I got up, and got ready as usual. I decided to get a coffee from the cafe, where I got the coffee yesterday.

We walked over there, but they didn't open until 8am or something, so we had to wait around for 5 minutes or so for them to open.

I got my coffee, and then we got in the car, and went to work.

We got to work, and I went upstairs for a bit. The annoying support guy was making some huge issue about the South Afican support guy, that we saw in the pub yesterday. Apparently he didn't come back to work yesterday afternoon.

It was probably something with a reasonable explanation though, his wife has just had a baby, and there could have been some issue with his baby or wife, and he might have had to take off.

I spoke to the annoying support guy for a bit, and then while I was there, a big guy from the titles group came and said he wanted to have a chat with me.

I finished talking to the annoying support guy, and then I went and found the big guy, and chatted to him. He wanted to know about making a web page, and was telling me that he wanted to use it to expose a dodgy builder he's been ripped off by lately.

I chatted to him, explaining about the general idea of making a web page, and what he should be doing, after that, I went to my desk.

I started doing some work, and then I got stuck at one point, so I went through the output of the script I'd let run last night.

There were quite a few good hits in there, machines with thousands of mp3s on them. I ended up finding about 16GB worth of mp3s. I sent the list of machines to a couple of people upstairs, so they could go and collect any music they wanted.

Some of the files were on machines that were at different sites, (since the WAN is fairly transparent), which made accessing them a bit slow, so I copied most of the stuff I found to my machine.

I went back to working on code, while eating the lollies I bought at the lolly factory the other day.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he'd brought in an old mobile phone, to give to the old librarian, and wanted to know what he had to do to clean it up, internally.

I said I'd come and have a look, since I've mucked around in Nokia phones a little bit.

I went up there, he'd found a little kit of tools, and it had the correct bits for getting the torx screws out of the phone.

I went about dissassembling the rest of the phone, pulling all the boards out, taking it all apart, cleaning all the dust out, with an old toothbrush that was hanging around.

I cleaned all the PCB contacts under the buttons, they were looking a bit dull.

The bottom of the phone was a bit damaged, where it had been dropped, and 2 of the threads, little copper bits, in plastic, were snapped away from the rest of the frame. I found some superglue, and I fixed those.

I put the phone back together after that, and it was sort of working, but there was still problems with the screen, it kept going off.

I took the phone apart again, one of the bits I'd glued came away, and I must have got superglue in the thread, because I couldn't unscrew the screw.

I left that, and kept working, pulling the whole phone apart again. This time I took the screen off the PCB, something I'd avoided doing before, because of the fragility of the connections on most LCD screens.

When I pulled the screen off the PCB, I found that the contacts were all green and corroded. I carefully scratched the corrosion off, with my fingernail, getting it all shiny again. I put the whole phone back together again.

The phone was much better now, and all the buttons were working perfectly.


The contract DBA asked me about external hard drives. I told him that I didn't know very much about them, but suggested that he buy one from the computer fair, since they're a lot cheaper than buying one from a shop, and then worked out when the next fair was.

After that, we decided to go and get some lunch. It was raining fairly heavily, so we decided to drive to get some lunch. The manager of royalty, and the little guy from
royalty, and the senior DBA and I got in the senior DBA's car, and we drove over to East Maitland.

On the way over there, the manager of royalty noticed that the sunroof or something is leaking, since there was a damp spot on the roof of the car, above the door.

I thought we were supposed to be going to some schmick bakery, but then we ended up just going to the sandwich place near the RTA, where we'd been for lunch before, while we were waiting for the guy in royalty to sort out his license or something.

I wasn't too wrapped, I didn't think the food here was great. I got lunch anyway, and we sat and ate, while it continued raining.

On the way back, we went to the service station, because the senior DBA had the mechanic order a replacement wheel stud, for the one that got lost a few weeks ago, and it had arrived.

We went to get it fitted, and the mechanic found that it was totally wrong, and didn't even fit, but that was all he could get.

The car had wider tyres on it than it was supposed to have too, and they kept catching on the wheel hub guards. The mechanic suggested getting the correct width tyres fitted, to avoid that.

We left there, and drove to the tyre place that the mechanic suggested, and the senior DBA arranged to get new tyres on his car, they'd do it this afternoon.

