Gees it was cold this morning, and it's not even winter yet (until tomorrow).

Apparently the coldest day this year, it was 5 degrees at 6.30am.

I tried to call into the radio station competition again, but I must have been too quick, because after thay said "call now", I hammered the redial, and it rang, and rang, and rang, so I must have been one of the first 10 callers they ignore, byt the time I tried again, it was jammed.

I got up a bit after 7am, it was freezing.

I got ready, taking my time. I didn't leave until about 8am.

I haven't got enough fuel to go all the way. D'oh. Maybe I can on reserve.

I got about halfway between home, and where I had the accident last week, I'm going down the hill, getting a good pace after slipping up at the lights, when a car comes out, far in front, but going really slow, great, I'll get stuck behind this all the way around now.

As I pulled up behind it, I recognised it, it's my mate's dad, who I used to work for.

I wondered how long it would take for him to recognise me.

I just sat behind him, all the way around, after we got around the corner where the accident was, just about to go up the hill, he saw me, and waved, my mate in the passenger seat turned around and nodded.

We went up the hill, and I managed to get in front as we headed towards the freeway.

I held the lead for most of the way, but on the descent at the end of the freeway, he got in a better, lane, and left me behind.

I caught up though, heading down the highway, until he turned off to go a different way a few kilometres before DMR where I'm working.

I got to work about 9.15am. There was enough fuel too, 232km and I'm still not on reserve.

I went in, did some work, put my timesheet in.

I called up the temping agency about my pay, since it's $5/hr wrong. They said they'd get back to me.

I got back to work, went and looked at the windows server for the project I'm working on, fiddled around with that for a bit.

Went back to my desk, and mucked around with some html stuff.

My phone rang, it was the plastering guy, apparently I'm very hard to get a hold of. He was having issues getting on the internet, and wanted to know if I could look at it, I said I would come around tonight and have a look.

I sent a few emails to try to get my domains sorted out, didn't really get anywhere.

I went out just after lunch, and rode up to jaycar to get parts for the serial cables I'm supposed to be sending out today (oops, more things I was supposed to do on the weekend).

I went and got some fuel, and then I went back to work.

On the way back, my gear leave jammed, and I couldn't change down from 2nd to 1st, bit of a worry. I managed to force it, and it was fine after that. I think I really need to check the oil.

I worked a bit more, on getting the data into a reasonable format to load into oracle. It's going to take a while to clean all the baddata, people have put space delimited commas in the text, and it makes it hard to get rid of them, because it causes delimiters where they don't belong, and pushes all the fields out.

I was speaking to the project manager, when my phone rang again, I sent it to my message service.

I worked a bit more, and then I called my mate back, apparently he was having issues with his bike, and wanted to know if I could help him, but I couldn't because I was still at work.

I worked on the data until about 5.30pm, and then I left.

I realised about 5 minutes after leaving that I'd left my usb memory thing at work.

I got off the freeway, and went down to the plastering guy's place.

I tried to work out what was wrong with his internet connection, but the machine was unusable. svchost.exe eating up the whole cpu. I seem to recall this being a worm or a virus or something.

I battled with the machine for about 1/2 hour, but I didn't get anywhere, you'd click on something, and it would take 5 minutes to do anything.

I said I would have to come back on Wednesday and fix it.

I left. I called up the lady who's computer I was supposed to fix on the weekend, her daughter's boyfriend had fixed it for her. Good, something less for me to do.

As I was on the phone to her, I noticed my tail light was out again. Damn I'm sick of replacing these.

I dug around in the saddlebag, and found the spare bulb, and put it in.

I took off, I went to the supermarket, and got some dinner.

While I'm waiting in the line of the one register that's open, some old woman says "be careful you don't trip" to me, in reference to the fact that one of the velcro straps on the bike trousers has come un velcroed, and is flapping around, yeah, I'm really going to trip on a strap that's on the outside of the trousers (ie, not between my legs), and not long enough to reach the ground.

I paid for my frozen meal, and I left.

I headed around the corner, to get back on the road, I was so busy looking if anything was coming up behind me, for me to merge, that I didn't notice a speed bumb, and I got huge air off it, woo.

I went up the road, and headed to my mate's ex gf's place, where there was some mail for me apparently. I popped in, got my mail, and then I left again.

I went around to my mate's place, to see what was up with his bike, if there was anything I could do, but he wasn't there.

I stuck my head in the garage, and saw his bike there, so he's got it home.

I came home after that.

9.10pm. time to put my dinner on, and do a bit more tivo archiving. There might even be something worth watching on the tivo, now that it's got some free space.

Oops, I have to make up 2 tivo serial cables too.

I woke up about 3pm, watched some tv.

I got up about 5pm.

I've got a terrible headache.

I had breakfast, watched some more tv.

I archived some more stuff off the tivo.

I realised there were quite a few things I was intending to do this weekend, but I've not done any of them. I was supposed to:

pick up/fix/return a pc
install a network card in another pc
change the oil in my bike
wash my shirts

I'll get the pc tomorrow night, fix it over a couple of nights, and return it later in the week.

I'll either give the guy the network card to install himself, or do it one night.

I'll have to do the oil next weekend.

Luckily I've got a couple of clean shirts left, so I'll have to wash the others tomorrow night, and put them in the dryer.

It's 9.30pm. time for lunch.

I woke up about midday, and I started watching some tv.

I got up about 1pm.

I didn't do much, I reinstalled windows one my machine that crapped itself the other day.

I burned a couple of cds, and started on tivo archiving again.

Woohoo, after I was able to delete some recordings, the tivo started working again, actually recording things.

About 5pm, I decided to drill a few more holes in my exhaust, to make it a bit louder, and perhaps stop people from changing lanes on me.

I couldn't find my bike key. I looked all over, but I couldn't find it.

I hope I didn't do something stupid like leave it in the bike again.

I went down to check, nope, it's not hanging out of the barrel.. it's sitting on the seat. D'oh.

I came back up, got the drill, and went down to have a go at drilling some more holes.

As I expected, with a cordless drill, it was a complete waste of time, and I gave up again.

I came back inside.

I sat around and did not much for a while, had some dinner.

About 10.25pm, one of my mate's called me, they were down the club, was I coming down etc.

I had been putting off going out, because it looked so cold out there.

I grabbed my stuff, and I took off. It was freezing out there.

I got down the club, had a couple of drinks.

My mate had shaved his head, and it made him look about 13 years old, like Bobby Hill.

Just before midnight, some idiot who must have been drunk, fell head first on to our table, and his head belted a full schooner of beer that went flying everywhere. He just stood back up again like nothing happened.

One of my mates went out and told one of the bouncers, and he got thrown out.

I was down the club until nearly 3am, then I came home.

I mucked around with tivo/dvd archiving again for a bit, and went to bed about 4am.

Pretty much everyone left shortly after 4pm, so I packed up and left about 4.45.

I really couldn't be bothered sitting stuck in the traffic today.

Just after I left, I saw a chance to get through the traffic some of the way, so I went up as far as I could fit, when I'd normally just wait unless I'm sure I can get the whole way.

I did this again, and anded up behind another bike.

We went up the highway a bit.

We got near a set of lights, and the bike in front of me, instead of going up between the cars, went sideways, across the lanes, and then turned to go down between a couple of lanes, but there wasn't room for him to get back straight again.

I had a look, and I was pretty sure I'd be able to get through, just.

I started going up between the cars, got past 2 or 3, and then when I came to the next ones, they were pretty close, I angled my bike to go above/below the mirrors, but I couldn't angle it enough, so my right mirror just tapped the passenger side mirror of the car on the right, but on the left, my handlebar tapped the driver's side mirror on the car to my left.

There was a bit of a crunch noise, oh well, and I kept going up towards the line. Just after I hit the guy's mirror, he shouted something, but I just ignored him.

I pulled up to the line, and I looked in my left mirror (which was still set properly, the right one was pushed in towards me) where I could see the poofy looking guy. He took off his seatbelt, and opened the car door.

No worries, as soon as he gets a few steps away from his car, I'll just run the red light and leave him behind.

I checked the intersection, it was clear to run, because some idiot drivers had got into the intersection, and there wasn't room for them to get out again, so no one was going anywhere, I could have ridden between them.

Just as I was about to run the red light, it went green, cool. I started to go across the intersection, to go in front of one idiot stuck in the middle of the intersection, and without looking, he starts to move to try to get out of the intersection.

I swore at him, then I had to go sideways across the intersection, around the back of him, and back across to the lane I was trying to head into.

I pushed my way through the traffic for a bit, trying to make sure I could get a bit of distance from the dope who's mirror I bumped. I wouldn't really care if he came up to me, I'd just give him a mouthfull, or a mouthfull of glove, but I can't really be bothered, I just want to go home.

A few minutes later I was able to squeeze through, and leave most of the crap of drivers who want to go 30 km/h behind.

That guy had no hope of catching me now.

The rest of the trip was pretty much uneventful, the batteries in my mp3 player ran out just before I got on the freeway, and the first few kilometres of the freeway were like they were last week, stuck in second gear, and even stopping, only to find it's just caused by stupid people that can't drive.

I spent the night configuring the machine I started yesterday, and went to bed about 3am.

I got up, got ready.

Very cold this morning.

I was going to wear another hawaiian shirt, but they're all either too small, or too creased, or missing buttons.

I rode down this morning without issue.

While battling it down the highway, I saw the guy on the bike with the big ape hangers I've seen a couple of times inthe last few weeks.

We had a bit of a race through the traffic, in different lanes, swapping as to who was winning depending on what cages were in the lanes in front of us.

After doing this for a few ks, he pulled up along side me while waiting for some lights (where we didn't fit to lane split the cages), and we had a quick chat.

He took off after that, he picked better lanes than I did.

I got to work, did some work.

I emailed the colo guy to let him know what I've done so far.

I just rang up 8 different bike wreckers, and none have anything like my bike, terrific. I'm stuffed now, I don't know what to do.

The guy yesterday told me he can do a whole exhaust system for $1200, it's tempting, but I'd have to get some stuff to make sure it wouldn't get all stuffed if I drop my bike again.

I left work about 3pm, I was so tired, I felt like I was going to fall asleep, and I couldn't concentrate, so there was no point me being there.

I went to the wholesaler on the way home, and I bought a network card for the guy I'd been on the phone to a couple of times.

I went home, and I pulled into the bike place to confirm the part the guy thought I was after.

When he showed me the diagram, it was nothing like what I was after.

They had a 650 there, so we went out, and I showed the guy the part I was talking about.

We went back in, and the guy looked, that part is not available as a spare, just as I suspected, as it's welded to the exhaust. Half the exhaust is required in order to get that part, and it costs $730 something.

I've got bugger all chance of getting that out of the chick.

The guy suggested I try some wreckers, which is probably a good idea, I've had a bit of luck with that before, when I found a replacement swingarm for my 250.

I ordered a new lens, to replace the scratched one with the hole in it.

I took off, and I went around to visit the guy in the electronics place where I put the aerial up on the roof last year, before it had to be taken down.

I had a conversation with the guy for a short while, and then I went home.

I called up the colo guy, to see when he was going to be taking the machine to the colo, I spoke to his wife, since he wasn't in there.

He had left to take the machine in, so I said that was what I was after confirming.

I grabbed the colo keys, a power cable, network cable, and my Debian cd, and I took off.

I went to the colo, and looked at the machine.

It's got red hat on it, no cdrom drive. D'oh.

I found a couple of floppy disks hanging around, and booted up my laptop that lives in my rack, to download the rescue/root disks, and bootstrap the install.

After mucking around for about 20 minutes, I discovered the floppy drive in my laptop appears to be stuffed.

I don't have floppy drives in any of my servers, but I do have root access to the machine I'm about to install, and it has a floppy drive.

I backed up the floppy disks I was going to use, and then found a network issue between the server and the laptop.

I moved the network connection, and worked around that.

I booted the install, and then the root disk, but it didn't detect the network card in the machine. d'oh, I'll need the 4 driver floppies, and I don't have a floppy drive with network access now.

I tried forcing in the modules from the red hat install on the hard drive, but that install was using kernel 2.4, and the install floppy had kernel 2.2 on it, somehow I doubt I will be able to force a 2.4 module into a 2.2 kernel (but I tried anyway :-)

I rebooted, and booted the machine back into red hat, to at least work out what the network card is. a 3c59x.

I'd now been in the colo for an hour, and achieved nothing.

I almost brought a spare cdrom with me. d'oh.

I decided to pinch the cdrom drive out of one of the machines in here.

I went around, pulled the machine out, carefully unplugged the drive, the machine kept running, I unscrewed it, and pulled it out of the machine.

I installed the drive in the new machine, booted the cd up, did a basic install, configured it, installed ssh, tested it, and then I went home.

I had a conversation with my parents for a while, and then I came out.

I dist upgraded the install, put on mysql, and freeradius, and configured and tested freeradius.

I stuck webmin on, configured it, and then decided to finish it later.

I went to bed about 11.30pm

I just called the bike place, and described the part as best I could, the guy went and looked at the microfilm for the bike, he thinks he found the right part, $89.65 for it.

That sounds about right, too bad I couldn't find it on the road, I could have just got it welded back on.

I thought about it on Tuesday night, and I don't see how it could have just disappeared. Someone must have pinched it off the road. I hope they burnt their hands on it.

I'm going out to adjust my handlebars

I didn't get around to fixing my bars again last night, so I had to ride down with them all stupid again.

I adjusted the back brake before I left, I just tightened up the rod from the lever. I think I did it a bit tight though, because on the way, I almost locked up the back wheel coming to a stop at the traffic lights.

I had just got to work, and was about to start working on the database file from last night, when the technical guy I'm working for came over, and gave me some work to do, the work I was originally got in a couple of weeks ago to do.

I started working on that, back on relocating stuff from an old server that's getting decommissioned.

I checked in on the domain registrar, apparently you can't use their web interface to change the settings of the domain, that's pretty clever since I did when I moved it the first time.

I tried updating it again, still no good.

My mate said there was food on.

I went in to the rec room, and it's the fund raising morning tea thing on today, I donated a couple of bucks, had some cake, and then I came back to my desk.

I called up the colo guy, and I explained to him the issues I was having with the domain, and the workaround I had in place, but that the routes were gone, and the passwords changed, so I couldn't put them back.

He put the routes back, but it still wasn't working. Hmm.

Perhaps the virtual interfaces are down I setup.. yep.

We put the virtual interface up, and then I was able to traceroute to it, but the domain still did not resolve.

Ahh.. I need to restart bind, because it doesn't listen on addresses that weren't present when it was started.

After restarting it, everything was fine, and the domain is back, but still kludgily, requiring virtual interfaces, and static routes.

The colo guy has a machine to be setup to replace his radius server, so I asked him to park that in the colo, and I'll go in and bootstrap it tonight, and then set it up from home.

If I can get that done, and working with my radius server, then I can change the nas settings back again, and it will all be working, web, mail, radius, billing. everything.

I'll price the replacement part of my exhaust that went missing, and then I'll try calling the chick that cut me off, and see if I can get her to pay for it.

I went down and adjusted my handlebars last night, because they're a little bit off straight.

I went down, got the tools out, loosened the clamps, and then I was able to put them straight, I tightened it all up, and came back inside, and went to bed.

I got up this morning, got ready, went down, loaded up my bike, and went to take off.

It was now that I realised I had adjusted the handlebars to be a lot higher than they were supposed to be, it felt like I had apehanger handlebars.

I didn't have time to fix it, so I rode it to work. I'll come out at lunch and adjust them.

I got there about 9.15am, we had some consultants coming at 9.30, that charge $200 an hour.

I got in, and checked the export from last night I ran, it had broken the server about 2 hours after I started it. I think I need to adjust it back to be more friendly on the server.

The consultants turned up, and we sat and told them about the legacy system, and what we needed the replacement system to be able to do.

The whole time, it was a case of "yeah, it can do that, no worries".

We went up to the server, and we got that properly configured.

After fiddling around with that for a bit, and going over the details for confirmation, it was now that it became evident that "yeah, it can do what you want", however "but you need to write the scripts to make it do what you want".

Hmm, so now, we get to run their software at the front, which runs on IIS, and all the functionality, the linking, has to be done in scripts that we write.

I'd rather just build our own solution from the start, instead of just building half of one, and having some expensive proprietry software on the front of it. Oh well.

They left after an hour, and we'd come to the conclusion that in order to work properly, we'll have to have a database (oracle) holding the tables we need to be able to search.

I got to work trying to remember how to load stuff into oracle, working out control file formats, designing the tables, data types, field limits, date formats.

I don't remember it being this hard (yes, I do, it was harder I think, back when I was at CSC trying to load AMP's asset management database).

At least in this case the schema consists of two tables, no joins, and it's in English.

I worked all day, I got one table loaded in, and went to work on the other table.

I didn't go for lunch, and I forgot about adjusting my handlebars.

I gave up on trying to get the second table loaded, there's all junk delimiters through the file, and I'll have to reprocess it to get them out.

I left work about 5.30pm, I was a bit hungry at this point.

As I walked out to my bike, the manager of the department I'm supposed to be working in was leaving too, he had a look at my bike, and then I loaded it up and I left.

I decided to pull into KFC to get some lunch.

I pulled in, shoved everything in my bag, and went in, carrying my key and my wallet.

I realised I had no cash on me, and I couldn't see any eftpos machines.

I walked next door the service station, and I withdrew some cash.

I thought that I possibly needed fuel, I checked my bike on the way back to KFC, and found that I did need fuel.

I went into KFC, bought my food, and sat down and ate it.

Some guy came and sat at the table right next to mine, (even though there were stacks of empty ones) annoying me.

I finished my food, stood up, dumped the rubbish off the tray into the bin, put the tray back, and then realised I couldn't find my key.

I checked all my pockets, even ones I never would have put the key in, and I couldn't find it.

Uh oh, I think I put it on the tray, when I got my food, and I just dumped it in the bin.

I pushed the flap of the bin open, and looked in, I couldn't see it, but I must have dumped it in there.

I went over to the counter, and explained the guy, I thought it better than to just start rifling through the bin, like a bum.

He said to "go for it", in response to me going through the bin.

I went over, dragged the bin out of the cabinet, and started carefully looking for my key.

Perhaps it's just sitting on the top here, near my empty drink can, nope.

I was being careful not to move much stuff, so that it wouldn't end up down the bottom somewhere.

I couldn't find it, so I started going a bit deeper. I'm looking for a silver and black key, with a large red keyring attached. I had to come to KFC didn't I, where every wrapper, box, carton, etc, are all red.

I ended up going right down to the bottom of the bin, through half eaten pieces of chicken, and other gross things, and then I spotted my keyring, right at the bottom.

I grabbed my key out, put the bin back, and then turned around. The guy asked if I'd found it, I held it up and nodded.

I walked out, jumped on my bike, and I rode it across the footpath back and into the service station, I filled up, paid, came back, moved my bike away from the pump, put all my gear on, and got back on the road.

I headed up the freeway (once I eventually got to it), and it rained a few spots along, so I couldn't go too fast (and I still had my stupid handlebars).

I went to the supermarket near the end of the freeway, got some Coke and chocolate, and went home.

I got home about 7.30pm.

I bummed around on the computer for a while.

My mate I go to dinner with (when I remember :-) called me.

He'd signed up a few people today, but because my dns isn't working, my mail server is not available, and he'd put email addresses on the colo guy's domain setup. I'm really not happy with this.

I spoke to him for a few minutes, saying that I didn't really want this setup, and I'd rather the people went somewhere else all together, than have half an account, and the wrong email address.

I said I would call the colo guy to try to get my routing workaround (because I can't fix the domain settings) back up, which makes the website and the email server accessable.

I called the colo guy, briefly explained the issues, and he asked me to call him in the morning, that was fine, since I didn't expect him to do anything tonight, and it's not that urgent.

I started copying some CDs, and after going through a few, all of a sudden my machine (AMD2600 I built recently), started mucking up.

Windows blue screened, and said "unable to write files to drive c: data or files may be lost". Oh crap. the disk must have failed.

I rebooted the machine, and it started booting, ok, maybe windows just went dumb.

Windows started to boot, but it had a bunch of errors, about missing dlls, and stuff crashing.

I rebooted again, it did the same thing.

I booted with a floppy, and went to look at c:, to see if there was corruption or something.

When I looked at c:, there was no windows directory, or program files. it looked like it was another drive, my d: or something. The disk must have failed, and now d: has become c:

I rebooted again, and now the machine tried to boot off the network. great, the disk must be stuffed.

I boot off the floppy again, started up partition magic..

wtf.. my c: is now e:, and e: is now c:.

I thought perhaps the bios was scrambled, and had detected the disks in the wrong order or something, so I tried resetting it, but no matter what, it kept detecting them in the same order, 60gb, 120gb, 120gb. When it should have been the opposite order.

I pulled the disks out, and I connected the secondary master (which was c:, and became e:) alone, as the primary master, it was now back as c:, but windows was still not working, I think it's screwed.

It doesn't make sense. When I built the machine, I must have connected the disks in the wrong order, but it booted off the secondary master, and set it as c:, and now, even though I've had the machine for a few weeks, and rebooted umpteen times, it's only just worked it out, in the middle of running. Weird as.

I tried restoring an old backup of the registry, but that didn't fix it windows, it still complains dlls are missing, even though they are there, and in c:\windows\system. Stuffed if I know what's going on.

At least the disks are all ok, and the data is all still there. I don't really care if windows is stuffed, I'll just reinstall it, or put linux on, as I've been planning to do.

I booted up with knoppix, everything was there, and ok. I turned the machine off, and went to bed.

What a fantastic day (/sarcasm).

I woke up with the alarm at 6.30am, and I lay awake for a bit, but I just couldn't stay awake.

I fell asleep just after 7am, and didn't wake up until nearly 8am.

I had a shower, got ready, and I didn't end up leaving until about 8.40am, but I'm not sure of the time, it maye have been a bit earlier.

It had been raining outside, and the road was a bit slippery, so I was being careful riding.

I rode around to got on the freeway, and a couple of intersections before heading up the hill to get on the freeway, there was a lot of traffic.

I came to a stop, and then I moved into the start of the empty lane, and rode down towards the traffic lights.

A few seconds after getting into this lane, car pulled out in front of me, and I only had a few metres until I was upon in, I grabbed the front brake, and it locked up, I heard it screetching, but by the time I realised what was happening, it was already too late, and the bike was slipping out from under me.

I hit the ground, and I rolled over a couple of times.

