We left the office about midday to head around to the restaurant for lunch.

I started chatting to a guy from work I haven't had much to do with before on the way round there, when we got there, we went into the bottle shop across the road, and went halves in a 6 pack.

We went across and into the restaurant, I noticed it said "BYO wine only" on the way in, but it's a bit late for that.

Most people were already there, we grabbed seats, sat down and started drinking a beer while we waited for our food to be served (since it was already ordered by fax).

We were about 1/3rd the way through our beers, when the stupid woman comes over "I'm sorry, but you can't drink that in here, you have to buy our beer, we've got New, VB, Hahn Ice (and some other shit beer I can't remember)". The guy I'd gone halves with asked if we could finish these ones, and she's like "oh, yeah, I shouldn't let you, but I will". "Oh, and I'll have to charge you corkage" she added. "Yeah, whatever" was my reply to that.

Well it's your choice lady, if I can't drink my beer here, then I'll just leave now, and you won't get paid for the food I ordered. I didn't say that, just thought it.

They started bringing the food out, we continued drinking our beers. I put the rest of them under the table.

After about 15 minutes, everyone had been served, except for myself and a couple of other people.

I finally got served my food, an Antipasto pizza. "Cheese on toast" would have been a better description of it, and it was burnt.

I couldn't be bothered complaining, I just ate it. About halfway through, I'd finished my beer, the other guy already had, I asked him if he wanted another, and I said I'd just swap it under the table.

I grabbed a new one out of the pack, and did a quick swap under the table, putting the cap from the new one on the empty one, and putting it back in the pack.

I opened another for myself in the same way.

I finished my pizza, and then we sat and chatted for a while.

One of the guys from work got up to make a speech for the guy who's leaving, we chatted a bit more after that.

They came around to find out if we wanted coffee or anything. I don't think so, they'd probably find a way to burn it, or stuff up a simple request like a "black coffee" in some way.

A few minutes later people started to leave, and head back to work, it was about 2pm.

I got up, went over to pay for my pizza, I thought about not mentioning the corkage for the beers, but figured it would only be a couple of bucks, and not worth the shit if I tried to avoid it.

I was just about to pay, when I noticed a waitress going for the 6 pack under the table, I went over and told her to leave it, since I'm leaving in a minute (and I didn't want them to notice there were 2 empties in the pack, I can't be bothered arguing).

I went back to the counter, told the woman my order, and the corkage, and was expecting the bill to be about $12. $14 she said, $4 corkage? wtf?

I don't think I'll be rushing back here.

I grabbed the 6 pack, and left.

I noticed some of the guys from work a little bit ahead, so I walked a bit faster to catch up to them.

Some bogan walking the other way saw my carrying the 6 pack, and said "You've got the right idea mate!" and pulled 2 cans of Fosters out of his pockets to show me. I just laughed, and kept going.

We walked back to work, and I got stuck into working on the code I'm writing.

About 6pm, I was told that a few people were heading down to the pub, that sounds good.

I'm going to do it properly this time, not go down there for one beer, and then have to rush back to the building so I can get in before 7pm, when my card doesn't work anymore.

I did a bit more work, then grabbed my stuff, and wandered out.

I loaded up my bike, with the couple of beers that were left from the 6 pack, and rode down and parked behind the pub.

We went in to the pub, and there were a stack of guys from work in there, I went and grabbed a beer.

We sat in there until about 8pm, when they wanted to go for dinner, I went and dumped my stuff (helmet, jacket etc) in the room of one of the guys staying there, and then we all wandered down to the Leagues Club.

We signed in, went upstairs to the restaurant. $17.50 for all you can eat, bit pricey, but the food looks ok, similar to the tennis club.

The first few people paid and went in, I didn't have any notes left, so I went to the atm to get some money, I saw another guy from work as I was at the atm, and told him we were in the restaurant.

After I got my money, I went back in, paid, and sat down.

There was only 6 of us in there so far, still another 5 or so making their way in.

We grabbed some food, and sat back down again, then the others turned up.

The food wasn't bad, it wasn't great either, about on par with the food from the tennis club, the difference being I pay $6 there.

We ended up eating/sitting in there and chatting until nearly 10pm. I had a shocking headache, and now felt crook from eating too much, not that I ate all that much.

They starting turning the lights up and down to make us get out, so a little while later we wandered out, and went into the pokies area.

I wasted a couple of bucks through the pokies, one $3 at one stage, should have stopped then.

The bar services and Keno stopped at 10.15pm, so then everyone wanted to leave, since they couldn't get any more drinks, and we left about 10.20pm. The pokies were stopping at 10.30pm anyway.

