The DVD works. cool.

While I was over fiddling around with the av setup, I decided I wanted to put my 8 track deck in.

I just put it in, and listened to all (all 2 :-) of my 8 tracks I've got recently. Both ran slow. Hmm, that confirms what I thought, that the player is having issues. I think the belt is stretched.

I found a place that sells replacement belts, now I just need to try to find out what size this player (Craig Pioneer) needs.

My Herb Alpert album is so funny, I laughed my ass off. When Spanish Flea came on, I could just see Homer slouching in the chair waiting for his 4 new tires after going in for a free wheel balance. I had to listen to that cartridge twice.

While I listened to them, I read all about fixing cartridges and decks, some pretty interesting stuff.

I just put an MP3 on, wow, it sounded of such high quality! :-)

Well there was a fair on.

I went over there, I half there wasn't once I got there, they had "Computer Fair Parramatta Town Hall Today" stuck up on the window, there were no Hiaces, and the only people milling about were wearing basketball uniforms.

I stuck my head, there was a few stalls in there, so I went back and locked my helmet, went and paid, and wandered in.

Very poor turnout, about 1/4 of the usual number of sellers there.

I'm glad I didn't plan on buying a pc there today, I would have been hard pressed to get all the bits.

I went around a couple of times, looking at prices, I was just there to find prices, maybe buy another hard disk for more space for the tivo files, and some blank dvds.

I bumped into a mate, chatted to him for a bit, then I went around the fair another couple of times. 3 stalls had Maxtor disks, I got another 120gb ata133 with 8mb buffer (only wanted 2mb, oh well) for $155.

The dvds were expensive, I paid $26 for 10 Ricohs a few weeks ago, they wanted $28 or $30 this time. I've still got 8 (oops, 7 now, I'm just burning another one), so I don't need the desperately.

I couldn't get many prices for pc bits, and I forgot to get a pamphlet with the dates on it, so I had nothing to write them down on.

I saw another guy, I used to go to a computer club with, chatted to him for about 1/2 hour, then I left.

I went to Worldwide Appliances, where I bought my crappy Philips player, looked at the Pioneer (DV-355). $299 they wanted, I asked the guy his best price.. he said he'd check.

The display one was the last one, so he'd do it for $249, $4 less than cost. Not going to argue with that. Had to find the box, instructions, and a power cord, which took a few minutes, but I wasn't in a hurry.

While he was away looking for the box etc, I had a very close inspection of the unit, a couple of grubby marks on it, and a little mark in the plastic above the drawer on the front, but when I'm saving $70 from the other place, and getting it for less than cost, who gives a shit?

I also extended the warranty to 5 years for $25, that was necessary I thought, especially since I had the display one.

Oh, and it was the pre region modded one too, good, I don't have to fiddle around with that.

I paid for it with my Amex (which I can't sign, so I had to show a different card), got them to hold it for my while I got some lunch (I'm sure it would have lasted a long time strapped to my bike in the carpark).

I had some lunch, a salad, while I was waiting, the chick at the salad place started chatting to me, she saw my Queensland license, and I told her about getting one, and how they are cheaper etc. Her mum turned up while I was waiting, with a bag, it was a new phone the chick had bought, and she showed it to me, some Sony Ericsson picture phone thing.

I got my salad and left.

I ate it, went back over to the Appliance place, when I picked up my dvd player, the woman at the counter asked if I was the Amex customer, "uh, yeah", and then she went on to tell me that apparantly there is a strip on the back of the Amex you have to pull off before you can sign it. Whatever, I've had the thing for 3 years now, and not needed to sign it.

I strapped the player on, and took off. I noticed one of my mates had just pulled up, I beeped my horn, waved, and kept going. I probably should have stopped and had a chat, but it was far too hot out there.

I came home, unloaded the bike, dumped everything inside the door.

I was stinking hot (and stinking in general too), I jumped in the cold shower, the water coming off me was black, it's been at least a week since my last shower, if not two, it's just too cold.

I braved the cold, felt a bit better when I got out.

I setup my dvd player, and had a quick play with it, played an mp3 disc, groovy, put a region 1 disc in, played it, cool. Put my Sabrina DVDR in I made, played it, excellent. I tried putting the half burnt dvdr in from when windows crashed, but it wouldn't play it, I didn't really expect it to.

Oh yeah, I setup the dvd player, with all the audio options set to the best (digital out, AC3, Dolby Digital, MPEG out, 96khz etc) and my receiver supports everything but MPEG out, I had to go and set that back to PCM, so my Sabrina DVD would work.

Then I went back to watching more Robot Wars.

I've just finished copying Finding Nemo for my brother (can't really trust 7 year olds with DVDs), so now I'm about to check if it works.

I've done nothing with the hard drive yet, I'll probably play with that tomorrow, since I can see myself spending a lot of time moving data on to the new disk, repartioning the other disk, and swapping them around, since my current partitions are really dumb, and rather than just throwing more disk space at the problem, I might as well take the chance to make it more efficiently used too.

I woke up. No phone today. It was very quiet. What time is it? The alarm is flashing 7:17. hmm.

It's actually 9:30am. There must have been a blackout, and the power came back on at 2:13.

I left my machine running Maxtor diagnostics last night, now I'll need to run it again because I didn't see the results.

I booted everything back up, but no network traffic would work. I could ping, but I couldn't do dns/irc/email. Hmm, what's going on. It took me a little while to remember the broken firewall (Kerio) on the stupid windows machine with my ISDN card in it, because it refuses to work in linux. I disabled the firewall, woo, everything works.

The Maxtor diagnostic finished, claims the disk is ok. I've started running SpinRite on the disk now, it was saying 53 hours to run, which I could have waited, but then my brother came in with a DVD he wants copied. I changed SpinRite to just doing a read test, 2 1/2 hours left on that now.

Now I'm watching Robot Wars again. Tivo filled up and stopped recording things.

Oh yeah, at some point yesterday, I found my dud DVD that I couldn't format in the drive, and it has somewhat written. DiscJuggler must have written the TOC first, because the menu worked in a software DVD player. I tried to pick the last episode (which I knew wouldn't work, it isn;t on the DVD) and the player hung.

I tried putting the DVD in my crappy DVD player, in case it worked anyway, because it's not burned with Nero, but no such luck.

Someone told me there's a computer fair on today. I'm about to check. I need to get some prices, and maybe some more DVDRs

Guess what, I got woken up by the phone.

Well, not exactly, I had woken up, and I was trying to watch Robot Wars, but I couldn't keep my eyes open.

When the phone rang (my mate with the new computer's wife) she was trying to get a foxtel card going I'd given her. Took half an hour on the phone of how to get it sorted, but it was in the end.

I got up, started watching tv. Checked my email, it took me 2 hours to get through my email.

Ate some breakfast, bummed around. I got through a lot of episodes of Robot Wars.

While I was doing this, I was pulling Sabrina episodes off the tivo, in preparation for making another DVD.

I processed all the files, put them through Ulead DVD Movie Factory, and started the DVD rendering.

When I noticed something other than Robot Wars (all I've watched for about 3 days) on the Tivo, I decided to watch something different for a change. I then found that the channels had got all mixed up again.

Instead of an episode of Norm, or South Park, I had an hour of Sky Channel, woo, great.

I'm sick of sorting it out, it takes 1/2 hour, I get RSI, and then they just get mixed up again, and I don't notice until I go to watch something, and find the wrong channel has been recorded.

Bugger it, I decided to reorder the channels on the tivo instead.

while I was making a list of the channel order it keeps changing to, my mate I go to dinner with called me, I chatted to him for a while, he wanted me to go down to Sydney with him while he talks to some guy, I didn't really see the point of me going. He's basically just going to try to get rid of the work down there anyway, since noone is interested in climbing on buildings and maintaining the illegally installed wireless bridge.

I finished making a list, then I worked out the current tivo setup ids, channel numbers/names, and the new channel numbers, then I generated a script using nawk, ran it on tivo, and all my channels were properly remapped.

While I was working out the new channel ids, windows blue screened, with that "Error writing to disk D:" again. That's starting to worry me. Scandisk complains that there might be bad sectors everytime I boot too. Anyway, it came back, so I saved my file, and continued working. A little while later, while I was still working out the new channel numbers, windows locked up. Great, there goies my DVD rendering, that was a waste of 3 hours.

I'm sick of windows. I think I need to find some linux DVD software.

Oops.. I'd forgot about the fact that 7 doesn't work. It doesn't matter normally, since 7 is just "no broadcast on this channel", but now, it's a movie channel.

I've just mucked around making up new ir codes, loading them, rebooting tivo, waste of time (about an hour in total). I can either get a 7 that works as a 6 on it's own, or a 7 if its the second digit, or 7s that don't work at all.

oh well, I never watch that movie channel anyway, it had Tom Cruise on there this time, he's an idiot.

Now I have to try to remember the new channel numbers. Annoying ass satellite tv. It's only wasted about 4 hours getting it sorted.

I really need to blog more often. This every 2 or 2 1/2 days thing isn't working, it takes me ages to remember the things that happened, and then the order that things happened.

While still in a slumber, I thought about taking my laptop to the Cafe with me, then I can try to diagnose the SDSL connection with something a bit more useful than windows that just says "DHCP server unreachable".

I woke up, starting watching tivo (this Robot Wars marathon is filling it like nothing else), I got called up by a woman who's network I support. When she tries to use the browser to cause the firewall to dialup to the internet, it's saying "connection refused" hmm. She'd already tried rebooting. Bugger. OK, I'll come look in a bit.

I watched more tv.

I got called up again, the wife of the guy who's laptop I tried to fix/salvaged data from. They wanted to know about getting MYOB setup, and also about getting the laptop fixed. I spoke to the guy I work for sometimes, he wants me to come and look at setting it up for him, and also running cables for his speakers/projector. OK, I'll come look tomorrow.

I watched a bit more tv. Got up, ate breakfast, hmm, the dvd burning light is still on.wtf? I turned the monitor on, BSOD. D'oh.


The machine was still up, I could copy files across the network to it, but the local interface was buggered. I reset it. Popped the DVD out, half burned. hmm.

When it rebooted, I tried to format the disc. Nothing will seem to let me format it. the format button/function is greyed out in everything, Nero/DiscJuggler, and something else I tried to use. Great, that was a waste of $2.60. I should invoice M$ for it.

I looked at the spec sheet for my burner, apparently DVDRW is only at 1/2/2.4X, and I burned at 4X, making it DVDR, that's probably why I can't format it.

I took off for the Cafe, dropped in to see the woman, I plugged the monitor into the firewall machine, it normally sits there headless. the login prompt was there, I logged in, everything looks ok, could ping the windows workstation, could connect to the port that causes the dialup to occur, what's going on here?

I went back to windows, and confirmed that it was saying "connection refused", hmm, maybe it's trying to go through the proxy, and squid is broken.

I was able to telnet into the firewall, that's a good sign. Telnet localhost 3128: connection refused. Aha. I tried restarting squid, no such luck. Checked the log files, something about disk write error, device full. OK.

I rm -rf the squid partition, and then squid -z to rebuild it, restart squid, away it goes. groovy.

I took off again, got to the Cafe about 11am, realised I had forgotten to bring my laptop. Bugger.

I started on sorting out the network. I don't remember exactly what I went through, but I basically got the dhcp server configuration all sorted, and the bind server sorted out, so both subnets resolve and reverse lookup.

I also managed to get Source NATing working, so the mail on the other subnet will work.

I collected the SDSL router from downstairs, tried testing it locally, along with the spare, nothing will work. the link will come up, but no traffic goes across.

I managed to get my mate to bring in another router when he went to get some monitors, and after some fiddling around, I found 2 out of the 4 would connect. So I took a working one back downstairs, plugged it in, bang, network up. great. Added the MAC of the machine downstairs into the dhcp conf so they get a proper IP too.

I found the guy from the supermarket, had a look at theirs, for some reason they had an IP on the wrong subnet, a disable/enable fixed that, crappy Windows. Their mail worked too.

It was now about 4pm, everything is sorted. It only took me 2 days to get the network sorted.

I fiddled around trying to get the time server working, and then I started looking at all the domains hosted on one of our servers, most of them are crap, a waste of money. If any of them are still registered, I don't think I'll bother renewing about 40/50 of them.

Closed the Cafe about 5pm. I intended to take both the stuffed SDSL routers with me, to see if I could reset/reconfigure them, but I forgot them.

I went around to my mate's place (who I have dinner with). We've a machine in the Cafe I need to configure as a dialup router for a Senior's club, so he dropped that off at his house, and went to teach a guy.

I got the PC setup, found a floppy, looked around for linux floppy router distributions, started looking at LRP, which I use here at home, but it's now officially dead, and it was a mungrel to get setup.

I found "freesco" which looked ok. DNS, DHCP, DynDns, Web Interface all built in. I downloaded it, made up the floppy. Put it in the old 486: "Boot failed" Bugger!

I tested it in another machine, booted fine. I configured it. While I was doing this, my mate with the new cpu/mobo/disk etc called me, he still couldn't get his network going. OK, I'll come look when I finish here.

I tried the floppy in the other machine again, still no go. I tried putting the "safe" syslinux boot on. No good.

My mate came back from teaching about now.

I tried booting the machine with a dos floppy, fine. Hmm, the drive works then. I tried loading freesco with loadlinux, that worked somewhat, but I didn't pass the right boot parameters.

I got the right parameters, made a batch files, and was able to successfully boot it up. OK, good, but it's not acceptable to have to boot a dos disk, change it for the freesco disk, and run a batch file. Too hard.

I tried getting the latest version of syslinux, tried both normal and safe boot modes, still no good. Getting frustrated.

I went back, and tried to see if I could make it dos bootable. Nope, only 41kb free, and the dos boot files are ~300k at best.

I went looking for "freedos" maybe it's smaller. Yeah, but not 41kb small.

Hmm, what am I going to do.

Around this time my mate came back from picking up some pizzas, so I stopped and ate dinner. I thought about it, I seem to recall older versions of syslinux having better compatibility than new versions. I went and found version 131 of syslinux, ancient, loaded it on the floppy, and guess what, it booted. Hoo Fscking Ray.

I grabbed a modem, performed the modem config, it detected the network card. Groovy. I mucked around for a while, I though about testing it, but I couldn't be bothered installing nics/cables. I'll just do it when I put it into production next week.

Freesco was a hell of a lot easier to configure than LRP (besides the booting issue, which LRP would have had anyway).

I left, dropped in at my mate's place to look at his network. Just as I arrived, he told me he'd fixed it, it was a crappy network cable. I stayed and chatted for a while, about ISPs and things, and whether we still want to do one.

I'm waiting to see what happens with my friend's ISP first. I'm not starting up until it's sold or shutdown, it would just be wrong. I know I was going to start up in competition back in August last year, but that's a completely different situation. They need me to run this one. I would feel so guilty if I walked away, let this one fall down because no one else can run it, and then start another one up.

Anyway, he told me he's decided he wants a tivo, so now I'll chase up getting one for him, and setting it up.

I left, came home, and started blogging. I've now been sitting here for 75 minutes blogging. Time to watch some Robot Wars.

I got up, started watching tivo.

My throat is killing me.

I decided to try my dvd in my parent's dvd player, is the disk not burned properly, or is my dvd player the piece of poo I think it is.

My parents have a Pioneer DV-355 (the player I wish I had bought instead of this Philips crap, but the Pioneer doesn't have a 5.1 ac3 decoder, and the Philips does, and my old analogue reciever didn't have ac3 decoder but 5.1 in, I've since replaced the receiver with a digital receiver with ac3 in, so I wouldn't have had an issue with the Pioneer, and I've only got 3.1 speakers connected anyway).

So anyway, I shoved the disc in, and in about 2 seconds the menu popped up. Great, and shit. Great, my disc works, I mucked around with it, the menu is perfect, all the video files work, they look great, but shit, it means my dvd player is a piece of poo, what a surprise.

I watched a bit of tivo.

I searched for my laptop hard drive adapter, found it after 1/2 hour. I pulled the hard disk out of the laptop, put it in my pc, booted up knoppix, mounted the disk, and started salvaging the data. I think the disk is dying, it keeps making all these clicking noises (although it's done that since it was purchased, back in 2001). Halfway through it locked up, great. Oh, and some files claim to be unreadable. after I rebooted/remounted etc, I continued grabbing files, and was able to grab the rest.

Rebooted again, into windows, burned a cd, put the hard disk back in the laptop.

I rang my mate to find out if he wanted me to drop it around. He wasn't home, his daughter who now works for him was, yeah, he probably wants it.

I loaded up my bike, and went around there, dropped off the laptop and cd with his data on it. His wife was there, and her cousing, he's renovating the garage my mate was living in until last weekend (who moved into the place he used to live in).

I chatted for a bit, and took off.

I went around to Domayne to look at DVD players, I think I want the Pioneer player, I've got a Pioneer receiver now, and my remote for that will control the dvd player. $320 for the DV-355, not too bad, I paid more for the shitty Philips thing.

Not only does the Philips refuse to play burned discs, but it also has problems running for more than about 90 minutes at a time. It's great, I sit down to watch a long movie, like T2, or more than one movie at a time, and the thing shits itself. It has to be off for 1/2 hour before it will go again, and then you only get about 1/2 before it screws up again. Crap.

After that I got some lunch at McDonalds, and sat and read the paper for 1/2 hour. It was nice to be able to sit and do nothing.

Then I went to pay my Amex bill. 3 trips around the Post Office, and I can't find a parking spot, even for my bike. Oh, and 3pm is the worst time to go through Gosford. Mum's taxis everywhere, and everyone who can't drive is out on the road.

I gave up on that, and went to another Post Office.

I decided to go back to Gosford again, I think there are a couple of electrical places in there, get some more prices. I went to Retravision, and was completely ignored. They didn't have any Pioneer anyway.

I went over to the other shopping centre, the electrical place is gone from there, (along with almost every other shop, why is this shopping centre even open?), so I went back to the first one where I was parked. I went to Dick Smith on the way back there, "we don't have Pioneer, you'll have to go to Powerhouse at Erina". great, thanks for nothing.

I got back on my bike, and headed for home, it was getting overcast and dark, I think that bloody storm is having another go.

I've got a shocking headache. I stopped in at the general store on my way home $5 for 12 Panadol. Christ. I bought them and went home.

I started watching tv, the storm rolled in a bit. Mum came in, apparently my sister and her boyfriend are up from Melbourne. Like I want anything to do with them.

Got a little bit of rain, nothing much.

I felt really shit. I lay down with a cold cloth, I tried to sleep, I noticed that tivo was recording the Sky channel. Bugger, the channels are all mixed up again. I got up and started sorting them out again. I thought I was going to die, my head was killing me. I took more Panadol and went back to bed. It was about 6pm (tivo started recording the simpsons). I turned it off.

I slept until about 11pm, then I got up again, and mucked around with video files again. I felt ok now.

I tried to find something else to burn dvds with, apparently some people have issues with Nero, I hate Nero anyway.

I downloaded some "winiso" thing, it crashed, and looks like it only makes CD isos anyway, then I tried some other iso thing, isomagic I think, I couldn't find a crack for it. No good.

I tried using mkisofs to create an iso and burn it with DVDdecrypter. First I tried isoing the 5.3gb dvd files, it crashed at 75%. I then tried again with the proper dvdshrunk files, and it crashed at 96%.

I then tried burning the dvd with DiscJuggler, hey these are DVDRWs, if it doesn't work, I'll just format it again right? It is now about 3am, and I have to work tomorrow, so I'm leaving it burning and going to bed.

I was woken by the phone this morning (why do I keep having to type this?) at about 9am.

My mate I go to dinner with, "What are you up to?", "uh, mm, ah, sleeping". "Will I see you at the meeting this morning?", "Yeah, when's that?" "10am", "OK, see you there, bye".

I've got a really sore throat.

I checked my dvd rendering. Uh oh, BSOD, "Error Writing to Disk" "Unable to Write to Disk D:" "Data or Files may be Lost".

Bugger. Pressed enter, it came back ok, it was just starting on the second video file. It continued going.

I ate some breakfast (toast, no cereal left, I need to go to the shops).

I headed into Gosford, had a meeting with the network guys, and we had a chat about the situation, and what we need to do to sort it out.

We went and looked at the equipment we've installed, I need to get a camera, so I can get some pictures, and put them in here.

After that, someone from the Cafe called us, problems with internet access for some shops in the centre or something. "I'll look at it when I get there".

It was now about 11:40. I went to the shops, bought food, brought it home, unpacked it, checked my dvd rendering, it was on the next video file.

Some mail had arrived, a couple of 8 tracks I bought recently, "Greatest Hits of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass" (why did I bid on this?), and "Meet the Beatles".

I grabbed my mp3 player, and took off to the Cafe.

I had a quick look in next door where they were having problems, some weird network range setup, what's going on here.

The gateway address did not respond to pings, maybe the machine on the roof is having issues.

I found a cleaner, had to go to centre management to get access to the roof, removed the machine and wireless antenna that's not used anymore, dragged it all back downstairs.

The solicitor arrived while I was on the roof. Talked to him for a while, got things sorted out somewhat. I was going to find some details of the customers, plans they are on etc, but then I remembered the busted machine.