I stood up, to see where the car was I was trying to avoid, and it was heading off down the road.

I left my bike, which was sickly idling, and I started running down the road, to at least get the number plate if the car kept going.

It got to the intersection, where the light was red, and I caught up to it a short time later, it was about 100m down the road from where my bike was.

As I got alongside it, the window went down, and the girl says "I'm stopping! I'm stopping!".

Yeah, well it would have been nicer if you had stopped immediately, or pulled off the road near the accident, instead of making it look like you were going to drive off and leave me lying on the road.

I told her to pull into the car park on the otherside of the intersection.

I jogged/limped back up to my bike, still on it's side in the middle of the road, it had stalled now.

As I was coming back up to my bike (or running down the road, I'm not exactly sure), someone was asking if I wanted an ambulance. I did not, and had no need for one, the only damage to me I can see is that the knee of my pants are ripped, so I answered that no, I was ok.

I started picking my bike up, thinking how typical it was that no one had stopped to help, when one of the guys from the plaster place on the side of the road came over, and helped me pick it up, he then helped me move it across off the road.

I asked if he had seen it, but he had only seen me running down the road chasing the car.

I noticed some fuel had run across the tank.

I turned my bike off, and took the key out.

I jogged back down to cross the intersection to see the girl, and I now realised my knee was hurting pretty badly.

As I was waiting for the lights to change, so I could cross, I could hear someone beeping their horn. I looked around, but I couldn't see who.

I turned back to wait, and heard it again, I looked around again, and saw a girl in a car motioning for me to get in, I went in and got in the car, she asked if I was ok, she had seen the whole thing.

Just as I got in, the lights on the intersection went green, and she drove across the intersection and into the carpark, and pulled up next to the car I had avoided hitting.

I asked her to stay there for a minute, and she said that was fine.

I got out, to speak to the girl in the car that cut me off.

She was on the phone, had the door shut, and the window up, so I just waited there, and she ignored me.

She got off the phone, and opened the window.

I cannot remember the exact exchange at this point.

I asked if we knew who's fault it was (ie, for her to admit it was her fault), and she said she did not know, but that her dad and her brother were police, and she could get them down here.

I said she should do that, if she didn't think she would be bothering them.

I asked how long she thought that might take, and she said it could be about 25 minutes.

She got on the phone again, and she called her dad (I assume).

She spoke to him for a short while. While she was on the phone, I went around to see the girl who drove me over, and I asked for her details, and explained that there were police on their way, but they would take a while, so she could go, and I would be able to contact her if I needed to.

She gave me her details that she had already written down.

I stepped away, and started taking my gear off (jacket, jumper etc), because it was so hot, and the sun had come out for a brief period of time.

I went back over to the car, she was still on the phone.

She said to me that we were both at fault, because we both failed to change lanes safely, (according to her dad).

That's pretty clever based on only what she has told him, when she caused the accident by not even seeing me, so I don't know how she could have explained what had happened.

I asked to speak to him, and she gave me the phone.

I asked to briefly explain my side, I was able to say that I was several cars behind her, I had moved into the lane where it started, and she came out and cut me off, and I had to throw my bike down to avoid hitting her car.

He said that it was my word against hers, and that I would have to go to court about it.

I said I had a witness to the whole thing, and he then said that I would still have to go to court, and my witness would have to go to court too, and if my witness did not, then I would lose, and carried on like this.

I noticed a paddy wagon stopped at the lights, I said there was a police vehicle here, and asked if I should flag it down, he said that was my choice, but that if I was injured, they would not take particulars, and I would have to contact the police on some telephone number (which he told me, but I don't remember), and he also gave me the telephone number of the police station, where I could report it.

I flagged the paddy wagon down, I thought they saw me, and the left turn blinker went on, and I expected them to enter the carpark, but they did not. I thought perhaps they were heading around the corner, to come in a different entrance, but they did not, they either didn't see me (fairly difficult, since I was standing right near them, waving my arm at them, or chose to ignore me).

I then told him the vehicle had not stopped, and he went on to tell me something about how procedures had changed relating to accidents, and reporting them, and gave me the number I should contact, of the local police station to report it. He also mentioned that things had changed, and he had been "out" for about 2 years now.

He then asked me to put his daughter back on.

I gave the phone back to the girl at this point, and she spoke to him for a few minutes before she got off the phone.

I asked for her details, and she gave me some paper and a pen to write my own down.

We swapped details, and then I asked what we wanted to do at this point, argue over who's fault it was (ie no, I don't and you shouldn't want to either), but then she took me literally, and started arguing.

I said I did not care, that I would go and look at my bike, and if it wasn't too bad, then I would either just sort it out myself, or I would contact her, and get her to pay for it, if it was like $100 in parts or something, or go halves, because I'm reasonable.

I left, and I walked back up to my bike.

I had a look at it, and I couldn't see anything really obviously wrong with it. The existing damage looked a bit worse.

The front wheel guard was scratched again, in the same place as when I ran off the road in Brisbane, glad I didn't pay the $750 to replace that. This time it was sort of discoloured, probably heat generated from sliding.

The right footpeg was bent up, the brake lever more bent than it was before, the front blinker was bent back a bit, and the lens scrtached, the plastic around the back right blinker was worn down a bit (but still attached). The part where the mirror is bolted on was more scratched than it was before.

I tried calling my mate who works at the place I'm at, but his phone said he was unavailable.

I called the project manager of the database project I'm working on, since he's probably wondering where I am. He didn't answer either, so I left a message.

I kept looking over my bike, and I noticed that part of the exhaust was missing, a chrome bit that goes over the actual pipes, the welding had snapped, and it had come off.

I looked on the road to see if it was there, I couldn't see it.

I walked up the road a bit, and crossed to the middle of the road, where my bike went down, but it was gone.

I saw the scratches on the road where my bike slid along on it's side.

I looked in the gutter, and on the grass off the road on the other side, but the part was just gone. Stuffed if I know where it went.

I went back to my bike, and I tried starting it, it didn't have any issues starting or idling.

I kicked the footpeg back down near where it belongs, I shoved most of my stuff I had taken off (jumper, neckwarmer, balaclava) into my bag, along with the bag cover, and I put my jacket and helmet on.

I went to ride off, this was when I noticed that the handlebars were not in the correct position, they were back wrong as they ended up when I went off the road in Brisbane about a year ago.

I wasn't sure what to do, I can go home, and straighten the handlebars up, but I don't want to go on the freeway if there's something seriously wrong.

I rode around to the motorbike place slowly and carefully, I rode up, and saw the mechanic.

He came out and had a look at my bike for me, but he couldn't see anything really wrong with it, other than the obvious damage, most of which was already there before, just not as bad.

He hopped on it, and yanked the handlebars around, and they popped almost exactly back into place.

This is when we noticed the lens on the front right blinker was scratched again, with a hole in it. Bugger, this is the lens I just replaced, just before Christmas, when I had my accident near the same intersection.

The mechanic got a big shifter, and he used it to bend the brake lever back where it belonged.

He showed me a bolt in the bracket that holds the brake lever and the footpeg, that's used to adjust where the brake lever sits, it's all bent, but that's old, because the brake lever has been bent and in the wrong place for ages.

I asked him anything might cause my bike to be defected, like the part of the exhaust missing, he said the bit missing off the exhaust doesn't matter, it's the scratched lens that may cause issues, if I was to get pulled over.

The mechanic went away for a second, I got my wallet out to check what I had on me, a $20 note.

The mechanic came back, with an old bolt, and some tape, and he taped up the back left blinker that's been hanging off for ages, and I keep taping up.

I tried to give the mechanic the $20, but as usual, he refused to take it, he said he'd get it from me next time (which is what he says everytime).

I said that I was planning on changing my oil this weekend, since I haven't done it for about 300 thousand kilomtres, so I'd come and buy it from him, and he laughed.

I got back on my bike, and headed back towards the freeway, I went up, got on the freeway, and just took it easy, once I felt that the bike was ok, I pushed it a bit, and didn't have any issues.

As I got near the end of the freeway, and was decelerating, my bike started mucking around.

Then as I headed on to the off ramp, I realised I was out of fuel, I'd only done 210km on this tank. I must have lost about 10km worth of fuel, in the amount that leaked out while my bike was on it's side.

I put it on reserve, and started heading down the highway. I pulled into a servo.

As I got off to refill the tank, I realised my knee was really aching now.

I filled the tank, and then I limped across to go in and pay.

The guy asked me how my day was, terrific so far, having just had an accident, and he told me to make sure I look after myself.

I limped back, got back on, and continued on my way.

I got to work, just after 11am.

I went inside, dumped all my stuff. One of the guys in the work area asked if I'd hurt my leg, and I said I had a prang, and one of the other guys said that that was why he wasn't a biker, it's not you that you have to worry about, it all the idiots on the road.

I took off the torn motorbike trousers, my mate will not be impressed when I give them back, I noticed that my bike jeans had a tiny tear in the knee, I pulled them up, and checked my leg, just a graze.

There was a note on my screen from the project manager, to give him a call when I got in.

I wasn't in the mindset for logging into the pc and checking how last night's export went just at this minute, so I decided to go up and see him.

I went out, got in the lift, went up to level 5, went to his office, it was empty.

I wandered around towards where the dba sits, in case he was around there, but he was not, and the dba wasn't either, so I went back around to the lifts, to come downstairs, as I was waiting for the lift, the project manager appeared, and I stood and chatted with him for a couple of minutes.

He hadn't answered my call earlier, because he was on the phone, and didn't recognise my number, he thought it was a real estate agent calling him.

I said I was ok, and that I was going to get to work now, after a coffee.

I came back downstairs, and I went to the coffee shop next door.

I mentioned to the guy in there about what had happened, and he said exactly the same thing had happened to him, someone just changed lanes and cut him off, he had to dump the bike to avoid hitting them.

He had someone on the back too, and didn't have a license, and it wasn't his bike.

He came off, and managed to go onto the grass of the median strip, so he was ok.

Apparently it cost hime about $2500 to fix the bike up.

He gave me my coffee, and I limped back inside.

I sat and did some work.

I was having great difficulty, and I couldn't think straight.

I managed to do some work however.

I got a call from the woman whose pc has been at my place for months for me to fix it. "You haven't managed to get around to fixing that yet have you?" "yes, it's done, I did it on the weekend. I put some extra memory in it I found, so that's all I'm billing you for, because it took so long." She insisted on paying for my time though, even though it took me about 6 months to actually fix the pc.

She asked if she could pick it up tonight, but I said no, because I've still got a nic in it, and the side is off it.

I said I would sort it out tonight, and she could pick it up in the morning.

I got back to work.

I finished writing one of the scripts I had been working on, and I set it up to run, it was going to take about and hour and a half to run.

I went out, to get some lunch, It was now about 3pm. I went up to the Thai place, but all their lunch stuff was gone, I couldn't be bothered trying to pick something off the menu I didn't know what it was, so I came out, went into Subway next door.

After I had told the guy what I wanted, and he'd made it, I realised I had no money.. that $20 I had in my wallet, I spent $14.50 of it on fuel on my way.

I had $8.70 in change in my pocket, and my lunch was $7.95. phew.

I went back to the office, one of the guys from the team said that there was no drinking on the job, unless I was going to share, thinking I was carrying a bottle, before he realised I had a sub roll.

I sat and ate my lunch, and then I tried to get back to work.

I started writing this blog, while it was still in my mind.

The script I was running finished, I kept working on this, then the project manager called me, I told him that the script was done, and I would come up shortly.

I got the keys to the room where the server is upstairs, and I went up. I was able to map a drive to where all the data was that I'd exported.

I went in and saw the project manager, said I would be in mucking around trying to get the software configured.

I went in, and set it up to index, it was slow.

I started looking through all the junk in the room, old 4x cdr drives from 1998, old pcs, millions of old "decpeaters", and ancient equipment.

I spotted a SparcStation IPX on the floor, along with a couple of tape (and perhaps storage) modules.

There's all sorts of junk in that room.

The project manager came in, and I showed him the software running, we decided we would get the vendor of the software in tomorrow (they were supposed to come in today, but he put them off after he got my message), so he went away to arrange to get them in tomorrow morning.

I went back to looking at junk, and I discovered a draw in the desk just full of junk.

The project manager and the dba came in then, and the project manager commented that they'd have to metal detect me on the way out, with all the stuff I'd pinched, and I said that the stuff was such junk, I'd be more likely to bring stuff in from home and dump it in here, to try to get rid of it.

We looked at the software running, it had run through 7000 directories, and there will be about 120000 directories in there, and it had taken 1/2 hour to do that, we worked out it was roughly going to take about 8 1/2 hours to run the whole lot.

I'm not going to stand here and watch it. It was now about 4.45pm

We came out, and I went back downstairs, and continued writing this blog.

The manager of the department I'm working in came and asked how I was feeling, and how my machine was, I spoke to him briefly.

I rang up my mate, whose trousers I'd ripped up, and spoke to him for a short while, he was on the train heading towards the city. He told me that he wasn't really worried about the pants, that's what they are for, and then he went on to tell me that he's getting a car shortly, and we said we might have to catch up on Saturday or something.

We spoke for a bit more, and then the phone dropped out. It was about 5.30pm now. My mate rang me back a minute later, and we spoke for another couple of minutes, before his phone dropped out again, bed reception in a lot of spots on the train line.

I started getting my stuff together, and I got an sms from my mate, he said he'd try to call later.

I put all my stuff on, including the torn pants, since apparently it's raining outside now, and they'll be better than nothing.

I came out, there were 3 bikes parked there now, one guy was just leaving, I loaded up my bike, and started putting my gear on, and another guy turned up and took off. I took off a bit after that.

I rode home, there were a couple of spots of rain on the freeway, so I didn't want to go too fast, unlike most of the people on the freeway.

I came home, and I got changed out of all my gear.

I took my jeans in, and asked mum to stitch up the hole, before it just frays the whole pants away, like usually happens to me.

I sat in there for a while, told them what had happened.

I came out to write this blog, and finish the pc, then have a shower and got to bed.

My phone rang, my message service, it was a message from my mate I go to dinner with. Oops, I was supposed to go up there tonight, I totally forgot.

I called him back, and spoke to him for a bit.

Apparently the colo guy is going to start charging me, because now I have a single customer, paying $10/month. Great, even though I can't add my own customers, my domain name doesn't work, and my email doesn't work (because dns is broken).

The issues with radius aren't likely to get sorted in a hurry, since he apparently only wants to do things when I'm there, that's difficult considering I'm working near the city until like 6pm each night, and he goes away on the weekend.

Ugh.

I'm going to put this pc back together, and then I'm going to have a shower and go to bed.

What a shit day.

I went to work.

I renewed my registration, it took me all of about 2 minutes to renew it online, Queensland is so much better organised than NSW.

I called them up after that, to get my rego sticker sent to me, instead of mucking around trying to get it forwardeded down.

I used paypal to pay for some IT work I'm having done.

I paid my Amex bill, I went to an ATM, but it wouldn't read my card. I tried to find another one.

I went to the supermarket, and asked if I could get cash out, I could, but not enough.

I went to another ATM, got the money, then I went to the post office and paid the bill.

I shelled out over $1000 today.

I went home, didn't do much, and went to bed.

I saw and watched tv.

I was hungry.

I went to the supermarket, and bought some food.

The checkout chick's like "what did you get up to today?"

"nothing. I sat and watched tv, and decided to get some food. bye".

I went to the service station, to get fuel so I wouldn't need to in the morning.

I filled up, went and paid.

I was just about to go home, when I heard a massive screech of brakes on the roundabout.

Unfortunately, dissapointingly, there was no crunch.

A couple of cars pulled over, one on the roundabout must have gone too fast, and slipped out and rubbed all down the side of the car outside it.

I went home.

I woke up at 8am for some reason, went back to sleep for a couple of hours.

I woke up again, and started watching some tv.

As I was lying in bed, I had the song "Bang The Drum" by Todd Rundgren going round in my head, except:

"I don't want to work, I want to bang on the drum all day", became:

"I don't want to work, I want to blog on the web all day", except in my case, it actually that I don't want to blog on the web all day, I want to work all day. I get so wrapped up in my scripting, "in the zone" if you will, that I don't want to stop.

All week, I've only been stopping for a couple of minutes because I'm starving, I go next door, grab something greasy, and go back to my desk and keep working.

The phone rang, here we go again.

I got out of bed and answered it. It was my mate, he'd taken the PC back again, but apparently was having issues with installing the printer.

"It's coming up with an error", he tells me,
"what sort of error?"
"An error installing the usb drivers for the printer", yes, we've established that,
"what is the error message?"
"something about an error installing the drivers. I tried downloading some usb drivers for windows 2000, but nothing came up".

Hmm, I wonder if he's trying to use that shitty usb card I wanted to take out.

"Where are you plugging it in?"
"to the new board",
"to the board, or to that stupid card?"
"the board"
"then try it in the stupid card".
"Ok, hang on for a minute, I'll go and try it"

I wait.

"It's not found anything, do I need to reboot"
"I wouldn't think so". "Do I need to turn the printer on?"

Argh.

I heard him turn the printer on

"Oh, it's come up found new hardware. Where do I want to look for the drivers? there's no floppy, or windows update?"
"turn those off"
"it's found some drivers. Now it's coming up again"
"wait"
"oh it's installed now".
"great, bye".

I hate vagueness, things like:

"some error came up"
"it said error"

what error?

"it doesn't work"

what doesn't work?

"something was flashing"

what, something on the screen?, a light?, someone outside the window?

Don't waste your time telling me shit like that, and don't waste my brain power trying to work out what you are going on about.

Do people like this go to the doctor and say "I've got something wrong", and expect the doctor to know what is wrong, and what to do about it?

For shit's sake, if you are going to expect me to help you, then you must be painfully precise in what you are talking about, otherwise I am going to end up trying to work out what your problem is, and giving you an answer to a problem you are not having.

/rant.

I've done nothing useful today.

After that phone call, I ate some toast (nothing else describable as "food" left), and watched some tv.

I added some things to my scripts that I thought of.

I got a phone call from Mum, she wanted to know if I'd spoken to my cousin, I said that I had, yesterday, and wasn't going to the concert because I couldn't be bothered.

I blogged the past week. It's taken me about 6 hours.

It's terribly difficult to try to remember the events of a whole week. I'm going to need to find a few minutes each day to blog, or at least make notes of the main things that happen, when I come to blog.

In the meantime, while blogging, I also noticed an issue with DNS. For the last few days my domain has not been resolving. I checked, and it seems that besides the fact the DNS servers won't update in the registrar, the virtual interfaces to support those addresses are unreachable too.

I decided to transfer the domain to another registrar, where perhaps I will be able to actually update the settings. I went through finding out how to do that, I had an account at the registrar I wanted to transfer it to, but the stupid registrar won't let me change the company in the username, or the username, so I had to create another account with them, and request the transfer.

Now I need some "domain registry key password" or something, and I can't find where the hell that is. I found some form that allows you to request them, and they get sent to the administrative contact, so I did that. I managed to get one password, totally different to what I thought it was when I generated the transfer request, so it will fail, and I'll have to generate a new one. What a pain this stuff is.

I've eaten the rest of the bread. There is now no food, so I am forced to go and get something to eat.

I thought about going and doing a proper load of shopping, but I can't be bothered, and it looks cold out there.

Maybe I'll just order a pizza. No, I won't, because they are far too expensive, I'll reach the point where I am completely starving, and I'll end up at the supermarket buying junk food about midnight.

I was intending to change the oil in my bike today, since I haven't done it for about 300 thousand kilometres.

Maybe I'll do it tomorrow.

Ugh, here we go again. The phone rings,
"yes mate?"
"I've just had a phone call, from (the woman who owns the hideous pc), she can't send email".
"is there an error?"
"yeah"
"what is it?"
"I don't know".
"then I can't help you. since 'it doesn't work' tells me nothing, and I can't be expected to know what the problem is, or how to fix it"
"oh, I suppose not"
"call me when you have a precise error message, so I have some idea of working out what the problem is" "bye".

The alarm went off, and I lay in bed listening to the radio for a bit.

They had a stupid thing on the radio with some sound you have to work out what it is.

I've been hearing it for over a week now, and it's worth more than $5000.

I'm sure it's windscreen wipers going up and down again.

I decided to try ringing in this morning, the last few days I've not been bothered, but I'm sick of hearing it, and the dumb things that people reckon it is.

I got up, tried ringing a bunch of times, but the number was busy as usual, so I went back to bed again for a bit.

I got up, got ready.

Last Friday, a guy had been wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and got bagged out a bit, I almost wore one last week, and when I saw him wearing one, I said that I would wear one this week, so I picked out the loudest nice looking Hawaiian shirt I've got (not the bright orange one), and I put that on.

A couple of days ago, it occurred to me that my rego is due for renewal soon.

While I was down loading my bike, I checked the tag, yep, May 28th. Crap, I haven't been told of a renewal letter turning up either, I'll have to call Queensland Transport today, and see if I can get my mailing address changed, and reissue of the renewal letter, or an "out of state kit" or something.

I took off, I couldn't be bothered with mp3s again this morning, my ear is sore again. It probably doesn't help that I'm just jamming the earbuds in my ears, and they don't have the crappy rubber bits on them anymore, because they stretched, and went all hard, and fell off. I was forcing them back on for a while, but now they're gone, they must have come out of my pocket at some point.

I bought new earbuds a while ago, when I forgot to bring the proper ones, but they didn't work, I could barely hear the music with it turned up full, letalone while riding at 140km/h. Maybe it was just the crappy ones I bought, and I should try a few different ones.

I got down there just after 9am.

The technical guy I work for, and the tivo guy from yesterday were outside, having a smoke.

They told me not to rush in, because a circuit breaker had blown in the datacentre, and everthing was down.

I hung around outside chatting for a while, they got their coffees and went in.

I ordered a coffee and hung around in the coffee shop waiting for it. One of the guys from the department I'm sitting in was in there, and also a chick from the department both my mate and I are working in, in there. I chatted to them for a bit, and came in to get to work as soon as my coffee was ready.

The stuff I needed was up, so there was no issues there.

I checked the export from last night.. Argh! it fell over at about 8.30pm, and half that time, it was having issues. Only 150 documents came out. So I sat in here until 7pm last night for nothing!

I dumped the other table out (which I hadn't been able to do last night, because the database was down), but the format it came out in was even worse than the format I got when I just did a "select *" and piped it to a file.

I decided to work out how to process the select * export, since it at least has all the fields in the correct order.

