I woke up at 6.35am as usual, lay in waiting for the radio to come on.

It came on at 6.50am, wasn't tuned properly, so I got up and fixed it, and then lay in again. I probably could have just started getting ready at this point, but I don't really want to be at work at 7.20am.

I lay in, listened to radio until the end of the news at 7.10am, then I went and had a shower and got ready.

I brought the shirt I won at the Bundy factory up with me this week, so I decided to wear it today.

I'd just made some toast when some guy came out, I spoke to him for a bit, he works for DPI too, he's over from Armidale.

When I was nearly finished, I went around and knocked on the door of the room that the senior DBA was staying in, no answer, he's probably in having a shower or something, I just wanted to make sure that he was up.

I went back, finished my breakfast. The senior DBA came wandering out, he had still been in bed. I told him that I was going to work, and I'd probably see him there later, and then I went back in my room, grabbed the stuff I needed at work (jumper, ipod to charge it, floppy with blogs from last night, room key), and then I walked to work.

The senior DBA had to move his stuff from the room he was in last night, into the room I was in last night, because we're both in there tonight and tomorrow, so I left the door unlocked.

I got to work, sat and did some testing of the code I've written in the last couple of weeks. I need to get this into production at some point today.

I got an email telling me that there's a morning tea this morning, for the Director of the section that I'm contracted too. They had his dinner last night, which I didn't end up going to.

I went out there, thought I'd have a cup of tea.. hmm.. there's a box of leaf tea here, but no tea bags, WTF? I saw that a couple of the indexers had teabags, and I asked if I was blind, or if it was BYO teabag, they said it was the latter, and offered me one, they were on their desk.

I remembered that I had a box of teabags that the temping agency sent me on my birthday, so I grabbed one of them, went back and made a cup of tea.

Quite a few people commented on my shirt, apparently it goes very well with my fading green/yellow hair (I didn't fix it this weekend when I was at home, I don't see the point, I've got to get rid of it in a couple of weeks to go to court, so I'll just left it fade out a bit).

We listened to all the speeches, and the director was given a bunch of presents, a signed book, a mining report, a card with a photo taken in 1986 when the director started (the current time he's been working for the department), the first geological map of NSW printed, framed, a bottle of wine, (since he's going to work for the SA Minerals, near the Barrossa, instead of in the Hunter here).

He was also given the first Geological Survey shirt made recently.

The cute chick I keep seeing at these things was sitting under the stairs, with the women from the mail room, and the chick we were at the pub with last night, so when all the speeches finished, and we could eat, I wandered over to speak to them. The cute chick didn't say anything, I just chatted with the others, and then went back to work.

I did another couple of hours of work, about 12.30pm I sent an email to the senior DBA, asking if it was lunch time yet, because I was bored and cold, (the airconditioning is still not fixed, I'm waiting for ice to start coming out of the grill above my desk).

He replied, saying he was going outside for a cigarette. I wandered out to the front of the building, and bumped into him coming down the stairs. We went outside, chatted for a bit, while he had a smoke, and then we went back inside.

He didn't want to go to lunch yet, because there were people over from Orange, and he wanted to see them off before they left back to Orange, so I went upstairs with him.

I chatted to one of the big managers for a while, he rides a bike too, so we chatted about that, him telling me how one night on his way into Orange he'd hit a roo while going about 140km/hr, and had only ended up swerving onto the wrong side of the road, not coming off his bike, damn, that's lucky.

A few minutes later, the sysadmin, the senior DBA and I left to go to lunch.

We walked down the road, and went into the cafe we were going to for a while, both the sysadmin and I noticed the special on the board outside, chicken kiev, that sounds ok.

We went in, sat down, the senior DBA had to work out what he wanted, we chatted for a while. We ordered our food, the sysadmin asked what chicken kiev was, and the woman explained to him how it's chicken, went to say breast, but then said that it wasn't breast, was thigh, stuffed with garlic butter and crumbed.

Hmm, I'm pretty sure that chicken kiev is supposed to be chicken breast, whatever, so we both ordered that, and the senior DBA ordered a roll or a sandwich or something.

We got drinks, sat and chatted, and our food was served a little bit later. While we were eating, the senior DBA saw the contract DBA go past in his car, strange, he's leaving early, but then the senior DBA said he'd mentioned something about going to get something done on his car, to do with the damage on the side.

