I woke up at 5am, hearing a loud crash noise. I realised it was the alarm clock falling out of the bed. I got up, put it back on the bed, and went back to bed.

I was woken again at 5.50am, by the alarm going off. I should have left it on the floor. I hit the silence button, and fell asleep again.

I got woken again by the alarm going off again, at 6.10am. I put the radio on, listened to it for a bit, and then got up at 6.20am, and went and got in the shower.

I got dressed, and packed my stuff up, the rest of my bag etc.

I unplugged the access point, to avoid anyone attaching to it, since I don't have any protection on it, while I'm not here all week, and getting up to who knows what.

I then remembered some stuff I wanted to copy on to the laptop, Miranda, and my history file etc, so I plugged the access point in again, booted up the laptop, and copied the files across.

Just as I finished, the senior DBA turned up. I shut the laptop down, and packed it back in my bag, and unplugged the access point again.

I grabbed my trenchcoat, and my bag, and went and got in the car.

We drove to work, it was freezing.

I got to my desk, and set my laptop up. I had a spare network patch, from when I had a laptop here, a few months ago, so I was able to just plug in there.

I then had to work out how to get internet access on it. I didn't really want to have to work out how to get proxy settings with authentication in there, so I found squid for windows, and installed that on my work PC, then I configured it to allow my laptop to connect through it.

After that, I copied anything I could possibly want, from my laptop, to my work machine.

I then started to install debian. I decided I'd try to do a network install, but I had to find a way to bootstrap it.

Usually I'd just use the boot/root floppies, but my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, and I didn't order one, when am I ever going to need it? (oops, now :-)

I tried to see if there was a way to boot off a usb drive. There is, it's even in the debian documentation. I followed the instructions, which was quite difficult to start with, as I had to get the laptop booted up with linux, knoppix worked here, giving me access to usb, and the network.

I copied the required files onto the memory drive (after copying all the files I needed off it), and tried booting off it. No go, it was coming up telling me that it couldn't find some ISO. That's strange, I shouldn't need one, I thought the whole idea was that I was installing over the network.

I read the instructions again, and found that I did need an iso, there's a netinstall iso, that's 50mb. I downloaded that, and copied it on to the usb memory drive. I booted again, it still couldn't find the iso. Damn.

I gave up at this point, I'd wasted enough time, and I started doing some proper work. One of the indexers came over, and told me about a report he'd found, where the documents weren't being identified properly. I went and had a look, and found that my identification process was a bit broken, there were a few big bugs in the logic I hadn't noticed.

I rewrote the process, and fixed up all the bugs I could find, and got the identification working on the report that had been identified. I used that code to update the internal production interface.

After that, I wondered if it was something to do with the fact that the drive is not partitoned, and the raw device is formatted, that was causing the installer not to be able to see the iso. Apparently some BIOS' can have issues with that. I redid the whole thing, after partitioning the usb drive, and formatting the partition.

This didn't help, I couldn't even boot off it now. I tried fixing the MBR on the drive, but I still couldn't boot. I spent a little bit of time on this, and then gave up, and then went back to work.

I got a call from the sysadmin, he'd brough his tv up, and wanted a hand moving it in to his house. I told him I'd help him. I got off the phone, and went upstairs.

The sysadmin and the senior DBA were mucking around, trying to fill in their flexsheets. I sat and waited while they did that.

Eventually we left, I went with the senior DBA, in his car, while the sysadmin drove his car (full of the tv) to the place he's renting. We got there, and the senior DBA and I carried the huge tv inside, and put it down, near the aerial socket.

We left there, drove back to work, and then the sysadmin jumped in the senior DBA's car, and we drove off to get some lunch. We couldn't decide where to go for lunch, we ended up deciding to go to the pub near the station, to get some lunch.

We went there, went in, got drinks, went and ordered lunch, then we sat out the back and chatted.

Our lunch was served, and we sat and ate. The senior DBA ate hardly anything as usual, not even half a sandwich, and offered me the other half of the sandwich, I was hungry, so I ate it.

We waited for the sysadmin to finish his lunch, and then we left, and the senior DBA drove us back to work.

I hung around upstairs for a little while. While I was up there, I noticed that the little guy from royalty had left one of those bracelets made of those chalky candies, and a few of those chalky heart candies on the senior DBA's machine. Heh.

I went back to my desk, and I noticed that he'd left some of them on my machine too, heh. Maybe he's realised that he really annoyed me on Friday afternoon.

I got back to work, for about an hour, and then decided to have another go at getting the install working on my laptop.

I tried reformatting the usb drive again, more mucking around. I tried to setup the boot environment manually, rather than using the image, which required booting up knoppix quite a few times, to make a little change, which was really frustrating, only because of the amount of time knoppix takes to boot.

While I was there doing it, some people that work around me were wondering around the office with a thermometer, trying to find the temperature at different points in the office, since it's so bloody cold in here.

They eventually found that the coldest part of the office was my desk, putting the thermometer on the partition in front of me, under the airconditioning duct that blows freezing air on me all day, they found it to be 17.5 degrees.

I gave up trying to boot off the usb drive, this is just a waste of time. I deleted the partition I'd created, and formatted the raw device back like it was, and trashed the MBR off the device.

