I don't like the way blogger is all ass about when you add new entries on the same day, and it puts them above the last post for that day, it all ends up out of chronological order, so this is an edit of yesterday's several posts.

Oh what fun.

In retrospect, this is just one of those days where "everything that can go wrong, does go wrong".

I'm sleeping, I wake up. It's dark and quiet. We've had a blackout, I have no idea idea what time it is, I check my watch, 4.30am.

I need to relieve myself (that's why I woke up), hmm, I'm going to have fun doing that in the dark.

I check outside, the street lights are still on. Hmm. I see up the street a light in someone's house is on. I check my lights, they work. Oh great.

I relieve myself, and think about what to do. The fuse must have clicked off for some reason, do I go outside, at 4.30am, to go to the fusebox, in the sprinkling rain (through the overgrown garden, meaning I'll get all wet), or just wait, and fix it in the morning?

Hmm, if I do that, I'll have to spend an hour getting everything running again, and then I'll be even later for work, and my alarm won't got off. I guess I'll have to go out there,

I got dressed, grabbed my torch, and wandered out, through the garden, getting all wet, and walking through several spider webs on the way.

I get to the fusebox, open it, only a daddy longlegs in here for once, no huntsmans.

I locate the breaker for my power, it's off.

I click it back on, it goes off again about 1/2 second later. Hmm, either it's the usual silly buggers this breaker does (it also has the power for my hot water heater on it) or there's something wrong.

I click it on again, and it clicks off again. I did this a total of 5 times. Normally after the second time, of it not staying on, you could work out something was wrong, but, the hot water heater breaker, will click off for no apparent reason, and I will have to turn it back on, have it click off again, and only once I've repeated this process, sometimes up to 15 times, will it stay on.

I figured it was just because of all the stuff coming on when the power comes back, and drawing too much power. It starts to rain. I wander back through the garden, getting more wet.

I get back inside, I turn off all the power points (or so I thought), I went back to the fuse box again, tried turning the breaker on again, twice, but it still just clicks off. Hmm, I must have missed a power point, I wasn't sure I made sure the fridge was turned off, but maybe there's water got in the roof, where the power comes in.

I went back through the garden again, now pretty much soaked. I checked the power run along the beam outside (but I now realise that's an extra run, just for the hotwater heater anyway), it's got a bit of water on it, but it still looks like the seals/insulation is good.

I checked, the power point the fridge is in is still on, since that's the only thing plugged in there, and it's hidden behind a cupboard under the bed, I crawl in and turn it off.

I decided to check the roof space for leaks, it's been raining pretty heavily for the last 5 hours. I grab the ladder from the bed, lean it up against the entertainment unit, carefully climb up, push the manhole cover up, climb up further, peer around the roof cavity, no water that I can see.

I got back down, putting the manhold cover back into place. I wandered back out through the garden, to the fusebox again. This is the third trip now. I turn the breaker back on, it stays on.

Aha, must be the fridge. Have to test that theory though, maybe it's just the motor coming on, drawing too much current, too quickly after the power is restored. I went back inside, I turned on the power point with the microwave in it. It came on, the display came on.

I waited a minute, it was still on. I crawled in under the bed, turned on the power point with the fridge in it. I heard the motor come on, run for about 3 seconds, and then go quiet. I got out, and found the microwave display was off.

Yep, the fridge is fucked. Terrific. I went back to the fusebox again, for the fourth time, I turned the power back on, it held again. I came back inside. I turned on everything but the fridge this time, no issues (yet). (Though as I wrote that, I decided to copy all this text into vi, and save it locally, instead of losing it if the machine goes off again).

I booted all the pcs up, got everything back running, dns server, router, gateway, card server, video editor, this pc. I'd forgotten to put the tivo and sat decoder (along with the rest of the entertainment gear, tv, vcr, receiver etc) back on, so I did that, watched them boot up.

It's now 5am, I'm all wet, I'm getting a headache. I just checked the weather prediction (guess) for later today, there's one issued at 4.30am, I'll just repeat it here:

For Wednesday
Showers and thunderstorms with possible hail, squally winds and heavy rain.
Strengthening north to northeast winds ahead of a gusty westerly change in the evening.

Lovely.

Now, I'm probably not going to end up going to work tomorrow, considering that, should I even bother going back to bed, or just watch some tv, and do something useful, like image the hard disk I got on Sunday for the new tivo, and install that, or should I put the soundcards in the spare pc, and setup the mixing box?

I think I'll go back to bed, it's only 5.23am, I can still get a couple of hours sleep in, before deciding what to do.

