The radio woke me up at 6.50am this morning, for once I didn't wake up at 6.35am.

I slept in a bit, ended up getting up at 7.25am. The senior DBA joked that he was already ready for work, because he'd slept in his clothes.

He couldn't find his phone, so I tried calling it, and got some message about sending an SMS or something.

He was worried that he'd left it in the pub last night.

I started getting ready, went and had a shower etc. When I came back, the senior DBA told me he'd found his phone, it was in his car.

He didn't know what had gone on, because the car was unlocked, and the drivers seat was reclined, like someone had been sleeping in there.

I decided to iron my shirt, and the senior DBA said he was suprised to see me ironing, and I said I wanted to look good for when I go to the movies tonight (getting him wound up that I'm going to make him go to the royalty manager's dinner on his own).

I had some breakfast, and then we left, and headed for work. The senior DBA went the long way, so his car would warm up, and then I came to work.

I started doing some work, and then the project manager came to me with a diagram he'd done, based on the discussions we had in the meeting yesterday, I suggested a couple of changes, since I see the flow working a bit different, and then went back to work.

The senior DBA kept sending me emails, getting me to tell the royalty guy I'm going to dinner, and I kept winding him up, saying I wasn't sure etc.

I got another email, expecting it to be from the senior DBA, but it was from some busy body woman at work, telling us all about morning tea this morning.

I kept working, and then decided to go and see the manager in royalty, to let him know that I would be coming to dinner tonight.

I went out, and realised the morning tea was on, so I grabbed a bit of cake, and then kept going. I went upstairs, the manager from royalty was on the phone, so I went and spoke to the senior DBA, winding him up a bit more, that I was going to tell the guy I wasn't going.

I hung around for a while, but he stayed on the phone, so I gave up, and said I'd send an email, and went back downstairs.

Almost all of the food was gone by now, I grabbed a few biscuits, stood around, and then decided to go back to work.

I sent an email to the royalty manager, and told him I would be coming to dinner tonight.

I continued working on the script to look after the website, and put it in for a test. I had to be able to check the email, for the output from cron. I started looking through the email, but there's about 250 emails in there.

While I was looking through them, I got a call from the sysadmin, he said one of the big managers in Orange wanted to talk about the website issues, and did I want to go up there for a conference call, or him come down here.

I said I'd go up there, and I gave up looking through the emails, and I went upstairs. He was already on the phone, so he put it on speakerphone, and we sat and had a conversation for about 20 minutes, about the architecture of the webserving, other applications the servers run, and the issues we're having.

When I got off the phone, the little guy from royalty who we bag out for looking like he's 12 years old came over, and started having a go about making conference calls in the main area of the office, rather than going into a "quiet room" or something.

I wasn't having a bar of it, and I told him that he was welcome to go into the "quiet room" while the sysadmin and I had been on the phone, or that because the office is a large place, he could have taken himself elsewhere.

The sysadmin showed me an email he'd received, it was from the script I'd written, and I'd stuffed something up, the path wasn't set or something.

The manager of royalty came over, and the senior DBA was telling him that he can't eat fish or seafood, so I thought it a relevant time to mention that I can't have dairy products. The manager of royalty thought it was a joke, that we were trying to be funny, and make things difficult for him for a laugh.

We went out to lunch after that, and we all went down to subway, except for the senior DBA, who went somewhere else, and got a sandwich. We sat outside subway, and ate our food.

When I was finishing up my food, I felt that something was wrong. I looked up, and there was a bird perched on the street light directly above me, looking like it was going to take a crap.

I quickly moved my chair away from there, and then figured it had been a false alarm, but about a minute after I moved, the bird did indeed crap, right where I had been sitting before I moved.

We finished our food, and then walked back to work. On the way I mentioned about the fact I had to go to court, and I explained the situation to the guy that looks after the phones/comms stuff. He said his neighbour is a police sergeant (sp?), and when they get things like the registration details wrong, the case gets thrown out.

I said I might have to go and talk to another solicitor about that, since the one the other day told me not to argue about that.

I got back to work, and went back to my desk, when I got back, there was a message left on my mobile, it was from the guy at Shelley Beach whose computer/wireless stuff I went to fix up ages ago.

He wanted someone to look at his wife's computer. Well, that's a bit hard now, since I don't do that anymore, don't spend any time on the coast anymore, and don't have a license, or way to get to Shelley Beach.

I tried to ring my mate, who lives in Wyong, to see if he wanted to go and fix the machine, but he didn't answer his phone, so I left a message.

I fixed up the script I'd been working on before, to look after the website, and ran another test. It should work this time.

I took some time, and I wrote up the documentation about the script, and what the usual fixes for the website were, like the guy in Orange had asked me to do.

