Old habits die hard..

I'm back to waking up late again, got up about 8.30am, got ready, and left a bit after 9am.

As I was going through Ourimbah, to get to the freeway, I saw a flash from the speed camera in the school zone. Haha, some idiot driving a Holden Commode just got busted speeding in the school zone.

When it went to two lanes, I raced straight past him, and got on the freeway.

I got to work at 10.20am.

I did a bit more work on the form I'd been doing yesterday, and prepared to reload the tables.

The wrapper from the kitkat I bought the other day had a competition on it, I'd sms'd the code in, to see if I won anything, but not received a reply. Because of the terrible phone reception at work, it kept dropping out when I tried to sms the code in, so I eventually got a reply, saying that the code had already been used (obviously when my phone said "message not sent this time" one of the times, it did actually send it).

I got an sms, saying the code I sent in had won a ring tone, and they claimed it was worth $2.95.
How can you put a value on that? I've got millions of tones in RTTTL format, which I usually load my phone with, or I can just make my own with "nokring" or whatever it's called, from midi files, that you can download for free.

Anywat.. "Oh great" I thought. I went to the website, put the code in, and was then told I could claim a "top 20 ringtone", I looked at the list, and they were all crap songs.

The only one remotely passable was "Call on me" which is the remake of Steve Winwood's Valerie.

I previewed it, pretty crap, listened to a few other ones, they were all just crap, so I selected that, received it, and saved it over the top of "Inna Gadda Da Vidda" that I had in my phone already.

I went back to work. The project manager came and saw me, going on about a plugin they wanted in the browser so they could view the TIFF files from the application I'm developing. They need to be administrator on the PC to install it apparently, and one of the PCs they have, has had the admin password changed on it.

I went to look at it, the first thing I noticed was that the red gun in the monitor was gone, and the screen was a hideous shade of blue, instead of white, ugh, I couldn't look at that.

I sat down, tried to run the users/passwords thing, but it wouldn't accept any of the passwords I tried.

I decided to just use the "Offline NT Password Change Utility" thing, which is a linux boot disk that mounts the NTFS partition, and lets you edit the SAM file.

I went back to my desk, found that, downloaded it. The project manager found me a floppy disk, so I rawrite the image on to that.

I went back to the PC, by this time they were swapping the monitor for a non stuffed one, and once that was done, I rebooted the machine, off the floppy disk.

It booted up, I mounted the partition, changed the Admin password, saved it all back to disk, unmounted it, and rebooted. It said Windows would do a disk check when it booted, so I let it do that.

After that, it rebooted again, and Windows started. I again tried to run users/passwords, but it wouldn't accept the password. Weird. I looged out (of the user's account) and tried to login as local admin, but that wouldn't accept the password either.

I've never had that password change util not work, I wonder what happened. Anway, I got the user to login again, and then I tried running the users/passwords util, and this time I logged in as the domain admin, and it accepted that.

I added the user in as a local admin, then logged him out and in again to test it, this time I saw the login script fix the time properly, which it had previously been complaining about "the user does not have sufficient privileges".

I went back to my desk. A few minutes later the project manager came to me again, anothet guy needed the plugin on his pc, so I went and did the same thing (just logged into the users/passwords app as the domain admin).

After that plugin was installed, the project manager asked if the users should be removed again, I said that would be a good idea, so he removed him again, but now was unable to use a plugin.

I said they'd have to get another plugin then, because it's not going to be acceptable that users have to be a local admin to use a piece of software.

The guy upstairs called me, said that some of the consultants we'd been dealing with were there.

I went upstairs to see them, chatted for a while, and then we decided to go and get some lunch.

We went across the road to the cafe, I didn't really want to go there, I'm a bit sick of their food, anyway.. we went in, sat down, and prepared to order.

My phone rang, with my craptastic new ring tone. It was my mate in Newcastle, who pranged my bike. He asked if I could talk, I said in a minute, and went outside the cafe on to the street, where I'll get better reception, and be able to hear him, and not be rude.

I spoke to him for a few minutes, he wanted to know if I could find some time to come over and setup the hard drive I'd helped him buy at the fair a couple of weekends ago (when my mate bought his new computer).

I said I'd try to get away from work a bit earlier today (around 6pm) and head over to Newcastle.

I got off the phone, and went back in the cafe. A few more people from work had come in there, and the DBA had pinched my seat. Apparently someone had told him I was sitting there, but he didn't care, typical :-)

The waitress came and took our orders, we chatted for a while, and then the food came out. Both myself and the guy upstairs had to wait for ages for ours, and I was served last again.

I'd ordered fish and chips, not terrific, but then none of the food in this place is great, especially not for what you pay for it.

After that, half the people left to go back to work. I would have left too, but I was stuck in the corner. When the others finished chatting, we got up, paid for lunch, and went back to work.