Oh, and I don't know what annoys me the most about the fridge going, the fact it took all the crap above to sort out what it did, and work out it was stuffed, the food in it, having to get it fixed, or have to get it replaced.

If I have to replace it, I think I'll just get a barfridge, but I need a reasonable size freezer, I live on frozen food, I wonder if they make a bar freezer.

So much for going back to bed. I'm just bumming around on the computer..

I start chatting in irc, mentioned it was 5.30am, and all the issues I'd had, and a guy starts going on about how he's thinking about killing himself, because his palm stuffed up, and lost his data, and because he made a mistake, and didn't move his pc side backup out of the way, it got wiped.

I'm here trying to get him to calm down, but he's not being at all logical, or making any sense, but this guy's like that.

Oh, and some mongrel cats were squablling on the front verandah, I went out with the torch, Dad had come out to go to work, so he sorted that out, and I cam back inside. Now it's nearly 6am, and I've already been outside in my underwear (I took all the wet clothes off). Fucking cats.

This is going to be a shit day. (I didn't know just how right I was).

I went back to bed, a bit after 6am. I put the tv on, and watched an episode of Futurama, then when it finished, I went back to sleep, that was about 6.45am, and it was still raining, so I didn't bother to fix the time/alarms on my alarm clock.

I woke up again at 10.30am, the noise of the garbage truck in the street woke me up.

I put the radio on. Just as I put it on, they were talking to some guy from the Bureau of Meteorology, he was saying the rain would be staying until midday, and then would just build up, and storm again later.

I went back to sleep. I woke up again at 11.30am, the stupid woman next door having an incredibly loud conversation with someone. Shut up!

It's not raining, or even overcast now. I put the pillow over my head, and lay there for a bit, then decided I should get up, and do something about the fridge. I think I'll just buy a new one, a smaller one.

I got up, at 11.45am.

I might try running an extension cord from the house though, and running the fridge of that, to see if it's a problem with the fridge, or my crappy power.

I know the voltage was low, because I've got a monitor, and the tube doesn't stay on properly in a brownout, the picture loses sync, like when you run a frequency a monitor doesn't support, and then the tube keeps losing power like being turned off, he picture disappears, and then it comes back on, and repeats the process.

Perhaps because the voltage was low, the fridge was drawing extra current, and tripping the breaker.

I found an extension cord, ran it out the door, and in the other door to the house, plugged it in. Mum's there, says "where are you going with that?" and I said "to run my fridge". I went back in, dragging the cord behind me. Now I had to get the power cord from the power point, to plug it into the extension cord.

I crawled under the bed, pulled the plug out of the powerpoint, crawled back out from under the bed.

I went to the back of the fridge, found a black cord, carefully pulled it a bit, it started coming out. It got stuck, so I put a little bit more force on it, and then it came a bit more, got stuck again, I pulled it again, it came loose.

The cord came out from behind the fridge, and then I noticed something strange. There's no plug on this cord, there's just bare wires on the end. This also isn't a power cord, it's a bit of coaxial lead. Great, this is my aerial. I've just reefed the aerial cord out from behind the fridge, and ripped the plug off the end in the process. I wonder where the hell that is.

I got back in under the bed, oh, here's the plug, still in the wall. I pulled it out, and chucked it out from under the bed.

I traced the power cord to the fridge, ah, it comes out the other side of the fridge, that's not really accessible. I reached in there to try to find the cord, and put my hand in a huge mucky puddle. Ugh.

I got out from under the bed, and got down to pull the fridge out, I pulled it out a bit, then was able to reach in, find the cord, and start pulling it, it got caught. I got back under the bed, unstuck the cord, Mum pulled the rest of it out.

I said that if it didn't work, off the other circuit, then I'd have to buy a new one, because no one's going to want to fix a 20 year old fridge, and Mum corrected me, a 26 year old fridge. Gees, it's older than me.

I plugged it in to the extension cord, the compressor started, I was expecting it to go for a couple of seconds, and stop, as the breaker for the circuit in the house trips, but it just kept running. Great, perhaps nothing wrong with the fridge, it might be the breaker, since the same unit has the breaker for the hot water heater on it, and it just clicks off all the time for no reason, and takes tons of attempts to stay on (but I already mentioned that).

I left it running like that.

I watched a bit of tv, ate breakfast. The milk was all gross, having sat in the unpowered fridge for at least the last 8 hours.

Mum rang Dad, to find out about getting an electrician to fix/replace the breaker, Dad suggested some guy, the same guy that installed it. Great. He said he'd sort out getting him out to fix it. Dad suggested running the fridge off the circuit in my parent's bedroom, since it has an earth leakage protector thing (and the extension cord isn't in that circuit), so Mum found more extension cords, and ran it off the other circuit, the fridge kept working.

