I woke up at 5.50am, listened to the radio for a bit, and fell asleep again.

I was woken up again at 6.10am by the alarm again, so I got up, and went and had a shower.

I got dressed, packed my bag, took the temporary clothes line down, had breakfast.

The other day someone needed a pen, and I realised I don't carry one anymore, so I grabbed my parker pen that's hanging around, shoved it in my pocket.

I looked at slashdot while I waited, I didn't have to wait around for long, and the senior DBA turned up, so I grabbed my bag, and went and jumped in the car. The guy from CCB was getting a lift up today, so I sat in the back.

We got on the freeway, and pulled into the service station, because the senior DBA had no fuel. I haven't been in here for ages, used to get fuel here everyday. The woman who was working everyday when I got fuel was in there, so I went in, to get a drink.

I bought a drink, there was a line, so I didn't get to speak to her very much, because she always wanted a bit of a chat in the mornings, when it wasn't particularly busy.

I went back and got in the car, and once the senior DBA had finished fuelling, and paid, we drove to work, listening to Nova until the reception dropped out, quite far this morning, we were on the back way to Maitland.

I got to work, grabbed some stuff out of my bag, and as I shut the car door, I busted my thumbnail. D'oh.

I went into work, and I need to find a pair of scissors to fix my thumbnail, because it's busted off right down low. I looked in a few sets of drawers at work, thinking someone would have a pair of scissors in their top drawer. No such luck.

I gave up, and started doing some work. I'd been sent a copy of the spec for a new project at work, that I've not been told anything about, but will probably end up doing. I looked through it, and found that they want to design something around Oracle Application Server, and in Java. Yuck, I thought the whole idea of these projects was to redesign all these crap applications we have now, and get them away from using borken stuff like Oracle AS, and J2EE.

I feel like prototyping the project in PHP, and then getting them to let me do it properly.

My thumbnail was annoying me again, I really need to fix it, so I went to the stationary cupboard to look for scissors, and found none.

While I was looking there, some woman came in to send a fax, and asked what I was looking for, I told her I was looking for scissors, and she said that I wouldn't find any there (yeah, I've figured that out actually), and told me that she had a pair, but no spares.

I'm not going to tell her that it's to cut my thumbnail, that's probably gross.

What the hell is going on? Did the useless OH&S guy deem that scissors are too much of a hazard, and we can't be trusted with them?

I realised I'd left my ipod in the car, and I wanted to get the new songs out of it that I loaded the night before, so I'll have to go and get it, and then I could use my leatherman to fix my nail.

I continued working, couldn't be bothered to go to the car, I figured I'd go later.

I saw something about an ad with John Cleese in it when I was looking at slashdot this morning, so I went and found that, and started watching the video.

One of the indexers came and asked me about scanning sizes, so we went and mucked around with the photocopier for a bit, because it can scan to TIFF and PDF, we worked out that B&W TIFFs are probably the best, because the file sizes I kept reasonable, and we should be able to OCR them.

I finished watching the John Cleese ad, pretty funny, and went back to work.

A couple of minutes later, the project manager came to me, complaining that the website was down again. I checked it, and found that yet again mysql had fallen over.

I started looking to see if anything was logged about it, as to why it shutdown. I found in the error log that it shutdown at 11.30 last night, but it doesn't say why.

I went back to work, and a couple of minutes later my phone rang, a guy from "Web Services", about the website being broken, and I told him that I'd just restarted mysql, and it was available again, so he got off the phone.

I went back to work, working on the new table design.

I got another hour or so of work done, and my phone rang again, someone from Web Services again, the website's down again. I check, yep, mysql is gone again. I restarted it, and looked through the error log.

I can't work out what the problem is, there's a whole bunch of stuff about communications packets, and then there's something about a Sig 10, and then it generates it's own Sig 11 so that it crashes, and there's stuff in there about memory allocation.

I think I might just write a watchdog script that checks that mysql is running every 15 minutes, and restarts it if it dies.

