Got up, watched tv. Mucked around on the computer. Watched more tv.

Ate some food, realised that I really need to go to the shops and buy food.

Wasted so much time that it got too late (About 2pm) where I wouldn't be at the shops until school got out, and then it would be ful of obnoxious kids.

I watched tv and waited instead.

Tivo went dumb, it partially recorded a show when it could have recorded the whole thing, luckily the rest of the show was still in the live buffer, so I rewound to watch the end of the show, then it went really dumb.. the bar got stuck on the screen, it thought it was rewinding at tripple speed, but it was playing. I couldn't telnet in either. I watched the end of the show, and then I pulled the power out. I took the chance to move the power into a powerboard behind the tv, instead of the annoying extension cord.. ah, the powerboard has one stuffed socket, so I had to swap it out.

I watched some more tv.

At 4.30, when it was supposed to start recording, it didn't change the channel on the sat box, weird.

I looked, I couldn't change it with the proper remote either. I reset the box, it still wouldn't change.

I then noticed the LED that flashes when there is IR hard on, I could use my hand to block it, and then the remote would work.

I managed to change the channel, just in time, luckily the show started 4 minutes late.

I wrote a shopping list, and prepared to leave to go to the shops. I grabbed the tivo serial cable to post. D'uh, I'll need the address it's going to..

I then could not find the shopping list I had written, to write the address on it. I searched everywhere. I then found the list in my back pocket.

I wrote the address down, and rode down to the shops.

I went in, it was 5.10pm, and the post office part of the newsagent was closed, d'oh. There was a woman behind the counter, but because it's a post office, she would have refused to serve me.

I went into the supermarket. I had intended to get a trolley, but I was so annoyed with the post office being shut, and people getting in my way, that I forgot.

I dragged around, got all my shopping, paid, and then came back to my bike.

Just as I gort near, a guy said hello. It was one of the guys who started the ISP I worked for back in 98 and 99.

I gave him a quick update on what was happening, and he told me that if I needed any help with anything, to let him know, that was cool. I might call on him in a few weeks when I'm up, and he can do setups or something, because I'm really not interested in doing it (although I'm sure I will end up doing some).

I came home, loaded the shopping, and sat to write this blog.

There is still some amount of IR flooding in from somewhere, since the IR light on the sat decoder is still on, and all my remotes are having difficulty working properly.

As before, not much happened yesterday afternoon/night..

Dad came in with the phone bill, apparently it was a few hundred dollars over what it normally is. Looks like the telco has bugged up and been charging incorrectly, like used to happen to the customers of the business I was running every now and then.

I told him to ring up and complain.

I had a pie and chips for dinner while I watched some tv, and then I went to bed a few hours later after running tivo out of shows again.


I started working on getting freeside working this morning.

Some relatives were coming to leave their cat with us, since they are moving, and they don't want to or can't take him with them.

I haven't seen the relatives since 1989, when we went for a holiday to Queensland, I'm not exactly sure how I'm related to them.

My brother came in and told me that they were here, I had a shower, got dressed, and went inside.

We had lunch, they'd already put the cat "Buster" in the house, and he'd gone under my parents bed.

After lunch, someone went and got him out, he's the biggest cat I've ever seen.

None of our 5 cats would come anywhere near the house, but that was only because the dopey dog that wanders the streets was hanging around.

We chatted for a while, and then they decided to leave, since they had to drive a few hours back up the coast.

We were having a look at my bike just before they left, and noticed that a bracket that holds some part (maybe a regulator or something, I'm not sure) had rusted and snapped. Bugger, I'll have to fix that.

I came back inside, to get back to work.

My phone rang, it was my message service. A message about 10 seconds long, of just background noise.

I called my mate (who was in the US recently) back, (since he called me and left the noise message). I asked if he was trying to call me, or if he sat on his phone.

Apparently he was trying to call me, wanted to know about cheap computer places, to get a new monitor. He said he would come around in a bit.

I was planning to go out to get the parts to make another tivo serial cable that got ordered, I suppose I can go out there while we're out.

I got back to work, I almost had freeside working (or so I thought), I fiddled around a bit more with it, it was mainly just missing perl packages, and had wrong permissions, apache was running as the wrong user, stupid fiddling things like that.

My mate turned up about an hour later.

We chatted for a while, he had a look at the tivo, and I showed him the interfaces for the sat decoders.

We left, went into Gosford, had a look in the computer shop there, $310 for a 19" monitor, but they had none in stock, and it would take 2 days.

We then went out to Erina, we were looking for one computer place, I think is fairly cheap, but they must have moved. We ended up going to a bloody expensive place, and my mate paid $340 for the monitor, but because he wanted to use some interest free thing, he had to spend at least $500, so he looked around for some overpriced games to push the price up.

I wandered around for a bit, disgusted at the prices. $100 for GTA3 that came out 2 years ago??

I walked across the street, went to the electronics place, and bought the parts I needed for the tivo serial cable. The guy working there was on the phone, complaining to someone that he didn't vote on the weekend because he didn't know it was voting day.

He got off the phone just as I wanted to be served. I asked him if he forgot to vote, and he told me that he just didn't realise that it was a voting day, because he hadn't seen any advertising for it. He said that it wasn't that he was lazy, or didn't care, (at which point I said that I didn't, and hadn't even bothered to enroll), it was just that he didn't know, and apparently a few of his mates hadn't either.

He'd rung up the electoral commission to find out if he was going to get fined, and they said not if he didn't hear from them. Apparently they only pick a few people and fine them, as examples anyway.

I said that I never bothered to enroll, and didn't care about voting, because it makes no difference. Politicians are all just talk, don't actually do anything, and until they throw them all out, and start again, I won't be bothering to line up to vote, it's just a complete waste of time. I don't even care who won, it makes no difference.

I wandered back across the road, my mate had just finished being ripped off I mean paying for the monitor and the games. We loaded them in the van, and went to the pie shop around the corner.

I'd had lunch, so I had some apple custard pastry thing.

My mate complained he wanted an SVideo extension cable, so we went back to the electronics shop again, and bought 4m of 4 core cable, and an svideo plug and socket. $9 something worth.

We came back home, I grabbed all the parts, my mate gave me $5 to put it together, hmm, he probably could have bought a premade cabled and joiner at this rate, maybe. Oh well.

I went back to fiddling with freeside, and got it to the point where it doesn't just spew errors, but it's not working properly. I can't put any data in, and it keeps deleting all the settings.

I started making up the extension cable.

I managed to put it all together, finished, then realised I had the plug and socket slip covers on around the wrong way, and they are different sizes.

I undid one end, swapped the covers, and put it back together, getting frustrated by this point, I hate these svideo ends.

My brother came in to ask if I wanted dinner.

I wandered inside. The huge cat was wandering around.

We had dinner (Grandma hadn't gone home yet).

After dinner, I sat around chatting for a bit.

Dad showed me the phone bill again, apparently after arguing with the telco for a long time, they sorted it out today, and took a couple of hundred dollars off the bill, because they stuffed up.

The air in their house attacked me as usual, and after an hour and a bit I was sneezing and had watery eyes.

My phone rang, it was my mate I go to dinner with. (He's on holidays in Queensland at the moment) he asked me if I was going to the club for dinner tomorrow.. uh, what day? he's lost of track of the days, must be having a good time :-)

They flew up yesterday, and they'd been to SeaWorld today.

He asked me how I was going, I said I was slowly getting there, a few more days of work yet, that I had the switch for the seniors club, and I'll have to line up tomorrow going to put it in on Thursday or Friday.

We chatted for a bit, until he was worried about going over his 10 minutes, so I said I would speak to him later.

I came back inside, and the air attacked me again.

One of our cats turned up, and the huge one started growling at him out the door, we managed to get him inside, and they just sort of looked at each other for a bit, and the huge one growled.

The rabbit had been let out, and was mucking around, jumping around like crazy.

Eventually both of the cats moved in to the bedroom, we heard growling on and off for a bit, but it seems they are ok with each other now.

Dad took Grandma home, and I decided to retreat back to where I could breathe.

I've mucked around with freeside a bit more, didn't get anywhere.

I made up and tested te tivo serial cable, I'll mail it out tomorrow.

I think I might go to the bank, and get the rest of my statements, to find out if I got paid properly the whole time I was working to keep the business running, the last payment, a few days before they screwed me over, was only $30 something, what a joke.

The wrong number was the only eventful thing yesterday.

Oh, I did finally manage to get RADIUS working last night, now I just need to get LDAP working.

Anyway, I watched a bunch of tv, ran tivo out of things to watch, and went to bed about 1am after watching King of the Hill.

I've not really done anything today, watched some tv (woke up to discover the sat box screwed up again, and tivo recording black).

I'm just eating breakfast, and trying to get freeside billing/administration software working, without much luck.

Bloody wrong numbers..

The phone rings, I answer it, there's a lot of noise in the background. "Hello?" "(mumble) (mumble) Central Coast (mumble)?" "Sorry?" "Is that Central Coast Brakes?" "No, I think you have a wrong number" "Oh, sorry mate".

That extra hour was nice.. Instead of having to get up and out by 10am, we really got until 11am, but I'll put the adjusted clock times here.

I was woken early (about 7.30am) by mate's phone ringing. He just cancelled it and turned it off.

I lay in, sleeping a bit more.

I eventually started getting ready about 9am.

Someone knocked on the door several times. I was just getting out of bed to answer it, when I heard the door open, close, and then the bathroom door close. Dunno who that was.

Watched some telly, got dressed, had a couple more Panadol, and a cup of tea.

I came down to check out a few minutes before 10am. The undies were still on the door knob. I left them.

I was feeling really seedy at this point, even though I drank water and stuff before I went to bed. It must have been all the beer.

I checked out, and waited outside for the others. Someone mentioned something about a parking voucher for the parking station. I went back to get one, you had to buy it, $19, god damn. I was thinking about not paying it before (when I thought it was $10, I wish I had just gone with that plan).

We went back to the car park, and loaded everything into my mate's car, we wanted to wander around the city a bit before we left.

We wandered around, the first record shop (that they went to yesterday afternoon) didn't open until midday, and it was only 10.45am. We went to the next one.. it didn't open until 11am, it was now 10.55. We didn't wait, we went to the next one..
It was open.

I wanted to buy Tron on DVD, but I couldn't find another DVD worth buying (it was a 2 for $40 thing, Tron was $42 on it's own).

We were in here for a while, and then we came back to the second record shop, had a look around. The others started complaining they were hungry. I thought I was a bit too seedy to eat, but the walking around helped a bit.

We didn't bother to go back to the first record shop, we went to HobbyCo instead (a models etc shop) Looked in there for a while. They had a model of the Yamaha 1600 Road King, almost my bike :-) Along with a few other good ones, like the BTTF DeLorean, Ecto1 from Ghostbusters, the Robocop Cop Car, but they were all cheesy snap together models.

We got some breakfast/lunch, at Oporto's. I wanted to buy some batteries somewhere, since I forgot to bring my charger, and I doubt the batteries in my CD player have got much left in them. I didn't find any. Maybe I'll just stop at a servo somewhere up the coast on the way home and get some.

We slowly wandered back to the parking station, I got my gear, came up to my bike, retaped the blinker, and took off.

I got to the boom gate at the exit, the machine said "Do not insert plastic ticket" and below "Insert plastic ticket" Make up your damn mind. I tried putting the parker voucher in "Please Wait" "Invalid".

Great. I rode around the boom gate (like I was planning to do anyway) and took off. That was a waste of $19.

I rode home, back over the bridge, up the coast.

I stopped in at a servo just before getting on the freeway. I bought and drank an energy drink, I wasn't feeling too bad, but it can't hurt.

I was going to buy batteries, but they were far too expensive, I decided I would just run the ones I had as far as they would go (they made it all the way home).

Some guy commented "nice bike" and all that, I chatted to him for a little bit, before I took off, got on the freeway, and came home.

I'd just come off the freeway, and I was heading for the road that comes down the hill to town, where I go through to get home.

As I came through the traffic lights, A cop car sitting facing the other way fired up, lights and siren and everything. Not Again! What is this?

I took off down the hill, took the back way off the main road, and raced into home. I'm getting sick of this, they must be out to get me.

I need to fix all my clocks, and load some new tivo guide data now. I got 87 emails (that got past spamassassin) since I checked it yesterday morning, and about 84 of them are spam.

OK, now what's happened in the last couple of days..

I got up about 10, had a shower, some breakfast, and left to go to the computer fair to get a replacement fan for the busted machine (I also had to get a switch for the seniors club, but I had forgotten about that at this point).

I rode to the computer fair. Just as I got there, my phone was ringing (about 11am), I went to answer it, just missed the call. It was my mate who got me the consulting work a week or so ago.

I went inside. I bumped into the people from the seniors club where I was setting up the network a week and a bit ago. I started talking to them. My mate who just tried to call me bumped into me. I continued talking to the people from the club for a few more minutes, until my mate rescued me.

I had a chat to him for a bit, he's off overseas next week, and wanted to get a cheap webcam for someone so his wife could communicate with them while they are overseas.

I got another short distance around the fair, before bumping into the computer club I used to be a member of. I chatted with them for a few minutes, they want me to come and be a guest speaker at one of their linux workshops in a few weeks.

I eventually managed to get away from them, and around the fair. I bought the fan I needed.

I wandered around the fair just looking, since I didn't need anything myself.

I was just about to leave, and looking at the last table, I noticed a USB powered network switch, just when I thought they couldn't possibly make the stuff any more cheaply.. they get rid of the plugpack adapter (it's probably half the price).

Then I realised I had to buy a switch for the club where we had network issues because of the shared ports on the switch.

I wandered back around the fair again, not much choice, hardly anyone had switches. I found one stall, it had a 5 port crappy looking switch for $28, or an 8 port reasonable looking switch for $30. I got the 8 port.

I wandered around a bit more, it was getting close to midday (about 11.45). I need to call my mate and find out what the plan for getting to the city is.

I went back to my bike. stupid switch box was too big to easily fit in the saddlebag, I emptied it out, folded up the box, and shoved it in the bag.

I tried to call my mate, no answer.

I took off, I went back to the shopping centre (where I found the bag etc) and I got some lunch.

I finished my lunch, and was reading the paper, about 12.10pm, I called my mate again, he answered, they wanted to leave to go down now.

He said the car was full, so I could get the train, and they'd pick me up down there. Bugger that, I'll just ride.

I said I would meet him at the service station near the freeway, once I had my stuff.

I rushed home, emptied the switch and fan and stuff out of my bike, chucked all my stuff in my bag (we usually suit up when we're down in the city). I tried to call my mate again, to check we were suiting it, but no answer again. argh, oh well, I am anyway.

I took my green suit, a plain white collarless shirt, and a black t shirt. I'll see what looks best down there, don't have time now.

I took off again, rushed up to the servo, it was now about 40 minutes after the first phone call. eek.

I got there, they were waiting there, I apologised for making them wait so long. I fuelled up, chucked my big in there car, and we took off.

They got ahead, because I was mucking around trying to put my earbuds in.

I got stuck behind a ton of slow traffic, and then one of my earbuds fell out.

I pulled over, fixed it, and took off again.

I had to try to catch up to them, since I didn't know where I was going, and I was going to follow them.

I started out on the freeway going about 120/130, thinking I would see them in the distance fairly shortly. I didn't, I pushed it to 140 for a bit, still no sign of them.

Down the big hill, I just went full throttle, got it up to 160 (only 50 over :-), and up the other side.

I dropped it back to 130, hoping I would catch them soon.

Quite a few kilometres later, about halfway down the freeway, I saw them.

I pulled in behind them, and just followed.

We came to roadworks, where the speed limit is 80, bit of a change going half the speed I was just going.

The rest of the freeway was a bit boring, slow, not much to do, my mate sat in the outside lane going at the speed limit, annoying most other drivers. I just sat behind him, if I had got out, into the correct lane, then it would have been a moving road block, even worse.

We got to the end of the freeway, and started going down the road where I went when I was consulting back days ago.

I remembered the tolls to get over the Harbour Bridge into the city.. I've no change, only notes, and it takes ages to muck around paying.

I'll see if I can get my mate to pay for me, and we both go through.

I finally managed to get a gap, where I could pull up next to him, and ask him to pay.

I then got ahead of him, so I pulled off, waitied, and jumped back on the road behind him.

We headed towards the city. As we came near the tolls, some guy started to change lanes on top of me, I knew he was going to do it, so I blasted my horn at him.

We got closer to the tolls.. my mate headed towards the automatic lane.. d'oh, this won't work.. he waved out the window. I pulled up alongside, and he gave me some change.

They went through, I chucked the change in, and kept going.

We got through the city, and pulled into the parking station.

I parked up (on the next level) went down, got my bag, and we went and checked in.

Apparently we weren't going to be staying where we normally do, because they were full or something, my mate tried to book at a different place, but the booking didn't go through. 4 rooms in the normal hotel came up last night, so my mate booked them.. this made them $25 each more. D'oh, oh well.

We checked in, my mate staying in the room with me wasn't there yet, so I just dumped my stuff, and went in next door with a couple of my other mates.

We watched some of a stupid documentary on Mark Hamill for a while.

2 of the others we were waiting on turned up. No sign of the guy I was sharing with yet.

We all went out to wander around the city.

Some of us went to the pub, and the other went into a record shop.

They all came into the pub a little while later. I had 2 pints in here.

About 4.45pm we all decided to go back to the hotel, get ready, I pinched a pint glass for my mate who wanted one. We'd come back out about 6.30 for dinner.

I unloaded my stuff, and was getting ready to iron my shirt, I was just about to get in the shower, when someone knocked on the door, it was the guy I was sharing with.

I ironed my shirt, had a shower, and got dressed.

I went back in next door to wait. My mate lent me a 70s style shirt, white with brown diagonal lines on it, and a big collar. I put it on instead of my white shirt, it looked really cool.

We decided to head out about 6.20pm. I told the guy who was sharing with me where we were going (the same restaurant we went to last time) and he said he'd meet us there, since he'd only just got out of the shower.

We left the hotel, ended up just going into the pub across the road, to wait for the others. I had a schooner in here.

My mates, most of them seeing my suit for the first time, found it humerous.

We sat in the pub for a while, then we got a call from the guy I was sharing with.. he'd wandered off down to where the restaraunt is. Oops.

We left the pub, and went down there.

On the way down there, one of my mates asked a cute chick what she thought of my suit, "it's gorgeous" was her reply, hehe. Too bad that was the only real reaction all night.

We got to the restaraunt, we were in there for a while, then one of my other mates had to go and find the guy I was sharing with.

We all had dinner in here, it was pretty good, I had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner.

For 8 of us, it ended up costing $240 something, about $31 each.

We left here, and kept going.

We went over to Darling Harbour, to the Pontoon bar. It was full. D'oh. We kept going, around the harbourside, to the Cargo bar.

I decided no more beer, time to start on spirits, then I noticed they had Beez Neez (a honey wheat beer, from Queensland) on tap, so I grabbed one.

We hung around in here for a while, there were no seats. I was just about to order another drink (A long island iced tea) when I was told we were leaving.

We left there, and wandered up to the cab rank. 2 of my mates had already left, leaving 5 of us. 5 weren't going to fit in a cab, so we went 2/3 in 2 cabs. We went over to the Rocks, to the Lowenbreau. We went upstairs to the "UberBar", I had a half stein of Dunkel (so much for no more beer).

We hung around in here for a while, nothing much going on, so we eventually decided to move on. We came out, went around the front, and then everyone went back into the same pub we had just come out of.. they wanted steins, which were only served downstairs, it was too late anyway, but no one listened.

I sat down to wait. I don't want more beer, and I don't want to line up for ages.

2 of my mate's I was going to go with to the next pub disappeared. We didn't see them for hours..

The others who had gone in to get steins came back eventually, with more half steins, since it was too late to get a stei. Why don't people listen?

We sat there for a while, someone ordered some food, and we ate that. I went back and bought the next drinks, I got more half steins of beer, and a Southern Comfort and Coke for myself (I wonder if it's the 30% Southern Comfort? :-).

It started raining. We eventually decided to move on, and we went into the nearby pub, thr Orient, where we thought the other 2 who disappeared had gone. No sign of them.

The had one chick serving at the bar in here, it was hopeless. I eventually got another drink, a Bundy Rum and Coke.

We sat in here for a while, then we decided to go and get some food, and go back to the hotel.

We wandered out, and down the street. We went to McDonalds, and got some food. We were in here for a while, then we left, and went 2/3 in cabs again to get back to the hotel.

I had a shocking headache at this point. I went to the local convenience store, and bought some Panadol and a small chocolate bar. $10.30 for both. Far out.

I went back, and into the hotel. We went up to the room next to mine, where my mates were. Just as we were getting there, the other 2 who went AWOL turned up.

We all sat in the room for while, I had a cup of tea. I had about 1/5th of my chocolate bar, and everyone else polished it off, buggers.

My mates who just reappeared wanted to go back out. Daylight savings ends tonight, so we get an extra hour (we get 2-3am twice) so they wanted to take advantage of it. I thought about it, but my headache was really annoying me.

We sat in here and talked for a bit, then the others started getting stupid, and flicking undies around the room. I wasn't terribly impressed.

They took my room key, and were going to put a pair of undies on the guy I was sharing with, who had gone to bed. They didn't, they just hung them on the door knob of my room. great.

After a bit more mucking around, I wasn't really impressed with the behaviour, I decided to go to bed.

I went back my room, and went to bed, not sure what time it was.

I started eating sugar to stay awake.

I then finished off the corn chips that were hanging around on the desk.

I watched a bit of tv.

I put the computer into the new case, I managed to find the power pin headers I couldn't find the other day, they were hidden under the drive bays, and I couldn't find them because of the cdrom drive being in the way.

I also found a usb header on the motherboard, good, it can be used to run the front usb sockets that will undoubtedly be attempted to be used, resulting in "the usb doesn't work" unless I connect them to something. I plugged both sockets onto it.

I finished moving everything over into the new case, including the "new" disk, to replace the one that might be damaged.

I powered the machine up, it's making a terrible noise. The "new" disk is most of the noise, and the cpu fan is the rest of it.

I ripped the "new" disk out, using the old one, it's fine. I'm not going to replace it, the replacement disk sounds like the bearings are going.

I tested the usb ports, one works, the other does not. I found that you can't run 2 ports of one header (why do they have 10 pins, and you only use 4?) The usb card in the machine has a single pin header on it, so I moved the non working port onto that, so one port on the front is usb 1.1 (connected to the mobo) and the other is 2.0/1.1 on the usb pci card.

