to charge, 45 minutes of charge'll have to be enough to give it another couple of hours of playtime.

I sat and played the guitar, and waited. At 12.05pm, I got a message from my mate's wife's phone, asking if I was still going, because they were leaving now. I tried to call back immediately, but it wasn't answered. I left a message, saying I was still planning to go, and I'd head over to their place to see what was going on.

I was just about leave, when my phone rang, it was my mate's wife, I said I was still planning to go, and asked if they had left, they had, they were a few kilometres away, but could come back, I said that would be good, and then got off the phone.

My mate turned up about 12.15pm, I jumped in the car, and we took off.

My mate asked me how last night had been, I said it was good, and chatted for a bit. I said I'd sent him a message, but then he told me that he'd left his phone at the party in Sydney last night.

We got on the freeway, I felt like I was going to work. There were a few patches of rain on the way up, I'm glad I didn't ride up.

I said I had to go to an ATM somewhere, and get some money out, my mate said he did too.

A couple of minutes before we got to the Newcastle exit, my phone rang, it was my mate in Newcastle, he asked where we were, and I said we'd be at the basketball stadium (where the fair is) in about 20 minutes, so he said he'd meet us there.

We got off the freeway, and headed to the basketball stadium, just before we got there, my mate remembered about going to the ATM, there weren't any around here. We continued to the stadium, parked, went in. It was now about 1.30pm, we've got an hour before they pack up.

We figured we'd get some prices, then go and get cash.

We'd been in there about 5 minutes, were looking at the second stall or so, when we met up with our other mate.

He was after a dvd drive, and a hard disk or something, my mate was after parts to upgrade his pc. We wandered around, looking at parts and prices.

I suggested he get an AMD AthlonXP 3200+, and a good board, seeing as it's the fastest Athlon chip, that's 32bit. I figured it would be faster to get a 32bit CPU, to run 32bit code on, than a 64bit cpu, which'll be running in 32bit emulation mode the whole time.

I had to get a couple of disks, for the new tivo, and for my pc, (to replace the 60gb that went dodgy), 4 sound cards, and some blank dvds. I had $40 in my wallet, that's not going to go far.

We went to one stall, and it was a guy I know, who I bought all the stuff for the servers from, he lined up a deal for my mate, and discounted it a bit, looked like a good deal.

We kept wandering around, said we'd come back. We looked at more prices, it was now after 2pm, only 1/2 hour left.

We weren't finding much in the way of AthlonXPs, expecially not the 3200, and then the woman working on one of the stalls said that it was discontinued (it probably is), so my mate then somehow worked out that because something is discontinued, that it's crap, so he wasn't interested in looking for XPs anymore.

My mate went outside to think about the prices, I raced around looking for disks, and soundcards.

My mate finally decided to get the deal that the guy I know had offered, an AMD64 3200+ and some super motherboard with dual power supply and who knows what, a hard disk, 1gb of dual channel memory, some expensive video card, and a cheap and nasty case. It worked out to be a little more than he had, we tried to get the price down, got it down a little bit more, but I ended up putting it on my card, and my mate would get the cash and pay me back in a bit.

He got all that stuff, and while finishing off, I raced over to get the disks I needed, I was lucky to find a place that had a 200gb Maxtor in both ATA and SATA, so I bought one of each (and they were cheap, just a bugger about the 5% credit card charge).

While I was getting these, my mate who wanted the dvdrom and hard disk came over, I said I'd seen a 120gb Maxtor down the back for $135, so he went down to buy that. He came back with it, I was still finishing off paying for the disks, the guy was writing out some overly detailed receipt, with the drive serial numbers on it, and my drivers license details.

I then had to find the sound cards, by now it was just after 2.30pm, and everyone was starting to pack up, I raced around, found one place had some craptastic cards for $18, somewhere else had similar for $19, I was hoping to find something for about $15, since I needed 4 of them.

