I woke up about midday, and I got up.

I could hear that the others were already up, and getting ready.

I went out, they'd got their stuff together. I got an sms on my phone, it was my mate (whose place we were staying at), just letting me know his new number, because he had got his new phone this morning.

The person had turned up at 9.30am, and rather than wake us all up, my mate had gone and waited outside, and dealt with the person out there.

I updated my phone book, and then I went back out with the others and they left a few minutes later, saying they were going down the road to get some breakfast.

I went and had a shower, and got ready to leave. As usual, I was feeling a bit seedy this morning, I felt better after the shower.

I went out, got ready, and went down to my bike. I called up my mate to find out where he and his wife had gone for breakfast, they were in a cafe down on Darby St. I said I'd be down there in a minute.

The people living in one of the other units in the building were moving out, so they had a truck parked out the front of the building, and they'd unloaded all the stuff they needed to secure all their stuff on the truck, ropes and tarps etc.

Once of the tarps had blown across, and was against my bike. They'd seen me come down, and it was pretty obvious I'd be riding, since I was wearing a leather jacket and holding a helmet, but they'd not bothered to come and move their tarp, so I kicked it out of the way, and left.

I took off down the road to find where my mate and his wife had gone for breakfast, I spotted them sitting at a footpath table at one of the cafes, I found a spot a little bit further up the street, where there were a couple of other bikes parked.

I locked my helmet to my bike, and then I walked back to the cafe they were at.

They'd already ordered, so I went in to look at a menu, worked out what I wanted, and stuck it on the table order at the counter. I went back and sat outside with the others.

I chatted to them for a bit, and a little while later the food started coming out. I knew my food would be a few minutes behind, since I'd ordered later, so I just sat and waited.

It got to the point where it was ridiculous though. My mate had ordered a big breakfast, sausages, eggs, bacon etc, and he'd nearly finished it, and all I'd ordered was some french toast.

I went into the counter, and asked what was going on, they said there was a bit of a holdup in the kitchen at the moment, but that they hadn't forgotten. My mate had asked me to order a glass of orange juice for him, so I did.

I went back and sat down to wait after that. My food came out another short while after that, along with my mate's glass of orange juice.

I ate the food, it was pretty good, but $10 is a bit rich for some french toast and a banana, anyway. When we'd finished, my mate went into pay, and I went across the road to an ATM, because I didn't have much cash in my wallet, and I might decide to buy something at the computer fair, and I'm sick of paying credit card charges, because of being disorganised.

I was just finishing up at the atm when my mate came across, because he'd parked over near here somewhere, he gave my my jacket that I'd left on the chair (thinking I'd be back from the atm before he was finished paying) and then I crossed back, walked to my bike, and got ready to go.

I waited for my mate to come out, because I was going to follow him to the fair. I waited there for a few minutes, and I was just thinking I'd go across to find out what was going on, when I heard him coming out, so I got ready, and then I followed him.

We rode to the basketball stadium where the computer fair, and looked for a parking spot. We started out on the grass, but then because we were worried that it would rain again (it had rained during the night), and the ground was a bit soggy, we didn't want to risk our bikes kickstands sinking, and falling over. (I wasn't that worried, since my bike has a proper foot on the kickstand, to distribute the weight a bit, but my mate's sports bike only has a silly little stand).

We rode up a hill, and into the asphalted area of the parking lot, into the back of a spot, so we parked there. We were getting off our bikes, and some woman in a bus (any vehicle that seats more than 4 in comfort is a bus, this looked like it seated about 10) in the spot next to us hung out her window, and said that we couldn't park there, because it was staff parking.

She just didn't politely ask us to move or anything, it was just "you can't park there" basically. My mate asked what staff were parking there, and she said "basketball staff", my mate asked if there were any working today, and she said yes. She then continued on bitching at us.

There was an empty spot just across from us, that wasn't staff parking, so we decided to move there. I was still on my bike, and would have just moved straight across, but my mate was parked in front of me, and he'd got off and locked his helmet, so I had to wait for him to get back on, before I could move.

