I woke up early this morning, lay in for a bit as usual.

There's something funny going on with the radio, the signal keeps dropping out, and just leaving a blank carrier signal, because I can retune the radio and get static, or another station, then put it back, and it's blank, and then the signal will come back again.

I listened to this for a while, waiting to hear the weather, and then the guy crapped on for ages, and just as he was about to say the weather for Sydney, the radio dropped out again. Argh.

I got up, and went to have a shower. I turned the heater light on in the bathroom, and 3 seconds later it went off again, uh.. along with the rest of the power.

What the hell's going on here? Did the heater light blow the breaker? it can't have, because it should be running off the light circuit, and that's totally separate to the stuffed one.

Argh. I had a shower, bloody annoyed about the power. I knew this crap was going to happen.

I finished in shower, got dressed, and went out to the fusebox to turn the power back on.

Hmm, both breakers are in the same position, it can't have blown both the power and the hot water. No, it hasn't they're both still on, along with everything else in the box. But the power usage meters aren't moving at all.

What on earth is going on here? I tried using the test button on my breaker, didn't trip the breaker. Perhaps it's a blackout, it's the only thing I can think of now.

I went back through the garden again, I looked in the window, looked like all my parents' av gear was off. I saw my brother, he came and opened the door, I asked if the power was off, and it he said it was off until 1pm.

Oh, terrific. I am sick to death of this. I need to buy a UPS.

I finished getting ready, and left for work. I didn't bother to eat breakfast, because I still haven't been to the shops, and I really don't feel like eating dry ceral.

It was about 8.20am when I left for work.

I saw my mate (who runs the plastering business)'s van in the service station on my way to the freeway, he must have been inside the service station though, I didn't see him.

I got on the freeway, got fuel, and kept going. On my way out of the service station, to get back on the freeway, it was the same thing as the last few days.. some idiot just rolling along the onramp.

How do they expect to get from 30km/h to 110km/h to merge into the traffic, in 1 second?

Yet again I overtook the idiot in the breakdown lane, got up to 110, and merged, leaving them far behind. This is about the 5th day in a row this has happened now.

I got about halfway up the freeway, not really paying attention, and I noticed a cop moving along behind a group of cars ahead, whoops, I slowed down.

It was a station wagon, one of the dog handlers I think. I sped back up a bit, to just hang behind him, he over took a few cars, I was having trouble catching up.

At one point, I was going over 140, and still not making any ground up on him. I'd get stuck behind someone, and he'd get further away, then I'd get past them, go full throttle, and only just start to make up some ground on him.

That was pretty groovy, since I got to do that, riding at full throttle, until he got off at the Newcastle exit, and he was still a way ahead of me, I hadn't managed to catch up to him, going over 140 for several kilometres.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, got to work, about 9.30am.

Went in, started doing some work. I have to work on populating a dropdown box on one of my forms with valid selections, and I need to get this from exisiting records in Oracle. I've got them out, but now I need to process them into a format I can load into a separate Oracle table, I started on that.

The project manager came over, and I showed him, he watched me run a few commands across the file (after getting sqlplus to stop forcing line breaks, I was then able to use sed to replace all the "\n" in the file with real line breaks, separating the values into lines, and then run sort/uniq on the file).

The project manager suggested we go to get some morning tea. The Director General and Deputy are here today, went out for morning tea about 11.30am, and after a few speeches, I had some food, and then spoke to the Deputy Director General for a bit (I had a few meetings with him previously, while trying to get the website and the ecommerce stuff working).

I came back to my desk, went back to work, on the file. Haven't looked at the java stuff today, I think I might just write something else, export the data from Access, write a parser for it, and load it in to the Oracle table manually.

Once I had the file done properly, I filtered it to only give me values that had appeared more than 5/10 times in the file. Once I spoke to the project manager, he wanted the one with more than 5 references, so then I emailed that file to him.

He gave it to one of the new employees to check, get rid of the odd comma, and duplicate entries (with different spacing/commas etc).

I did a bit of work on a form, and then got a call from the guy upstairs, wanting to know if it was lunch time, I went up to see what was going on.

I hung around up there for a bit, and then we went down the road to the cafe for lunch.

He told me he'd sorted out the issues we were having with the java database loading the other day, turns out the problem was nothing to do with the java, the issue was in the PL/SQL that gets run after.

We both thought that the java was populating the temporary table, and then once that was done, completely, the PL/SQL would process the temporary table.

It turns out that after each line was appended to the temporary table, the PL/SQL was being called to process it, rather than loop through afterwards.