We had a meeting, and went over what point we were up to.

I went through some of the issues I'd had, and what was going on, stuff is taking longer than I thought, but nothing has been terribly hard.

After that, I got back to working on the table export. The whole project is basically waiting on this now, once I have this table sorted, then I setup the prototype of the database running off the filesystem, and how the web indexing software works with it.

It took me hours, but I worked out what I had to do to fix the file format up.

It's the most hideous sed script ever, but it works, and it sorts everything out, nicely.

Right in the middle of working it out, my cousin called me, he wanted to know if I was going to the Superjesus concert tomorrow night, I said I had forgotten about it, didn't have a ticket, and I couldn't really be bothered, I'd rather just have a somewhat relaxing weekend of doing nothing.

I reached the point where I was able to process the whole database export (until then I had just been working on a few hundred lines of it, instead of all 100M of it), and tried to run it.

Oops. sed keeps segfaulting.

Maybe it doesn't like working with a single line, 100M long (the result of removing all the linefeeds from the moddle of the records).

I found a different version of sed on the machine, and started running it against that, it was now about 3.20pm.

It ran, and ran, and ran.

They had to take the server I was working on down at 4.30pm.

After 4pm, it was still going.

I think I need to find a smarter way to do this, than expecting sed to grok a 100M long line, breaking the file into chunks, and rebuilding it again or something.

I set up some cron jobs to start the sed script again at 9am tomorrow morning, and also to start the document exports over the weekend.

At 4.30pm, I got a call from the technical guy, he was over at the datacentre, and they wanted to take the box down. I checked I had put the cron entries in properly, and killed the sed that was running (over an hour later, still done nothing), and said he could shut it down.

I called the project manager, but he must have already left.

I shutdown my machine, and I left.

The traffic was appalling, I would much rather spend more time at work, and go home later, since I end up getting home about the same time (that's why I leave home about 8am, get to work around 9am, if I leave home at like 7am, I don't get there until about 8.40am anyway).

I went over to the motorcycle place I got an email from last week, telling me about a sale they've got on. I've been intending to get over there all week. I might look for a new helmet.

I went in, started looking in the gear section. Nothing was terribly cheap, there were a couple of bargain bins with gloves and stuff in them, nothing special.

I looked at the helmets, same old stuff, nothing too cheap.

I was completely ignored the whole time I was in there, none of the staff greeted me or offered to help or anything.

I left, headed back up to the main road, and headed up to my mate's place.

On way, I realised I had forgotten to sort out my rego, crap.

This damn PC again.

He'd reinstalled windows on it again, instead of just waiting for me to check that it had a pagefile or whatever, oh well, it was his hours of time he wasted reinstalling it.

I connected the backup disk again, booted up a dos disk, and copied the files across, to avoid windows moving its page file on to the backup disk again. I wished I had knoppix with me.

We stopped and had dinner, my mate picked up some pizzas when he went to get his wife from the train station.

After eating, I got back to the PC again. My mate had backed everything up on CD for them, so I copied some stuff back from the CD.

A couple of the people we go to dinner with turned up, my mate had got them to use a cassette recorder he'd lent them to make up some tapes for him to listen to in the car, so they had brought them around.

"Where's their My Documents directory?" I asked. "Did you put it on the CD?", "probably not" came the reply, argh, then why did you tell me you made a backup cd.

I plugged the hard disk back on again, stuff the consequences, I'm not buggering around with trying to backup and restore all the long file names, and copy the stuff in dos, I'll just use windows, because I've not seen a machine move its swapfile without asking before.

I booted up windows, it didn't make any changes to the virtual memory settings.

I coped the files off the disk, and then I was finished.

I decided to ghost the partition, in case they stuff it up.

Hmm, there's 4gb worth of stuff, and 3gb second partition, the compression in ghost is going to want to work well.

I started it ghosting. It was going to take over an hour to make an image of the 4gb of stuff.

I left it running, and we chatted for a while. After about 50 minutes, it came up and asked to open the next span file.. uhh.. I didn't put any span options. The disk must be full. Crap. That was a waste of time.

I exited it.

Hmm.. the ghost image is only 2gb. Ohh.. Fat32 partition, 2gb maximum file size.. that's why I needed to span, to another file, to overcome the file system limitations. D'oh, it would have fit. Oh well, I'm not wasting another hour.

The people we go to dinner with left.

I set it to defrag, and I left too.

I am so sick of this machine.

Half the problem has been that I haven't been doing the whole job, and my mate keeps doing things that I tell him not to.

"Don't do (whatever), as it will cause (this)", so then he does it anyway, has problems, and I have to fix it, and what pisses me off the most, is that I knew the problem would occur, I didn't want to have to fix it, and that's why I went to the effort of telling him not to do it in the first place.

I just don't care about people with winblows problems anymore, fixing that shit was just pocket money until I could get into a position of doing something useful, like I'm in now, where my effort has some consequence, instead of spending hours fixing up some shitty winblows pc that's going to last 5 seconds before the clown that owns it gets it filled up with virii, worms, spyware, and all sorts of crap, because they don't know what they are doing, and shouldn't be using a computer.

I came home, to discover there is no alcohol left. I poured what was left in all the bottles I've gone through in the last couple of months out, and managed to get about a single shot out of all of it.

I really need to go shopping, there's like nothing at all in the cupboards now. Perhaps I'll go tomorrow.

I sat and started looking at my scripts.

I worked out a lot better way to process the database export, so I sat and wrote a script to do it, and I tested it.

I watched some tv, and I went to bed about 2am.

I got up and got ready at a reasonable time today, not late.

I left home, on the wey to getting on the freeway, I got stuck behind this piece of crap car with Jesus propaganda all over it "Jesus is my life" and something about The Lord stickers on it, along with the mandatory "I can't drive" fish sticker on the back window.

If this person goes any slower, then they'll be meeting the lord fairly shortly.

I got to work, I looked at the results of the export from last night. Pretty successful, we got over 6000 of the documents extracted, resulting in 32000 pages, and then my script shut itself down when the database went down for backup.

Oops, there was logic error in my script, because I had missed changing a variable name when I had made some changes, so now I didn't have the documents that had been processed listed properly.

There were network issues again this morning.

We had a meeting, and worked out what had to be done yet.

I went about writing a script to rebuild the table exports on the filesystem, I was able to verify the exports, and rebuild one of the tables, along with a list of all the documents that exist.

I went to work on the other table, I've got an export, but it has linefeeds in weird places, and awful delimiters, making it a real mongrel to work with.

The woman who lined up the work for me at the college called up, and wanted to thank me for my work, and putting up with the phone calls, and sorting out the email problem on Monday. She had a bit of a nag about getting her pc fixed, fair enough, since it's been here for about 2 months now. I said I would try to find some time on the weekend to fix it.

I found a script that would extract the other table for me, but I was unable to run it, because the database that runs that table (there are 2 products, one table in each), had fallen down, I'll do it tomorrow after the box is rebooted.

About 4.30pm, I had to setup another extract to run tonight.

I started trying to work out what had been processed last night, and what was left (because of the bug in the script).

About 4.45pm, the boss left, and told me not to stay too late, and I said I was leaving in a few minutes too.

I got back to it.

A few minutes later, someone else on their way out came over, and said they'd heard I was the tivo expert. Heh, I chatted to him for a few minutes, he just got his tivo yesterday or something, not got a serial cable, and had to make one up. I offered to make him one up if he wanted. He said he'd see how he want with the soldering iron first :-)

He left, and I got back to work again.

It took me a little while to work out how to sort out the files, I went through 3 or 4 ideas, I would get halfway through working out, then realise it wasn't going to work, and have to start again.

I ended up deciding I'd have to use diff to compare the master list of the documents, and what I had exported last night, but then I had to process the diff result, to get all the line location details and details of what file they came from out.

(In hindsight, perhaps I should have just modified my extract script to read diff files).

I started this processing, and it just went on and on and on.

I gave up at 7pm, I left it sorting the list out, and ran against one of the exported chunk files, so I'll have to do this whole thing again tomorrow when I get in.

At least it should be a quick run home.. wrong.

I got a little bit up the road, and there was tons of traffic, what's going on?

I slowly got through it, ah, half the road is closed because there were 3 firetrucks parked there, along with police vehicles, obviously there's been a fire in a place just here.

I didn't bother trying to look, I took advantage of the people gawking to get through and around them, and the firetrucks, and kept going.

I got on the freeway, and kept an average speed of about 145km/h.

As I got off the freeway, I realised I needed to get fuel shortly. I decided to go to the supermarket first, then get fuel, and go home, because of the dumb layout of the road, otherwise I have to go around the block twice.

I went to the supermarket to get some dinner. Wow, there are still shops besides the supermarket open in the shopping centre, oh yeah, it doesn't take that long to get back at that speed.

I went into the junk food aisle to get a bottle of coke. There were 2 fat fuck people in here, a male and a female. The female was all excited because some chocolate bar was 15c off or something.

I managed to avoid her, but the fat fuck guy she was with was blocking the whole shelf containing the Coke I wanted (plain, as opposed to vanilla, or diet, or diet lemon, or a 6 litre bottle, or whatever else shit they want to try to sell me). I managed to reach around and get a bottle, just as the 2 of them decided to leave the aisle, walking side by side, as a moving roadblock, blocking the whole damn aisle.

I managed to escape them, get some frozen dinner thing, and go and queue up. Christ.. late night shopping, it's not even 8pm, and they've got 1 checkout working.

As I'm waiting for a long long time to buy 2 things, all of a sudden I hear to really annoying people having a conversation as they wait in the line behind me. It's the fat fucks again.

"What do you need a 5L crockpot for? what are you going to make that consists of 5L of material?" "your head" came the witty reply from the female fat fuck.

I got served, and got out of there.

I was just putting my helmet on when I heard some really annoying voice going on again, holy crap, can I not get away from these fat fucks?

I was in such a hurry to get away, that I forgot to get fuel. Damn, I'll have to waste time getting it in the morning.

I got home about 8.30pm, and after putting the food in the oven, I started doing the washing up.

The phone rang, ugh, it will be my mate wanting to whinge at me about something he's stuffed up and needs me to fix.

I kept washing up, the phone rang again, I ignored it again, and again.

After I finished the washing up, I sat down to wait a few minutes for my dinner to finish cooking, the phone rang again.

I answered it this time.

Yep, my mate.. he'd taken the dodgy motherboard back, and upgraded to a better one. He'd taken the parts to the guy we know who had a heartattack recently, and got him to install the replacement board, and windows. My mate had then spent the day putting all the applications on it, and then had connected the backup hard disk to get some files from the backup. (I told him to use Ghost to just copy the whole disk across, avoiding me having to explain the fact you can't copy files like msvcrt.dll without issue).

When he had put the disk on, it had come up saying it had found new hardware or something, and that it was making changes, but he'd not bothered to pay much attention to it.

He'd taken the disk off again, and now windows was having issues with virtual memory, saying it had no pagefile.

I tried to go through telling him how to fix it, and spent a few minutes trying to do that, but I just didn't have the patience, so I said I would fix it tomorrow night, and for him to just leave it and do something else.

I got off the phone. I am so sick to death of this frigging machine.

I got my dinner out of the oven, which was now a few minutes overdone, and I watched some tv.

I went to bed about midnight.

The alarm went off as usual, and I lay there for a bit before getting up, but I fell back asleep, and didn't wake up until after 8am. D'oh!

I had a shower and got ready, I was down at work a bit before 10am.

I worked on scripts all day, and modified the export script to try to pull the whole table out.

Network issues started occuring in the early afternoon (NFS mounts were being a bit flaky), but I decided to try exporting the whole database anyway. It will only fail, and I'll have to try again.

I started it exporting, about 2pm, and it went along fairly happily for quite a while, but the network issues got worse, and a short while later, it reduced the network to being useless.

I was still exporting the whole table (ended up being 250MB worth of data, not too bad), but it took hours, because the NFS mount I was exporting it to get going away, and then the process would wait for it to come back.

My mate rang me, he'd taken the mongrel PC back, plugged it all in, and it had done the trick of ending up with scrambled CMOS data again, so he'd brought it back home again. Oh well, I'm not interested in dealing with it again, it's obviously stuffed, and the whole reason we got these parts was to replace faulty hardware, so I'm not replacing faulty hardware with more faulty hardware, he'll have to take it back and get it replaces, or preferably get a non shit board to start with, instead of that SiS shit.

I couldn't use the internet, and the machine I was exporting the data to kept going away, which made it difficult to check things, for the script I was writing.

I was able to do some scripting locally, but I gave up, setup an export (first full export run, of about 10000 documents from the optical disks), and left about 4.45pm.

I came home, watched some tv for the first time in about 2 weeks.

Dad came in, and said there were DNS issues or something, and I said that I wasn't interested, I'd look at it tomorrow.

I went to bed about 11.30pm.

Just like yesterday, I got up, had a shower, got ready, checked my spam, left, about 7.45am.

I went to work, and worked all day, I stopped for a few minutes to get some lunch, and kept working.

I get so engrossed in the stuff, I don't want to stop.

I managed to get all the records out of the database, to do with the stuff on the optical disks I have to export.

The windows server they've got to replace the system turned up this morning, so it was setup in the afternoon.

I went up to the "warehouse", which is just a room where they dump all new and old equipment.

The server was in there, I installed the software on it, but it kept saying that I didn't have license permission to do things.

I rebooted, but that made no difference. I thought perhaps the license key was case sensitive, so I changed it, but that made no difference, I uninstalled and reinstalled the software, still no good. This is crap.

I went and saw the project manager, told him about the issues. We called up the company, the woman was really rude, when we explained the situation "no, that's not the correct key for that software, you have to use a different key" it turned out they hadn't even given us the correct key.

There are 3 cds, and 3 keys, and the keys we were given were listed with the name of the product they are for, and the 3 cds had the corresponding names of the product printed on them, so logically, you would think that there was a key per cd.

Apparently not, there are 2 products on one cd, and they hadn't given us the key for the other product.

We asked for the correct key, and she asked if we were at the machine, we were not "well you have to be at the machine so I can tell you how to change it", "no, you can just tell me the number, and I will use the license manager and enter it myself.". She then proceeded to tell us the stupidly long product key.

We got off the phone, had a meeting for a short while, I went back and entered the code, it was fine.

I went back down, and continued working on an export script.

My mate rang me, he'd got the new parts for the PC we were working on on Saturday, some guy had turned up, and had put the board in to the case, but because the screw holes in the board didn't quite line up with the spacers screwed into the mobo tray, he hadn't bothered to put any screws in it. Hmm. great, so I get to do the whole thing again. My mate had apprently almost finished "setting it up", and just needed me to restore some of the backed up data.

I gave up on the export script, and left, I'll just miss a day without running an export, since there are things I need to test.

I left, and I headed up to my mate's place, to finish the PC off.

I looked at the board install.. the guy who board the board in expected that the stupid little plastic clip spacers and the cards would hold the board in place, instead of screws. That's crap.

I started by ripping that all out, and working out why the board was about 1mm out of place.

It seems that the cutout in the back of the case, where you put the plate around the ports on the mobo was the issue. I tried bending it, to see if it would allow me to move it slightly, and get the board close enough that the screws would fit, but it didn't work, it was a couple of mm out of place.

I asked if my mate had any tin snips, but he said he didn't, but did have a hacksaw. Ugh, that will have to do.

He dug through the toolbox to find it, and found some rusty old tins snips he said din't work.

I tired using them, he's right, they don't work.

I looked, and saw that the blades were close, but it was possible to make them come apart, that must be the problem. I tightened the nut on the side, oops, a bit far, now I can hardly get them open, but I was able to successfully trim the bottom off the plate.

I put it back in the case, and now the motherboard lined up, so I screwed it in.

It was a crappy motherboard, SiS something, and my mate had tried to put their shitty old video card on it, but it didn't work (yeah, AGP voltage issues) (oh, hang on, I think they only had a PCI card in their old machine).

I asked him why he didn't get one with onboard video (which is crap, but not as bad as the card he had in there), and he said because it was cheaper, and he wanted to use their video card. (Argh! why?! I told him on Saturday when we were bringing the PC back with us, that there is no point upgrading a machine and putting a shit video card in it!).

I continued working on the machine anyway.

I attached the disk I'd used to back up the machine, and copied the email, address book, and favourites across again.

It now seemed like it was done.

Something seemed a bit suss. I asked if my mate had reinstalled windows (because the mobo had been changed), "no, it's the install you did the other day". ARGH! the crappy install I attempted on Saturday, which failed spectactularly, because the hardware was screwed! This has been a complete waste of time.

Apparently his idea of "setting it up" was installing all the shitty applications I don't even bother doing.

We had dinner, some sort of fish bean curd thing with rice.

I went back to the machine, and removed the backup hard disk, and attached the cdrw drive, to finish the PC off.

Uhh.. the POST screen of the BIOS is scrolling off the screen listing "Base Peripheral Devices" or something, what's all this garbage?

Winblows wouldn't boot either, it hung halfway through.

I reset the machine, and now, it wouldn't even boot properly, it would come up with some details, but then instead of counting the memory and continuing on to try to boot, it would just reboot itself. I let it do this about 5 times, before I turned it off.

I unplugged the cdrw drive again, but it made no difference. I went to reset the CMOS data, in case it had got scrambled.. no CMOS clear pins on the motherboard. This is a really shit board.

I had to unplug the machine, remove the battery from the mobo, wait a minute, and then put it all back together.

The machine reset, and it worked fine. I booted winblows, shut it down again, and did this about 3 times to test it was fine.

I put the cdrw drive on again. The CMOS data got corrupted again, all the "Base Peripheral" nonsense came back, and the winblows boot hung, or the BIOS would get caught in a reboot cycle.

I reset the CMOS again, back working fine. Either there is something wrong with this cdrw drive, or the mobo.

My mate said that he didn't have a personal number for the guy at the wholesaler that sold him the board. Well of course not, as if he's going to go giving out his home number to every clown that buys something off him, so he can have them calling him at 9pm complaining something doesn't work, that he couldn't give a shit about.

My mate had another machine there at the time, with almost exactly the same cdrw drive in it, so I decided to test what was going on. I removed the drive from the other pc, connected it to this one, and it worked fine. It must be the cdrw drive then.

I removed the cdrw drive that was causing issues, replaced it with the drive from the other pc, and put the drive from this pc in the other one.

OK, the machine is done, it can go back to them now, I'm sick of it. I don't care that the install of windows is screwed.

I left, and came home.

I checked my email, and went to bed about 11.45pm.

I got up, had a shower, got dressed, ate breakfast, checked my spam, left about 8am.

I didn't put my mp3s on this morning, because my ear is all sore from having the stupid earbud jammed in it.

I hate earbuds. I should buy a helmet with speakers in it.

I went down the freeway, got off, went to the college, I got there about 9am.

I fixed their email, it was coming up and asking for a password when they tried to send email. It took me a couple of minutes of fiddling in the settings, and I found that it had "use username and password" set in the smtp options. That must have come from the lookout settings when I imported them, although I didn't notice it on the other machines when I set them up originally.

At least now thunderbird is remembering the password.

I fixed the second pc, same story, fixed it by turning off the smtp username/password option.

When I fixed the third pc, I noticed it had the option set too, but I know it wasn't on, and this machine wasn't configured by having the settings inported from lookout, because I rebuilt the whole pc.

The email addresses had been changed on the three pcs too, apparently the guy who owns the place had changed the settings, because he's going to get separate email addresses for each pc, he may have inadvertantly set that option.

The reception chick asked me to explain how to run a virus scan, and I showed her, but I told her there is no point, because the virus scanner has a resident shield to stop anything being run that's infected (and with their semi permanent internet connection, they keep them selves updated).

I was there for about 15 minutes, I forgot to ask if my pen that I lost there had turned up.

I got back on my bike, and headed down to DMR, it took me about 1/2 hour to get there.

I went in, worked all day, and was there until about 6.30pm, when I gave up and left, because the database I was trying to extract all the records from a single field from had some sort of limitation, and would just hang, without returning the results to the query.

I came home, went to the supermarket on the way home, got some frozen thing for dinner, came home, cooked it, ate it, and worked on a script to more smartly get all the records out of the database, rather than expecting it to return them all at once.

I went to bed about 11.30pm.

D'oh, I just wasted like an hour fiddling around when I really should be going to bed.

Anyway, I was just going through my search terms, and I came across the following one:

why don't mcdonalds use polystyrene cups anymore

I have no idea why my site would turn up in a search for that.

Uh oh, I've got to go to bed.

I sorted out all my clothes, to wash them.

I went in, loaded the washer, then discovered there's no washing powder. Terrific.

I came back, and decided to tidy up a bit (even though it needs a lot).

I tidied up a bit (unnoticible however), and I came across a plastic bag, containing a row of capacitors.

Ah, these are the caps I bought to replace the dud ones on my mobo with.

I thought I had bought 63v capacitors, to replace 6.3v caps, which is not supposed to work very well, but I discovered these were actually 16v. D'oh. I should have just put these on in the first place.

I pulled the board out (that died again a short while after I replaced the capactitors with some 1500uFs last week), desoldered all the stuffed 1500uFs, and I just finished putting in the 2200uF 16v caps.

I left one of the 1500uFs, since it still looked ok, and I instead replaced one of the really stuffed 2200uFs I had to leave, because I didn't have a replacement 1500uF.

I plugged the board all back in again, put the ram and cpu back on it, and it powered up first go.

Now I'll do another burn in test.

Ugh, I didn't want to get up this morning.

It's cold, and I'm tired, there's nothing to eat, and I'm just not interested.

Anyway, I got up, and started going through my emails.

I had received an email from a guy I used to chat to all the time, but then he just disappeared.

He said he found my blog, and asked if I could put a comment system in so that he could make sarcastic comments on my life. Hey, that sounds really cool!

So I googled around, and I found a couple of blogger comment systems, since commenting was not something blogger offered natively when I started this blog, I didn't really think anyone would read it anyway, so I never bothered to spend the time finding and setting up a comment system, at the start.

I came across "CommentThis" at http://commentthis.com/, which looked ok, but the comments are hosted on some guys server, not mine, and I don't like things like that. Back when I used to actually do something with my other website (which I won't go into detail about, you can find it if you look hard enough), I spent too much time working out what files had disappeared, when GeoShitties or xoom would decided to delete me for no reason, and then, while I hadn't actually lost anything, it was a pain to find my backups of everything, upload them all again, and change the links in about 100 pages.