I'll buy a new cpu fan for this machine tomorrow, and then it's done.

My brother came in with a letter, at the same time my mate rang for a chat, I looked at the letter, it didn't look like something I wanted, it looked like a fine. Hmm, what could it be from? Could they have seen my plate yesterday? I wouldn't be getting a fine for starters, and it wouldn't arrive today. Maybe they somehow saw my plate when I buzzed the speed camera on my way up to Newcastle a couple of weeks back. Oh.. hangon, as far as they are concerned, I don't even live in this state.

I put the letter aside, without opening it, and tried to concentrate on the conversation on the phone.

I couldn't concentrate (and I don't remember any of the conversation), I opened the letter.. it was from the bank, oh is that all.

I went back to the conversation, when I got off the phone, I looked at the letter. It's a new PIN for my replacement card, oh bugger, they've changed my card number. I've had the same number since 1999, and now I have to remember a new one.

There's also direct payment things setup with those details. I wish the useless guy at the bank had told me the number would change, I would have tried to make the card last until August, when I would get a new one anyway, and keep the same number.

I put some dinner on, and did the washing up.

I got one my 486s, and made up a freesco disk to run on it.. disk failed. Argh, these damn floppy disks.

I ate my dinner.

I tried another disk, still no good. I tried earlier versions of syslinux, like I had to do last time I tried to use freesco on an old machine. Still no good. I tried my win98 boot disk I know works.. no good. I reckon this floppy drive is stuffed.

I found my new floppy drive my mate gave me a few days ago, connected it.. oh look, it works.

Freesco would try to boot, but fail to load the kernel.

I used norton disk doctor to "fix" a floppy, reimaged the disk, and then it worked, somewhat. I only wanted to see if the network card was working (I think so).

I watched some documentaries, one about frogs.

My mate (I go to dinner with) rang for a chat, because there was nothing on tv. Hmm, I really need to get something sorted out with these card interfaces, but I also need a proper internet connection. I chatted for a bit, about the pc being almost ready, and the replacement disk being stuffed. I got off the phone, because it was getting close to 10 minutes, and then my mate had to pay a lot more for the call.

I stopped procrastinating, and I started reading about ldap. I needed a few more packages installed, and some configuration changes.

I am currently trying to load in some ldap entries for authentication, so I can reconfigure (and test) radius configured to authenticate against ldap, this would be nice, since it will avoid users' passwords getting out of sync across machines.

If only I could work out what these error messages mean, and how to get past them.

I went to watch an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

The phone rings, I'm thinking "what does my mate (I got to dinner with) want now?"

I answer the phone, "Hello", "Where are you darlin'?" "uh, I think you've got a wrong number" "What number is that?" "it's (my number)" "it's not (some other number I don't remember, that's not my number)?" "no, this is (my number again)" "Is that the Grange (local pub)?" "No it's not" "Oh, I'm so sorry, bye" "bye".

Why is she so sorry, it's just a wrong number, oh yeah, it is 11.56pm.

I'm going to watch my episode of Aqua Teens, and then I'm going to bed.

I got up, watched some tv.

I sent an SMS to the guy who wanted the money for the hotel room tomorrow night, to find out if he got the cash I left in the letterbox. No reply. Maybe it's not the right number.

I dragged all my linux and unix books out to see if I had any with stuff about LDAP in them, because I'm sick of staring at monitors. Nope. More square eying.

I put some pizza in the oven for lunch.

My mate I go to dinner with turned up, I helped him move the busted machine, new case, and all the bits inside.

We had a chat for a while, he's interested in trying linux, heh.

I'll look at doing something with the machine later today, and then I will know if I need to get a "new" motherboard tomorrow.

I am so tired.

I put a bolt back in and tightened all the others.

I sat and watched tv for a while. I was about halfway through watching a documentary on the universe, at about 6pm, and I fell asleep.

I woke up about 7.45pm. I didn't know what time it was. The show I was watching had finished, and for some reason, tivo paused at the start of the next show, so it was dark, and quiet.

I watched the half of the show I missed, and then I went to bed, about 8pm.

I watched a few more documentaries tivo had recorded (it thinks I'm Steve Irwin, and records anything about crocodiles). I got up about 11pm, checked my email, went back to bed.

It's been a day of excitement.

I got up about 8.45 to head to the club to be there for 9.30am. I checked my email, got dressed, grabbed the tivo cables I made up yesterday, and the addresses, and left.

I about 2/3 of the way there, I got stuck behind someone in the outside lane going about 15km/h under the speed limit. I sat behind them for a while, then when I saw a gap in the inside lane, where they should have been, I decided to overtake them.

I indicated, changed lanes, hammered down, indicated back, and changed lanes back in front of them.

Just as I was changing lanes back in front of them, I heard a siren go on. There was a cop car going the opposite way, on the other side of the divided road. Uh oh.

Bugger this, I'm not getting another fine.

I hammered down, there was a fair bit of open road, then when I came across some more vehicles, they were nicely scattered in each lane, perfectly setup for some weaving, I went back and forth between the lanes, between the cars. The cops will be back there somewhere, they've had to turn around, giving me a bit of an advantage.

I got stuck behind a pack of vehicles, I thought about going between, but there was a slight curve in the road coming up. I sat behind for a second, thinking I would be hearing the siren any second (although I did have my music one).

I saw a turning lane to the left, I used it to over take a couple of vehicles, now if the cops do come up, they'll have difficulty getting past there. I thought about getting off the main road down that turn off, but that might be what they are expecting me to do, and it might be a dead end. I was going too quick to turn anyway.

I kept going, weaving through more, getting further in front (I hope). I saw another turn off, a reasonably big road, so I went down there, into a residential maze. I looped around in there a bit. There was service station, I thought about hiding in there, but it was too close to where the residential area went back onto the main road I had got off, so I just kept going.

I copped a bunch of sand in the face off a trailer, it really hurt (and it's taken hours for my eye to stop watering), I kept going to the club, uneventfully after that.

I got there, about 3 minutes after I planned to be there, not too bad, considering the detour I had to take to shake the cops.

I stayed there for a couple of hours, the problem seemed to be with the network cable going into the router, it worked with a different cable (and port, since I was using the uplink port, but only had one crossover network cable).

While they went to get another crossover cable, I looked at another machine they were having difficulties with, it worked. Hmm.

They got back with the new crossover cable, I put it in, still didn't fix it.. I then realised it was an issue with the switch.. port 16 and the uplink port are shared ports.. the router wasn't working in the uplink, because the shared port was being used.. by the machine they couldn't get to work.

I have to buy thwm a 4 port switch on the weekend, and crimp up some cables, I'll pop back up there (hopefully without the police chase) next week sometime, and put it all in.

My mate I go to dinner with was there, apparently the woman who owned the machine I had to kludge up the switch in a few days ago got her machine back yesterday, and while trying to put it up on a shelf (why?) she managed to drop it on to the monitor, and on to the floor. The case of the monitor is damaged (I didn't see it however) and the machine hit the floor.

I had a look at the machine in the back of his car before I left.

It smashed the front off the PC, including the switch I fixed, and the front of the floppy drive.

Apparently it makes a very loud noise when operating now. The disk I would suspect.

So now.. my mate is off to buy a new case, he has a spare flopy drive, and he's arranged a new hard disk, he's going to drop them (along with what's left of the machine) at my place tomorrow. I'm off to the computer fair on Saturday to look for a "new" motherboard for the Pentium MMX 200 chip (about $5 for this, last time I bought one), and at some point I get to put the "new" mobo in the new case with the "new" hard disk, and move everything over, and copy her old hard disk contents to the "new" one. Great.

My mate who was in the US recently called me. They've booked the rooms in Sydney for Saturday night, not the usual place we stay, a different place, and they want the money. Ok, I'll sort that out. D'oh, no card.. and the cash I withdrew is at home, so I have to go home, get the cash, and come back out to give the money to my mate.

I left the club, I started heading back, I avoided the route where the cops where earlier.

As I came towards the shopping centre (where I got my haircut recently), there was a cop paddy wagon heading down the road, I kept my distance, they kept going, and I pulled into the shopping centre, there's a post office here, I can post these cables, and get some lunch.

I parked in my usual spot, up on the footpath outside one of the entry doors.

I wandered through the centre, there was a cop walking the other way, I knew there was nothing to worry about, I'm not paranoid, so I just wandered past.

I went to the post office, posted the cables.

As I came out of the post office, I noticed a branch of my bank where I put my card in for replacement yesterday, I had the slip they gave me, so I decided to get the money I needed out of the bank, instead of coming home to get it.

I expected them to ask for my license, so I dug my old NSW license out of the back of my wallet while I waited, to avoid any nonsense with me having a QLD license. I got the cash.

I wandered back through the centre, got some lunch. On my way back to my bike, I decided to buy a lottery ticket. I went down to my bike, scratched it, won nothing.

I was just about to leave, had my bike all ready, and I noticed a trolley left in the carpark just in front of my bike had a bag left in it, there was something shiny in the bag, and my light was reflecting off it.

I thought maybe it was just rubbish someone had left, but I decided to check anyway. I put the stand down again, hopped off, and had a quick look, the bag had a pair of kids platform sandles or some similar footwear in it, and a couple of other things.

I went back, parked up my bike again, locked my helmet on.

I grabbed the bag, it had the shoes I saw, a CD, a double adapter, and possibly something else. I didn't look too closely.

I'll have to hand it in. I grabbed the bag, and headed back into the centre.

I found the information desk, and handed the bag in, I wasn't going to leave my details, but I decided to anyway.

I went back, took off from there, and headed over to my mates place to pay him for the hotel room.

There was no one there, so I left the money in the letterbox.

I noticed the tape holding my blinker on had died again, so I replaced it. Can't risk it, if the cops saw my blinker hanging off when I burned away, they might be able to spot me (and I don't know if it was hanging off, but I'll fix it anyway).

I then noticed that the one remaining bolt in one side of the chassis was half out. Oops. I tightened that back up. I think I should go to the fastener place and get new bolts again, and not the crappy black ones I got last time that rusted in about 3 seconds.

I forgot where I was going, and came home (and I only just realised I was supposed to fix that bolt). I think I'll put the crappy black one back in for the time being, and maybe use some locktight to stop them from rattling out.

I have to call one of my mates and find out what the plan for going down to Sydney on Saturday is.

I think I'll put that bolt in while I think about it.

Hmm. So much for "just put the modem back and it's done".

I put the modem back, but then the drivers weren't there.

I pulled it back out of the machine, tried to identify it, found a couple of different drivers.

I put the network card back in, (I'll be buggered if I'm mucking around with all these stuffed floppy disks again). I copied the drivers across, I swapped the nic for the modem.

Not the BIOS starts complaining about a conflict. uh oh, maybe it will go away when the drivers are installed, and it's setup correctly.

I booted windows, it found the modem, I pointed it at the drivers, didn't seem to do anything. The modem wasn't showing in the control panel.

I had a look at the drivers I tried to use, ran the setup program, it didn't look like it ran properly.

I rebooted, still no modem. I tried running the setup from the other drivers, this was more successful, the modem installed.

It appeared to work, I could query it, however the BIOS was still complaining about the conflict.

I googled the error, I tried resetting the BIOS umpteen times. After about an hour, I found the unofficial emachines support site, I'd already identified the board from the proper site, and I downloaded a newer BIOS.

Argh, I'll need a boot floppy. I thought about just making a boot floppy, so I could run the update from the hard drive, but then I would have to swap the modem for the nic and back again, too much pissing about.

I eventually managed to find a working floppy (I used one of the 2 I found that worked the other day, when I was trying to make my own rescue disk to install linux) I made it bootable, put the update on.

I booted up the machine, updated the BIOS, and it still complained about the conflict. ARGH!

I ripped the modem out, booted the machine, no error. I turned the machine off, put the modem back in, booted it up.. no error. ARGH! I just wasted like 2 hours trying to get rid of the error, looking for a software solution, when all I had to do was take the modem out for a boot.

While I was looking for support on thei "emachine" on the net, I found that a lot of people think they are a joke.

I put the machine all back together, and was finished about 12.30.

I went back to mucking around on my server, i configured the networking, updated apache, installed squid (but haven't got it properly configured yet, having issues with userids mounting ext3 partitions). At that point, about 2.45am, I gave up and went to bed.

I got back up a bit after 9am, the woman had turned up to collect her machine, I loaded it into her car for her, and she gave me a cheque to pay for the work.

I burned a CD with the virus scanner install files on it, so they can install it on their other machines. The woman left.

I spoke to Mum for a while, saying I wasn't going to bother with the meeting, not that anyone has rung me about it (or will, most likely). I think I'll just go to Industrial Relations.. I need to know if they paid me the last couple of hours I'm owed, or not.

I rang up the colo guy, to find out if he had the figures he was going to call me on Monday with, he was busy, he called me back about 15 minutes later. The figures all seemed fine, so I'll get the keys off him early next week.

I was hoping to have all these servers built by Friday, but there's no way in hell, the progress is far too slow.

I got off the phone with him, had some breakfast, and started working on the server again.

I decided to start working on RADIUS. there are a few different packages for Debian, I decided to go with freeradius. I installed it, it seemed to work, but I need to test it.

I install radiusclient, which you can use with getty to make your standard logins go through radius, that might be a good test..

I took me a long time, and a lot of frustration, to get it somewhat working.

I can login if I have valid details in the radius users list.. I want it to use the system password database, can't find how to configure that. I still can't login properly through radius, the default login script doesn't do anything, so you pass valid details, it accepts them, and then you're just back at the login prompt again.

My mate who was in the US recently called me, am I planning to go down to Sydney on Saturday night? yeah, whatever, put me down, if I don't go, I'll pay for the room anyway, I'll probably go, but I might change my mind. He was working, so I said I would speak to him later.

I tried kludging the login script, but now whoever logs in gets a root shell. oops.

I gave up, and decided to go out. I've got a couple of people who want Tivo serial cables, I should have gone out yesterday to get the parts to make one of them.

I went out, I went to the shop, bought the parts I needed. I went and got some lunch, and read the paper, I noticed in the paper and ad for cheap grog, including the Scotch I like, I'll get some on the way home.

I came back to Gosford, I went to the bank, I deposited the cheque I received this morning, ordered a new card ($10) and got a recent transaction list. They have to take me card, until my new one is ready, which they mail out. I had to withdraw a bunch of cash, otherwise I'll have no money.

I then decided to go to the club, and renew my membership, so they stop whinging when I go in there.

I then went to the bottle shop, and bought the Scotch, bargain, and it comes with a free glass too.

I came home.

I need to make and test these serial cables.

I've had a quick look at the recent transaction list, it looks like a few days before I got excommunicated they paid me some pitiful amount, like 2 hours worth, I'm about to check the dates, and work out what's going on.

I was woken up at some point before 9am this morning.

It was Mum knocking on the door, "What?", "I've locked myself out of the house", "So? do you want my keys or something?", "No, I'm going out. If you go out, unlock the door and leave it unlocked so I can get in when I come back from..." And she continued, but I went back to sleep.

I woke up again about 10am, started watching a documentary on the Titanic Tivo had recorded.

I started working on the server again, got it downloading the files it nearly finished getting last night.

It failed trying to install a couple of packages, because they all relied on each other. Oops.. I never did the network configuration when I debootstrapped this disk, like it says in the documentation, so I have no /etc/hosts, and exim refuses to configure, because it can't find itself.

I fixed that, and updated everything. I forced lilo again.

I rebooted.. it booted! then I realised, d'uh, of course it did, I didn't disable the IDE disk. I rebooted again, went into the BIOS, disabled the IDE disk for about the 20th time, and booted. I got carried away, and looked at something else. When I looked back, I noticed the machine was booting, so just being dumb and saying "LI".

HOORAY! It's only taken me about 5 days to get to this point.

I had to leave it, I have to fix one of the PCs I've got here to fix.

I booted the machine to fix up.. so slow. No nic.

I found a nic on the shelf, I've used all my intel nics now (I had a stack of them, where are they all?). I found the realtek drivers for the chip on the 100mbit card I wanted to use, eventually found a working floppy, loaded the drivers.

I put the card in, booted up. not found, hmm, maybe it's just an ME "feature". I forced the drivers from the floppy in. It then complained that it couldn't read them. Argh, I hate floppy disks.

I copied them onto the disk again, 5 times, in different directories, one of these will have to work.

I loaded the drivers, it accepted them, but didn't claim to have found the adapter, and after a reboot, still no nic.

Now, whenever I rebooted, the BIOS complained the nic was causing a conflict.

Oh yeah.. It's this crappy Compex card isn't it? that's why it's on the shelf, because it always conflicts with everything.

I tried disabling the ports/sound everything I could, resetting the PNP settings etc, but still could not get past it. I ignored it. Windows booted, found it, but claimed the drivers on the floppy were not correct.

I went to get the compex drivers, I didn't know what adapter it was. I shut the machine down, pulled the card. No ID whatsoever on the card. I made a guess from memory, downloaded the drivers, put them on the floppy, and tried again. It accepted the drivers, but the card didn't show up.

My mate I go to dinner with turned up, he dropped off a couple of 486 machines that have been rattling around that no one wants. I'll setup freesco on them, stick a nic in them (ooh, they've both already got 3com Etherlinks in them, groovy) and sell them as dialup routers for $50 or something.

I'd now spent close to 2 hours trying to get the NIC working in this machine.

I chatted to my mate for a while. He asked me if I was coming up for dinner tonight, oh yeah, it's Tuesday isn't it? I said I would go up about 6pm. He asked how the ISP setup was going, and I told him the guy I spoke to about getting colo and stuff didn't call me back yesterday, I'll call him in a bit (I forgot, I'll call in the morning).

We chatted a bit more and then he took off, he wanted to get some lunch, and then go to another job he had.

I gave up. I ripped the shitty compex card out, left it on the floor. I checked the machine my mate (who I installed the new PC for last Monday) gave me. tons of memory errors again, one of the memory sticks must be stuffed, because I swapped them around, and now the errors are the same, but at different locations.

I shut if off, and grabbed the intel nic out, I put it into the machine I was trying to fix, booted it, windows found it, I rebooted, all done. Why did I waste over 2 hours trying to get this shit compex card working?

I backed up all the files to one of my machines. This was a task in itself, after getting the network adapter in, I had to share the disk. Foe some reason, this machine is incredibly slow. I lot my patience and threw the keyboard away several times.

It was so slow, it took me several minutes to kill off all the processes running in the background, it then became almost usable, I shared the disk, and backed up all the files.

I rebooted it, repartitioned it, formatted it, and started installing 2000.

Oh shit, I didn't back up the mail settings or anything. Bugger. I'll have to try and work them out from the headers of some mail, once I load it back in.

I ran an update on the accesslog of my blog, looking for interesting search terms people use to find my site, since someone in IRC mentioned a doozie they found in theirs. The best few in my accesslog for this blog are:

air matress in sydney supermarket

foxtel left the satellite on my roof what can i do with it

my computer sizzling noise

and the classic:

bogans

There's a whole bunch about sat tv as well.

Anyway, I went back to working on the PC.. I finished installing it, moved all the data back, (oh look, a bunch of virii here, including some of the programs making the machine so slow when I was trying to share the disk). I imported the mail back, then I decided to install Thunderbird, and import all the mail in there too, I'd rather they didn't use Lookout and keep getting the machine infected with virii.

My mate I go to dinner with called me, it's after 6pm, am I coming up? I told him to give me a couple of rings when his wife was getting near the station, then I would go straight to the club.

I got fed up with the machine, had a shower, and left a few minutes later.

When I got close, I checked my phone, a couple of missed calls, it must have been my mate. I went around to the club. I didn't see his car. I tried calling him, no answer.

I checked the missed call, A number I didn't recognise. I tried calling my mate again. No answer. My message service called me, the missed call was the woman who owns the PC I was fixing. She forgot to give Mum the CDs of software she wanted installed, how was I going etc. I called her back, spoke to her young (about 5 or 6 year old I think) daughter for a bit, until the woman got the phone, then I told her I was nearly finished. She said she would come and get it about 9 or 9.30, pm I assumed, but after confirming that, she said she would see me in the morning. Oh, 9 or 9.30am she meant, whatever.

Makes no difference I suppose, but I'll have to get up early, and probably tidy up a bit, it looks like a computer factory spewed in here. I am literally surrounded by computers sitting here.

Anyway.. I got off the phone with her, and I tried to call my mate again, still no answer. This is wierd. I decided to go around to his place and find out if he was there or what. I got around to his place, no one there, I noticed another missed call. Argh, just as I rode around to his place. My message service called me back, it was my mate, when I get there, they've paid, so I just need to go in. Oh, for god's sake.

I rode back around to the club again. I went in. The woman at the door was busy, so I walked past, she yelled at me. I went back, and she complained that I wasn't going to say hello, and did I want a dinner ticket, no, I don't need one, I've been paid for apparently. I went in, the people at the front of the food area said I had been paid for, and took me to the table where my mate was. The chick then said she needed my card. I showed her my membership card, "No, your dinner ticket". Argh, so that's why the woman on the door asked if I wanted one.

I went back out to the door again, to get the dinner ticket. The woman was all smug, expecting me to apologise for not listening to her before. I do not have the patience. She wouldn't give me the ticket "What do you say?" I wasn't giving it. "I know what I have to say, but I'm not going to say it" "You're supposed to apologise" she gave me the ticket, I said thanks, and walked away, she then continued on something about being a "know all male".

I went back into the dinner area, and gave the chick the dinner ticket.

I've had enough, and I want to go home now. I ate my dinner, rather quickly, since everyone else had almost finished by now.

I found I had a dollar, so I played the pokies, I nearly won it up to $2, but lost it all.

My mate's wife played the pokies for the first time, she won a dollar, and gambled back to the dollar she started with, took it out, and went home. Heh.

I came out, and came straight home.

I got back to fixing the PC.. I imported the Address Book in, but no addresses turned up. WTF? I tried importing it into Thunderbird, it got nothing either. I ran up the address book again, imported it again, and it seemed to work. I imported into Thunderbird again, and it worked.

Now I just need to get the modem back in the machine, create the dialup networking connection, and it's done.

I went back to working on the server, I managed to debootstrap onto one of the SATA disks. I got it all working.

I copied across everything I needed, lilo'd the SATA disk.

I rebooted, removed the IDE disk settings from the bios, tried to boot. "LI".