I grabbed the net install iso I'd already downloaded, and just burned it on to a blank CD I had in my drawer, and then booted off that.

It wasn't as fast to boot into the installer as it had been off the usb, but at least now I could see all the files.

I kicked off the install, partitioned the disk etc, and then waited for all the required deb files to download, and install.

The installation didn't complete, I found that I'd badly partitioned the disk, the mount points were far too small, and /usr filled up, and /var was pretty close to full.

I mucked around a bit, trying to get the install to fit, by removing some applications/packages I wouldn't need. It didn't help much.

The console was only 640x480, filling up about 1/4 of the screen, stuck in the middle, with huge borders around it. X wouldn't even start. I found the graphics drivers I needed, they needed the kernel source, so I tried to install that, but now it wouldn't fit in /usr.

I didn't bother mucking around anymore, trying to make it fit. I just gave up, and I restarted the install again. I repartitioned the disk, making the mount points a fair bit bigger, losing a few gb out of the biggest partition, which I'd formatted as fat32, so I could use it in both windows and linux, when I'm dual booting.

I ran the install through again, it was faster this time, because of squid running on my machine, I had all the deb files cached, and they ran across to the laptop as fast as my desktop machine could serve them.

The install finished happily this time, and I installed the kernel source. I grabbed the graphics drivers I needed, again, and tried to compile them, but they wouldn't compile.

I gave up. It was now after 7pm, and I'd had enough of this. I packed up my laptop, put it in my drawer, locked the drawer, and found a place on my desk to hide the key, since I didn't want to risk losing the key somewhere, and having to break into the drawer to get my laptop out.

I left work, and walked to the pub. I found the senior DBA, and we went and checked in. The guy behind the bar gave us the wrong keys, so we went back and swapped them, and then went up to the room, and dumped our stuff.

We went to the pub, and the social club guy was in there, we had a couple of drinks, and I played the pokies.

While I was in there, my phone rang. I answered it, could barely hear who was on there, I worked out that it was some woman from Dell calling me, about the ticket I logged about the keyboard.

Why are they ringing me at 8pm? The woman obviously hadn't read the ticket I logged, because all she seemed to know was that it was an issue with the keyboard, so I had to explain the whole thing, about the key spring breaking. She told me that someone would call me about it later.

I bummed around in the pub for a while, and then went to find the senior DBA, he'd wandered off somewhere. I found him, around the back, out of the carpark, talking to the chick from work, and her boyfriend, in a "new" (secondhand) car they've bought.

Hmm, the boyfriend can't afford to get his car fixed, and the chick can't afford to pay for the rego on her car, but they can afford to go and get a new car. I don't understand how that works.

They left, and then the senior DBA and I went back into the pub. We told the social club guy that we were planning to go down to the club to get some dinner.

We left the pub, and the senior DBA wanted to go back to the room in the pub. I couldn't be bothered waiting around for him, so the social club guy and I walked down to the club anyway.

I started looking at the menu, trying to work out what I wanted for dinner. While I was doing so, a beer on the table behind the social club guy got knocked over. I'm not sure what happened, it didn't look like the social club guy knocked it over, and he said he didn't, but we couldn't work out what had happened, so he just bought the guy a new beer anyway.

Before I ordered my food, someone pointed out that the kitchen is closed. WTF? last week they were telling us that the hours have changed, and now they are serving dinner on Mondays, this week we get told that no, the kitchen is closed, and Monday nights are the only time the kitchen is closed.

Bugger. What are we going to do for dinner? We couldn't go anywhere else, since the senior DBA will be coming down here, we have to wait for him. While we waited, the social club guy and I had a game of pool.

The senior DBA turned up, we explained that the kitchen was closed, and tried to work out what to do. Just as we were about to walk down the road, the support guy turned up. The senior DBA and the support guy stood around, wasting time, trying to work out what they were doing.

The senior DBA called the pub near the station, to find out if their restaurant was still open, but there was no answer, he gave up, and hung up.

I told them I was hungry, and going to get some dinner. The social club guy and I headed off down the street. We walked down to the kebab place, and got a couple of kebabs, and the social club guy got some of the chili corn he always buys when we're here.

We walked back to the club, and we sat and ate our kebabs, and had a couple of drinks.

We played pool again, and then ran the jukebox for a while.

We sat at the bar, the other bartender was on tonight (not the footballer), and he was trying to make up a drink, so he gave us all a drink. He described it as having Southern Comfort, Midori, and Coke in it. I asked him what he was calling it, "paint thinner"?

He told me that he wasn't sure of the name, but that was probably a good one for it. We had them, and it didn't taste like paint thinner, but it sure had the same effect (or so I imagine), I had a headache immediately.

He made another one after that, I wasn't game to touch it, it was Southern Comfort and Midori again, but with lemonade, and some soda water or something, it was supposed to be a "pine lime splice".

We left the club after that, at about midnight, and walked back to the pub. We all sat on the balcony for a while, and then the others decided to go for a walk. I couldn't be bothered, was tired, and I went to bed.

I was lying in bed, trying to get to sleep, when I heard the others came back. The senior DBA, the social club guy, and the support guy, all ended up in the room.

They were having some conversation that I really didn't want to know about, so I pulled the covers over my head, and didn't listen to them, and got to sleep.