In this case, if the guy disappears, then I'll probably lose all my comments, which I really wouldn't care for.

I kept looking, and I found "blogkomm", at http://www.blogkomm.com/. It looks really good.

It's a php4 script, that doesn't really require anything special (except a web server with php4 on it).

I started looking at installing this.

While I was reading through this, before I went and spent a lot of time installing it, I had also found "Quodlibet's Blogger Commenting Service", at (silly long url, so it gets its own line):

http://comment.quodlibet.be/v2/index.php?page=&sub=&forum=&stats=&books=

I noticed in the news items there, that blogger.com now provides its own comment system. It must be part of the new interface they launched a few days ago, that I first noticed on Tuesday.

I went over to blogger.com, and I browsed around. I found a page about "get feedback", where they talked about allowing viewers to post comments.

I went into the settings of my blog, and found a new comment section that I hadn't noticed before.

I changed some settings, and enabled it.

It's currently enabled to allow anyone to post a comment, since I know what a pain in the bum it is, when you come across something on the web, where you want to put a quick useful comment about whatever is being discussed, perhaps a URL or somethuing that's relevent, but then you are forced to sign up to something in order to do it.

I rarely go through with that, since I only wanted to put a quick comment there, and I can't be bothered waiting for some form to load, filling it in, waiting for an email back, clicking on something, and then hoping my email address isn't going to get sold to spammers.

Anyway.. so, my blog is now configured for anyone to be able to comment. I don't know how you comment, you can work that out.

I will be closely monitoring the comments, and if there's anything dumb that turns up, it will be deleted, and if there's more than a handful, then commenting will get changed to blogger.com users only, and you'll have to sign up, or I'll disable it altogether.

Have fun.

I put my phone on silent early this morning when I went to bed.

I don't want to get woken up at 8am by the bloody phone like usually happens.

I half woke up about 9.40am, and heard the landline phone ringing (it's pretty quiet, so if I was asleep, I would probably sleep through it). I just ignored it.

My phone started silently ringing a little bit after that.

I answered it, it was my mate I built the PCs for on Tuesday night.

Apparently he had a computer he'd stuffed up while trying to fix a couple of days ago (deleted registry keys), and had reinstalled windows over the top, but it needed a couple of things sorting out.

He wanted to know if I was coming up to do it. He'd asked me about this earlier in the week at some point, and I recalled him saying I had to be at his place for 11am, no, apparently I had to be there for 10.30am, since the place where the pc was, was a 1/2 hour away.

It was now 9.45am, if I get up and get ready now, I can be at his place a couple of minutes after 10.30am.

I had a bunch of missed calls on my phone.. yep.. first call at 8.15am. Glad I turned the thing to silent.

It was my mate who I was supposed to be seeing this morning at 9.30am, to fix his internet. Because of the fact I found out there were issues on the server side, there was no point me going over there, since I wouldn't be able to fix it.

I called him, and told him that, and said I would get him moved on to my service on Monday, and would give him a call and tell him how to set it up on Monday night or something.

I got up, had a shower, got ready, and left.

Dad had moved the Jag up the driveway to work on something, so I had to do a 10 point turn to get out.

About halfway to my mate's place, I noticed a car that looked familiar, I pulled up closer, and I realised it was one of my mate's I'd been out with last night, who lives up near my mate I was going to see.

I pulled along side him going around a roundabout, and bipped my horn, but he didn't noticed, I followed him up the highway, and flashed my high beam at him a couple of times, but he still didn't notice.

We got to the traffic lights near the station before the long straight into where my mate lives, and I pulled up along side, and then he noticed me, he waved, I nodded at him, and then I took off, slipped up the side next to all the cars, and took off when the lights changed.

I got up to my mate's place about 10.45am.

I went in, he was just working on a PC someone had got him to do for them.

I went and had a look, some ancient compaq thing, with a 2 part motherboard, it had one mounted the opposite way to usual, with the cpu and ram on it, and then a mobo in the bottom of the tower, with the slots on it. Weird.

I'll bet this thing is only like a really late model 486 (it has PCI slots), or an early pentium, like a P60, or P75 or something.

Apparently the guy wanted a USB card in it, which my mate couldn't get going. I said that it was probably because the PCI slot will be early, like PCI revision 1.1 or whatever it was, and the manual for the USB card said it required a PCI 2. something revision slot, which this machine won't have.

We jumped in the car, to head up to fix the PC.

A couple of minutes later, my mate noticed he didn't have his wallet. So we had to go back to get it. I wouldn't have bothered myself, but he said he was worried about getting pulled over and not having his license. I said I would have just showed them the wallet with the ambulance service logo on it (because my mate is retired ambulance assistant superintendent or something similar), or it might have been like when my mate's wife got pulled over a couple of years ago, didn't have her license, was told she was a "silly billy", and to bring it to the station in the next day or so.

We went back and got it, and then headed up there.

The place was a little way up the coast, near the power station, it looks like a nice ride up here, I might have to come up here one weekend, but during the week, I get so sick of doing stuff, I just want to stay at home and do nothing on my time off.

We got there, about 11.20am, it was a trailer park, or "pre fabricated housing village" as it was referred to on some signs. Wow, I didn't know such things existed here.

It wasn't too bad, the places all looked respectible, with gardens and stuff. We parked, and then wandered down to the place where the people with the PC lived.

We went in, and looked at the PC, the woman complained about not being able to get on the internet, not being able to get any support, and not having anyone call her back when she did manage to get through.

I sat and looked at the pc.

It was a mess, files here and there, lookout took like 3 minutes to actually start.

I spent a few minutes working on it, and we decided to take the machine away, so I could back all the data up, rebuild it from scratch, and put the data back in. Should only take me a couple of hours.

We pulled the machine out, chatted to the people for a couple of minutes before we left, they want to change to my service when I get it running, so we talked about that.

We left, I carried the machine back to the car, and then we went back to my mate's place, got there a bit after midday, and setup the pc on the table.

His Chinese relatives were making lunch at this point, and since we were using the table, they said they would eat outside, it was a nice day anyway.

I got the machine setup, put an extra disk on it, partitioned it, and started backing up their data.

At this point I was told I had to come and eat lunch, because otherwise the noodles dry out.

It was noodles with some sort of a pork soup like thing, it looked fairly interesting. My mate said just put a little bit, in case you don't like it, but before I had a chance to do anything, one of his Chinese relatives had served it all up for me. Oh well, I'll eat anything, so I'm not too worried.

As I started to eat it, the Chinese relative told me that I can come to China, and stay in her house. Heh.

It was really nice food, one of the other Chinese relatives stood outside having a cigarette, and once he saw that I was enjoying it, he went in and told the others in Chinese that it I liked it.

(I can't speak Chinese or anything, but my mate has a fair idea of what they are up to most of the time, since he went and stayed in China with them for 6 months a couple of years ago, and he was telling me that's what was going on).

I ate all my lunch, and then went back inside to work on the PC, once my mate and I had finished, the relatives all went out to eat their lunch.

I finished backing up the pc, reformatted the hard disk, and tried restoring a ghost image I found on it. That may make things a bit quicker.. nope, after waiting for it to restore, it failed booting with a "corrupt system file or i/o error" or something, and after that, it wouldn't boot at all.

I reformatted again, and installed windows.

Some of my mate's wife's friends turned up at this point.

I put all the drivers on, got everything working. These people were nice and organised, and had all their drivers for everything together, so I didn't have to go spending hours looking around the web for them.

Once everything was back working, I tried to get the scanner working. It was dumb, it kept just adding it as a USB unknown device, and wouldn't ask for the drivers. When I tried to change them, it kept wanting to use the windows usb driver. I got rid of the inf file for it, hoping it would then use the proper inf file for the scanner, but then it complained it couldn't find any drivers. Argh.

I went and found some drivers on the web, I didn't think they were any newer though, and were more than 1.4mb, so they wouldn't fit on a floppy. I had my memory key, but it needs drivers to work on 98.

I found the drivers for the memory key, downloaded them, it took me 3 floppy disks and 2 floppy drives in the machine I was working on before I could get them loaded, and after all that, they weren't even the correct drivers for this memory key. Perhaps I should actually set the thing up to be bootable, and then I could just boot dos off it, copy files off it (or the proper driver for it), and not have to worry about this in future.

I was able to get the scanner to detect, and install at this point, but all I had done was change the floppy drive (the original one kept causing the machine to lock up), something weird is going on here.

My mate got a phone call, he had to go and pick his wife up from the train, he asked his wife's friend's husband to move his car, so he could get his out, but he just gave him his keys to take his car. He went out and was about leave.

I heard the next door neighbour start up his tank of a car (XF), which I doubted he would be able to get past my bike, even though I was parked in pretty close to the house.

I went out to ask if I was in the way "You certainly will be" was the guys response. There was no need to be like that.

I jumped on my bike, and rode it up the driveway and out on to the street to get out of his way.

Gees it was nice being able to ride so freely, not wearing my hemlet, or jacket, or gloves, or balaclava, or neck warmer.

I went out on to the street, and waited for the guy to get his tank out, so I could go back in off the street. My mate came out behind me, went a bit down the street, turned sideways for some reason, and then was trying to tell me something.

He turned around and took off. The tank came out on to the street, and then I turned around and went back down the driveway.

I parked back where I was, but it will be in the way again. I'll move it a bit later, when my mate comes back, since I don't think he will have to go out again, I'll be able to park close behind the cars or something.

As I came back down the driveway, a ball was rolling across it, there were a couple of kids from next door sticking their heads over the fence, so after I parked up, I grabbed their ball from the garden where it had rolled, and went and gave it back to them.

I went back inside to start working on the PC again.

I started moving the data from the backup drive back to the originaly disk. Really annoyingly, after copying a few hundred meg, the machine would BSOD with errors in vcache and vmem. Hmm, this seems like hardware memory errors to me.

I took me about 6 goes to move all the data back (copy some, bsod, reset, repeat). I was getting pretty fed up at this point, after spending hours working on this machine, and having nothing but issues.

I have serious doubts about this hardware.

My mate's wife and a couple of the relatives walked down to the shopping centre (where the internet cafe is) to get some groceries.

My mate called up the people, told them about all the issues we were having, asked them if they had had any (BSODs etc), and they said they had been having them, and lockups and all sorts of errors since they got it. We talked them into replacing the main parts of the machine (mobo, cpu, ram), and installing it all, pretty much for cost.

We tried to work out me getting the parts, but the place isn't open when I have a chance to get there. My mate will either go and get the parts, or get them couriered up, and I'll rebuild the PC on Tuesday night, before/after dinner.

Ok, so there's not much point working on this anymore.

My mate's wife and the relatives came back, heh, they brought a trolley with the shopping in it all the way from the shopping centre.

I went out and moved my bike, I put it close behind the cars, so the guy should be able to fit his tank back in now.

I found memtest, but the disk was stuffed. I downloaded it again, booted it up, ran it, and immediately the screen was filling with errors. Aha! I knew there was something wrong. Perhaps it's just a stuffed ram stick.

I pulled the ram out of the machine. Wow, no wonder it's having issues, it's caked in dust, there's probably current bleeding going on between the pins of the chips.

My mate pulled a 128mb stick out of one of his machines, and I put that in there. I booted up memtest again, no errors to be seen. It must be that stick.

I got an old toothbrush, and carefully cleaned the dust off the memory, and put it back in. Now it did nothing at all, the machine wouldn't even boot, just beeping.

I put the good memory back, it worked, I put the stuffed memory back, no good again. It's dead now, another keyring.

I pulled the cpu fan out, and the heatsink, they were just coated with dust, and that's why the ram ended up covered.

That's a pretty crappy design, putting the chip side of the ram facing the gaps in the heatsink, pretty much right next to it.

I cleaned it all, put it back in.

I heard the tank come back and go past the house about now.

It booted up, windows had some error, msgsrv32 or something crashed, and so the machine didn't do anything.

I rebooted it again, and it came up properly.

Whenever I tried to use ctrl+esc to bring up the start menu, explorer would crash, everytime, cool.

I fiddled around for a bit, before realising the machine was stuffed, perhaps some files had been corrupted by the stuffed memory.

I moved all the data back to the backup disk again. Windows wasn't crashing after moving a couple of hundred meg this time, so that's a good sign.

I rebooted, formatted the disk etc, it said "keeping current list of bad sectors" or something, when I formatted it. Hmm, so the disk isn't in great condition either.

I tried to reinstall using the cab files I had copied to the original disk, and moved across to the backup disk, but the setup crashed some of the way through, with a "SUWIN" error or something, and complained about bad cab files.

I copied the files off the cd again, and ran setup again, it got a lot further, did a reboot and stuff, but when it got to "updating system settings" or whatever it is, in the list of "final tasks" it goes through, the machine had a heart attack, and all sorts of errors were popping up.

I gave up at this point. It's not the memory, it must be something else having big issues, like the mobo.

I pulled the machine all apart, we moved it out to the laundry, and I started spinrite running on the disk to check it's health. Perhaps that's part of the issue, and a new mobo/cpu/ram will still be dumb because of the hard disk.

It was now about 6.15pm. So much for me popping up here, spending a couple of hours on this, and going home to do something on my own time.

I hung around for a while, they would be having dinner shortly, and they're always trying to get me to stay. On Tuesday night when I was up here, they were trying to get me to come up on Wednesday night, for dinner, but I said I didn't know what would be going on because of the funeral.

Anyway, we had dinner, there were all sorts of interesting things. I'd never eaten roast beef (or whatever it was, tasted like beef) with chopsticks before, normally I just about need a chainsaw to get through it.

The head on the fish looking at me was a bit off putting, but otherwise it was all good.

I sat around for a short while afterwards, looking in the fish tank with the boy that was there. There's a snail going around in the tank now, I asked him if he knew what is was, "nope", "what does it look like?" "a snail shell" "and why does it look like a snail shell" "because it's a snail".

My mate came over a few minutes later, and he remarked about it too. He has no idea where it came from, he didn't buy it, or put it in there, it just appeared, he noticed it on the glass about 4 days ago.

I asked if he had put any new weeds or rocks or anything in there recently, thinking perhaps it was attached to something, but too small to be noticed, but he's not put anything but food in there for days.

Where the hell could a snail just appear from? I think I'll have to google this one.

I sat and watched some tv, and I left about 8.35pm.

It was freezing outside. I put my music and all my gear on.

I took off, heading for home. My music dropped out about halfway there, flat batteries, hmm, they have gone to work and back, and come up here this morning, that's close to 4 hours playing time.

I went to my mate's (who's birthday it was) place on the way home.

His Dad answered the door, my mate was there, but asleep. It was about 9pm. I said I was just popping in on my way past, and I'd give him a call in 45 minutes or so.

I went to the supermarket, bought some coke and chocolate, and then I came home.

I put the stuff in the freezer.

I mucked around blogging, and couldn't be bothered going out again, so I didn't call my mate. I couldn't even be bothered to sit and watch a DVD, I went to bed instead, about 10.30pm.

My alarm went off at 6.30am, and I listened to the news on the radio.

Apparently there was a major accident on the freeway between the road I use to get to work, and the city. It doesn't directly effect me, but it will most likely make the roads a nightmare.

I decided to go a bit later this morning then, I also had to get fuel.

It's somewhat casual dress on Fridays, I found my BSOD shirt I haven't worn for ages, so I decided to wear that, the IT services guys should find it somewhat humerous.

After getting ready, I went down and loaded up my bike.

Oops, nearly forgot the box with the software in it, and I also intended to put some WD40 on my back brake lever that is all gunked up and keeps jamming on. I came back inside and got the box and the WD40, fixed my brake.

I left home, went and filled up the tank.

I got on the freeway a bit after 8am, and had a really good trip down this morning.

The highway between the end of the freeway and where I'm working was pretty good too. After squeezing through a couple of times at the lights, I had the road to myself.

I ended up getting to work a bit after 9am. Too bad I didn't get such a good trip home. (I'll get to that).

I spent some time working on the scripts again.

I missed the coffee trip (going next door to get a coffee) so I just kept working, thinking I would go and get one in a bit.

The IT services manager came to find out how I was going with the project, and I said that I was getting there, that I had successfully managed to extract some files out of the database, and that after we worked out the directory structure, and some other small issues, we should have something useful in the next few days.

I was just about to go for a coffee at this point (about 11am), when my mate (who wants me to start the ISP for him), said that there was a morning tea on.

We went in, and there was a full feed there, it looked great. There were a bunch of krispy kreme doughnuts there, I had one (my first one) gees, they are good.

After a few minutes of eating, a few announcements were made. One guy was leaving after working there for 22 years, so then he spoke for a bit.

The IT services manager who I'd just been speaking with made some announcements too, that we were on schedule for the move to Maitland (probably explaining why he was asking me how I was going with the database work), and he mentioned the server that had gone down on Tuesday afternoon.

One of the major windows servers fell over on Tuesday afternoon, and one of the guys in IT services spent 36 hours straight trying to get it back up, because it ran all the network drives and everything for the normal users that work there.

Heh, I did wear an appropriate shirt :-)

After he finished, his announcements, we got back to eating, and some of the IT services guys noticed my shirt and had a bit of a laugh. Apparently the "Micro$haft" is too subtle on it.

We ate for a little while more, I went next door and got a coffee, and then I got back to work.

I was pretty certain my export script would be working now, with the changes I'd made to it, so I continued on the sorting script, to build the directory structure to put all the files into, once they are exported.

About midday, I got a call from the guy who I'd been speaking to in the carpark in Gosford back in March, apparently the ISP I was looking after before I got screwed had tried to do an upgrade on some equipment, or make some changes to something, had botched it up, and half the customers had not been able to get on for like a week.

The explains why I've been getting phone calls, because the customers are desperately trying to find out what's going on, either not being able to get through to the "support", or not called back.

Ah, I probably would have worked this out earlier, but obviously I'm not connected to their service anymore, so I didn't know what was going on, and why their customers were calling me.

Haha. I said I would find out what I could get sorted out for the guy.

I called up the colo guy, to find out about adding customers on to his equipment temporarily, until I get the radius issues sorted out, he told me how to do it.

I called the guy back, said I could set it up, got the details I needed. I setup his account, and then he tried to login, but it didn't work, he was trying to connect as DOV, but it just didn't work.

I called the colo guy back again, apparently the Cisco 5200 and 5300 he's got don't do DOV, so I'll need to get the Tigris going, or he's got an Ascend Max 4000 with a password in it we don't know (and you have to reload the firmware to reset the password).

I called the guy back, and said that the current production equipment doesn't do DOV, that I might get something sorted out, but that I didn't know when.

He said he would approach one of the other guys he'd seen that offered DOV, and would go there, and when I get my stuff sorted, he'll change to me. Oh well, I tried.

I guess I'll have to try and get the Tigris working again now, perhaps it'll work if I just set it up with a single radius entry, and let freeradius do the proxying.

I've no idea when I'll find time to sort that out however.

I got back to work.

About 1.30pm I got called up by the receptionist at the college again, to see if I could fix their email.
I said I couldn't, because I was going to a birthday dinner. I said I would have to change it to Monday night. She didn't want to accept that, went on for a bit, and I was convinced to go anyway. I said I would try to get there about 5.30pm tonight, but I would only be able to spend a short while there.

I was hoping to be able to get home, and have a shower, get changed, before going to the dinner.

A went back to work.

It was pretty quiet in the office now, since everyone was at the barbeque or the pub for one of the guys that were leaving today.

I finally stopped coding and looked out the window for a minute, while I tried to get my brain around a sorting issue I was having.

The project manager for the database project came down, and asked if I was looking for inspiration, heh, I explained I had been staring at the screen all day, and had to stop for a minute.

I explained to him the directory structure I was working to, and the filename standard I was using to move the files, and sort the table entries into.

I said I was getting reasonably far into the sorting script, and it was fairly close to being done.

He said he leave me to it, and went back upstairs.

The guys that work in the area I was sitting in started filtering back in from the pub a little while later.

I'd heard them mentioning tivo a couple of days before, and remained fairly quiet, though I had mentioned I had one.

One of them started talking about the tivo, so I made a couple of comments about it.

I asked if they were on the mailing list, and they said they were, and they talked about that for a bit.
One of them complained about the amount of mail they get some days, and I said that I was probably responsible for that.

I was asked who I post as, and when I told them who I was, they got a bit excited (before they started slagging me :-) to find out I was one of the noisy guys off the tivo mailing list.

We sat and chatted about tivo for about 45 minutes, (oops, waste of time, and I needed that time). I got told to shutup by one of the guys in that area, he doesn't have a tivo, and is sick to death of hearing about it.

One of the guys found some pictures on the internet of the crash on the freeway this morning. Wow, doesn't look good at all. If you weren't told, you could hardly recognise it was a car. Apparently a truck behind it went on to it, and crushed it, and it burst into flames. Didn't look good at all.

Someone brought some sandwiches in, what was left from a lunch of one of the guys who was leaving, so I ate a few of those, since I hadn't gone to lunch.

I went upstairs to test my updated export script about 4.30pm. I had a couple of issues, I'd just done a couple of dumb things like forgotten to change a variable in a couple of places, not made one of my scripts executable, and forgotten to copy and modify one of the standard scripts, to avoid it logging into the production logs.

I had all these silly issues sorted in a few minutes, and I kicked off an extract of 184 images.

Fairly shortly after, we had a bunch of files exporting, and the logs going in the right place. Woohoo, it's all working.

Uh oh.. there's too many files appearing in the export directory, what have I done wrong?

Ah, nothing.. I had forgotten about the multipage images, which get extracted as multiple files. A couple of the documents I had exported had up to 77 pages attached to them, so that explained why almost 600 images ended up being extracted.

I ran my verification script against the export, but it claimed that every file exported had failed. Hmm, more dumb logic I'll bet. Yep.. I hadn't put the final file name format into the verification script, I had one I had stuck in there temporarily, not knowing the file name format when I wrote this script on Wednesday night, or yesterday morning.

I quickly made a couple of changes, but it still didn't work exactly right. It was now a couple of minutes after 5pm. Bugger it, I'll look at this at home over the weekend.

I ftpd my updated scripts out (since I'd made a couple of changes in production), put them on my memory key thing, and took off.

I went back downstairs, grabbed my stuff, and I left DMR at 5.20pm, somehow I don't think I'll get to Hornsby (where the college is) in 10 minutes..

It took me an 70 minutes to get there, and as I expected, they'd all gone home by the time I got there.