I went back to working on the table. The project manager came around asking me about the huge file from the other day, and I said that someone needs to put some sort of a PDF editor on their machine, and delete the 6000 photos out of the PDF that don't belong in it.

He then started asking me stuff about my license, and I really couldn't be bothered going through it all again.

The sysadmin came to my desk, so I started talking to him, he wanted clarification of what needs to be done to solve the issue with the mail relaying that we're having on the production server. I went through what I thought needed to be done, firewall rules, routing etc, and he said he'd contact the colo, and get them to make some changes.

I went back to work. I realised I'd forgotten to add a field I needed to the new table, D'oh. Oh well, at least these days you can add fields without having to drop and rebuild the whole table.

I added in the extra field, and then worked out how to find the details I needed to populate it.. I generated a couple of scripts, that end up having to update about 800 000 rows in Oracle, so it's going to take a while.

I kicked off the first one, waited for a bit, got fed up, and went to see about going to lunch. I went up, spoke to the senior DBA for a bit, and the sysadmin, he had to go and change some backup tapes, so we just waited.

The contract DBA came back, and said he loved the email about the dinosaur I sent the other day (Dino on the volcanic island), and told us about how he'd stayed there before, on that island.

The sysadmin came back, and we got ready to go down the road to the Thai place for lunch.

The support guy who wanted to come was on the phone, so we waited for a minute, and then he said he didn't know how long he would be, and told us to go, so we went without him.

We started walking down the road, first we stopped off at the locksmith, the senior DBA wanted to find out about getting a spare key for his limo/Merc, since it only came with one, but the guy said he had no blanks for it, couldn't copy it, and he'd have to go to the Mercedes dealer.

We kept wandering, and went into the pub we're staying at, and booked in for the next few nights, making sure to get it all sorted now, rather than get down here at 5.30pm to find they've buggered up the booking, and we don't have a room, like they've done before.

We paid, the guy telling us that the water is going to be off between 5am and 8am on Thursday morning (great, since I have a shower at 7am), we got our keys, and left, and kept heading down to the Thai place.

We got down there, took our time, ordered, chatted, ate, paid, and wandered back towards work.

On the way back, the senior DBA wanted to get some shoe polish, for his white leather shoes, while he was in there, I went into the newsagent, and bought a $1 scratchy. I won $2, I went back, and got a $2 scratchy with the winnings, and won nothing.

We walked back to work, and I went back to my desk. The first script had finished, 560 000 something rows updated, only a few hundred thousand more to go.

I ran the rest of the update scripts, they were a bit faster. Once it all looked ok, I went about modifying the PHP to use the new table.

It seemed to be working ok, so then I was able to implement the functionality of storing the results of analysing the files in the table, to avoid having to analyse every single file belonging to a report when someone looks at the report, in case they want to download it.

It took me a little while to get that in, eventually I got the logic right, I always forget to define global variables in functions, and then the value of the variables is NULL.

The project manager and the woman who used to adminstrate the old system I rewrote came around, talking about changing processes, and the scope of the project. The project manager was just trying to outline what we needed to discuss, tomorrow, at a meeting, but as usual the woman administrator always wants to get into technical details, about things that don't matter, and how the old system used to work. Argh. I don't care how the old one worked, some of it was really convoluted and dumb, the whole point of rewriting is to make it simpler, not just port the cruft to a new platform.

They arranged a meeting for tomorrow, and I went back to work.

About 4.15pm, the senior DBA told me that he was leaving, to take the guy from CCB back to where he's staying, since his computer is in the car.

I finally got around to going down to the car, to get my ipod, and the cable etc, and my leatherman to fix my thumbnail (which by this point I'd got fed up with, and just ripped it off already).

I grabbed the stuff out, and then there was a change of plans, the CCB guy was just going to load his computer into the car that belongs to the woman in the mail room, whose house he's staying at, and go back to work, so the senior DBA moved his car over near it, and we moved his pc to the other car.

I went back to work, along with the guy from CCB, and the senior DBA said he was going back to the pub, and that he'd drop my bag off in the room.

I said I'd see him later, and I went back to my desk, doing more work, while getting the new music out of my ipod.

