I got up, had a shower, got ready, had breakfast, packed my bag, and then I walked to work. I had to be up a bit earlier this morning, to be at work for 8.30am.

When I got to work, a bit before 8.30am, the royalty manager's kids were sitting in reception. I spoke to them briefly.

Apparently their parents were doing something today, but the royalty manager had left something he needed at work.

I went in, and dropped of my stuff at my desk. I decided to go back and wait in reception, since I hadn't seen anyone working in reception.

I really didn't want the guy turning up, seeing no one at reception, and buggering off again.

I went back and sat in reception, and chatted with the royalty manager's kids, and then the manager came out, and I spoke to him for a minute, before they all left.

I wandered around out in reception a bit, waiting. I had to fart, so I looked around, didn't see anyone, and let rip with a fairly loud fart.

I sat down again for a minute, and then I paced around again, and I realised that there was a chick working in reception, hidden in the corner. Oh d'oh.

I decided to go and wait back at my desk. At about 8.50am, my desk phone rang, it was the chick from reception, telling me that there was someone there to see me.

I went out to reception, and collected the guy, he was carrying a huge box with him, big enough to fit 4 laptops in.

I lead him to my desk, and pointed out my laptop, just sitting on the desk.

He opened up the huge box, it had a tiny keyboard in it.

I let him sit at my desk, and go about taking the laptop apart. He didn't look like he knew what he was doing, and was just basically attacking my laptop with jewellers screwdrivers, trying to pry bits of it off.

He eventually managed to get the plastic panel above the keyboard off, complaining that he didn't like working on new laptops, preferred ones that had been knocked around a bit.

He mentioned that there were less tabs on this model, than the other ones, making it harder to get it apart.

He took the keyboard out, I wasn't paying attention at this point, I was chatting with one of the indexers, over near his desk.

The guy put the new keyboard in, and put the panel back on, and turned my laptop on. Linux booted up, to the login screen, I logged in, ran up a terminal, and then tested every quick on the new keyboard, it all seemed fine.

I signed off on the fix slip, and the guy packed up his stuff. He told me that I could have just had the whole unit replaced (a bit extreme, just for a broken key), but said that I probably wouldn't have wanted that, because I'd got "all my stuff installed on it".

He left, and I sat down, and looked at the laptop. He'd burred up a fair bit of the plastic, digging at it with the screwdrivers, the panel above the keyboard wasn't fitted properly.

I sat there, tried to fix the panel, it wouldn't go back on properly. I ended up grabbing my leatherman out of my backpack, and taking the panel off again.

I then found that the keyboard wasn't installed properly, and was crooked. I fixed that, positioning it properly, and then I put the panel back on, and it went back on properly.

If I'd known this would be the case, I would have had them send me the keyboard, instead of sending some disorganised guy who didn't know what he was doing.

I did a bit of work. The indexer asked me about using the ps/2 barcode readers with the usb keyboards. I told him that I hadn't managed to get the adapters, and I suggested just trying to use it anyway.

We plugged in the ps/2 barcode reader, it didn't work. I rebooted the machine, it still didn't work.

I rebooted the machine, with no keyboard attached, I would have liked to test the barcode reader at that point, but it's a bit hard to send ctl+atl+del with a barcode reader.

I plugged the usb keyboard in, logged in, and found that the barcode reader wouldn't work.

Hmm, crap. Oh well, we're back to adapters, or ps/2 keyboards. In the short term, the indexer got the one usb barcode reader off his machine, and put it on the scanner machine.

I went up to see the email support guy, to find out about getting a lift home today, but he wasn'y there.

I went across the road, and I bought a chocolate bar, and came back to work. I noticed there was a competition on the wrapper, I entered it. (I ended up winning another crappy ringtone, which I didn't even bother to claim, and deleted the sms with the code to get it).

I went to see the email support guy again he was at his desk now, so I arranged to get a lift, that was fine.

I went back to my desk, went to run kismet, and found it complained that I had no wireless device.. Oops, I put a new kernel in, and I haven't built/installed the wireless drivers for it again.

I did that, no dramas, and got the wireless card running again.

I did some work, until the senior DBA, and the guy from royalty came down, and said they were going out to lunch.

I went with them, on the way, the guy from royalty asked if I knew anything about tv aerials.

I asked what he was after, splitting an aerial run, to go to 3 tvs instead of 1, and I suggested he just get a splitter, and use some F connectors on the runs.

We walked to Dick Smith, and went in, to look what they had for doing it.

He only wanted 3 runs, so it was better to get a 3 way splitter, instead of a 4, because there's signal drop that way. We managed to find a 3 way splitter, and some f connectors, that you just screw on to the end of the coax.

The senior DBA noticed some tiny digital cameras in a bargain bin near the counter. I said you had to worry about the resolution, those crappy little cameras are usually less than 1 megapixel, and the guy working behind the counter chimed in they were .3 megapixel (as opposed to 300 kilopixels?).

The royalty guy bought his aerial bits, and we left, and kept walking.

There's a temporary shop setup, selling factory outlet shoes, we went and had a look in there (maybe should have another look in there, since I need some shoes).

We left there, kept going through the mall, went in to the shopping centre, we went to the bakery, and all got pies.

We went and sat outside, and ate our pies, and then we walked back to work.

I hung around upstairs for a little while. The email support guy went off to get some lunch, and a couple of beers.

The senior DBA was working on the little guy from royalty's machine (who wasn't there), just cleaning it up a bit, putting some patches on it, defragging it etc.

While we were doing that, the other guy from royalty, who's rarely there, that sits next to the little guy, over the partition from the senior DBA, complained about his laptop not being configured correctly.

He asked if we could look at it, and we jokingly told him that he'd have to log a helpdesk ticket about it, and he complained that he already had, and showed us a post-it note with the job number written on it.