As I waited at the traffic lights just past the entry to the freeway, I noticed I had some missed calls on my phone, I couldn't be bothered to pull over, get my helmet (and balaclava, neck warmer, earbuds) all off, and wait for my message service to call me, so I just went the few minutes around to the college anyway.

I went back, got on the freeway, headed towards home. I got off the freeway, and headed straight to the place where the dinner was. (I received a call from my mate, earlier in the day, to let me know the venue had changed).

I got there about 7.12pm, parked up near the restaurant, and ripped all my head gear off.

The dinner was supposed to start at 7.30, and it was byo, so I decided to wander over to the nearby bottle shop.

As I was waiting to cross the road, at about 7.15pm, my phone rang, it was my message service calling me back. I finally got the message left on my phone at 5.37pm, by the receptionist, wanting to know if I was coming. Argh.

I went over to the bottle shop, bought a couple of bottles of Becks, and a 700mL bottle of Beam for my mate for his birthday. I didn't get a chance to get those thongs for him.

I went back over to the restaurant, my mate who works at the ABC had just turned up, so we went in together.

Quite a few people were in there at this point, I gave my mate the bottle of Beam.

We chatted for quite a while, a couple of the people coming were playing soccer tonight (where I used to play with them), an 8pm game, so it would be finishing at 8.30pm, and they would be here a bit after that.

One of our other mates turned up, and gave the birthday boy his gift, an LP. It was some obscure album, "The Coombe Boys present a TV cover version of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club" or some other weird thing, and our mate had jokingly "autographed" it on at the back as Ringo Starr.

My mate received another LP like this a couple of years ago, from his Dad, complete with a dodgy autograph. I think it's a running gag now.

We ordered some garlic bread and stuff, to eat while we waited for the others.

We ordered our food about 8.15pm, the others could order when they got here.

While we were ordering, my mate who works at the ABC was asked my the Italian waitress if he was Italian, (he is not), and he claimed he'd probably been watching a bit much of The Sopranos recently. The waitress explained she thought he was Italian because of his pronounciation of the menu items.

When she came to take my order, she told me that she was pretty sure I was not Italian, since she has not met a red headed Italian yet. Heh.

My mate (who was in the US not so recently) turned up a bit after 8.30, he'd come off the game at half time, and had a shower, and then turned up.

One of the others, and his girlfriend (my mate who works at the ABC's sister), turned up a little while after that.

The food started to come out a while after that, and we all had dinner.

After we had eaten, the Italian waitress got up, and made some announcements, there were 3 birthday dinners going on, and it was a tradition that the birthday people get up and have a dance. My mate got up and danced with his older sister, it was pretty funny, at times it looked like they were more wresling than dancing. One of the other birthday guys got up and danced with his daughter (assumedly), and the other guy didn't get up at all.

The guys who had come from soccer left, to go and get dressed to go out (somewhat ironically, since they were better dressed than most of us there), after putting in for their dinner.

We sat and chatted for a while after that, and then got the bill, there ended up being 13 of us to dinner, the total bill was $360, not too bad, however there had only been $180 put in. Hmm. Turns out half the table hadn't put in yet (phew), and I put a bit more in to make up some of it.

Some of use headed out to a night club after that, I was out there first.

I went in, wandered around for a bit, and then my mates turned up.

We grabbed drinks, and had a chat.

It was too crowded inside, so we went out on to the verandah, but that was a bit too cold, so we moved back inside.

The band started up, we stood behind where the people were dancing. Some drunk guy came over and started talking to me, asking what I was riding and that sort of thing (since I had my jacket on). I spoke to him briefly, hoping he would go away, he was a bit of a personal space invader.

We found seats at a table near where we were standing. A little while later some people came over, apparently they had been sitting there, so a couple of us got chucked out of our seats.

I stayed sitting.

The drunk guy came back again, and was trying to get the chick who was sitting next to me to dance with him. She wasn't interested, and then he grabbed her arm to try to pull her up to dance.

She got his arm off, and told him to leave her, he stepped back for a second, but then had another go.

I stood up, and pulled him away, and told him to leave it, that she wasn't interested. He returned "yeah, but you've got to try", to which I replied "yeah, you did, and she's not interested, to try someone else", and then he moved away, and I sat down again.

People give me the shits.

We moved outside again, and we stayed out here chatting for ages.

I had a greasy sausage roll and sauce, and a coke. Half the reason I eat that stuff is because the others go on with "how can you eat that?" etc. "Because it's food".

We stood around quoting bits out of "The Olden Days" and "Bargearse" for a bit.

Some weird looking chick came over, and started talking to us. I didn't pay much attention, since she was standing dirctly next to me, where I was slouching on a chair, so without dislocating my head, or moving, I wasn't able to look at her directly.

She asked a couple of my mates how they were going and stuff, and then when my mate (who was in the US non recently) came back from getting a drink, she was introduced to him by one of my mates.

She then latched on to him, and dragged him away for a dance. It just seemed very strange.

My mate came back a few minutes, it turned out she was after getting some speed, and she taken him in to the dancefloor, and was going on with things like "you can frisk me for a wire", and this sort of nonsense.

He got away by saying he had to go to the loo, and she said "you're not going to come back are you?", he just shrugged.

We stayed out here chatting for ages more, and then we went back inside, and up to the R&B room.

There was about 3 people dancing in here, and not many more in the room in general.

It was far too cold outside, but because everyone was smoking they were all outside. I sat inside with one of our mates, who had wanted to come inside for hours, because he didn't have a jacket and was freezing.

One dopey bloke we'd bumped into before (a useless drunk, ie, he becomes a nusance when he's had a bit to drink) came back before, (He was at my mate's birthday a couple of years ago (maybe it was only last year), and got thrown out of the golf club for being drunk.

He said he wondered if our mate (in the US non recently (I need to abbreviate this)), would buy him a drink if he went and sat in his lap.

Hmm, somehow I don't think so, seeing as he's a full homophobic.

We watched him, through the glass door, he did it, and my mate arced up, pushing and shoving went on, I was waiting for fists to start flying, but they both refrained.

A bouncer came rushing over, we expected to go out and sort it out, and throw them out, but instead he went over to the DJ box, and started talking to the DJ through the window, seemingly completely unaware of the nonsense going on outside.

I hung around for a short while more, until about 1am. I was cold, tired, I didn't want to stand outside anymore, and that's where everyone was, so I went out, said bye to everyone, and headed for home.

My mate who's birthday it was told me to come around to his place tomorrow night, and have a few drinks there.

I came home, got home about 1.30am, and went to bed.

I got up about 6.45am, and went to work at DMR again.

Nothing really eventful happened on the way, it took me a bit over an hour to get there as usual.

I sat and started working on the script.

I had a chat with the technical guy I'm working for, he gave me the box containing the software they hope to use to replace the proprietry database with. I don't have high hopes for it, however.

He told me to take it home, have a look at it, work out how it works.

I went back to my export script, and verification scripts.

I got a call from my mate who does the plastering. Apparently he can't get on the internet, he got his camera going however. He wants me to go and see if I can work out what problems he's having getting on the internet. I said that Saturday morning as the earliest time I had available, and he said that would be ok, and I arranged it for 9.30am. Ugh, I wanted to be sleeping then.

I worked out the syntax of the request for the export script (since noone ever got me the cgi script I was after).

I went up to run a test, and was able to get a few files to come out. Woohoo.

The log files from the request ended up in the wrong place, so I had to find a way to sort that out, and a few other little problems, like the filename now being set properly, but that's a fault in the web export script I will have to try to work around, but otherwise, it was a successful test.

I went for lunch with my mate. I have a terrible memory, I don't remember what we went and had. I think we went for pasta, but that might have been Monday, I remember getting a salad roll from the shop next to the building, where I get my coffee in the morning, that must have been it.

I went back in after that, worked a bit more on the scripts. The technical guy and others that could have helped at that point had all left, and gone to the data centre to do some work, so there was not much I could do at this point. I said I would work on the stuff a bit more at home tonight.

I left about 4.45pm today, early :-)

I rode towards home. I got off the freeway fairly early, a bit after 6pm, so I decided to go and visit my mate I had arranged to see on Saturday morning, so I could sleep in hopefully.

I went down there, to find that he wasn't there. His son was, so I was at least able to get in the house, but he locked the computer room, so I couldn't look at the pc.

I chatted to his son for a while, who had just got home from labouring all day, and wanted to have a shower, so I left at that point, I possibly still have to go and fix a PC tonight, that I'm really not in the mood to do.

I left, I went to the supermarket between his place and home, that I go to every now and then, and usually bump into a guy I did the motorbike course with a while back, but he wasn't there this time.

I bought some greasy frozen thing for dinner, and came home.

I was in the middle of eating it (after cooking it obviously), and working on my scripts, when I got a phone call.

I didn't recognise the number, so I was hesitant to answer it, in case it was the woman who's pc I was supposed to be fixing. I was going to call her, to reschedule, but I've lost her number.

I wasn't in the mood for getting an ear bashing right at this minute, but I risked it, and I answered it anyway.

It was one of my mates, whose birthday it is in a couple of days (oops, found out later it was actually his birthday yesterday). He was wanting to know if I was available to go to his birthday dinner tomorrow night.

I told him that I would most likely be available to do that, depending on how long I was working tomorrow, but that I would almost certainly be there, and he told me the details.

He then said he was at work (explaining why I didn't recognise the number), and that he had to get back to work.

I got back to eating and scripting.

I had brought the software home I'm going to be trying to use with the 2 million files from the database, but I didn't end up getting a chance to look at it, I spent all my time scripting instead.

About 11pm, I decided to copy the cds, to look at it later (perhaps on the weekend), then I found that 1 cd had 65mb on it, another had about 3mb, and the other had 600k on it. As a result, I just copied the files off the cds.

I got all my stuff ready for tomorrow, and I went to bed about 11.30pm.

I woke up about 8.30am. I had intentions of getting up, and getting out to the hairdresser shortly after 9am, but that sort of slipped a bit.

It was too cold to get up at 8.30, I forced myself out of bed about 8.50am, and had a shower to defrost.

I had some breakfast, and left about 9.30am. I figured it would probably take me about an hour to get out to Erina, get a haircut, get home again, get my stuff, and take off hopefully around 10.30am, to be down there by about midday.

I got out there about 9.45am, I rocked up to the hairdresser, and sat and waited.

It took about 15 minutes, not too bad.

I got my hair tidied up a lot, the mohawk was barely recognisable anymore, it was just a mess.

I got the guy to trim my beard and moustache too, they both keep getting in my mouth when I'm riding (because of my balaclava and neck warmer).

They usually don't charge me extra for trimming my beard, because I just get them to run the clippers over it, but the guy fiddled around with actually shaving bits of it this time, so I got charged extra for that, oh well, it's not like I can't afford it now.

I came out, a bit after 10am.

I decided to spend a couple of minutes to see if I could find a new phone cover, because carrying my phone around in my pocket is really annoying.

I went to the first phone shop I came to, asked about a cover for an 8210, the guy grabbed a cover for an 8250 (tiny difference, but a difference all the same), I asked if it had a metal clip, yep. Cool.

"What do you want for that?", I asked, expecting to hear $10 or $12 or something. "$25" came the reply. eek. Oh well, no time for shopping around now, and it looks like quality anyway (would want to be for $25), so I bought it.

I put my phone into it as I walked back to my bike. It was a bit of a mongrel to get it in, because there is a small size difference between the 8210, which I've got, and the 8250, which this cover it for.

I managed to force it in however, I was half expecting the zipper tab to bust off as I tried to zip it shut, but it didn't.

This cover looks a bit better than the last one, the leather doesn't cover up half the buttons.

The clip is different, and a bit more fiddly to get on and off my belt than the last one, but I'll get used to it.

I got back to my bike, and rode home.

As I got just near home, the dopey dog that wanders around the streets was following a couple of people wandering along.

I was half expecting him to just wander into the middle of the street, so I setup on the brakes ready, and then when he did wander out into my way, I was able to brake easily in time to avoid it. Stupid animal.

I got home, and was about to swing up in to the driveway, but someone had parked the car right up the driveway, and on the wrong side, so there was nowhere for me to go.

I parked on the street, ran inside, grabbed my bag I'd packed last night, with my suit and stuff, and then I went down, loaded up my bike, stuck on my music, and took off, about 10.40am.

I got down the freeway, no issues at this time of day. I decided to go across the motorway, since I wasn't sure what sort of time I was making.

I went to the toll booth, and I paid the guy $3.80, thinking that was the toll, but the guy said it was too much, and gave me some back. Hmm, perhaps the motorway goes off peak or something.

I didn't take any notice of what he gave me back, $2 something, I just shoved it in my pocket and took off.

I went across to my mate's place, and I was there about 11.30am. Woo, excellent time. It about 74km to my mate's place from home, so that's an average speed of just under 90km/h.

I went in.

My mates were already there (my mate told me last night he was doing the work this morning, and heading over about 12.30pm). They were all dressed up, so after a couple of minutes of chatting, I went in and got changed.

I noticed my phone was off as I got changed, I turned it back on. It rang as I was finishing getting dressed, my message service. I answered it, it was a chick from the temping agency, they were trying to get in contact with me, to get details to send me my timesheet etc.

I finished getting dressed, went out, and called the temping agency. I spoke to the chick, and explained that I wasn't at work today, and was at a funeral, and she said she had already managed to get in contact with my mate at DMR, and had sent him my timesheet. I said I would get it sorted out in the next couple of days.

(When I spoke to my mate on Thursday, and I mentioned them trying to call me, he said they were trying to get in contact with me, to apologise for not paying me this week. heh, well, it's not their fault.. they can't pay me when I don't put a timesheet in).

I polished my shoes up.

My mates said they were going to a shopping centre, to buy a tie, and my mate had to find a pair of shoes, because he had left his dress shoes at home, and only had a pair of yellow boots with him.

I jumped in the car with them, and we went around to the shopping centre. We went to a shopping centre we used to go to every now and then, when I lived down near there.

On the way over, I asked them in the motorway goes off peak or something, trying to work out why the toll was less than it was the other night. They told me it depends where you get on, I didn't think about that. Apparently it's only $1.60 to do the first half of it, and it's $3.80 to go the whole distance.

When we got there, it was a fair bit different to when we used to go there (but that was about 15 years ago).

We went into one of the variety shops, and went to the shoe section.

My mate found a pair of seude boots pretty cheap. My other mate and I wandered around a bit, we noticed some bogan looking thongs, and slippers, with Ford logos on them. We both thought of someone who would appreciate them (one of our mates), and I remembered it was his birthday in a couple of days.

I didn't end up getting them though, I thought I would find some other time (perhaps tomorrow night, late night shopping), to get them then.

My mate wanted to wear the shoes out, he asked for something to cut the tag off. The woman at the layby counter (or whatever it was) near the shoe section called up someone to check, and told him that he had to pay for them first.

We went around the shop a bit more, they picked out a tie, and then got some aftershave, and we went to the registers.

I wasn't buying anything, so I just stood back a bit while my mate bought his shoes.

The checkout chick commented that we looked like the Blues Brothers. My mate replied in a dry tone that we were on our way to a funeral.

We got outside the shop, and my mate changed his shoes again.

My other mate went to find some food, but apparently it was a fair distance away. We decided to get some drive through on the way back to my mate's place.

We headed back towards my mate's place, decided which greasy fast food to get. We decided on Hungry Jacks, we went into the drive through, and my mate asked for a large Big Mac meal. The person on the other end of the crappy speaker didn't seem too impressed, but it was difficult to hear them anyway.

He then went on to put my proper order through, (although I realised I meant to ask for without mayonnaise, but couldn't be bothered trying to sort it), and the person on the speaker thought that that was it.

My mate then put through my other mates order, (who always orders it without about 6 different things, he might as well just ask for meat and a bun), and he put that order through wrong, asking for it without something my mate did want, so then he had to argue with the speaker to try to sort it out.

My mate who was driving then got around to putting his own order through (not a Big Mac meal this time), and we were told to move to the waiting bay.

It took them about 5 minutes to bring the stuff out, we got it, and then went back to my mate's place.

Everyone was pretty much ready by now.

We started eating, they had really gone overboard with the mayonnaise, I kept having to fold the paper over as the greasiness disolved the paper.

My mate's (who's mum died) Dad and family arrived (his Mum and Dad separated a long time ago, and his Dad has a new family, so my mate's half brothers and sisters etc).

We started moving outside, and it was now about 1pm.

After spending a bit of time hanging around chatting outside, we all started driving over to the church.

I jumped in the car with my mates again, and we followed the minibus with my mate and his dad and family over.

We went into the church about 1.20pm, and the service started about 1.30pm.

There was about 100 people there, the church was full.

I don't think I should say all that much about the service, just that it had some really good bits in it (considering the circumstances), where the relatives got up and paid their respects.

There was a slideshow/video of photos towards the end of the service, (some of the photos ones I got off the machine for my mate on Friday night), and I got a bit upset towards the end of it.

The service went for a bit over an hour and a half, and then they carried the casket out, and we all moved outside, before getting into the procession, and heading across to the cemetery.

About halfway to the cemetery, my mate's dad pulled up along side us, and asked where our mate was. Apparently his dad was going to pick him up as we went past the church to leave, but the route we took, following the hurse (sp?), went around the block, and not past the church.

Uh oh, I hope he hasn't got left behind. One of my mates made a few phone calls, managed to get in contact with him, someone had picked him up, and he was on his way over.

Because of traffic, and traffic lights etc, the procession had become a bit broken up. We found the rest of the procession, everyone had their hazard lights on, as well as their headlights.

We ended up getting to the cemetery just as the hurse was getting there.

As we headed into the cemetery, it felt very familiar for some reason.

We drove up the hill, following the other cars, and I worked out why it was familiar. This is the cemetery where my grandfather is.

We drove up the hill, parked, and we walked over to the plot.

They had a mobile shelter thing there, they must have been planning for the rain, that was expected, but it was actually a fairly nice day, just cold.

We moved over there, and a few minutes later, I noticed my mate, who had almost been left behind had arrived.

It was now about 3.30pm.

I looked over to see if I could work out where my grandfather was, but I couldn't really remember, I haven't been here for about 15 years.

The casket was moved over, and placed on to the mechanism that lowers it into the ground.

I think almost everyone from the service had come to the cemetery.

There was a bit more of a service here, and the casket was lowered. I didn't think it was very deep, unlike when my friend was lowered in a few months ago.

I got upset when the sand went in, like last time.

My mate's young brother had put some in, and then sat down again, a bit upset.

After everyone else who wanted to put some sand in had, he asked if he could put a bit more in, and the proceeded to put a few more handfulls in, before tipping the whole container in.

Everyone stayed around chatting for a while.

I thought about going over to find my grandfather, but I didn't think I would have time, it was a fair distance away.

Because we were getting to be so late in the day (now after 4pm), the caretakers must have been finishing up shortly, so they brought the truck in with the fill for the hole.

My mate and his dad were over near it, and it was a scene worthy of a photo as my mate and his dad stood there, with his arm around my mate, and the fill went in, and all the dust came up around them.

I was sitting in the car with my mates at this point, so our view was a little bit obscured by the shelter thing, but we could see our mate and his dad helping raking the fill and everything.

I found that a bit unusual, but it's typical of my mate, always helping out with physical work wherever he can, and after meeting his dad, it's clear that he's very much his father's son.

We left the cemetery, and headed back to the church, it has a function centre, and that's where the wake was.

We were here for about an hour.

We sat and had some rather deep conversation, about religion, and other related things.

I think this event has changed some of us. It could have just been the day, but everyone was acting a bit differently.

My mate who drove down (and I'd been in the car with all day) had to leave, to get back up the coast to go to university. One of our other mates had come down in the car with him, so he was going back with him. I decided to leave too, since my mate who's mum died had a lot of family and friends there, and he wouldn't see any of them as often as me, so I wouldn't have felt right being there taking away from time he wouldn't have with other people there normally.

I said goodbye to a few of the people there, my mate's older brother, his sister, and her husband (who are leaving to go back to Germany on Friday), his father, and his younger brother.

My mate gave us his keys, so we could get into the house.

We left, jumped in the car, and went back to his Mum's place.

My mate grabbed his bag, and they both left. I got changed back into my casual gear, for the ride home, and I locked up and left. I hid the keys on my way out, since my mate only has one set.

It was now after 6pm.

I went across the road to the service station, and I refilled my tank. I put my music on, and I took off.

I went back across the motorway, paid the toll, and then rode all the way towards home.

I went to the supermarket before getting home, I bought something for dinner, and a few other things, and then I came home.

I went in and saw my parents, chatted to them for a while.

I came out, and sat and started scripting the stuff to work on the database. Hmm, I'm supposed to have something working tomorrow morning.

I put on some dinner about 9.45pm, sat and ate it while I kept coding up my export script.

I came across a couple of issues that would require some googling around, to find the best way to do things, so I gave up, and went to bed a bit after 11pm.

I should have written these posts at the time, instead of waiting nearly a week.

Blogging has destroyed my ability to remember anything, I just look in the archives here to find out what I did, and when.

Anyway.


I called the guy back, and spoke to him.

He apparently was trying to change his username again, and having issues with it.

He had contacted the support of the ISP, and they had to escalate it, apparently others were having issues.

It's probably like the problems I had at the seniors club recently, where because of dumb non fully qualified domain names, machines can't access their servers to change their details.

Anyway, he said he was going to wait for them to fix it, and apologised for wasting my time, I didn't really care.

I got back to work.

I went out to lunch with my mate, (who wants me to start the isp for him).

We went and had Thai, it was pretty good.

We went for a walk around on the way back to the building after that, and had a chat about ISP details.

I got back into the building about 1pm.

About 1.30pm, the technical guy I've been working for came over, and said we were going up to see a couple of other people.

We went up to level 5 of the building, where all the geologists are, so there are rocks, and bits of rock, and geological maps and all sorts of things all over the place.

We went into an office up there, to see the project leader for the project.

The project is the one I briefly mentioned in yesterday's blog, about the database with the TIFs in it.

The woman who looks after the database server, and a guy who does some of the technical stuff for it came in.

The 5 of us had a chat for a while, and they basically explained the whole project.

It's a database containing all the geological data/reports for any geological surveys in NSW.

The database runs on some old DEC Alpha machines, which will most likely not survive being relocated to Maitland in a few months. As a result, we have to work out how to extract all the data, get it as files, move it to a more reliable system, work out some way to tie it all back together, so that users can access all the data.