I said that I would have thought that would have been all sorted out by now, paid for by the insurance of the idiot that ran into him ages ago. Neither of them knew the story about that, so I told them what the contract DBA told me, how the Toyota Echo had T boned him on the roundabout at Erina, and then the Echo had self destructed, leaving a scratch on the side of the contract DBA's car.

The Echo was written off, the engine ended up coming through the firewall, and ended up between the 2 front seats, the driver ended up sitting in the back seat, the back rest of the drivers seat just collapsed, he was still holding the steering wheel, that had come off the steering column, and both stop lights popped out the back of the car, and were hanging there by the wiring.

The food wasn't terrific, all brown chicken, I picked around all that, and it was a waste of time putting the leg or whatever bone it was in there, because it had no meat on it.

The senior DBA said he was just going across the road to the pub for a minute (where we were staying), and the syadmin and I continued eating, and chatting.

The senior DBA came back a few minutes later, paid for his lunch, and then sat outside and had a smoke.

We finished our lunches, went and paid, and went out near the senior DBA, and then we walked back to work.

The usual building manager (who's always having a go at me for something) is on holidays at the moment, his temporary replacement was in chucking stuff in the dumpster when we got back to the building. The dumpster is in a caged area of the car park, we joked that she'd been locked up, and said we'd come back with some food, things like Twisties, that would fit through the cage.

We went back in to work, I went back to my desk.

I'd been testing the new code I've written over the last couple of weeks all morning, and hadn't found any problems, so I decided to update the internal production system, which doubles as a testing environment, (there's only a few people using it at the moment), so I pushed the new code up there.

I asked the woman who used to look after the old system to go through it, and see if she could find any problems.

While I was standing near here, I heard a discussion starting up between the project manager, the indexers' manager, and one of the indexers, it was about that huge file that I didn't want to load into the system.

I just listened in for a few minutes, and it wasn't really going in a direction that I was liking, apparently they had rejected the reoprt once, and then it had come back again, slightly smaller, but still ridiculously over the spec that we say we accept, and now they were talking about just giving up and accepting it.

I'm not having that. We say we want files around 10M, with a maximum of 20M for a reason, if you start accepting 135MB files, then everyone is going to send them in, the system's going to become useless to people on slow connections (even basic broadband will have trouble with that), and people are going to be downloading bunches of stuff they don't want or need, to get the stuff they do want or need.

The saw my way, and said they'd reject the file again. At this point my manager came out, looking for a Nokia charger, I told him to use the one on my desk, and then we continued our discussion, he asked what we were talking about, the indexers' manager explained it to him, and he agreed with me, that we reject the report again, and again, until they send what we say we'll accept.

I went back to testing the new code with the woman who looked after the old system, I was trying to test a bit of code I'd put in, but it didn't seem to be working, I figured I must have stuffed up my logic.

I went back and looked at the code, found that the logic was right, it was my memory of what logic I'd put in there that was wrong, so I was able to test that properly after that.

My phone rang, I answered it, it was the senior DBA, apparently there was a couple of things up in IT they wanted me to look at, so I said I'd be up in a few minutes.

I briefly spoke to the woman again, and then I went upstairs.

The contract DBA who'd wanted to see me about a problem with cron wasn't there, so I spoke to the senior DBA for a bit. The tiny guy from royalty who we always bag out as looking like he's 12 years old was acting the age he looks, and making a real pest of himself.

He'd taken the senior DBAs cigarettes, and filled up the packet with coffee grounds, which he took great pride in showing me, and then he showed me the other nonsense he'd been up to, undoing the strap on the DBAs laptop bag, and strapping it around the desk, and then filling up his bag with junk, and taking his jumper, and putting a big P on the back of it with masking tape.

The senior DBA had enough of him at this point (even though he's responsible for encouraging him), and they started having a play fight, the DBA trying to wrap masking tape around the little guy.

He eventually was told to go back to his desk, which he did, and then found a holepunch, opened it, and put it in front of the fan on the DBAs desk, resulting in little circles of paper flying all over the desk.

The contract DBA came back at this point, so I started talking to him, to work out what the problem with cron was that he was having.

The senior DBA told the little guy to come and clean the paper up, and the little guy just wiped it all off the desk on to the floor. The senior DBA told him to go away again, and then picked up all the paper off the floor.

I looked at what the contract DBA was trying to do, we tried a few different things, but it just kept resulting in a java error, something about a class def not found.