Hmm, what have I done wrong.. oops, wrong filesystem, the partition containing the kernel is ext3, and ext3 is a kernel module.

I reformatted to ext2, and tried again. Still no good.

Oops, dummy.. I moved the kernel into /boot, but lilo.conf has /vmlinuz in it, not /boot/vmlinuz.

Still no good. Ok, I don't know what the problem is now, maybe lilo is not working for some reason.. I found a command example with -v paramater. Aha, it gives me the version while it does it's thing.. this is older than the install on the IDE disk.. oh yeah, I've got woody on the SATA disk, and I haven't dist-upgraded yet (I lost track of how many installs I've done, 2 on this machine, so this is the third dist-upgrade I need to do).

In order to update lilo, I had to update a bunch of stuff. I forced in from the debs I'd already downloaded what I could, but there was still a few meg I couldn't find already having had downloaded.

It had a few meg to go, and I was just starting to write an email.

I noticed a bright flashing light out the window. A couple of seconds later the power went out. Hmm

I then saw another bright flash out the window, heard a really loud buzzing sound, and saw all sparks fly into the air (whatever I was looking at, the substation I assume, was at least a kilometre away), the power came back on for about 1/2 second, and then went off again.

I sat in the dark for a minute. Great.

I felt around, and found my watch. It was 11.23pm.

I navigated my way across the sink, got the candles out, found the box of matches, and tried to light one. All the matches are stuffed, and the phosphorus or whatever the head is all crumbles off the stick when I tried to light them.

I eventually got one to light, lit a candle.

What am I going to do now? I might as well go to bed.

I mucked around with matches and the candles for a while, never miss a chance to play with fire.

At midnight, I decided I might as well go to bed.

I plugged my mobile phone into charge, "it didn't beep as I plugged the charger in" I thought, oh yeah, what's it going to charge off?

I blew out the candle, and got into bed.

At 12.17am the power came back on. Everything started booting back up, and the light I had on came on. Whoops, next time I'll remember to turn all the switches off.

I got up, and started some stuff back up.

I went back to bed. The sat decoder was flashing.. no signal, the box it's chained off must be turned off for some reason.

Tivo was trying to record something, I tried to stop it recording, but it wouldn't, I was pressing record, then select, which I thought said "stop recording" but it doesn't, you need to press record, down, select, the default is "continue recording", I only found this after I turned the tv on.

Tivo was recording something of free to air anyway, so it didn't matter the sat didn't work.

I watched something, then I noticed the sat signal come back, about 10 minutes later.

I turned the tv off, and went to sleep.

I must be really tired lately.

I turned the telly off about 1.30am this morning, and slept until after 11am this morning. I ended up getting out of bed about midday after watching a couple of episodes of the Simpsons.

I looked at the PC I left memory testing last night.. truckloads of memory issues.

I grabbed the disk out of the machine, and booted it up to test its memory again.

I put the disk into one of the servers, and booted it.

Same kernel images, so it's not just memory related, and I still couldn't use vi.

I found that I could, after removing nvi.

I started eating the box of biscuits I was going to eat for dinner last night, as lunch.

I tried to remove libncurses, so I could reinstall it, hopefully to get the kernel to configure/compile.

Oops, I then ended up with no useful binaries left. I couldn't even reboot. I reset the machine, and kicked off the install again.

Once it was installed, I wanted to do the dist-upgrade again.

I ftpd in a bunch of files until I could put ssh up, and then I scp'd all the deb packages I backed up last night back in, and updated a bunch of stuff.

I found I should also have backed up /var/lib/apt/lists or something, so I ended up having to wait a while for apt to update. Oh well, at least I've got all the debs, and they are what takes the time.

I configured the kernel, same issue.. I then found after installing a couple of packages (which I'd done before I reinstalled) it then worked. Hmm.

I was able to compile the kernel. I rebooted, and it finally found the SATA controller.

It set one of the SATA disks as / and wouldn't boot (because it was blank). I booted the old kernel, then discovered I'd been pretty smart, and compiled the driver for the hard disk as a module. Oops, how would you load a kernel module from a disk you can't access, until you load that module?

I recompiled with support built in, rebooted, and it was all go.

I even managed to get the onboard network controllers working.

Now I need to get the files installed onto the SATA disks, so I can rip the dodgy ATA disk out of the machine again.

I partitioned the SATA disks, (still need to work out how software RAID works). hdparm -t results in about 50mb/sec transfer, not too shabby.

I started running debootstrap to install on to the SATA disks, it's still downloading stuff in order to install. Why it can't just use files from the existing install I don't know.

My phone rang, it was the woman who owns/is responsible for the machines that got dropped off yesterday. She wants one of them fixed reasonably soon, I'll do it tomorrow.

My phone rang again later, it was my mate's ex girl friend who I setup the internet for a while ago.

She'd got Wide Area Calling enabled on her phone, so she could call into Sydney to avoid the bandwidth problems in Gosford, but I doubt those issues exist anymore, for the price of those VISP ports, they would want to have a bit more bandwidth behind them than when we did it.

But, as still noone has spoken to me directly, and I don't know what's going on (almost 2 weeks later) I don't know what the story is.

Dad came in before, with some paper work for registering a business, or a company or something. I really don't like the name, but apparently the business name TCPIP is gone.

I got up about 11am.

My dialup connection had dropped out, so I reconnected it, and continued the dist-upgrade.

I checked email, and watched some tv.

I heard someone turn up, and some talking outside. I kept watching tv.

A few minutes later, Dad dragged a couple of PCs. They are from someone who I fixed the PCs for before, (it's one I've fixed before, and another one). Apparently the one I've fixed before is stuffed, and the other one needs some work. Great, just what I need at the moment, more bloody work.

Dad came in again later, told me he was going out, and that he'd leave the door open if I wanted to look at their foxtel (it wasn't working) (already emails had gone back and forth of how to fix it).

I went in to look at it. Three of the four wires connecting the interface had been ripped off the board. Gee, I wonder why it doesn't work.

I pulled the box out, reattached the wires. Took the box back, it still would not work.

I dragged it back out, and started testing it connected to my machine. It worked, but it was a mongrel to get working, had to put the card in an out about 30 times, and keep restarting the software to get it to work.

The dist-upgrade finished downloading about 1pm.

I kept working on the box, it was working ok, but it was just really fiddly to get it working.

I tried putting it back in place, still refused to work. I put one of the old galaxy boxes in place, it worked.

Hmm, now I don't know what the problem is.

I decided to put one of my powered interfaces in, it then worked properly every single time, attached to my pc. I went and put it back inside, but it wouldn't work.

I then went about putting the old galaxy box back in.

As I was doing this, I heard my mate (with the adsl) turn up.

I kept putting the box back in.

After fiddling around for another couple of minutes, my parent's phone rang, it was my mate.

I went out to see him. He told me the details of getting my bike reregistered, it'll get done in a month or so.

I told him about the treatment I had received lately, and we had a chat about me starting my business and everything.

He left after about an hour, and I went back to fixing the foxtel again.

I put the old Galaxy box back in again, and it wouldn't work either.

I eventually found it to be because the serial ports on my parent's machine were upside down (the top port is com2), but it was very weird, it was like they were switching around or something.

I then put the newer box (my 660) back in again, with the powered interface, plugged into the correct serial port, and it all worked. That only wasted about 4 hours.

I then went back to the machine, the dist-upgrade had finished, so I started configuring all the updated packages.

It finished, I tried to compile the kernel again, and it still failed. Issues with ncurses libraries. I googled around, but could not find the answer.

I found there is a debian kernel package of 2.4.25, so I started apt-getting it, 30mb, a couple of hours worth.

I went back to watching tv while I waited.

It was about 7.30pm, I was just thinking about making some dinner.. I have to do the washing up, there's no clean plates or cutlery.

Hmm, there's a box of savoury biscuits, I could just eat those.

My phone rang, it was my mate who came around earlier. He asked if I'd had dinner, no, did I want Chinese, yeah, sure. He told me to go around to his place in about 1/2 hour.

I went back to watching tv again. He called me again a couple of minutes later, what did I want at the Chinese, heh.

I got off the phone, watched more tv, then realised I would need to start getting ready.

I had a shower, got dressed, and left.

The kernel package finished downloading just before I left.

I got around to my mate's place about 7.10pm.

He wasn't there, not back yet I assume.

I hung around, and he turned up about 15 minutes later.

We sat and ate dinner, my mate, his wife, and myself. My mate had borrowed "Bringing Down the House", which he put on, it was an ok movie.

I had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, it was nice.

I ended leaving about 10.30, and came back to keep working on getting the servers up.

I tried to compile the kernel, same nonsense about missing ncurses libraries. I tried to configure the kernel just using the text mode interface, it worked, but I answered a couple of questions wrong.

I went to vi the Makefile, to fix the errors I made, but vi segfaulted everytime I tried to run it. Along with every other editor.

The machine had run out of memory too, 384mb, there's only 5mb available, yet nothing in top is taking over 1%.

I rebooted.. got "LI". D'oh! I got the install CD, used a rescue image to boot the machine back up.

I still could not use vi, or any other editor.

This machine must be stuffed.

I used scp to backup all the debs I've spent the last couple of days downloading, onto a different machine, in case this disk turns out to be stuffed.

First I'll check the memory, if it's ok, then I'll reinstall it all, and do bad block checks when I format the disk.

I downloaded the new version of memtest86, and booted it up on the machine. I read how the "badram" kernel module works, and went to bed, watched a couple of episodes of the Simpsons.

My mate I go to dinner with just turned up (about 7.40pm), with the machine with the busted switch.

I found my bag of spare panel parts.. d'oh, no switches.. I did have some, but I used them on my mate's machine after the incorrectly labeled motherboard resulted in me connecting all the front panel cables incorrectly, and causing all the small gauge wires that run to the LEDs and switches etc to all get melted together.

I found an on off switch in the same sort of style as the switch I had to replace, but about twice the size.

I checked the electronics catalogue, nothing in a replacement part I could find.

I shoved the double size switch in there, but without the little plastic frame, it was about 10mm back from where it needed to be, so when the front panel power button gets pressed, it does nothing, because it's nowhere near the switch.

I got a match, and I trimmed it down until it was just the right length to go between the button and the switch. it seemed to work.

I used the meter to find the switched pins, soldered the wires on, spliced them in between green and ground on the ATX connector.

I plugged it in, and it seemed to work.

I don't know how long it will last. If it was mine, it would last forever, because the only time I ever push the power button is to turn things on that don't come back on automatically after a power outage, and when they do, I never touch the switch.

Anyway, if my kludgy match fix dies, then I'll just permanently short green and ground together, and the machine can be switched with the switch on the power supply.

We chatted for a while, he looked at the partially built server hanging around.

I gave him an IDE cable, I thought I had more. I need to get more.

He's just left, about 8.45pm. Time for dinner.

I got to bed at about 3.45am this morning.

I slept until about 11am. I lay in for a bit, I was just thinking about getting up, when my mobile rang. It was mate I go to dinner with, he wanted to know what tie today I was coming up "what time is it now? about 11.20, ok I'll be there about 12.20" "ok I'll see you then, oh, have you got any IDE cables?", "Yeah tons", "Can I have a couple" "Ok, I'll bring some up".

I got up, checked my mail.

The kernel had finished downloading, I saved it.

I got some breakfast.

I extracted the kernel, and started configuring it.

I realised I didn't have time, had a shower, got dressed, and left.

I took the CDs and floppies I needed with me. I forgot the switch/soldering iron/solder I needed to kludge up the machine with no power header. I also forgot the IDE cables.

I got to my mate's place, he tells me he's just finished installing xp. Fine, I'll go home again. I didn't.

He said I could fix the switch. Oops, this was when I realised I hadn't brought the stuff I needed.

I started installing 2000 on the machine.

I said I would just go home again and get the stuff I needed. My mate said he might no someone with the switch I need. He called up, and the guy told him it would be quicker to replace the case. I don't think so.

My mate told me that he was going to be coming near my place to see someone later, so he would just bring the machine with him, I could fix it at home, and he could get his cables.

I finished installing 2000, installed all the drivers.

My mate came back from the shops, we had lunch, and then I left his place.

I stopped in at the BP and got some fuel. As I was waiting to get back on the road, the car in front kept moving back and forth, and when he finally got a gap, he got back on the road, and then he hung out the window, with his finger up, and shouting something. I couldn't hear what he was shouting, or work out who he was shouting at, as I had my music on.

A short while down the road I blasted past him and left him behind, if he was shouting at me for some reason, then that probably pissed him off.

I headed to my mate's place I worked with earlier in the week, and picked up my crimping tool I left there with his next door neighbour. Apparently they are going to replace the failed bit of cable that runs between their houses. I'll just go back and terminate it at some later point.

I called up the guy I setup a new PC for on Monday, I had some software he wanted installed. He was home, but only until 4pm (it was now 3.20pm).

I rode down to his place.

I went in, and went to install the software, but I wasn't sure what he wanted.

He was heading out at 4pm with the guy I used to work for (doing aircon) and he knew, so he'd look at it when he got there, at 4pm. It was now 3.40. No worries 20 minutes to fill in.

I had a cup of tea while I waited. My mate's wife asked me how the meeting went the other day, and I told her it didn't, because the solicitor is in hospital. "How convenient" was her reply, which was my exact thought when I heard the same thing.

I said that when I spoke to the guy about colo later that day (On Thursday) that he told me about the De Facto calling him up and claiming that I and my mate were "up to something" and "out to get her" and that she "just wanted to get rid of us".

There's no point having that meeting, you can't reason with someone like that. I'm just going to go to Industrial Relations and make my claim, and whatever money I get out of that will be compensation to make up for any lost business as a result of her defamation.

The guy I used to work for turned up, and he had a look at the software, and told me what version to install.

My mate wanted me to try and find the email address of some accountancy in the UK.

I had a quick look, they all left to get the train to Sydney, because it's the guy I used to work for and his wife's anniversary tomorrow.

I found the contact details of the place he wanted to contact, but not an email address.

I grabbed a couple of my DVDs I'd lent them ages ago that I noticed on my way out. Hmm, there were a few more. I wonder where they are, somehow I think I'll be replacing them unfortunately.

I left there, and I came home.

I started mucking around with the kernel again.

I can't get the IDE support in 2.4.25 to compile.

I wasted about an hour on this, I totally lost the plot, I've absolutely no patience any more.

After looking through the entire kernel source for references to the variables not being defined, and finding nothing, I was about ready to give up.

I poured myself a drink, it was nice. It's a bit of a worry, but I must be an addict, I've been grumpy and unable to think straight the last week, because I haven't been drinking.

I was then told that I probably will not be able to compile it without updating all the devtools.

It turns out I need to update almost the whole distribution. I'm now an hour and a bit into waiting about 20 hours for 265mb to download.

It seems weird that 2.6.x kernels would compile, but 2.4.x will not. Oh well.

I got up at about 8.30.

Had a shower, got dressed, ate. Checked my email. I don't know why I bother with email anymore. Nobody sends me anything, I only ever get spam.

I had a couple of minutes to fill in until I had to leave, I started doing something, lost track of time, and ended up leaving a few minutes late.

I went to the Senior's centre, they'd managed to copy the floppy of the linux router I setup for them. They almost got the printer setup, it wasn't shared, and they were putting the wrong slash in the run box (// instead of \\). I got all that sorted.

They'd changed the linux router to a different machine, with an unsupported network card. I moved the working one from the other machine they were using.

They had 2 machines that weren't in there last time. I set them up, neither of the network cards were automatically supported (ancient ISA things, with jumpers). It's not worth fiddling around with that stuff anymore, setting jumpers, or finding software, and configuring the cards, when you can get a second hand Intel PCI network card for like $3 that you just plug in and it works.

I swapped both of the unsupported ancient ISA cards out, with a couple of PCI cards they had.

I tried to adjust their projector for them, because they use it on an angle, the picture ends up skewiff, but the projector only has adjustments for when you use the projector aiming upwards, not downwards, so that couldn't be fixed.

I ended up leaving about 11.30. They asked if they owed me anything, but I didn't ask for anything, they paid me enough when I was there the other day, and this was just a bit of fiddling, so I wasn't worried.

I came home. I got my gear sack, and stuck it on my bike.

As I took off, I had a brain fart, I stopped, but I was on an angle, and my foot was too far out, the bike started to go down, I did what I could to hold it up, I almost balanced it, but it just very very slowly went down, until I put it down on the driveway, so slowly, it did no damage whatsoever, but then I was faced with trying to pick it back up again.

The fact I was on a steep slope didn't help, but I managed to pull it up. I jumped off and had a look, no damage at all, didn't expect any. I noticed that one of the bolts that holds the whole back of the bike on was missing again. It wasn't stuck in the exhaust this time, it's gone. I'll need to get 4 more to replace them. I'm not getting the shitty black ones that rust immediately this time however.

Anyway, I went to the supermarket. Bought some food, and some lunch, and came home again.

I started trying to get the server going again.

I managed to compile a kernel for the machine, I don't think it will work though, it doesn't have any references to the SATA controller I need support for.

I remembered I had to send my resume to the guy at the place I contracted to on Tuesday/Wednesday.

I started trying to fix it up, it's a shambles, and I can't be bothered rewriting the whole thing. I just did a quick tidy, updated it, and zipped it up.

I called my mate that works there, got his email address, and sent it through. Apparently the guy that wants to hire me wasn't there today, he's off sick, so he'll get it on Monday. Whatever, I'm not too worried.

I remembered that my other motorbike that my mate was going to pay for renewing the rego is nearly out. I rang to let him know, he said he would call me back later, or tomorrow. Yeah, sure, so either I end up paying the renewal, or I wait, and end up paying the renewal, along with a full inspection, because it's gone out of rego.

I got back to the servers. I made a custom rescue disk, then I had to find a floppy to put it on.

I tried one, it appeared to image without issue, however the server would not boot off it "boot failed" nonsense.

I went through over 20 floppy disks (and tried 3 different floppy drives) before I could find a floppy to put the rescue image on without getting CRC errors. I gave up in the end, and used one that errored, because it errored at the end.

I managed to get the machine to boot off it. No references to the controller or the SATA disks though. Not too happy.

It asked for the root disk. I went through the whole thing again to find another floppy disk that would work. When did floppy disks turn to complete shit? I found one, put the root image on it, no matter how many times I tried to boot it, the kernel would oops. I tried another floppy, same thing.

I then realised I had somehow managed to overclock the CPU to AMD 3200+ instead of 2500+. I changed the memory timing from 200MHz to 166MHz, and it returned to the correct speed (that probably explains the crashing using knoppix) (ooh, that was fun, while typing this, my machine just pseudo locked up for a minute).

I managed to boot into the setup tool, but as before, it claimed that it didn't see any hard disks. Shit.

My mate I go to dinner with called me, when was I coming up. Oops, it's 5.30, I was going to go up there at 3.30. I said I would leave soon.

I fiddled with the machine for a minute, gave up, and left.

I went up to my mate's place, I had a look at the PC he was trying to work on the other day, and accidently pulled the leads for the power switch off, and couldn't find where they went.

I tried all combinations of the pin headers where the IDE LED and other front panel connectors goes. Nothing. I tried shorting other pin headers I could find, nothing.

I though about shorting the mobo power supply connector signal line to ground (to force the ATX supply on) but I couldn't remember which was the signal line.

I got on the net, and managed to find the manual for the motherboard. It did not say where the power switch pin headers were. Useless.

I went and tried shorting everything again, no good. I decided to short the powersupply to force it on, but I couldn't remember the line to short.

I went and got back on the internet again (we had to hang up to order pizza, and you can't ring the pizza place from my mobile). I found the pinouts, you short the green wire to ground.

Ah, I thought that's what it was, I was trying that, but it was only making the floppy drive click.

I went back and did it again, same thing, only the floppy drive clicks.

I put the mobo power connector back on the board, shorted the green wire to ground, and everything powered up.

When I removed the paper clip I was using to short the green wire, it went off. That's weird, it really should stay on. Maybe it requires the power switch to pull a component shut and hold it, and because I'm bypassing that, it doesn't work.

I left the paper clip in there, booted it up. It wouldn't boot windows or whatever. I found a boot disk, booted it up, tried to look at the contents of the disk, and got "invalid media error reading drive C:". Looks like the disk is toast.

My mate got back from picking up his wife from the station, and the pizzas. I told him it looked like the disk was toast.

He then told me that he'd been trying to rebuild the machine.. ah, he's repartitioned the disk, but not formatted it yet, that's why I'm getting the error. I was expecting there to be an OS on the disk.
We ate dinner, and then he pulled in the case and mobo of the machine he wanted me to put together.

I mounted the motherboard, the case was a bit cheesy, but not too bad. Everything went in without any issues. Took about an hour and half to get the whole thing assembled, then we dragged it out, plugged it in, and I configured the BIOS.

I told him how to use partition magic to partition it, and then install Win2000.. oh. I'll need my CD, so I'll have to come back tomorrow with it.

I sat and chatted for a bit, and left about 9.30pm. He gave me a floppy drive, cool, I needed one for the servers.

I took off, and decided to pop in and see my mate (that was in the US recently) and see if we were doing anything tonight.

I got there about 10pm. Another mate was there, we hung around there for an hour or so, listening to music, while another mate turned up. Apparently the taxi he called had electrical problems, so they had to send another one.

It eventually got there, they all jumped in the taxi, and I rode behind (I didn't intend to stay out as late as them. I need to get these servers built).

We went out to Terrigal, went into the club there. It was about 11.30pm. I had a drink. This place didn't have the usual vibe, it felt very wrong.

We hung around in there for an hour, one of my mate's got fed up a lot earlier, and went across the road to the beer garden.

We found him, they all jumped in a taxi, and came back to Gosford. I followed behind again.

We went to the club (got there about 12.45am). We hung around playing the pokies and stuff.

I couldn't lose on the pokies (but couldn't win either). I played them for about 15 minutes, and came away with the same money I started with ($20).

While hanging around, I saw a guy I did my motorbike course with (well, he saw me first :-). I also saw a guy from school I haven't seen since school.

We went in for a dance for a bit. I saw a guy I hate. I was hoping he would come over, so I could tell him to bugger off, and then hopefully have a go at him in the carpark I've been waiting to do for about 7 years.

He didn't. While we danced, the guy from school came and danced for a bit near us, it was a laugh.

Some midget came over, and started giving my mate dance tips. I could hardly keep a straight face. The midget tried to match my mate and I up with a couple of chicks that were dancing near us, but they wouldn't have bar of it.

A few minutes later they both went up and behind the stage, they must have been paid to be dancing there.