I got an email, it was details of the meeting the project manager had been talking about earlier, damn, a 3 hour meeting. I'm going to go insane in there. I hope someone gets a cake or something.

About 5.20pm I got a call from the sysadmin, he wanted to leave, so I said that sounded good, and said I'd see him in a minute. I packed up all my stuff, and waited for him to come down to my desk, but gave up, went up to his, and he was just about to come down.

We left, went and jumped in his car, and drove down to the pubs, he dropped me off behind the one I'm staying at, and then he went and parked on the street near the pub he's staying at, across the road.

I went in the back of the pub, and up the stairs, there was some funky smell hanging around at the top of the stairs, I thought I was going to be sick. Thankfully it was localised to the the stairs, and the toilets, and wasn't so bad around near the room.

I went in, my bag was dropped off in here, I dumped the other stuff I had on me (ipod, sunglasses, floppy disk for laptop etc), and then I left the room, decided to use the loo not near the funky smell, and went back down the stairs.

I wandered through the bar, no one I knew was in there, so I left, walked to the pub where the sysadmin was staying, realised I didn't have his mobile number.

I got a drink, and some change for the pokies, $5. I went into the pokies room, and started playing the pokies while I waited for the senior DBA to call me.

I almost went through the $5, held on to a dollar, and had a couple of $2 coins. I thought about having a practice game of pool, by myself, but then couldn't be bothered, so I put it through the pokies.

As I was playing the last dollar, the senior DBA called me, and I said I was here playing the pokies, he asked what I was wanting to do for dinner, we'd been invited over to the woman who works in the mail room's place, and could order some pizzas or something.

I said that sounded ok, and I'd see him when he got back over here (he was driving around somewhere I assume), and he said to keep playing the pokies.

I ran the last dollar out, and figured I'd just slowly go through a couple of dollars out of the $20 note I'd got in change after buying the drink.

I put that in, and started playing it, not really getting anywhere. The other guy who'd been playing the pokies left, I kept playing.

I went and played the machine he'd been on, and put a few dollars through it, and managed to activate the free games feature twice, and won about $7 each time.

I fritted some of this down, accidently because I had it on 2 credits/line. The senior DBA turned up, and I pulled out what credit I had on the machine, about $8, which ended up getting me back to $22, down $3 from when I started.

The senior DBA gave me a dollar to put through the machine, which I did, and got the free spins again, winning him about $6. I took it out at $5 and gave it to him, he went and played a different machine, and just lost it all.

We got drinks, and went and sat in what was left of the beer garden out the back, not much, since the construction site has expanded, now there's just room for 2 tables, and a few chairs, and it was pretty dark out here, because the wiring's all been ripped out in the construction site while they're renovating.

We sat and drank, a few people wandering out to the toilets (in a portable building in the carpark behind the pub, because they've been ripped out too) commented on how dark it was.

The senior DBA called the sysadmin, he came down a little bit later, and said he'd been watching the news in his room, and fallen asleep.

We chatted for a while, we'd been thinking about getting him to drive some of us over to the woman from the mail room's place, since there were 5 of us going, but then he said he was tired, and couldn't be bothered, which was fine, because then there were only 4 of us (a chick from work, her boyfriend, the senior DBA, and myself) so we could all pile in the chick's car.

The senior DBA called her to arrange it, and she said she'd be there to pick us up between now (6.30pm) and 7pm. We waited, and chatted, and got another call from her at about 7.05pm, saying that she'd be there in about 15 minutes.

She did turn up about then, with her boyfriend, and the senior DBA had just got another beer, so the chicks boyfriend got a drink, and we had to wait for them to finish.

The four of us left, and the sysadmin said he was going to wander down to the pizza place near the cinemas, we said we'd see him tomorrow.

We left the pub, and went and jumped in the car, and drove towards the woman from the mail room's place, we stopped at the bottle shop on the way, because she'd sms'd the senior DBA that she wanted a pack of smokes, and we wanted grog anyway.

We went in, I was looking for JD & lemonade in a can, but they didn't have any, only a blank spot in the fridge where they may have been.