I ended up buying them from a guy who was slow at packing up, but ended up paying $22 each, d'oh. I was going to have to put it on my card too, making it even more. I was just getting that sorted, my mate came over, I asked if he had $48 on him to make up the difference, he said he might (his wife was looking after the money) he came back a minute later with another $40, now I need $8 more.

My mate scratched around, and found $3 in change, down to $5 left. My other mate, who I'd come with, went away, to his wife, and came back a minute later with a $5 note, sweet.

I paid, grabbed the cards, and away we went.

Now I had no money, and all the stalls were packed up. There goes getting some blank dvds.

I went round, and my mate and his wife grabbed all the bits they'd bought, and we went out and loaded up the car. My mate who I'd come with asked my other mate, if there was somewhere to get a drink, he said we could go to Darby St, to a pub.

We got in the car, he got in his car (he's back driving his unregistered car, now that he's wrecked my bike), and we went around to Darby St.

I pulled a jacket that was hanging around in the back seat over all the equipment, so it was a bit less obvious.

My mate went to the ATM, and pulled out as much cash as he could, and gave it to me, now he's just short by a couple of hundred bucks, and he'll get that to me later in the week.

We went into the pub, I asked if they had a menu, but they weren't serving food now, it was closed, (it was just after 3pm), so the woman said we could bring takeaway in.

We ordered drinks, and then went and sat outside. We chatted for a while, about 3.35pm, my mate went across to get a pizza. he came back a minute later, and said they'd be ready in 10 minutes, I went to get my mate and myself another drink.

When I went in, the woman behind the bar was cleaning it, including the soft drink tap things they have, I asked for a couple of Bundy and Cokes, she grabbed some glasses, put the Bundy in, then went to top them up with Coke from the tap.

She put the buttons back on the tap, and then pressed the Coke button, but only water came out, she put a bit more in, it wasn't getting any better, so then she grabbed another glass, put another shot of Bundy in it, grabbed a little bottle of Coke out of the fridge, and used that to top up the two drinks.

I went back outside, gave my mate his drink, and sat down, a minute later, he complained there was something in his drink, I had a look, and there was something floating around, under the ice, it looked like a bit of dough or something, yuck.

I took it back inside, complained, and the woman gave me another one (that's now four glasses, to give me two), I went back outside and gave it to my mate.

We chatted with my mate who lives in Newcastle, about him having to go to court, after being assaulted by the police, he's got a witness, so that's a start.

He went back across the road, and came back with 2 pizzas, from Pizza Hut, we were expecting a pizza from a little takeaway place.

We ate all that, and chatted more.

The woman from the bar came out, and collected the empty pizza boxes, and a couple of empty glasses. We chatted a bit more.

We left the pub about 5pm, went back, got in the car. We followed my mate back to his place, he had some stuff he'd borrowed that he wanted to give back to my mate.

We waited out the front of his place for a few minutes, and then he came out with the bag of stuff, and some photos, gave them to me, I put them in the back.

We took off after that, went back, got on the freeway, and drove back to my mate's place.

We unloaded all the gear from the car.

When we got inside, I took my sunglasses off, and put them on the table inside the door.

My mate wasn't sure about the video card he'd bought, an ATI Radeon 9800 XT or something, so we went into the computer, and googled it a bit, and found that it's a little bit old, the chipset was released in 2003, but apparently it was a top of the line card about a year ago, and it's still a prefectly good card.

He was happy after that, so we went out, cleared off the dining table, grabbed all the parts over, checked everything, and started to assemble the new PC.

I went in to the kitchen and made up a couple of Bundy and Cokes, and came back.

My mate wanted to have a go at putting the machine together, with me mainly supervising, that suited me.

I showed him how to mount the motherboard in the case (the cheap case we'd got didn't have a removable motherboard tray), and then putting the memory in, and the cpu, and the heatsink.

I put the heatsink in, because it was hard to explain the correct way to put the heatsink, without the heatsink paste on the bottom getting stuck on something, while my mate worked out my directions.

After that, we put in the video card, gees this thing must need some juice, it's got a 12/5v drive connector on it.

We put the disk in, wired up the front panel LEDs/switches, plugged the power on to everything.