We left the club before the last song finished, so my mates could beat the "rush" for the taxis. It was about 2am.

I came home.

I started googling, and I found that kernel 2.4.21 has support for the SATA RAID controller on these boards. I started downloading kernel source for 2.4.25, and gave up after waiting an hour.

I got up about 11am, bummed around on the computer for a while.

I had a shower, got dressed, ate something.

Looked at a bunch of SinFest comics.

About 12pm, I went and found Dad, I then called up the guy I was going to see today, he was at his shop, so Dad and I went over there.

On the way, Dad asked me how the servers were going. Not very well, considering the Debian install kernel doesn't support the dopey RAID controller.

I figure there are a few ways around it. I can install onto a standard ATA disk, compile/install a new kernel, push it onto the RAID disks, and hope it can boot, or I can try building a custom kernel, and making my own rescue disk with the kernel with RAID support on it (on a different machine) hopefully resulting in the machine working.

We got to the guy's shop, were in there for about an hour and a half, having a good conversation about starting up, and some rough prices.

We had a laugh about the things my friend used to get up to, and a bit of a conversation about the current state the business has got into, and the nonsense that's going on.

I'm starting with 5 dial in lines, I think it will be enough for about the first hour, and then I will need more, but we'll sort that out as we go.

We left, they guy told me that he'd contact me on Monday with the proper prices.

I think I'll need to put someone on for support too, as much as I don't want to, I think it's true that people like personalised support, rather than a menu system.

If I can get all the online help (yourself) system working properly, then it shouldn't be an issue. Someone will do something wrong, and before they can find the support number, they will already be on the support pages, where it's telling them how to fix whatever problem themselves, or create a helpdesk ticket themselves.

I don't think I'll offer an unlimited account, you don't make anything out of it, and in some cases, it costs money. If I do, it will have to be like $30/month. I would rather put people on ADSL.

On the way back, we went to drive through McDonalds, and then came home.

I grabbed a spare table, and a monitor, dragged them out.

I setup the machine my mate gave me on Monday, and blasted linux on it. I'll use it as a staging server, and to build the custom kernel/rescue disk I need to install linux on the servers.

Dad built one of the servers while I mucked around getting linux installed.

I started watching a bit of tv, had dinner with my parents, then came back and started watching tv again, while I waited for security updates to download over my painfully slow dialup connection.

35MB downloaded in 3 hours.

I tried to get X working, can't.

While I was doing this, my mate I go to dinner with called me on my mobile. Apparently I've still got "divert when busy" set on my landline. I was sure I turned that off.

Anyway, he bought all the computer bits today, so I'll have to go and see him tomorrow afternoon, and put a motherboard in a case for him.

I've just spent hours downloading the lastest one (4.4) instead of 4.1 that ships with this version of the distribution.

I still need to fix up my resume. I will have to do it tomorrow, when I get back from the senior's club.

The extra cases/memory/video cards that got couriered up yesterday were moved in tonight.

I don't know when I'll be doing anything with them, there doesn't appear to be a driver for the RAID controller for linux on these motherboards, that's just craptastic. I've got 480GB of disk space, and I can't use any of it, because they are all SATA disks, and the mobos only have SATA RAID controllers, the "normal" IDE interfaces are ATA133.

I knew I should have bought the Titan Pro II board I wanted.

Apparently the RAID controller on these boards is no better than software raid anyway. Great, I could have bought ATA133 disks for cheaper, and just done a softRAID.

I had a look at the machine that I got in return for the work I did on Monday, installing the new PC/phone socket, it's not too bad, I might use it as a Dev machine, or a staging server of some description.

Dad came in to talk about names for the business. Here we go again.

I went in, and listened to all the suggestions. I've already spent hours doing this with my mate (who I worked at the same place with today and yesterday) when we were going to start our ISP last year.

I've already decided I want to use TCPIP, that's why I registered it. If they want to pick something else, then I don't care.

I think I might contentrate on getting this job where I worked the last 2 days, so I need to get this up and running in some respect in the next week or so.

Day asked me if I knew what was going to be discussed at the "meeting" in the morning, and I started going through the story again, like I've gone over in my head tons of times.

While I was in having the conversation, my mate I go to dinner with tried to call me several times (the new procedure is he will ring my mobile and hang up, then I will call him back, so he doesn't have to pay a big phone bill). I was ignoring it for the time being, because I was concentrating on telling the story of the events on Tuesday/Wednesday last week. I was intending to ring him back in a few minutes. He left a message, so then my message service called me, he told me he had a message about the meeting tomorrow.

I tried to call him back, busy. Hmm. and again. I called his mobile, he went on about the computer he was trying to fix for a bit, and then got to the details of the message about the meeting. The De Facto had just called him, and apparently the solicitor is in hospital (and will be for the next few days) so the meeting is cancelled. Great, so now this shit drags on longer.

I think I might have to contact Industrial Relations to let them know what is going on, before it gets too late.

I got fed up, I'm really stressed now, and I feel awful. I'm probably tired too.

I made some dinner, and I'm just watching a bit of tv. I get to sleep in tomorrow now.

I'm going to see the guy about the colo facility/space/data/lines tomorrow afternoon, get all that sorted.

I didn't have to be there so early today, so I lay in for a few minutes, and I spent a bit more time in the shower.

I left home about 7.20am

I got out on the freeway, blasting past everything, coming up a hill, about 5 minutes after getting on the freeway.. I started running out of fuel. Not again. How could I do this again?

I didn't think about the extra distance going to and from my mate's place last night.

Argh.

Drop back speed, sit in the inside lane. I've still got a good 45ks of fuel at least (based on my calculations from the last time I did this, the other day), and the next sign I passed (a few minutes later) said it was 32ks to the end of the freeway. I'll probably make up, but not going at full speed. Stuff it, there's a servo not far away, so I just hammered it back on again, took the exit where the servo is, fuelled up.

I only managed to fit 14L in though, that was very strange. I doubt I used nothing out of reserve getting more than halfway down the freeway. It was now 8am.

I got back on the freeway, and the end of the freeway was only 10ks away. D'oh, I definately would have made that, and wouldn't have wasted all this time detouring to get to the servo.

I rode the rest of the way almost uneventfully. Just before I got there, the woman from the senior's club I was at last Thursday called me. Then my voicemail called me. I got to the building, parked my bike where my mate showed me yesterday, and rocked in, about 8.45am.

I spoke to my mate for a bit, then my voice mail called me back again, the woman wanted me to call her.

I called her up, she wants me to go and finish setting up the network on Friday (they've got a couple more computers they didn't have the other day).

I went back and chatted to my mate again, then I said I was going to get a coffee, it was 9am, he said it was his coffee time too, and the IT guy that sits near him. We went next door, got our coffees, and had a bit of a chat.

My mate had to get back to work, so we came back inside.

The guy I was supposed to be working with wasn't there yet (apparently that's not unusual) so I just started typing up the documentation of the work I had done.

The guy turned up about 9.45. I continued documenting. He logged me into the SunBlade, and I checked some things for my documentation.

I was updating the documentation, and my phone rang again, it was the guy who's PC I fixed recently (and sent the other one to be fixed under warranty). He was having issues with it, locking up and stuff. Hmm. He had some woman there (his accountant I assume) trying to use Quickbooks and Word at the same time, but it wouldn't have a bar of it. It was running out of memory for some reason. I tried to help her sort it out.

My phone rang again a few minutes later, I thought it was the woman again, but it was my mate I go to dinner. The guy I was speaking to at dinner last night had a problem, he couldn't remember the solution to the problem I told him last night. I was suffering from the same problem, I couldn't remember what the problem was, or the solution. They managed to jog my memory, so then I told them again what to do.

My mate said I must be at work, because he could hear people laughing in the background. He jokingly asked what they were doing laughing, I laughed and said I didn't know, I was too busy working, "No you're not, you're on the phone talking, and laughing" "yeah, well I was writing documentation before you called me :-)". I got off the phone and went back to working.

My phone rang yet again, it was the woman I had just been speaking to, and I gave her some more ideas, to try disabling some startup stuff, and see if there was then enough memory available. She didn't call me back, she must have worked something out.

I did some final checks, it all looked ok, so then I started on the production server.

I got all the files across, went to configure apache, it failed, couldn't find gcc. I couldn't find it either. It wasn't installed.

I got that installed, tried to configure again, couldn't find make. I set up the correct path. Tried to configure again, something else missing, fixed the path again. configured.. worked. compiled, worked. Went to install it (as root) make not found again. Oops. Fixed the path again.

Configured PHP, compiled it. Went to install it.. fixed the path again, installed it.

Configured apache on a test port, it started. Went to check the PHP content, it didn't work. Uh oh, what I have I (not) done?

Oops.. trying to look at PHP content on the production Apache, which doesn't support PHP, not my new Apache. Oh look, it works when you access it on the correct port.

I left my mate testing it.

I went to lunch, came back, shut down the new apache, configured it to run on the standard port, shutdown the production Apache, started mine up. No problems, worked. Groovy.

Fixed up the scripts/symlinks to start/stop apache, and then went about updating my documentation.

My mate told me that one of the guys wanted to talk to me, I went to talk to him, he wanted to know what I knew about, Oracle, Java, Application Servers, Apache etc, and I told him my experience while I worked at CSC.

He wants me to work for him, getting the web applications rolled over to Oracle 9i from 8, and they have some legacy applications that need to be rewritten because they don't have the source, and they aren't compatible with Oracle 9.

I don't know how to program java, but if they get someone that does, then I can put all the stuff on, and get it working.

He really wants me to work for him, and I think it would be pretty cool, it's a great place to work, and they pay properly.

I have to fix up my resume, it's too long, and it's crap. He wants a copy this week. Yet another thing to be done.

I went back inside. Finished up the documentation.

I hadn't done my timesheet (it hadn't come across). My mate called up the woman at the temping agency, and she went to email the timesheet across. I waited around for a bit, and then I tried to call her. When I eventually managed to get through to her (her phone was busy). She told me that it bounced out of my account (weird), but the Internet/email was down in the office anyway, so I asked her to fax it.

It came through a bit later, I filled it in, got it signed off, faxed it back, and then I left, about 5pm.

Slow trip home, came up the freeway ok, cruised in home.

Got home about 6.15pm, not too bad trip.

I woke up at 6.27am this morning. Why is my alarm going off?

Oh yeah, I have to work today.

I got out of bed, had a shower, got dressed, found something to eat.

Grabbed my CD player, and my street directory, and took off about 7.05am

I rode down there, fairly uneventful, where I had to go, was all stupid no right turns, so I ended up taking a left turn, turning around at a round about, coming back, and going straight across. It was about 8.20am

I went around looking for a parking spot, couldn't find one. I wasn't sure where the bike parking my mate was talking about was.

I found the building, I tried to call my mate, unavailable. hmm. I went around the block a second time, I thought I saw the path he said the bikes go up, but I didn't want to just start riding up some foot path. I went around a third time, halfway around I called my mate, he answered the phone, and came out to meet me. I went around to where I tried to call him from the first time, and he showed me where I could park, up on the footpath between the pillars of a nearby building.

He showed me where the bikes park, it's totally hidden, and it is up that footpath I thought. I'll remember that in future.

We went inside, went to see the guy at reception, to get a pass, he said don't worry about it, see someone else, and get an access card, they weren't at work yet.

We went in, and my mate gave me the stuff the woman from the temping agency had sent over, forms and stuff.

I met a guy that works there, the DBA, he showed me the databases he looks after, there's some pretty groovy stuff in there, 3d maps and other things, all done with values stored in a database.

The guy I was supposed to be working with wasn't in yet, so we wandered next door to get a coffee.

Went back inside, and my mate showed me some of the work he does there, a lot of it is migrating flat html into the new fancy markup language they're using for their intranet.

He needs to hire someone to do the tedious work. It only pays half what I'm being paid to be here today, but it's still good, and for a job that's so easy.

The guy I was there to work with turned up about 9.30. He got settled in, and then came over. I went over to his desk, he had a windows machine and a SunBlade 150 on it. I used the SunBlade.

He ssh'd me into the production server, downloaded php and apache for me. I started looking at compiling them.

My mate told me the woman from the temping agency had called, and she wanted the paper work, so I started doing that. Sign the contract, tax/banking details etc. Took me a few minutes, and then I photocopied them, and faxed them back to her.

I went back to work. I fiddled around trying to build php with Oracle support, I've not tried this before.

It didn't work, uh oh. I needed access to the internet so I could read what to do.

The Sun machine didn't work, because it didn't like the proxy authentication.

I tried setting up an ssh tunnel to an external proxy server, on my mate's machine (because he's not firewalled) but it didn't work. I've just checked it from home, doesn't work either.. my shell acount in California must have ssh tunnels disabled or something.

The guy I was working with found me a PC with internet on it, so I went back and forth, scribbling on bits of paper what to do.

I found how to do it, still didn't work, getting weird issues to do with "CLASS64", I was trying to build php 32 bit, against the 64bit Oracle client. doesn't work.

Back to the internet to read more. More scribbling.

I found how to force it to compile against the 32 bit libraries, then I built apache again, should work now, nope.

Read more, scribble more.

I was getting a bit worried, here it is, midday, and I've not really achieved anything. Nothing will compile properly, or when it does, it doesn't start or work. Have I got myself in over my head?

Turns out they needed me to build it with 64 bit Oracle support anyway, otherwise the data will get corrupted.

I found the compiler flags I needed, and rebuilt php in 64 bit. I then tried to restart apache that I'd managed to compile and install.. it now wouldn't start, because I was trying to run 32 bit apache with 64 php, don't work.. recompiled apache in 64 bit.

It should work. There was already an apache install on the staging server they didn't want to trash (yet), so I configured my new one to run on port 82.

Started it up, it should work, it should have php support, and it should have Oracle support.

I wrote the quick php test page "" basically, called it php.php, dumped it in htdocs. Viewed it with the browser, and it came up! no errors, nothing. Woohoo! Now we just need to know that it's properly working.

It was now just after 2pm. I went to lunch, came back just after 2.30.

My mate showed me that the default page on the staging server was wrong (it was being served by the apache already on the machine). I went to roll it out of the way, and put mine in, and move the content over, but the SunBlade had locked itself.

I went back and read more documentation. The guy I was working with came back about 3.30, and unlocked the machine for me (they wouldn't give me any passwords, I don't blame them, I'm only there for the day, and you can't have everyone knowing all your passwords).

I tried to kill off the existing apache, but it just kept respawning, no matter what I tried to kill it.

I put mine back on port 82, symlinked in the test content, and restarted it. It all worked. Groovy.

They said I might as well come back tomorrow and finish it all off. Even groovier.

I fiddled around for a bit more, my mate left about 4pm (to get the train) everyone else disappeared around that time too, so I left about 4.20pm.

I wandered back, jumped on my bike, and started ride back up the coast.

About halfway up the freeway, I saw a car that looked like my mate's work car. I went flying up alongside it, and one of my mates hung out the window. We had a bit of a race for a bit, and then I just hung back when he started weaving around like crazy.

He sat just a few cars ahead the rest of the way, and when we got back to our exit, I went flying past, because I was going further north.. it's Tuesday and I'm going to see my mate to go to dinner.

I got there, parked up. One of his other friends was there, it's his 50th birthday today.

We chatted for a while. I had a look at a computer he had there, with a busted keyboard port on it. The computer screams whenever you put a keyboard in, and it changes if you jiggle it around. Must have a stuffed port.

We went back and watched tv for a bit, and then his wife called, so we picked her up from the station, and went to dinner.

The people I was having dinner with were there too.

I tried to get some money out, but my stupid Visa card wouldn't scan in the ATM. It has a small mark on the magnetic strip.

I had to put it through about 50 times before it read it. I might have to get a new card.

We went and had dinner, and I chatted to the people I was having dinner with about all the things they wanted to talk about.

There ended up being 9 of us there at dinner tonight.

After that, 7 of us ended up back at my mate's place. He'd changed his fish tank again.

I hung around for a chat for a bit, and then I decided to leave just after 9pm, I'm knackered, and I've got to get up early again tomorrow.

Dialled up to the net, checked my email, blogged, and I'm starting to work out if I can get an ssh tunnel working so I can web browse on that SunBlade tomorrow.

I went to bed early last night, just after midnight (early for me).

I got woken up at about 7.40am, Mum came in and asked what time I was getting up. "later" "aren't you working?" "no, it's tomorrow now". She wanted to get the Sat card, before I left, and complained she had no tv over the weekend. I told her to pull out the dummy card and reinsert it (to reset the cam, then the software will work). I expected her to come back a few minutes later and complain it didn't work, but she didn't, so it must have.

I went back to sleep. I got woken by the radio coming on at 9.30am. I don't know how I keep managing to set my alarm clock to radio. I lay there for a few minutes.

Someone tried to send me an SMS. My phone is full. I deleted an SMS, and then it came through a minute later.

It was Dad, asking if it was ok to contact the guy I bought the servers off, (to arrange a courier to pick up the extra bits I need the guy didn't have at the fair), and also to ask me if downloading Debian 3.0r3 was right.

I replied, telling him it was fine to contact the guy, and that I only need the first 3 discs, not all 7 of them (I rarely need the 3rd disk even).

I got out of bed just after 10am.

I checked my email.

My phone rang, a weird number. It was the guy from the place I sent the busted PC to, to get repaired under warranty. It was ready to pickup. He wanted to know what I wanted to do, I said I thought it was getting couriered to Homebush. He asked who it would get couriered with, and I said I didn't know, I wasn't arranging that. I took their address, and I said I would contact the guy who owned it, and get back to him.

I called the guy it belongs to (who I saw on Tuesday morning, and gave him back his other pc) he told me he'd go over there and pick it up.

I called the guy from the PC place back, got stuck on hold. Waited 5 minutes, hungup, called back, selected a different option on their dopey menu, got through, asked for the guy, spoke to him again, told him the PC was getting picked up, and who was coming to get it.

It was now about 10.30. I had a shower, got dressed. I started reading some more best of craigslist.

I left just after 11am. I loaded my mate's PC onto my bike, and his new keyboard. I left the mobo box with all the junk in it, I need to come back to get my tools anyway.

Halfway to my mate's place, my phone started ringing, it was my mate I was going to see. I was at the lights, I thought about whipping my helmet off and talking, but with my luck, I'd get done for riding without wearing a helmet or something dumb. I accidently answered it, so I hung up, he rang again, and I let it ring out.

I got to his place a couple of minutes later, he was there, funny, I thought he was supposed to be working this morning.

I pulled his PC inside, he was just putting a lock on the office door.

Because he was there, I was able to use his tools, so I didn't have to go home and get mine. I wished I'd gone to the hardware and got the stuff I needed on the way, but I didn't know how much phone cable I needed anyway.

I drilled a hole through the floor.

My mate gave me his contractor license, so I could get a discount. I went to the electrical wholesaler, but he really wasn't interested when I asked for 10m of phone cable, "Only comes in 350m boxes. Go to an electronics retailer, or try the hardware".

I went to the hardware I would have gone to anyway. I got the cable, and the wall socket.

I went back, I shoved the cable in, crawled around under the house, pulled the cable across, pushed it up to the first point.

Went back inside, patched it in. I wished I had my tools, so that I had my crappy plastic krone punch down tool.

Forced the cable in with a screwdriver in the end.

I put the wall socket on the other end, plugged the PC all in, booted it. Plugged the modem in, it dialled up first go. Groovy.

I had a cup of tea with them, told them what was going on, just as everyone else has been, they were disgusted.

You go out of your way to do something nice for someone, and this is what happens. I'm worried that I'll come out of this as a suspicious indifferent person.

I bummed around until about 2.30pm, then I left. My mate was going to replace the washers on the taps to his washing machine, chuck his old PC and the monitor I lent him into his van, bring it to my place, and then I'd give him the mobo box with the CDs and other junk for his new PC. I told him I was going to see someone, and would be home after 3.15.

I went to see the guy I at West Gosford where my friend and I installed a wireless aerial last year. He wasn't there. I left a message for him to call me, but he hasn't yet. I might try and see him again on Wednesday.

Oops, I took my mate's contractor license with me. I'll give it back to him when he comes around later.

I decided to get something for lunch. I don't really want anything, but I need to eat something. My bike was out of fuel. That burn down the freeway the other night back from Newcastle with my mate on the back must have chewed up the fuel, I got 25ks less than usual.

I went to the petrol station, fuelled up, paid, left. I wasn't thinking, and I came home instead of getting something to eat.

I got home just after 3pm. Waited around for a bit. I found the contact details of the guy in Darwin who's RAS I've got on loan. I wanted to call him and thank him for the money from the job I did for him recently, and to sort out the details of the RAS.

I found his contact details, hung up my crappy dialup connection, and tried to call him.. apparently he's in Bali for a conference. Half his luck. He'll be back next week, so I said I would call back then.

Mum came in, and I had a chat. She thinks I should get the signed statements from the people I was doing the networking for on Thursday, that I mentioned I could get, as proof that I wasn't trying to crack into the servers on Thursday, as was falsly alleged. I don't know. I doubt the actual logs will be there at the meeting on Thursday.

A while later, just before 5pm, my mate turned up, he gave me his old PC, and my spare monitor back. I gave him the receipt and his mobo box. he took off again.

Damn, I forgot to give him back his license again.

I grabbed my crimping tool, and some ends, and went to see my mate I'm working with tomorrow. Just before I left, I called him to check he was home, he was, so I went there.

Had a great long chat about everything that's been going on.

I'll be getting mod_php working tomorrow, ooh, difficult. First on a staging server, and then on the production server.

The organisation is moving in the near future, and a lot of people are leaving, so they're going to have a ton of jobs available, they'll possibly want to employ me to do database work or something. We'll see, I'll suss it out tomorrow. Might be good, my mate says it's a great place to work, and that's the most important thing to me.

My mate I installed the new PC for called me, "Did you leave my license at my place?", "Oops, nope. I've still got it", "Can you drop it at (my mate who was in the US recently)'s parents place?" "No worries, I'll do it in a bit" "Cool, I need it tomorrow to get discounts, if they aren't there, just put it under the mat.".

We went next door, to see the guy there, I was there to try to fix the network link between the houses, he was busy, his wife has just had a baby, so I left my crimping tool with him (I won't need it tomorrow), and I'll get it back on Wednesday or something.

I'm riding down tomorrow, it's about $6 of fuel compared with $15 for a train ticket or something, and I hate trains.