We have to:
work out how to get ~600 thousand images (and a few other files), out of a database, that has the data stored on an optical drive jukebox,
dump the contents of 2 tables, from separate databases,
sort the records into files
work out a directory structure to hold the ~2 million files
sort the files into the directory structure.

This shouldn't be too difficult, only 2 tables, and the schema is in English. I'm streets ahead of when I was doing AMP's asset management when I worked for CSC, where the schema consisted of about 35 tables, and was in German.

The other issue we have to deal with, is that the images are stored in TIF format, and a proprietry TIF format that a lot of image viewers can't handle. We have to work out how we can convert these files to a generic TIF format.

We chatted for a while, basically to work out if it was viable for us to do the work ourselves, or if we had to get the vendor in (who charge $1800/day), to do it for us.

They wanted to know within the next 24 to 48 hours if we could do it.

I said I would probably be able to work it out for them this afternoon.

We finished the meeting, and I went with the DBA back to her desk.

I was still trying to get my brain around the whole thing we were trying to work with here.

She explained it pretty well, telling me how there is a reports table, then there is a documents table linked to the reports table, and then there is an image or other file linked to each document record.

I had a look through a script they have for exporting the images from the database, and figured I could write a wrapper shell script of some description, that would generate requests for the images, and then the standard daemon would retrieve the image from the optical drive, and drop it into an export directory.

There would be some interesting logistics involved.. I won't get away with having 2 million files in a single directory, so I'm going to have to come up with some way to sort all the files, while exporting them.

I said I could probably get something scripted either tonight, or tomorrow night, and have something that runs on Thursday morning, since I am taking tomorrow off to go to a funeral.

They seemed happy with that.

I went and got my memory key, copied some files on to it, scripts, table descrptions etc, so I would have something to work with.

It looked like most of the settings of the export script were done as parameters, but I wasn't sure of the exact syntax. I tried to find the cgi scripts that the web pages call, since they would contain the proper syntax, but apparently we couldn't find anyone with access to the webserver the cgi files are on.

I said I could code up the rest of the scripts, and then just put the syntax of the request in later.

I ended up leaving about 5pm, and I headed up to my mate's place for dinner. I got there a bit before 7pm.

I noticed when I got there, that my tail light and brake light (same globe, 2 different elements) were both out.

I hung around there for a short while, and then we went across to the tennis club for dinner.

I was wanting to come home after that, but my mate reminded me I was supposed to be building a couple of PCs for him, oh yeah.

I went back to his place, dragged all the hardware out.

I went to work building the PCs, hoping to get them done pretty quickly, so I could get home, have a quick look at scripting something up.

I got a pc together, set it all up. While my mate mucked around putting winblows xp on it, I built the other machine.

When the first was done installing and setting up, I used ghost to copy the disk onto the disk from the other machine (instead of doing the install/config all over again), and then I put a cdr drive in the machine, burned a bootable cd with the ghost image on it, to act as a recovery disk for the pcs, since hopefully they will end up with about 8 of them.

After that was all done, I tested it, put the second machine together, tested it, everything worked, so the machines were put together (cases on etc), and packed away.

I ended up leaving my mate's place about 10.45pm.

I decided to pop in and see my mate (where my bike is parked) on the way home, who I'd been intending to call, to find out what the plan was for going to the funeral tomorrow, and if I could ride down in the car.

I got there about 11.15pm, went in and spoke to him briefly, he was working in the morning first, so he'd be heading down really early. I said I would get sorted in the morning (go to the hairdresser etc, so I don't look like such a bum), and then ride down.

I came home, I checked my email, got my suit out ready, and I went to bed, before midnight for once.

I decided to go a bit later today, to see if I could miss all the rush hour traffic.

I didn't get up until a bit after 7am, had a shower, and got ready.

Apparently it's going to rain later today, so I brought my drysuit, and different gloves, I just shoved them in the saddle bag, I don't want to have to drag my bag around again today.

I realised I hadn't put my phone on to charge last night. I'll charge it on the way..

I went down, loaded up my bike. I put my phone on charge (I've got a car charger in my bike, I plug it into the cigarette lighter socket I wired on a couple of days after I got my bike).

I left about 7.50am.

The freeway was a bit lighter this morning, and I just came straight off the freeway at the end.

The traffic flowed pretty well this morning, and there were a few gaps at the lights I was able to take advantage of.

I got to DMR about 9am. Typical, I left about 1/2 hour later, and got here 10 minutes later.

I grabbed the bits and pieces out of my bike, and headed to the building. I grabbed a coffee on the way in today.

I came in, sat down, and started working.

I wanted internet access, and the machine I was using had no proxy settings. my mate's machine is outside of the firewall, so he doesn't have to worry about it.

I went over, checked if he still had putty on his machine, nope, so I grabbed my memory key, plugged it in, copied it off to his machine.

I setup an ssh tunnel on his machine (I tried this before, but when I investigated it later, it's because tunneling is blocked by the machine I was trying to tunnel through last time). I came back to my pc, and I tried sshing into one of my servers, where I had setup a tunnel.

It asked me if I wanted to log in, because the signature was unknown, woohoo, this might work, and then I got a connection closed error. "Software caused connection close" or something. Hmm.

I tried connecting again, now I just got connection refused errors.

I went over to see if putty had crashed or something, "oh, did you want that running?" asks my mate. Hmm. I started it back up again.

I came back over, and tried logging in, this time I got a login prompt. I was successfully able to login. I reconfigured squid on my server to allow the ip address I was coming from (although the tunnel would probably have taken care of that), and then I was able to browse. Woohoo.

I started going through the documentation from yesterday, making a few updates, and writing these blogs.

At about 11.45am, I realised I didn't have my phone. Oops. I left it charging in my bike.

I went out and got it, 19 missed calls, and only half a battery, it must have moved around, and stopped charging, d'oh.

My message service just rang me again, I only had one message, from 8.08am (Who the hell would ring me then? they're lucky I'm working, or I would have been bloody annoyed).

It was the guy who I went to see, and fix his wireless ADSL recently.

I guess I'll call him back now.

I woke up about 6.30am with the alarm going off. It's 13 degrees, ugh.

I got out of bed, after about 10 minutes.

I had a shower, oops, the soap stuff ran out. Oops no deodorant left, I knew there was something else I had to buy at the supermarket.

Oh well, I'll probably just stink, not much I can do about that now.

I got dressed, had some breakfast, then I pulled my insulated trousers on, it looks pretty cold out there.

I took my bag with me, with a bunch of junk I probably wouldn't need.

I ended up leaving about 7.25am.

I came down the freeway, no issues there, at the end of the freeway, there was a bit of a wait to get off, ugh, that's never a good sign.

A couple of bikes went flying past me, up between the lanes. Stuff it, so I went up there too.

After that, the lanes are far too close to be able to do that much, if at all.

It was a pretty slow trip after that, my clutch hand got a bit sore from all the stops and starts.

I got to the Department of Minerals and Resources about 8.50am. Ugh, an hour and a half to get here.

I parked up off the street, where I did on the second day when I worked here about 6 weeks ago.

I headed straight in, I tried to call my mate a couple of times, but he didn't answer. I went into the reception, and told them who I was, and they called my mate on his desk phone.

He came out a couple of seconds later, and I went into the office area with him.

I took my insulated trousers off, it was hot enough with kevlar lined jeans on as it was.

I spoke to the guy I'd be working for, and he told me what he wants done, just basically working out what's all sitting within the intranet files on an old server, moving the stuff that needs to be kept, and dumping the rest of it.

That will probably take me a week or so, and then after that there are some different projects I can have, if I am interested, including finding some way to automate the conversion of 600 thousand TIF images, from a proprietry TIF format, to the standard TIF format. Hmm, that will be an interesting one.

I thought about it for a while, apparently they are all stored in a proprietry SQL database (perhaps a variant of M$SQL), and there's an ODBC driver that hooks into that database, to pull the TIF data out, and serve it to web browsers.

The ODBC driver is really buggy, and crashes the machine most of the time apparently, and isn't compatible with winblows XP, which they are running on almost all of their gear.

I said that there would probably be some way to do it, build a machine running 2000 (or whatever the buggy ODBC driver works somewhat reliably with), and get it hooked into apache (if that's possible), and then write a script of some description, that will request all the images, and then pipe them into a standard TIF generator.

But anyway, that's the next project, if I want it.

They found a desk for me, and I was able to get started.

I started working on this project, attempting to relocate everything of value from an old server.

Apparently the machine has a lot of issues, and if you do the wrong thing, then the whole thing will fall over. I decided I would just tar everything up I needed, and then move it to the dev machine, and go through it there.

Even that wasn't easy, since the tar on the old machine is ancient, and it doesn't strip the leading / from the paths, and then when you restore the tar, you end up walloping files.

I moved the tar file across to the other machine, and tried untarring it, but it didn't work.

I decided to ftp the files over (since to start with, I only had a few files to work with), but even that was a pain, it wanted to copy the files from one server, to the same location on the other server, which didn't exist, and I wouldn't have had write access if it did exist anyway.

I ended up having to ftp the files across, with no paths on them, switching to the directory the files where in, and then I was able to get them across. Ugh.

I went through the telephone "database" first, something I thought would be fairly difficult, dumping the contents of a couple of oracle tables perhaps, and then loading them back in to a different one (and different version), but as soon as I started poking around in the cgi-bin directory, to find the scripts that handled the telephone directory (searching, updating etc), I found that it wasn't a database at all.. the perl scripts in cgi-bin were just working with a text file.

I found the text files it used, and found they were just flat files containing all the details. This has to be one of the worst things I've ever seen. There is no error checking in it, or anything.

The file locations are bad too, the stuff lives in /etc, and then is served by apache, that's just asking for trouble.

I copied all the stuff over to the replacement server, and went about making it work with some more sane file locations.

I would have replaced the whole thing, loaded the data into oracle, and found or written something to pull it out, but I was told that the department is merging with a couple of other departments in a couple of months, and one of the other departments is going to be looking after the telephone directory, so that would have been a waste of time. (Over a year later, it's still in production, maybe I should have rewritten it).

At some point, when that happens, they'll probably get me in to convert their flat file of details into the format required for import to the system the other department uses.

I continued working on that, got the searching working, cool.

I had a look at the update procedure. There's a web form that calls a cgi script.

When I examined the cgi script.. it didn't even update the flat file of details, it sent an email to 3 people, containing all the data the user had entered into the form, one of them must then somehow manually add/change the entry in the flat file.

What a hideous thing.

My phone rang, it was the receptionist from the college I was at on Friday. Apparently they can't get their email, it keeps asking for the password.

Hmm, Thunderbird must be being dumb with passwords again. I noticed that one of the other times I installed it recently too, ah, I know, it was in the cafe, when I got rid of lookout, it refused to save one of the passwords for some reason, and asked for it everytime.

I never have an issue with passwords in my install of Thunderbird, and I have like 5 accounts set up in it.

I told her type the password in, and then it will get the mail, I thought that would sort it out.

She didn't know the password. I couldn't remember it. I told her to call the guy who owns the college, he told me the password the other day, when I installed Thunderbird.

She also complained of not being able to send email. Hmm, perhaps it's not a problem with Thunderbird then, but the mail server they were trying to use.

I told her to try sending the email from the other machine (that will test the mail server/internet connection), and if that fails, to try contacting the tech support to see if they are having problems with their mail server.

About an hour later, she called back again, still having issues. She had got through to the tech support after about 40 minutes, and they had gone through a few settings to check, including some settings on the ADSL router, I don't know what they would have been checking in there.

Anyway, it was still asking for the password all the time, and putting the password in didn't help.

It was now about lunch time, so I went out with my mate to lunch, we wandered out of the building, found it very cold and windy, and came back in and got our coats.

We wandered around the corner to a greasy food place, and I got some pasta. We sat and chatted for a while.

On the way back to the office, my phone rang again, it was the colo guy.

He asked me how I had gone changing the radius back over the weekend. I told him that I hadn't, because I didn't get home on Friday until like 1.30am, and then I left it over the weekend, in case it didn't work, because he doesn't like not having the phones manned when changes are made.

He said he would change it over for me now, and see how we go.

I got back to the office, I went and chatted with the guy I was doing the work for, my phone rang again. Ugh, I'll bet it's the college again. I sent it to message bank.

About 3 seconds later, it rang again, it was the colo guy. I spoke to him, and he told me that the radius was not working. The requests were coming through 4 times, and then failing.

Hmm,I said I would have to have a look at it later.

He asked me what time I was getting home, I said about 6pm, forgetting I was going over to see my mate, he told me to give him a call, and we'd go through it then.

I got back to talking to the guy again, he told me more about the other projects they will have available soon, that I can do if I want.

He also told me several times to make sure that I take my time doing things, not to rush, and make sure that everything is done properly.

My mobile phone rang constantly, my message service with the message whoever it was I sent to messagebank left.

I came back to the desk where I was working, and my phone rang again. I answered it this time, it was a different woman from the college, wanting me to call her.

I called her back, but only got a message service. I left a message for her to call me.

I got back to work, going through the cgi-bin directory, to find out what scripts were in there, and what they did.

My phone rang again, it was the receptionist from the college again.

I told her that the email should just work, and that if it wasn't I would have to come and have a look. I said that Friday night would be the earliest time I had available, and it would be about 5.30pm.

I told her how to open up lookout (because I removed all the shortcuts to stop them from opening, as one of them did about 3 seconds after I installed Thunderbird).

It seemed to work. Hmm. I told her to get the guy who owns the place to call me if he wanted to get me in there on Friday.

I got back to work, going through the cgi-bin directory.

I found a search engine of some description in there, didn't work. I fiddled around, almost got it working, but then came across a problem I didn't know how to fix, so I just left it and kept going with the other files.

I found references to cgi scripts in the web pages, that weren't even there. Hmm, including on the live webserver, oops, who did that? Obviously noone uses the search engine, or they would have complained, and something would have got done about it.

I found the cgi script of the missing search engine, on the old server I'm moving the files off.

I grabbed it off, and worked out how it worked, and I got it working.

It was now a bit after 4pm.

About 4.30pm, I called up my mate's place, to check he was in, he wasn't but would be back in about 1/2 hour. I said I was heading over, and would probably get over there about the same time.

I packed up, and I left, after checking the street directory.

As I was loading up my bike, I realised I would need some change (or money in general) to get across the motorway (toll), and I only had about $1.50 in cash on me.

I headed off, I need fuel anyway, so I can get some money then.

I headed across towards the entry of the motorway, I didn't see a service station except for one past the turnoff to the road that leads on to the motorway. Bugger.

I went over there, filled up, pulled some cash out, and got the guy to break the $5 note change so I had the exact money to get across the motorway. I put the exact money in my jacket pocket, so I can just rip off my glove, grab the cash, chuck it at the guy, put my glove back on, and take off.

I headed back to the road that lead to the motorway, it was all banked up, took a while to get through there, and there was a service station down there. D'oh.

After a little while I was able to race across this road, get on the motorway, and head towards my mate's place.

I got to the toll booths about halfway across. D'oh, the toll must have gone up, I thought it was either $3 or $3.30, the amount I put in my pocket, but it's actually $3.80.

I pulled up, gave the guy the $3.30, and then I had to fish out an extra 50c. I had to rip off my other glove, and stand up, because my bike jeans are so tight around the pockets (presumably to stop stuff falling out).

It took way longer than it should, but I got it out, gave it to the guy, and then I had to put my gloves back on, and take off. Sucked in to the guy waiting behind me.

I headed along the rest of the motorway. It's been ages since I've been across here. I was sure I had to head for the end of it, but I kept seeing turnoffs with signs that looked like where I wanted to go.

I hoped I did remember correctly, and I wasn't going to end up in Canberra or something.

I came to the end of the M2 eventually, longer than I thought, it was 5.15pm. So much for being 1/2 hour away.

I went over to my mate's place, he wasn't there, but his sister, her husband, and some woman I haven't met before were there.

I had a quick chat, and then just sat down to wait.

My mate turned up about 1/2 hour later.

I saw his wife, who I haven't seen for ages, she's been over in the US for about a year or something now.

I was there until just before 7pm, because my mate's brother had arranged to have a meeting with the estate advisor, and they had to leave.

He asked me if I was coming to the funeral, and I said I was, so we worked out the details of that. Apparently one of our other mates is coming, so I'll just jump in the car with him to come down on Wednesday morning.

I pulled my insulated trousers on again, it was pretty cold out now, I went out, loaded up my bike, and I took off, and rode towards home.

I thought about going back across the motorway, but at nearly $4, it's not worth it. At this time of day, I'm in no real rush, and the normal way is empty anyway.

I headed into McDonalds just before getting on the freeway. I sat and read the paper for a bit. I felt like about 11.30pm, but it was only about 7.30pm.

I left, got on the freeway, and came towards home. Whenever I cornered on the freeway, it felt like my bike was slipping a bit, not very good at 120km/h.

I found that if I sat back and a bit more upright, it didn't seem to do it, it could be a weight placement thing, or it could just be me imagining things.

I got off the freeway, and headed to the supermarket.

It now felt like it was after midnight, but it was only 8.30pm.

I bought deodorant and stuff, and then I came home.

As I took my insulated trousers off, my phone was somehow stuck to them, and it tore the clip off the cover that's slowly been getting more worn over the last year or so. Bugger, now I'll need to try to find another leather case for it, and they probably don't make them anymore, and most of the new phones are smaller than this one (nokia 8210 I think it is).

I went in and saw my parents, gave Mum her chocolates (I would have given them to her last night, after I came back, but it was too cold, and I couldn't be bothered going outside).

I sat in there for a bit, there was a letter there, from the tax department, my tax had been done, and I had received my refund. Ah, that will be the money I received I didn't know where it come from.

I watched tv for a bit, and then I came out.

I sat and watched the tv for a little bit, and then I went to bed about 11pm.

I watched some tv, and then I turned it off and went to sleep.

I didn't end up getting to bed until about 5am.

The alarm went off about 10.30am for me to get up to go up to my mate's place. Not going to happen.

I sent him an sms telling him I would be there about midday, and I went back to sleep for a bit, the extra 45 minutes will have to help.

I got up about 11.15am, and had a shower, just as I got out of the shower, at about 11.35am, the phone rang. I answered it, it was my mate, "where are you? at home?" "yes, I sent you an sms telling you I would be there about midday". "Oh", "So I'll see you then".

I got dressed, had some breakfast, checked my spam, and I left about 11.50am.

I got there about 12.15, the traffic was shocking.

My mate's wife was planning on getting on my bike (since they don't all fit in the car), so go around to the barbeque, but instead one of the relatives who is over went.

He jumped on, and I waited out on the street for the others, and then I followed them around to my mate's mate's place, where the barbeque was.

No great issue in getting there.

My mate had to take a pc back to someone who lived around the corner, so I went with him to do that.

We got around there, plugged the pc all back in, and he showed them how to use the new things.

He was telling them about the virus scanner, and that they have to keep it updating, and how the firewall will keep popping up asking if they want to do things. I could see the people getting a bit glazed over, having no idea what he was telling them.

I basically explained that when the firewall pops up, if it's an outgoing connection alert, then you can accept it (not entirely true, it could be adware trying to download banners, or send the data it's collected), but if it's an incoming connection, then it should be denied (again, not entirely true, but you don't want these people ringing you up every 5 minutes saying "it's popped up saying this, what do I do?" etc).

They seemed to understand that.

My mate went on to explain how to use adaware, again, they seemed to get a bit glazed over, but I just left that one. I don't want to seem condescending or contradictory.

We went through the list of items that run automatically on the machine, seeing if there was anything that could be taken out. There were a bunch of itmes to do with the printer, which had been removed, and we decided to test that the printer worked without them running (since a lot of these crappy usb printers don't actually do anything, and software running on the pc is the printer, and if you disable it from the startup, then the printer won't work).

We tried to do a test print, nothing happened.

They calimed it was because there was no cartridges in the printer, but I would have expected to see an error message, not just have the machine sit there doing nothing.

I opened the printer, to see if it would power on, and move the recepticles out to enable loading new cartridges, but it did nothing.

I looked at the printer, asked if it was turned on, tried unplugging the power cord from the back of it, and back in again, then I noticed a power button on the front, not lit up.

I pressed it. held it, all sorts of things, but it just wouldn't do anything.

I checked that the transformer was plugged into the wall properly, yep.

My mate climbed down behind the desk to check the transformer (it sits in the middle of the power cord, rather than having a big ugly brick that stops you from using the point next to it). It was cold.

Hmm, he checked the cord between the transformer and the wall, it wasn't in properly, pushed it in, and the printer came on.

Not able to print, and no error messages, but I didn't really care, I was sick of being here at this point.

They seemed happy to get their machine back, so we started to leave.

They asked for a card, my mate said he had one in the car, went out to get one, and realised he didn't have any with him.

He came back, and they said they had his number.

They paid him, more than he asked for (but mainly because he asks for so little).

We got back in the car, and headed back to the place where the barbeque was.

On the way, I suggested that my mate type up a couple of instruction pages to give people when he returns their machine, telling them how to use the firewall, run adaware, update and run the virus scanner etc, because these people just don't pay attention, and then they either call up complaining they don't know what ther are supposed to do, or they just don't do it, and their machine ends up full of virii and spyware again.

We got back to the barbeque, went out the back where my mate's mate was cooking some meat.

We stood around the barby talking for a bit, I had a beer.

We cooked up everything, taking about 45 minutes, and then served it all up.

We sat and ate, after about an hour, most of the people went inside, because it was getting a little bit cold outside, the wind was blowing, and it had become a bit overcast, with rain clouds.

My mate's mate suggested I move my bike inside his gates, and close them, because there are some feral kids around, great, you couldn't have told me that when I got here nearly 2 hours ago. I moved my bike in. I didn't see any feral kids around however.

My mate's mate's wife played the organ, and her husband sang some songs for a while, I wasn't too entertained by it, but the Chinese visitors seemed to enjoy it.

It started sprinkling a bit, and I wanted to get back before it really started raining (I also wanted to see if I could get to the hairdresser before they closed today), so I motioned to leave.

I grabbed the helmets and stuff, and my mate told the guy I brought over (well, got his wife to tell the guy, since he only knows about 3 english words), that we were going back before it started raining.

My mate gave me his garage door opener, so we could get in once we got back.

I went out, backed my bike out, and he jumped on.

I noticed the feral kids on push bikes down the road, I was too busy looking at them, I didn't think about what I was doing, and I ended up going around the corner on the wrong side of the road, and wondered why a guy in a big truck was coming straight at me, and then I realised I was on the wrong side of the road, oops.