This is where the problem was, the field that the data was supposed to go into after the temporary table, had a smaller field size than the temporary table, which explained why we were getting the "field too long" (or whatever Oracle's obscure message for that error is).

The guy had changed the PL/SQL, forced a truncation while moving the data from the temporary table to the final table, and was then able to load all the records.

We had lunch, and then went back to work.

I did a few more hours work on the form I'd been working on earlier, got that working properly.

I discovered that the field sizes I want to use are too small though, the records that don't fit, can't be edited to make fit, because they contain all valid information.

I'll have to rebuild the table with bigger columns, and load the data in again.

I went to see the guy upstairs for a while, we left work at about 5.45pm.

I came down, grabbed my stuff, and left, I rode down the road, and followed his car, we parked behind the pub where he's staying.

We saw a few guys from work up on the back balcony. We went into the pub, got drinks, and went up to sit on the balcony with them.

We chatted for a while, a woman from work turned up, someone wolf whistled at her, and she came up and sat and chatted.

Someone asked why the pool table from work had been moved into the carpark, and apparently it's because the OH&S guy at work complained that the pool cues and balls etc present a risk of injury, so we're not allowed to have it.

What a waste of money, brand new pool table they bought, never been used (the cues are still wrapped), and now it's been stuck down in the carpark with a tarp over it (and today it had section divders in front of it, so it wouldn't be so obvious while the DG and DDG are there).

I went down to get another drink, decided to get a beer for once, since I knew I'd be here for another while, and I saw they had Laffe Blonde.

I went back up, and sat down again, continuing the conversation.

Across the car park, we noticed some intoxicated woman having an argument, perhaps in the window of a car, or perhaps with the car, she was pretty drunk, looked like almost falling over a few times.

We sat and watched that for a few minutes, it was so far away we couldn't hear anything of what was being said.

After that, the car reversed ouot of the parking space (oh, so there was someone in it), and headed off to go out of the car park. It slammed on it's brakes, and then reversed right back to where it had been.

It sat there for a few minutes, the woman had moved away behind another car, then a guy got out of the car, went over speaking to her.

We lost interest at the point, and recommenced our conversation.

A little while later, maybe around 7pm now, someone suggested we go and get some dinner.

I said I'd be up for that, if they got organised, and I didn't end up leaving at 10.30pm.

They squabbled a bit over where to get for dinner, I didn't want to stay where we were (which was one choice) they ended up tossing a coin, to go to the other pub, where the kitchen's been redone recently.

We started getting organised to go there, a couple of the guys staying in the pub wanted to get changed.

I followed the guy from work, dumped my jacket/helmet etc in his room, then went to the loo while he got changed.

We went back downstairs, we had to wait a few minutes for another guy from work. I went in to put a couple of dollars through the pokies, didn't win anything.

Just as I was finishing wasting my money there, the guy we were waiting on came down, so then we walked down to the other pub.

We went into the restaurant area, ordered our meals (I ordered a small one this time, this being the place that served the food I couldn't finish the other day), and then went back into the bar area to get some drinks.

The guy from work we'd been waiting (the guy from Orange who's taken over IT) shouted the drinks, that was cool.

We went back into the restaurant, sat down, to wait for our food.

We chatted for a while, and about 15 minutes later, the food started coming out.

The steaks they serve there are huge, about 6cm thick, I could never get through something that big. I'd ordered the nachos, they came out last.

Lots of chips, not much meat, oh well, there's still a lot of food anyway.

We sat and ate, then once we were finished, we went and sat in the bar area.

It was now after 9pm, I was just thinking about heading back to the pub to get my stuff and leave, when one of the other guys said he was tired, and going to bed, so I said I'd go too.

The guy from work, whose room my stuff was in, gave me his key to get in and get it.

I left the pub with the other guy, and we walked back to the pub.

On the way back, he was telling me that a guy he works with had lined up for both of them to be at a meeting in Orange, at 9am on Thursday, gees, it takes nearly 5 hours to get to Orange from here, he wasn't terribly impressed about that.

We got back to the pub, went in, I grabbed my stuff out of the guys room, locked the door, and hid the key where he could find it.

I went down, jumped on my bike, and took off, about 9.30pm.

I got home a bit before 10.30pm, sat on the computer for a bit.

A guy at work had mentioned there was a Monty Python movie on tonight, I browsed the program on the tivo, and found "And now, for something completely different" on channel 10 between 11.45pm and 1.45am.

I set that up to record, and went back to mucking around on the computer.

At 11.45pm, the tivo changed channels, started recording the Monty Python movie, I half watched a bit of it while I was still on the computer.

I went to bed about 12.30am, watched a bit more of the movie, and then turned it off a bit before 1am.