I looked a bit more closely at the script, and noticed that the java line had a dot in it, refering to the current directory.. but when the script was run from cron, there is no current directory, or it's / or something, so that's not going to work.

I suggested that he put a cd command in the line above, so the dot reference might work, we ran it again, the next minute in cron, and it worked. Sweet.

The senior DBA asked me to help him now, there was a problem with one of the production systems, when it was supposed to be querying the database and returning some data, it would take ages, and then just come back with nothing.

Before we got a chance to look at this, the senior DBAs phone rang, it was the guy from Orange who's supposed to be looking after the website, telling him that the website was supposedly wrong.

We checked that, and yes, mysql had stuffed up again, and the host was blocked from connecting to itself, so we did the "flush-hosts" thing again, and got it back working.

We went back to looking at the other system. Now instead of taking ages and coming back with nothing, it was taking ages and coming back with a 404.

I went looking to work it out, but couldn't find where the file it was trying to access was, or was supposed to be. No wonder there's a 404, but the files haven't changed for months.

I mucked around, we stopped all of Oracle, the application server, the interface between application server and the tables, even the tables. We brought it all back up again, and it was still doing the same thing.

What the hell is going on here?

I had been checking prstat, thinking perhaps some http processes had gone defunct, or something was eating all the cpu or memory (like convert does sometimes when people try to convert A0 size pages between TIFF/JPEG in my system, but I blocked people from doing that months ago).

The only think that looked strange was the license server for some geospatial software, eating 40% of the cpu, so I restarted that, and then the production application magically started working again.

Hooray. I went back to my desk. I was hoping to get the external production code updated, but with all the other problems on that box today (the website and the application I just fixed, and the cron stuff were all on the same server), I decided to leave it for today.

I got an email from Dell, telling me about "up to $1000 cash off", oh yeah, so I went an looked, the laptop I'm interested in, that I customised up the other day, and was really tempted to buy, the 2200, only had $80 off.

The base price has dropped by $100 though, so after customising it again, with a 60gb disk, and a bigger capacity battery, it was less than $1400. There's a free screen upgrade on it too, to a 15" screen, but it was only 1024x768, I'm sure when I looked the other day it had a higher res screen in the 15".

There's no bag either.. and the backpack is like $100, so that ends up nearly $1500, maybe I'll think about it a bit more.

I did a bit more work, a few tests in the testing system, and then I went up to see who was left in the office.

The sysadmin was still there, just finishing up, I waited while he grabbed his stuff. I noticed the senior DBA had left his jumper and sunglasses here when he'd left, so I took those.

I went down to the carpark with the sysadmin, and he moved his car into the secure carpark under the building, leaving it here for the night.

Annoyingly, it was starting to rain, we walked down to the pub. The sysadmin asked me what I was doing for dinner, I said I didn't know, I speak to the others first, and work it out. He told me that he wanted to go to the Thai place down the road that we went to for lunch the other day, I said that sounded ok, a nice change from pub food.

The sysadmin was staying in a different pub this week (one that has a tv in the rooms!) and he'd told the people in the pub where I was staying (and he had last week) that he wasn't in town this week, as a way to avoid taking his booking in that pub.

He went in where he was staying, and I went into the other pub. I dropped off my stuff at the room, and then went back down, and found the senior DBA and a guy from CCB in the bar, so I sat with them, and got a drink.

The others had already been drinking, and got more drinks.

A few minutes later, the sysadmin called the senior DBA, I answered it, told him where we were, and it was at this point that he explained to me about telling the staff in here that he wasn't in town this week, so he couldn't really just rock in to the front bar.

I said we'd give him a call when we were planning to go for dinner.

I got off the phone, told the others what was going on, and that the sysadmin wanted to go for dinner at the Thai etc.

We sat and watched the news for a while. The guy who looks after the email systems at work popped in, we spoke to him for a bit, and then we went home.

We saw the social club guy from work going upstairs, so the senior DBA and I went across to the pub where the syadmin was staying, and the guy from CCB got another beer, and waited for the social club guy, and then they'd come across.

We went over, the senior DBA called the sysadmin, and told him that we were in the bar of the pub where he was staying, so he could come down there.

We got drinks, and then the senior DBA and I went in and played the pokies, waste of time and money, oh well, it was only $2.

We came back out, and decided to have a game of pool, so I paid, and racked up the balls.