I headed back towards my mate's place, but I couldn't remember the way, I didn't pay enough attention on the way over, I thought I came to the turn I had to make, but I must have gone past it, not recognising it from the different angle/approach.

I came to another turn, which I thought was the correct one, but as soon as I turned there, I realised it was not.

I didn't matter however, because there was a main road at the end of the one I had just turned on to, so I was sure I could find a way back.

It was starting to rain now.

I got on the main road, and after a short while I was the bowling club we had gone past on the way over there, so I knew where I was at that point.

I rode back to my mate's place, the guy I took over there and back jumped off and went inside (I opened the door with my mate's garage door opener).

A few seconds later my mate turned up in the car with the rest of them.

Either he was going a bit quicker than I, or I wasted a fair bit of time with the wrong turn.

It was raining a fair bit now.

We went inside.

I went in with my mate, he wanted to go over the prices of the machines he quoted to build for one of the seniors clubs recently, I made a few changes to the parts, and it worked out a bit cheaper.

He started sending an email to the wholesaler, to get the parts sorted out so he could pick them up, I lost my patience about halfway through, and I finished it off. It was painful watching him using a spreadsheet (which he did before composing the email, using up my patience), instead of just dragging the cell contents around, and deleting lines he ddn't want, he'd cut and paste everything, using the edit menu. ugh.

We had a what for a minute, working out when I could build the machines for him (since he doesn't want to mount the motherboards in the cases), and what I would charge to do it. I said I didn't know when I could do it now (I had planned to do it on Tuesday night), since I may be staying down in Sydney on Tuesday night, depending on the arrangements I make with my mate (who's Mum died), when I go and see him tomorrow night.

It was now about 4.15pm, oh well, I've missed the hairdresser.

I was cold and damp, and tired.

I decided to come home, so I left at that point.

On the way home, I realised I had nothing for dinner. I went to the supermarket.

I was going to buy some of the crappy single pizzas I've been getting, but they've been discontinued (have been for a few weeks), and there was only one left, and the box was open. Screw that, so I had to get some more expensive ones.

I bought a box of chocolates for Mum, I think they jack the price up for mother's day, oh well, it's a choice between spending a few dollars more than usual, or putting up with months of whinging.

I came home, and then just bummed around for the rest of the night.

I watched tv, ate my food, and then went to bed about 11.30pm

Oh yeah, I checked the tour dates of the band last night when I got home, and they were on last night.

There a few more concerts however, I'll just go to another one.

I slept until after midday.

I got up, got dressed.

I checked, there was a computer fair on today.

I grabbd my bag, and I left.

I went to the ATM, and tried to get some money out, it kept telling me "invalid account type". Terrific.

I went to the computer fair.

I was looking for a socket 370 mobo, so I could use the 667mhz PIII cpu I've got.

I wandered around for a minute, bumped into the people from the neighbourhood centre computer club, and spoke to them.

I chatted to them for a while, and then I kept wandering. I saw the guy I bought all my servers off, and who my friend used to deal with.

I spoke to him for a bit, told him I just had my ISP going now, and some other stuff.

I noticed he had a socket 370 mobo in amongst some other bits and pieces.

I asked him what he wanted for it, and he told me that I shouldn't buy it.

He said it was unstable, just for testing, and that if someone else wanted to buy it, then he would sell it for $10 or $15. heh, at least he's being courteous enough not to sell it to me.

I kept wandering.

I went around again, and I found a $370 mobo, for $49.

I bought it on my credit card, at least that still worked.

I wandered around more, bumped into the people from the club again, and also a guy from the computer club I used to go to ages ago.

I spoke to him for a bit, and then we started wandering again.

I saw one of mates there. I wandered over, he was buying some stuff, and was trying to find a dollar to make the amount for his purchase easier, so I gave it to him.

We chatted briefly, he asked me what I was doing tonight, I said not much, probably just going down the club.

I bought an ATI Radeon 9200 card to put in my "new" machine I bought a few weeks ago.

I bought it from the guy I got my servers from. I could have got it cheaper somewhere else, but it was only a few dollars, so I didn't really care, and he gave me $5 off his normal price anyway.

While I was paying for that, my phone rang, it was my mate (who was in the US recently). I spoke to him, he asked what I was up to tonight, and I said I would probably just go down the club, and that I had just seen one of our mates.

My mate asked me if I wanted to come around his place for a bit first, yeah, sure.

I got off the phone, and finished paying for the card.

I wandered around quite a bit more, and ended up buying a 32mb usb flash card thingy for $35. Everyone else wanted to sell 128mb or 256mb cards. I don't need that much, I only need to carry around a few files, like the install for avast, adaware, and maybe some other utils.

I ended up leaving a bit after 2pm, because all the stalls were starting to pack up.

As I left, I thought I was going to have issues getting past the guard, because I had three bags, with different receipts etc.

He saw a single receipt in one of the bags, and said I was right.

Gee that's really good. You can steal all you want, as long as the stuff is in bags, and you buy at least one thing, and get a reciept.

I wandered over to my bike, some of the people I had been chatting to earlier where near it, and we chatted a bit more.

I loaded my stuff, put my gear on, and took off.

I went to McDonalds, and got some breakfast/lunch, about 2.30pm.

I came home.

I started fiddling around with the board I had bought.

I put the cpu on it, plugged everything in, but it didn't do anything.

While I was fiddling around the other day, one of the wires came off the cpu fan, so I decided to fix that, in case that was an issue.

I soldered that back on, but it made no difference, the board just did nothing.

My theory now, is that the fan (which still did not work) had failed, and the cpu had overheated, and it had somehow caused the other board to fail.

When I tested the other board with the cpu on it a couple of days ago, it blew up a power supply (it now outputs -1.5v on the 12v rail), and the board scorched the cardboard box I had it sitting on.

So, I spent $50 something on a board I now don't need, because the cpu seems to have failed, and I could have bought a board with cpu for about that. Bugger.

Ok, plan B. Lets see if I can fix the original board with my 800 on it, that keep dying.

I came home a few days ago to find it had died again, and it's done nothing since.

I looked at the stuffed board that blew up the psu.

It had 7 1500uF 6.3v caps on it.

I desoldered them, this was pretty difficult, but I got them in the end.

I desoldered 7 of the 9 pretty obviously stuffed (2200 uF) caps from my 800 board.

I soldered the 1500uF caps on in place.

It was difficult to get some in, because the holes weren't clear enough.

I found a sewing pin, and I grabbed it with the pliars, I was then able to use the soldering iron on it, and force it through the board to clear the hole.

I remembered reading somewhere that solder doesn't stick to stainless steel, and I think most sewing pins are stainless, so I should be able to push it through, wiggle it round a bit, leave it in there, and then pull it out after the solder has set, and push the cap through.

This helped on a couple of them.

I got them all in in the end, and put a bit of solder on them, but this wasn't great.

I think I need a hotter soldering iron for this stuff to work properly.

I put the board back, cpu etc back on, plugged it all in.

Bang, it booted up first go, when it had refused to boot for the last week or so.

I pulled one of the stuffed capacitors apart. The paper, or whatever it is in them, was rock hard, totally dry, and mostly brown. Down the bottom, where the legs enter the paper, it was black, and burnt looking.

I left it, and I went inside to speak to my parents, because my brother had come out a bit earlier.

I took a couple of caps in, and showed Dad.

He showed me the 8 track player he had gone and collected from my grandparents holiday house they recently auctioned off.

It's some huge thing, with a reel to reel mechanism on the side of it, and you can do dubbing to/from 8 track to reel to reel.

Apparently one channel is stuffed on it, and it only works in mono.

There was a box of 8 tracks too, some stuff I've never heard of. There was a Doobie Brothers 8 track Dad pulled out, apparently he bought that one, when my grandad had an 8 track player in the car.

He asked me what was going on with the ISP, and I told him I got it working Thursday night, but then I stuffed up the routing, and broke it again, but that I'll fix it on Monday (well, it's already fixed, but put the radius settings back), test it all Monday, and if it's fine, then I'll change the other nas over to proxy through freeradius, and I can start people dialling in on Tuesday.

I had a chat with my parents for a while, we discussed billing, and telephone support etc.

There was a letter for me that had arrived a couple of days ago, it was my pay slip for the contracting I did about 6 weeks ago.

I came back in.

I shut the machine down (I left it running testing it). I had to hold the power button for 4 seconds to get it to go off. Hmm, not a good sign.

I booted the machine back up, and it came straight up.

I shut it off again, had to hold the power. hmm.

I went to connect the hard disk, to see if windows would run properly.

I noticed the board was pretty warm near the memory.

I checked the underside of the board, warm. The DVD case I had it sitting on was even warmer.

I checked the power supply side, it was hot.

Hmm..
I pulled it up, and had a look at it. I think the fan has ceased up.

I pushed it around with a screwdriver a bit, and then I shorted the ATX power connector pins to make it run, and the fan spun.

It started pushing the hot air out, and cooling the whole thing down.

I plugged it back to the board, and put the hard disk on, and the network card in.

I tried to boot the machine up. No good.

I pulled the disk off, still no good. I took the network card out, still no good.

Crap. Board is dead again. Oh well.

It was now about 8pm.

The phone rang, it was the guy I play snooker with.

He wants to know if I'm coming up to a barbeque tomorrow, and if I cand take his wife around there, because they all won't fit in the car. I said that was fine.

He wants me to go up there a bit earlier, so I can adjust the satellite dish (I never "fixed" it, because the signal issues he was having went away), and to try to work out why the sensor light that's stopped working has stopped.

I said I would come up and have a look at that stuff.

I had arranged to go up to his place on Monday or Tuesday to build a couple of computers for him he's been contracted to do for one of the computer clubs, I said that may have to change, because I'm going to see my mate again on Monday night, so I won't be getting back until late, and depending on what happens there, I may go back again on Tuesday night, stay there, and go to the funeral on Wednesday, and then come back up Wednesday afternoon, and build the pcs then.

I mucked around with my memory key thing. It said USB 2.0 on it, but I only have usb 1.1 in this machine (on a board I bought in about 1998). I decided to try it anyway.

Windows found it, installed the drivers, and an extra drive popped up.

I copied some stuff on it, it seemed fine.

This should be handly. I can carry it around now, and it's got adaware and avast and stuff on it, so I can clean up machines without having to deal with waiting 1/2 hour for stuff to download (just have to do quick updates), and dealing with machines that have lsass crash and the machine want to reboot (which they don't seem to do without an internet connection).

I had a shower, got dressed, and I left about 8.45pm.

I went to my mates place.

I had a couple of drinks, a few of our other mates were there.

They were waiting on a pizza, that turned up, so I pinched a few bits when my mate was finished with it.

One of my mates who was there went and lay down on the lounge, and went to sleep.

They called a taxi, and when it turned up, 4 of us jumped in and went down to the club. (I don't know what happened to my other mate).

As we were getting in, a couple of my mates started pissing about, I thought they were all in the taxi, and so did the taxi driver, because he started to drive off, but one of my mates was still out of the taxi, and the door was open. He got in, and we went to the club.

We wandered in, had a few drinks, and sat around bored for a few hours.

About 1.20am, I went to play the pokies. I started with $5, won up to about $9, lost it back to $5.

Just as I did so, my mate called me to tell me they were leaving.

I changed my coins, and I left.

We were looking for a 5 seater taxi to get back, and then we decided to go in 2 groups, of 4 and 1, because one of my mates was going home, and so he just went on his own.

The rest of us went back to my mates place.

We sat in and chatted for a while. My mate who went to sleep got up, and we told him he didn't miss anything.

He went home.

My mate put on Reservoir Dogs. Heh, I just watched that a few days ago.

I started watching it, abut then realise it was going to be about 3.30am before it finished, and then I'd have to get home, and I'd spend too long blogging, and wouldn't have time to get any sleep.

I left, I went to the service station around the corner, and I got some chocolate, because I'm hungry, and all I've eaten today was some McDonalds, a couple of bits of pizza, and I had a microwave pie down at the club (and the crappy vending machine ripped me off, because it didn't give me my sauce I paid extra for).

I came home.

I started blogging.

I just tried booting the stuffed/fixed/stuffed board up again.

Still no good.

Perhaps the 2 2200uF caps I didn't replace (because I didn't have any more "good" caps to replace them with) have totally failed because the others are now good.

I think I'll have to chase down some more, and try replacing the rest of them.

Great, it's 4.30am. It's taken me 45 minutes to write this entry.

I would think about getting some voice dictation software, to make blogging a bit faster, but I would end up with things like "we suck young blood" and "kicking squealing gucci little piggy" written in the middle of all my blog entries

I'm going to bed.

Here we go for another day late blog entry.

You're lucky when I do this a day late, half the details are missing, so it's not so "incredibly boring" as I saw my blog described in a different blog recently. Hey, the warning's there, just look to your right, for the inset bit.

Anyway..

I got up about 8.45 after lying in bed for a bit, I had a shower, and some breakfast.

I left about 9.30am.

I got down the freeway, and to the place, about 10.25am.

I went in, and asked what was to be done.

Not much at this point in time.

The laptop I was supposed to fix was there, but I hadn't seen the guy who owns the place.

I started explaining file sharing to the woman there, but she picked up that I wasn't very happy (hey, I was tired, it was a cold trip down, and I really wasn't in the mood for explaining basic stuff). She asked me if I was ok, and I just whinged about being tired.

I went in and made a coffee while she was talking to someone about something.

I shared some stuff, showed her how it worked.

The other woman, who was supposed to be bringing her pc in (and I was originally going to go to her house to fix today), stuck her head in, and said that she hadn't brought her pc, because her husband needed to use it, and they couldn't be without it for a day.

I said I would have to arrange to fix it one day next week then.

The guy came back, and gave me his laptop to fix.

I booted it up, errors with lsass.

I installed avast on his laptop, ran a scan, it found sasser on it, and it also found some other malware, not netsky, a different one, nachi or something I think it was, I didn't pay much attention.

I managed to clean it off.

I got a phone call, it was the colo guy.

Apparently he'd changed the radius settings in the cisco back to the original, going direct to his radius server, and bypassing my proxy, because my proxy had stopped working properly, and his customers weren't being authenticated.

I said I would have a look at what had happened, and I would get back to him.

I downloaded putty, ssh'd in, and had a look to work out what the problem was.

I was able to resolve the hostname of the radius server the requests are supposed to be getting proxied to, that still worked.

I was unable to ping the radius server. Hmm..

I tried tracerouting to the server.. I received a host unreachable (!H) error, but from a strange IP address, I was also unable to ping the server.

The IP address returning the host unreachable error, was one of the virtual interfaces I setup last night.

Uh oh. I think I know what's happened..

I checked the routing table on the server, yep.. when I setup the virtual interfaces, on the other subnet, so that dns would work (because the registrar has not effected my changes to the name servers for the domain), it added in a route for the network the virtual interfaces were on, and also the radius server I was supposed to be proxying to, but that server and subnet are only accessable through the gateway machine.

Oops.

I added in a static route for the radius server, did a couple of radtests, and worked out it was back working again.

I sent an email to the colo guy explaining the situation.

I got back to work, I finished cleaning virii off the laptop, and I installed a few windows updates at the same time.

The woman with the other pc I was supposed to fix (who I thought was the woman who called me, but it wasn't), wasn't there, and didn't turn up, so I didn't have to fix her pc either.

My phone rang again, it was my mate who wants me to setup his ISP. We chatted for a minute, and he asked me about work on Monday, confirming that I am on contract for the next couple of weeks. Cool.

The guy came back again, and I spoke to him for a bit.

He wanted to change away from using LookOut Express, woo, cool.

I told him about Thunderbird, he seemed happy with that, and got me to change them to that.

I downloaded it, installed it on the three pcs, and the laptop.

I was so easy, install, import settings, import mail, import address book.

Sort the mail folders, move some messages, move the addresses in the addressbook, done.

I showed them how to use it.

The guy had to go somewhere, so I sat and showed him how to use Thunderbird.

He was on the phone, and was working it all out for himself, as I watched, so I didn't have to do anything there, that was good.

He left.

It was now about 1.30pm, and I had been in the parking lot for 3 hours now (it's 3 hour parking, that's why I got a ticket for being in there for 7 hours), so I had to go move.

I asked them where the next parking was, because a couple of them had already been to move their cars, and they said I should park in the shopping centre.

I got up, took my helmet with me, and went and moved my bike into the shopping centre.

I went to some fast food place and got a burger, and I ate it on my way back to the office.

I got back, fiddled around for a bit, they'd worked out how they were going to deal with their files, they wanted 2 of the machines to have all the files backed up to cd, and then removed from the machines, and setup to use a single set of the files, on one of the other machines.

I showed the chick at reception how to burn the files, and left her watching it.

I called in to the colo guy, spoke to his wife, told her to let him know I had sent an email to him.

I downloaded a demo of some cd burning software on the other pc, and set it to backup.

The demo was limited to single speed burning, so it was going to take about 1/2 hour.

I watched it for a bit, it got to about half way through, and I decided I might as well get going.

I left.

I got just outside, and I realised I didn't have my pen.

I'd seen it floating around, I noticed it on the floor earlier in the day, and I put it on the desk where I was working.

I went back, and had a look around, no sign of it. Hmm.

I checked the other desks, and a couple of drawers, but I didn't find it.

I asked them to keep an eye out for it for me.

I might call them on Monday to see if they've found it.

I went back to the shopping centre, and my bike.

I checked the street directory for how to get to my mate's place.

I took off.

I rode towards his place, got to a place where I had to turn, but thought I was going the wrong way, from the signs.

I cut through traffic, and headed the other way, ended up going the totally wrong way.

As I waited at some lights, I saw some emergency vehicle lights flashing up the top of the hill, looks like something good.

As I waited still (took ages here), tow truck came down the hill, and the car it was towing, was totally wrecked.

It looked like it had driven under something, and the bonnet was all crumpled up, the windscreen smashed, and the left half of the car pretty much crushed. No idea what had gone on.

I rode around a bit, looking for a place to pull over to check the street directory, I didn't find one, and ended up heading back up towards where I turned the wrong way.

I then started to see signs telling me the distance to where I was trying to get to, so that was a good sign.

I folled that around, then worked out where I was, and had no difficulty finding my mate's place from there, it just took a while because of peak hour traffic.

I got there, it took me an hour to get there, instead of about 20 minutes.

I went in, saw my mate, his brother, and his sister's husband, and their (the sister and her husband) daughter.

We chatted for a bit.

A friend of the family turned up, and they chatted for a bit.

We went across to McDonalds, got some food, and sat and chatted for about 45 minutes.

The family friend left, to pick up his and his wife's dinner and go home.

We went back to the house.

We found the house was locked up, and my mate's brother in law and daughter had gone out.

We went around the back, to climb in the window.

My mate told me about the fire they had had a couple of days before, the pool filter pump had caught on fire, and had fire blowing out of it, because it was still running.

We had a quick look at it, it was just all black, and stank.

We couldn't really see much, because it was so dark.

I helped my mate get in the window.

He had a bit of diificulty, because his wrist (which is now mostly healed), gives him some pain.

He got in, and went and opened the front door.

We sat and played a video game for a bit.

Another guy turned up, I think he's a friend of theirs, that they are getting to do some of the work for the funeral.

He been called and asked to come over by my mate's other brother, who had turned up, collected the brother in law, and the daughter, and they had left, he must have forgotten he asked the guy to come over.

My mate tried calling his brother, but only got through to his message service.

We chatted to the guy for a bit, he was there for about 45 minutes.

My mate mentioned the funeral will be on Wednesday, and that it's taking a fair length of time, because his Mum is an organ donor (and mentioned that 7 people will be helped by her), and they want to do some investigations to work out why she died.

About 7pm, my phone rang, it was the colo guy, he'd got my emails, and said I could change the cisco settings back to using my radius if I wanted (since he had given me the passwords). I said I wouldn't be near an internet connection for the next few hours, so I may do it later.

I remember that something was going on tonight, I think tonight was when we were planning to see the Hoodoo Gurus, I went through my phone, checked my sms, yeah, it's tonight, starting at 8pm, I don't think I'll be there somehow.

My mate told me that his sister's video camera (which had a tape in it they wanted to process) had run flat, and they couldn't charge or use it, because the charger is designed for 120v. (It probably has a switch mode transformer and will work on both 110 and 240 now I think about it). I said I would bring my stepdown transformer down on Monday, after I do the contract work, so they could use the camera.

My mate asked me to see if I could fix his sister's computer, since it had a lot of pictures of his Mum on it, they wanted to get off.

I had a look at the machine, my mate told me that it just didn't come on. I disconnected everything, and shorted the atx power switch wires on the atx connector, and it seemed to be working, so it wasn't the power supply.

I plugged it back on to the mobo,and it fired up.

I put the disks back on again, and the machine booted up fine.

We spent about an hour and a half going through the machine, collecting all the pictures.

I sorted it out, and we found 650mb worth, so I burned a cd of them.

I took the hard disk and cd burner out of the machine, and I put them into the other pc. That took us about 1/2 hour.

I wasted more time here, because I put the hard drive from the other machine in, set as master, and didn't think about the cdrom in the machine, also set to master, so I had to pull the whole machine apart, and fix that.

I tried to copy the cd again in windows xp, but it's just dumb. The built in cd burning software is rubbish, it wants to cache the whole cd on the hard driver first, and there was not room, and there's no way to tell it to put the files in a different place.

I waseted a bit of time on that, tried running nero from the other disk, but it just complained about missing files, and once I fixed that, it complained the demo was expired, and I couldn't get it to run.

It was about 11pm when I finished mucking around with this stuff.

My mate's sister and her husband/daughter along with my mate's brother came back from wherever they had gone.

His sister was happy to see me, and was appreciative of me going through and collecting all her photos from her machine.

I was wanting to get going soon, before it got too late.

I went back across the road to McDonalds again, with my mate.

We had a chat, while we ate.

We came back from there about midnight.

I started getting my stuff together.

My mate lent me his bike overtrousers, and some thicker gloves, because he was worried about me getting cold.

I put my bag on my bike, and noticed the hard disk sitting in it, with all the music on it, bugger, I forgot to do anything with it.

I ended up leaving his place about 12.20am.

I rode some of the way back, and pulled into a servo before I got on the freeway, because I only had about 30km worth of fuel left, and home was still 50km away.

I filled up, went to go in and pay, and found that the servo was locked, and they were serving through the little pay window.

I paid, came back to my bike, put all my gear on again, and started off.

I got on the freeway, and headed for home.