I said I would see my mate tomorrow. I went back to my bike, the tape holding the busted blinker on had died again, so I started putting new stuff on.

Some guy on the street, asked me if I lived there, I noticed on his shirt he was from an electricity supplier. I told him no, but that my mate was. As I went to put my helmet on, my top earring got caught, and popped open. I spent a couple of minutes trying to fix it. Gave up, I'll fix it later. I shoved my helmet on.

I headed for home, I wanted to get some lunch. I decided to go to Subway near my mate's place I just left, for a change.

I started trying to fix my earring again, gave up. Noticed I didn't have my phone. Damn it, must have left it at my mate's place. That's the second time.

I jammed my helmet on again, went back, got my phone. He reckons I feel too much at home there. heh. I went back to Subway again. I bought some food. I jammed it in my bike, and left.

I headed toward's my mate's parent's place. They weren't there, I put his license under the mat, and I came home.

I ate my Subway, and watched an episode of The Simpsons that was just starting on the tv. Timing.

When the ads came on, I paused it, and went and fixed my earring.

Dad came in a bit later, asked me if I didn't work today. "Yeah, I did" "You didn't go down, I waited for you off the train for a while" (must have been on the way home, I was going to go down on a later train). "No, I didn't do that job, it's tomorrow, I did a different job today".

He told me that he couldn't arrange the courier today, it was too late by the time he contacted the courier company (they only pickup in the morning) and the guy didn't have the parts ready anyway, so he would get it sorted tomorrow. Mum should be home to accept it.

He gave me the first 3 Debian discs, now I need to install them.

I watched the end of The Simpsons, some other stuff on tivo, until about 8.45.

My phone rang, it was my mate I go to dinner with, can I call him back, yeah, no worries. He must have tried my landline first, but now it's plugged into the modem, and I'm not connected, so I didn't notice the AA light flashing, especially since I was in the bathroom.

I called him back, and told him about the work this morning. He asked me about tomorrow, I said I was consulting, that I'd got a phone call, he thought that someone from my friend's company that screwed me over had called me, and that I was consulting to them. I don't think so, they can't afford me.

I told him about the work I was supposed to be doing today, that was tomorrow. He asked if I would be coming up for dinner, because a couple of people want to talk to me. Oops, I forgot it was dinner tomorrow, and I didn't realise I'd made dinner plans, it was just a "we'll have dinner and discuss this further" when I left it.

I said I was riding down, I wasn't sure how long I would be working (~8.30 - ~4.30 is 8 hours, but that's only if I don't take a lunch break. I'll probably end up down there until 5.30). I said I would call him when I was leaving, and let him know if I would be there or not. I should be able to get back in an hour and a half, but it is rush hour.

He's got a pc he needs fixing, it might have a dry joint, I said I wouldn't be able to do much, because I'm not dragging a soldering iron around tomorrow. He told me that he had one, so I said I would bring some solder.

He's also going to be getting some computer parts on Thursday, and wants me to mount the motherboard for him, I said I might come up on Thursday night, and start on it.

I just jumped on the computer, dialled up my crappy dialup, checked my email, there's an email from the club I was at on Thursday, they're having a couple of issues, so I said I could go there either Wednesday or Friday to look at it.

It's going to be a very busy next few days.

I'm consulting tomorrow, followed by dinner, then trying to fix a computer.

On Wednesday, I might be going to the seniors club to fix a couple of problems that popped up, otherwise I'm concentrating on building my servers.

On Thursday, I'm going to the meeting to try to stop all the defamation that's going on, then I'm going to make an arrangement with the guy with the rack space, bandwidth etc, and hopefully get the keys. Then I'm up to my mate's place to put the mobo in for him.

On Friday, I'm going to the club if I don't go on Wednesday, and I'm going to see my mate I setup the new PC for today, and install some software for him to run his business.

I've just spent and hour and a half emailing and blogging (It's taken me over an hour to write this entry!).

The server I built yesterday I have been running burn in tests (X apps displayed from another PC), and it's been going fine for about 24 hours now. Groovy.

I called my mate, and asked if it was ok for me to install his pc and phone tomorrow.

He told me he'd leave the door open, I could come and do the work, and then lockup when I leave.

I started working on his pc, very nice, easy, uneventful.

Partitioned the hard disk, installed 2000, installed the video drivers, motherboard drivers, modem drivers, dvd software, cd burning software. Put on the applications I like to install. All done.

While I was waiting for the machine to run disk checks, I started building the first server.

Very nice case, it would want to be, for the price paid. Mounted all the components.

I finshed setting up the machine for my mate, packed it all up, and dragged the server into place.

Configured the BIOS, and the RAID. Now I need the Debian ISOs.

I called my mate, to ask if he could download them for me, since he's got ADSL, and there is a mirror available where it doesn't count on your download. He was out, but told me that they weren't available anymore. Hmm. I said I would be out later, and might pop in.

I fiddled around with the machine, booting up my knoppix disc, it wouldn't run properly. I turned the memory back to 166 from 200, and it worked. Hmm, might have to investigate that more fully when I have a proper install.

The guy I'm going to work with called me, to tell me that he was going out. I said I would go and see him tomorrow night or something, he started telling me what time he gets back, then he remembered that he's not going to work tomorrow, so anytime during the day is fine. I told him I would see him tomorrow afternoon, after I install the PC.

I looked to see if the Debian ISOs were available on the ADSL. They are, but not where they used to be, in a new files area, that only started a couple of weeks ago.

I bummed around for a bit, I was hungry. I decided I would go and see my mate, try and get him to download the files for me, then go and get something to eat.

I went around, dropped his helmet off, he was playing some war game. I sat around for a while, watching a nature documentary that someone had put on.

After about 40 minutes, they wandered outside for a smoke, I had a quick chat, and then said I was hungry, and took off.

I went to KFC for a change. They had a couple of teenyboppers serving, and all the most useless people queued up when I got there.

I eventually got my food, sat and ate it, and then came home.

I sat and watched tv, I haven't watch much tv at all recently. Tivo is filling up.

My mouth tastes like congealed fat or something, gross.

I half feel like ringing the solicitor, telling him not to bother with the meeting, and just never having anything to do with any of those people ever again, but, I think I need to, at least then, if I do contact Industrial Relations, or start legal proceedings to sue for defamation, then I've made an attempt to negotiate things before hand.

I went to bed just after 5am.

I got woken up about 10.20am, my brother knocking on the door. "Dad says can you get online".

Hmm, I looked, modem was still connected to my backup dialup account.

I still had webpages, but my email didn't work. Thunderbird had just gone stupid, and by changing folders it started working again. I vnc'd into Dad's machine, and checked the settings.. should work, yep, it does. What the problem?

His mail didn't work though, an issue the router introduces when it doesn't have the firewall rules entered properly. I remember this had something to do with an ipfwadm command with -Wppp0 on it, instead of -Weth0.

I googled around, found a command for masquerading with ppp, looks like it'll work. I typed it in, went to test the mail, but Dad or someone is using the other computer now, so I left it.

I was going to go back to bed after I got this fixed, now I won't, I'm too concious.

I checked my mail, started trashing the spam.

My mobile rang, it's my mate I'm going to work with tomorrow.. no, I'm not, on Tuesday now he tells me. No worries. I told him I was intending to go and see him (I was going to go and see him on the way back from my mate's place where I put the roofing up yesterday, but I forgot to take my crimping tool and rj45s with me, which was the main reason I was going there).

I was going to do something on Tuesday.. what was it? Oh, that's right, I was going to install this PC I bought yesterday at my mate's place on Tuesday.

Maybe I'll pull my finger out, get it setup, and go and put it in tomorrow.

OK, good, I don't need to go and send the temping fax back today, I can do it tomorrow.

Now, today, I need to go and visit my mate, and drop his helmet back, and go and see my other mate, and work out the details of going to work with him on Tuesday, and have a go at fixing a network link between him and next door.

Middady. I have a headache.

Nearly up to date..

I got up at about 9.40am. I had a shower, Just after I got out of the shower, the power went off. Argh, not again.

My mate got ready, left some of his stuff here, and we left.

Just before leaving, my mate (who I worked for plastering before) called me, he was at the computer fair, I said I would be there shortly. He rang me back again about a minute later, to say that he didn't have any money, and couldn't get in. Again, I said I would be there very soon.

We jumped on the bike, and I dropped my mate off at the station, I think he was going to get the train to his Mum's place.

I went back to the computer fair, saw my mate there, we went in.

The first stall, where I started looking at the prices of prebuilt systems, was the stall of the guy down in Lidcombe I went to see several weeks ago. I told him what had happened to me, and he didn't think it was very nice.

We decided to buy one of the systems he was offering, so he started building it.

I bumped into the people from the Neighbourhood centre I went to help on Thursday, they were having a couple of issues, so I gave them some advice. They were also looking for a different PC to act as the router for their network.

My mate told me that since he had picked out his PC, that the cash he had on it's way could be given to me, I could sort the guy out, and take the PC with me, so he didn't have to be there, no worries, I'll sort it, and he left.

I saw another guy I know from the fairs, I told him what had been done to me, he didn't think it sounded very nice.

I started wandering around, trying to look for prices. I hadn't brought a pen with me.

I saw the dopey guy from the Cafe that fixes the PCs. I ignored him, and he ignored me. I wouldn't have said anything to him even if he had spoken to me I don't think. I'm not taking my chances speaking to any of these people without a solicitor present.

I saw a guy I went to TAFE with in 98/99 (who I recenrtly bumped into at the supermarket), told him what was going on.

My phone rang, my mate (who was in the US recently)'s Mum had arrived, with the cash for the PC (the guy is her cousin).

I had a quick chat to her, and took the money.

I called home to find out if dad was coming down, Mum said he was just leaving. Power was still off.

I went back to pay for the PC, it was finished being assembled, and then the guy did the BIOS setup for me, it all worked, groovy, so I paid for it.

Dad turned up, I grabbed all the bits, loaded them into the car, after getting past the security nazi woman.

Went back, to look at his prices for bits to build my servers. He was giving me very good prices.

I goit a ful cost, and had a quick check around. I found some bits a little bit cheaper elsewhere, and he didn't have the motherboards or disks I wanted.

I went back, and got the bits I needed, he matched the cheaper prices I had seen.

I had a look at the different board he was trying to sell me, it actually looks better than the one I wanted.. it's got "dual gigabit LAN". I decided to get them instead.

The guy didn't have 3 of everything (to build 3 servers), so he owes me a couple of bits, including 2 of the monster cases. I'll get it all couriered on Monday.

I just needed disks, he didn't have Maxtors, so I wandered around. I only managed to find a single 120gb disk, I need 6. The woman said she could ship them to me if I couldn't find them.

I wandered around, couldn't find them. Decided to buy 80gb disks instead of 120gb disks, one stall only had 3, I bought 2 of them (so they are somewhat "matched", since they are for RAID), I then went back to the woman who had the single 120gb, and I bought 4 more 80gb disks.

My mate who was in the US recently called me, to find out what time the fair went until, because he wanted to get a new video card, I said I thought it was 2pm. I asked if we were going to do anything later.

I then grabbed a couple of 3 1/2 - 5 1/4 adapters, so I can mount the hard disks in the bigger bays, for better air circulation/cooling.

I got some CDs for my mate I go to dinner with. He also wanted a keyboard, but I forgot to get that. I probably should have got one for building the servers too. Maybe I'll just use my IBM type M typewriter.

I left the fair after that, came home. Dumped all the bits in my place. I've got enough to build a single server at this point.

I have to wait for the couriers to get extra cases/video cards/memory.

I grabbed my cd player, and left to go to my mates place (that I go to dinner with), I was supposed to be helping him put up an awning/shelter thing, to extend the one we put up a couple of months ago.

I left home, and then realised that I should have brought some of my tools, socket set, drill etc, like we used last time.

The batteries ran out in my mp3 player about 2 minutes after I left home. Crappy batteries.

I got there, he'd started on it, I started helping him, he put up the brace on the wall, put the end piece across, this was all easy.

We started putting the roofing sheets up.. this was a mongrel, the join in the middle is not something it's designed to do, normally you would run the roofing 90 dgress to the way we did it, but we started out using scrap roofing, so we used it the best we could (and it was fine as it was, the issue only appeared when we tried to add to the existing structure).

The people next door were having a party, they must have been annoyed with all the banging and drilling and shouting going on, and me climbing all over the fence. Oh well.

We eventually managed to get the roofing clipped together, then I realised it would be very difficult to reach to the middle.

I pulled an old door out of the garage, chucked it on the roof, and climbed up on the door, I was then able to get across to the middle, and force the roffing down, and screw it down.

I didn't take any of my tools, and we didn't have the right size socket, so I couldn't use my drill/socket converter to use the drill for putting the screws in.. hmm. I thought I could probably tighten the chuck of the drill onto the hexagonal head of the bolts.. yep, it worked, you just had to be careful.

I got it all done, a couple of the bolts went dodgy, because I couldn't see the underside to see if I was lined up properly.

I dragged everything down, and got the door off the roof.

Just as I sat down, my mate's daughter and son in law arrived (both police), with his grandchildren.

We picked up the tools, and went and had afternoon tea (it was about 4.40pm).

My mate and I told them about everything that was going on, how I got sacked, not that anyone has contacted me yet to tell me, and that my mate quit. We also told them about the threats of getting the police involved, with the false allegations of me trying to break into thier systems. The both thought it was all rubbish.

I noticed my phone was full of SMS again, I deleted one, got a new one, it was my mate (who called me to find out the times of the fair), saying he was home.

We sat and chatted for quite a while, they left about 6pm.

I intended to leave too, but I kept thinking of things I wanted to discuss.

My mate's wife made me dinner, because she didn't realise I'd said I was leaving, and was trying to leave :-)

It was a ton of spaghetti, it was good, I haven't eaten anything for the last couple of days.

I left a little while after that. I was leaving, the party next door was cranking into full swing, apparently it was a chick's 18th birthday. They had CCR pumping out, and they were saying that they were sorry for the noise, but it was a birthday party etc. I didn't care (it's not like I live there, and I was leaving anyway :-) so I told them to turn it up.

They were going on about "come over for a drink", mainly to my mate, since he's their next door neighbour. He said he'd be over in a few minutes, and then I left.

I headed back to my mate's place, and had a chat. He'd got to the fair, and bought himself most of a new computer. I think he bought most of the parts off the guy I know, and had bought my servers off.

We bummed around there for a while, and then we all decided to go to the Leagues Club (not again, I feel like I just left there). A couple of my mate's jumped in a taxi to get there, I doubled my mate on my bike.

We went in, wandered around, couldn't find the guys that came in the taxi.

We started playing the pokies, $1 machines. I put $5 in, on the 3rd dollar spin, I won $23. I pulled it out and went.

I bought myself a drink, one of my mates who came in the taxt called me, found me.

We went in and all sat down, had a chat and a laugh, another dribk, and we stayed in there until they closed that section of the club.

We ended up back at the pokies, I put $5 through a $1 machine, lost it.

They were all heading up to the nightclub upstairs, I'm not interested, it's a waste of money (even though I won it), it stinks up there, and I'm too tired and not in the mood.

I came home.

I had to find my dialup details of my account with the ISP I was with years ago before I got my account with my friend's ISP, I was getting sick of having no internet, having not been on the Internet since Thursday afternoon.

Took me a bit of fiddling to find them, but I'm now back online.

I'd be interested to know how they claim I've been trying to crack in for days, when I've had no internet connection, and no power for some of the time, that is, during the time when I'm even near a computer.

Hmm, I've been blogging for nearly 2 hours now. Bedtime I think.

I got up about 10.30 am.

I called up a guy who had offered rack space earlier.

I told him what was going on, he has had some dealings with the business, and he couldn't believe it, we had a bit of a laugh, and then I told hime I was investigating starting up and ISP, and I wanted to find out if the previously made offer of rack space and bandwidth etc was still open, yeah, he had rack space, bandwidth, dialin lines, ip addresses, everything, all spare, sitting there doing nothing. Wow.

I went and spoke to Dad about it, he's leaving this sort of stuff to me, but he thought it sounded ok.

I called the guy who called me last night to find out if I was going to be starting up, I told him that I'd spoken to the guy, and everything was there, so I'd probably go in there, and do it.

I spoke to Dad, we looked at the prices, and it seems like it will work.

The guy from last night called again, to ask about the details, I said I was still working it out.

I called up the colo guy, and told him I wanted to do it. He had checked the prices, and some where a bit cheaper than he told me before, it was now looking even better.

I just need to pay for some of the bandwidth he's got sitting there doing nothing, there are already 30 dialin lines available, he just wants his cost for those, he's got 60 spare IP addresses, and I need to pay a bit of rent, and electricity.

I setup a meeting for next Thursday with him, to make an agreement, get keys etc, and then I can start setting up.

I need to supply my own rack, because his are full, no worries, I've got one.

He's got a couple of spare RAS, I've already got mine on loan, so I'll use it, and either buy it, or buy a different one from eBay or somewhere.

I got off the phone with him.

I ran the figures again, I now need 58 customers to break even, that shouldn't be too hard.

I left it at this point, everything I can do has been done.

I watched some episodes of The Simpsons, nearly fell asleep.

About 8.30pm I called my mate who called me earlier in the week (the guy who was in the US recently), to find out if he wanted to do something tonight. My other mate answered tha phone, told me they were down at Bondi for another mate's birthday, and did I want to come down. Bit short notice, I don't feel up to riding ~100kms, through Sydney, to get to a party or whatever it was, especially when it looked like it was going to rain.

And then I had to get back at some reasonable hour, to sleep, to get up early, to go to the computer fair tomorrow and buy my servers.

My mate and I decided we would just go to the local club, and play pool, have a couple of drinks. It was still before 9pm, and the club is a bit sad at that sort of time.

I still had "The Parole Officer" recorded on my Tivo, so we watched that. when it finished, my mate had a shower. I thought about it, but time was getting away, I wanted to be in bed at a reasonable hour (since I was so tired), and it's not like anyone would be able to smell my BO over the stale smoke, and general manky smell of the club.

We headed down there about 11.30pm, grabbed a drink, headed up to the pool room. We played a couple of games a pool, bit embarressing, my mate with a broken wrist plays better pool than me.

He sunk the black ball in the first game, giving me the game, we played on for a while, with a different ball set as black, and then he "won" the game.

We played again, and he still played better than I, at the end I had 4 balls left on the table, and he was on black. I came from nowhere, put my 4 balls down, and then sunk the black.

The pool room closed at this time, so we headed downstairs.

I put a couple of bucks in the pokies, lost it, put a $5 note in, played it for ages, lost it.

I then put a $20 note in, played $2 out of it, pulled the rest, and changed it back to notes.

We left at this point, nothing left to do in the club but get ripped off by the pokies.

My mate commented it was too bad we couldn't get any alcohol, I've still got most of a bottle of vodka.

We stopped at a petrol station on the way home, bought some soft drink, and lollies, and came home.

It was now close to 2am, I wanted to be in bed at 2am, oh well.

We watched "Dazed and Confused", drank a few vodkas.

After it finished, about 3am, we chatted for a while, I went to bed at 4am.

This claims to be written at 11:50pm on Thursday, however I was in Newcastle at the time.. I'll get to that.

about 3.30pm, I tried calling the solicitor again, this time I got through. He said he tried to call me back, but that I didn't leave my number. He didn't have any issue contacting me yesterday morning however.

I told him that what was going on was unacceptable, and this needed to be sorted out. I will not put up with people getting around making false accusations, and allegations about me, with either no or fabricated "evidence", I will not allow this defamation to go on.

I told him that we need to have a meeting, so that this can get sorted out. He told me that the De Facto is working Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday next week, so it will not be possible until next Thursday. That's not really very good, this should be sorted out sooner, and I told him that, however there is nothing I can do about it.

I told him how I had been up all night and morning throwing up bile, and for this situation to continue, is just completely unacceptable.

I got off the phone, I was angry again.

A little while after this I rang a solicitor, I had his home number, and he wasn't at home, so I just left a message with his wife (I assume).

I wanted to speak to the guy in IGA that I know, since I wouldn't get a chance to see him again probably, seeing as I won't be in the plaza any more. I didn't have their phone number, and I couldn't find it.

I tried calling centre management to get it, no answer. I tried again a few minutes later, still no answer. I tried ringing the pharmacy in the plaza, since they are near IGA. The woman told me she couldn't get the number for me.

I tried centre management again. still no answer.

I found the number of the florist in the plaza, since I spent a fair bit of time in there recently, fixing an SDSL link my friend setup, before he was killed, and one of the devices failed. I called them, the guy answered, I told him what was going on, he couldn't believe it.

He went and got the number for me, and then we chatted a bit more. He told me that if I wanted to get him a card with my details on it, then he would contact me to fix his computer.

I called IGA after that, and spoke to the guy I know in there, I let him know what was going on, and said it had been nice knowing him, but that I most likely wouldn't be in the centre again.

I bummed around for a while.

I went and sat inside. I chatted to Mum for a while.

I can't remember what happened for a while here, Dad came home.

We started having dinner, and my mobile rang, it was the survey guy that had rung me last night. I gave him my landline number, came and sat on the phone for about 10 - 15 minutes, doing a survey.

It's basically to find out what I think about the fact that Southern Comfort is reducing the alcohol content from 35% to 30%. I said I wouldn't care as long as the price decreased, but it's not, so it would effect my choice of buying it. I've got a chance of winning $250 or something, so that's not too bad.

I went back inside.

The guy I had been speaking to in the carpark on Monday, where the conversation was overheard that perhaps caused all this issue, called me. He told me what he had found out.

All the equipment had been moved upstairs at midnight on Tuesday, and when they did, they were trespassing, since he is the leaseholder of the premises where the equipment was, and he didn't give permission for them to go in there. While they were there, they cut all the network cables running into the rack, including all the patches that run to the desks in the office space.

When the new tennant who is moving in there shortly finds out, he will go ballistic. This news made my day.

I told him that I was pretty certain of starting up my business, and would be sorting it out tomorrow. He offered to be a partner, or financial assistance, or technical assistance, anything. I told him I would have to do some business viablities, and work out if I wanted a partner or what, and that I would get back to him tomorrow.

The solicitor I called, called me back, I told him the story, and he told me that there wasn't much I could do about the defamation, because you have to prove that damage has been done, and your reputation has been effected, and you need affadavids (sp?) to be able to prove it. He basically told me not to worry about it.