He started to unlock his helmet, and the woman continued bitching, and my mate told her to keep her panties on, we were moving, and then someone came and swung into the spot we were going to move to. We both said, "oh well", and my mate relocaked his helmet, I got off, and locked my helmet, and we went over to the door.

We paid the entry, and went in, and headed across to speak to the guy we were getting the parts off, a monitor and a dvd burner and stuff. We spotted him out the back having a smoke, so we wandered over there to speak to him. My mate jumped out the back with him, and had a smoke.

While we stood there, we heard an announcement over the PA, "would people riding motorbikes.." and our number plates were read out "please move your bikes from the staff parking" or some crap.

Yeah, that announcement is going to make me race out and move my bike, I'm sure. We continued standing there, my mate kept smoking. A couple of minutes later, the security guard came over, and asked us if we were riding a yamaha and a honda.

My mate said that yes, we were, and then the guard told us that we had to move. My mate started going on about the silly bitch that had been whinging at us, but the guy didn't care, he just went on about how "they'd put a call over the PA" so we had to move.

"Yeah whatever" was our response to that. A few seconds later, the guard continued, "you'll have to move", and my mate's like "yeah, I'll just finish my smoke".

The guard shut up, and just stood there. My mate finished his smoke, put it out, and then we headed back to our bikes, the guard walking in front of us.

We jumped on our bikes, and moved them around to another spot that was free, and then we went back inside, and didn't acknowledge the guard, now standing back on the door.

We went back to see the guy we'd come to see, and sorted out getting some stuff from him. We were supposed to be getting a monitor from him, but he'd sold them all. He went around to see if any other stall holders had any stock left (which was pretty good) we went around looking as well.

We didn't end up finding anyone else with any left. We got the rest of the parts, a case, keyboard and mouse, dvd burner, and some other stuff.

While we were wandering around, I saw a guy selling a few IBM NetStations. They looked fairly interesting, $60 or something he wanted for them. They just looked like some sort of basic pc, diskless, that would probably be a pretty groovy X terminal.

I thought about buying one, but then figured it's just more crap that I don't need. I'd muck around with it for a while, getting it working, and then it would just sit there, and I'd never actually use it.

Once my mate had everything he needed, we left the fair. We went back to our bikes. I said I was going back to our mate's place (where we'd stayed) because he needed a computer fixed.

I said I'd go and sort that out, and then when I finished up there, I'd shoot down the coast to his place, and help him sort out computer stuff.

We both took off, and I headed back. I got in, and started working on the computer. My mate had put the hard drive in that I'd got him to buy a few weeks before, but he hadn't partitioned it, or formatted it or anything, so couldn't use it.

I sorted that out, and then went about installing windows on the drive. I'd taken a CD with me, just with 95/98 on it, because I thought he had been wanting to get going some crappy old computer, not a PII or whatever this was. Oh well, nothing else here to install, so got no choice.

I started copying the cab files to the hard disk, and that was taking forever, and then it crapped out all together. I'm pretty sure the cdrom drive in this machine is had it.

I got a cdrom out of one of the other old computers he had there, and started putting that in the machine. I noticed that the power supply was red hot. What the hell's going on here?

When I investigated, I found that the fan wasn't spinning in the power supply. My mate said he knew about that. Terrific, thanks for letting me know. I took the power supply out of another pc (we're not using that pc, because it's got filled with virii, and I don't have my usb thumb drive with the virus scanner on it, and I'm not waiting to download it over dialup).

I swapped the power supplies out, finished swapping the cdroms across, and had another go copying the files. This worked slightly better, but then it crapped out again. This cdrom is stuffed too.

I gave up, and I took the dvd rom out of the other machine, put that in this one, started all over again, and this time got a lot further, it was faster, but then right at the end, xcopy stuffed up yet again. I redid the whole thing, using copy, instead of xcopy.

This worked, and then I was able to start the install. I got most of the way through the install, and then windows came up with some error, unable to read a cab file. Terrific. I thought I was stuffed at that point, but it continued through, and the install didn't exit.