We had a look at his laptop, he was complaining, that whenever he shut the lid (because he's using a port replicator, and an external screen etc), that the laptop suspends, so he has to leave it half open, in order to use it.

This will be something to do with how the lid switch is configured. I suspect that's a setting in the bios. We rebooted his laptop, went into the bios, and then found that the Acer laptops are crap (well, we already knew that), but that there's bugger all options in there.

I then thought, maybe it's in the power tab in windows, where you set the screensaver etc.

We booted up windows again. For some reason, it took an absolute age for the login box to come up, after the blue background or whatever appeared. It took like 7 minutes.

The guy was complaining, accusing us of busting his laptop, when all we'd done was reboot it. (yeah, we'd gone into the bios, found nothing to change, changed nothing, and exited without saving).

It was a relief when the login box came up. Oh, and the external usb keyboard wouldn't work either, so the senior DBA logged in with the laptop's keyboard.

I then suggested replugging the keyboard, pulled it out of the port replicator, and plugged it in again, and it started working.

We opened up the display settings, screen saver tab, power settings button, and found a screen, with options like "when I close my lid", and a drop down box, with options like "shutdown", "suspend", "do nothing".

We set that to "do nothing". I found it humourous that we had to tell windows to "do nothing", I thought windows had been designed from the ground up, to "do nothing".

I went back to my desk after that, and continued coding. At about 4.30pm, I got a call on my desk phone, from the email support guy, he was leaving.

I packed up my laptop, grabbed my backpack, and went down to the carpark.

The email support guy wasn't out here, I just wandered over near his car, and a couple of minutes later, he came out of the fire stairs.

We got in the car, and started driving, towards the freeway. We didn't get very far, and we got stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, crawling very slowly.

It took us 50 minutes to go about 10 kilometres, to get to the service station, before even getting on the freeway. During this, the email support guy said he should have gone the other way, the back way.

The email support guy got fuel, and I just waited in the car.

I looked across, and on the main road, the cops had busted someone for something, light's going, cop over at the car, writing them a ticket.

The email support guy came back, and we left the service station, went and got back in the crappy traffic.

It took us another 15 minutes or so, to get on the freeway.

This was all caused by a dumb roundabout, all the people coming up the freeway, are then just streaming around the roundabout, to the right, to go up the pacific hwy, and blocking the people going south, who want to go straight through the roundabout, and get on the freeway.

We eventually got through there, got on the freeway, and I got dropped at home. It ended up taking just over 2 hours, to go about 100km. Pathetic.

I got the email support guy's phone number, in case I had to arrange getting a lift from him on Monday morning, and then I came inside.

I sat and watched tv.

I spent a bit of time mucking around with the disks in one of my machines. I bought a 200gb sata disk to put in it, about 4 months ago (when I went to the fair in Newcastle, and my mate bought most of his machine).

I finally got around to putting the disk in, because I wanted to get the 200gb pata disk out again, which I had bought for the tivo, and I want to get that ready to take to Maitland.

Anyway, I put the disk in, and then I tried to use the disk manager in windows to partition it. I wanted a couple of 100gb fat32 partitions.

It wouldn't let me do it, complaining that it's too big. Crap. I have another disk in this machine, with a 120gb fat32 partition on it.

I kept trying to do it, but it refused to let me have any partition bigger than 32gb as a fat32. I googled around to find out why, and apparently Microsoft are trying to force you to use NTFS.

Well, I don't want to use NTFS, because I intend to one day put linux on this machines, and be able to access all my files.

I couldn't find anyway in windows to create the correct partition sizes, that I wanted. I'd downloaded Mepis a couple of days ago, and it was on my laptop, so I used k3b to burn the iso. I booted that up, and used kparted or something (maybe only cfdisk, I don't remember), to partition the disk as I wanted.

While I had Mepis running, I decided to use that copy all the files. I moved everything from the pata disk to the sata disk, back in the partitions where it belonged (I needed 3 partitions, because I'd had 2 disks partition tables go, and 3 partitions).

Once that was done, I rebooted into windows, went in, and assigned the correct drive letters to the partitions on the sata disk, to put them where the 2 pata disks (120gb/60gb) were, before windows crapped on the partition tables, about 6 months ago, and I had to rescue it with "stellar phoenix", on to the pata disk from the tivo, because stellar phoenix would bsod when the sata controller was in the machine.

While I was doing this, I realised that the 200gb pata disk, from the tivo, was only showing up as a 120gb disk.

I decided that I would get the 200gb disk working properly, and leave it in this machine, and I'd put the 120gb and 60gb disks that windows screwed the partition tables on, into the tivo. It's only 20gb difference (not even 10 hours of recording in the tivo), and I won't end up using them otherwise.

I went and confirmed that everything had copied from the pata disk to the sata disk (I was only a couple of files out, but figured they were some crap, like swap files, or temp files or something), and then I deleted everything off it.

I tried to fix the disk/partition size, but nothing I did would make windows recognise it was a 200gb disk.

I booted up mepis again, used kparted, it came up, said there was a 200gb disk in there, with a 120gb partition on it, and 80gb unpartitioned. I just deleted the 120gb partition, created a 200gb partition.

I rebooted, into windows again, and it came up, now seeing a 200gb disk. How retarded you are windows.

I sorted more files out, got everything back where it belonged, and the machine working better, back like it was 6 months ago, before windows crapped on the partition tables, (though not working as well as when I had linux running on it).

After all that, I decided to not leave the 200gb pata disk in the machine. I don't need that much space in the machine now, and I'd be better off getting one of those usb external disk caddies, and putting the 200gb pata disk in it, and using it with my laptop.

I went to bed at 5am.