I woke up, lay in bed for a bit, got up, and then bummed around on the computer, and watched tv.

About midday, my phone rang, it was my mate, the drummer, he wanted to know if I wanted to go and get some lunch.

I said it sounded ok, and I'd see him in a bit, and got off the phone.

I continued bumming around on computer for a while, and then I went and had a shower, and got ready.

I sat around and waited, and my mate turned up. As we went to leave, I went to take my sunglasses, and realised that I'd stepped on them at some point, D'oh.

I'm not having much luck with glasses. I bought this crappy pair to replace the ones I lost the lens out of at the beach a few weeks ago.

I decided I'd just buy another new crappy pair when we were at the shopping centre.

We jumped in the car, and headed out to Erina Fair. On the way, my mate's phone rang. I answered, since he was driving, it was our other mate that goes to concerts with us everynow and then, and who also works in Maitland sometimes.

He told us that he was already out there, in HMV, so we said we'd see him in a few minutes, and got off the phone.

We kept going, got to Erina Fair, parked, walked in, and found our mate.

We went into get some lunch, I realised I needed cash, so I went to the ATM, and then went and bought some lunch, and sat and ate it.

After that, I went to the juice bar, and got a drink, and then the three of us wandered around the centre a bit.

We went into the ABC Shop, and we looked at The Goodies stuff, there's some good stuff (bad pun).

Didn't get anything, it's all a bit pricey. We walked over to JB HiFi after that, and browsed around.

I wasn't going to get anything, but then I saw "National Lampoons Vacation" cheap, and decided to get that.

We came back across to the centre after that, and went into Coles. I don't remember if I bought anything, but I probably did.

Then we went into the bottle shop, and decided not to buy anything, and went out again.

My mate dropped me off at home after that, and I sat and watched some tv, and just generally bummed around, on the computer, playing the guitar etc.

At about 6pm, my phone rang, it was my mate's brother in law in Bundaberg again.

I spoke to him for a minute, and then I called him back, since his phone had no credit, and spoke to him about the computer.

We went through using LSPFix, but it couldn't fix the problem with the DNS issues, it's something else doing it.

I tried doing some nslookups, (or asked him to), which fail when DNS is b0rked, but they were working, so it can't be a DNS problem.

I got him to telnet to a webserver, and do a "GET /", which worked. Hmm, this is getting weirder.. there doesn't seem to be a TCP level issue, but neither FireFox or IE will work to web browse.

I knew I hadn't put a firewall on there, so it can't be that.

The only other thing that I thought about, was that perhaps it was something to do with the Avast web protection, since it acts as a transparent proxy.

We mucked around with that for a bit, pausing it didn't help, but terminating it did. Once we stopped it altogether, the browsing started working again.

I couldn't find how to permanantly disable it, it would restart the next time the computer was rebooted, so we went through the configuration, and I found where to change the port it was intercepting requests to, ie 80, and had him change it to 8080.

That all seemed to be fine, so then I got off the phone.

A few minutes later, I got an SMS on my phone from him, telling me there was a timeout while trying to get to hotmail or something.

Ugh. I don't have the patience to deal with this write now, I figured I'd call him back later, but then totally forgot about it.

I made a Long Island Iced Tea, but for some reason it tasted horrible. I drank it anyway, can't waste perfectly good alcohol.

I put on dinner, a frozen pizza, waited for it cook, and then ate the pizza, and had another drink.

I watched tv, and then decided to watch Blues Brothers.

Once that was finished, I went to bed, watching tv, and fell asleep, and left the tv on.