I went back to working on the database, the guy had worked on the file I needed checked, so I went about loading that into Oracle.

It was looking a bit dark outside, I checked the Bureau of Meteorology website, and saw that there was supposed to be heavy rainfall over Maitland.

What are they talking about? it's not raining at all.

About 2 minutes later, it started pissing down with rain outside. I went over to the window to watch it.

Then it started hailing, it wasn't the ridiculous tennis ball size hail like the other day, this was just the standard pea sized stuff.

I stood watching out the window for a bit, and then the guy who sits at the desk near where I was standing, goes "Oi! What's going on here?", and at that point I realised the window was leaking, there was water coming in everywhere.

We looked, and there was about 5 spots along the top of the window, where water was just streaming in.

There were quite a few people watching the rain out the window now, so they started grabbing stuff and moving it away, so it wouldn't get wet.

The guy at the desk tried to call the building manager, but he had his phone on away mode.

I got bored of watching the rain (the hail had only last about a minute) and the window leak, so I went back to work on the database again.

I'd managed to load the file in, but once that had gone in, I realised that the field wasn't big enough, I'd truncated a few records, so I altered the table, made the field bigger, reimported the file, still not big enough.

I think it took me 4 goes in the end, before I'd made the field big enough to hold the longest records.

I reloaded the other tables after that, because I had to make a couple of columns larger. Once I'd done that, I was trying to work out why records were not being accepted as being the right length, when they were.

I fiddled around with that for a bit, didn't really get anywhere, so I left it, and went back to working on the other table I'd done, with the edited file.

I had to design a form that would allow for adding new records, as well as editing and deleting existing records in that table, so I sat and did that for a while.

While I was working on that, the guy from upstairs come down to install some software on the project manager's pc. He kept asking me for things, to email him files he needed (like Oracle's tnsnames.ora file) which I did, and was then asking me about the username and the password for the generic account to be used.

I didn't know, the DBA created all that, and I am supposed to grant privileges on that account, but I haven't done it yet.

I was a bit grumpy, I had a terrible headache, and I was annoyed that I had to go to Newcastle to fix a bloody computer, and would end up seeing what was left of my bike, instead of just going home.

The guy from upstairs came through and said he was leaving, at about 5.15pm, and said he'd been in the pub if I wanted a soft drink or something.

I kept working on the form I was going, and I decided to leave work at 6pm, as I'd planned.

It had stopped raining a while before, and because it was so hot during the day, the rain had all dried up.

I thought my bike maight have been looking a bit cleaner (since I still haven't cleaned all the muck from the carpet off it), but it looked worse if anything.

I got on, and took off, I rode all the way into Newcastle.

I got the Darby St, took the turn, and was trying to remember which road I had to take. Last time, I'd gone straight past it, so this time, I took the first left turn. D'oh, no, that's too early. I turned left again, and because of the layout of the roads, I ended up back on the main road, so I turned left into Darby St again.

I went a bit further up this time, I recognised a street, but I had passed it again, it's ok, I can take the next turn, so I did, and then headed back.

I knew where I was now, so I had no trouble getting to my mate's place.

I parked out the front went in, it was about 6.45pm. I knocked on the door, he came and opened it.

I went in, we chatted for a while. He went into the kitchen to continue preparing dinner.

His wife was there, I chatted to her as well. My mate offered me a drink and some cake he'd made, we chatted a bit more, while he kept preparing food.

I started looking at the PC for him. He'd told me he'd put the disk in, and it showed up in device mangler, but I told him that he needed to partition and format it before he could use it.

I took the disk out again to check the jumper settings, it was all correct, and I installed the DVD rom drive he'd bought.

While I put the parts in, he went and had a shower, because he'd just got back from the shops, and ridden up the hill on his push bike, and was all sweaty.

I booted the machine up, checked that everything detected properly in the BIOS, then let the machine boot up XP.

It came to the login screen, I picked my mate's login (there were 4 on there) because I thought he had no password, nope, he does. I checked the password hint, and then I had a couple of guesses, picked it on the third attempt.

I went in to disk mangler, and some silly wizard popped up, I went through that, and initialised the disk, then once that was done, I created a partition that filled the whole 120gb disk, and formatted it.

I mucked around with the drive letters after that, to get some sort of a sane lineup, instead of having a couple of disks, then cdrom and dvdrom drive, and another disk.

Once that was done, my mate came back from the shower, I showed him it was all done.

The PC was making a bit of noise, I think the CPU fan needs cleaning.

My mate's wife called him, and he went into the kitchen to help here more with preparing the food.

I shut the machine down, and took it out, full of dust. My mate came out of the kitchen, got his vacuum cleaner, and cleaned out most of the muck. I took the fan off the heatsink, and got more dust out.