A while later, I got a call from the guy I used to travel on the train with, who I was going to start the ISP with.

He wanted to know if I could come and contract where he was, to setup some bluetooth stuff, because they're exhibiting at Cebit in a few weeks, and they want to be able to beam people contact details wirelessly or something.

I told him that I couldn't help him, because I know nothing at all about bluetooth, I've never used it, configured it, or anything.

I also had a bit of a chat, and told him how I'd been suspended, and had to live at work now, and had to go to court to sort it out.

While I was on the phone, the senior DBA kept trying to call me, on my desk phone (since I was on my mobile), and the 4th he rang, I made my excuses, got off the mobile, and answered the desk phone.

The senior DBA wanted to know about the stuff in cron on different servers, because he'd been asked to document it. I answered his questions, and then got off the phone, asking him to leave one of the servers until last, because I was working on the crontab file (adding in the script I'd written and tested earlier).

I finished the documentation I was writing, and then I emailed it to the sysadmin, and went up there, to go through putting it up on their intranet, and also to see if I'd fixed the script up. The output of the script was good, so that was fixed, and the documentation went into their technical intranet.

While I was up there, the little guy from royalty was mucking around, he'd made up one of those string/cup telephones, and was using it to talk to the senior DBA over the partition.

I couldn't handle all the nonsense, so I went back to my desk, and went back to work.

A little while later, I got a call from one of the guys in web services, he wanted the IP address of one of our servers for some reason, I think because DNS doesn't work across the VPN client they're using to connect to our LAN.

I got off the phone, and then he rang me back again a minute later, and explained that he'd rung the wrong number.

I went back to work, the senior DBA called me a bit later, saying that dinner was at 6.30pm (I still hadn't confirmed that I was going yet, was winding him up), and that he was leaving for the day, I think this was about 3.30pm.

I did some more work, and then I had a quick look at slashdot, and saw an article about the new a380, massive plane. I was looking at some pictures of that, when one of the indexers came past, and had a look, then he sent me an email about a huge rollercoaster, here.

I had a look at that, and then I got a call from the sysadmin, he told me that he was leaving, I told him I still had more work to do.

I did some more work, and about 1/2 hour after calling me, the sysadmin came down, and said that now he was leaving. I left with him, and we walked up the road to the pubs we were staying in.

I went into the pub I was staying in, noticed it was 5.05pm, I lay down for a while, until close to 6pm I think, and then I went down to the bar, with the senior DBA. I had a beer, and he bought a bottle of wine for us to take to dinner, I checked, and it didn't have preservative 220 in it, so I could drink some of it.

We sat down, I had a beer, and then we drove to the royalty manager's place. We couldn't remember exactly where it was, so we went to the house we thought it was, and it was right.

We went in, sat and had a few drinks (the royalty manager has stacks of different alcohols), and some chips and dip etc, while we waited for dinner to finish being cooked, a baked ham.

While I was sitting there, my phone rang, and the royalty manager joked that it was my mum. Close, it was dad. I went outside to speak to him. he told me that there was a few letters there, and did I want them opened.

It looked like there was a letter from QLD Transport, the Tax department, and the Red Cross. I said it was fine to open them, I wanted to know what the QLD Transport one was, another bloody fine or something probably.

He opened it, it was the rego renewal for my bike. Well, I'm not going to be rushing to pay that, considering I could lose my license when I go to court, and then I've paid rego for nothing. The Tax department letter was about my refund, which explained why my account had gone up yesterday, I thought I'd been paid.

The Red Cross letter was a blood donation card, and it said my blood type, which I don't even remember. Ahh.. I put the card in my wallet, here it is, I'm an A Negative blood type.

I got off the phone, and went back inside. The royalty manager asked what mum had to say, and I said it was dad, and explained that it was just some mail was there, including the blood donor card (since the royalty manager arranged the blood drive thing).

I had another drink, and then dinner was ready, and we sat and ate. The royalty manager, his wife, his 2 kids, the senior DBA, and I.

They cracked open the wine, and we drank that. After dinner, the royalty manager served the desert, a tiramisu (sp?), which I couldn't eat, so I was served a huge plate of fruit, ugh, I was full from all the ham. I ate it anyway.

After dinner we had a chat, and the royalty manager mentioned that one of the geophysicists at work used to be the drummer for Machine Gun Fellatio.

(I told a couple of people that since then, they found it hard to believe, but I did some googling, and could back it up. He wasn't the drummer, he was the original lead singer, who called himself "Adolph Mantovani", though that's not his real name).

We chatted a bit more, and then we left about 10.30pm, got back to the pub, and I went to bed about 11pm.