We wandered back to the pubs, I went up to get my stuff out of the guy's room. We went out on the balcony for a minute, a common balcony, there was a guy from next door out there reading a book, since it's stinking hot inside, we chatted to him for a minute, then I grabbed my stuff, and wandered out and over to my bike.

I left Maitland about 10.40pm, and it was a good ride home, almost nothing on the road.

I went past one spot, and suddenly saw flashing lights, great, here we go. I just kept going, didn't slow down, they were on the other side, I saw them go into the u turn bay, and thought they were going to come after me, but then I didn't see them again.

Perhaps they saw I was on a bike, and decided not to bother.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, and I got home, and in the door, at 11.40pm.

The tivo was there, so I unpacked that and had a good look at it, it's an ancient PTV100 Philips unit.

The guy sent me a proper Philips Series 1 remote with it, rather than the DirecTV remote I got with the other one. He'd also sent the power cable, serial cable (heh, last thing I need), and the ir blaster cable.

The ir cable with this one is different to the one I got with the first one, it's got a purple plug on it, and the ir leds are smaller, 3mm instead of 5mm I think.

I was just about to find the torx bit to undo the screws on it, when I noticed a torx key thing (like an allen key, but with torx drivers) taped to the back of the unit, handy, I undid the screws.

I opened the unit (that was a task, the case was on so hard), found it pretty good inside, little bit of dust, as to be expected, but also noticed it had a disk in it, didn't expect that at all.

It's a quantum disk, and I noticed it had the cable hold stuck to it, must be an original disk.

I also noticed it had a sticker on it "This disk has been uniquely configured for TiVo, it will not work in your personal computer".

I plugged the unit in to the av cords I've got hanging around for the xbox, and booted the unit up.

It's got a cool retro looking boot prom screen, followed by it saying "Almost there.. a few more seconds please", heh.

It booted up, and displayed the "Welcome to Guided Setup" screen, so it hadn't been setup. Bugger, I wanted to see if there was anything recorded on it. Perhaps someone did a clear and delete everything on it.

I tried to find how to skip the guided setup, just to see if there were any recordings on it. I need to use the serial terminal.

I got the serial cable that came with it, plugged it in, found the adapters I needed to allow me to plug in the null modem cable going to the DEC VT510.

I hit enter a couple of times, no prompt, maybe this isn't a hacked image.

I rebooted, and tried to access the boot menu, no luck, maybe I didn't get it in time. I tried a few more times, no luck. Strange. Perhaps there's something wrong with this terminal, or cable (the same ones I was trying to use on the Sparc) (But I just remembered I used them on my working Sparc a few days ago, so it's not the terminal or the cable).

Anyway, I decided to test it, I plugged the cable into my other tivo, and saw garbage come up on the screen, a ppp connection attempting to be established.

I found my tivo serial cable I made, and tried using that, along with a couple of serial -> cat5 adapters.

I grabbed the longest bit of cat5 hanging around, which I usually use for the xbox, and pinched that from connecting the switch to the hub from the other day, I'm not using now.

I put the cable together, plugged it all in, still not luck.

I then plugged it into my pc, instead of the DEC terminal.

Still no luck. Very strange.

Now I found that I couldn't browse any web pages either, what's going on here?

Then I realised that I still had the proxy server plugged into the hub, from the other day when I was trying to nmap the Sparc, and I'd temporarily used the cable from the xbox to stack the hub to the switches, which I'd pinched to use as a serial cable.. and isolated the proxy server from the rest of the lan, duh.

I tried a few more times to access the boot menu, I'm not having any luck.

I put the test disk I've been using while writing the installation script in there, and booted it up.. it has bash running on the serial port, so that should at least allow me to test that the serial port on the tivo works.

I booted it up, and saw a couple of bits of garbage come out of the tivo, (the speed on the terminal must have been wrong) but at least I know that the port can at least send.

I think I left the disk configured for ppp on the serial port, so I can't even access a bash prompt to test sending data, I can't be bothered pulling the disk out, putting it back in the pc, booting it, and using my install script to reconfigure the serial port use.

It's now just after 1am. At some point in the last hour I checked the tivo, as I though, no guide data, so I kicked off my dodgy guide data update script, then I noticed the tivo start recording something, good. The amount of stuff that's repeated on foxtel, if I missed recording for a whole day, I probably won't even notice anyway, because tivo will just record the next showing.

Anyway, I had a splitting headache, so I went to bed.

It was stinking hot, and I couldn't get comfortable.

I realised I hadn't put the ipod on to charge, got up and did that, and put the fan on higher, and moved it.

I lay down again, still uncomfortable, head killing me, I got up and got a washer and soaked it, then went back to bed with that on my head, ahh, that's better, it was now almost 2am.