When it was cleaned, and I'd put the fan back on the heatsink, I went to reinstall it, but found that taking it off had caused the little plastic clip on the CPU socket that the heatsink clips onto to break off.

I tried clipping it back on, there was enough that it would grab, but when you let go of the heatsink, and it moved a tiny bit, the clip would pop off. Crap.

I took the fan off again, and turned the metal clip around 180 degrees, put the fan back on, and found that the way the metal clip was shaped, it was now able to clip onto what was left securely.

My mate's wife had been given a digital camera recently, a 5MP Minolta, which my mate showed me, and he decided to take a picture of me. (Watch out the camera doesn't break! :-)

He found the install CD for it, they hadn't installed it previously, because there was no room on the hard drive.

I powered the machine back up, and I showed my mate how to install software, changing the destination directory, to install it on his new disk.

Once it was done, he plugged the camera in, and we looked at the pictures on it, including the picture of me. The red eye reduction hadn't been on, on the camera, so I had these evil looking huge red eyes.

He then decided to be smart, and opened it up in paint, and decided to fix my eyes, but just replaced the red with huge black circles, with little white ones in the middle, saying it looked like I was on acid.

About this time, my mate's wife had finished making the dinner, and served it to us.

My mate decided that he wanted some wine with it, he had a bottle of red wine, but no opener.

I went down to my bike, to check if I still had my old pocket knife in the saddle bag, with a corkscrew on it. Nope. D'oh.

I went back up, and after mucking around for a bit, we got it out. I suggested screwing a big drill bit into the cork, and then using pliers to pull it out, this didnt work, the drill bit just drilled a hole in the cork, not right through though.

My mate got a bit of coathanger wire, and thought he could use it to pull the cork out, but it was just pushing it in further.

I said stuff it, we'll just fish the bits of cork out, said to drill a hole right through, then push the wire right in, with a sharp bend back on itself, and reef the cork out.

We did that, and it worked, and when we poured the wine, there wasn't any cork floating in it, it must have all got stuck in the drill bit.

I finished my meal, it was really good, a stirfry, I don't remember the last home cooked meal I had. When I finished that, and my wine, my mate managed to convince me to go and look at the bike.

We went down to his storage area, and it was parked in there, along with his 250 Ninja that doesn't go, and a couple of pushbikes, and a stack of boxes and stuff.

He pulled it out, so I could have a look at it. Ugh. The tank is totally stuffed, the side has a big ding in it, and the top is all crushed in, god knows how that happened.

All the damage was down the left side of the bike:
the rubber off the footpeg was gone, and the springed metal bit was in the wrong position, all stuffed,
the clutch lever is gone,
the mirror is smashed,
the bolt that holds the rear shock to the swingarm is snapped off,
the engine case has really deep scratches in it,
the sissy bar backrest cushion is gone,
the tailight is smashed,
the headlight is smashed,
the front wheel isn't straight, the front guard is almost rubbing on it.

He said he'd pay me some of the value of it in a little while, when his inheritence from his mother's estate comes through, and then he wants to repair the bike, try to seel it, and pay me the rest after that.

I said that was fine, if he wanted to pay the first bit soon, then I'd give him a year to get it sorted, and sell it, or else pay the rest of the money I wanted for it (if he had been able to sell it, before wrecking it), and then chuck it away, or do what he'd liked with it.

We went back up to the flat after that.

He made me a coffee, and I looked at some papers he'd prepared to take to court with him (he'd gone to court last Tuesday, and had it adjourned for a month while he seek legal advice).

I looked through that, it had pictures of his injuries, and my bike, and where the accident/assualt from the police had occured.

It also had a bunch of character references he'd had people write for him, I only brieffy looked at those, but they all basically said the same things, that was good.

There was also a statement from the witness in there, it was really good, it backed up everything that my mate had said had happened.

After that, he gave me some papers he'd got from the court, including the police's statement of what had happened. I read that, and you could tell that it wasn't right, it just didn't make sense.

(Besides being badly written, and full of spelling mistakes). At least it said in there that one of the police had punched my mate in the head.

Their explanation of the situation, was that they'd seen him pull over and turn the bike off, and the roll it down the hill (which he had done, to be considerate, since he was coming back late), and they'd seen that as suspicious, so followed him.

They claimed they'd identified themselves as police then, but it didn't say that they'd turned their lights on, or used their siren.

It mentioned how the woman had unloaded the OC spary into his face without warning, apparently because she thought he was going to throw the motorbike at her. Yeah, sure.

After he took off down the hill, became unable to see because of the spray, and then crashed, he was saying "who are you?" several times, and the police woman said "I don't have to tell you!", and only after asking several more times did she say that it was the police.

Their statement didn't say anything about that, but the female witness' statement said exactly the same thing as my mate.