Once the solicitor left, I was able to look at the server. I plugged the machine in, booted up ok, I could ping the machine in next door, but none of the stuff on the proper network. wtf is going on. Tcpdumping, no help, this is just weird. Tried mucking around with the network configuration, taking interfaces up/down, couldn't get anything out of it.

I eventually (about an hour later) went and checked the rest of the physical network, found that an rj45 with a busted tab had slipped out of the uplink port on the switch slightly, disconnecting the hub I had the server plugged into from all the machines on the network range I couldn't ping. Aha!

Network traffic was flowing, I went back next door, they were fixed.

I went to check the florist downstairs that has an sdsl link through the telephone system in the plaza to us upstairs, I fiddled around here for ages, the link on the sdsl comes up, but no traffic goes across. I went back and forth between here and the Cafe about 10 times. Could not get it working. I even tried a different SDSL router, the link wouldn't even come up then.

The guy from IGA came to talk to me, they were having issues too, I told him to change back to the previously working network range, which should now work. It did, but only when using the proxy. Any direct connections to the internet failed. I decided that ip forwarding must be having issues, but then discovered that it's more likely caused by the non routable network range being routed through another non routable range, to the ADSL router, which when it tries to reply, thinks that the originating non routable range is on the internet, and sends the traffic back out to the internet. dumb.

I tried mucking around with forwarding/nat/routes etc, but no good.

I put a static route in the ADSL router, and the stupid thing got hung up claiming it was busy. I had to come back to the Cafe, and power cycle the dumb thing.

I then played around with different static routes. I also setup DMZ forwarding, and dyndns setup. Groovy, I can get in from home, it works.

I could not get the routing to work though. no matter how I tried putting the static routes in, with network ranges or specific IPs, different metrics, it just ignores them and sends the traffic out to the internet. Spastic thing.

I think I need to try to get IP Masquerading working on the router machine now, so I won't have to try to get routing working on the dumb ADSL router.

It was now after 5pm, I tried to get the stupid printer working that stopped last week. Finally the 172mb driver had finished downloading (why the F does a driver need to be 172MB??? What are you doing HP??), after clearing some disk space so the installer would not fail (there's 500mb free, how much do you need? shit driver). After all that, there is still no printer installed.

Oh forget it. We left the Cafe.

I'll be back in on Thursday, so undoubtedly, between now and then, someone will fiddle with the network settings on everything, and I'll have to spend 5 hours changing them back, before I can even start trying to find why there are problems.

I went back to my mate's place. Chatted for a while, had dinner, and then I came home.

I just started fiddling with the DVD stuff again. It finished rendering. Hmm.. I waited I don't know how many hours, and the video files ended up exactly the same size they started (if not bigger) even though I told it to recompress them so 120 minutes (6 episodes) would fit on a DVD.

Maybe the recompression settings were lost when I had to restart the procedure after it crashed.

I'm now running the rendered dvd files through dvd shrink, hopefully I will get a working filesystem, and then I can install the dvdr drive, and burn it. There's 20 minutes left on the analysing, i wonder what it does next.

If the video ends up too nasty (it should be ok, they're being recompressed to 80% something, or 700mb from 900mb) but if they aren't, I'll at least now know I can only get 5 episodes/dvd nicely.

Oops, I've got 6 hours of Robot Wars to watch now, and tomorrow I need to find the laptop hard disk adapter I've got somewhere, and extract some files off this laptop that won't run for more than 3 seconds without turning itself off.

OK, after DVDshrink finishes analysing, it starts rendering, that took 54 minutes to finish, when it was done, I had a new filesystem, 4.3gb worth ready to go on a DVD. It worked in VideoLAN player, groovy.

I installed the DVDR drive in the computer, no great task.

Now, software to use. I started up DiscJuggler, since it can burn dvds, it made references to data dvds though, and I want a movie dvd, and I thought maybe it's similar to CD/VCD/SVCD, you have to use special software, you can;t make an SVCD just by putting mpeg files on a CD. DVDs aren't like that apparently, you can use any software to make DVDs, but I'm not sure.. I'll come back to this.

I installed Nero that came with the drive, apparently imgburn is a good tool to use, and it uses Nero's api or something. I couldn't get it to work, just kept getting "communication failure" (as opposed to communication breakdown) errors.

After disabling dma on the dvdr drive, and rebooting, it seemed like it was going to work. I started it going, it took 1/2 hour to burn. When it was done, I stuck it in my crappy dvd player, Philips DVD707, it flashed "loading" for about a minute, and then said "no disc" crappy bloody thing.

I gave up and went to bed, about 4am.

Woo, that was fun.

I got woken up by the phone again.

I started watching the Robot Wars marathon on the telly, 6 hours of Robot Wars. While I watched these, I'd pause it and muck around with tivo's files, I think I may have a working solution for the files..

Anyway, I went back and forth between watching Robot Wars and extracting/cutting ads/vobbing/mpeg extracting Sabrina episodes.

My mate with the new mobo/cpu/ram/disk called me, with issues with his laptop, the networking won't work on it. Buggered if I know. I suggested he rip out all the network settings, let windows detect the card, and load everything back.

I went back to watching Robot Wars, by this time I was having to fast forward a lot of the talking, I'm not going to get through 6 hours of this otherwise (and there's 6 more hours everyday for the next week, I'll never keep up!).

On the end of one of the episodes, there was a tribute to David Gribble, the driver of the robot "Pussycat". I googled around a bit, he was killed after a motorcycle accident, only 17 years old. Sad.

I went back to watching Robot Wars again

My mate who's place I was at last night called me up to see if I wanted to come to a barbecque in about an hour at his place.

I kicked off Ulead DVD workshop rendering a dvd.

I watched a bit more tv, then I left about an hour later, went to the supermarket and bought some sausages, and headed to my mate's place.

Sat and played GTA again, it's such a cool game, I need to download it for PC.

Some food came out, I went and chatted with the other guests, then we cranked up the barby, hoed into the food, went back to playing GTA for a few more hours, I was the last to leave, at about 11pm.

I came home, and the dvd rendering had crashed. D'oh!

I started it off again (after rebooting), and left it.

I watched more Robot Wars, then I deleted all the Simpsons episodes off the tivo I've seen recently, and changed the wishlist setting to record the Simpsons in medium quality, so I can fit more on there.

I'm off to sleep, I've got a meeting with the network provider in the morning.

Ok, so I headed to my mates place, I got there about 5.10. He wasn't here. hmm.

It took me all of about 2 minutes of being here before I found a sliding door that I could lift to bypass the lock, and open the door.

I started watching tv, waiting for him to arrive. A storm warning was issued on the tv, I thought about going home again, I didn't want to get stuck here for the storm.

I decided to wait until 5.45, at about 5.44, just as I was about to leave, my mate turned up.

I helped him move the trailer in, and his shopping.

I had a look at his linux box I built for him, it doesn't boot, I think the root partition is stuffed.

We sat and played GTA Vice City for a while, that's a pretty cool game. my ADSL mate turned up with some bits and pieces, including my crimping tool.

My mate left to pick up his coffee table and a few other things, I had a beer while I waited.

He came back, I showed him how to make cat5 cables.

We decided to get some pizzas, they came a fair while later.

We chatted, my adsl mate tried to perk up our spirits about trying to pick up chicks at clubs, after that, we all decided to go to the club. Another mate turned up,we all jumped in his car and went to the club.

I played the pokies, after I lost all my other mates. I won $5.

As I was wandering around looking for my mates, some guy came up to me, and said "it's you". I'm thinking "who TF are you?" I told him that I didn't recall who he was. He told me that I was the guy on the roof of the butcher's the other day.

Yeah, while I was down in Wahroonga trying to work out what was going on, and tracing cables, I was inspecting the cable modem installed on the roof of the butcher's. I vaugely recalled some clowns across the road jeering at me.

I asked him if he had seen the news item recently about the guy who died in the plane crash. "Yeah", "well that guy was my friend, and I was trying to sort things out for him" "oh", and the guy gave me a break. I can't go anywhere.

We found each other, and decided to leave. We jumped in a taxi back to my mate's place. It cost $15, there goes my huge $5 winnings, oh well, it didn't cost me anything.

I grabbed my bottle of grog, jumped on my bike, and came home.

I'm playing around with the tivo video files again. That rendering finally finished, and gave a pretty good result, now I need to process some more episodes.

Far out. I'm waiting for Ulead to render a dvd with a single 20 minute episode in it, it's been going at least an hour, and is only 56% through "converting video title" whatever that means it's doing.

Why does tivo client have no issue in spending 11 minutes transcoding audio and coverting video from ty to vob, and then about 5 minutes converting that vob to a vob within a dvd filesystem, but Ulead is going to take hours?

All I want is some chapters, which tivo client almost did properly. If it wasn't for the pretty sad looking menu that tivo client creates, I'd just stick with using it on it's own.

I pulled the phone out and silenced my mobile again this morning when I went to bed.

When I woke, I had one missed call, no number.

I also had an sms, from my friend's De Facto, she wanted the password for my friend's laptop, I sent an email in reply.

I plugged the phone back in.

I forgot to turn the ringer back on on my mobile phone. When I checked it again, there was another missed call, no number.

I thought maybe it was my friend's De Facto calling in reply to my email. I called her, it wasn't her calling, we had a chat for a few minutes, and I found out that we did manage to get the network link back up yesterday.

The only other person I could think of that has caller ID turned off is my mate who is moving this weekend.

I called him up (it's 11am) he's still in bed, sounds like I woke him up. It wasn't him calling me, and he's turned his number back on now anyway.

He asked me around for drinks tonight, he's in his new place (where he lived 3 houses ago), I said I'd go if it wasn't pissing down with rain. "Why?" he asked, "Because I'll get wet and melt" was my smartarse reply.

He also wants me to bring my rj45 crimping tool and teach him how to make cat5 cables. Sounds like an exciting party :-)

I said I would probably turn up around 5pm (oops it's 4.30 now).

So I have no idea who the person with caller id turned off is, they didn't leave a message either. Oh well, if it's important, they'll ring back.

Since then I ate some breakfast, watched a bit of tv, and started mucking around with the tivo video files again.

I think I might be getting somewhere. I pull the files out with TyStudio editor, open them in Tivo Client, make a keyfile, edit the keyfile, to cut the ads out, make a vob, then use mpeg-vcr to join the video clips, and export an mpeg, then import the mpeg into Ulead DVD Movie Factory, make a menu, and export a dvd filesystem.

I've only got 3 episodes ready to go on dvd at this stage, so I need to do 2 or 3 more, then I'll create a full dvd. It'll be too big, so then I'll need to recompress it with DVD shrink or rempeg or something, but I'll get to that bit once I've processed a few more episodes off the tivo.

OK, I have to get ready to go to my mates place, I'll probably have to pickup my crimping tool on the way that's still at my adsl mate's place.

Ok, I've mucked around trying to find a workable solution for these files.

I've tried changing the ty files to vobs, and then joining them with other vobs, and making an mpeg, and changing it back to vob, that didn't seem to work, then I tried joining vobs, that was somewhat successful, but the chapters won't work in the second file. Hmm, I think I might look at this tomorrow.

I've just finished drinking the 6 pack of Rum and Cola's I bought, now that there's nothing left to do, I'm going to bed to watch a couple of episodes of The Simpsons.

So much for sleeping in, I woke up at like 8.20 anyway. I went back to sleep for a while, and at about 10am, I checked my mobile phone, 4 missed calls.

As I was checking the numbers, it started silently ringing, it was my mate in the Cafe, apparently one of our network links has failed, can I fix it etc.

He wanted the key to get into our equipment in Sydney, and we had to work out how to sort that out, I think it's a waste of time. If the wireless bridge is down, we won't be able to get on the roof, and the config is on a laptop lockied in a shop, and i don't know the ip address/username/password for the equipment anyway.

So after several calls I arrange to drop that off, so I eat my breakfast, get dressed, jump on my bike, and head to the freeway.

I gave the keys to my mate, and then took off.

I didn't want to just come home again, so I took the windy old way to Woy Woy, and then I came back the normal way.

I dropped in and saw a mate on the way back, he called me on the Saturday before the accident to get a quote on a new computer, I hadn't forgotten, but I hadn't had time. I told him what was going on, and told him I would get the quote sorted out.

I came home, on the way, I stopped in to buy some alcohol, the shop was too expensive, so I just got some Coke, and decided to get some grog around the corner from my house where it's cheaper.

I got home, and I'm now updating my blog.

I don't know what I'll do now. I really should try to get a working mpeg solution and start archiving the Tivo before it fills up.

Ok, so I got picked up by my mate I go to dinner with, we're off to look at a guy's pc and recommend an upgrade.

On the way, he tells me what's been going on with the solicitor, I'm not too happy. He's trying to cut me down to working 1 day a week, that's all well and good, if the business could function like that, I'd be happy to do it (well, somewhat happy, this is heading towards being the same situation that caused me to leave the first time).

Anyway, we get to the guy's place, head up, look at his pc, there's a little AT case sitting there. There's no point even turning the thing on, it will need to be replaced if he wants to upgrade.

My mate turns it on, it's a 686 200, with 32mb of ram. it boots up, running windows 95. Somehow I doubt his USB printer and camera will be working on here.

We tell him we'll get a quote, and let him know.

He paid us $10 for turning up, normally I would have refused, but in my current situation, I have to take any money offered. So I got $5 out of it.

I came back home again, and I just bummed around on the computer and watching tv for the rest of the day.

I sent an email to he guy in Darwin, apparently the equipment in Melbourne doesn't belong to us, great, I don't have to get that sorted out.

I'm going to sleep in tomorrow. I've just unplugged the landline, and silenced the ringer on my mobile.

OK, I just had a look, at my host finally got around to setting up my domain name, www.tcpip.net.au.

I've moved the blog over to sitting behind this new address, so I have some logging.

Since DNS takes a couple of days to update, I've put symlinks in to keep this working until the DNS is working reliably.

My mobile phone rang, it's my mate with the new mobo/ram, "i just tried to ring and the phone went to the Cafe", "yeah, it didn't ring, and it's diverted there if I don't answer or it's busy" "oh, ok. windows doesn't work" (well, duh), "it just has a blue screen instead of starting". What do you expect when you change the motherboard. Windows has enough trouble running when you don't change the motherboard. "reinstall windows" "ok". Bye.

I go back to writing this blog. The landline rings "oh, hi, I was just testing this number", yes, my number works (my mate that just called my mobile). "The install is working". "Great, bye".

Did I mention I hate phones?

Far Out.

10am, my mobile rings, it's the tech support woman, the ADSL in the Cafe isn't working. I try to rememeber what to do in the admin page of the router. It seems it's connected. Call the ADSL provider. I hang up.

about 1 minute later, the landline rings. Shit I hate phones. I dive out of bed and grab it, it's my mate I dropped the motherboard and ram off to last night, he seems to think that the motherboard's not going to fit in the case.

The shitty case has a fixed motherboard tray, so he'll probably have to pull everything out of the case and fit the board, then put it all back.

In a couple of hours my mate I go to dinner with is coming to pick me up, and we're going to see a guy that wants his computer upgraded. After that, when I get home, if he's having problems, then I'll go an look.

I've been awake for 18 minutes, and I'm already sick of today.

I woke up this morning, got up.

The phone rang, my mate was having a discussion with the solicitor, and wanted to know the minimum time I could agree to work.

I was still asleep, I don't know what I said.

I bummed around for a while, watching tv.

When I went to watch some tv, I noticed the channels were all mixed up again. Argh. It took me 1/2 hour to sort them all again. SBS and ABC and a couple of other channels were missing this time. Bugger.

While I was fixing the order of channels, so Tivo will stop recording History channel instead of Comedy channel, the guy who lives next door to the guy I was going to start the ISP with called me, he wanted to know about the second hand pcs and ram available, I told him to call me back after 1pm when I was at the Cafe.

Mum went out, she backed the car out, stopped at the bottom of the driveway, checked the mail, got back in the car, started going again, then pulled over at the side of the road. I wondered what she was doing. On the tv, the show I was watching, a guy started going "shit, shit, shit", then I noticed mum walking towards the grass holding her shoe. Oops, she must have stepped in it.

I watched a bit more tv, then I went and had a shower, loaded up my bag, with the laptop.

I went to the guy's place, picked up his stuffed laptop, my mate (his son) turned up, along with my adsl mate, had a chat to them for a bit, turns out my mate is moving again on Sunday, back to the place he lived in 3 houses ago. I think I might skip moving all his junk again.

As I was here, my phone rang, it was the customer from yesterday with the static IP, complaining that DNS was broken again. I said I would look when I was near a PC.

I took off, went and checked the post office box, then headed up to the Cafe.

As I got in there, the phone rang, it was the guy who called me earlier, I told him I had just got there, give me 45 minutes.

I started working on the laptop, the network cable I tried to use didn't work, wasted time with that, found another one, tried to find SP1 that had been downloaded, someone must have deleted it.

Went to download and install it, before it could install, the battery ran out. End of that.

I asked about the second hand pcs and stuff.

I had some conversation with my mate I go to dinner with, about my hours getting limited. I'm not interested in getting $100/week to work 1 day/week, and 50% of the PC repair stuff. It's a setup link this that caused me to leave the first time. I'm also very unimpressed I was not included in the discussions with the solicitor.

The guy called back, I told him what was going on.

I then went to fix something apparently wrong with the admin pc. No virii, I don't know what your problem is.

Then someone complained that the printer wasn't working, I tried to fix that, my friend's De Facto came in, I explained to her about the Wahroonga setup, and that we should try to get rid of it.

She was in there for a while, we chatted about other things, but not my dissatisfaction.

After she left, I continued mucking around with the printer. Need to download 173MB driver. WTF. Stupid HP, how can a driver be 173MB? I tried to download it, it claimed it needed 670MB free on the hard drive. Far out.

I left that going.

I contacted the guy at Wahroonga I had been speaking to, he can have the setup.

I collected the motherboard and ram I ordered for my mate a couple of days ago.

We closed the shop.

I went to my mate's place, sat and had a big chat about everything. I'm not really interested in this 1 day/week, or even worse, 2 4 hour days/week. As if. If I leave, then when something breaks, it's all over.

We're pretty certain this is the end of the business. It might last another month or maybe 2, but it will die, without techs on hand to run it.

We might start our own ISP after this one falls down.

We went to dinner, some of his friends were there, they have Chinese wives too, they were celebrating Chinese New Year.

After dinner, I went back to his place, sat and had another chat, and then I left, I was tired.

I stopped in at my mates place (I was going to start the ISP with), and told him bits of what was going on. Had some discussions about perhaps starting the ISP we had been talking about. We looked at the figures, and with really rough estimates, something has be seriously wrong with the incoming money of my friend's ISP.

It pissed down with rain, when it let up for a second, I came home.

I realised I hadn't blogged yesterday, so I did it, and today's. I'm going to bed. It's nearly 1 am.

OK, this is Wednesday, I'm writing this on Thursday night, I don't remember all of what I did yesterday, this is some of it.

I stayed at home all day.

The phone rang a ton of times, I can't remember who I was speaking to, or what about however.

One customer rang me, he wanted to know about getting his static IP moved to Sydney, and dialling in there, to bypass the slow service in Gosford, I said I would have to find out the details of how this is done.

I was supposed to go and pick up a laptop belonging to the guy who owns the air con business, but I was kept too busy on the phone.

Oh, it turns out our Gosford pop is so slow because there's only a 128k connection there. Great, 128k to share amongst 90 dialin lines.

We've got that increased to 512k temporarily, we have to go and talk to the network provider on Tuesday to work out what we want to do.

I spent some time mucking around with mpeg stuff, trying to work out what to do with these tivo videos, it took me 90 minutes to process 20 seconds of video, and it ended up double the size it started.

My parents came in for a chat, and brought in a laptop they'd got off someone to fix.

I chatted for a while, about the stuff I had seen at Wahroonga, and what was going on with the business, I showed them the Tivo, they seemed impressed.

After they went, I started mucking around with the laptop, "full of viruses" apparently. I installed AVG, updated it, installed AdAware, ran a full scan, got rid of about 100 spyware items, but no virii were found.

I went to install the windows updates..42 available. SP1 not installed. I haven't got the adapter for this laptop, and I won't have time for SP1 to download, so I left it. I'll take the laptop to the shop and install it over the ADSL tomorrow.

Today was a long day as I expected.

I got up, found that my sat tv was all stuffed up, after watching a channel for 3 seconds it would say "E38 service is not currently running", and I could fix it by changing channel up/down, but that gets a bit tedious having to do that constantly, and sort of makes the tivo a bit useless.

I tried changing some details on the card, but it made no difference. I gave up, I was now late anyway.

I went and got some fuel, I realised I had forgotten to bring my pen, and also my torch, I would need the torch.

I decided to get the mail, and then stop in at home and get the torch, and then go up to he shop for the appointment I have this morning. I immediately forgot what I was doing, and went the wrong way. So I came home, got my pen and my torch, then went and got the mail, the letter we wanted was there, so that was ok, then I headed north.

I got to the real estate about 20 minutes late, it turns out they have been dealing with the other computer shop, not terribly impressive. I went in and got the dolt from there, he was trying to find a password recovery tool to get the password out of the adsl gateway machine.