The motherboard he got has a dual power supply thing, in case one fails, the other will keep the machine powered, I installed that, and put the retaining clip around it, that was a pain.

We were done at that point, so we went in, unplugged the old pc, plugged the new one in.

My mate pinched the DVDROM drive out of his old pc, that he didn't use much, and we mounted that in the new PC.

I booted it up, it came up first go, that was good, said Athlon64 3200+ etc.

I went into the BIOS, to configure it properly, my mate commented on the fact that the date in the BIOS was correct, but the time wasn't correct, it was 3 and a bit hours out, it said 4.30pm in the BIOS, but it was actually 7.28PM. I set it to 7.30PM, close enough, I'll use something like D4 and synchronise it later.

He found an XP disc, I booted it, went through the first couple of screens, expecting it to come back and say something about not having a hard disk, since it had a SATA disk in it, but I'd told my mate to connect it to one of the SATA connectors controlled by the motherboard chipset, rather than by the RAID controller (gees these Sil3112 controllers are on everything!), so it was able to detect the disk.

It was a 160gb, but it only came up as a 130gb from some reason, hmm, perhaps the BIOS needs updating.

I partitioned it as 130gb, formatted it, installed windows on it (yuck), and then once it was running, I installed all the drivers from the CD for the motherboard, to get the onboard ethernet going etc, and rebooted a few times to get it all right.

My mate had been using USB to connect to the ADSL router he's got, but I hate USB, so I had him find a patch cable, and I used that to connect the router to the PC.

After all the drivers were on, and the ethernet working (had no issues with getting the router to work via ethernet) I installed the @BIOS thing from the CD, and went about updating the BIOS.

That was an interesting exercise. I figured the first server you can use to get the updated BIOS file from would be overloaded, so I selected one of the alternative options in the list.

I had nothing but issues, one timed out, another was connection refused, another was full, one I connected to, got 1% of the file, and then was disconnected. I don't remember the issue with the fifth one was, but the sixth one I tried, actually first in the list, and the default, worked fine. Argh.

It flash updated the BIOS, and then I rebooted. I was half expecting windows to not boot up again, because with the newer BIOS, it would recognise the disk properly, and it would have a different drive geometry, but it didn't windows came back up fine, that was surprising.

I looked in the disk manager, and found that it could see the disk properly in here, there was 20 something gb of unpartitioned space on the end of the disk.

Either it's a better IDE driver been installed from the driver CD, or the real mode driver that the windows install uses is crap, and can't see more than 128gb.

I installed the proper drivers for the video card, and all the million windows updates available.

I read some reviews on the cpu/board, I wanted to find out why people would be buying a 64bit cpu, when there's bugger all software for it.

I couldn't really find a good explanation of that, only that once a ton of people had 64bit cpus, they'll start coming out with 64bit code.

My mate came in, gave me another glass of Bundy and Coke, and said he was going down the road to get a BBQ chicken, because it was a bit late for anything else (just after 9pm I think it was), he'd tried to cook a couple of steaks, but that had been a disaster he told me.

I sat on the pc a bit more, reading, looking at benchmarks. I heard my mate take off in the car.

He came back a bit later, then came, while his wife made up a salad.

We installed Doom3 on the PC, to see how it would go, but it took so long to install, that by the time it was installed, the dinner was already, and we were starved, so we went out to eat.

About halfway through eating, my mate put on the Farenheit911 DVD he'd borrowed from the video shop, which was due back today or yesterday or something, he figured that if he was going to pay a fine for taking it back late, he might as well actually watch it.

We all finished eating, and the moved across to the lounge to continue watching it.

Pretty interesting movie, some stuff about Bush I hadn't known about previously.

I sat and watched that until it finished, at midnight, and then my mate dropped me off at home.

When I got inside, I realised that one of the soundcards had come out of the bag, must be rattling around in the back of his car, d'oh.

I sat on the PC for a while, and then went to bed, about 12.30am.

I couldn't sleep, I tossed and turned for ages, I think it was about 2am I finally got to sleep.