The sysadmin came down, and the senior DBA and I played pool.

I was playing shockingly. Not enough alcohol yet to play acceptably. I kept making the worst shots, missing everything, putting the white in, putting the wrong balls in.

I ended up putting the black ball in when there was still about 6 balls left on the table, that was the end of that.

I spent the next few minutes taking some practice shots, and wasn't too bad then, after already having totally stuffed up, typical.

We chatted for a while, and then the guy from CCB and the social club guy came in. We all chatted for a few minutes, and then started heading down to the Thai restaurant. The social club guy had to go back and get his spray jacket, because it was "raining". Pff, raining.. it's not even sprinkling, there is a spot of water here and there.

I had to make the Bogan comment "what, are you fuckin' made of sugar?" in response to them saying it was raining.

We dawdled along, waiting for the social club guy, and then we walked down to the restaurant. There was some stray dog hanging around, and the senior DBA kept encouraging it. I didn't want a bar of that, I don't want some mangy animal hanging around.

The stupid dog ended up following us all the way down the road.

We got to the Thai, it was a BYO, so then we walked over to the pub nearby to get some takeaway grog.

As we walked across there, the social club guy asked if we'd been to the mexican restaurant in the pub a bit down the road from there. We told him that we had, quite a few weeks ago, when the guy from Orange who took over IT was supposed to be going back to Orange, as a farewall, and then he didn't end up going back anyway.

We told him how it had been very expensive, and the crappy banquet ended up with them just bringing out 3 or 4 entree dishes between us, with tons of cheese on everything, and carrot, and there was no main meal. it was totally greasy, and I couldn't handle eating all that cheese.

The sysadmin added in that it cost him an extra $100, because he bit down on something, and chipped his tooth, and had to go to the dentist and get it fixed the next day.

We got to the pub to get the grog, the others went in on a couple of bottles of red wine, but it undoubtedly would have had preservative 220 in it, and I don't feel like having a concussion when I wake up tomorrow.

I saw they had Becks, so I figured I'd get a couple of those, I got some money out of the ATM, and got 3 bottles of Becks.. $11.40, the guy must have stuffed something up there, seems far too cheap, especially since 1 Becks or Heinekin is $8 in the pub where we're staying.

We walked back to the Thai, sat in there, and looked at the menus. The social club guy asked what people thought of sharing, and I said that I wasn't really big on the idea, mainly because there wasn't all that much on the menu that interested me, and I didn't want to end up with everyone pinching what ever I did decide to get, and not wanting any of whatever they got.

We ordered our entrees, and mains, taking ages, because people didn't know what they wanted.

Once that was done, they opened the wines for us, and I started on a beer. D'oh.. pop top, and I don't have my keys, with the bottle opener on the keyring. I used the key from the hotel room to get the top off, shooting it across the room accidently, oops.

This lead the social club guy to tell us a story about the fact that Cascade Premium is his favourite beer, and it always came in a pop top, and then one night he was at a function, and it was provided. He looked around, and saw a couple of other people drinking them, so he figured that one of them must have had a bottle opener.

He went over, and asked one of them to open the beer for him, they looked at him a bit weird, took the bottle off him, twisted the twist top off, and then handed it back to him, making him feel like a dope.

Apparently it had only been fairly recently that it had changed from a pop top to a twist top.

The entrees came out, I'd ordered a chicken soup, it was pretty spicy, and a couple of times I sucked down a bit of chilli from it, and it made my eyes water.

The others all had pastry type stuff, curry puffs, spring rolls etc. They were all swapping (which I can't very well do with a soup), the senior DBA swapped a curry puff for some weird looking vegetable roll thing.

He's alergic to seafood, so he checked it, and found that it had a couple of prawns in it, so then he started freaking out about having it on his plate, so he asked me to grab that and eat it.

We finished our entrees, and the senior DBA and the social club guy went outside to have a smoke. The social club guy took his glass of wine outside with him, and then the Thai waitress went off her nut, about how he's not allowed out there with it. Why are you telling us love? we're inside, he's the one outside, we don't really care, so then she went outside and told him, and brought the glass of wine back inside.

Gees, how paranoid.

They started serving the mains, once all the mains were served, and some fried rice etc, the others came back in from outside.

I'd ordered a stir fried pork dish, with plum sauce, that was pretty good. The others had curries and stuff, which didn't interest me.