We went back, I booted it up.. "Where's the adsl device?", "Oh, I moved it over here". "Ok, so put it back here", "but the line is over here". Great, ok, shut it down, unplugged it, dragged it over the other side, started plugging it back in, some guy from another office came in and had a cry because I'd parked behind him.

I went down and moved my bike, when I came back, the dolt had plugged the machine all in, and booted it. The keyboard and mouse didn't work. they were some dumb wireless thing. I went to get the other ones that were in it before. "Oh, I put the plugs in around the wrong way" says the dolt.

Fixed that, rebooted, connected, I downloaded my password tool, got the password out.

I left there, and went up to the Cafe. If the real estate had still been using us for their IT services (we installed the ADSL for free) then it would have been ok, but the fact they've gone elsewhere.. they will be receiving an invoice from me.

I burned a Knoppix cd to take with me to recover the machine at Wahroonga, chatted for a bit, arranged to order a motherboard and ram for my mate who we'd just unsuccessfully replaced his failed cpu.

I left, got on the freeway, and raced down to Wahroonga.

I started having a look a the machine, it seems ok, nothing wrong. Tried to change the root password, stupid Red Hat, can't do anything. I tried to boot my Knoppix cd.. the cdrom drive is stuffed. Great.

I had a user login, so I used that, started poking around, couldn't see any issues.

I called our tech guy, and he gave me the root password, I knew it, but had forgotten, there are too many bloody passwords to remember.

Ok, I started tcpdumping the interfaces, couldn't see any issues.

I then decided to work out the wiring. I found a bunch of cables doing nothing, so I started ripping them out.

I found about 100 powerboards all chained together, so I shut the machine down, pulled that out, and recabled all the power. When I put the power back on, I noticed that one length of cat5 going into the hub didn't have a link light, I traced it, it went out the window, up the wall, over a door, up and in an open window.

Maybe the internet source is in there. I tried to work out what that was, there's just empty offices up there. Maybe someone moved and took some equipment they shouldn't have.

I went back and examined the telephone lines, I found an active onramp with nothing plugged in, an active onramp home highway, connected to a netjet card in the server. Aha! maybe this is the data feed, but I thought it was a cable modem, but it's not here anymore, maybe it's not.

I poked around on the server, I couldn't find any config for the netjet stuff, I've no idea if this was used.

I went and spoke to the Chemist, he seemed to know some of what was going on. I went out the back of his place, and I ripped out all the coax network cable that's not used anymore, about 200m worth.

I found a length of cat5 running out his vent, around the corner, around a carport, on to the roof, across the roof, and then I found it strung across the road. I couldn't see where it went, but I assumed down under the bookshop where the rest of the stuff is.

I spoke to the chemist, he told me to speak to the guy in the Chicken Shop, he might know. I spoke to him, he said that my friend's stuff was in the flat upstairs, that they don't use anymore. He then gave me bad directions, and I went into the wrong place asking about our telephone service.

They didn't know anything about it.

I went back to looking at cables again, I went around in the alley, found some stairs, and saw a suspect bit of cable hanging over the edge. I went up the stairs, and saw some dodgy bits of cable, hmm, maybe I'm on to something.

I spoke to the guy in the flat upstairs, he told me there was some stuff on the roof.

I climbed on the roof, went along. I found the remains of a plastic container that the sun had destroyed, the lid had collapsed, and the thing was half full of water, with a cable modem floating in it.

So much for being back at the shop at 2pm, it was now just after 2pm.

I pulled it out, shook the water out of it. Maybe I've found the problem here. I tried to move the container, it just completely disintegrated. I started tracing cables again. I found an Optus Cable install on the wall, with a cable running out of it under the flashing and along, it must go into the modem. I traced the power for the modem, it ran down and was plugged in near the cooling units for the butcher's coolroom.

I then started tracing the cat5 out of the cable modem, and found 3 lots of 20 pair cable scotchlocked to the end of a 100 pair cable, it ran under the flashing along, then came out, and was strung across the road, with the cat5 cable tied to it.

I traced the 20 pair cables, they ran down and into a telstra mdf on the wall, ok, here's where our phone lines come from.

I went back to the cable modem, the power should still be active, I plugged it in again, it powered up, the ethernet link light came up, and the activity light was flashing, but it would not go "online". I shoved it under the airconditioner, hopefully it will be sheltered enough, and won't get full of water again (the corrugated roof should give it good drainage).

Ahh.. I remember someone calling us a few days ago about an Optus bill. I'll bet it's for this cable modem, and no one's paid it, and it's been cutoff.

I surveyed the situation. We've got a 100 pair cable and some cat5 strung across the road, then it comes back again, going to the other side of the lane.

When I was down here yesterday, I found a bit of cat5 strung across the lane on the other side, it goes into an office over there.

I knew what was going on now, and I couldn't fix anything from here. I got off the roof, cleaned up, and got some lunch.

The Chemist found me, it was his office across the road, we went to look at the cable modem. About this time, I was called.. there had been a blackout in Gosford, and now it was slow. "I'll be there in an hour or so".

I went over to the office and looked in there, then I saw the 30 pair cable that also runs across the street and the lane, it's telephone lines patched into his pabx apparently.

I had a discussion with him about what we might do in future with this setup.

I need to take pictures of all this stuff, it's brilliant.

Anyway, I ate my lunch, and sat down to make some documentation. Got called a bunch of times, eventually was able to leave.

I got abut halfway up the freeway, there had been an accident, and it was slowed to a stop. I stopped for a second, decided bugger it, and rode several kilometres up the outside of the lanes, get's a bit tight in a few spots. I kicked one of the reflectors it was so tight.

I managed to get across to the inside, and got a few more ks in there, before I came across a truck I couldn't squeeze past, so I just waited there for a couple of minutes.

I got annoyed there, and went up the newly made lane that's not open yet, where the emergency vehicles had been travelling. Good enought for them.

I rode up there as possibly far as I could, before the concrete barrier started, and I had to get back in the lane, or end up in the roadworks.

I could see emergency vehicles from here, so I didn't want to get too close, in case the cops got me.

I was trying to get back in the lane, people weren't having a bar of me fitting in there, so I pulled over, put the stand down, took off my helmet, and waited. This way, I won't get busted if cops come up.

I made a phone call, told the guy in Gosford where I was and what was going on, got off the phone and sat for a minute, saw some movement up ahead, so I whipped my helmet back on, got started again, and squashed into the lane. Got a bit closer, they were merging everyone into 1 lane, which took a bit of time, and we were past it.

I saw a totally destroyed Commodore, sucked into some Bogan, he'd run up the back of something very hard, nothing else left around here. We were back to 110km/h now, groovy. I went past the weight station a bit down the road, and a tow truck was carrying another destroyed car, a Bogan spec Ute in, maybe it was part of the prang.

Anyway, I got back to Gosford, went in to where our equipment is, and started having a look. One server hadn't come back up at all, and another had come up with firewall rules stopping everything from running (and dns wasn't running, but I forgot about that, I really should have updated that script I said "yeah, ha ha" about recently). I fixed that, everything looked like it was working, so I left.

I came home. It was now just after 6pm, a long day.

My sat tv was still stuffed, E38 error constantly.

I fiddled around a bit, read some forum posts, changed to channel stacking, and it was then working ok. I didn't notice, but the channel order was all mixed up.

About this time I got a call to tell me there were problems with people logging on. I logged into the server, and saw some people failing to logon. When I tried to check other things, everything would segfault. Must be memory issues. I said I would look in the morning, I'm not going back to Gosford now, at 9.30pm. I waited 1/2 hour, and then logged in, I was able to run top, and sort by memory, there were a bunch of spamd processes running, one of them was chewing 85.1% of the memory (450MB worth), and it belonged to me. Oops, I must be getting spammed. After a minute or so, it went away, and there was 450MB free ram.

I sat and watched some tv, deleted all the recordings from today that were just half an hour of the E38 error message (about 8 hours worth), and then I was just about to go to sleep, about 11pm, I noticed the tivo recording, I went to check.. it thought it was recording comedy channel, but the history channel was there. What's going on? then I realised the channel order was all screwed up.

I used the channel sorting stuff to manually sort them, that was ok, I found there's a few new channels, instead of the 52 standard ones, there's now repeats of some that are offset by 2 hours, and other stuff that my card can't decrypt. It took about 20 minutes of button pressing to sort things, and I almost got RSI pressing up and down about 4000 times.

Anyway, it was now sorted, and all the channels worked.

I had a look at all the new channels, most are scrambled, there's a couple of crappy channels like country music, but I also found abc and sbs, so now I want to rechannel the tivo to use the sat abc/sbs instead of the nasty terrestrial ones. Oh, and I found some channel that I assume is widescreen, and the data rate seems to be too high for my box to decode it properly.

it's now midnight, I'm watching an episode of the Simpsons, and going to sleep.

Bloody garbage truck woke me up this morning, I got a phone call a short time later, it was my mate a the shop, he asked me about problems accessing websites or something, and also problems with mail, I had a look, it was getting spammed again, and there was 4mb free, as I watched the huge spamd process (me again) finished, and it went back to having 500MB free ram.

The phone's been going off it's head all day since then.

I wrote some documentation for the tivo mailing list, took me ages with all the phone calls going on.

Someone else called with problems with something.

A guy I used to work at CSC called, he wanted to talk about a business opportunity, I told him what was going on, chatted for a while, I'll call him back in a couple of weeks when I have some time.

The guy who called yesterday after the blackout was complaing dns was broken, I logged in, and found that dns was not running on one box (oops, that script I need to fix), and dns was broken on the other box, I had to kill -9 it and restart it, that was fixed,

Then I had to make several calls back and forth about the bandwidth in Gosford, I thought it was just throttled, but it seems that it's saturated, probably all that spam, now I have to worry about trying to get static IPs moved to the Sydney pop.

I still need to find some MPEG2 software that works, otherwise I'll just DivX/XviD this stuff and be done with it.

Last night, just as I was about to go to bed, I realised I didn't have my phone. uh oh. I hope I left it at my mates place, and it didn't fall off me on the road somewhere.

I tried calling it, it rang, but I couldn't hear it ringing, it's not here.

Oh well, I went to bed anyway, about 2am.

I got called up just before 8am this morning, it was my mate I go to dinner with, who I was going to Sydney with today. I don't remember the conversation, I think he asked me to check the post office box, which I forgot immediately.

I tried calling my phone again, no answer. Bugger.

I had to find my mate's phone number, so I could ring the house line.. I hope it's backed up in Nokia Data Suite. Uhh.. it doesn't work since I didn't reinstall it after I fixed windows.

Ok, I found the installer, installed it. it runs, here's the number, I called it, woke his wife up (oops), yeah, my phone is there. Cool.

I ate some breakfast, got dressed, and left the house, about 8.30am

I got to my mates place, his wife came out and gave me my phone, I had a chat with her for a couple of minutes, while I was there, the next door neighbour came reversing out of her driveway, and reversed straight into the sandstone wall around their garden, I hung around, I wanted to see the damage, not too bad, just a nasty scratch on the rim around the wheel hub.

Anyway, I took off from there, and went to my mate's place. He wasn't there.

Just as I called him, he turned up. I unloaded everything from my bike, put my bike in the garage, and we took off.

As we headed to the service station to fuel up, he asked "Did you get the mail?", "Oops" was my reply. I'll get it in the morning. Really.

We got fuel, got on the freeway, we went down to Wahroonga where we have equipment. Met the solicitor, had a look at what we have there, I thought it was just a cable modem and a pc providing internet to the bookshop and the chemist, then I find bits of cat5 running across the road, I dunno what's going on here.

The chemist turned up, he knows some about it, it's a joke. I thought we could just shut this pop down, but now I don't know.

I don't even know where the cable modem is, it's not here anymore.

We were here for an hour, and I achieved not much, so I have to go back tomorrow to fix the pc, and try to document what is there.

We went from there to Chatswood, to the Internet Cafe, introduced ourselves, met the owner. I collected the key to the Sydney pop from our tech guy's wife, who met us there.

We were here for about 40 minutes, we then travelled into the city.

We went to the building containing the dialin equipment, I made some documentation, and worked out what's in here. Spent about half an hour in here. The setup could be nicer, but it's not too bad.

We left here, went over to Central Railway station, had lunch at Hungry Jacks.

We left Central, and headed over to Newtown, to collect the laptops my friend bought before he had his accident.. Uhh, the place has moved. Some people in the same building were nice enough to help us, giving us the phone number, and letting us call them to find out where they were.

We went over to Marickville, where they had moved to, collected the laptops, had a chat with the guy for a few minutes, and then we left again.

I had a quick look at both laptops in the car, silly little portege things with external everything (pcmcia cdrom, usb floppy etc), they are a pretty tiny unit, I might see if I can have one at cost, the compact size would be handy for moving it around in my bike.

We headed over to Lidcombe, to get a satellite decoder, and to go visit the pc supplier my friend used before his accident, we were supposed to be picking up a pc, but the order got cancelled early this morning, so now we were just going to sort a couple of other things out.

We bought the sat decoder first, no worries, in and out, then we went over to the pc supplier (they both have units in the same commercial complex).

We chatted with him, worked out to get a couple of stuffed modems replaced, I priced some stuff, I bought a new cpu for my mate (who bought the new hard drive, his computer blew up), and priced an adsl router for my adsl mate. Far too expensive on the router $195.

We left here, and headed back towards home a little bit, to Pennant Hills, my mate picked up his wife, then we headed up the freeway to home.

On the freeway, I got a call, it was a tech guy I was talking to a few days ago, he wanted to know what time I would be at the real estate agent tomorrow. D'oh, I forgot about that. I said I would be there at 9am. So now tomorrow I need to get the mail, go to the real estate, and then go down the freeway to fix the pc/inventory the crap. It's going to be another long day.

I stayed and had dinner, then I decided to leave, because I had to drop off the cpu, and then I wanted to get home and try playing with mpeg2 software again. I was going to bring the sat decoder home with me to test, but I couldn't fit in my bike, so I left it. I might take my bag up tomorrow and bring it back tomorrow night.

I dropped in at my mate's place with the cpu, installed it, still no good. Either the mobo is stuffed, or it doesn't support the cpu. I brought the old cpu home with me to check.

I got home, and noticed the error led lit on my sat decoder again, argh, that stupid "service is not currently running" issue again I'll bet, changed the channel up/down to fix it.

Next thing I know, the light is on again, wtf. I looked more closely, it must be some other issue.

I turned on the telly, and I see it's actually a "service is currently scrambled error", uh oh, my card must have missed an update or something.

I pulled the card out. WTF? this is not my card. This is the card out of my parents box. Great. Their card has died, so they've come and taken mine, and put a dead one back in. What was the point of putting it in there? far out, do they think I won't notice. Argh, now tivo has recorded hours of "Channel is scrambled". There will be words about this.

I reprogrammed the dead card, still getting scrambled error. Argh. There must have been a public key update in the last 2 days since I last backed up my card.

I started getting dressed to go inside and get my card back, so I could get the current keys off it, just as I pulled my shorts on, the picture came back, it must have copped the update, groovy.

I then found that the Radiohead special I wanted to watch was on (damn, missed 40 minutes of it). I sat and watched that for ages, then I got some dumb message on the screen about calling Austar about a pending interruption to my service or some rubbish, and I had to find my remote to press exit. Dumb. I hope that does not happen again, or tivo will be recording more nonsense.

If I was paying for this crap, they would have me on the line complaining every single day, I honestly cannot understand how they can expect people to pay for something that's always got issues.

Anyway, I got around to testing the cpu, it doesn't boot my pc, it must be stuffed, put my original back, works fine.

I icq'd my mate and told him, so I'll arrange for a new mobo and some RAM to get ordered tomorrow.

I went back to watching Radiohead, until it finished.

I checked my Amex statement again, finally, the paypal registration is on there. It took 4 days, that's poor. I completed my paypal registration, and paid for a couple of eBay auctions I won recently.

It's now nearly midnight, I'm going to bed, I'll have to get up at like 8am tomorrow, to get the mail and be at the real estate at 9am. I need to charge the batteries for my mp3 player.

I got nothing done with mpeg2 stuff whatsoever. Argh. Tivo will be full again soon (although, not at the rate of "Service is not currently running" recordings it's been making recently).

I got up at some point this morning.

I ate some rice bubbles for breakfast.

My mate called me with tech calls again, some idiot user's mailbox was full, and Lookout couldn't handle downloading his mail, what a surprise. Very celeverly, someone decided to login to the webmail interface, and delete the large mails, while Lookout was still trying to download, this resulted in the mailbox being emptied, I assume either because the message order was changing, and the wrong emails got deleted, or because 2 things were modifying the mailbox at the same time it got corrupted and qmail or sendmail or whatever mail server is on there trashed the mailbox.

I watched some tv, there was a comedy show Tivo had recorded, it had a funny clip in it, containing the exact car one of my mates used to own, I digitised the clip, and emailed it to him.

I went to my mate who just got Foxtel installed's place. I took my Phoenix programmer and some software.

I grabbed the red card out, read off the hsn, noticed the card locking value was not set on the card, weird. I made a card that should work.. yep, but it won't update.

I thought that since the card locking value wasn't there, maybe it wasn't locked, I made another card, with just normal autoupdating details on it.. bang, it worked. Groovy, now I don't need to worry about constantly fixing this card when it fails to update.

It seems really strange that a brand new install wouldn't be card locked.

I stayed around here for a while, they gave me lunch, that was nice, I had a Margarita, and a Martini after that, it was a very enjoyable Sunday afternoon.

I popped in to see my adsl mate on the way home, he wasn't home, so I left there.

I popped in to the bottle shop around the corner on my way from there, grabbed a six pack of Rum and Cokes, I'm just finishing my third now.

I watched a bit of tv. I listened to some music. I decided I really need to start processing all the files on my Tivo before it fills up.

I'm now crusing around looking for some good Mpeg2 software, I want to be able to edit the Tivo streams, I'll need to chop bits out (the ads) and then recompress the clips a bit smaller, since even with ads cut, they end up being about 1gb each, and I would like to be able to fit more than 4 episodes on a dvd.

This is a whole new thing, dvd editiing/authoring, I need to do a lot of reading, I can tell.

Oh well, I'll have to go to bed very shortly, I need to be up early in the morning to go to 50 different places tomorrow, and my Duran Duran marathon has just finished anyway.

I didn't do much today.

I got up, watched some tv, my mate that I go to dinner with, and work with now, called me to tell me about the whinging messages people had left on the answer service.

I really don't care if people are having problems with email. They choose to use Lookout, they choose to try to email 20MB bitmaps to each other. People are dumb, and when they decide to actually learn the correct ways to do things, and then have issues, I will happily help them, because there will be no issues, because we won't have to worry about the mail server grinding to a halt trying to deal with stupid users.

It is Saturday, they are not paying for 24/7 support, so they are not getting it, especially not from me. I will be working my 3 days/week, and that is all. If people want to pay me $50/hr during the week to deal with their issues out of hours, and $100/hr on the weekends, then I will help them, otherwise they can help themselves, or wait until I decide to deal with their nonsense.

Anyway, I gave yes/no answers to his queries about the issues, I really don't care on the weekend.

I went back to watching tv.

My mate that I was going to start the ISP with/got a new hard drive called me, he'd had Foxtel installed, and wanted to know about getting some extra channels, I told him I needed to see his card to make one, I might sort it out later.

I went and bought some food.

I watched more tv.

I decided to have a shower, since all my skin is peeling off and it's gross. The cold shower was too much, I couldn't handle it, so I didn't end up getting much of it off.

My mate called with user's problems again, one person wanted to know their adsl password. Sorry, but we don't keep them on record. Tell them that I will be available on Tuesday, and I might be able to recover the password from their computer.

The customer that wanted that done called me shortly after, so I just told them exactly what I had just told my mate to tell them. Far out, it's the weekend, don't expect anything from me on the weekend unless you want to pay for it. I'm busy on Monday, you can't just expect me to be available for your purposes 2 days before the fact.

I went back to watching tv.

I did some washing up.

I ate some fish and chips for dinner.

I went to bed about 2am, I setup the Tivo to record Rage so I wouldn't have to sit up and watch it.

I was woken up this morning by a large bang followed by a sizzling noise. I know that sound, that's the power station blowing up.

Yep, no power, wonder how long it's been out. It's about 8.30am, and it's raining heavily outside, ugh. I go back to sleep.

I think at about 9am I heard a loud pop, and some of my equipment came on for a second before going off again.

I woke up again about 10.10, by another loud pop, and everything coming back on.

I got up, starting fixing things up, default routes etc.

I ate some breakfast, bummed around, I'm supposed to be going to the Cafe today, I really don't want to.

I noticed the Tivo had been recording something, I checked it.. it was trying to record "Whose Line is it Anyway?", but when the power came back on, the Sat decoder locked on to the wrong set of channels, so it was recording the fashion channel instead of the comedy channel. delete. Oh, and here's half a Simpsons episode that started recording when the power came back on, think again.. the Sat decoder came back on on the wrong channel, so it was some of an episode of "Murder She Wrote". Delete.

And here's another Simpsons episode from this morning, from 7.50am, and it only goes for 17 minutes.. the power must have gone off at 8.07am.

I watched a full episode that was on here, I was waiting for the rain to let up. Just as it finished, my phone rang, the tech support woman, am I coming in today? "yeah, I suppose, be there in half an hour or so".