The project manager from work rang me on my mobile, I explained that I wouldn't be in, because of the fridge, and power issues, (and it was now after midday, so I wouldn't have got ready and got to work before 2pm, not much point). He told me there was a problem with the application I'm developing (it's being used in production) the intranet version has issues connecting to Oracle, and something about error retreiving text for error message, ah, I've seen this before, it's when the Oracle environment variables aren't set properly, and php can't find the Oracle home directory, and the Oracle client libraries.

It must be from all the mucking around with apache yesterday, someone's restarted it using apachectl, rather than the init.d script, which force sets the Oracle environment variables. I told him to get someone in IT to restart it, using the init.d script. He said that was fine, and I'd see him tomorrow.

I went back to watching tv. A couple of minutes later, the phone rang again, work again. I answered it, this time it was the guy upstairs, the project manager had gone to see him to restart apache. He wasn't sure what I'd told the project manager to tell him to do, so I explained to him how the init.d script forces the environment variables.

He restarted apache using the init.d script, and went to do a test query in my application. I said it should come back in about 5 seconds. It didn't, we waited, and waited, it was taking far too long. I heard the project manager say that it would take about 5 minutes, and then come back with the error message.

I suggested that he cold restart apache (stop/start) rather than warm restart it, so he used the init.d apache script to full stop apache, and then cold start it. He did the test query again, and it came back in about 5 seconds. All fixed.

he asked me where I was today, I said I was at home, and explained the power issues, and the fridge packing up, and all the rest of it. I asked him yesterday to replicate some Oracle tables between a couple of servers, so I had the data on a development server, rather than doing development on the production server. I said I'd see him tomorrow, and I got off the phone.

While I was on the phone, Mum had come in, seen I was on the phone, and gone away again. I went back to watching tv. Mum came out again a bit later, said that Dad had arranged for the electrician to come back to fix the breaker.. 8am Monday morning he'd be here. Great, my fridge is running off 50m of extension cords for the next 4 days.

I sat and played the guitar for a bit, and watched the tv.

I'd recorded "Wave Aid" that was on tv on Sunday, a concert to raise money for the Tsunami victims, and my mate (the drummer) was interested in seeing it, so I said I'd put it on a tape for him. I mucked around, getting the tivo connected to the vcr, and all setup to record, did a couple of test recordings.

Oops, I had the VCR on the wrong channel, tried again, still didn't look to work. Then I realised I didn't even have one of the outputs of the tivo attached to the VCR anymore, so I fixed that, did another test recording, this time it was fine.

I sat back, and started watching the concert. It got a bit cold, and windy. I looked out, it was overcast, here comes the rain back again.

I went back to watching the concert. Bloody Kasey Chambers came on, I can't stand her, so I muted it, and while I waited for her to bugger off, I played the guitar a bit.

I started to ascii art a tab, to tab what I'd worked out of "She Said She Said", I only managed to get the first bar staff ascii drawn, when I heard a couple of specks of hail hitting down.

I looked out, and saw someone out in the street covering their car with blankets. Hmm, probably not a bad idea.

I grabbed a spare quilt I've got, went down to my bike, I moved it back, and dragged it towards the garage door a bit more, to make sure it was under cover of the balcony more.

I put the quilt over the tank, and the front of the bike (handlebars, front fender, mirrors etc).

I stood down there to wait. A couple of huge chunks of hail came down. One landed on the grass across the road. I'd never seen such a huge bit.

I ran back inside, (since going up the stairs is uncovered) grabbed my motorbike helmet, pulled it on. I ran down, and across the street, grabbed the chunk of hail, it was the size of a baseball.

It was all tiny little bits, about 6mm across, stuck together to make one big ball, but it was stuck together well, because it bounced on the ground a few times, and stayed together.

I ran back across the street, and went up and gave it to Mum.

I few more were coming down, smashing on the road. They were more of these little hail stones stuck together.

All of a sudden a huge solid one crashed down, hitting something metal, and making a massive bang. A few more of these came down, I got hit on the elbow by one of them, it hurt like hell.

I grabbed some carpet underlay that's hanging around near the bin, from where my parents recently ripped up the carpet in one room, and I threw that over my bike, got another couple of bits, did the same.

At some point, I got hit on the hand by a piece of hail, my index and middle fingers copped it, and were bleeding.

All of a sudden there was truckloads of these huge stones coming down. I got hit on the shoulder, and the back (I still had my helmet on).

