Got up late again, but not too late for once, got ready, left for work.

Got to work at 10.30am. There was a missed call on my phone, from someone at work.

I went into the building, they were just getting ready to have morning tea. I dumped my stuff, I was about to send an email to the guy upstairs, and ask if he'd called me, but I decided that nothing could be that urgent.

I went out and had some food, and a chat. A new guy at work commented on the ding on my tank from the hail, saying it was surprising, because where it hit is the hardest part of the tank.

I went back to my desk about 11am, and was just starting to do some work, when I got a call from the guy upstairs, I had to go up there urgently.

The guy who posed in his boxer shorts the other day had come to see me about something, so I spoke briefly (haha, pun not intented) with him, while going upstairs. I was busy thinking about what was so urgent, I don't remember what he was speaking to me about.

I got upstairs, and I was told the website was down again. Oh, is that all, I thought it was something important.

I got on a machine, and looked at the server, all the processes look fine, what's the problem? The guy showed me, "it does this", and showed me a page saying "page not found" (not the generic internet exploder one, but one generated by the software we use to run the website).

Hmm, something funny going on here. I logged into the editing interface of the software, and discovered that the URLs had disappeared, it wasn't listening on any address. I put the correct address back in, tried again, now it was working internally, but not externally.

I logged into the secure machine that sits between the server and the internet, checked the configuration there. It had been changed by someone. I put back what was supposed to be there, restarted apache, and then it was back working again.

There's something very strange going on here, 2 servers have had configuration changes made.

We sent an email to the guy who'se looking after the website now, to let him know what's going on.

He called back a few minutes later, and I spoke to him in a conference call, explaining what I'd found.

We suspected that the vender, who has root access to both servers, had changed something, because they've been trying to implement another instance of their software.

The guy said he'd call and find out.

Now that the fire was out, we decided to go across the road, they wanted coffees, I'd just had one downstairs with my morning tea.

I went across anyway. The got coffees, I just got a chocolate bar. We moved outside after ordering, because the guy from upstairs wanted to have a smoke.

I'd worn my Lowes shirt and ugly pattern shirt over the top, for a laugh again. While we stood outside, I saw a guy walking up the street wearing a white Lowes shirt.

They got their coffees, and we went back across the street to work.

My old pc is still hanging around up there, they had Dell come out the other day, and they replaced the motherboard and the cpu. geez, about all that's left of the machine now, is the case.

The new guy there, who keeps himself busy dealing with helpdesk stuff, has been going on about a disk for it. I told him that I'd use it without a disk, with a bootable disc (knoppix) (since I'm sick of him whinging about the disk).

I got the machine, took it around the other side, and started setting it up.

I went downstairs, and burned another copy of knoppix, then I came back and booted it. While it did that, I went in and got a bit of cat5 to patch it, and then I went into the computer room to patch the data port on the desk.

I patched the right one to start with, but with a dud patch lead, when I found that I couldn't get a link up, and I went and changed the patch to the other rack, but this was the wrong one, downstairs instead of upstairs, so then I used a different cable, patched the original port in, and it worked.

D'oh, I forgot that the video card in these dells is crap, and knoppix doesn't support anything more than real mode 640x480 on it. Oh well.

At this point, my old boss came in, it's his last day today, he told me that my beard is the stupidest looking this he's seen, it looks even worse than the one I had when I started there. (When I started there, it was just a bushy mess, now it's still like that, but there's a bit of a goatee).

I started doing some work, they had backed up some data to tape, and restored it, and I had to verify that the backup/restore had worked correctly.

I grabbed a couple of TIF files that had been backed up and restored, but they aren't valid TIF files, I had to work out what they were, (perhaps containing JPEGs) and work out how to convert them.

On the whiteboard behind me, someone's drawn up a calendar, and IT staff write what they're doing for the next couple of weeks on it. The sysadmin had written "Ho Ho Ho Ho" in his (4 days, next week), and someone said "what's that supposed to mean? he's going on Christmas leave?", ("Ho" being "Head Office").

The boss asked why they weren't using a collaborative calendar, (on their pcs), I said it was a collaborative calendar, I've seen everyone scribbling on it.

At that point he said something about "I can do without wit from temporary Australians", and booted the chair I was sitting on.

It was pretty funny. (Temporary Australian being someone who rides a motorbike).

I went back to working on the TIF files. The guy next to me, had been sent more junk in the internal mail. This time it was a fluro yellow/green safety shirt, to go with the hard hat and safety glasses he's already been sent.

Someone started joking that all the IT staff should have to wear them, especially when going to fix someone's pc.

Someone found a safety vest, and gave that to me, so I put it on. The guy next to me then put the hardhat on me, and we all had a bit of a laugh.

I just left it on, and kept working.

The helpdesk guy showed us a HP 95lx he'd dug out of somewhere, in the box, complete with manuals. It was going to get thrown out, along with a whole bunch of other good stuff.

The boss asked if anyone was going for lunch, but a lot of the guys were leaving early today, and didn't want to waste an hour getting lunch, so no one went.

A lot of people left, it was now about 2pm, I just stayed working on the TIF files, found that if I hexedit the file, remove the first 512 bytes, it's then a valid JPG, and I found that the files had backed up and restored properly.

I went back down to my desk, and took the HP with me.

I kept working downstairs, working on Oracle stuff, and some more of my application.

More people left, about 3pm.

My old boss came round, he was on his way out, I shook his hand and said bye, and then he went back upstairs.

There was an email from him to all users a little while later, explaining that he'd been fired, and it would probably be the last job, he'd retire etc.

I ended up being one of the last people left in the office, and was asked "don't you have a home to go to?". I wasn't getting much done, so I decided to leave, it was about 5.30pm.

I took the HP with me, and I went home.

I went to the supermarket on the way home, got dinner etc, and came home.

I sat and played with the 95lx for a while, pretty cool. I'd read on the internet about the pinouts for the serial port on it, so I found a cdrom audio cable (they fit) and went about making an adapter for it.

I had some issues getting the serial stuff to work properly, in the end I found it was a couple of problems. The adapters I was using for db9/25 -> cat5 had different pinouts, the rx/gnd were around the wrong way in one of them, and even when I got that right, there was some sort of crosstalk or something going on, so that when the rx and tx were both connected to the remote end, I was getting loopback.

Not sure what's going on there, I mucked around for a few hours with it, trying to be able to use it as a simple serial terminal on the tivo's port.

I googled for info on multitrack recording on linux, and read a bunch of stuff, I want to get one of the servers I built running as a recording box for when I play my guitar round at my mate's place, and I really don't want to put windows on it.

I looked at the Jaycar catalog, working out cables I'd need for my amp, an XLR cable to 6.5mm, and then a 6.5mm to 3.5mm so it'll go in the sound card etc.

I sat up until 3am, and then went to bed.