I got my stuff together, put my dry suit on, and left a couple of minutes later.

My shoe starting filling with water almost immediately. A couple of kilometres later, I felt really cold, I was getting wet in a certain area. hmm. Another couple of kilometres down the road, the traffic became very slow.

I rode along in first gear dragging my foot for about 3 kilometres, ah.. there's been an accident. People seem to forget how to drive when it rains. They've done a good job, there's some bogan spec station wagon thing here, it's destroyed, already got a flat tyre and everything.

Glass and plastic all over my side of the road, looks like boxes and clothes and stuff on the other side, I managed to avoid running over any of the junk on the road, and kept going.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful.

I got to the Cafe, wandered inside, took my "dry" suit off, discovered that I looked like I'd had an accident in my pants, and also that my shoe was completely full of water.

I am very not impressed at this point.

I sit down for 2 minutes, some woman comes in "is my computer fixed yet?". Jesus, I only got here 2 minutes ago. What computer? where? what's wrong with it?

I told her I would have to look at it, does she want to come back in an hour. "Just ring me when it's done" "I've had to bring this thing back 5 times now". Well, that's not my fault, I wasn't even here. People give me the shits.

Hmm. This machine looks very familiar. It's a trade in that I received before I stopped working in the Cafe a few months ago, I got the thing all setup and ready to sell, and said I wanted some of the cost when it was sold. I was never paid that, when I was in the Cafe before the accident, I noticed it wasn't where I left it anymore, I assumed it was just moved.

I booted it up, "Non System Disk or Disk Error" ok, the boot sector is stuffed, a quick "sys c:" will fix this. Uh, wrong.

After I managed to find a boot disk, I found the hard drive contents all corrupted. I also noticed it claimed it had a 1284MB drive in it, I know this machine had a bigger disk in it when I set it up.

Hmm, maybe SpinRite or Norton can fix this, where are they? I can't find them on the network drives.

Maybe they are on my PC out the back.. it won't boot. I disabled a bunch of startup crap and fixed that. Why is Lookout on here?, let me guess, there'll be virii on here too. I'll update the virus scanner.. uh, no ip adress.. ah.. no network cable.

I managed to find a network cable (I will need to bring my crimping tool up and make some cables I think), plugged it in, tried to get an IP, and keep getting "IP address conflict" errors when I try to get an ip off the dhcp server.

I decided to disable the dhcp server on the adsl router, in case that is causing issues. I had intended to do this anyway.

Still getting the same conflict error.

I reconfigured dhcp on the server, to issue the new gateway ip address, and restarted it.

Still getting the same conflict error. Getting annoyed.

It's now I find that there are far too many manually configured tcp stacks around the place. I went around and changed everything back to automatic like it is supposed to be. While doing this, I find one machine with a static IP assigned that is supposed to be on my machine. aha. changed the machine to automatic, groovy, now I've got an IP. I updated the virus scanner, rebooted to it would take effect, updated again, ran the scanner. Oh look, Klez on the machine. Only 2 infected files surprisingly.

I found and downloaded SpinRite again, ran it on the broken machine (it's only taken me an hour of pissing about to actually be able to start on this machine). It's happily reading the disk. What about the fact the data is all corrupt? it must just deal with hardware errors.

I found Norton Disk Doctor, ran that, it fixed a few errors on the disk, the Partition Table, the File Allocation Tables, and something else. Dodgy Directories, 4000 something lost chains, it runs through all those, asks me if I want to fix it, and then crashes. Hmm.

I tried running it again, crashes. Put himem.sys on and loaded it, still crashes, tried mucking around with config.sys settings, still crashes. Decide I'll have to fix this some other way.
I started googling for disk recovery software came across a page listing a few different products, went and looked at details of all of them, some appear to not exist anymore, PowerQuest's Lost+Found has disappeared since PowerQuest has been bought by Symantec "use Norton" they'll say.

I found something called "Stellar Phoenix", I want the dos version so I can fix it on the machine, I found a crack for it, but it was for the windows version, oh well. I downloaded the demo of the windows version, installed it, applied the crack, pulled the corrupted disk out, plugged it in, booted up, ran the software, followed the tips, and it found everything on the disk.

At this point the woman rang to find out what was happening, "I'm working on it".

I then recovered all the lost files to my hard drive, formatted the corrupted one, moved all the files back, tried to get it to boot, but all the files are corrupt after all that. 5 hours wasted. Oh well, I know good software and the method for doing this the next time I need to recover files.

I tried to call her back to tell her the hard disk is stuffed and that it will need a windows reinstall to fix, but she'd gone out. I left a message that it will be fixed next Tuesday or something.

I talked to the other tech guy, he reckons it's come in corrupted before, and he's reinstalled windows to fix it. Looks like it needs that again. She was charged last time, I don't think I can charge again, maybe it's her fault, but it could be a hardware fault.

I decided to replace the disk, install windows on it, and she can take it away. If it screws up again, she's paying.

I went back to my mates place, ended up staying for dinner, got home about 9pm. I rang my adsl mate, he wants a 4 port adsl router now. I'll get one on Monday.

I watched Jackass while writing this, that's a funny show.

Ok, I'm going to bed I think, I'll play with my DVDR drive tomorrow, only bought it a week ago.

OK, as usual, this is not being written when it claims. I seem to prefer updating this every second day, but it's harder to remember what to put in here.

Ok, I got up at some point, bummed around.

I got a phone call because the tech support woman couldn't work Thunderbird, sorted that out.

I called the guy who removed the missing server from the roof, he's offered to allow us to put some stuff in his colo, I wanted to have a look, but he's not going in there today, no problem. He told me where it is, I might go and have a look anyway (apparently there's a window in the door).

I went to have a cold shower, but I couldn't handle it, so I went inside and had a proper shower.

I came back and got dressed, grabbed my mates broken phone, and headed over to talk to the guy who owns the repair place.

He had just ducked out, and would be back in an hour. I decided to get some lunch while I waited.

I took off, and went to pay my Amex bill, took a bit of fiddling to find a parking spot, paid it, then took off again.

I was going to go for lunch, but I wasn't paying attention, and didn't turn at the right place, I decided I would go to Coles, buy some Aloe Vera for my skin and come back.

I went to the shopping centre, went into Coles, couldn't find what I was looking for, I went to the cheap shop, and found a bottle of Aloe Vera bath gel for $2.50, not too bad, grabbed it.

I went back to KFC, had some lunch, then I decided to get check the colo. I rode back to Gosford, went near where I thought it was, I couldn't find it, so I gave up.

I went back over to the electronics place, I chatted to the guy over there about my friend, and how he'd been told that plane would kill him, oh well. The guy offered to help us out with cheap equipment if we want it, I tried to get my mate's phone fixed, but apparently Telstra phones aren't worth fixing, what a surprise.

I left there, he had another appointment, and I came home.

I bummed around watching The Simpsons for a while.

I decided I needed to digitise the video my mate had asked me to do for him, I fiddled around and got that set up.

I captured the video, 20 minutes worth, spent a couple of minutes chopping out static frames, then set it to MPEG2 encode.

5 hours later, my 20 minute video was encoded, so I burned it on a CD as an SVCD, only 430MB, groovy, good quality too, you can't tell the difference from the original tape.

It was now nearly 1am. I went to bed, watched another episode of The Simpsons, and went to sleep.

OK, I'm now on about the 6th loop around of Houses of the Holy.

I have just tried to sort through the ~200 emails I have received in the last couple of days while I've not been interested in looking at computers after I come home.

I just emailed the lady who sent the 8 track player to me 104 days ago to let her know I got it, and also the guy who sent my my turbonet card for my tivo (and I complianed to him about ripping me off for $10 on the shipping).

I might go to bed now. 2.35am

I woke up early for once this morning.

Watched some Simpsons, then realised I was going to be late, I had said I would be at the Cafe for 10:30, and I didn't get out of bed until after 10. ugh.

I quickly ate some breakfast, and I got dressed as quickly as I could, which is not terribly quickly with my skin as it is.

My brother came in, "A big package has arrived", he went back and lugged it in. I checked the customs slip. Hooray! It's my 8 track player. I had to open it and have a look, I've waited 4 months for it. D'oh, it was packed with rca audio leads plugged in, the box has got knocked around a bit, and the audio sockets are broken away from the plastic on the back.

I grabbed a screwdriver, popped off the top, had a quick look, realised I couldn't get to the back of the sockets to make the cable any longer to replace the broken sockets, decided I didn't have time for this, and put the thing down. It was now about 10:25. Oops.

I got on the bike, and took off. About halfway there, I came across tar spraying. Great. The traffic was stopped, and far off in the distance I could see smoke rising. This is stuffed, I'll be here all day. I turned around, went back, took the detour route (which had been setup a couple of days earlier, I came back along this road last night, it was fine, or I would have avoided it altogether), went up the other way, and got to the Cafe about 11am.

The guy I was there to fix his PC was there, I had a quick chat, realised he had a virus, I grabbed a couple of cleaning tools, shoved them on a floppy, scanned his pc, cleaned it, put a network card in, installed a new virus scanner, updated it, deleted all the email error messages flying in of virus infected emails he had tried to send being rejected, pulled the nic out again.

45 minutes work, charged him for that, rushed out, (ooh, I need to pay my Amex bill, I'll do it when I come back), jumped back on my bike, and went down to the club where I had to fix their internet (in return for lunch).

On the way, I thought about the payment situation. If I can do a single hours work in a day, then that almost pays my salary for the day, and if I can do 6 hours work (in 5 days), then for what I want to earn, it will only cost the business $10 to have me there all week. Maybe we can make this business work.

I got to the club, fiddled around, found their password corrupt on the server for some reason, fixed that, it dialled on fine. Cool, easy. Oops, no that easy, their silly liitle uClinux based firewall router thing keeps rebooting, that's why the connection keeps going up and down.

I told them the story, the thing is probably out of warranty (yep), so I'll just setup an old pc to run LRP (Linux Router Project) off a floppy to do NAT/DHCP for them, instead of wasting hundreds of dollars replacing that silly firewall thing.

We observed a minutes silence for my friend, during this time the woman at Wahroonga where the dialin pop used to be tried calling me, I sent it to voicemail. I left after that, to head back to the Cafe, I tried calling her back, she'd gone out, ok, ring me back in 20 (when I'm back at the Cafe).

I jumped back on the bike, and went back to the Cafe. Ran out of fuel on the way back, so I had to pull in and refill. Forgot to pay my Amex bill again. Forgot what I was supposed to be doing back here again.

The woman rang me back again, their internet access is broken. Damn, it's that crappy server down there with issues I wanted to replace months ago. I told her I am working voluntarily and I can't afford to be travelling down there to spend hours fixing some server for free, which only provides free internet access to her anyway. She can get a modem setup and use that.

I decided to organise the email. Having support email for 3 different ISPs, along with invoice enquires etc, all going into one account is dumb. You don't know what you're doing. I ended up fiddling around for hours sorting that out, creating proper accounts on the servers, disabling redirections, getting things organised.

The tech support woman started looking up award rates, if we are "office clarks" we should be getting $14.75/hr, I would have been happy with $10/hr. Now, we will get that, which means we have to reduce our hours worked in order to keep afloat, a win win situation I think, more money and less work.

Thunderbird is a very buggy mail client. You can't add similar mail accounts to it, it claims they are already there, and if you try deleting them, you can't readd them. Dumb. I don't know what I'll do about this. Oh, and the password manager is crappy, what part of "Remember this password" do you not understand?

We had sorted out the pay a bit earlier, I actually got some money, now I can buy some food, cool.

I was left on my own at this point, everyone else had left, one of the cleaners from the centre came in for a chat, he'd been chatting to my friend a bit, about his plane etc. It turns out that my friend had listened to us all, he had taken the plane to a mechanic, apparently there was a problem with the spark, and the mechanic fixed it, or told my friend how to fix it. He had not charged my friend, because that would make him liable if something went wrong (how ironic), and also because my friend did not have a pilot's license. He'd also been chatting to one of the other cleaners, who told him he should put an electronic starter on it so he could restart it. My friend must not have got around to doing that.

I locked up the shop, and went around to my mate's place, he wanted to chat to me.

We had a chat, I was worried about having to relocate the equipment in Gosford, apparently he'd been speaking to the guy who had the missing server, and he's offered to let us move the equipment in there for free.

I drew a bunch of diagrams to illustrate the equipment and network links etc, to work out what's involved in moving it all, maybe it won't be that hard. there's incoming phone lines, incoming data, and a few servers. there's a couple of sdsl links, if I can find out where they are linked to, we can find out about moving them too. Maybe we can do it, and moving the stuff into a proper colo facility would be nice, instead of where it is now. It all depends on what it costs to get the E1s relocated, that will dictate if it can be done. I suppose, at the least, the servers can be relocated, and the dial in equipment left where it is, I'll have to diagram that.

I called my friend's De Facto to tell her about what I had heard from the cleaners, we chatted for a bit.

I got off the phone, and went back to chatting with my mate, I started talking about the equipment in Melbourne, and what a waste of money it is sitting there doing nothing. We decided to go down and remove it all, pending agreement for coverage of costs involved.

I had dinner with my mate and his wife, we told her about possibly going to Melbourne.

I then went in with my mate to his computer, and we sorted some accounts out, my mate with the new hard drive called me, I intended to go and see him tonight, to apologise for being busy and forgetting to ring him back a few days before, so I told him, and he said he see me soon.

I left there not long after, I took my mate's broken phone with me, I want to go and see the guy who runs an electronics place tomorrow anyway.

I went and saw my mate with the new hard drive, told him some of what has been going on the last few days, and then had a look at his computer. It seems stuffed, I pulled the cpu out, and it looks like it's blown, one edge of the chip on the top is really rough looking, and there is material all over the top of the cpu.

I tried mucking around booting it with nothing but cpu/mem/vid like I did with my machine recently, but it didn't work, it must be stuffed. I'll sort something out next week when I'm in Sydney going here there and everywhere getting 600 other things sorted out.

He paid me back the rest of the money I lent him a while ago to build a server, that was cool. Now I have some real money back.

I came home, and started playing with my 8 track again. I put the top back on, took the bottom off, bingo, here's what I wanted, direct access to the cables to the broken sockets, I pulled them a bit longer, now I can easily replace the busted sockets. I put the bottom back on, and attached a speaker I have hanging around.

I found my stepdown transformer, plugged it in, jammed in a cartridge (Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy) I bought on eBay a few months ago, the program light came on, I couldn't hear anything.

I fiddled around with the speaker leads, then I could _just_ hear it, seems I need a preamp for this thing.

I plugged it into the video monitor I use for video editing, it has an amp in it, and I've just spent the last hour listening to the whole cartidge around twice, on the third run now :-)

Time to go look on eBay for more.

Oh yeah, I managed to arrange to get tomorrow off, so I don't get overloaded.

Tomorrow I will pay my Amex bill :-)

I forgot to blog this day, so I'm doing it now (Wednesday).

I also forgot what happened today I think.

I got rung up at about 10.15am. Damn, I slept through my alarm, this getting up is really hard, I want to go back to sleeping all day.

"Are you in Gosford putting the server back yet?", "uh, no, I'm still in bed", "well we can't get to the other server", "great, I'll look at it when I get there".

Maybe it's been stolen or moved.

I ate some breakfast, got dressed, loaded the server into cardboard box, and strapped it to my bike.

I very carefully rode into Gosford, dragged the server inside, (noticed it's about 10:45am) put it back in the rack where it belongs, plugged some cables into it that should work, and booted it up.

it booted up, but apache failed to start, because dns was broken, on both the machine itself (hmm, is the network broken too?) and on a backup server (dns is probably down on it, it usually is).

I pulled the console out, and plugged it into the backup server. Yep, dns was down, ok, I started it up manually. Ah, I see the reason, when I updated named/bind on here, I put a debian init.d script on, which won't work on Red Hat. I must fix this (yeah, haha).

I was able to log into the missing server, apache did not start though, and named/bind did not start. No worries, I'll just restart bind and then apache. Uh, no sudo. Uh, I don't know the root password.

Ok, no biggie, maybe I can get in with webmin, since I might know the root password for webmin, and then change root's password. Uh, webmin did not start. Ugh.

Ok, time to break in. Reboot, lilo= linux init=/bin/sh

This should have worked. Dumb Red Hat. libraries scattered everywhere, required partitions not mounted. ls does not work, vi works, but everything is read only. mount does not work. Hmm.

Here's a Tom's root boot disk. I booted the machine with it, I can't mount anything. The kernel on this disk claims to not support e2fs, so I can't mount any of the partitions. wtf.

Ok, I decided to go back to that backup server, go download a new version of this boot disk, recreate it, and try again. I went back over, found the home page, started downloading the file, I'm only getting 1k/sec, this can't be right. I just waited.

I went back to the other server, booted it up again, this time a different website failed to resolve while apache was trying to start, maybe we're getting somewhere. I went back to other server again, the download was finished, I saved it.

I checked apache on the missing server, it was up, and serving. I checked dns, bind seemed to be working, webmin was also up. Ok, so the box is back, and operating normally, now we just have the issue of the unknown root password.

I was able to use a windows machine in the ajoining rack, since webmin is impossible to use in lynx, logged in, went to the "other" tab, went to commands thing, where you can enter single commands to execute.

I was sneaky, I put in "echo 'toor:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash' >> /etc/passwd" and then "echo 'root::11622:0:99999:7:::' >> /etc/shadow"

Now I was able to log in as "toor" instead of root, with no password, and what do you know, I'm in /root as root. passwd root, to something I know, and then vi /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow and delete "toor".

OK. I'm all finished here. It's only like 1.30pm. That should not have taken 3 hours.

While I was trying to do the above, I had several people calling me, some guy wanting his computer fixed, the guy who had the missing server, and both the guy I go to dinner with, and the guy who fiddles around on the servers (several times calling me) trying to find out where I was up to. This probably did not help the amount of time it took.

I was just about to leave, I went to tell them I was finished, some chick goes "I can't get on my F drive and my email doesn't work". ("Uh, do I care?"). "Well, I was working on my equipment, I had nothing to do with your network or your servers" "Well it only happened since you've been here, so you must have done it" "yeah, whatever, let me look". I was hoping to find something dumb like her typing something in wrong or windows shitting itself and needing a reboot, so I could be smart that it was her problem.

No such luck, after a reboot, it claimed the domain server was unavailable. I then ran ipconfig "Cable Disconnected" ah, have a look, maybe the stupid woman has kicked it out. Damn, nope, still plugged in to the network card, and the wall, no link light though.

I went back to the bloody rack I'd just sat in for 3 hours, all the workstation cable runs come into a patch panel in the top of this rack.

I rebooted both switches all these runs are plugged in to, no change.

I started pulling them all in and out of the switches, no luck.

I lost the plot here, I was hot and bothered, very sore from my sunburn, I did not want to be crawling around under desks and stretching up to cables coming out of the roof. Here I was, in behind the rack, swearing as loud as I could under my breath while angrily pulling cables around. This wasn't even my fault. If this server had not have been moved, I wouldn't have even been here, and when her network run broke, it would have been their problem. This is not productive. I have to get out of here, I'm supposed to help my mate move equipment out of the storeroom in the shopping centre.

I gave up, I found a longer network cable, I plugged it in to her network card, and ran it around the corner, and plugged it into the switch that was hanging there, to make up for the fact there are not enough ports on the wall. Bang, link light up, IP issued, home drive accessible. I'm outta here.

I told the guy I was finished, and about the busted network link I fixed, that was not my fault, he was appreciative at least.

He tells me again about the fact they are moving shortly. This is a hassle, I don't think we can, I don't even know what services terminate in here.

I left, I jammed the box back on my bike, and fanged it up the freeway to the shop.

I had forgotten everything I intended to do today, all wiped out by screwing around putting that server back.

I fiddled around on all the cafe pcs, cleaning up virii, and removing spyware.

The solicitors came again, we looked through the bills, tried to sort out payment of some of them, had a chat about things, and ended up there until about 5:30.

I went from there to my mates place, sat around there for a while chatting about what had gone on with the server, and I got a bit carried away, I confessed that I was worried about the fact I'm running out of money, and I should have worked a proper paid day on Monday, but instead I came into sort things out.

We decided that something would be done about getting paid properly.

We went to dinner, I wasn't particularly hungry, still feeling a bit sick being sunburnt.

Went back from there, I usually sit round for ages, but I was too sore.

I came home and got in the bath, tried the stuff my parents told me about yesterday, I was no bloody good either, my skin is all stuffed.

Trying to sleep is a nightmare.

While I was up spewing and blogging at 4am this morning, I sent out a couple of emails, it was lucky I did, or else I probably would have slept all day..

I slept through my alarm that went off at (I assume) 9.45am as it was set to, and a nice lady I'd sent an email to at 4am rang to thank me for what I had to tell her at 10am, which woke me up.

I got out of bed, gingerly ate breakfast, feeling pretty rough, and so sore it's not funny.

I got dressed, and took off for the Cafe, we were having a meeting with the solicitor at 11am. On the way to the Cafe, I had to deal with a closed road and a detour, which wasted a bit of time, but I got there just in time.

We had discussions with the solicitor, and at this stage, our plan is to keep running the business. We're going to start doing things properly, keeping track of money, paying wages properly.