I got in between my bike, and the garage door, and crouched down for shelter, they were coming in straight at me, and I was getting hit all over.

I saw one of the cats come out of the drain (probably a good idea, since it will be filling up with ice and water) and pissbolt up the road.

My sister came down, and said to go and get the cat. I went down, not expecting the cat to be there, perhaps she went under the car. I couldn't see her (wasn't getting down to look under the car, and get hit on the arse), and I was getting hit on the legs and feet with hail. I copped a couple of big hits on my helmet.

I went back up, and got undercover again.

The huge hail stones continued. The cloth shade cover thing over the driveway had tons of them hitting it, and the front edge, where they were all pouring off, was torn by them.

I ran back upstairs, and inside, to find that because I'd left the door open, it had all come inside. I grabbed all chunks of ice, and threw them out the door.

I went out on the balcony to watch the rest of it.

When it stopped, it was still, and quiet, not raining even.

I went for a walk around. Mum came out and said the skylight in their bathroom was smashed.

We went and looked at the Jag, that's parked on the street out the front, the boot was all marked, all dinged in.

One of the sheets of laserlite roofing on the front verandah had a bunch of big holes in it, other bits were just pushed right down, and had to be popped back up.

I went and uncovered my bike.

I pulled all the wet carpet underlay off my bike, great, as I thought, the rubber's all gone weird, and some of it's stuck to the bike seat, now I'll have to try to get that off.

I pulled the quilt off the front of the bike.. oh.. that's new, a huge ding in the tank near the filler cap, on the curve of the tank. Terrific.

It started raining, I went back inside, and continued watching the concert I'd left on, while standing on the balcony.

It stopped raining again, and the weather was weird again. It might hail again.

Mum and my sister went down the garage for something, I just stayed up on the balcony. They started covering my bike up again. I went downstairs, and told them not to bother, since it's stuffed anyway.

Lets, see the current damage to my bike (from all previous accidents/drops):

The exhaust is scratched,
a heat shield is missing off the exhaust,
the left side of the tank is scratched, and dinged in,
the back left blinker is held on with tape,
the front fender is all torn, and wobbles around,
the front right fork is dinged in,
the steering head isn't straight,
the headlight mount is broken, and the light is fixed in place with wire and tape.

That's all I can think of at the moment, but I'm sure there are a few more things, not to mention the new hail damage.

I wandered around the front and back yards, they were still covered in ice, some huge chunks. My brother was putting them in the freezer.

I went back inside, and sat and watched the concert. It started pissing down with rain, I just stayed watching the concert.

I think it was now about 6pm.

The rain stopped, and the sun came out, and dried the road up, so a little while later, I went down, and I dragged the wet carpet and underlay off my bike, it was now filthy from the carpet, and I went out for a ride to see the damage, and get some dinner.

As I went 'round the corner, an emergency glass repair truck was on it's way somewhere.

There were leaves and branches covering the entire road, I had to be careful to stay in the narrow wheel tracks through all the mess.

I got around near the main road, there was a puddle of water that covered the entire lane, so I had to ride on the wrong side of the road to get around it.

I got onto the main road, and rode to the supermarket, a couple of kilometres away from home, there was nothing, just a few leaves down.

I got to the supermarket, got some dinner, and headed for home again. When I came past the local bottleshop, I noticed it was still open (the door anyway, all the shutters were down), I might get a drink.

I pulled over, "chucked a uey" (did a u turn), went back, into the carpark. I went grabbed a 6 pack of Bundy and Coke, paid, and left. I couldn't be bothered chatting with the guy.

I thought I'd have to stick it in my jacket or something, since the saddlebag was full with my dinner, but the other one had enough room to shove it in.

When I got home, I mucked around on the computer for a bit.

I looked out the window, and saw people on the roof of a couple of the houses around the corner, changing roof tiles.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. I ate my dinner, watched some tv.

Nightline came on, and they had a story about the storm, including some home footage from Gosford. I recorded it on tivo, then I copied the recording to my pc.

I mucked around, trying to make it into a small divx file, but didn't have much luck, I gave up in the end, and just used tmpgenc to reencode it smaller (got 29 seconds from 20mb to 6.5mb).

I uploaded it here.

(I downloaded this at work to show the guys the next day, and had issues, the pcs at work couldn't play mpeg2 files natively, so I had to find a codec for that, and then once that was on, it turns out the movie file is in the wrong aspect ratio, all stretched. I found that if I play it with "Media Player Classic", that it plays it find though. Weird).

I gave up on the video file, and went to bed about 1am.