I got up, went and got ready, packed my bag (since it's Friday, and we got to checkout again), and then went to work.

When I got to work, I knew the senior DBA wouldn't let me press the first floor button in the lift, so I tried to be a smartass, I ran up the stairs, and pressed the lift button to go up, on the first floor, thinking it would stop the lift anyway, I wasn't quick enough.

I dropped off my stuff at my desk, and then I went upstairs, and hung around for a little while. I explained why I'd gone up the stairs, and tried to be a smartass.

We decided to go for coffee, so we all went across the road, and got coffees, and then went back across the road.

This time I was able to press the first floor button in the lift, and when it got there, I got out, and the little guy from royalty followed me about, because he was busy telling me something, and he didn't realise that he was on the wrong floor.

I told him, but he wasn't listening, someone else in the left told him, then he realised, but they'd already pressed the door close button, and went without him.

He went up the stairs, and I went back to my desk. I setup my laptop, and spent a bit of time fiddling around with X, trying to get the proper drivers going, since I'd only managed to get the VESA drivers going so far.

I decided to update the BIOS, in case that's something to do with X not being able to identify the chipset.

Hmm, this'll be interesting.. I have no floppy drive, and I don't have windows on the laptop, so I'm going have a bit of difficulty updating the bios.

I googled around, and found other people in my situation, running linux without a floppy drive, and wanting to update the bios.

Apparently you can use a usb drive (like I tried before), to do the bios update. I needed to download a floppy image, which I did, from dell, I need to image a floppy disk, and then there's a way to copy the contents of the bios update floppy to the usb drive.

I didn't have any blank floppies, so I went up to the build room to find a couple. There were stacks of packs of 10, so I grabbed a pack. While I was looking in the cupboard, I spotted a USB floppy drive, for Dell even. D'oh.

I borrowed that, and went back down to my desk. As I came back down, someone was out setting up food in the common area, another morning tea?

I dropped off the stuff at my desk, spent a couple of minutes mucking around, and then went out to eat some of the food, and chat for a while.

I went back to my desk, imaged one of the floppies with the bootable floppy image/bios update.

I shut the laptop down, attached the USB floppy drive, put the disk in, booted up the laptop, brought up the boot menu, booted off the floppy, and updated the bios from A03 to A04.

I booted up again, and the bios update didn't make any change to the machine that I could see.

I mucked around, compiled a new kernel, managed to get kernel 2.6 running.

I went up to see the senior DBA, he'd told me that he had a spare laptop bag hanging around that I could have. I got the bag off him, nice, it's a Dell bag too.

While I was up there, the senior DBA told me that he and the little guy were mucking around.. they'd got a digital camera, and taken a photo of themselves, posing to look the same as a photo the manager of royalty has on his desk, of his 2 kids.

I helped them with it, setting up the print settings, so the picture would print out at the same size. We printed it, and then they found some tape, and stuck the printout over the glass in the frame of the photo on the manager's desk, when he was away from his desk.

He came back, and we waited around for quite a while, not noticing it. The little guy got impatient, and asked the manager where the photo of his kids had been taken, at which point he looked at it, and immediately cracked up laughing.

The senior DBA told me that he was still looking for the port replicator for the laptop he's got. The last time we saw it, was when the idiot "spatial expert" was trying to fit his acer laptop on to the dell port replicator.

We went and looked in the build room for it, in case it got shoved in there at some point. We went through all the boxes of junk, but couldn't find it.

There was stacks more stuff in here when we first moved up here, the annoying support guy must have been chucking it out or something.

I went back to my desk, with the laptop bag, and dropped it off down there, and then I came back up, and we worked out going to lunch.

We decided to go and get Thai, but since it's so far away (almost a kilometre away), the others wanted to drive down there. I would have been happy to walk, but I wasn't going to walk on ,my own, and get there 10 minutes after them, they would have already ordered by then.

We got in the royalty manager's car, (the royalty manager, his wife, the senior DBA, the little guy and I), and we drove down to the Thai place.

We parked, got out of the car, and I realised I had no cash. Oh D'oh. I walked all the up the mall to the shopping centre, went in, to the ATM, waited behind some chick, slowly getting her money out, and then I got my money out, and walked all the way back to the Thai restaurant.

When I got back, the others had sat down, at a 4 person table, hmm, thoughtful, so I grabbed a chair, and sat on the end of the table.

I grabbed a menu, worked out what I wanted, and then we all ordered. We chatted for a while, and they started serving the food.

The guy serving us wasn't actually sure what he was serving, so he thought that the little guy's dish was the one that I'd ordered, so he served it to me.

I started eating it (normally I would have waited, but a couple of others had been served, and started eating), and then they came out to serve the little guy, and that was when the stuffup was realised.

Since I'd already started eating the meal, the little guy didn't want it (fair enough), and reluncantly ate the meal that I'd ordered.

We finished eating, chatted, and then paid, and just as we were leaving, the sysadmin came in. Oops, no one invited him.

We went and got in the car, we couldn't go anywhere, because a couple of busses of school kids had turned up, were parked blocking the road, while all the kids got off and went into the gym.

We saw the comms support guy from work, he walked into the gym, and came out again about 10 seconds later.

He walked across towards us (not realising it was us in the car), and we opened the windows, and heckled him about having a quick workout. He said he wasn't going in there with all thise kids in there.

We continued waiting to get out of the parking spot, while we were waiting there, a car stopped in front of us, and the driver picked his nose, and then looked at it, and put it in his mouth, we were all revolted.

We eventually got out of the parking spot, on the road, and drove back to work.

I mucked around on my laptop, I downloaded the Intel drivers for the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200 (IPW2200). I compiled these, and installed them, along with the firmware, and got the wireless going.

For once something was easy, and the instructions didn't have anything wrong, or missing.

I then tried to get kismet working, so I could sniff for wireless networks. There's a debian package, which I installed, but it's old, and didn't support the IPW2200.

I then went and got the experimental version, or the cvs tarball or something, and started trying to compile that.

The senior DBA called me, and told me that he was wanting to leave now. I told him I just had to pack up, and he said he'd come down to see me.

I got off the phone, and started packing up my stuff. The senior DBA came to my desk, I finished, grabbed all my stuff, and we left, and went and got in the car.

We drove back, and the senior DBA dropped me at home. I sat and watched tv, and mucked around on my laptop.

There was no food in the house to make anything for dinner, and I couldn't be bothered drinking anything.

I sat around watching tv, and then went to bed at about 2am.