After he left, we had some continued discussions, we plan on getting rid of stupid expenses, tidying up the Cafe, try to make it profitable.

Someone tried to print something, and I discovered the admin machine (with all the emails on it I will need to sort things out) has virii all over it, so I got to muck around trying to fix that, and I nearly flew off the handle. I've got really crappy stress management at the moment.

After that, I had a technical meeting with a couple of the other tech guys that used to run the ISP side of things, at our Gosford pop. I showed them where the missing server is supposed to be, we went and looked in the area in the carpark, and worked out what was in there. Before we left, we had some discussions with the organisation in the office where our equipment is. Apparently they are moving in a month. Now we have a big issue. We either need to relocate some or all of the equipment/network links/phone lines somewhere else (we don't even know half of what is there) or try to organise with the organisation moving into the office to allow us to leave it. I'm assuming this is the intention, since before my friend crashed his plane, he had installed wireless equipment in there.

We went around to the other location in Gosford where we have equipment, where the machine is supposed to be hidden in the roof. It took me a while to find the right key, but eventually got it. I looked around in the colo, I couldn't find any of our equipment anywhere. I climbed into the roof, I still could not find anything up there.

Now we have an issue. The server is no where to be found, and the machine hidden in the roof is not there. Hopefully they are the same machine, and we've only lost one machine, not two, but then again, the server we are looking for has 50 websites on it, and only some are backed up.

After we left, I remembered that the machine hidden in the roof was to connect to another office nearby, I did not know where though, and I didn't have the phone number of the guy I needed to contact, I decided I would do it when I got back in the Cafe tomorrow.

I left from there, and headed to Wyoming, to get some lunch with my mate I go to dinner with. We had some conversation about what we're planning to do with the business, and about the missing server. I don't know what to tell the customers, but we can't tell them that the server is lost.

I started to feel really sick, the airconditioning in Hungry Jacks was too cold.

I went to Coles, and got some cheap and nasty brown vinegar, apparently it's supposed to work well on sunburn.

I got home, rubbed some of the vinegar on, didn't notice any difference. I lay down and started watching tv.

My phone rang, it was the guy who's number I didn't have, my mate I went to lunch with had just called him, about the missing box. He told us that he had removed a machine from the roof it was hidden in, after it was found, and the people who found it went apeshit.

He told me he would drop the box over. I hoped it was the server we were looking for.

He arrived about an hour later, and it was our missing server. Thank God for that.

I had a chat with him for a while, it turns out that the webserver had been hidden in the roof, to make use of someone elses internet link to serve the websites hosted on it. The guy told me that my friend had put it there, and told him it was part of a wireless link they were setting up, but there was no radio equipment with it, or it has been removed by someone else.

So now I have the server here at home, I'll take it back where it belongs in the morning, and hopefully be able to reinstall it back in the rack where it belongs, and to the correct network.

I called my mate I go to dinner with, and told him I had the server here, he was relieved.

I went and had a bath, I put a ton of brown vinegar in it, it didn't seem to make any difference, I still hurt all over.

I've just watched some tv, and realised I am really hurting. I just tried more vinegar, I think it's a waste of time.

I'm going to try and lie down.

Well, I went to the beach like I said I would yesterday. Not a great day however..

I got out of bed about 9 something am, had some breakfast, put my beach gear on, loaded my beach stuff into my bag, grabbed my friend's keys so I would have access to the servers, I managed to find the door/alarm code scribbled on a piece of paper, it was what I remembered, good, I wasn't sure.

I couldn't find my sunglasses, I spent 20 minutes looking for them, I gave up, started putting my shoes on, and saw my sunnies in a box of junk near my shoes.

I took off about 10.30am. I headed straight into where the servers are, unlocked the door, entered the door code (good, not been changed) entered the alarm code (good, it unarmed, not been changed). I then went into the room where the racks are. Uh.. there's no server here, there's a keyboard sitting in the rack where it belongs. I also noticed one of the other servers is missing.

I unlocked the back door into the carpark, went to unlock the area where more equipment exists.. the lock is broken, so the door just pulls open. Not very good.

No servers here either. I'm now a bit worried. The server was running until at the latest Thursday. I hope someone didn't pinch a couple of servers while everyone was down in Canberra. We have another place in Gosford where the servers could be, I might check in there tomorrow.

Anyway, while I'm looking in the area in the carpark for our equipment, I noticed a security guard outside. Great, now I have to deal with wasting time explaining who I am, and why I have keys/codes. My bike is parked just outside the door too, surely this will have to get his interest up.

I left the front door unlocked when I entered, he's going to find that unlocked and start poking around, so I closed the area in the carpark, went back in the back door, closed and locked it, headed around to the front door for the confrontation.. there was none. Great security guard, he didn't notice doors open in the carpark, me standing there, or the fact the front door was unlocked. Remind me not to hire this firm.

I put the alarm code in, armed it, went out and closed the internal coded door, closed and locked the front door.

Got back on my bike, and rode out to the beach.

There were about 6 million people here, great, I was looking for a park, ended up way away from the beach, screw this, I went back and parked on a footpath under a ramp.

Wandered down to the beach, it was 11am.

Lay on the beach for a bit, nice and warm, went and slopped in the ocean, it was a bit rough for my liking, too strong undertow, and the waves were all dumpers. I mucked around in here for a little while, went back and lay down again. I listened to my mp3 player while I lay there.

I lay there for an hour or so, got too hot, went in the ocean again for a bit, went back and lay down again. it was now about 12.30. My adsl mate called, he wanted to know if I wanted to come out to the beach. I told him I'd already been here for hours. I lay back down, and fell asleep (oops). My mate turned up, woke me up, commented I was looking a bit pink.

It was close to 2pm now.

We went and mucked around in the ocean again, came out, lay down, I listened to my mp3s again, and he read a book.

We both decided to leave about 2.45, ended up leaving around 2.30pm. went and had a shower to unsuccessfully attempt to wash the sand off, only managed to soak my shorts again. I got dressed, packed everything back up, loaded it on the bike, decided I was hungry and wanted something to eat.

I rode down to Terrigal, took me ages to find a parking spot again.

I walked around, bought a loaf of bread, and a Heinekin (to honour my friend), went and bought some chips, and started eating chip sandwiches and drinking beer. There were too many chips, I can't stand waste, so I ate them all, started to feel slightly crook. My mate with the new hard drive called, I didn't want to think about computers today, so I didn't answer it, I left it, he left a message saying he couldn't get Windows to work. What a surprise, it's designed that way.

I returned to my bike, got on, took off. Got around to heading out of Terrigal, heard some weird noise, realised I wasn't wearing my glasses. Oops, I must have left them on the seat behind me. Oh well, they're recked now.

On my way home, I went past Erina Fair, decided to scrounge all the cheapshops for some new glasses, as I rode around the carpark, some mates saw me, and shouted at me, I parked, found them, had a chat about the last few days. They wanted to go to HMV, so we all went inside.

I followed them, lagging behind a long way chatting to one of my mates, we ended up in Big W, and I bought a DVD, Escape from LA, I already have Escape from New York.

My mate I had been chatting with disappeared at this point, I wandered around with my other mates, it was now 4pm, and all the shops were shutting. We walked to some juice bar thing, and I got a fruit juice.

We were just leaving, and we bumped into my other mate, who we'd lost, we went down to the carpark, someone decided to have a LAN party, and wanted to know if I wanted to come. I said I would, but they'd have to pick me up with my stuff.

I went home, had a (cold) shower, changed my clothes, felt ok, realised I was really sunburnt. My mates turned up, said I would only need my monitor/keyboard/mouse/network cable, since my mate had brought his pc, because mine was not fast enough.

Loaded the stuff in the car, went around to a mates place, helped him load his pc, then we went to another mate's place where we going to have the party.

On arrival, he was getting in trouble for not going to Church on Sunday (apparently, we waited outside) and we were told we could not do it. After a few minutes of discussion, my mate convinced his parents to let us do it.

We went inside, I went to chat with his parents, we ended up having a long discussion about what had happened, the funeral etc.

At this point, all the machines/LAN were setup, so I went inside. I was feeling a little bit crook again, I assumed dehydration, I got some water and sipped it, felt a little better.

My mate got his machine setup for me, and we started a game. It was pretty cool, I haven't played a game in ages.

My mate I go to dinner with called me, he wanted to know about video capture stuff. I told him I was busy and that we would see what we could work out for tomorrow.

My mate's dad offered to buy pizzas for us, if we picked them up, I was ok, I still felt full from lunch I'd had.

We contined playing, someone went to get the pizzas, they ate, and then we played again.

I was starting to feel crook, I put it down to staring at the monitor while sitting in the dark. Around 9.15 I started to feel really ill, I was hot and cold at the same time. I lay on the lounge for a bit, I got up just after 10pm, and went and spewed, it was all the chips I'd eaten for lunch, probably not a good idea to drink beer after being in the sun for ~3.5 hours either.

I went back and sat at the table, hoping sitting up would help me feel a bit better. My mate offered me a lift home, I took it, dragging all my crap with me.

I wet a washer, drank a bit of water, and went straight to bed.

Nor sure what time I got to sleep, but I've been having the worst nightmares, my head is killing me, and I keep dreaming about trying to sort out all the issues my friend has left behind.

I gave up, got up about 3.30, spewed again, felling a bit better now. I'm sitting and drinking water while I write this, I'll go back to bed in a minute. I've got another long day ahead.

I was listening to some Floyd earlier, I've been listening to the Dark Side of the Moon album over and over since the other day when I watched the DVD, and the following verses or breathe hit me:

Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be.

For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave.

I'm wondering if I have been listening to this over and over since then for a reason, perhaps I was supposed to hear the above verses, mainly the bits about flying high, and early grave, maybe they should have stirred something in me, and made me do or say something. But I guess I will never know.

I'm just watching Rage, and they are showing a "Rock Arena" episode from 1987, they just played a couple of Smith's songs:
"Girlfriend in a Coma" which is from the album "Strangeways, Here We Come", and
"Stop Me if you Think You've Heard this One Before", from the same album, which contains a roadsign saying "Strangeways".

The funeral was at the school that my mate went to, in Strangways Road.

I got up at around 9am this morning, it was hot.

I tried to get my dodgy computer going. it kept locking up. Hmm. no point buying a dvdr drive if this computer is stuffed. I pulled the extra memory out, and played with the timing settings, eventually got it to not lockup all the time.

The guy I was going to start the ISP with called me, he wanted to know if I was going to the computer fair, he wanted a hard drive, and to give me some of the money he owed me.

I had been planning to go, I wanted a dvdr drive, but I didn't have any money, if he wanted to give me some, great.

I grabbed my bag, jumped on the bike, headed around to the fair. They had some stupid fishing show on, so the computer fair was shoved in some crappy shed down the back.

There was a big line to get in, half the people were there for the fishing show, and it wasn't until they got inside that they complained that was what they wanted. How dumb, it only says things like "computer fair this way" and "computer fair" about 400 times all over the front and the doors, while the stupid fishing show had a big sign and entry a distance away. Typical dumb people.

I got in, it was a nightmare, too many people, not enough space, and it stank. I went around once, as quickly as I could, with stupid people going the wrong way around the fair. I called my mate to find out if he was there, found him. Chatted for a few minutes, talked about the drive he should get, he gave me some of the money I lent him previously.

We went back in, and looked for a drive, almost all the 120gb 8mb buffer ATA Maxtor drives were gone, and the fair had only been open 1/2 hour. We nearly settled for a 2mb buffer (I would have), but decided to keep looking.

I went to a stall, where the guy had the dvdr I drive I wanted, at the cheapest price I had seen ($208) so I grabbed one. I noticed this guy had the 120gb disk, a little bit more expensive, we haggled, he wouldn't change the price.

We went around again, went back to where the 2mb buffer disk was, it was gone, so now we had 2 choices, pay the extra, or get no disk (getting a different brand is not a choice, Maxtor are the only disks worth buying). We went back and my mate paid the extra for the disk. I now wanted some blank dvds. Found Ricoh DVD+Rs for $2.60 each, so I bought 10.

My mate left, he'd got a lift with his next door neighbour that wanted to go, I told him I would pop in and see him a bit later.

I left not long after, I couldn't stand the heat/squash/stink anymore. I went and got some McDonalds for breakfast, since I still have no food at home. I sat and read the paper, nothing in it about the crash. I got some fuel at the servo nearby, and came home.

It was now about 11.30am. I had to go and see my mate like I had just told him, and then be at my mate that I went to the funeral with's place for lunch at 1.30. I sat and checked my email for a minute, my mate (I'd just seen at the fair) rang me again, wanted to ask about putting his disk in, mentioned the aircon was on, so I decided to go and talk to him, rather than melting at home.

I was there a few minutes later, helped him put the disk in properly, and then attempted to set it up, realised that XP would shit itself if we tried to swap partitions/letters etc. He decided to reinstall everything. I went through the theory of the best way to set it up, and then realised that it was 1pm and I had to leave. I chatted to him and his wife for a few minutes, about the funeral etc, and then I left.

I raced up to my mate (who I went to the funeral with)'s place, I was running late, so I went up the freeway, and then I took a bypass around into Wyong. I went along the road, and past the paddock, where the crash was. I didn't pay much attention though, or spend too much time thinking about it. I just kept going.

I got to my mate's place, about 1.35, we had lunch, I helped him put his new coffee table together, and then we started talking about the shop/business, and things that need to be sorted/done. The server that failed was still down, people were starting to complain. Email was apparently working though.. then it clicked, when I fiddled with the firewall rules last night, I fixed a different server that works as a backup mail server. My mate with the new hard drive called me a few times, to ask me bits about setting up the new drive.

We rang my friend's defacto, to find out about getting the keys to where the server is. She said we could come up in a bit to get them. My mate with the new disk called again, he wanted to know if I wanted to go to a movie with him. I would have, but I remembered I had told my adsl mate I would go there tonight.

We left a bit later, about 3.30, and headed to her place.

That was quite difficult, it was where my friend lived. His car was parked outside, it had been cleaned out though, and the number plates removed. We went inside.

My friend's defacto was on the phone, we spoke to her daughter (who does the tech support) we looked at some bills that had come in, tried to work out what they were. My friend's defacto finished on the phone, we chatted to her, she offered me a beer, I accepted, and drank one of my friend's Heinekins. She offered my mate a drink, but thought that he'd probably prefer a cup of tea, and a lamington, I found this particularly humerous, he's not that old.

We spoke for a while, we went outside to get the keys, she gave me all the non car keys. The number plates off the car were on the table, apparently they are going to send the car to the wreckers. We went and looked in the shed, it's attrocious, equipment and junk everywhere. I offered to help her sort it out.

We chatted outside for a while, then went back in.

For a few hours, we talked about what we wanted to do with the business, ways to sort things out, make it more profitable, and easier for us to run. If we are able to find a way to keep running the business, ie we get legal ability to do that, then with some work, I think we can make a go of it. While we were there, the tech guy we'd met the day before rang, and claimed that the server was fixed. Somehow I don't think so, he doesn't have access to the server (or does he) and I was pretty sure he thought it was fixed because he was getting mail.. just because I fixed the firewall at 1.30am this morning.

My mate got a call, at was his wife, she had made dinner, all the guests they have staying there at the moment had arrived back from sight seeing, and they were waiting so they could eat. We realised it was 6.25pm. It was now a week since the crash. I was glad I was there at that time, to think that we were all together, and pretty happy at that time, since we talked about some of the things my friend had got up to, and all the trouble he'd left for us.

We left my friend's place, I nearly left the keys, thinking the server was fixed, but then I decided to hang on to them, just so I could check for myself, and that it wasn't just confusion. I've got to be in the Cafe at 11am for a meeting with the solicitor, and at the Gosford pop at 2pm to sort things out with the office where our equipment is.

We got back to the house. I decided I would leave to visit my adsl mate like I had told him the night before. I was putting my bag on my bike, my mate came out, he told me that I was supposed to stay for dinner. I didn't think they would have catered for me, but they had, and because my mate's wife is Chinese, and all the visitors Chinese, it would have been disrespectful for me to have left, so I sat and had dinner with them, authentic Chinese food, and it was pretty good, I didn't expect it to be, since I know all commerical Chinese food is made for western taste, but the authentic stuff was actually nicer I thought, (except for the jellyfish, I was too fussed with that :-)

It was a bit strange drinking a VB while eating Chinese food I must admit (but then, it's strange for me to be drinking a VB).

They told me that my chopstick technique was good too, surprising, since I've only used them a handful (no pun intended) of times, and really don't have any skill.

I went outside, and I called my mate that owns the aircon business, to let him know that would not be available to work on Monday, had a quick chat to him.

After that, I helped to clean up, and then the watermelon was served, I had a bit of that, chatted with the Chinese people there, (that spoke English), and then I left.

I travelled back to my adsl mate's place, he was cleaning some stuff out, and gave me some documents related to joining the police force, since I mentioned I had been thinking about it. He also gave me back a book I lent to him in about 1999.

He told me not to worry about fixing up the computer, he'd sort that out later. Offered that I could have a game on his machine again, but I'm not interested in games, I'm too unco to play any of the games these days, and they don't have any playability, just flashy graphics.

I left there, went to the supermarket, bought some cereal and (soy) milk so I can have breakfast for the first time in about a week. Not that I've been able to eat first thing in the morning much this week, or much during the day.

I also got some Coke, and bread, so I could have a drink tonight, and maybe toast in the morning if I can't handle the cereal.

I came home, checked my emails, luckily not much has come in in the last few hours, and then decided to write the last 3 days worth of blogs, before my brain starts overloading and I forget things.

It has been a very long week. It has been a very hard week.

I am going in to Gosford to try to fix the broken server tomorrow morning (it turns out that it is still broken), now that I have the keys (I think I can remember the alarm code, I hope they haven't changed it), and then I am going to the beach. I am going to lye on the beach all day, listen to my mp3 player, and turn my phone off.

After that, I will go to the beer garden, and get a Heinekin, and drink in honour of my friend.

Like yesterday, this post is being written at 9.45pm Saturday, not when it claims, I couldn't be stuffed to write a blog then.

I got up at 7am, went to have breakfast, I was freezing, shivering, it was shocking. I had been expecting to stay at a hotel, where I normally get a buffet breakfast, and then I can have cereal with orange juice (since I am lactose intolerant, and no one ever provides non dairy alternatives, even though lactose tolerance is not normal and is caused by a mutation in the body). So anyway, I had a couple of chicken rolls for breakfast, same as we had for dinner last night.

Again, I had been expecting to stay in a hotel, and have a shower in the morning, so I didn't bring soap or anything, and I couldn't be bothered having one anyway.

I was so cold, I went and got dressed properly (I was still in the casual clothes I wore to drive down in), put on my suit pants, a shirt (which I can't remember wearing since the last funeral I went to), and a tie.

The only issue at this point was that my hair was such a mess. I wet it and used my comb to try and sort it out, which doesn't normally work, but for once it did.

I looked half respectable, shaven face, formal wear, tie.

I went and had a cup of tea, that was nice. My mate went and told his daughter we were leaving.

We loaded the car, jumped in, and took off. It was 8am. About an hour later, we got back to an area where there is some GSM coverage, so my phone came back. I got a message my adsl mate had sent about 9.45 last night, wanting to know I was ok, I sent a message in reply, and left it.

We travelled the 2 hours into Canberra, and to the church. We got to the church about 10:05am.

We wandered across the road. My friend whose funeral it was' defacto was there, we greeted her, everyone started collecting outside the church, we signed an attendance book, and received the booklet. The picture on the front of my friend is a nice one, that was good.

We all moved inside at about 10.30. I sat a few rows from the front. During the service, my friend's brother got up to give a speech, he held himself very well, I couldn't have done it. He told us about some of the crazy things my friend used to get up to, some of them quite funny, which helped, it cheered everyone up a bit.

At the end, when they started to move the coffin, I got very upset. We moved back outside the church, they placed the coffin in the hurse, everyone was very upset. I chatted to my friend's defacto for a while, she told me about how she had gone to visit him in the morgue the night before.

We all drove in procession to the cemetary. We saw the headstones for my friends father, and 2 brothers nearby. The coffin was lowered into the ground, I was ok at this point, but when the sand went into the grave, I got very upset again. I moved away slightly, and then I moved away altogether, back to the car.

We left the cemetary, to go to the club where there were refreshments, we took my friend's brother around there with us, and chatted to him. He is a very nice bloke, he done the same as us, told the guy to make sure he got the engine checked out in his plane.

We got to the club, it was sad to start with, but within a few minutes, everyone was starting to cheer up a bit. I got a double contreau on the rocks. As I drank this, I felt the egde of my emotion softening, and I cheered up a bit.

I was able to have a good chat with my friend's defacto, and I made her feel a bit better (I think) by letting her know that recent events (before the crash) had been for a reason, and that inadvertantly things she had done were good.

I met the guy we've got down in Sydney that looks after the servers. Apparently one of our servers was down, so we tried to make arrangements to get that fixed.

I got another drink, the same again, everyone was cheering up a bit by now. We ended up staying here for around an hour, at which point we said bye to everyone, hopefully we'll see most of them in circumstances other than these in the future, but it never works that way does it, people never make an effort to come and see you, catch up with you, until it's too late.

We jumped back in the car, and took off.