We drove back to the office after that, and the little guy from royalty and I stayed at work, while the manager of royalty drove back to the tyre place in his car, while the senior DBA did the same, so the senior DBA could leave his car to get new tyres, and the manager would bring him back to work.

I went back to my desk, and continued working, until my machine came up and claimed "network cable unplugged". I waited a couple of minutes, annoyed, because all my ssh sessions to the servers were stuffed now.

I noticed my phone constantly rebooting, there's something wrong with DHCP I assume. I went upstairs to find out what the hell was going on. I went into the computer room, expecting to find a few people in there, either trying to work out what's going on, or having caused it, or trying to fix it.

There was only one guy in there, some guy from forestry. I asked him what was going on, he said he didn't know, but it was something to do with the UPS, and all the servers had rebooted.

I then went to investigate the UPS', and I found that one had gone into fault mode. I checked the breakers, and found that the 3rd unit had tripped it's internal isolation breaker for some reason, I put that back off, to put it back in use, and it held.

I then went to find out what the status of the UPS was. I read through the manual, to work out what I had to do. I tried running a diagnostic on the unit, but you need to enter a password to do that, and I couldn't find it written anywhere, and have no idea what it is.

While I was in there, the email support guy came in, to sort out the servers that had all just been hard rebooted. I told him I was trying to work out what the UPS problem was, and that he was right to fix the servers.

I then decided to just try rebooting the unit, so I went through the shutdown procedures, changing all the breaker configuration behind the front panel, waited a minute, and then started it up again, putting all the breakers back to the original configuration.

I forced the unit/inverter to go back online, it had to get back in sync with the other 2 units. After that, I forced the other 2 units to go online, so that everything would be in sync. It looked like it was sorting itself out.

The email support guy had finished getting things back in order, and had gone back out of the computer room.

I went back to my desk, and continued on the work I'd been doing about an hour before, before the UPS crapped itself for no apparent reason.

At about 5pm, I got a call from the senior DBA, he told me he was leaving for the day. I said I'd leave too, and meet him out the front. I finished up, and went out to the front of the building.

The senior DBA hadn't come out of the building yet, so I just waited near the car. The contract DBA and the woman from the mailroom came out, and they got in the contract DBA's car, and left.

I waited, and eventually the senior DBA turned up, we got in the car, and drove down the road to the pub.

We went in, I dropped off my stuff, and then we hung around in there for a little while, before we went across to the other pub.

The old librarian was in there, so the senior DBA gave him the mobile phone I'd fixed up for him this morning. We didn't have a SIM card for it, we'd have to get that sorted out yet.

We got some drinks, and then I played the pokies, and we had a chat for a good while, before we started to leave.

I thought the old librarian had left his jacket behind, so we went to find him, he hadn't got far, just to the loos, so when he came out, I told him about his jacket, he thanked us for reminding him, because it was his, and he had forgotten about it.

The senior DBA and I walked down to the pub near the station, and went it. It was really smoky in there, yuck,

The woman who owns the pub was sitting at the bar, we had a quick chat to her, and she told us it was only 2 weeks until the house will be ready.

She then told us a great long story about her online banking, how someone else had set it up for her, and then it had got locked out for some reason.

She'd tried to get it unlocked, but she couldn't, because she wasn't the person who set the online access up. She asked the person who set it up to call up, but they couldn't get it unlocked, because they weren't the account holder.

It was totally ridiculous. Typical bank.

We had some drinks, and then noticed the guy from CCB was sitting in there, so we went over, and chatted to him for a bit.

I had no cash, and wanted to get the next round, so I had to get some cash. I went over, and asked for $60, like I usually get out, but the woman working behind the bar told me that I could only get $50 out.

I know I've got more than that out before, but I couldn't be bothered arguing, and it only made $10 difference.

We decided to go and get some dinner, so we went in, ordered, and paid, and then came back to the bar.

We got served, sat and ate. After that I put a couple of dollars in the pokies, and I won $10. I had them give me the money (payouts are disabled on these machines, you can't even get $1 out).

We finished our drinks, and then we decided to go to the club, so we walked there.

The new guy was in there, we chatted to him, and played pool for a while. We ran the jukebox, and ended up leaving the club at about 9.30pm.

We went back to the pub, and then I went to bed. I couldn't get to sleep, so I lay there with my ipod on, until about midnight, when I finally got to sleep.