We sat there for quite a while eating and chatting, and then the senior DBA and social club guy went out for a smoke again, and the staff came and collected our empty plates.

There was still a bit of food in a few of the dishes, so they asked if we wanted to take it away, the sysadmin wanted it, but I said that we didn't really have anywhere to put it, but then remembered that there is a fridge in the common area in the pub, so he could put it in there.

He had them pack up some of the dishes. The guys came back in from outside, the senior DBA came to the table, threw down $30, and said he was going back to the room, but we just told him to wait, because we were leaving in a minute.

The social club guy had disappeared, he came back a couple of minutes later. Then they gave us the bill, and a few dinner mints.

It came to $119.90, not bad for a dinner for 5, we all put in. First we worked out it was $24 each, I put this in, because I only had $20 notes, and some gold coins that came to $24. I noticed $5 sitting on my jeans, it must have been floating around in my pocket and come out when I took my wallet out.

The social club guy then upped it to $25 each, so I was a smartass, and with the pile of money sitting there, I said "I'll see you 4, and raise you 1", like we were playing poker, as I put the $5 note in, and took the $4 worth of change back.

The social club guy counted up the money, and there was $120 there. Wow, a 10c tip.

We all went through our pockets, and dumped whatever shrapnel we had on there as a tip, they probably ended up with $5 or $6 worth of change.

There was still half a bottle of wine left, and it was a screwtop wine, so they got the cap for that, and I still had a beer left.

We left the restaurant, and wandered back up towards the pub where we were staying. I ate a couple of the after dinner mints, and then noticed that my tooth that I've had root canal done on felt funny.

The crap music was still going in the mall, that they play to stop gangs congregating there or whatever, and because they were all half pissed, they started dancing ridiculously to it as we walked through the mall.

We got back to the pub that 3 of us were staying in. The sysadmin didn't want to come in, because of the fact he'd told the staff he wasn't up this week etc, but we managed to convince him to come in, since he could sneak up the stairs without anyone seeing him.

The guy from CCB must have got a taxi and gone back where he was staying at that point, because he didn't come in.

We got upstairs, dumped some stuff in our room, I checked my tooth in the mirror, and I had chipped my tooth.

At least it doesn't hurt, I think they killed the nerve or ripped it out when I had the root canal done, I'll have to go to the dentist and get it fixed though, great.

We went and sat on the balcony, I took my beer, the social club guy and the senior DBA had the wine to finish off, and the sysadmin doesn't drink, so he just had a glass of the nasty tang out of the fridge.

The senior DBA was in the room rolling a joint, and he was in there for ages. The social club guy went to find out what he was doing, and then he disappeared for ages too. The sysadmin and I sat there chatting for a while, he couldn't stand to drink more than half the glass of tang, and I wasn't really in the mood for beer, but I drank it anyway.

The social club guy came back out again, and sat and had a cigarette. He couldn't get the lighter to work properly, when he finally did, I jhad a look to see if it was one of the adjustable Bic ones, it was.

I popped the guard thing off, and went about turning the adjustment dial around a bunch of times, and then tested it, and found the flame to come out about 10cm, sweet.

I haven't done that for ages. Used to be funny for watching people take their eyebrows off as they lit up.

The senior DBA came back a while later, he must have wandered off somewhere to smoke. We chatted for a bit, and then he went to have a cigarette. The social club guy started to tell him about the lighter, but then the DBA commented that it was the last cigarette, which annoyed the social club guy, because they didn't have any more, so I told him it was at that point he be quiet.

The DBA put the cigarette in his mouth, and grabbed the lighter, and went about trying to light his cigarette, because he knew it took a bunch of goes to get the lighter to work, he cupped his hands around it, and then flicked it a couple of times, and it lit, with a huge flame.

We pissed ourselves laughing, he hadn't burnt himself or anything, it was just the shock of the huge flame near his face.

We sat and chatted for a while, and then the DBA said he was going to bed at about 10pm, and the sysadmin said he was going too, so he left, forgetting to take his takeaway food from the restaurant, or put it in the fridge.

I chatted to the social club guy for a little while, and then said I was going to bed.

I went in, and went to bed. I'd been intending to get an hour or so of blogging in, but the DBA had gone to bed, and I doubted that he wanted me hammering away on the laptop like a machine gun across the room for an hour.

Oh well an early night'll be good for once.