I felt a lot better on my way back. I think I had closure. I was starting to finally accept that my friend is gone. I think I will go down and visit at some point in the future.

We headed straight back up to the coast, we stopped at Pennant Hills, at about 4.45pm so my mate could pick up his wife from the shop she works in. We left there about 5.15pm, and were back to my mate's place just after 6pm.

He ordered a couple of pizzas, went and picked them up, we ate, I had a beer, chatted for a bit, went and sat outside, I was a bit spaced out, in deep thought. We just sat outside and chatter for ages.

I left there about 8.30, I headed to my adsl mate's place, to let him know I was back, maybe have a chat. I told him about the day's events. I showed him how to crimp cat5 cables, we made up a cable for his suXbox, it still didn't work, I then worked out that the new adsl router he had bought wasn't configured properly. I explained dhcp to him, configured it on the router, and then the suXbox started working.

He signed up for some trial access to the online gaming thing. I just felt like a borg assimilation was going on. How can someone be so enthusiastic about giving their credit card details to Micro$oft?

I was going to go home at this point, but I was offered a drink, the beer must have been wearing off, he had some wine, I was in the mood for that, so I grabbed some. I sat and watched him playing the game for a while, it was all laggy and crappy and unplayable. Typical Micro$oft product.

I left at about 12:50am. I had been a very long day, and I felt destroyed. I have to get up reasonably early in the morning too.

As I was leaving, my mate asked me about how he could fixup his old computer to loan to someone. I started telling him how he could do it, and then realised I was probably wasting my time, so I told him I would come by tomorrow night to sort it out. He told me he would make dinner.

I got home, bummed around for a while, reading the 170 emails in my inbox, chatting on irc. Checked the Tivo, and found that it's filled itself with Sabrina and The Simpsons episodes, and trashed everything else because it's getting full. not too impressed with that.

I started looking around for details of the broken server, it is still down (as I expected) I had a look around in my friend's files on the server, trying to find anything that might help us. I noticed that a lot of things were having difficulty on the server, I found that stupid firewall rules that break everything were back in for some reason. I blew away the firewall rules, which fixed my problem with the webserver. It turns out it fixed other things, but I didn't realise..

I finally went to bed at 3am. my bed was a mess, it was hot, but I was too tired to sort things out.

This is actually being written at 9.20pm on Saturday, but I would have written this at the time it claims, if I wasn't ~500km away from home.

I got up this morning, at about 9am, found there was nothing to eat (one piece of toast for breakfast) and then I got dressed, grabbed my bag, jumped on my bike, and headed to my mate's place.

He had just rung his daughter, and arranged for us to stay there, down at Wallendbean, a couple of hours south of Canberra. We loaded the car, and took off. Stopped in to get fuel before getting on the freeway, while filling the car, my mate who I work with doing aircon stuff rang me, wanting to know if I could work on Monday, I didn't know, it depends if we are opening the shop or whatever, I told him I would let him know.

The woman from the service station told me to go away on the phone, stupid woman, I wandered away, still talking to my mate, I told him what was going on, and the fact we were on our way to Canberra.

I jumped back in the car, got off the phone, and we were off.

We talked most of the trip down, about things that were happening, ideas of what to do etc, we travelled until about 1pm, stopped off at (somewhere I can't remember I'll put it in when I can find my map) at Hungry Jacks or Burger King or something for lunch.

I tried to get my mp3 player going with a tape adapter, but the tape player couldn't work it out, and kept trying to change sides. I fiddled with it for about 10 minutes, and gave up.

At about 3pm, we got into Yass, went to the police station, where my mate's daughter lives, he was just letting her know we were here etc. After that we travelled about another 20 minutes to the house. In the same yard is the Wallendbean police station, and the house is the old station, with a decommissioned cell attached, that was pretty cool.

My mate's ex wife was there looking after their grandkids, they chatted for a while, and my mate's ex wife left. We looked after the kids then, they mucked around out on their bikes, and eventually settled down to watch tv for a while.

At 6.30 my mate's daughter and son in law, who are both police, came home for dinner. I must admit, it was pretty strange to sit down to eat a meal and chat with two uniformed police officers, complete with holstered guns on their belts. They were just on a meal break, so they went back to work afterwards, around 7pm.

We looked after the kids again, put them to bed around 9, they're good kids.

My mate and I chatted for a while, about his past, and what had happened etc, he decided to go to bed about 10:30.

I went to sleep not long after, was woken about 12:45am, when either my mate's daughter, son in law, or both had returned, someone was clanking plates around in the kitchen, I went back to sleep.

Woke up every few hours, the air matress I was on had started to go down, and depending on how I lay, I ended up lying on the floor. I was cold too, even though I was fully dressed (except for shoes), it gets really cold down there.

I decided to install the turbonet card in my Tivo.

I started moving stuff off it (speaker, Foxtel decoder), in preparation for opening it again, I burnt my finger moving the Foxtel decoder. Hmm, stuff shouldn't be this hot. I noticed that the top of the Foxtel box is just basically a plastic mesh, and the speaker was covering most of the holes.

I pulled the Tivo cover off, it was roaring hot in there, I think I might have to get a couple of hard disk fans/coolers and install them, the disks won't last long otherwise. The stereo receiver was also really hot, but it had been running at a high volume all day.

I grabbed some cat5, plugged it into the turbonet card, threaded it through a convenient hole on the back of the case.. oops, hangon, that hole gets covered by the case. I noticed a small hole in the bottom of the case, where the fan sits, I could almost get the rj45 through the hole, but it was being a mongrel. I would have just threaded the cable and crimped a new rj45 on it, but I left my crimping tool at my mates place the other day. Bugger.

I took the fan out, put the cable through (just managed to jiggle it through) and put the fan back, no worries.

I tried to fit the turbonet onto the Tivo motherboard, could not get it to fit on, one side would go on, but when you tried to get the other side on, so it was straight, instead of at an angle, the other side would pop off, it was like a see saw.

I remembered reading something about a bit of plastic that can get in the way, and indeed, there is a foot on the Tivo, and the plastic that holds it on sits just under the edge connector, that's the issue. I undid the little clips that hold the board in, bent it up very slightly, slipped the card on the connector, and pushed the board back down, and did the clips up again. It's a tiny bit bent, but I don't think it's stressed too much.

I booted it up, got into the factory settings menu, had a fiddle with setting ips and stuff, couldn't remember what had to be set in here, so I just booted it without saving my changes. The card came straight up automatically when Tivo booted, it dhcp requested an ip, and was on the network.

I then went about configuring a static ip for the tivo, edited the dhcp config file on my router, telnetted into the Tivo, and ran dhclient, but then tivo disappeared off the network. the serial link came up, but no traffic would work. Stuff it, I rebooted the Tivo, it came back up, and requested the correct IP, good.

I tried ftping and stuff, it seemed a lot quicker. I found the copy of tystudio I had downloaded, ftpd it to the tivo, tried to install it, got some nonsense about "awk no such command", hmm, I must be doing something dumb. Yep, I'm trying to install the linux editing software on the tivo. I downloaded the server (tyserver), ftpd it into the tivo, ran it, installed it, started it.

Downloaded the windows editing suite, installed it, connected, no worries, a list of streams showed up. Woo. None were indexed however, and you can't do anything without them being indexed, so I just left it.

During doing the above bits, my mate I go to dinner with called me, told me some of the support calls that had come in, that he didn't know how to deal with. I rang a couple of people, fixed their problems.

I watched tv for a bit, the home ice cream man came around, so I went out with my brother to get some. Dad came home while we were waiting, and I had a chat to him for a few minutes. The ice cream man turned up, I bought some ice creams, came back inside, watched more tv.

My brother went back inside, came back a bit later to see if I wanted some dinner. I went in and ate, had a conversation about the things I've been doing the last few days (since I've been getting home late). After dinner, my mate called me again, told me the funeral is going to be on Friday, and I arranged to go down with him.

Went back and told my parents, then I wandered back out. I decided to call my adsl mate to find out if the Telstra tech turned up today like he was supposed to, my mate told me he was just about to come around.

I cleaned up a bit, my mate turned up, we had a chat, I told him about the funeral, and that I wouldn't be around for a couple of days if he did get his adsl sorted. We chatted for a while, Dad came out with the phone, A guy I went to TAFE with back in 1998 was calling to ask me about if you could copy games for GameCube, my adsl mate said bye, and took off, I told the guy on the phone that I had no idea if the games could be copied, I had a chat with him for a little while, toild him about the funeral and other things that have been going on, the phone battery was running out, so we left it at that.

I had a shave, and jumped in the shower, I've never been so appreciative of a cold shower.

I just starting mucking around with TyStudio, and decided to finish writing this blog, which I started as I waited for my mate to turn up after I called him.

Oops, I never rang my other mate that got ADSL from us recently to find out the setup details. Must do that soon.

I'm going to get my suit out, and pack my bag for the next couple of days.

My god it is so hot. it should not be this hot at 11pm, it tried to storm/rain out there, but it was a pathetic effort.

There will be no post tomorrow, I'm travelling to Canberra, 5 1/2 hours away, staying down there for the night, and attending the funeral on Friday. I will be coming back on Friday afternoon/night, so I may post late Friday, or Saturday at some stage.

I was woken up at 9am, my mate I go to dinner with, apparently a guy who joined up yesterday and then had an issue because his username was too long, called up and left some rather unnice messages.

I noticed at this point it was hot.

I called the guy up. explained the situation, and fixed his problem. He apologised, because he was not aware of the situation.

I then decided to start making some documentation. I have made notes of most of the stuff we know about, and put in necessary details. There is a hell of a lot of stuff we do not know.

I wanted to do something to get away from this heat, like go to the beach, but I thought if I did that, I would not have the motivation to do the documentation, and would keep putting it off, or end up not doing it.

My turbonet card turned up yesterday, I didn't get home til late last night, so my brother just gave it to me.

I called up the branch office for Abit, to chase up getting my board fixed/replaced. The guy asked me to send through a bunch of details, serial number etc, which I couldn't find.

I was just about to pull the board out, so I could find the serial number, I decided to have one more go with it, before taking out all 600 screws to get the board out.. what do you know, the bloody thing booted!

I put it all back together, and sent an email to the tech to let him know not to worry.

So now I'm preparing to put the card in my Tivo, and start ripping videos. I've stopped now (2pm) to have some breakfast (pizza :-) I'll spend a bit of time mucking around with Tivo etc, and then I will call my mate up to find out the procedure for setting up ADSL, so I can write some technical documentation on that.

Well, I'm off to bed, I've run out of Coke, so there's nothing to mix my Bourbon with. I was planning to go earlier, but then I got chatting on irc, and some people offered condolences, that made me feel better, so I sat and chatted for a while.

I looked around on the Internet, trying to find any more news about the crash, there is no new news. Most of the details were in the "Coast Extra" bit of the Sunday Telegraph, but these are not on the Internet.

I had intentions of heading to the Cafe at around 10am again today, I had to collect the mail from Gosford on the way, and I thought I would drop into the office where our Gosford equipment is, and let them know what is going on.

I woke up at 10:30, I must have been really ripped (I drank nearly the whole bottle of rum). My stomach was really upset, I didn't eat anything. I listened to Bad and cried again.

I left the house, I headed into Gosford. I went straight to where the equipment is to tell the lady we deal with the story, but it turns out she is on leave, so I just left again. I was going to pop in to see the shop that collects payments for us, but I couldn't find a parking spot close by, so I just kept going, around to the post office, to collect the mail.

I went from here, headed up towards the shop. My mp3 player screwed up, so I ended up riding the whole way in silence again, the whole reason for taking the bloody thing is to try and take my mind off things so I can concentrate on riding.

I got to the shop, headed in, the door was open and the computers were out on sale today, business as usual basically.

As I headed in, a couple of people I know where in there, we had a quick chat.

I tried to contact some of the people I had not managed to yesterday. I tried to contact the guy in Darwin we bought the equipment off. He no longer works there, and there are no contact details for him. I think I have his mobile phone number somewhere, I hope it is his personal mobile and still works.

I went back to cleaning, more things were thrown out. The shop ended up quite tidy by the afternoon.

The guy I worked for before starting the Cafe, and after leaving the Cafe, called me up, he wanted the number of the Cafe, he wanted to get an ADSL connection sorted out. I told him not to worry about calling, we've suspended the new accounts. I then asked him if he had seen the news about the plane, he had, I told him who it was. He was shocked, offered his apologies, I explained the situation I was in, and I told him I would contact him when we got setup again. He asked me if his son, my mate, know, I told him I didn't know. We got off the phone, and I went back to work again.

Some flowers were delivered, they were from the people who provide our ADSL connections, and also do our billing, it was addressed to all the staff, and offered apologies. I went out the back of the Cafe, sat and cried.

Around 2pm, the guy I go to dinner with got a call from my friend's defacto. She had spoken to a solicitor, and because the guy does not have a will, the solicitor instructed her to shut the Cafe. We finished what were doing, and closed the Cafe, leaving a sign to say that it will be closed until after the funeral. At some point we will have to work out what is going to happen.

I realised at this point, that there is no backups that I know of. I am going to have to try and work out where all the equipment is, what it does, and try to find a way to backup all the important files.

We went and spoke to centre management, to see if they would hold our mail while the Cafe was closed, if the post office would not, they said that was fine. I remembered I still had the mail in my bike, the guy's defacto's daughter (who does the tech support) came with me to get it, I said I would wait to hear from here for the funeral details. We don't know if the funeral will be on Friday now, the police have not released the body yet, it is still being identified.

I went to the post office, where my mate had asked them to hold the mail, they must not be able to, they gave him the sorting centre's phone number, and told him to contact them.

I travelled to my mates place, I sat and had a sandwich and a coke with him, told him about the night before, and we talked about the guy.

My mate had a computer job to do, so we left his place at about 4pm to go there, it wasn't far.

They were running XP, and it was all screwed up. Some "Cryptographic Service" was failing, so you couldn't install any patches or service packs. Windowsupdate wouldn't work, and ssl websites wouldn't work.

There was truckloads of spyware on the machine too, I fiddled around for ages, finally manged to fix it, had to reregister dlls, stop a service, delete a bunch of files, start the service, change the internet explorer settings, managed to get windowsupdate to work, downloaded blaster patch, installed service pack 1 again, ran adaware, left the machine to go. It took us an hour and a half to get this far. We were asked the price for the work, since it wasn't my job, I just helped, I didn't say anything, I would have charged $50, my mate asked for $30.

We went back to the car, he gave me $20, normally I would not have accepted it, but I have not worked for so long now, and I have almost no money left, I needed to buy food, so I didn't argue, I just accepted it.

We went back to his house. I put the tv on, and we watched the news for a bit, and had some conversation. I realised we had not installed the blaster patch on the xp machine. my mate's wife rang him, she would be late coming back from the shop she works in, so we should go to dinner now, and pick her up afterwards.

We left his house, went back to the place where we had just fixed the computer, my mate went in to install the blaster patch, I sat in the car. Stairway to Heaven was on the radio, I turned it up and sang along, I enjoyed that.

We then went around to the club, I had to renew my membership, after that we went in, started eating dinner. I wasn't particularly hungry, I just ate what I could. The other people my mate knows that we usually go to dinner with turned up, they sat on a different table, I think my mate went over and told them what had happened.

We finished our meal and left, we went back to my mate's house, just as we drove into the garage, his mobile phone rang, his wife was almost to the station, so we drove back to the station. We waited for the train, it arrived, all the people got off, but we couldn't see my mate's wife. I spotted her going over the pedestrian bridge to the other side of the station, she must have thought we would be over the other side (that's where the club we went for dinner is) my mate ran after her, and called her back. There was a misunderstanding, she thought we would go to the club, my mate would come out and pick her up, and then go back to the club again, to finish the meal and so she could have a meal, we just went back to his house instead.

I sat and watched the tv again for a while, and had a green tea, we went to check a voicemail that had been left on the business phone, at that time, the other people from dinner arrived. We looked at some photo's my mate had taken on his digital camera last night.

Tea was served, I had another green tea, it was nice, we had a chat for a while, one of the blokes from dinner said he was sorry to hear the news, and asked a few questions.

We looked what was on tv, found Point Break was on, watched that until 10pm, when the signal dropped out. The satellite dish aim was changed when the roof I mounted it on was adjusted to fix a drainage issue. When it became really cloudy and foggy, the signal dropped out.

Everyone decided to leave at this point, the people from dinner had to go, because one of them had to get back to his car to go back down to Sydney, I was tired, so I left to, it ws drizzling outside, I couldn't get any grip on the ground, and had to get my mate to help my turn my bike around.

For once my mp3 player worked, the rain was really annoying, I couldn't have the visor up, because it was like getting sandblasted, and when I put it down, I couldn't see anything, especially when there was an oncoming car. So I spent the whole trip putting the visor up down up down up down up down etc.

I got home, came inside, and decided to deal with my email from the last couple of days. Went through and did all that, I checked the police article about the crash I found last night, it's not been changed.

I decided I really needed to get this blogging done before I forgot things, or lost the inclination to do it. I wrote the blog about yesterday, and updated it several times while writing today's events up, as I kept remembering things, and then I wrote this blog.

I just put Stairway to Heaven on, it made me feel ok. I think I'll check my email again, irc a bit, maybe put Bad on and have another cry, and then go to bed. The Cafe isn't open tomorrow, I don't know what I am going to do. I think I will start writing up some technical documentation, to describe all the equipment, and write some procedures for how to fix things.

I am actually writing this much later than it claims to be, I was too upset to write this post when I got home last night. I can't remember a lot of details, it was a very long and hard day.

I planned to go to the Cafe around 10am, I woke up early, got up, got dressed, ate some breakfast.

About 8:30 I received a phone call from the guy who's machine I fixed the other day (the virus machine) he wanted to collect it at about 11:30.

I received another phone call, at about 8:45, from a tech support guy at internode, the provider my precision driving mate has applied for adsl from. It still does not work. The tech support guy tells me that Telstra have checked from the exchange, and that it works. They will leave the ticket open until tomorrow, giving me a chance to test it.

I moved the computer I fixed into the house, told mum someone was coming to pick it up.

I hadn't charged the batteries for my mp3 player, I stuck them on charge, waited around for about 20 minutes, until about 9.45, and decided I had to leave. I grabbed the batteries, stuck them in the player, jumped on the bike, and took off. I got about 2 minutes from home, and the batteries went flat again.

I rode the rest of the way in silence.

I got to the Cafe, I was a little bit upset as I came up to park, got off the bike, wandered in. I had to give a stiff smile as I entered.

The door of the Cafe was pulled down, with a sign attached to say that we were closed due to a death in the family.

I can't really remember what was said at this point, the first hour or so of being in the shop I have no memory of.

At some point in the first while I was in there, the phone rang (it rang a lot of times today), my mate who I go to dinner with answered it, he talked for a few sentences, asked who it was, and then announced that it was someone from the Daily Telegraph, we were disgusted, he was told "no comment" and hung up on.

People from the centre, and Wyong in general came several times during the day to offer their condolences, and any help we might want.

I decided to clean up, the place looked a total mess as usual, one of the main reasons I stopped working in there a few months ago, I couldn't stand the mess.

I kept myself busy, sorting stuff out, moving things around out the back, trying to tidy up in general.

I would stop every now and then, ask/answer some questions about the business/technical issues.

I collected a trolley, and started filling it with rubbish, empty boxes, papers etc.

The guy's de facto, and her mother came into the Cafe, it was very uncomfortable, everyone was upset. We had some conversation, mainly about the business, what was going on, then some details about the crash were described. Someone got a newspaper, it had a large article about the crash in it.

We sat and had discussions for a period of time, I can't remember a lot of the things that were discussed. The funeral is going to be in Canberra, where the guy's father and brother are. I think I will go down for it. There will also be a local memorial.

After the guy's defacto and her mother left, we went back to what we had been doing.

I rang a couple of people, to try to find out details we would need to keep the business running, trying to make arrangements with people, and just finding out as much information as possible.

People rang in during the day to confirm what they suspected, offer their condolences etc.

I was called up by a lady I do support for, my phone was out of range, she had left a message, I went outside to call her back, and left a message for her. I then called my adsl mate to let him know about the call I had recieved this morning, told him I would come to have a look at it later, and where I was and what I was doing. i went back inside, and my message was replied to, but again I was out of range, so yet another message was left, I gave up at this point.

A guy responsible for the national dialin service recently setup, and the Newcastle POP called. We decided to shut down the Newcastle POP. It's an office, containing an ADSL connection, a Tigris, a laptop, and a switch, the laptop and the switch belong to us, the rest of the equipment was leased off the guy who called, we'll have to arrange to get that equipment back.

i stopped at about 3pm, and went and got some food. The lady at the food shop said she was sorry to hear of our loss, she asked me if he was my friend, or just a man I worked for, when I told her he was my friend, I lost it. I managed to finish ordering my food, and pay, I quickly headed back to the Cafe, I sat and ate my lunch, all the while crying.

After a few minutes I went back to keeping myself busy, we had to tell too many people what had happened, it didn't get any easy each time.

We made a big difference to the organisation of the shop during the day, a lot of rubbish was thrown out, machines were moved, it all just looked a lot better, I hoped that would make the environment better for us to work in. I think we took about 5 loads of rubbish to the bin.