He said that the main legal claim I could make was to do with my pay. The pay I had received was not the correct award rate for System Administrator (I was classed as a "Technical Office Junior" or something similar), and that I was also possible entitled to holiday pay, to casual termination (2 or 3 hours pay), superannuation, and that I needed to be provided with a group certificate.

He told me to contact Industrial Relations, tell them what had happened, they would make up a claim, and get back to me before the meeting next Thursday, and then I can call them and tell them to have a cheque ready.

LOL, I would love do it, but it wouldn't help my case that I wasn't doing anything wrong, or being malicious, since that probably would be, even though I am entitled to a lot more money than they paid me. We'll see. If the meeting does not go well, and I don't get an acceptable result, then I will be contacting IR, making that claim, and getting compensation. If it all gets sorted out, then I'll just walk away, and have nothing do with any of those people again.

The guy seemed pretty interested in, and I told him that his advice made feel better, and it did.

I sat back and watched tv for a while. My mate who broke his wrist called me, for a chat, I started to tell him what was going on, when his money ran out (calling card). He rang me back a few minutes later using change, it ran out after a couple of minutes.

I thought, "gees, I might as weell just go up there and talk to him". He rang me again about 20 minutes later, and asked what I thought about going up to Newcastle. Yeah, whatever, it's only an hour away. It was now 10.20.

I pissed about for a couple of minutes, getting my cd player and spare helmet, then I jumped on the bike, and took off. I checked the trip counter, it looked like it said about 125, cool, another 100ks at least of fuel left.

I got on the freeway, about 2/3 of the way there, my bike started mucking around, uh oh, is there something in the fuel line? I looked, and the trip counter was on 235, and I was out of primary fuel. Hmm, the trip counter must have been on 185 or something.

I turned it to reserve, got in the slow lane, and travelled at 100km/h. I was doing mental calculations, trying to work out how far I can go on a litre (about 16/17 km, based on that I get about 240k/14L fuel), how much I had left (3L reserve), and how far it was to go (about 40km), with 3L of reserve fuel, that will get me about 48km, maybe up to 51km, and I have to go 40km. hmm.

I got off the freeway at the Newcastle exit, headed along the link road, went into the first petrol station, fueled up, and fit 16L of fuel into the 17L tank. I had a few km left of fuel, but only a few. It was now 11.20pm, I was supposed to be getting in the CBD in a couple of minutes.

I headed into the CBD, spotted my mate outside a bar chatting to a chick. I found a park, and wandered over. It was now about 11.30, good timing.

The chick was from an advertising agency, that are responsible for the advertising on the backs of dockets from one of our large department stores.

My mate had mentioned me, and how I was starting a business (why do people keep thinking "I might start a business" == "I'm starting a business").

She gave me a spiel about how her advertising works, prices, contact details.

I'm not even sure if I'm going to go through with this whole thing yet, and I don't even have a business name.

We left that pub, it was packed anyway, and we headed to a pool hall, it was shut, we then went to a different pub, my mate bought me a birthday drink. It was his birthday a couple of days ago.

We had a chat about what had been going on, how I would probably start my business, and things like that. I bought him a birthday drink after that, and we sat and chatted a bit more.

I was feeling ok now, after all the stress and stuff from earlier in the day, it was now all OK, after hearing about the damage to the network cables, and the advice the solicitor had given me, this could all just work out ok.

About 1am, we decided to leave, he asked me what I was like pillioning, and I said fine, I've been dragging a few people around on the back recently. He asked if I had an issue with taking him down the freeway, nup.

We went across the street, and got some food, then we headed back to his place. He packed up a few things, we loaded the bike up, and headed back down the coast.

We stopped off at a petrol station (the same one I stopped at earlier), got a couple of drinks (those ones with the guano in them (yes, I know it's not guano, that's bird shit, I'm trying to be funny here)), hung around for a few minutes, and then kept going.

I'm not sure of the times involved here, but I think I got home about 3.30am, or maybe 4am.

We sat and chatted for a while, he'd brought a drink down with him. so we got into that.

I ended up going to bed about 5am, and I left him mucking around with email.

Oops, time to start tomorrow's post.

This just keeps getting better.

I had that drink last night, and then I couldn't stop. I finished the bottle of gin, and I started the bottle of vodka. I drank until after 4am.

I was thinking about not going to bed, since I wouldn't be able to sleep, I eventually decided to lie down, I immediately realised I had to spew. I was in spewing for several minutes.

I went back to bad, managed to get to sleep.

I woke up at 9.37am. Shit, I was supposed to be at the seniors club at 9.30. I found their phone number, called, apologised, let them know I would be there shortly, and I left.

I rode there, took me a minute to find it, went in.

I told them all what was going on, they gave me a cup of tea, that was nice, since I doubt I'll be able to eat anything.

I started working on the network, got things sorted out. I setup a router for them, got everything working, printer sharing.

During this, my mate who called me yesterday afternoon called me, and he told me that he'd been cutoff because he knew me, and therefore "is in cahoots with me", "that no one who is a friend of me can be connected, because they will give me access".

She also claimed that I was "continuously trying to crack in", and that I was "trying to crack in right now". Jesus, does the crazy woman think I have nothing better to do?

There has always been people trying to crack into all the servers, I told them that weeks ago, it's just that no one cared, and they weren't paying me to go securing all the servers. I didn't get around to putting in the quote to build a new server, that is the only way to deal with all these mail issues, and to secure the boxes. They are running Red Hat from 1996 for Christ's sake.

So of course, as usual, someone is trying to crack into something, and they're just blaming me for it.

It would be pretty clever for me to be cracking in while I'm busy crimping network cables and configuring pcs.

He said he had arranged the consulting work for me, it was all setup, and asked if the woman from the temping agency had contacted me, not yet. I spoke for a bit, and got off the phone.

The woman called me shortly after, told me how things work, and the forms she'll send me. She was very nice to talk to.

My mate called me back again after that, and I told him it was all sorted. It turns out the guy I was going to be working with is taking Friday off, so the work is on Monday instead. Fine, gives me a chance to contact the solicitor and try to get this sorted out.

A little while after that, while finishing setting up the network, I fetl a bit sick. I went into the loos, and I spewed a lot, it was all bile. I felt a bit better, I washed my face and went back.

Just when I was finished up, they said there was another office in the building that needed some networking done. We went in there, and I started speaking to the woman, she told me she was having issues with her ADSL connection. I spent a little while looking at it.

The other people wanted to leave, so I went and got all my gear, and they paid me.

I went back into the other office, worked out the problem with the ADSL, fixed it (someone had disabled the network card, and fiddled with some settings), and then had a quick chat with the woman in there. She took my contact details, and said she would probably be in contact. I didn't charge them, I only spent a short while on the problem, and I was already there.

I'm really upset about this nonsense with these false allegations now. It is defamation as far as I am concerned.

I came home. I tried calling the solicitor, I left messages, he has not called me back. I want to go in, sort this out, and then walk away. If they won't let me do that, then I will have to get a solictor, and sue them for defamation.

I am so sick of all this.

Mum came in, I told her about the conversation.

This is just ridiculous.

I did a quick check, and my mate's account had been cutoff.

I called my mate and let him know what was going on again, and that he'd been screwed just like me. I got a couple of phone numbers off him.

I rang a guy to find out about ADSL circuits, and setting up for hosting.

I then browsed around looking for more ADSL plans available.

At some point the useless guy that fixes the PCs rang me, everyone else is too gutless to speak to me obviously.

"What's the password for the domain registrar?" I told him what it was, the same as I told the solicitor earlier. he said ok, and I got off the phone.

I bummed around on the computer for a while. Looking at prices of ADSL still.

I rang one of the clients who I have been dealing with recently, to let him know that I couldn't help him anymore, because I had been locked out of everything, and no one will talk to me. I told him what I thought was going on, but that it was only a guess, because no one will speak to me.

He told me that they had been locked out of their equipment too. He asked me if he should take his business elsewhere, I told him that I could not give him an answer to that, I feel that would be wrong, but I told him that I had been speaking to other clients, and they had decided to take their business elsewhere, which is the truth, I've nothing to gain by lying.

I offered to help him get his stuff working. He asked my rate, I told him something reasonable, I'm not trying to make money, I'm trying help someone, because I feel morally inclined to help them out of the situation.

He said he would try to find out what was going on, and would get back to me. He didn't get back to me.

I went and had another conversation with Mum, and sat inside watching tv for a bit.

My phone rang again, it was the useless guy that fixes the computers again. He's tried to login but the details don't work. Well, I'm sorry, but that's not my problem. You will have to go through the "forgot password" procedure, and change it, just like I had to to get in there a month ago when the main domain expired, so I could renew it. If the details I gave you don't work, then I don't know what they are.

They are lucky I'm speaking to any of them at all, after the unbelievable treatment I have received from them, so they can't expect me to go out of my way to help them with a problem. They should have thought about that before screwing me over for no reason.

I left at this point, I went to visit my mate. It took me over 40 minutes to get to his place.

I told him what was going on, we had a conversation. He told me he rang in earlier to find out why he had been cutoff, and when he was fed nonsense, he told them he quit.

We sat and chatted for quite a while. The guy I saw yesterday and made cables called me, he'd installed them, but a couple were too long, and he wanted the final setup done. I said I could come and do it tomorrow or Friday. He asked me to arrange with the woman in charge when I could do it, and he gave me her details.

I got off the phone, I tried to call her, but her line was busy. I'll try again in a bit.

We chatted a bit more.

The guy I was going to start the ISP with last year called me, "Are you having trouble logging on?" he asked me, "Yeah, you could say that", and I told him what was going on. Obviously it's turned into an ISP only for the people the De Facto likes, and everyone else gets cutoff.

I chatted to him for a bit, he told me he might have some work available, so I queued up a day's work on Friday.

I tried ringing the woman again, got through, explained that tomorrow was the only time available this week that I could sort out the network for them. We arranged for me to turn up tomorrow morning and sort it out.

Then we went and picked up his wife from the station. We came back, and made some dinner.

During that, the phone rang, it was the De Facto. My mate told her to ring back in half an hour. We ate dinner. I started on desert, and my phone rang, it was my Dad.

I started talking to him, he told me he had just talked to the De Facto, to find out about him getting paid for work he did last year, she wouldn't even talk to him about that, only about me.

It's nice that she'll talk to everyone but me about me.

A couple of minutes in, my mate's phone rang, it was the De Facto. I went outside so I could continue my conversation with my Dad without the De Facto knowing I was there.

She had told him some nonsense about me trying to crack into the systems, and had "evidence" to support it.

Well, it must be fabricated, because there will be no such evidence, because I've not tried to crack in to their systems. All I've done is tried to login to my accounts, that up until Tuesday morning I could use.

She claimed I had some "crack disk". I didn't work what she was on about until later.. yeah, a copy of the linux based disk that lets you change passwords on NT systems. I mentioned I had this when they asked me to see if I could get into my friends laptop, to get the files off for them.

A disk that lets you change the password on windows machines, require physical access, is really going to help me crack into a bunch of linux machines I don't have physical access to isn't it?

It's difficult to argue with someone who doesn't know what they are talking about.

She also told him that someone had overheard a conversation I had with someone in the carpark near where the equipment is, that was on Monday.

She claimed that she was going to take legal action against me, and that she had the solicitor investigate me for the last month.

I became irate. I spoke on the phone for a while, expressing the fact that this is all crap.

Been investigating me for a month? WTF? If you have some sort of an issue with _me_, then come and talk to _me_ about it, don't go pissing about.

I got off the phone. I was angry, I felt sick.

I went back inside, I tried to continue eating my ice cream, but I couldn't. I also couldn't handle hearing half the conversation my mate was having with the De Facto. More nonsense about this domain registrar crap.

I went and stood in the garage where I couldn't hear what was going on.

When he got off the phone, I came back inside.

He told me some of things they had discussed.

He asked why I had not been contacted. She told my mate that she was paranoid, and couldn't contact me until all the equipment was moved, which happened last night. He wondered why she didn't call me to let me know what was going on today, but he didn't say that.

I felt sick. I was so upset. I felt betrayed. Tears came to my eyes. I felt like my friend had died all over again.

My mate who was in the US recently called me, he asked me how I was, I told him that I was not very well. I didn't tell him any of the new details, I was too upset, and could barely talk.

He told me he'd mentioned to his Dad (the guy who owns the air con business I've worked for) the treatment I had received, and he was disgusted, and that he was going to write an email and tell them that. heh. He asked me some questions about his hardware he was having problems with, that I was trying to fix when I was at his place last night.

I got off the phone, and I was really upset now. I cried.

I shouldn't have to deal with this. I've just spent the last 9 weeks running my friend's business, being paid almost nothing, and they just cut me off, and won't even speak to me. To make it even worse, they are now making false allegations that I am a cracker, without even approaching me about it.

I decided that this is getting out of control, and something needs to be done. I am going to call the solicitor tomorrow, and arrange a meeting between himself, myself, the De Facto, and anyone else who wants to come along, bringing this "evidence" of me attempting to crack into their systems, so I can set this all straight, and make them all realise that someone doesn't like me for some reason, and is going out of their way to cause shit.

I came home. I had tears running down my face the whole way home. This is so stuffed up.

I realised what was going on.. it all clicked. The conversation the other day that was overheard, where I said that "I was considering starting up a business, based on what happened to this one", someone's gone and told her that I'm going to start a business, she's decided that I'm a competitor, and has started all this defamation against me, claiming I'm a cracker, and that I'm trying to break into their equipment, either to scare me off so I don't startup, or that if I do, people will think I'm bad news.

I might have to sue for defamation.

I got home, I went and spoke to my parents. I told them what I had just worked out, and they agreed that it sounded a logical explanation. It's the only possible reason I can think of for causing all this.

We chatted for a while about it, and I told them everything I knew, and the conversations I'd had with people earlier today.

Dad remembered that while he was speaking to the De Facto, she complained that while I was in the Cafe I would take drinks without paying.

WTF? I would turn up, do like an hours work, and take a 50c can of Coke while I was there, and I didn't pay for it?? how about the $50 you didn't pay me for the hours work you just got?

I was so angry. I gave Dad the solicitor's contact details, so he could put in his bill for the work that he did.

I'm off to bed, I have to be up early to setup that network. A quick drink will hit the spot though, I don't think I'll be able to sleep otherwise.

I just got woken up, about 10.40, my Mum knocking on the door. "Yeah?" "Phone".

I got out of bed, opened the door, grabbed the phone.

It was one of the solicitors dealing with the business.

He wants to know if I know anything about someone illegally trying access things, and trying to change domain settings.

Apparently the De Facto wants to get the police involved, but the solicitor said there are other ways to deal with things.

WTF?? They lock me out of everything, fire me, and don't even have the courtesy to tell me, and then they accuse me of trying to do illegal things??

I said that to the solicitor, he said that was an issue I had with the De Facto.

What a bunch of crap.

I told him that I have had nothing to do with changing any passwords or accessing domain settings since a month ago when one of the main domain names expired.

I had to use the "forgot password" procedure to change the password on the account, I managed to log into the site, change the relevant details required in order for me to use my credit card, and renew the domain with my credit card. After that, I wrote the new details down, and made everyone aware of them. I've had absolutely nothing to do with it since then.

I told him the password I changed it to, and he said he would get back to me.

This is completely stuffed. I wasn't trying to make things difficult for them. If I was, then I would have just cracked into everything, and fdisk'd all the servers, trashed the configuration on the RAS equipment. I wouldn't bother pissing about with doing something that would cause a minor inconvenience, and end up with the same legal issues as totally stuffing them, I'd just do things properly. I'm not interested in playing games like they are.

What a terrific day.

I got woken up at 10.20am by the guy who works for the place I went to on my birthday, to try and fix their computer. He wanted to pick up his other computer that I fixed.

Hmm, it's at my mates place that I go to dinner with, locked in his garage, and he's in Sydney. I told the guy I would find out what I could do, and call him back.

I got up, called my mate, told him the situation, he told me I could get into his house the same way we did when his keys went missing, ok, or I've got another idea. No worries.

I called the guy back, told him I could get it. He said his modem was stuffed, did I have a spare he could borrow, yeah, in the Cafe, come up, grab the PC, and then we'll go get a modem. He told me he would be leaving shortly, and get there about 11.15.

I worked out I would have to leave about 10.45 to get there for then, so I had aboiut 15 minutes.

I checked my email, a box had popped up asking for the password for my account on the mail server that runs as part of my friend's business. The mail server must have got hit with spam again, and it's just buggered up. I escaped the box, and checked my proper mail.

I ate some breakfast, got dressed, and I left. It was stinking hot already, so I left my jacket at home, too hot. I headed up to my mate's place. Got there about 11.20. I got in the way I thought I could, then I sat around and waited for the guy to turn up. I read a terribly interesting (postage) stamp bulletin that was on the table while I waited.

The guy rang me, told me the modem was ok, and that he was going to go to an ATM to get the money to pay me first. He turned up about 11.45, I gave him the pc, collected my pay. He had a quick chat, wants to make some changes down at the markets, and add a cd burner for backing up their records etc, I said I would sort that out when he wanted it done.

I locked up and left.

I didn't have anything to do, and I didn't want to go home, it was stinking hot. I went for a ride, out towards the beach, see if I can have a quick perve. I got out there, a ton of seaweed had washed up, and it stank. I rode around a lap, and then left. I went to McDonalds, had some lunch, and read the paper.

I came home, the power had been off. Hmm. I booted up everything, and tried to connect to the internet, my password kept getting rejected. This seems very strange. Perhaps there is a problem with radius, or the switch, or something in Gosford because everything has just powered back up.

I called the Cafe, to see if there was a problem. The useless guy that fixes the computers stalled me, and told me they would have to ring me back, and gave me some nonsense about not being able to log in either.

WTF? either there is a problem, or there isn't, not that you will have to get back to me.

I tried dialling in again, still no good. I reconfigured my router to use my backup dialup account with another ISP I never got rid of. Once I was connected throught that, I then tried to login to my accounts on the servers, then on any of the equipment, almost every password had been changed, locking me out of everything.

This is just charming. I basically volunteer over 2 months of my time to continue running my friend's business, which would have gone with him in the first week, if I hadn't helped, and this is how they thank me.

I want my email. I tried to login to an account I know that has root access, so I could gzip up my mail, and scp it out to my shell account elsewhere.

It seems that everyone's account I know details of has been locked out from root access.

My password must have been changed early this morning, and that's why my email client was asking for my password.

Well, that confirms it. I've been fucked over royally.

About a minute after I realised this, the guy I was in Gosford with on Monday called me. He's having problems. Well, I'm sorry, but I can't help you, because I've been locked out of everything.

He said he was going to find out what was going on, and let me know.

I've been fired, but they don't have the courtesy to tell me. Even when I'm on the phone to them.

I regret fixing that DNS issue yesterday, I should have left it, then when that client contacts me, and I tell them that the issue can't be fixed, they would leave. Oh well, they are going to anyway.

Hee hee, I just remembered a couple of things I never did fix, so everytime one of the servers is booted up there are changes that have to made manually so it will work, and never fixed it to do those things automatically.

I called my mate I go to dinner with, he'd just got back from Sydney, and I told him what was going on.

He went in to the Cafe to try to find out what was going on. I was going to wait a while, and then call him in there, to see what he found out.

I decided to have a shower while I waited that time.

I was just getting in the shower, and then the power went off again. Argh. I just got all this stuff back up and running.

I had a shower, got out, waited for a bit.

I decided to ring Mum and tell her what was happening, and that I had made a decision regarding the conversation we had last night.

Oops, the phone doesn't work without power, stupid ISDN crap.

I went inside, since the first phone circuit works without power. (I've only just realised I could have used my mobile).

Mum was inside. I sat and told her what was going on.

She then said she had to go and pick my brother up from school. Oops.. the garage door doesn't open without power, and the access door to the garage has about a ton of stuff piled against it. She rang someone she knew, to arrange them to pick up my brother, and drop him at Grandma's.

She came in a chatted for a while, after about 45 minutes, (since going off) the power came back. I started getting everything back up again.

I knew I would still not be able to logon.

I rang the Cafe, to speak to my mate. The tech support woman answered, and I told her the power was back, were there any issues with Gosford, she told me there were, and that the upstream provider were looking at it.

Oh yeah, since when did they have access to any of our equipment? I thought, ah, since I gave out all the passwords the other day, "because the solicitor asked for them". Somehow I doubt the solicitor knows anything about it in hindsight. I was hesitant to give them out. I should have followed UF's advice, the first thing you do as a sysadmin, ensure job security, change all the passwords.

I was a bit suspicious when I was asked for all the passwords the other day, but me not giving out the passwords wouldn't have achieved anything, they just would have asked any of the other people who knew them, got them anyway, and then it would have made me look dodgy.

I asked her to let me know when it was fixed, so I could logon. Of course she did not get back to me, because they are playing stupid games. Why not just tell me what is going on? Do they think I am completely stupid, and didn't immediately work out what's going on?

I continued getting my network working, and my mobile rang. It was the guy I was in Gosford with, he told me what was going on, and that he's now going to change to a different provider, did I know of any good ones. Heh.

I got everything back up again, still using my account with the other ISP. Because of the sorry state of the network, using dialup to another ISP is heaps better than ISDN into my friend's ISP. Hah.

I bummed around for a while, trying to log into and of my accounts to work out if I could somehow get my mail. There was a box in Sydney, I was briefly able to login with my account before, but after the power came back, my account had been disabled.

Someone must be watching the logs, and seeing where I'm trying to log in to/from, and then changing the passwords.

All I want is my damn email, and a few files out of my home directories.

I gave up mucking around with this nonsense for the time being, and left, I head up to my mate's place.

He found my hair slightly humerous, I was too annoyed to be in the mood for joking.

I explained exactly what was going on.

Oh well, the business will not last long before it runs out of funds, based on the figures I heard yesterday, and recently, and then the customers get taken away in lieu oy payment, and my friend's De Facto ends up with nothing, and goes bankrupt.

I checked my phone, a missed call, a guy I haven't spoken to for months, I'll have to call him back (oops, I'll do it tomorrow).

We hung around there for a while, and then we went to dinner. While eating dinner, some woman commented that she liked my green hair better, heh.

While I was eating, my phone rang, "Private Number", ah, here we go, it might be the De Facto to tell me what's going on. I answered it, nope, it was my mate that was in the US recently, he wanted to know why I didn't call him back on Saturday, I told him because it was wet and cold and crappy, so I just stayed home and got pissed, "oh, well as long as you got pissed" was his reply. I said I would pop in on the way home in a few hours.

After the meal, I played the pokies, lost $1, walked away.