Who knows what happened there, it was probably copying something useless, like wallpapers or something, and so it didn't care. It got a bit futher, and came up and asked for the product key.

I used to be able to remember this, but now I wasn't sure, since I haven't had to do this for about 18 months now. I put in what I thought it was, but it wasn't right. Hmm, now how do I check.. it's in a text file on the cd.

I had to get the other pc going. First I wasted a few minutes trying to reoil the fan in the power supply, so the computer wouldn't blow up, running off an overheating power supply, that didn't even work, it had been seized up for so long, that the motor was burned out.

I gave up, just plugged it into the pc, put a cdrom attached, and booted up the other machine with a dos boot disk, and then I was able to look in the text file, grab the product key, and shut the machine off again.

I swapped the monitor and keyboard and stuff back to the other pc, put the right code in, and finished the install.

Once that was done, it rebooted etc, and I setup the modem. We had to get the internet settings, my mate didn't know the dialup number or anything, so we had to call up their support number (on Sunday), to find out the dialup number. Luckily, they'd changed it recently, so the new number was part of the message when you ended up on the menu system, so we didn't have to wait to talk to anyone.

They could have listed the dialup number in the phonebook (though it would have been the old one) that would have been a bit more organised.

Note: This is an incredibly long blog to write, I'm sick of writing it already, and I've still got hours of the day left to blog.

Anyway, we got the number, and I setup a dialup connection, but then my mate couldn't remember his username and password properly. We tried to connect 5 or 6 times, using different details, no luck, it just kept kicking us out.

Eventually my mate says "is the password case sensitive?" ugh. After we put it in with the correct case, we got on the first time.

I went and found the drivers for the video card (so I could get rid of the hideous 640x480 16 colours we were stuck in), found them, waited 15 minutes for them to download, installed them.

Rebooted at that point, and it came up fine. I fiddled around a little bit more with the machine, but everything was basically working, so I said my mate could install anything he needed, and work it from there.

I got all my stuff together, and I headed down to my bike to leave.

My mate came down with me, and we chatted a bit while I loaded up my bike.

I took off, and I rode down the coast home. I dropped off my stuff, and then I went out again, around to my mate's place, to fix up some computer stuff for him.

We spent a couple of hours mucking around with the computers, my mate had swapped his pc into a new case, but it didn't work (he called me about this on Thursday night).

I poked around in there for a bit, ended up basically pulling the whole machine apart again, it was only when I thought that perhaps the front panel switches/LEDs had been connected wrong, and were stopping the machine from booting, that I found the problem.

I've seen this before, working with a badly labelled motherboard, I connected all the front panel leads around the wrong way, since the 2 rows of pins were labelled ass about, and this resulted in all the wires melting.

I pulled all the front panel leads off, and then went to short the power switch pins, to attempt to turn the machine on, and then I found that the power switch pins weren't part of the main block, where the reset button and LEDs all connect.

The power switch hadn't been connected the whole time.. there'd been nothing wrong, except that there was no way to turn the machine on, not that it wasn't turning on.

Argh. I put the whole machine back together (I'd even pulled out the secondary voltage regulator off the board and everything), this time I connected the power switch, and it booted up first go.

After that I moved over to working on some other stuff he had there, getting a PC ready to go up to Bundaberg, for his brother in law.

This was easy stuff, we just had to mount a motherboard, and some drives, plug it all in. We'd already used this machine, so it already had an OS on it, I didn't have to worry about any of the software stuff.

I set that PC up, networked to the other PC, so my mate could make sure he'd moved all the data off it that he wanted.

We had dinner after that, I think we had Chinese, my mate went up to the local Chinese restaurant, and got takeaway.

I wouldn't have minded a beer, and my mate went down to the bottlo to get some (he'd already gone to the one near the restaurant, but they were closed), but the other bottlo was closed too.

After dinner, we chatted for a bit, and then I found my belt, that I'd left here from when I'd had a shower after getting caught in the storm on the way back from the beach, grabbed that, and I left, and went home.

I probably bummed around at home for a bit, and then went to bed.