Someone took a photo of the Cafe, with the door down, and us inside. He was shouted at, I would have chased him, but right at that time I was very upset and had been crying out the back, so I was in no fit state. The hide of some people, it's disgusting.

A woman from one of the data providers called up, there had been plans to get a new link installed, and share it with another guy, I had told him earlier in the day it was probably better if he had that link in his name, and looked after it, she was calling to confirm that it was acceptable. I confirmed it. She then asked what was going to happen with the equipment in Melbourne. I was lost for words. I don't know what to do with it, she said not to worry about it now, we'll sort it out later.

I got off the phone with here, and I discussed the equipment in Melbourne with the others. I had forgotten about it. There is a rack on the 52nd floor of the Tower in Melbourne, which I relocated back early in the year. After Octa4 went bust, my friend must have bought it off them. I decided I would call the guy in Darwin we bought it off, to see if I could find out the contact details of the local tech that turned up to help me complete the relocation, to find out if he could remove the equipment, and either sell it, or ship it back to us.

We closed the Cafe around 4pm, I went from their to my adsl mate's place, I had been there for a couple of minutes, when I realised it was his birthday, I had completely forgotten. I sat around for a little bit, he showed me he had got some cat5 and rj45s to setup the adsl router. I came home, got my crimping tool, and went back again.

I fiddled around for about 3 hours trying to get the service to work. There is still no sync. I read the manual, I tried different phone cable pinouts, resetting the device, reconfiguring the device.

I eventually gave up, and called the tech support. I told them that it was still not working. They would try to arrange a Telstra tech to test the service at the premises, rather than at the exchange.

I went down the road to McDonalds, I sat and ate my meal, and I read the paper. I thought the paper was the same as the one containing the story, but either it wasn't, or that section had been removed, there was nothing in the paper.

I sat in McDonalds for about an hour. I went back to my mates place, we all ended up sitting outside having a conversation and a couple of beers for a couple of hours. The birthday cake came out, we had some, a very funny anecdote was told, and I couldn't help but laugh, it felt very good to laugh, it helped.

We decided to get some more alcohol, we headed into Gosford, went to the bottle shop, we bought a bottle of rum to drink, and I bought a cheap bottle of whiskey to get me through the week.

We got a pizza on the way home, and while in a daze, I fell down a step, the others found that very humerous, I was too far away mentally to care.

We went back, my mate's wife was reading the paper, I expected to see something about the crash in the paper, but there was nothing.

We made up some rum and cokes, very strong, watched a video my mate had filmed with a camcorder over the last couple of days, just talking and cars and stuff, pretty boring, but funny in some spots. We went back outside again.

We listened to some music, Dire Straits, and drank our strong rum and cokes. The song "Brothers in Arms" came on, at the end of this song, I lost it again. I sat on the step and cried. My mate consoled me, I felt really bad, here it is, his 22nd birthday, and I'm sitting here crying my eyes out.

We had some private conversation for a while, I felt a bit better, I kept drinking more rum. After a while, I started to think of all the crazy things the guy and I got up to in the last 18 months or so, that made me feel better, the things we've done, heh.

I thought about it, and realised that he did make good use of his life, he achieved a lot of things, and I think everything he wanted to, he had a successful business, knew lots of people, earned lots of money, and bought all the toys he wanted.

I just sat outside, and listened to my mates stories of places he's worked, and the things he's done, I drank more rum. at about 2:30am, we went back inside, we were going to watch Army of Darkness, but my mates friend was on the phone. I watched him play a Lord of the Rings game on his suXbox, realised it was about 3am, and that I needed to get to bed, because I had to go back to the Cafe again in a few hours. I left, and I came home.

I sat and listened to some U2, Bad was a very important song. I cried again.

I tried to deal with some email, I couldn't concentrate on it, so I went to bed, listening to U2, and crying.

I am just adding a quick post here for today.

I am very upset today. I am drunk right now.

I just found a a couple of URLs about the tragedy:

http://www.police.nsw.gov.au/media/detail.cfm?ObjectID=5435&SectionID=media

and

http://www.sundaytimes.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,7034,8319870%255E1702,00.html

I am going to bed, I will write a proper post about today, tomorrow.

I just realised I was incorrect in one of my last posts.

The last time I saw the guy was as I was getting on my bike after I left the Cafe the other day, he came running out to tell me that he had remember the password on the Cisco 675 we were trying to configure just before I left.

Last night's event really brings things into perspective.

My dilemmas have been deciding what to eat for breakfast, and dealing with the fact that my TiVo has filled up, whereas other people now have to worry about waiting for the results of a police investigation, arranging a funeral, and dealing with not having an important person in their life around for the rest of their lives.

I have been thinking about joining the Police, I would like to be a computer forensic expert. Maybe I should do something more than just think about it.

This event has made me realise, you have to live life to it's full extent, while there was a tragic accident, the guy was doing something he enjoyed.

I am a big believer in fate, but I'm beginning to question that. I have been testing fate recently, sitting back and doing nothing until fate does something for me. Maybe there is no fate, I find it hard to believe it was this guys fate to die in a plane crash. I don't know what I think. Maybe in some horrid twist of fate he died in order for me to have something to do, I have to go back and sort things out with the business.

I don't know what I am thinking, that's a horrible thing to think. I'm all messed up, I think I need a strong drink.

I would like to be able to say that today was unremarkable, like most of the last few days, however today is remarkable, for a terrible reason.

I woke up about 12:30, started watching tv as usual, got out of bed to check my email, watched some more tv.

At about 3pm, I had just started to watch an episode of The Simpsons ("King of the Hill") when the phone rang. I paused the tv.

I answered the phone, it was my mate who I go to dinner with each week. He asked me if I had heard the news, "No, what news? I haven't seen the news for like 2 months". I was then asked if I was sitting down, I was. "_name withheld_'s dead. He died yesterday. His plane crashed".

I'm not sure what the conversation contained after that, I can't remember. The guy who died is the guy who I used to work with, who I just saw a couple of days ago, when I was trying to get my ADSL arranged (I'm only thinking about this now, to try to link it to earlier posts, to help me explain the guy, since I don't want to put names in here). The conversation went on for a few minutes, I agreed to go to the Internet Cafe we ran together until a few months ago tomorrow. We're going to try to work out what to do. There is a hell of a lot of stuff that only he knew.

I was stunned. I couldn't do anything. I just sat and did nothing for about an hour. Then I did a bit of cleaning in here, just pointless activity. I eventually got back to doing something, I checked my email, I started typing an email about setting up networking, routing specifically, and realised that a lot of my routing knowledge came from the guy that died.

At about 5pm, I called my mate, who I was going to start an ISP with, to tell him, since he worked for the guy for a month a few months back. He wasn't home, I left a message with his wife for him to call me. I went back to typing my email, he called me a few minutes later. I told him what had happened, he had the same reaction as I did. It's just such a shock. I don't remember that conversation either.

I went back to my email for a few minutes, and the phone rang again, it was my mate again, he wanted to explain that he had spent the day drinking and watching the cricket, and that he was fairly intoxicated, in case he came across as being insensitive when I told him what had happened. I was so out of it I didn't notice.

I finished my email, and sent it.

My mate called me back again about 5:30, told me he had just seen it on the local news. We chatted for a few minutes again, I told him that I was going up to the shop tomorrow to help out with whatever I can.

I got off the phone, and just sat around a bit more. I noticed the time was 5:53, so I put the local news on, recorded it on tivo. 2 minutes into the news, the story came on, about how "A scenic flight over the Central Coast last night changed to tragedy, when a 40 year old man was killed in an ultralight plane crash near Wyong. Police haven't ruled out mechanical failure as the cause of the accident".

The story then went on to show video from the scene last night, "about 20 to 7 last night, there was a loud crash. Police, Ambulance, and Rescue crews were sent out. The wreckage was located, but the pilot was found deceased, still in the wreckage".
It showed a Policemen investigating the crash, and detailed other factors. A witness claims he saw the plane "heading north at about 500 feet (150 metres), when the engine stopped".

Immediately I was reminded of part of the conversation I had with him on Tuesday. Apparently when the plane was out the other day, the engine stopped, but assumedly he got it started again, or was able to land it safely. He must not have done anything about the engine at the time.

The story continued, about how forensic experts where going to come in an examine the wreckage, and that mechanical failure could be the cause, but that high winds could have been a factor.

I sat and felt very shaken up again. It was starting to sink in now, after seeing the story. I went inside, I told my parents what was going on, they had heard about the crash on the radio. I cried. I ate dinner with my parents tonight, something I have not done for a long time. No conversation went on about it.

I just came back to where I live, checked my email again.

It's now 8:45pm, I've just put that episode of The Simpsons back on I started watching before. I unpaused it, and Bart said "Mum, a man just died". I decided to write this blog now, before my mind forces out all the things I don't want to remember.

I have just watched the news story again, to remind myself of the details of the story, which made me think about the conversation the other day. I cried again.

As I left the Cafe on Tuesday, I said "I'll call you in a couple of days". That was the last time I saw him, and the last thing I said to him.

I will speak to the guy that came in to replace me in the Cafe tomorrow, I think he knows a bit more about the engine failing the other day, and I will contact the Police, to let them know the details, in case it helps the investigation.

I first had dealings with the guy back in about 1998. I spoke to him over the phone a few times while I was at my first job, an ISP. I left that ISP, and I worked for CSC for 20 months, 19 of those months were spent working on the same floor of the building with him. After I left CSC, I had dealings with him when I went back to TAFE, he set me up with an ISDN connection at home, and I was signing up customers to a new ISP he had started (he already had a couple of others). For months he talked about starting an Internet Cafe.

We finally started the Cafe in January last year, almost exactly 1 year ago, it's a week or so short of a year. I worked in the Cafe up until about September, the guy had lost his job at CSC a few months earlier, needed work, so I left, so that he could do the work I was doing, fixing PCs. I went back to the job I had between leaving TAFE and starting the Cafe. I hadn't had much to do with him since then, the odd phone call, popping in to the Cafe every few weeks for a chat. I never expected this to happen.

It's now nearly 3am, I can't sleep.

I didn't end up doing anything useful today, so now it looks like marmalade on toast for breakfast tomorrow.

Around 8pm, I noticed that my ISDN connection had crapped out again. No amount of reconnecting/changing connections/disabling firewall/rebooting made any difference. I couldn't get any NATted traffic to work. It was only after a reboot that a dialog from the crappy firewall popped up, did I want to update it?, yeah, go ahead and try. So I waited 20 minutes for the update to download, installed it, rebooted, and then things seemed to start working again.

I'm sick of this ISDN rubbish, and I'm sick of this dumb Windows machine. If it had not been 8pm on a Saturday night, I would have rung up and arranged to have this rubbish removed, so I could get my ADSL on.

I found that TiVo was getting pretty full.. stuff that I had marked as "Save Until I Delete" was disappearing. I went through, and found that I had a truckload of duplicate Sabrina episodes, so I fast forwarded through them all to check them, and then I deleted the duplicates I didn't need. There's still about 25 episodes in there, and 5 more will start recording in a few hours.

My Turbonet card should turn up in the next few days, I think, since it was sent on New Years Eve, actually, I'll probably be waiting another week. Hopefully I will have my computer fixed by then, and I can start archiving the stuff off the TiVo, it still has 106 of 160 GB used.

Ironically, I didn't even sit and watch any of the stuff on TiVo. I spent a while changing all my Season Passes to Wishlists, since they work better, especially after the changes with the guide data recently, which resulted in the TiVo claiming there were no upcoming episodes of The Simpsons.. Hello.. there are like 10/day. I think the Wishlists are better anyway, now I just need a "Simpsons" Wishlist, instead of one to record the episodes on Fox8, and on 10, and the Simpsons Hour on 10. I also chucked a Wishlist in there for "Life Support", so when it starts again, TiVo will be recording it for me.

I have still not been able to contact the people I bought my motherboard from. I called the mobile number on Saturday, and I left a message, but what a surprise, I have received no call back. I can't find any listing of the company in the Yellow Pages to check the phone number either.

I sent an email to Abit in Taiwan to let them know what was going on, since according to their website, Taiwan is the Australian branch office, gee, that's convenient. However, they got back to me, and told me about a couple of different companies over here that are designated as branch offices.

I've sent an email to the first one, in an attempt to arrange an RMA, but as yet have heard nothing back. I did not expect to, the website says they are closed until the 5th, and it is the weekend (somehow I think, that unlike me, they won't be at their PCs at 3am Sunday).

I really wish I had won that money the other night. I could have bought a projector, maybe a laptop, I would have bought my DVDR drive, and probably a new player while I'm at it, instead of this shite Philips one. Oh well, not worth spending any more time thinking about it. Maybe I should just go and see an accountant and put this (oops, last) years tax in, I should get a refund of at least a few hundred dollars.

I wanted to hear "She Sells Sanctuary" which was stuck in my head, that's why I got up again. I just listened to, it's a cool song. I thought I might watch Rage, but rather than turn the TV on, I just checked the playlist on the website. It seems they are showing old episodes of Recovery from 1998 until 5am, at which time the crap 20 start. So it's just all crap.

I have instead put Radiohead's "Capture the Thief" album on again. I'm going back to bed to lie awake in the heat. Ironically, the Radiohead song "Go To Sleep" just came on.

I am writing this bit the next day. After I went back to bed and lay there, I thought about my events of the last few days. I haven't done anything. I just get up, watch tv, eat, watch tv, eat, watch tv, and sleep again. With a bit of email and irc thrown in there. I have become a useless waste of space, I'm not of any use to anyone at the moment. I should really get a job, I'm running out of money as well.

I woke up at 8:30 this morning, don't know why, I didn't go to sleep until nearly 4am. Went back to sleep.

Was woken again about about 10:30, by a mate wanting to know if I could give him a quote on a computer.. around $1200 for something with a 17" monitor and a DVD burner. Hmm, I'll be lucky to do that for cost, and I'm not interested in mucking around spending hours buying all the parts, aseembling the machine, installing all the software, and then offering tech support forever for free.

Oh well, I need to get the prices for my own purposes anyway, so I'll just price the bits I don't need and make up a quote. There's a computer fair next Saturday.

So far, since then, I've just listened to music and updated the genre data in the oztivo database.

I'm currently watching an episode of Full Frontal from about 1997, I think my sense of humour since then has changed, because it's just not funny.

It's a nice day out there, I probably should do something today, at least go to the shops and buy some breakfast cereal.

Today has been a complete waste of time.

I woke up, starting watching TV, didn't stop all day. I think I've watched about 15 episodes of the Simpsons today.

Someone mentioned the Palm game "Geeks", so I downloaded and installed it, it's a pretty crappy game. I then browsed around on Palmgear a bit, I got a new version of SolFree, rather than the crappy old B&W one I got back in 98 when I got my palm, I also got some Broomstick game, which is some cheap ripoff of something from Harry Potter, that got deleted pretty quickly.

I also downloaded "JoesDestructionInc" but when I try to run it on my IIIc with OS 3.5, it complains that it needs OS 3 or greater. WTF?

I've just finished playing the second game of Trivial Persuit, it's ok, besides the dumb installer that doesn't work because I don't have Palm Desktop installed, and I had to rip the prc and pdb file out of the temp directory with the installer running, and load them. It's too US centric though, apparently sport is only something that occurs in the US, nowhere else in the world are there sports, teams, or players, apparently.

I'm sick of tv, and I'm hungry, lets see what frozen delicacies I have in the freezer.

I just rang my precision driving mate to find out if the tech who rang me at midday called him to arrange a time to fix his adsl, but he was too busy to speak to me. I'm sure I'll find out soon enough however, when I'm expected to set it up.

I've given up on updating the last post, it takes too long to load and I can't find the bits I want to edit easily.

I feel seedy. It's no wonder, I drank:

2 pints of Heinekin
1/2 Bacardi/Coke
1 Bundy/Coke
1 Double Contreau
1/3 bottle of red wine
2/3 bottle of Moet

In about 5 hours.

I don't think those 2 cigars would have helped either.

I might have to slow down with the drinking I think, my body treats me worse and worse the day after everytime.

I'm going to go watch the episode of King of the Hill I started yesterday, and drink some green tea, and try to stop burping.

ok.. the last few hours.

I gave up on trying to configure the Cisco 675 after finding the rj45-db9 adapter was totally wrong, (why is the rx line tied to gnd? that's not going to work) fixing it, and trying all different speeds and cables. this thing must be stuffed.

I started watching an episode of King of the Kill, Bobby had just seen Luane naked when the phone rang, pause. It's my mate, He wants to know if I'm planning to go down to Sydney for New Years, I said I was in 2 minds about it, and it depended what the plan was when we got down there, he was just about to start when he said that he had another call he had to take, and would call me back in a minute. I waited for a minute or so, and he rang me back. We continued the conversation, I told him that I was not interested in going if it was going to be like every other time we had gone down, where we spend hours getting down there, and then can't find a pub to get into to get pissed, before I finished getting to the point, he knew what I was talking about, and he assured me that "no, the plan is to get down there, get into a pub, and stay there, I don't care about some flashy lights in the sky" ok, fair enough, that suits me, the environment is usally conducive to a good time, and just the other day, my mate who I played snooker with, when I mentioned about going down to Sydney for New Years (since my mate rang me while I was at his place the day before) told me that New Years was bascially just a huge singles party, anyone with kids doesn't go, and older people have seen too many new years to care. Oh well, maybe it won't be all bad, lots of drunk chicks all over the place.

So I told him that his plan sounded ok, get into a pub and screw the fireworks. "OK, we're getting the train at about 6:50", this was at about 5:50, ok, I've got an hour to shower, dress, get some dinner, and get to the station. i should be able to handle this. "OK, I'll see you there".

I turned off the tv, got on the train timetable website to confirm the time of the train (since others have a way of reading the weekday section of the timetable on weekends, and vice versa, and also reading am instead of pm) so I thought I would just check what was really going on. Ok, there's a 6:55pm train in the NYE timetable, that must be it. I jumped in the (cold) shower, washed (tried to get all the green skin off my neck that's reacted with my crappy pewter/copper chain), dried, cleaned my teeth, applied deodorant, and was out of the bathroom at 6:12. I was shaking at this point, hunger I assume, but the cold shower couldn't have helped. At this point it actually felt fairly nice, since it was so bloody hot.

Got dressed, no spiders in my shirt today, I pulled on the trousers I bought to go to a fancy dress party as Fry from Futurama recently, and my "I'm too pissed to walk shirt", with a "no walking symbol on it. I'm sure that a few drivers will get a laugh out of it as I ride my bike to the station shortly. (I'll have to remember to close my jacket on the way home, in case the cops are out, since I am planning to be too pissed to walk fairly shortly).

I ate some peanuts while I waited for some bread to toast, it popped up, I jammed some cheese in it, and ate it, burning my hands and mouth, but I didn't care, I was so hungry, thought about throwing a fruit mince pie down after before running out while I had a glass of coke, but then realised time was getting away.

It was getting to the time I needed to leave, it was 6:20, I shoved $70 in my wallet, and $2.40 in change in my pocket. I jumped on the bike, and headed for McDonalds to get a bit more food, food will be very important tonight. Went in, ordered 2 cheese burgers, take away, "that'll be $2.50" D'oh, only got $2.40, I would have had the $2.50 too, but I chucked a useless 10c piece in the collection just before I left, so I broke the $20 ($65 in notes and $4.90 in change now carrying) grabbed them, it was now 6.25, and I was thinking that I had 1/2 hour until the train went, thought about sitting to scoff them, but decided to eat them at the station, to make sure I got there in time, so I chucked them in the saddle bag, rode to the station, as I got close, I thought about the fact I should have brought my big bike chain. Oh well, too late now, and "she'll be right mate".

Rode down to the bike parking on level 1 of the carpark (you enter on 6) that's a really badly designed carpark, I ended up getting annoyed and riding down the no entry up ramps to get down, otherwise it would have taken 20 minutes to get all the way down. I parked up, jammed the burgers in my pockets, locked my helmet on the bike, put my gloves in the saddle bag (I'm pretty sure I did the bag up at this point) rushed up to the station, no sign of my mates, called my mate who called me earlier to ask me if I was going down to the City. "Are you at the station yet?", "will be there in about 5 minutes", "OK, are you planning to come back before 4am? Will I get a return ticket (valid till 4am) or not?", "I'm not planning on coming back before 4am", "ok, whatever, see you soon". I bought a return ticket ($9.80, leaving $55 in notes and $5.10 in change), even if he's not coming back before 4am, I think I will. I'm sure I will have had enough by then.

I dawdled down onto the platform, having a good perve on the way down the stairs and along the platform, might be a good night afterall, by the looks of things. It was now 6:45, 10 minutes to go. On the opposite platform, the train waiting to head to Newcastle was there, and I noticed that the carriage parked directly opposite me was the 5810, the carriage we used to end up on almost everyday when I was commuting to work while I worked at CSC and QI, back in 2000/2001.

I ate my burgers, and then wandered over to the drink machine, bought a lift to wash the greasy burgers down, as I was at the machine I saw my mates come down on to the platform. I collected my drink, walked back to where I had been waiting, everyone:

My mate that called me,
another mate (who was Dirty Harry at the party recently),
a mate that works at Target,
a mate that works at ABC,
and me,

were there, they had a smoke in the uncovered area, the train arrived a few minutes later.