The guy behind the counter said they were almost out of everything. I couldn't find any other premixed spirits with lemonade (that weren't chicks drinks), and I didn't want anything with Coke, I can't stand the stuff anymore, it's just liquid indigestion.

I ended up getting a bottle of Riccadonna, and the senior DBA got a 6 pack of Becks, and the smokes for the mail room woman.

We realised the guy behind the counter was the useless guy from the pub we were staying in, who kept ballsing up the reservations, and leaving us without a room. We spoke to him for a bit, he doesn't have much to do with the pub anymore (I wonder why), and then we finished paying, jumped back in the car, and the chick from work drove us to the mail room woman's place.

We wandered in, the CCB guy was there watching the Simpsons, and the mail room woman's 4yo daughter was running around. I sat and watched the tv, the others were all out the back smoking.

We just sat around for a while, I opened the bottle of Riccadonna, and started drinking, and eventually we organised ordering the pizzas, and the useless pizza place tried to argue that what I wanted on my pizza (beef, ham, onion, diced tomato) counted as more than 4 toppings, because I also wanted cheese. Uh, since when is cheese counted as a topping? it's like asking "would you like a base with that?".

Eventually that got sorted out, and paid for with the senior DBA's credit card.

The chick from work on the phone noticed that the "e" from the end of his name was missing off his credit card, and apparently it's because his father had dropped the "e" on his birth certificate, because he was used to signing his own name (which had an "e") on architectural designs, and it was easier to fit his name without the "e" on the end, and now the senior DBA is trying to get his name changed officially, to include the "e", since the rest of his family has one.

Anyway, once that was done, we sat around and waited, and the pizzas turned up about 1/2 hour later. Some chick delivered, them, and the credit card had to be signed for. WTF? I've never had to do that before, it's a telephone transaction, it doesn't require a signature. Useless.

I went and found the senior DBA, he was out the back smoking, he came in, and tried to sign the receipt. The pizza delivery chick didn't have a pen, so we tried to find one, there was one on the floor. The senior DBA tried using it, but it wouldn't work. I remembered that I had my pen in my pocket.. I went to grab it.. and found that it wasn't there.

Oh terrific, I've lost the bloody thing _again_. That must be about the 10th time I've lost it, the last couple of times, it was lost in Mum's car for about a year, and then when I got it back, I took it a job I did at Hornsby, and lost it there for a couple of months.

Now I think it's gone. I can't remember the last time I felt it in my pocket today.. it was in with my wallet, so it could have come out at any of the times I've needed my wallet today.

Let's see.. first I bought the juice at the service station, so it could be there, or in the back of the car, then I got to work, and had to get through 2 security doors, with my access card that's in my wallet, so it could be in the car park, or in the building somewhere.

Then I went for lunch, and paid for the Thai, so I could have dropped it on the street there, I would have used it to get back in the building when I got back from lunch, or when I bought the drinks at the pub.

If it lasted that long, it could have ended up in the back of the chick from work's car on the way here, or maybe it's in the lounge I was sitting on.

Meanwhile, the senior DBA found a pencil on the floor, signed the receipt, and we got the pizzas.

I started looking around for my pen quickly, in the lounge, on the floor etc, no sign of it. It's probably long gone, dropped at the service station this morning.

I sat and ate my pizza, the chick from work sat down, and then her boyfriend came to eat. The mail room woman and the senior DBA were out the back chatting and smoking, they were out there for ages, because by the time they came in, I'd eaten 5/6 of the pizza, had enough, and nearly finished the bottle of wine.

I went and sat on the lounge, there wasn't room for all of us at the table anyway, and finished the bottle.

We sat around for a while, another hour or so, and then we left, since we were all getting a bit tired.

I checked around in the back of the car for my pen, but it wasn't there. Bugger.

The senior DBA and I got dropped back at the pub we were staying at, and went in, the smell had subsided somewhat, we got to the room, I looked through my stuff, I hadn't accidently emptied it out of my pockets when I was here before.

I went to bed, a bit after 11pm.