I woke up, at about 9am, lay in, and ended up sleeping until 10.30am.

I got up, and put the tv on, and went back to bed, and watched tv for a while.

I ended up getting up again about midday, and then checked my email, and made some toast.

I got a phone call from my drummer mate, he was on his way. I went and had a shower, cleaning up all the dead ants that had fallen into the shower, after I sprayed them with bug spray last Monday.

I got dressed, and then made more toast, and my mate turned up. He paid me for the DVDs I ordered for him a few days ago, and then I grabbed my bass guitar, and we left.

When I went out the door, I noticed that my laptop had arrived at some point during the week, and the box was sitting inside the back door, groovy. Wish I'd noticed it last night though.

We went around to our mate's place, and we played the instruments until after 4pm, and then we left again.

We went to Coles on the way home, I got some food. While I was in there, I bumped into a guy I worked for, back in 1998/1999. I spoke to him for a little while.

I bought the food, and then we went to the bottleshop, and I got a bottle of JD, and a bottle of lemonade, rather than buying cans of JD and lemonade, premixed.

I came home, and then went and got the laptop, and unpacked it. It looks pretty cool.

The first thing I did was take the DVD drive out of the unit, to find the model number, so I could find a region free firmware for it, since most of my DVDs are region 1, not region 4, and I want to be able to watch them all, not be limited to changing the region 5 times.

When I put the model number in google, NEC ND6500A I think, I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a dual layer DVD burner, I wasn't expecting that.

I found the region free firmware for it, and downloaded that.

I put the drive back in the laptop, and then I booted up knoppix on the laptop, since I'm not intending to use windows on it.

I had issues with that, I couldn't get the drive recognised properly or something, or the network wouldn't work, there was some reason that I couldn't use knoppix, since it's an old version.

I tried a few more bootable disks, but I couldn't manage to find one that gave me working network, and hard drive access.

I gave up, pulled the hdd out of the laptop, found my 2.5" -> 3.5" ide adapter, and connected the drive to the machine I use for imaging disks for the tivo.

I started a backup, using dd to bzip the hard drive contents, over the network to a different machine.

While I waited for this, I made some dinner, and ate it, and watched some tv.

I ended up using the laptop anyway, booting up "dynebolic" on it, a bootable linux distro I've not been able to use before, because it's always been incompatible with the BIOS' in my other machines, and refuse to boot.

It didn't have any sound support, which was a bugger, but I was still able to sit and play some games on my laptop.

I ended up playing some bubble game for 70 minutes, while I waited for the disk that was backing up.

Eventually, after 2 1/2 hours, the backup of the disk finished. I shut the machines down, and I put the disk back in the laptop.

I set it up, I decided to very briefly accept the license agreement of windows, and use it, since I had no way to install linux, I should have been smart enough to download isos of the first few discs of debian, and burn them at work last week.

I tried to get the wireless working, this was a ridiculously difficult exercise. It wasn't the laptop that was the problem, it was my access point.

I've got 2, I haven't used them for ages, and I couldn't get either of them working properly. One of them has a pcmcia card in it, which I'd taken out to use in a laptop at some point, and because it's not labelled, I couldn't remember which way up it was supposed to go (and the socket in the AP isn't keyed, so it fits both ways).

I worked that out, got the unit running, with an ethernet link up. I couldn't see any DHCP requests from the unit though.

I fiddled around, and eventually discovered that I'd used a patch lead that was plugged into a 10mb hub, that didn't have a backbone link to the rest of the network.

I moved it to the switch, and restarted it, but still didn't see a DHCP request. I tried using the other AP at this point, it didn't work either.

I was starting to get a bit annoyed. I tried another cable at that point, and then had a bit of luck, and I saw a DHCP request. I tried to bring up the admin web interface, but it didn't want to respond.

I scanned for networks on the laptop anyway, and was able to connect to it, and get a proper configuration, unlike the "limited access network" rubbish I was getting before, when DHCP was failing to configure the laptop.

I mucked around on the laptop after that, not really doing anything useful, just having fun browsing wirelessly, and streaming mp3s from my other machines, wirelessly.

I drank the rest of the wine I opened yesterday, and then I copied a few games on to my laptop. I sat and played GTA, 3 I think, but the video was really poor, like something's wrong with the video drivers, it's slow.

I found my flash drive, and used the laptop to burn the isos to CD, of the new tivo images, I'll muck around with that later.

I went to bed, at 5am.