I woke up, I was hungover, I lay in bed until 7.45am. I got up, went and had a shower, and then got ready.

Even at that time of the morning, the shower was still dry, and there were no plates on the sink, so the senior DBA and I were the only people in the pub.

While I waited for the senior DBA to finish getting ready, I sat and read my book, I'd nearly finished it.

We went to work, and I sat at my desk, recoding more of the files, to avoid code duplication. I was asked to go to a meeting at 11am, I continued working, then went up to the meeting.

I found that there was no one in there, I waited around, with a couple of other people, all the others had gone across the road to get coffees apparently, they finally came back at 11.30am, and we started the meeting.

It was with some people they'd brought in to do another SOE, since the one we've got is crap basically. I just sat in mostly on the first half an hour, since that was mainly about the Oracle configuration, and dealing with version upgrades.

Some of the stuff did apply to the system that I'm developing, mainly the fact that the user account system is totally proprietry (I've written it in PHP), so the "single logon" thing they want to use won't work with it (nor any of the other Oracle applications we have).

After they got through all that stuff, I sat in for the next half an hour, with people to do with geosurvey, while we described what we needed in the SOE.

The geoscience guys decribed the issues they were having, and when the SOE guy started talking about the partitioning scheme they were going to go with, I suggested that they might want to have 2 configurations, since the GIS machines need a special configuration, and it would be inefficient to have that on "normal" machines.

The SOE guy wasn't interested in that, and said that they didn't want to end up with 50 images. I said that I didn't say anything about having 50 images, I said 2, one for the GIS machines, and one for everyone else.

It doesn't even have to be an image, it's just the partitioning and a few registry changes that differ, and these should be able to be done at the time the machine is built, automatically.

I spent about 18 months working in the SOE lab for CSC, and this sort of stuff is just basic, these guys are useless.

I couldn't be bothered having much to do with the conversation after this, since these guys had no idea what they were doing, and were trying to tell us what we wanted and needed.

I ended up getting out of the meeting at 12.30pm, and I went around to the senior DBA's desk. He was on the phone to the Systems Analyst contractor, that worked on MinView.

I spoke to him for a few minutes, while the senior DBA did something, because he's got a TiVo, so we chatted about TiVo.

While I was there, the email support guy came and spoke to me, he'd installed some software on his pc to generate reports about the exchange server, but he couldn't get it working properly.

I had a look at it, it was something to do with getting the ASP files to actually be interpreted, because they were only displaying on the screen.

I found a way around it, sort of, you could access the reports, but you couldn't configure them or anything properly.

While I was there, my mobile phone rang, I answered it, it was Mum. Apparently a bunch of mail had turned up, assumedly it was the mail that my mate's ex gf had mentioned a little while ago, when I saw her.

Mum had opened it all, there was a letter about the speeding fine I got, when they found my license was suspended. I hadn't paid that, because the rego details were wrong, and now it had gone to "SPER". I had to pay the in in the next week, or I could go to jail for a week.

I told Mum that I hadn't paid it, because I was waiting for the reminder, to argue about the rego plate being wrong, but that never turned up. Typical.

I said I'd just get the mail when I was there on the weekend, and sort it out next week.

Mum said she'd ring up about it, and I said she could if she wanted, but I didn't think she'd get anywhere.

I got off the phone, and went back to helping the email support guy, a couple of minutes later my phone rang again, I thought it would be mum, but it was the vendor of the software we use to host the website.

They wanted to know something about the ecommerce configuration, apparently it was broken after they'd done the upgrade yesterday. I thought about it for a while, it was a problem with the http/https redirection.

I remembered that because their way of doing was broken in our environment, I'd found a way to use mod_rewrite to trap the requests to the ecommerce via http, and force them to https, which was what we did.

This works, but their software can't work it out, and keeps forcing the connection to https, even though it already is. I remembered the setting we had to change, to disable that, told the guy, he changed it, and then it was fixed.

I got off the phone, and went back to helping the email guy again, for about a minute, until my phone rang again. It was Mum again, she'd called up, and asked about the speeding ticket, explaining that I wasn't there, and it wasn't my vehicle etc, but was told that there was nothing they could do about it, she'd have to ring up some "photo processing" place or something.

They also told her that they wouldn't be able tell her anything, because I'd have to ring up.

I just said again, that I'd just get the letter on the weekend, and pay it next week. I can't be bothered dealing with it, I'm not going to get anywhere. I'd have to go to court to argue it, and I'm not going to pay $2000 to go to court in Bundaberg again, to attempt to get out of a $250 (now $300) fine.

I went back to working on the asp thing again. I figured that it was either something to do with permissions in IIS, or to do with the file types npt being defined properly, and having an interpreter to run to parse them, rather than just serving the content/text of them.

The senior DBA told me that he was going out for lunch, so the email support guy, the little guy from royalty, and a couple of other people went out.

We walked down the street, and went to the bakery in the mall, we got pies. They don't make the pea pies anymore, I was a bit disappointed, they were nice.

We sat outside and ate, and then I decided that I wanted some annissed rings, so I went into the chocolate shop, and bought some.

we walked back to work after that, and someone asked me about TiVo, so I chatted about that as we walked back to work.

I got back to work, and continued rewriting the files, I'd been working on before wasting an hour and a half in the stupid meeting about the SOE.

A couple of hours later I got a call from the senior DBA, he wanted to leave. I said I was just finishing up coding a file, and then I'd come up.

I spent about 15 minutes finishing the file, and then I went upstairs, and we left the building, and we got in the car, and drove over to the chick from work's place.

We went in, sat and watched tv for a while. The senior DBA lent his car to the chick, and she drove off somewhere.

While she was away, the senior DBA and I were chatting to her boyfriend outside, while they smoked.

The chick came back, and then we went back inside, and I went in with her boyfriend, and we sat and played the playstation, while the chick and the senior DBA sat and watched the tv in the front room.

We were there for a while, and then we decided to go and get some dinner.

I went with the senior DBA, we drove back, and parked behind the pub we were staying at, and then went into the pub, to the room, and I dropped off the stuff I'd been carrying around.

We left there, and walked down to the club where the guy who was the Knight works.

We had a few drinks, I ordered some dinner, the senior DBA didn't eat anything.

I went in and played the pokies after that, and didn't win anything. Waste of time and money.

We left the club, about 8.30pm, the bartender asked us what was going on, because we never leave that early.

We walked back to the pub we were staying at, and sat in the common area and watched the tv.

The Bill came on, I sat and finished reading my book while the senior DBA watched The Bill, and then once I'd finished my book, I watched a bit of tv, and then went to bed.