I went back to my mate's place, we sat around for a while, and then I left.

i went and saw my mate, had a chat, told him what was going on.

I then helped him to fix his computer, graphics driver problems, and I played a game for a while testing it, seemed ok.

My other mate's housemate said he was going to bed, I realised it was 11.30, so I decided to leave.

I came home.

At about midnight, I decided to continue checking what equipment I still had a valid account on. Ah, one of the webservers. Too bad none of my files are on here. As soon as I logged in, I saw "Machine is going down for system halt now" come up. Oh, for god's sake.

Perhaps they are moving the equipment, getting all the illegally installed stuff out of the electrical cupboard, that the building manager threatened to rip out.

If I was a malicious person, I would just crack into all the stuff, and disable all their accounts, just for the laugh. Do unto others as they do unto you. Whoever's doing this is doing a reasonable job of it.

I'm sure if I tried I could still find stuff they've not thought of, but I'm not interested, I'm walking away. They can have all the shit.

I didn't want to be running all the servers in the first place.

Running everything and getting paid amost nothing is the reason I left this the first time, back in August last year. I only came back because my friend died, and no one else knew how to run most of the stuff.

All they had to do was tell me they didn't need me any more, and I would have left, it's not like this was even a job. It was me doing them a favour, temporarily, in the short term, so the business could keep running while they worked out what they wanted to do with it.

Why muck around and go out of their way to mistreat me like this?

Time to start my business, and be successful, and laugh.

Someone in IRC dropped this URL.

I think the pic is pretty cool, I'm going to steal it, and use it for the homepage of my hosting service, if I start one.

I watched Indy Jones last night (Temple of Doom), and then I decided to watch Trainspotting, I put it on at midnight, watched it through, bummed around on the computer, and went to bed about 2am.

I got woken up at 9am by a guy I hed been speaking to recently, about a seniors club that wants a network setup, He wanted me to make up some cat5 cables for him. I told him I would find out what was going on today, and get back to him.

I got up, called into the Cafe, my mate was there, I asked him if I was supposed to be doing anything today, since the last new, I was supposed to be teaching the guy in the Cafe who fixes the PCs how to look after the servers. "That's on hold for the time being", oh ok, whatever then. See you later.

I made some breakfast, and started eating. The phone rang. It was my mate from the Cafe, apparently there was a fault with a piece of equipment in Gosford. I got the contact details of the guy who was having the problem, and got off the phone.

I finished my breakfast (damn, soggy), and then I worked out where the seniors club is, I thought I might go over there, it's on the way to the shopping centre I want to go to, to get a haircut anyway.

I called the guy back, I'm not doing anything today, "I'll come over there and make up the cables, since I want to go over that way anyway.." "Oh, I'm at home, not at the club", ok, no worries, asked him where he lived, found it on the map, not far from the club anyway, and still on the way. "I'll be there in an hour or so".

I tried calling the guy with the fault in Gosford, no answer, left a message, waited for a few minutes. He'll wait until I get in the shower to call me, so bugger it, I'll just get that over and done with.

I had a shower, when I got out, the phone started ringing, my message service. I answered it, the guy had got back to me, can I ring him back. Heh. I'm late, I'll ring him when I get to the guy's place.

I grabbed my crimping tool, rj45s, and cd player. I was about to go out, when I remembered the cheque I got on Sunday, and that I had to pay for the sat decoder I won on eBay. I scribbled the bank details down, and grabbed the cheque.

I chucked it all in my bike, and took off.

I got to the guys place, as I got off my bike, the stupid like plastic bit off my earbud came off, fell on the seat, and immediately fell down the tiny gap between the seat and the tank.

I tried grabbing it out with my pliers, but it just got pushed in further.

It was stinking hot in the sun, so I took my jacket off.

I tried pulling the seat around, no good.

I ended up having to get the tools out, take off the pillion seat, so I could get to the bolt that holds the seat on, no worries. As I tried to find a tool that fit the bolt, I remembered it wasn't the standard bolt, because when I first got my bike, and went to visit my mate (that broke his wrist) we pulled the whole thing apart, and when it got put back together, the bolt didn't get tightened properly, and after a short ride, I noticed the bolt gone, so any old bolt that had the right thread went in there. Bugger, I ended up getting it out using the 17mm spanner and the spark plug socket as an adapter. Not right, but it worked.

I lifted the seat off, again tried to get the bloody thing out. Ended up using the spike in my leatherman knockoff to fish it out. I was boiling hot.

I put the bike all back together, went to put the bolt back in the pillion seat.. uh oh, I can't find it. I thought I left it in the tab when I moved the seat, maybe it fell out, on the ground, or rolled down the driveway, I looked, couldn't find it. I checked my pockets, nope. I checked the tool it, as I picked it up, the bolt fell out. Good, put it back in. Put the tools away, got my crimping tool and rj45s out, and went inside.

Only wasted about 15 minutes fiddling around.

I saw the guy, started crimping up the first cable, my phone rang, oops, the guy I was supposed to ring back.

I spoke to him for a few minutes, apparently the access point has gone down, is he local, does he want to check things etc, nope, he's at Gorokan, and I'm at Green Point. "I'll get there when I can, maybe in a hour".

I made up all the cables. I chatted to the guy and his wife while I made them up. He had a computer he wanted to use as a router, like the one I made up for the other seniors club recently. I looked at it for a few minutes, tried changing bios settings to make it attempt to boot. It seemed like it would, so I put in a "Win98 Startup Disk" the guy had lying around, turned the machine on, it accessed the disk, and then it started playing music. WTF?

I fiddled around, no matter what I did, I could not get it to boot up even to the bios boot screen, it just keeps making the same error beep code.

I gave up in the end, told him to rip out everything worth having (memory, disk, sound card, floppy, cdrom etc) and just chuck it, it's got some propriety mobo and power supply anyway.

I left, I reced into Gosford, as I got there, the guy was waiting outside. He'd got there, looked, and found the AP off. He assumed a failed power supply, so he'd been and bought a new power supply, extension cord, and a meter.

We went in, and looked. He tried his extension cord first, in case that was the issue, nope. Put the new power supply in, the AP still didn't come on. Uh oh, maybe it's failed. He grabbed the meter, tested the new power supply, it's only outputting 3v, oops.. that's what it's set to. Changed it to 9v, plugged it in, hooray, AP comes on. Fixed.

I told him that the building managed had found all the equipment in the cupboard, and that we had to move it, I told him some other stuff that was going on, and he said he'd need to know if the situation with the network was going to change, so that he could arrange moving his hosting stuff.

I chatted for quite a while, told him some things I had in mind, and told him that what happened in here with the equipment depended on decisions that were going to be made, I would find out what those decisions were, and let him know. I got the receipt for the power supply off him, to reimburse him.

I then got on the freeway, and went up to the Cafe. I claimed the cash for the power supply, and bummed around a bit, there's been some cleanig going on in here.

When I got a chance, I said I needed to know what the business was doing, and what was going to happen to the equipment. The tech support chick told me she couldn't tell me. That's not acceptable, I need to know. She called her Mum (my friend's De Facto), she wasn't available. I had to wait until she was, (Just bumming around in the cafe). It was now nearly 3pm, I had some lunch, and then I fixed yet another DNS issue.

Stupid DNS issues. All our servers have been setup as slave DNS servers, but the master DNS server is not in the list of authorities, so when the master is updated, the changes never propogate to the slaves. Dumb.

My friend's De Facto called back about 3.20pm, I asked her what she was doing with the business, and she told me some details. What she told me made me lose all interest in having anything to do with this business anymore, but I didn't say so, I just listened.

Anyway, what she told me basically means that the equipment in Gosford won't need to be moved, just removed, and that I won't need to tech the guy how to run the servers. Fine, suits me, I'm sick of this whole bloody thing. If my friend realised what's going on, I think he would turn in his grave.

I told her that the guy needs to know what's happening with the network, so he can make arrangements. She wanted to know who he was, and where he fits into things. I said I would find out exactly what he does (I had a fair idea, but thought there may have been other things I didn't know about).

I said I would find out, and get back to her later, like when I got home, because I couldn't hang around in the Cafe all day, I had other things to do.

I called the guy back, I told him what was going on, he asked me some questions, I couldn't tell him anything, because the tech support chick was there. I told him to talk to my friend's De Facto, and I gave him her contact details.

I realised I had forgotten to go to the bank, to deposit the cheque, and make the deposit/transfer to pay for the eBay item. Bugger. Now I have to go all the way back to Gosford again. Hangon, no I don't, there's a Hardly Permanent Building Society near here.

I left the Cafe, and I started on my way there, bad timing, tons of traffic. I went the back way around, got stuck behind bloody school busses. Got past them, got around the back, got to the shipping centre (not the one I wanted to go to).

I found the bank, deposited the cheque, made the transfer. Because it was 4pm, and I had to have transfers arranged/performed by 2pm it would get done tomorrow. Fine.

The teller kept trying to make small talk, "What bike am I riding" and "I have a common name, she went to school with someone with a similar name". I don't care, just transfer the money, I'm busy, and I've got better things to do than hang around in a bloody bank all day.

I left, rode a long way to the shopping centre I wanted to go to, parked, wandered up to the hair dresser. It's now about 4.30pm. I sat and waited, and waited, and waited.

Eventually, just after 5pm, they got around to me. I said I was thinking about getting a mohawk, but I was worried about it being a bit too far out. "Too far out for what?" he asks, I dunno, so I told him to do it.

It doesn't look too bad, pretty cool, actually, sort of like one of "The Two Guys from Andromeda", except without the snout.

It was 5.30 when it was all finished. I wandered down to the food court, and got an orange juice, then I wandered back, and went to my bike. Normally I would have just left, but the guy went to some effort getting my hair gelled up, and I wanted to get some reaction before I mashed it with my helmet. I could see people looking, not such a big reaction as my green hair.

I jumped on the bike, and realised I needed fuel. I rode towards home, stopped in and got fuel, then I decided to go to the supermarket, and buy something for dinner. And some donuts.

I went in, bought dinner, "Tuna Morney", instead of slop, er, I mean "Shepherds Pie". Grabbed some donuts too.

I went over to the bottlo, bought a bottle of Smirnoff, I've really gotten into this gin and lemon now, I'm sick of bourbon and coke anyway.

I came home. Got home about 6.20pm.

I chucked the tuna morney in the oven, and had a donut.

The phone rang, it was my mate I go to dinner with. He is as fed up with the business as much as I am. I spoke to him for a while, got off the phone, about 3 seconds later the timer for my dinner was up, groovy.

Grabbed it out, ate it, it's a lot better than the pie in the toaster oven.

I put some music on, and turned it up a bit.

Dad came in a few minutes later, "What have you done to your hair?" and all that. "There's a message on the answering machine I want you to hear, I won't explain it". Weird.

I wandered in, Mum saw me, same "What have you done?" "why?" etc nonsense.

I went to the answering machine. There's some whinging message from someone in the street, complaining about the noise coming from my room.

Piss off woman. I'm not stopping you from moving house. Shut your windows and your mouth. I'll do what I want.

Let her call the police, and have them sort it out. I'm well practiced in the art of dealing with police responding to noise complaints. I don't know how many times my mate's parties got shut down, and I dealt with the police every time, nothing ever happened, no fines, or warnings, or anything, and that was a party. I doubt they would even care about me on my own watching tv.

The message went on about "Have stern words with the person living in there", so dad, in a mocking way, says "Oh, well now you've had stern words".

I thought about capturing the message, but I don't know where my microphone is (hmm, I just went to type "microsoft" instead of "microphone". horrible), and the sound would probably end up shit. It was pretty funny. Maybe I will cap it, and mp3 it, and upload it here.

I came back out, cranked up the amp, and put some Nine Inch Nails on. I've got 4 hours of Nine Inch Nails here, and it will nicely fit in before midnight, when I have to "turn it down".

I listened to about 6 songs, then dad came in again. "Come in for a chat", oh here we go.

He wanted to chat about the business opportunity of starting up hosting or ISP or something. I chatted for a while, told them what had been going on with the business, what I was thinking, and how we could startup.

Sat and watched tv with them for a bit, the sat signal keeps dropping out, apparently the card sharing client isn't working very well for them. Hmm. I had a look, tried a different version, still no better. Hmm, I don't know how to fix this, I need to find something else.

I went looking last night, I found some European stuff that had card/cam emulation in it, but the only version I could find was the one where all the crypto/emu/card sharing stuff was ripped out. Bugger, this stuff has source too, someone could have worked from this to build a linux system compatible with the sat system here.

Anyway, I chatted for a while, and then the cat started to irritate my allergies, so I came out. It's after midnight.

Time for some music at a volume to be annoying, but not illegal, lets see how far I can push this.

I watched Indy Jones last night (Temple of Doom), and then I decided to watch Trainspotting, I put it on at midnight, watched it through, bummed around on the computer, and went to bed about 2am.

I got woken up at 9am by a guy I hed been speaking to recently, about a seniors club that wants a network setup, He wanted me to make up some cat5 cables for him. I told him I would find out what was going on today, and get back to him.

I got up, called into the Cafe, my mate was there, I asked him if I was supposed to be doing anything today, since the last new, I was supposed to be teaching the guy in the Cafe who fixes the PCs how to look after the servers. "That's on hold for the time being", oh ok, whatever then. See you later.

I made some breakfast, and started eating. The phone rang. It was my mate from the Cafe, apparently there was a fault with a piece of equipment in Gosford. I got the contact details of the guy who was having the problem, and got off the phone.

I finished my breakfast (damn, soggy), and then I worked out where the seniors club is, I thought I might go over there, it's on the way to the shopping centre I want to go to, to get a haircut anyway.

I called the guy back, I'm not doing anything today, "I'll come over there and make up the cables, since I want to go over that way anyway.." "Oh, I'm at home, not at the club", ok, no worries, asked him where he lived, found it on the map, not far from the club anyway, and still on the way. "I'll be there in an hour or so".

I tried calling the guy with the fault in Gosford, no answer, left a message, waited for a few minutes. He'll wait until I get in the shower to call me, so bugger it, I'll just get that over and done with.

I had a shower, when I got out, the phone started ringing, my message service. I answered it, the guy had got back to me, can I ring him back. Heh. I'm late, I'll ring him when I get to the guy's place.

I grabbed my crimping tool, rj45s, and cd player. I was about to go out, when I remembered the cheque I got on Sunday, and that I had to pay for the sat decoder I won on eBay. I scribbled the bank details down, and grabbed the cheque.

I chucked it all in my bike, and took off.

I got to the guys place, as I got off my bike, the stupid like plastic bit off my earbud came off, fell on the seat, and immediately fell down the tiny gap between the seat and the tank.

I tried grabbing it out with my pliers, but it just got pushed in further.

It was stinking hot in the sun, so I took my jacket off.

I tried pulling the seat around, no good.

I ended up having to get the tools out, take off the pillion seat, so I could get to the bolt that holds the seat on, no worries. As I tried to find a tool that fit the bolt, I remembered it wasn't the standard bolt, because when I first got my bike, and went to visit my mate (that broke his wrist) we pulled the whole thing apart, and when it got put back together, the bolt didn't get tightened properly, and after a short ride, I noticed the bolt gone, so any old bolt that had the right thread went in there. Bugger, I ended up getting it out using the 17mm spanner and the spark plug socket as an adapter. Not right, but it worked.

I lifted the seat off, again tried to get the bloody thing out. Ended up using the spike in my leatherman knockoff to fish it out. I was boiling hot.

I put the bike all back together, went to put the bolt back in the pillion seat.. uh oh, I can't find it. I thought I left it in the tab when I moved the seat, maybe it fell out, on the ground, or rolled down the driveway, I looked, couldn't find it. I checked my pockets, nope. I checked the tool it, as I picked it up, the bolt fell out. Good, put it back in. Put the tools away, got my crimping tool and rj45s out, and went inside.

Only wasted about 15 minutes fiddling around.

I saw the guy, started crimping up the first cable, my phone rang, oops, the guy I was supposed to ring back.

I spoke to him for a few minutes, apparently the access point has gone down, is he local, does he want to check things etc, nope, he's at Gorokan, and I'm at Green Point. "I'll get there when I can, maybe in a hour".

I made up all the cables. I chatted to the guy and his wife while I made them up. He had a computer he wanted to use as a router, like the one I made up for the other seniors club recently. I looked at it for a few minutes, tried changing bios settings to make it attempt to boot. It seemed like it would, so I put in a "Win98 Startup Disk" the guy had lying around, turned the machine on, it accessed the disk, and then it started playing music. WTF?

I fiddled around, no matter what I did, I could not get it to boot up even to the bios boot screen, it just keeps making the same error beep code.

I gave up in the end, told him to rip out everything worth having (memory, disk, sound card, floppy, cdrom etc) and just chuck it, it's got some propriety mobo and power supply anyway.

I left, I reced into Gosford, as I got there, the guy was waiting outside. He'd got there, looked, and found the AP off. He assumed a failed power supply, so he'd been and bought a new power supply, extension cord, and a meter.

We went in, and looked. He tried his extension cord first, in case that was the issue, nope. Put the new power supply in, the AP still didn't come on. Uh oh, maybe it's failed. He grabbed the meter, tested the new power supply, it's only outputting 3v, oops.. that's what it's set to. Changed it to 9v, plugged it in, hooray, AP comes on. Fixed.

I told him that the building managed had found all the equipment in the cupboard, and that we had to move it, I told him some other stuff that was going on, and he said he'd need to know if the situation with the network was going to change, so that he could arrange moving his hosting stuff.

I chatted for quite a while, told him some things I had in mind, and told him that what happened in here with the equipment depended on decisions that were going to be made, I would find out what those decisions were, and let him know. I got the receipt for the power supply off him, to reimburse him.

I then got on the freeway, and went up to the Cafe. I claimed the cash for the power supply, and bummed around a bit, there's been some cleanig going on in here.

When I got a chance, I said I needed to know what the business was doing, and what was going to happen to the equipment. The tech support chick told me she couldn't tell me. That's not acceptable, I need to know. She called her Mum (my friend's De Facto), she wasn't available. I had to wait until she was, (Just bumming around in the cafe). It was now nearly 3pm, I had some lunch, and then I fixed yet another DNS issue.

Stupid DNS issues. All our servers have been setup as slave DNS servers, but the master DNS server is not in the list of authorities, so when the master is updated, the changes never propogate to the slaves. Dumb.

My friend's De Facto called back about 3.20pm, I asked her what she was doing with the business, and she told me some details. What she told me made me lose all interest in having anything to do with this business anymore, but I didn't say so, I just listened.

I told her that the guy needs to know what's happening with the network, so he can make arrangements. She wanted to know who he was, and where he fits into things. I said I would find out exactly what he does (I had a fair idea, but thought there may have been other things I didn't know about).

I said I would find out, and get back to her later, like when I got home, because I couldn't hang around in the Cafe all day, I had other things to do.

I called the guy back, I told him what was going on, he asked me some questions, I couldn't tell him anything, because the tech support chick was there. I told him to talk to my friend's De Facto, and I gave him her contact details.

I realised I had forgotten to go to the bank, to deposit the cheque, and make the deposit/transfer to pay for the eBay item. Bugger. Now I have to go all the way back to Gosford again. Hangon, no I don't, there's a Hardly Permanent Building Society near here.

I left the Cafe, and I started on my way there, bad timing, tons of traffic. I went the back way around, got stuck behind bloody school busses. Got past them, got around the back, got to the shipping centre (not the one I wanted to go to).

I found the bank, deposited the cheque, made the transfer. Because it was 4pm, and I had to have transfers arranged/performed by 2pm it would get done tomorrow. Fine.

The teller kept trying to make small talk, "What bike am I riding" and "I have a common name, she went to school with someone with a similar name". I don't care, just transfer the money, I'm busy, and I've got better things to do than hang around in a bloody bank all day.

I left, rode a long way to the shopping centre I wanted to go to, parked, wandered up to the hair dresser. It's now about 4.30pm. I sat and waited, and waited, and waited.

Eventually, just after 5pm, they got around to me. I said I was thinking about getting a mohawk, but I was worried about it being a bit too far out. "Too far out for what?" he asks, I dunno, so I told him to do it.

It doesn't look too bad, pretty cool, actually, sort of like one of "The Two Guys from Andromeda", except without the snout.

It was 5.30 when it was all finished. I wandered down to the food court, and got an orange juice, then I wandered back, and went to my bike. Normally I would have just left, but the guy went to some effort getting my hair gelled up, and I wanted to get some reaction before I mashed it with my helmet. I could see people looking, not such a big reaction as my green hair.

I jumped on the bike, and realised I needed fuel. I rode towards home, stopped in and got fuel, then I decided to go to the supermarket, and buy something for dinner. And some donuts.

I went in, bought dinner, "Tuna Morney", instead of slop, er, I mean "Shepherds Pie". Grabbed some donuts too.

I went over to the bottlo, bought a bottle of Smirnoff, I've really gotten into this gin and lemon now, I'm sick of bourbon and coke anyway.

I came home. Got home about 6.20pm.

I chucked the tuna morney in the oven, and had a donut.

The phone rang, it was my mate I go to dinner with. He is as fed up with the business as much as I am. I spoke to him for a while, got off the phone, about 3 seconds later the timer for my dinner was up, groovy.

Grabbed it out, ate it, it's a lot better than the pie in the toaster oven.

I put some music on, and turned it up a bit.

Dad came in a few minutes later, "What have you done to your hair?" and all that. "There's a message on the answering machine I want you to hear, I won't explain it". Weird.

I wandered in, Mum saw me, same "What have you done?" "why?" etc nonsense.

I went to the answering machine. There's some whinging message from someone in the street, complaining about the noise coming from my room.

Piss off woman. I'm not stopping you from moving house. Shut your windows and your mouth. I'll do what I want.

Let her call the police, and have them sort it out. I'm well practiced in the art of dealing with police responding to noise complaints. I don't know how many times my mate's parties got shut down, and I dealt with the police every time, nothing ever happened, no fines, or warnings, or anything, and that was a party. I doubt they would even care about me on my own watching tv.

The message went on about "Have stern words with the person living in there", so dad, in a mocking way, says "Oh, well now you've had stern words".

I thought about capturing the message, but I don't know where my microphone is (hmm, I just went to type "microsoft" instead of "microphone". horrible), and the sound would probably end up shit. It was pretty funny. Maybe I will cap it, and mp3 it, and upload it here.