We all jumped on the train, it was getting close to full at this point, so we ended up sitting in 2 groups, of 3 and 2, I was in the 2 sitting with my mate that called me earlier, away from everyone else, had another perve as a few chicks wandered through the carriage looking for a group of seats, we had some idle chit chat, couldn't wait for the train to stop at Woy Woy, bloody bogans.

At this point I regretting not being bothered to bring a small bottle of alcohol with me, I could have started already, oh well, we'll be there soon enough. A few minutes later Dirty Harry wandered over from the other group, carrying a beer (where'd he get that from?) he hadn't brought his pizza, left it on the seat where he was before, we found it humerous that some Bogan would get on at Woy Woy and go "oh yeah, bonus half eaten pizza with this seat!", If he'd brought it over, I probably would have finished it, but I was right with my greasy burgers and carbonated soft drink.

After a few minutes, the conversation changed to phones (what is it about boring train rides that ends up wth mobile phones being great entertainment for hours?) then we played with phones (my mate and Dirty Harry both have picture phones, so they mucked around taking pictures of each other) as the train continured, some "no dose" got passed around, over the counter caffeine tablets, I looked at the label, "take one" "only for occasional use" "no substitute for sleep" "contains about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee" uhh, that last one got me. Why not just have a cup of coffee? it's not like a single sup of coffee does anything to me. Bugger this, didn't bother, maybe I'll get one later if I feel a bit tired, but I really don't see what it's going to do, especially not after consuming several litres of alcohol over the next few hours.

Eventually the train arrived at Central (after coming through Redfern with all the necessary comments "got a smoke brudda?" and travelling past Morturary station, where it appeared some people were having a dinner party, that sounds like a creepy place to have a party), we all jumped off. Headed through the ticket gates, and for the bar, it was shut (D'oh! whose bad planning is this?), so we head for the loos instead (and that of course had all the necessary comments "you should have gone before we left" and "don't make me turn this train around!"). I went before we left, so I didn't need to go, so I just waited outside along with my mate that called me, it looked like a party was going on in there, with the blue light to stop people shooting up, and the amount of people going in and out, and the noise they were creating. Slowly everyone came out, and the group moved away, I waited for Dirty Harry to come out so he wouldn't get lost in the crowd, we wandered over to the drink machine where everyone else had moved to while I waited for Dirty Harry. I got a free water because my mate was trying to get rid of his change. (Don't know where that ended up, I had it until the Casino, must have left it there).

We moved outside the station, into the somewhat fresh (albeit warm) air, my mate that called me made a comment that one of the group of chicks that were sitting near us looked like Melissa, I didn't notice because I was facing the wrong way, I jokingly scoffed that he should have told me earlier, then he said I'd probably just always get in trouble for calling her Melissa if that was not her name, yeah, probably.

We moved across the street, at this point Dirty Harry made a big show of putting his sunglasses on to wash his "no doze" down with his Vanilla Coke from the drink machine. We then wandered into the city, towards Chinatown, we parked ourselves in Paddy McGuires, on the way in, everyone got ID'd except me, I was worried about trying to bring my water in, some places don't like that, so I wasn't looking to happy I assume, I just wanted to walk in, the bouncer said something like "Smile mate, it's New Years Eve", and then as I fumbled to find my license, he said "you're right" while everyone else got checked.

I got to the bar, ordered a pint of Heinekin, ($5, leaving only $50 note in my wallet, and the $5.10 still in change) moved outside near the tram stop, saw my mate who called me's ex GF, her brother, and his GF at a different table there (I'm assuming that was the arranged meeting spot). My mate who works at the ABC sat on the table with them, and tried to look important. I sat at a different table with Dirty Harry, my mate who called me, and my mate who works at Target. We had a good time making fun of our mate that works at the ABC, as he tried to look very impoartant, with his body language and mannerisms.

I finished my drink, went back inside, went to the loo (oops, broke the seal far too early), came back, sat outside again for a while, chatted, during this time a tram turned up at the tram stop, with a group of police on it, at least one pretty large one amongst them, so then we made comments about him being "Bargearse", and narrating the conversation he was having with the other police "the trams should have pie vending machines on them" and the like. I went back to the bar and bought another pint and a packet of BBQ chips ($8, now I have $40 in notes and $7.10 in change).

I got talking to a New Zealander sat at the bar while I waited for my order, it was his first time coming into the city for New Years. I told him not to make the mistake we've made before.. don't leave the pub to watch the fireworks unless you are well and truly pissed, or get friendly with the bouncers before you leave, or you will not get into a single pub in the city after midnight. He thanked me for the tip, and I went back outside.

I opened up the chips, which was hungtrly devoured by the table, my mate who works at the ABC was still hard at work trying to crack on to my mate's ex GF or her brother's GF, depending on who was at the table as people came and went, getting drinks etc.

I was about halfway through my second pint, when my mate who called me offered to buy a round, I was feeling a bit bloated at this point (I can't drink beer anymore, just get gassy, spend ages burping and feeling uncomfortable), so I turned it down, thinking it was going to take me 1/2 hour to finish my pint.

The 9pm fireworks went off around now, for all those kids in the city, that'll probably be asleep before midnight. We couldn't see them, just hear them, and see the sky lighting up.

I finished it a little while after that, Dirty Harry had been taking his time with his beer like me, so went it was decided to leave the pub (uh oh.. we're making a fatal mistake here), and he said he couldn't fit his new drink in, a Bacardi and Coke, I grabbed it and drank about half of it, the difference from beer was great, even though it was still carbonated. Dirty Harry complained, that he could "have just skulled it", so I gave it back, and he finished it off.

Someone came up with the idea of moving into Darling Harbour, since we should be able to get into a bar/pub/club over there. We spent a few minutes moving towards that area, had to go through a "no glass" checkpoint, where security guards were going through bags and stuff, evidently it is just "no glass", I had no issue carrying my knife in there :-)

We walked through the Harbour area, police everywhere in here, groups of 5 and 10 of them, not doing anything though. We headed over to "The Pontoon", the main bar we wanted to go to, to find that it was "entry by ticket only", wherever you got one of those tickets from, probably had to book it a year in advance. We kept going around the harbour, out near the Aquarium, realised there was nothing else going on over here. It then turned into a heated discussion of "why did we make the same mistake as last time of leaving the pub we were happy in" "we're not going to get in anywhere here". I said we should head for the Casino, since we've ended up in there one of the other times we've dragged around the city for New Years or other large events, and it seems to be the only place with enough capacity to let us in, and serve us alcohol. This suggestion was accepted my both Dirty Harry and my mate who works at Target, which was enough for me, we told the others they could come with us to the Casino, or do what they wanted.

They stayed where they were, and the 3 of us headed towards Old Pyrmont Bridge, which takes us over towards the Casino, as we got near a guy was juggling flaming torches, "want to catch one?" he asked me as I walked quickly past "nope!" was my reply without turning to look at him, I've got more important things to worry about at this point in time, like getting more alcohol.

We visited the loos under the bridge before we crossed, while I was relieving myself my phone rang, sorry, can't answer it, hands full. Got back outside, and my Target mate's phone started ringing, it was my mate who called me to start the night, he wanted to catch up. We waited for the others to arrive. My mate who just called turned up on his own, said he wanted to use the loo, so he did. the three of us that had left the others waited, for the others to arrive from walking over (gees they must be slow) and our mate to come out of the loo. "Where's the others?" he was asked, apparently they'd gone with our mate that works at the ABC, he knew where to go apparently.

So the four of us went up and on to Old Pyrmont Bridge, walked right past the seat I was on when my GF's phone got stolen way back in 2001, and got over to the other side. Headed into the Casino foyer, and up the escalator towards the bar/gambling.
we all entered in there, again everyone except me got checked for ID "you're right mate" again. My Target mate asked me how I kept getting in places without ID, my reply was something about looking my age instead of looking 12 like some of our group.

We went past the pokies, I was interested in the bar at this point, my mate who arranged the whole thing got a phone call from the ABC guy, he wanted to know where we were.. we spotted him standing at the bar already. It turned out that he/mate's ex GF/brother/GF who we'd left at Darling Harbour, had got a taxi over to the Casino. Oh well, that's a waste of their money, I intend to buy alcohol tonight, not waste money on taxis going walking distance.

We all queued up at the bar, my mate bought 3 Cuban cigars, and a drink of some description (another Bacardi and Coke I think) cost him $50 even, far out. I got a Bundy (Rum) and Coke (I don't remember what this cost, $8 something I think, I just remember paying with a $20 note and getting a $10 note and some coins as change, so I now had $30 in notes, and about $8/$9 in change I think). I spotted the others again, they'd taken their drinks and moved over near the "band", if you can call it that, it was just 2 guys, a bass guitarist and a keyboardist/sax player.

After I finished my drink, I tried to play the pokies (I had about 8 dollar coins jingling around in my pocket annoying me now), every single pokie had someone on it. I wandered around for 10 minutes looking for one. Never seen anything like it. I noticed a woman just sitting at one, not playing it, paying attention to the one next to her someone (her husband etc I assume) was playing. I asked if I could just play the one she was sitting at, but she showed me it had $2 credit on it. I'll bet she just put $2 in, was sitting there, and as soon as her husband or whatever had finished, she'd press the collect button, get her $2 back, and walk off. People annoy me.

I thought about playing blackjack at one of the tables (like the $5 table) but I couldn't find where the hell you get the chips, so I gave up and went back to the bar/band area. For some reason or another most of our group seems to carry around US currency (myself included) so a bit of comparing of it went on at this point. Someone commented they were going to us a US dollar bill to light their Cuban later (which didn't end up happening).

I went back to the bar for another drink, I ordered a double Contreau on the rocks (I'm just going to get down to the business of getting properly pissed now), I got put off by the bar chick making a comment about my shirt, her reply to my request for my drink was "Sorry, you're too pissed to walk", which took me a second to respond to, because I couldn't hear her properly over all the noise, and it took me a second to work out what she had said. There goes trying to be suave, I probably looked like I was slow too, so then when she asked me how my night was, I just replied "fine so far" and didn't ask how hers was (because I was put off by not dealing with her witty comment properly), which I normally would have done, she replied "Mine has been fine by the way" in a rather cyncial way. D'oh. I paid for my drink ($13.50!!! far out! I'm running out of money, wallet check: $15 in notes, and around $11 in change) and walked away.

I polished that off over a few minutes, someone had bought a bottile of red wine ($23 they paid for a $13 bottle), so I got into that. Once the bottle was dead, I stuck my glass in my jacket pocket (I have a habit of collecting souverneirs from places I drink, every glass in mhy cupboard has come from a bar/club/pub, I've never bought any). My Target mate was joking about making a request to the band (he was sitting right next to them), I said "You might as well", so he requested any U2 since it's his favourite band, and they said they would try but they would not be held responsible for anything they did. After that they made a fairly poor effort at playing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", in the wrong tempo, with a bad backing MIDI, which was so wrong my mate and I couldn't work out what the song was until they started singing, we had a go of trying to sing along.

At this point, (around 11:15pm I think) the girls (my mates' ex GF and her brothers GF) wanted to know where they could see the fireworks, and if they should try to make their way over to Circular Quay to see the bridge. I told them to just go up to the top of the Casino, expoit the fact that they were 2 attractive females, and that all the security were male, and look out the window, guage what they can see from as far as they can get without having a VIP pass, come back down, and decide whether to try to pack into Circular Quay, or stay here, drink more, and then go back up the top at 5 to midnight or so to watch the fireworks. So they went up, were gone for a fair while, we drank more (don't remember what), and eventually they came back.

While they were upstairs, I spotted a free pokie, I rushed over and put $2 through, lost it. I went back to where we were drinking, found $2 on the floor (woo! a refund), and drank more, I think.

As it was getting towards midnight, I rang home to ask for a tape to be put on of the fireworks, since we had no plans of watching them, and I had forgotten to go through TiVo and queue up some recordings around midnight. But as it got closer to midnight, my Target mate told me that the fire doors were open and we could see the fireworks out there. Before we moved over there, I handed my $15 from my wallet to my mate, to go in on a bottle of Moet we were getting (so now I had no notes, and about $11 in change). At about 5 minutes to midnight, we all went to the loo, to prepare for standing watching fireworks for 15 minutes, we headed out the fire doors at about 1 to minute, and were there to see that start of the fireworks. We stayed to watch about 6 minutes of the fireworks, clapped, cheered, made lots of noise, shook hands etc, and then came back inside to continue drinking, with a bottle of Moet.

Most people were still over watching the fireworks at this point, so there were lots of empty pokies, and the bar was also pretty clear. I went to a 5c pokie, but 40c on one spin, and it started some stupid "hyperfeature", with a clowns moving head (like those dumb games at carnivals you can never win), and you had to press the button to release a ball and get it in one of four slots (something, major, minor, grand), once you got 3 balls in a slot, you won that amount. I got the first 2 in the grand slot, then al the others in turn, until there were 2 balls in every slot, so the next one decided what I got. Of course it went in the minor slot and I won a huge $33, instead of the grand prize which I missed by about a millisecond, which was winnings of $22159. I pulled my $33 out and walked away very sad.

I know that these things are rigged and I had absolutely no chance of ever winning that amount, but it still annoys me. So much for a Happy New Year, is this setting the stage for the year to come?

I then returned to our table (we'd moved from near the band when everyone went outside and there were some tables free) sat back down, the Moet had arrived and been poured, I started to tell the tale of how I just missed out on $22000, was told to be quiet, we had a toast to something, and drank some Moet, and then told the tale.

The girls returned at this point, and they were given glasses of Moet. The cigars got fired up, I sat back and drank the Moet, mentioned how nice it was, someone commented that it would want to be, considering we'd paid $93 for the bottle. $93!! it's normally $60 apparently, far out, this is a Casino, the drinks should be free, considering the amount you waste gambling.

I think at this point I got a hug from my mate's ex GF, that was nice, I haven't been hugged for like 2 1/2 years.

Eventually someone jokingly offered me a cigar, since I don't smoke and never had. I ended up taking it, and puffing on it, mainly for the shock value, but also because I was annoyed about my missing out on all that money.

I can't say that the Cigar was any terrific, but it also wasn't awful (although, as I go through and edit all my drunken ramblings and shocking spelling and dyslexia from when I wrote this after getting home at 5am this morning, it's now nearly 2pm, my mouth tastes like shit, I can feel the cigar all still in there).

We finshed the Moet, someone went and bought another one, we polished that off (someone knocked a full glass over onto the floor, there's a waste of $10 or so), and a third bottle turned up (at $93 a bottle, that's $279 just spent on Champaigne!!) and we polished that one off. Somehow, shortly after this, I ended up with both a cigar and a cigarello, I was holding them in my hand in a klingon manner, and smoking both at the same time.

I think I was very pissed at this point.

I then wandered around the Casino again, wasting my $33 winnings back in the pokies, winning a few dollars here and there, but mostly losing, no $22159 to be found anywhere.

I wanted to have a go at roulette, I thought I would stick $5 on 13. I asked a cleaner where you get the chips, he said you just buy them at the table. I approached the $5 roulette table, with 5 $1 coins to bet "Sorry mate, don't take coins, go and change it over there" and the dealer gave me some half assed arm gesture in I don't know what direction, I couldn't see anything to do with money changing where he was pointing, so I'm pretty sure he was just telling me to bugger off.

I went back and put some of those coins through the pokies. I returned to where the group had been standing, near the pokies, but there was no one there.. uhh.. I called my mate, they had left, so I hurried out to catch up to them, caught up, we wandered back through Darling Harbour again.

My mate and his ex GF were kicking a squashed bottle along like a soccer ball. Some Wog came over and tried to crack on to my mates ex GF, the guy just came over and put his arm around her, my mate was not impressed, nor was I, and my mate started mouthing off at the guy, calling him a Wog and that he thought he was God's gift to women and that he should just piss off.

The Wog took a swing for my mate, I was expecting him to, so I stuck my left arm up in the way instinctively, copped most of the force of the punch, was too pissed to feel it (still don't) it just breezed off and tapped my mate, he was so pissed he didn't realise I'd stopped him from getting punched full in the face, so he continued mouthing off at the Wog, thinking he had a really pathetic punch on him (maybe he did, I don't remember it hurting my arm). The Wog was put out by this, he must have thought my mate was superman or something, because I don't think he noticed me deflect the punch either, and he couldn't understand how this guy got a punch in the face and kept on going like nothing happened.

I took to opportunity, put myself between them, moved the Wog away a bit, and told him to just back off because my mate had a warrant out for him, for GBH, and that the guy was out of control (all BS, just to get rid of the Wog), another Wog jumped in to have a go at my mate at this point, when I had just got rid of the first one, so then I had to pull him to the side sort him out. Just as I started telling him to bugger off, the first Wog came over, and dragged the second one away. My mate's GF's brother and his GF had got further ahead of us, so they missed it all.

After that little bit of excitement (where are all those useless cops we saw wandering around in this area the first time we came through now?) we continued towards the train, my ABC mate rang me, he was on the station waiting for the train, so we hurried down there, all the while I'm trying to calm my mate down, because he's mouthing off about Wogs loudly, and I don't want more shit to sort out.

We got to the train station, wandered through the train (the 3:17) looking for my mates that were already there, couldn't find them, anywhere on the 4 carriages. My mate rang them, they were now on the train, back carriage, so we found them. There were no seats near where they all were, so I said we should move to the next carriage which was empty, no one wanted to move, so I said "fsck you then". I got off and got a drink from the machine (a Coke ($1.50), why didn't I get water? I probably wouldn't feel so crappy right now), got back on the train, in the next carriage where I could get a seat.

I sent a text message for everyone to move in where I was because it was empty. I then rang another mate we hadn't seen for a bit, to find out where he was, he was in the train, cool. After the train started moving, I wandered back to the other carriage where everone was, and gave up my 4 seat area where I had my feet up, and ended up on the floor.

I lay down on the floor for a bit, but that wasn't a good idea, made me feel sick, so I sat up. I noticed that my mate had something on his shirt. It looked like blood. It wasn't from his face/nose or anything, I thought maybe my arm had bust open again when it got punched, but it wasn't, who knows what it was or if it was blood, where it came from.

Some Bogans in the carraige offered me a seat, so I got off the floor and moved into it. There was a Bogan bloke lying down with his arm out, towards the seat I was sitting in, he was holding a lighter, I made a motion to take the lighter out of his hand and give it to one of the Bogan girls, but one said "oh, don't take that off him", and I just replied that I didn't like having a lighter that close to my crotch in the hand of a drunk person, so he piped up with "oh well you can fsck off then". So I just shutup and minded my own business. The Bogans got out some stupid cap device, and started banging it on the windows and seats in the train, pissing everyone off. I just ignored it. I'd had enough of dealing with idiots. I thought, "I'll bet these idiots get off at Woy Woy". I nearly got off to sleep, and one of the Bogan chicks said I was looking a bit green, and not to spew on her, which pulled me out of almost getting to sleep. I sat there for a bit, feeling very seedy, and then had to rush into the next carriage where the toilet was to spew.

There's some good design involved there, the sink is at just the right height that you can comfortably sit on it while you spew into the toilet. The only bit I didn't like was when the train turned and the water/spew in the toilet slopped, and I had to move to get out of the way of the splash. Also, there's stupid taps that don't stay on (ok, I suppose it has to be like that to stop someone leaving it on and running all the water out), but it makes it hard to wash your mouth out or wet your face. I tried to ja it on with my knife, but I was too pissed and I couldn't get it in the right place to hold the tap. I just splashed some water on my face, flushed the loo, and went back to the seat. I felt a lot better after that, sat quietly for a bit.

We arrived at Woy Woy and all the Bogans got off, what a surprise. I lay down for a bit again, now that there was space on the seat, it felt good. We got to Gosford, I got off, I think the others stayed on the train, I don't know, I was feeling a bit seedy again, and just wanted to get home, so I staggered across the platform, up the stairs, through the ticket gates, whcih were all open, so my mates with no tickets (that bought singles, and didn't buy one at Central to get back) were ok, if they'd got off here. I should have just got a single, I got ripped off for money I could have wasted in the Casino :-)

I got back to my bike, the pillion pegs were down (which I know were not when I parked it), the saddle bag was open (maybe I left open when I got my McDonalds out, but I don't think so, I would have closed it when I put my gloves in there), and the blinker was on when I turned the key on, hmm, i think someone's been pissing about here. Everything was there (gloves and tools still in the saddle bag), so I didn't care. I geared up, and rode home somehow and deiced to right this. (Very badly, it's just taken me 2 hours to rewrite/fix it).

My mouth tastes shitty, I can feel all nasty cigar in it, I fell very seedy, and really annoyed about missing out on that money.

The main thing that annoys me about missing out on that money, is that I recently had a dream that I won a lot of money, and I had to go into an office to get a cheque for my winnings. I think I was supposed to win that money, I got jacked because my coordination was not right, maybe this is fate telling me to stop drinking or something.

Anyway, I'm going to bed now, it's 6am, the sun is up, and the birds are making noise. Crappy New Year.

Oh, last wallet check: no notes, a bunch of change: $16.10 worth ($12 in dollar coins). So I started with $72.40, and ended up with $16.10, which means I spent $56.30.. not too bad, except for the fact I won that $33, and it's not here, so I actually spent $89.30