In her statement, she also said that after he had been loaded in to the paddy wagon, a cop was wandering around, and had stopped in his tracks when he saw her window open, obviously he knew they'd been seen assualting my mate.

She said that the cop then peered in the window, trying to see if anyone was there (perhaps her light was off), and then turned around and walked away.

Oh well, it certainly looks like they are definately in the wrong, but it only all happened because of my mate's suspicious behaviour, turning the bike off and rolling it.

I did tell him at the time, that I thought that was probably something to do with it, and that I don't do things like that. Bugger people, when I come back late from somewhere, I just make sure to just idle along past houses, and keep the light on low beam.

The only time I push my bike around (and never with the light off) is when I'm parked at someone's house, outside their window or whatever, and they've gone to bed.

Anyway, I finished looking at all the paper work, my mate had made me a coffee, so I drank that, and chatted with him a bit more, and then I went down to my bike to leave.

I really had a headache now, I just wanted to go home, to bed.

My mate came out with me, just as I got to my bike, my phone rang, it was a woman whose computer I fixed up ages ago, put a new hard disk in it (over a year ago), she'd rung me on Saturday, when I was in the shower, and I'd got the message just as I was heading out the door, so I meant to call her back, but I'd forgotten all about it.

I spoke to her for a few minutes, she knew someone that wanted me to fix their computer, and I told her that I don't do that stuff anymore, I pass all the work to my mate at Wyong, but they wanted me to go and do it.

Well, that's all good and well, but unless they want to pay me a day's wage, then it's not going to happen, I just don't have the time or patience to deal with that stuff anymore. (I didn't say any of that of course).

She said that she hadn't seen me for ages, and if I was ever down near her place, I could pop in.

Hmm, I have to go and see another guy near there (the guy who runs the plastering business I did a couple of days work for), who I'd seen at the shopping centre on Saturday, when we went to get lunch, perhaps I should line up going to see her, and then going to fix his bloody computer.

I got off the phone, it was really cloudy, and I could hear a lot of thunder, I hope it doesn't piss down on the way home. I spoke to my mate for another few minutes, and then I put my gear on, and took off. It was about 8.55pm I think.

I got back on the main road through Newcastle, saw a turn off for Sydney, but thought it was down the Pacific Highway, and I don't want to go that way, if it's raining. I kept going, to look for the way that goes to the Newcastle Link Rd, and to the freeway.

Next thing, I was thinking I must have missed it, because I was heading back the way I came from work. Bugger, I don't want to go all the way back across to Maitland, just to go south, to get on the Freeway, it'll add ages to the trip.

I saw Wallsend Rd, I knew that going down there would take me to the Pacific Highway, and at this point, it has to be faster than going back to Maitland to get on the freeway.

I went down there, and next thing, I was back on Newcastle Rd, which leads to the Link Rd and the freeway, woo.

I went along there, got on the freeway, and headed south. There's nothing at all on the freeway, weird.

I kept going, I came to the odometer check, and thought that I was about halfway home at that point, since my trip counter is on 40km when I get there in the morning, not thinking about the fact that I reset the trip counter at the service station in the morning, and the odometer check is only 10km before the end of the freeway, I'm back only 30km away from work, 70km away from home.

I kept going, the weather was mostly ok, hit a spot with some big rain, but only for a few seconds.

I needed to go to the loo, I know the service station on the southbound side is not far away (again, not thinking about my trip counter reset). I kept going, and going.

I went through the two night roadworks, and that stupidly bright light in the first one, and kept going.

I hit more rain, now it was coming down in huge drops, but the road wasn't really wet.

I finally got to the service station, pulled in, parked at the bowser, and went straight in to relieve myself. I was in pain walking in there. After that, I came out, put $10 worth of fuel in (to make up for the fuel I used going to Newcastle from work, and back to the freeway), and went and paid, and then took off.

I got to the stop sign, where the truck service station exit road merges with the car service station road to get back on the freeway, there was a truck coming, so I stopped to wait.

If it had been dry, I could have raced out first, but I'm not trying that in the wet (the road was soaked here). I waited, it went past, but another had come out, and was following it closely.

Then another. I turned my bike off to wait, because they were going slow, big semis with extra trailers. Another one came out, and then another. My god, how many are there. I crossed my arms and sat to wait.

Another one started to follow out behind, but was going even slower, so I quickly started my bike up again, and raced out behind the one just going past, before the next one could catch up.

I followed it out on to the freeway, and overtook it, and was away.

I got off the freeway, and came all the way home, got in the door just before 10.30pm. Bloody hell, nearly an hour and a half to get home.

I took some Panadol, and I went straight to bed, at about 10.30pm.

I couldn't get to sleep though, my head was aching too much. I remember tossing and turning, kept waking up at horrible times like 1.48am, and 3.36am.