I came back out, cranked up the amp, and put some Nine Inch Nails on. I've got 4 hours of Nine Inch Nails here, and it will nicely fit in before midnight, when I have to "turn it down".

I listened to about 6 songs, then dad came in again. "Come in for a chat", oh here we go.

He wanted to chat about the business opportunity of starting up hosting or ISP or something. I chatted for a while, told them what had been going on with the business, what I was thinking, and how we could startup.

Sat and watched tv with them for a bit, the sat signal keeps dropping out, apparently the card sharing client isn't working very well for them. Hmm. I had a look, tried a different version, still no better. Hmm, I don't know how to fix this, I need to find something else.

I went looking last night, I found some European stuff that had card/cam emulation in it, but the only version I could find was the one where all the crypto/emu/card sharing stuff was ripped out. Bugger, this stuff has source too, someone could have worked from this to build a linux system compatible with the sat system here.

Anyway, I chatted for a while, and then the cat started to irritate my allergies, so I came out. It's after midnight.

Time for some music at a volume to be annoying, but not illegal, lets see how far I can push this.

Went to bed at 5am this morning.

Slept until the alarm woke me at 11am. Lay in bed half asleep until 11.45.

I decided I had better get up, because I had that guy coming to get this pc fixed.

I got up, bummed around on the computer, cleaned up the bits and pieces hanging around.

I dragged out a power cord, found a keyboard and mouse.

midday came and went. I bummed around on the computer.

I ate some breakfast.

The guy finally turned up about 1.30. He wanted to watch the grand prix, so I grabbed my remote controls. (Another pic here). And put it on.

He watched the grand prix for a bit, while I fiddled on his pc, there wasn't really anything to be done. I checked the settings, dumped the temporary internet files, and the temp directory, just fiddling stuff wasting time.

After about 45 minutes, he asked me to see if I could restore a file he had accidently deleted a few days earlier. He has some "go back" program, which I tried to use, it looked ok, but all the versions of the file I restored were all the same, and corrupt.

I dug out Norton's old Unerase, but it kept complaining "Unable to read disk", I tried using "lock", but that made no difference. It's probably because it's FAT32 or something.

The guy had tried to pay for the modem I sent him too, but the payment was rejected, so he gave me a cheque instead. He asked me what I was going to charge him, I should have charged him $25 or something, but I didn't, because most of the stuff (besides the deleted file, which I didn't end up fixing anyway) was stuff that should have been done originally, but he rushed me, and it didn't get done.

He left, and I've just bummed around with email and stuff.

I decided to get my camera out to take a picture of all the remotes, and it won't work, doesn't power on. I'm trying to use a 5v adapter, which should work, even though the camera wants 6v, since it also runs off batteries, and 4 batteries won't supply 6v for very long. I can't use the normal adapter (which I can set to 6v), which I know works, because it's powering my phoenix programmer.

I eventually found some batteries, and shoved them in. The camera will power on and work fine, as long as I only want to look at pictures in the memory. As soon as I open the lens, all these white lines flash across the screen, and it turns off. Must be buggered.

I dug out my ultra crappy pencam thing, and used it to take the above pictures. This camera is crap, looks like about 100 kilopixel.

I don't really need all those remotes, there are:

4 sat remotes there (and I rarely need to use 1),
3 dvd remotes (I only need 1, and I usually use the receiver remote anyway),
2 vcr remotes, that I never need,
1 tv remote (that I need for one button)
1 receiver remote, that I usually use for changing the input or running the dvd player
1 tivo remote, that replaces the remotes for the sat, vcr, receiver volume, tv power.

Oh, I was reading best of Craigslist again last night, and I came across the following beauty:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/22366782.html

The title is "To the Lady who had guts dumped on her car".

I just read it again, and it's so good, I had to post it.

OK, time for a boring update.

I couldn't sleep, I watched boring documentaries on Discovery channel for a while, then I sat back on irc for about an hour, then I watched another couple of hours of documentaries before I finally felt tired, after 4am.

I got woken about 10am or something, my mate who's been over in the US recently, "is there a computer fair on today?" "dunno, the Terrigal one was last week, there might be a Gosford one" "Nah, I've just been past there, and there's not". "Oh, well there's not then". "Coming out [drinking] later?" "probably. I'll give you a ring later when I'm awake" and I briefly explained how I had to watch boring documentaries all night.

I went back to sleep.

I heard the other phone ringing at about 11am. I wouldn't have got out of bed in time to answer it, so I ignored it.

It stopped, then my mobile started ringing. My mate I go to dinner with. Telling me he's ordered the bits for the awning we're going to put on the side of his house, and that the guy is going to give him a replacement bit of deck for the one that's got fungus or something growing on it, apparently it can't be controlled, and it will rot the timber.

He went on to say he was going out to buy a fishtank, and that I probably don't want to do anything today since it's a wet rainy day. I hadn't noticed. I chatted for a few minutes, not really awake.

I got off the phone, slept a bit more, then I watched the end of the documentary I turned off earlier when I finally felt tired.

I got up just after that, and checked my email.

My hair is really pissing me off now, it's all long and messy and itchy constantly. I mucked around with it for a while. I think I might get a mohawk.

I mucked around on the computer for a while, emailing and stuff.

I checked the sat forums, someone told me to check my private messages on the forum, oops, there's about 10 private messages in here.. some from last month.

I read them, and replied.

I finally had some breakfast about 1pm.

I mucked around with the crappy sat decoder I can't get working again, someone suggested I try factory resetting it.. oh yeah, I never tried that.. so I did, and it didn't work, what a surprise.

I then watched some tv.

One guy on the forums wanted access to a card server, why not, it'll be a good test, and when I don't want him on there anymore, I'll just take his public id out of the access list, and that's the end of that.

Mucked around sending private messages back and forth for a couple of hours trying to get it working.

I gave up, I was just about to put some dinner in the oven (one of those slop/shephards pies that don't really work in the toaster oven).

My mate rang me again, he'd bought his fishtank, and then he thought it was too small, so he want back and got a bigger one. We chatted about the business for a bit, I really don't care anymore, I'm sick of the whole thing. I chatted for a while with him, said I'll see him on Tuesday to go to dinner, if not before. While I was on the phone, my mobile started ringing, I ignored it. My message service called me back while I was on the phone too, I ignored it.

I put the food in the oven. I needed to wash up, I couldn't get to the sink, for all the junk. I collected up all the recycling that was slowly getting strewn, and took 2 trips to dump it all in the bin.

I started washing up, my message service called back again, I answered it this time, it was the guy who's computer I fixed a couple of weeks ago, who rushed me, and it didn't get finished. He want's to drop and get his pc fixed tomorrow.

I finished washing up, came back to the computer. The guy had managed to get access to my card server, but it wasn't great, keep dropping out apparently. I think there is a network bottleneck somewhere causing it, UDP is a crappy protocol for this stuff.

I got my dinner, ate it.

I tried to call the guy back, line busy.

I started cleaning up a bit, I'm sick of the mess.

I sat on irc, I started looking in my access logs, I setup webalizer and ran it against my logs. I started going through them. I found John Kerry listed in my referers. "Who the hell is John Kerry?" I'm thinking. I went to the address, and the first thing I see is the titlebar, "John Kerry for President", I chuckled, I thought it was some teenager or someone being funny, like the "Ron Jeremy for President" poster.

Then the page loaded, and I realised it was serious, oh, that's right, the US is having an election soon, I thought I saw that while fast forwarding a news break on the tivo a few days ago.

I doubt my blog is linked on his page. I started looking in the logs, and I found the following:

acae5f3d.ipt.aol.com - - [25/Feb/2004:19:45:53 -0800] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "http://blog.johnkerry.com" "StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004"
ac96d432.ipt.aol.com - - [27/Feb/2004:00:13:31 -0800] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "http://blog.johnkerry.com" "Paid for by John Kerry"

What a joke! Spamming my logs!

I think I should find some free (or cracked) referrer advertising system, use it to dump porn urls in people's logs, along with "Paid for by John Kerry".

I didn't call my mate back about going out. I can't be bothered, it's too cold and wet and yucky out there. We'd only be down at the crappy Leagues Club anyway, where there's nothing to do but drink overpriced watered down alcohol, and waste money on the pokies. All the while, I'd be down there with either wet clothes, or at the least, wet shoes and socks from the spray off the road.

Hmm. I think I might watch Temple of Doom.

Nothing much to put in here.

I didn't really do anything yesterday afternoon. I watched tv, I finally got around to watching the first Indiana Jones DVD, I bought several months ago. I won an eBay auction for a sat decoder, the same as I'm currently using, which works with card sharing, so the one I can't get going can just bugger off in the cupboard or something.

I didn't really do anything today.

I got up and bummed around

I went to the shops, and bought some food. At the checkout, I noticed the bag of chips I was going to buy had popped, so I dumped them. I ended up buying dip and no chips.

I watched tv for a while.

Some guy rang me, about the online survey I filled in yesterday, he asked me some questions about alcohol, what I drink, when I drink it, the alcohol content, and how much a bottle costs. I think I was pretty close to the mark on most of the questions, so he told me that they were going to send me an envelope, but they don't want me to open it until they call me back, so they can get my initial reactions or something.

I watched more tv.

The auction seller finally replied to my email, I wanted to pay for the decoder today, now it will have to wait until next week.

My mate I go to dinner with rang me, at this rate, I won't be doing much with my friend's business for much longer, the electricity company and the building manager found all our equipment installed in the wiring cupboard yesterday, and almost ripped it out. I've not been asked to move the equipment yet, so who knows what will happen.

He also asked me to help him install another awning down the side of his house tomorrow.

I watched more tv, I drank alcohol. I was too busy watching some documentry, and didn't watch the next Indy like I planned to.

I woke up about 8am this morning, got up, started mucking around with email.

I then decided to watch some tv. I sat in the chair and watched for a while, but I wasn't comfortable. I went back to bed to lie and watch tv.

I was thinking about doing something useful today, like getting a haircut, or buying components to make up more interfaces for card sharing. I still need those PCBs though.

I fell back to sleep, and didn't wake up until after 2pm.

I got back up, mucked around with email again, and I've just eaten breakfast, at about 2.45pm.

I got up about 10.30, bummed around on the computer.

I read the instructions on the website for the decoder that won't work. I tried them, it still didn't work.

I called up the place about getting a replacement. The guy was useless. "Bring it in and we'll charge you $30 to fix it". I'm hardly going to spend hours going back to them, to pay them more money, to have them getting it working with something I don't care about.

I took the box inside, plugged it straight into the dish (where it has access to vertical polarity, which is what it needs to work with the crappy channels it's designed for). I followed their instructions. I was able to load the crappy channels, then with some trickery, I managed to get the fox channels on there.

I couldn't get rid of the crappy vertical channels however, no matter what I tried, since you can't do a "tune and rescan" successfully. I thought maybe they woud go away when I put it back in my place, on the horizontal only signal, but nope, they're stil there, they just don't work. So I set them all to "skip" in the menu, but now the first 45 channels are skipped, and it throws all the numbers out of whack (I'm not spending half an hour resorting them, to just have them change back again).

I soldered one of my interfaces into the box, it booted up and worked first go (I was pretty certain it would, after my quick test the other day).

I reordered tivo to match the new channel numbers. I changed it back to my remote codes that I used to use, but they didn't work, this was very strange.. the same remote I captured the codes from runs this box, but the tivo won't. Well, it sort of does, but only like the "4" works, nothing else.

I just put it on the channel I needed it to record, flicked the ir transmitter away, and left it.

I got called up about 2pm, "was I coming up to the shop", "what for?" "there's a switch that needs soldering" etc. I was going to dinner up there anyway, so if I got in there, did an hours work, and charged them for it, it reduces the work they'll expect later in the week.

I said I would be there in an hour.

I mucked around doing something for 1/2 hour (looking on the sat forums I think), then I had a shower, and then I left, about 2.45.

The traffic was attrocious on the way, it took me over 1/2 hour to get there.

I soldered the switch, then I bummed around out the back with wireless stuff.

I had a look at fixing a pc that was in there, but the onboard network doesn't work, so I gave up.

About 4pm I was starving, I went to get something to eat, I just wanted a bread roll, to tide me over until I went to "all I could eat", but there were none left. I bought a big damper thing instead. I ate some of it, then we left the shop.

I went back to my mate's place, he went out to drop off a computer.

I started watching tv, and eating the rest of my bread. There's really nothing worth watching on Aurora, I flicked around for a while, I found a channel showing an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, but the audio didn't work.

I finished my bread, then decided eating it all wasn't such a good idea.

I gave up watching tv. I went and looked on the internet to see if I could find any pcbs available. I need these pcbs, opening and soldering things into these decoders is not an acceptable solution. My mate came back, I continued looking, and chatting to him. I didn't find any pcbs. Gave up.

His wife called about 7pm, we went and picked her up, and then went to dinner.

I went and played the pokies after that, put a dollar in, lost it. Put $5 in, played the first one, won it up over $8. Played it back to $8, pulled it out and went, ooh, a $2 profit.

We left, went back to my mate's place.

We were there for a little while, then all his mates from dinner turned up, we all ended up being there for an hour or so, I got really tired, and when the phones kept ringing, we all decided to leave.

I had a chat to my mate for a few minutes outside before leaving.

I came home, watched some tv. I noticed the decoder was trying to lock on to the signal of one of the dodgy channels that are vertical only.

I made up the remote codes from the proper remote that came with this box, they were different to any of the codes I have for this series of box before. I discovered the remote for the box, and the box, are really strong/sensitive to IR. I can point the remote anywhere in the room, and the decoder will pick it up.

This probably explains why the decoder was on one of those dodgy channels.. the IR blaster in the front of the tivo had reflected off something, and attempted to change the channel, but not worked properly (assumedly trying to change to channel 46, and only the 4 worked).

I captured the new codes, translated them into tivo format, loaded them, rebooted it.. bang, they all work perfectly. Tested every channel twice, and every channel that matters works. (One news channel had a couple of double digits, and ended up on like 556 instead of 56, and similar for some other channel I never watch).

I then decided to watch some tv. I had stuff recorded from the 17th on here. I watched tv until about 1am, then I turned it off and went to sleep.

It was a long day.

I woke up at 6.27am, to make sure the tivo was going to record the right channel, yeah, but it's still got that annoying "video dropping out for a few seconds every few minutes" issue.

I left it and went back to sleep.

The phone woke me at 9.0am. "Is the mail down?" not this again. Why bother ringing me? I am just going to tell you "no, it is not down, it will be overloaded, and slow, what do you expect from a box built in 1996?". "Oh, and some guy needs DNS settings changed" "are we his primary or secondary dns?" "mumble something about mail exchangers" "yeah, that's the settings he wants changed, are we the primary or secondary dns?" "I don't know".

"Ok, I will be there about 10.30, and deal with all this crap".

I rolled over, lay in bed for 5 minutes. The phone rang again, some weird number, looked like Melbourne. I answered it, it was some IT guy contracted to IGA, he wanted to know details about the internet connection we have available to them, and if he could run some ftp application across the connection. He hadn't bothered to do any investigation into any networking stuff, I recommended he put in a vpn (to save me having to deal with nonsense about ftp over several NATs), he said he would.

I got out of bed, had a shower, some breakfast, bummed around doing email. I eventually left about 10.20am. I found the blinker had fallen off again, I came back, found some packaging tape, went down and strapped it up.

I took off, I got to the Cafe just after 11am.

I gave them the floppy drive I bought on Saturday, and got my money back.

On my birthday I went down and tried to fix a PC, had no luck, I had the guy bring it up, he dropped it at my mate's place yesterday, he brought the machine in this morning (along with the guy's home pc).

I started looking at it again, stupid flashing power LED and no starting. I tried a different PSU, no good. Ripped the drives and network card and everything not required out. Still no good.

I wanted to try a different video card, but it's got some dopey non standard slot. I tried a PCI card instead, no good.

I now had no idea, I've replaced everything but the memory (which I moved around etc) the CPU (which I checked was seated properly) and the motherboard.

I found the contact details for Octek (who provided/imported/manufactured all the parts the machine is constructed of) I spoke to a guy for a few minutes, he'd not seen the problem before. He checked the serial number, and it's still under warranty.. I arranged to send it back under warranty.

How it gets there all depends on if I can get this UEC910 decoder working. My mate rang them, and they told him to see the website for instructions. I checked the website, couldn't really find anything, except for some "trick" for when you have corrupted memory. If it works, then I don't know how to get the machine to Auburn, since it was going to go there on Friday, when my mate is going to Lidcombe to swap the decoder.

I shifted the machine out of the way, and started on the guy's home pc. I got it all cleaned up, so then I called him, and let him know what was going on. He was happy.

Some people who's machine I fixed recently (with the location settings of "dial 34545534 to make a local call") came back whinging, they couldn't get on. I played around with it, I could get it to connect, but only if you plugged the phone line in just as you dial. It seems like the hook on the modem is stuffed, and it gets stuck off hook. There were no spare modems, they're arriving tomorrow, so I'll put a new one in then.

I got a call from my mate, another mate (who moved up to Newcastle a few days ago), had stacked his bike, and broken his wrist, so he was going to go up to help, did I want to help. Of course I would help. He was going to be taking the van and the trailer up, so we could move the bike. He was at work at the moment, would be coming back up in a couple of hours, and then we would leave to go up to Newcastle.

I let them know I might not be in the shop for the meeting I had arranged, and I would let them know as it got closer to time.

I had some lunch.

I got another call, change of plans, we're just going to ride up, and work it out up there. No worries.

I had the meeting, between about 4.30pm and 6pm. I then called my mate to find out what was happening, left a message. As I moved my bike a bit, my phone rang. Argh. I pulled over, rang my mate back, he didn't answer. I rang again, managed to speak to him, there had been a stuffup, and he's leaving now.

I headed to the service station to wait for him, grabbed some junk food. He rang me again, he'd meet me at the servo a little bit up the freeway to save time.

I bought the junk food, shoved it in my bike, headed for the freeway. I went up to the servo he was talking about, pulled off. I went in the wrong place, ended up in the truck part of the servo. I rode around, couldn't find where to get into the car section, bugger it, I just rode across the foot path.

I got all setup, sitting in the carpark, music on, phone ready, drinking an energy drink, and eating a chocolate bar.

Very surprisingly, about halfway through, my mate turned up, he must have low flown the whole way.

There were a couple of chicks looking at us, my mate went in to relieve himself, came back, we jumped on the bikes, and took off . The chicks timed it so as to leave at the same time.

We got back on the freeway, they were looking at us the whole time. My mate rode up really close, and they starting writing notes and holding them up in the back window. Very celeverly, they decided to ask where we were going, yeah, it'll be pretty easy to tell them while travelling at 130km/h.

They were putting up signs asking stuff like am I his mate, and will I take them for a ride, ah, I'm all for a bit of mucking around, but not on the freeway at high speed.

I went past them at one point, they were waving and mucking around. I just left them behind.

After a few minutes, they came up and overtook again.

I hung back, my mate went around the sides of the car, mucking around, eventually, after about 10 minutes, the chick wrote her phone number on a card, passed it out the window to my mate, he grabbed it, and shoved it in his pants, and we kept going.

We got up to Newcastle, got off the freeway, headed into the Uni, parked at the Uni.

I'd missed a call from my mate I go to dinner with, he wanted me to give him a call when I got home, to find out how my mate was, and to chat about some other things.

We went to the Uni bar, we were looking for our mate, he turned up a couple of minutes later, with his hand all bandaged up.

We sat and had a drink, and he told us what happened. He'd been riding along, not really paying attention to the road, there was glass all over it, and it caused the back wheel of his bike to slip out, he tried to balance it, correct it, but it didn't work, and he got thrown off.

He went left hand first down on to the road, breaking his wrist, he then slid on his helmet on the road, and hit all the rest of his body on the road.

He jumped up, picked up the bike (not realising his wrist was broken), the engine was still running, and it was still in gear, so he just revved it up a bit, aimed it for the gutter, and dropped the clutch, it went flying at the gutter, hit it, bounced up, landed off the road, and stalled.

No one helped him at all.

He crashed right near the hospital, so he dragged his bike up there, he was having difficulty moving it, because his left wrist was broken, so he couldn't hold the clutch in (and the gear lever pivot was broken, so he couldn't get it out of gear), he asked some guy to help him, who told him that his back was stuffed, so he couldn't, but the woman he was with jumped out of the car and helped my mate push his bike.

He went into the hospital, had his armed checked, they put a cast on his wrist, and let him go.

He went to Uni after that.

We told him about the chicks on the freeway, had a laugh.

We then realised we had 2 bikes, 2 helmets, and 3 people. I took my mate with the broken wrist on the back of my bike, wearing my mate's helmet., over to his bike, parked at the hospital (where his helmet was), I then brought my mate's helmet back with me to the Uni (and took a wrong turn, and went for a scenic ride through the Uni, before deciding to go back, and find the right way).

I gave my mate back his helmet, and he followed me to the hospital. Now we had 3 bikes, 3 helmets, and 2 people that could ride.

We got the bike going, it was in 3rd gear, so we could move it on the road fairly easily. After a couple of minutes of getting used to it, we decided to go. My mate locked his bike, and left it at the hospital, I carried my mate with the broken wrist, and we went back to the place he's living.

It took a few minutes, and was a fairly interesting ride, but my mate managed to ride the bike about 60km/h the whole way, and didn't really need to change gears.

He showed us his place, and we bummed around there for a while. About 9.30, we decided to go and get my mate's bike from the hospital. He jumped on, and we headed back towards the hospital.

We both couldn't remember the way, and buggered it up, we ended up going a long way, but we got there. He grabbed his bike, and we headed back to my mate's place. We got fuel on the way (I had nearly run out), and then headed to KFC to get some dinner. It was a bit past 10pm, They had shut, but luckily our mate had gone in and bought food before they shut, and grabbed a six pack from somewhere.

We went back to his place, ate dinner, had a beer (which hit the spot) and a chat (and I found out why we didn't end up bring the van/trailer up). We sat and chatted until about 11.35, I said I wanted to get home, so we left just after that.

We came back home, I kept to about 115/120km/h on the freeway, so my mate slowly left me behind.

My mp3 cd player starting mucking up, so I slowed down so it could work (not great at high speed), it started working again, then I got stuck behind a truck going through roadworks where it was down to 1 lane.

Not long after that, I got off the freeway, rode the bit home, and pulled in. It was just after 1am.

I don't think my mate would have appreciated me returning his call, now that I'm home.

It's now after 2am. I am freezing cold, tired, I've ridden about 200km today. Bedtime.