It was very foggy on the freeway, and at some points, the visibilty was almost zero.

I was fine to start with, some idiot came and drove right up behind me, with his high beams on, next thing, my visor fogged up, and then I hit a really bad patch of fog, and couldn't see a thing.

I ripped the visor open, got out of the lane, and the idiot went flying past me.

I had to ride the rest of the freeway with my visor up.

We hit some roadworks, reducing the whole freeway back to one lane.

I ended up in front of the idiot with the high beams again, because as soon as he went shooting past me, he found why I was only going 100km/h, the fact there was no visibility.

We got past the roadworks, it opened back to three lanes, and we were off again.

The visibility was about 1m here, and I was just following the lines and reflectors on the road, because it was just invisible.

The cars dropped right back, they must have had even worse visibility.

The next 30km or so of the freeway that were left, were shocking. The visibility was poor all the way, and dropped back to nothing again a few times.

At some points, it was so thick, that it felt like someone was spitting in my face.

I got off the freeway, and there was smoke mixed in with the fog here, that was fun. Not only could I not see, but I couldn't breathe.

I came down the hill, and headed towards home.

I got home, about 1.45am. As I put the bike down on the stand, a ton of water went running off the mirror, it must have been collecting there.

I came inside, and went to the bathroom, I was soaking wet, my face, and hair and everything, from having the visor open.

My clothes were all wet, my jacket had water all over it.

I started getting undressed, and I found that the trousers my mate lent me had ice on the front of them. I'm glad he lent them to me, and the winter gloves.

I went to bed.

I was woken about 10.20am by the phone ringing.

I thought it was the alarm going off at first, so I pressed the snooze button on my alarm, but that didn't stop the noise.

I answered the phone.

It was a woman from the college I was at on Monday (who called me last week, while I was in the colo guy's shop), she wanted to know if I was going to be fixing her pc tomorrow.

I said I thought I had arranged with her on Monday, to bring her pc down on Friday. Nope.. it was a different woman, who had been told to bring her pc in on Monday, but had forgotten.

I told her that I had arranged with the owner of the college to go down tomorrow, to finish off the network (oops, I needed to buy more rj45s, I should have done this today, I forgot all about it), and to fix a pc, who I thought was hers.

I said that if she was to bring her pc down there tomorrow, I would fix it there, otherwise I don't know when I will have time.

She said she would probably do that.

Ok, so now I have to finish the network (difficult, seeing as I need to crimp up cables, using rj45s I don't have), fix a laptop (remove sasser crap), and fix 2 pcs, with problems I have no idea about.

I watched some tv, got up about 12.30pm.

I sat on the internet for a bit.

I wasted time compiling an ntp app for a guy on the tivo mailing list. it had an issue with "getservbyname", of which there is a work around in some "libtivohack" file.

I tried to find how to compile against this library, but I didn't, I ended up finding gimmicky things to install on the tivo. I put jpegwriter on, and put a few jpegs on the tv screen.

I then came across "TCS", or Tivo Control Station. It looked pretty cool, so I wasted about an hour and a half installing and configuring that.

I learnt how NFS works in the process, and successfully used it for the first time.

I then decided I really should be making use of this time to try to get dialin working.

I googled around, trying to find info about DNIS with freeradius, or proxying.

I found some info, went about configuring freeradius to do it. It should work now..

I had a shower (about 4.15pm). I thought about calling the colo guy to see about playing with the radius settings on the nas, and see if I had it right, but then I thought it was a bit late.

I decided to call anyway. I rang up, and spoke to his wife, she said he would be in there until 5 or so.

I rushed to get dressed, and I took off.

The traffic was useless on the way out there, people going half the speed limit everywhere.

It only took me about 15 minutes to get there, but it felt like about 30.

I went in, the guy was busy on a machine.

He was finishing off a machine for a guy, it had sasser and stuff on it.

There was another machine he was working on, had removed Lotus Smartsuite from it, and then the customer complained they couldn't open any of their files. Oops.

The phone rang, and he was kept busy there, so I finished off the virus scan on the guy's machine, it had just found some adware. What is the point of a virus scanner looking for porn diallers and adware? The colo guy put adaware and a couple of other apps on, and then we finished the machine off.

The colo guy was busy on the phone again, so I helped the guy move his pc out to his car.

I went back and had a look at the Lotus machine, finished installing it, tested it.. the files complain they were made with a newer version, and won't open.

We finally got a chance to look at the nas/radius stuff.

I went and added my nas to his naslist, since assumedly it will rewrite the auth requests to appear to come from my nas.

We then changed the radius definition in the nas, and requests started proxying through.. only halfway there though, it started coming up with "request from unknown client".

Hmm, I had edited the naslist, but not the clients file, so I fixed that.

It then started working. Woohoo.

His customers dialin, and if they use a plain username, or their email address, or hopefully based on the number they called, they get sent to his radius, and if they log in on my dialin number, or login with an email address on my domain, they go to my radius.

I let it run like this for a minute, and was working fine.

I then went in, and changed the configuration, to test if it was proxying based on the telephone number.. nope, because when I disabled sending all plain usernames to his radius server, they were trying to authenticate against mine, and failing, so I changed that back.

I tried to login as my test user a few times, but everytime, I ended up hitting the first nas, with the 4 E1s in it, which was still configured to go straight to his radius server.

We left it at this point. The second nas, with the single E1 in it, was the one we were testing, it seemed to be working fine.

The guy gave me all the nas passwords, in case something stuffed up, and I had to change it back.

I said I would probably end up doing testing around 2/3am, and he said that I could do anything then.

It was now a bit after 6pm, and we left.

The guy mentioned again about the radio restriction being removed recently, and that he was thinking about putting an aerial up on the roof, with a radio on it, to see if he could get to the nearby retirement village. I said I would help with that if he wanted, because I'd previously put a 15m aerial up, but the job never got finished, because no one got permission to put the aerial up (over 6m requires council permission, and on the roof requires strata permission).

Apparently the guy in the office next door had just put an air conditioning unit on the roof, and it was no drama.

I said, "oh well, you've got power for your radio then", in reference to all the dodgy things my friend used to get up to, and the installs he did, before he was killed, and we both had a bit of a chuckle about the idea of pinching power off the airconditioner.

I miss my friend. Every couple of days something reminds me of him, and I feel a bit sad. Perhaps in a few months, when I have a bit of time, I might go down and visit his grave or something.

I took off, and rode to the pizza place near home, I got there just after 7pm.

I sat in there, and while I was waiting for my pizza, I was able to relax for a minute.

I wasn't near a computer, I wasn't riding somewhere, I didn't have a hundred things going on at the same time. I was just sitting at a table, waiting, doing nothing at all. It's the most enjoyable time I've had for a few weeks.

My pizza arrived, I ate it, they've changed it from the last time I was here, it was still good though, then I paid, left, and came home.

I mucked around, dragged out the old laptop, to test dialling in, as one of my customers.

This was not as easy as it could have been.

I finished off the half a glass of wine left in the bottle.

I put the modem/ethernet card in, that was fine, it detected the modem part, and installed it as a normal modem.

D'oh, no dialup networking on here.

The ethernet's not working either (with no drivers) so I can't get to the cab files (even I can even find the cab files for winblows 95). The supported network card is the one in the other laptop.. in the rack, where the gear is.

I found the drivers for the card on the internet, less than a meg, ok, now I just need to find a working floppy disk to move them onto the laptop. Easier said than done.

I went through some of those mongrel floppy disks that don't work again.

I still have them all hanging around, because I was intending to try fixing them with norton disk doctor or something, but I never got around to it.

As I came across a disk, I tried formatting it in 2 different machines/os, when it failed that, I screwed it up, chucked it across the room.

Eventually I got a bit more carried away, and I bent the sill little metal catch out, so it would act as a stand, and hold the disk standing up. I then stomped on the disks, and smashed them.

I ended up going through 8 floppy disks before I found one I could actually format successfully.

I got the drivers on to the laptop, and installed them.

The network didn't come up.

I went in and removed the devices from device mangler, including the pcmcia slot, and the card services, when I refreshed, it didn't find anything.

I rebooted, windows had an error reading drive c, uh oh. Windows started, complained the registry was corrupt, restored it, and rebooted. Windows came up, and found the card, I pointed it at the drivers, and then everything seemed to start up.

When I put the network dongle in just the right place (because it's all broken) the connect light would come on, and when I requested settings with DHCP, I could see the traffic light flash a couple of times, but it still would not work. I tried the other dongle I've got, it's in worse condition, and the link light didn't even come on on it.

In the end, I rebooted, and it immediately started working. argh.

I found a cd with the 95 cab files on it, installed dial up networking on the laptop.

I tried dialling in as one of my customers. Almost every time I went on to the nas that still had the original configuration, so I didn't have a chance of it working properly.

When I eventually got it to try authenticating against my radius server, it failed.

I did a bit of fiddling, generating requests with radtest, and found that it was proxying them across to the other guys radius server, and then remembered I had to use email addresses.

It then tried authenticating against my server, but was failing.

I discovered it was because the realm stripping was working properly, and the mysql requests were trying to pull email addresses as usernames from my radius database.

I found a reference to the string used to query the database, and I changed to strip the realm, restarted radius, but it was still failing.

I changed the entry in the database to have an email instead of a username, and it worked, ok, stripping is still not working.

I poked around the other radius files, tried configuring my local radius server as a remote one in the proxy file, in case it was skipping the stripping procedure because it was accessing a local radius server, but it was still no good.

I decided to try turning on the debugging for the sql commands, and when I edited the file to do that, I found the changes I had made before, to query using the stripped username, had not saved for some reason.

I changed it again, made sure it was saved, and then it started working.

I changed the entry in the database back to the username, instead of the email, and it started testing successfully.

I went back to try dialling up, and about the 4th go, it went on. Hooray!

I sat and poked around for a bit, checking the network settings, and that the changes I had made in the sql database had been replicated (to see that replication was still working). It was.

Just then, my mobile rang. It was my mate who broke his wrist recently, and whose Mum passed away a couple of days ago.

He wanted my landline number, so I gave it to him, then I ripped it out of the laptop, and put it back in the phone.

He called me back, and I chatted to him for a few minutes.

I said I was sorry to hear the news, I couldn't really think of much to say about it.

I told him I would be in Hornsby tomorrow, so I could come and see him after that, and he seemed happy with that idea.

I mentioned I had just got dialin working a few minutes before, so we chatted about that for a bit.

He told me he was getting close to 10 minutes on the phone (after that it costs more), so I said I would call him tomorrow before I headed over, and we got off the phone.

I sent an sms to my mate I play snooker with, to let him know the dialin was working.

I blogged, I think I'll go to bed now, I have to be back up in a few hours to head down and fix all those PCs.

I woke up about 10.30am. Watched some tv, got up about 11.30am.

I didn't really do much today.

I had the worst headache.

I had a shower, breakfast (about midday now).

I called up the woman at the neighbourhood centre, I arranged to go and sort out the ADSL connection there.

I tried to call the woman in the computer group there (that I spoke to on Monday, at the bowling club), but there was no answer, so I just left a message.

I took the serial cables, (after getting the addresses they had to be sent to from my email), and the ADSL cd, (and my mp3 player).

I took off, went down to the post office, and I mailed the tivo serial cables out.

Someone was waiting for the parking spot I was in when I came back, so I just took my time putting my earbuds in, and my helmet and gloves etc on.

I took off, and I rode out to the neighbourhood centre. No parking, so I parked up on the grass. I should take advantage of things like that more often, but I'm worried about getting more parking tickets.

I went in, and went about fixing up the ADSL connection.

I used the cd to update the firmware in the ADSL router, it created a proper pppoa connection in the router, instead of needing the stupid pppoe client software.

Strangely, the username@realm had a different syntax to the install from the other day (and it's the same provider). This one was just the domain name, whereas the one from the other day was the fully qualified domain name. It would be nice if they had some sort of a standard, instead of making me waste my time fiddling around.

I sorted it in the end.

I put Avast on the machine, scanned it, it was clean. It claimed to have Norton Antivirus on the machine, stopping Avast from installing its resident shield thing. I removed Norton, it looked like some really dodgy version of Norton, I haven't seen it before.

I went to the next machine, and went about setting it up. Hmm, can't see the other machine on the network.. ah, someone's been fiddling in the network settings, and fixed an ip address in here. I set it back to DHCP and left it.

Bang, I had an IP, default route, DNS, could see the other machine, everything was set.

I installed Avast, and kicked off a scan.

I went to the third machine, and I reconfigured it.

I could get an IP with DHCP, and ping, but couldn't actually use the network connection, nothing worked, telnet, web, smb, nothing.

I thought maybe the tcp stack was stuffed up.

I removed some "Miniport Scheduling Device" or something that I found in the network adapters section of device mangler.

There was a second one, but it refused to remove it.

Still no good. I removed the network adapter, and reinstalled it. Still no good.

I rebooted, still no good.

Hmm. Getting desperate now.

I ran SFC, to check all the files.. it kept asking for the win 2000 SP3 cd.

I asked the woman if they had a 2000 cd, yeah, she said she would get it..

Went into the storeroom, and opened the safe.. to get the winblows 2000 cds out.

As if you would keep them in a safe, it's not like they would be safe from fire or anything, they would just melt.

Anyway, I put the CD in, it said it was wrong. I put it in the other CDROM drive, it still said it was wrong. OK, stuff this.

I googled around on one of the working machines.

I eventually found something on a forum, with a similar problem. They guy went through and showed a bunch of screen shots, going into the adapter, TCPIP, the advanced settings, optionsm, IP security, properties.

He showed setting it to "Do not use IPSEC", and also into the properties of "TCP/IP filtering", making sure "Enable TCP/IP Filtering" was not set, and that all the options were set to "Permit all".

I went back to the dodgy machine, and had a look.

Ah.. "Use this IP security policy" was selected, along with one of the options from the dropdown box. I changed that to "do not use IPSEC".

I checked in the filtering thing, it had "enable filtering" selected, so I deselected it.

Immediately the network started working, smb, web, telnet, everything.

Only took me about 1/2 hour to fix that.

I installed Avast on this machine, and started a scan. Both of the other 2 machines had finished scanning now, and were both clean. Surprising, considering the pppoe client bridges the connection, and puts a routable IP directly on the windows machine, that's just asking for trouble.

I went out, told the woman I was finished. I told her that they could file share, and print etc, trying to get out the door.

No such luck. "How do you share files?". ugh, here we go.

I really didn't have the patience for this today, expecially not when there's xp on one of the machines, that just makes it an excrutiatingly painful experience.

I showed her how to use "shared documents" to share things, it's a useless pain in the ass principle.

She asked me how I had moved the window so you could 2 at the same time. Uhh, how to move a window??

Instantly I felt like I was back at my mates place, where he sat and typed a sentencealllikethis because I hadn't shown him the spacebar.

I showed her how to move the window, and how to share a file.

I then had to resetup all the printer sharing, because I had renamed the windows machine from having some stupid name like" asi-srjiufeiubfaeuier" which I had great difficulty trying to remember and type into the other machines, because the dumb network browser didn't work as usual.

I printed a file over the network for her, and then I made my escape.

I told her I hadn't billed her for the last work, because I haven't got my ABN yet. (WTF is going on with that?).

I said I would drop the invoice in at some point when I was sorted, for the previous work, and for todays.

I left, I rode over to McDonalds, got some lunch (just before 5pm now).

I then went into check the gear, and work out what I had buggered up when I changed the network settings the other day..

Nothing! it wasn't my fault. The machines were up, and were working. One wasn't, because of that dumb issue with the kernel and the IDE controllers again. I don't know what to do about that.

I reset the machine, and it booted up, rebuilding it's RAID array again. I wish they wouldn't do that everytime they get shutdown improperly.

While the machine was booting, I had a look around. The 32amp cable was in, the guy had wired a massive switch box thing on to the line, and then the ups was hard wired to the 32amp cable. I would have thought the guy would have wired the 32amp socket on to the end of the cable, and then just plugged the ups in.

I noticed my rack's power had movied. It previously had it's own IEC -> standard socket cable going from the UPS, to the cable to my rack, but now it was moved into a powerboard. Hmm, assumedly my gear was down at the time I was trying to fix the stuff the other day, and that's why I thought I'd buggered up the network settings.

I hadn't tried to access it since, or I would have found that it was back (except for the mail server, with the dumb kernel issue).

The machine took 18 minutes to boot up and become network accessable, because the startup was delayed by the RAID arrays rebuilding. Not terribly impressive.

I think I might need to put the remote power switch thing in I built ages ago, and I'll need a pc to run it, since I can't trust any of these machines to boot up properly.

Maybe there's a bios update I need to apply, or something dumb. Bugger, I'll have to put floppy drives in the machines.

As soon as the machine was up, I left, and went to the supermarket.

I bought a couple of crappy froxen pizzas, and came home.

I watched tv for a while.

I drank most of the rest of the bottle of wine.

The alarm woke me at 8.30am. Ugh, not gonna happen.

I got out of bed about 8.45am. I really didn't want to, it was freezing.

I had a shower, got ready, grabbed all my tools, chucked them in my bag.

Pulled about 60m of cable off the roll, and took that.

I grabbed the tivo serial cables as a last thought. I still don't have the addresses.. but I can get into my email when I do the network install, and get them, then I can mail them when I got for lunch.

I ended up leaving about 9.30am.

I rode down the freeway, went to the college, and parked in the carpark next door.

I got in there about 10.20am. I had a missed call on my phone, it was from the guy who owns the college, he wanted to know when I was getting there.

I got to work.

I started dragging the cables around. What I thought was that metal skirting stuff you can pull off and put cabling behind.. was just a black strip painted on the bottom of the walls. the interior walls, separating the offices has the skirting stuff, but now around the permeter of the area. Hmm.

I dragged the cables behind bookshelves and filing cabinets anyway, there's enough stuff that it doesn't really matter.

The woman there kept complaining that she thought she had a virus on her machine, and that her email didn't work. I kept saying I would get the network installed, then the ADSL first, in case I had to download a ton of stuff.

I finished dragging the cables around. I use my crappy plastic krone punchdown tool to terminate the cables into the sockets.

About the third wire I tried to punchdown (out of the 8 of a single piece of cat5) the tool became completely useless. Great.

I found that I could use the tiny flat screwdriver in the little leatherman tool my mate gave me, when he came back from Thailand, that I use as a keyring, that I had with me because it's got the colo keys on it.

I punched down the wires, hoped it would work, and that the screwdriver wasn't just stuffing the connectors.

I made up some patch cables, and setup the switch.

I asked them for the ADSL kit, and they showed me the box. I grabbed out all the bits, and went about working out how to integrate it.

It needs a phone socket, their filter is not a passthrough/double adapter like the Thompson routers include. Now I need a phone double adapter.

There's no power sockets left for the transformer for the router (and the transformer for the switch doesn't fit in the powerboard properly).

I wandered up to the shops. I found a phone double adapter. I wanted a modular double adapter, but they didn't have one, only a normal clunky old phone connector to 2 rj11 sockets (which was still ok, because on the wall was a clunky old socket). I got that, and a powerboard.

I went an got in the line. I was in the line waiting to pay, longer than I was trying to find the things I needed.

My mate I play snooker with called me. He's apparently wandering around the shopping centre (the same one I'm in), filling in time.

I'd said I would be there (at the college) all day putting the network in, and that if he was down there, and wanting something to do, he could help :-) At this point, most of the stuff was done, so I didn't need any help.

I eventually got through the checkout, wandered back to the college.

I went past the Starbucks where the cute chick was (like 2 years ago), She wasn't in there today. I think I'd be worried if she was still just working there, 2 years later.

It was now about 12.20pm. Hmm, 2 hours, and I've dragged a couple of network cables, crimped up a couple of patch cables, and plugged the switch in. I'm going to be here all day.

I went back into the college, and plugged the ADSL router in, to the phone, made up a crossover cable, and patched it into the switch.

I put the network card in the pc that required it, that was a pain in the bum. The stupid "found new hardware" wizard, when I told it to search the floppy disk for drivers (because it didn't have it's own drivers) decided it wanted to use the XP drivers, on 2000, and I couldn't override it. Oh well.. should work.

"The device is unable to start". Maybe I need a reboot. Same error. I tried changing the driver, it refused to use the correct ones (for 2000) off the floppy, because it "had a driver that is a closer match". I tried removing the device, detecting it again, and telling it to use the 2000 drivers, but it still wanted to use the xp drivers.

I ended up having to delete the xp driver inf files from the hard drive, then when I told it to use the 2000 drivers, it did, and the card started immediately.

Kerio firewall popped up, with a network connection request, that's a good sign.. the switch is working, the router is working, but more importantly, my cabling is working.

I then went about trying to setup the ADSL connection. This should have taken about 2 minutes..

I went in to the web interface (I didn't bother installing the drivers/rubbish, they would be for using usb (eww) to connect to the device anyway). Uh oh.. what are the username and password.

The woman called the guy who owns the place, since he has the dialup account that was changed to ADSL, and the details are the same.

While I waited for that, I went into the next office, to start working on putting the cable through for the socket for the laptop.

The woman came in, gave me the phone, she had him on the phone.

I confirmed the email address/username (I had that right), and asked him the password, and then confirmed it back to him. I didn't think to confirm the spelling.. There's that assuming making an ass out of you and me again.

I went back, put the settings in. "Auth Failed".

I thought maybe it should have been on PPPoE instead of PPPoA (but then it wouldn't have got as far as "Auth Failed") so I tried that, no good.

I looked in the book, while there was no reference to it, a screenshot showed it set as PPPoA, so that must be what it is.

I tried a few different varations of the password, but it was no good.

The woman tried to call the guy again, he didn't answer.

I called up the tech support line, and ended up on hold for a long long time. (TMBG reference: "She's an Angel").

While on hold for a long long time, while listening to their painful muzac, they came on with a message about virus problems several times.

I listened to it, but didn't pay much attention to it. Sasser virus it was about.

After about 25 minutes, "Nicole" answered the phone. I wanted to confirm the username/password.

I told her the telephone number the service was on, and the username I thought.. it was correct. I told her what the password was supposed to be, she tried it, it was not correct.

She then tried a variation I hadn't thought of, with ie instead of y. It appeared to work for her.

I put the password in the router, reset it, and it successfully connected. Argh.

She asked me to test browsing.. no DNS. She then starts "go in control panel, then networks" yeah love, I know where to put the settings, just tell me the primary and secondary (oh wait, according to M$ they are "preffered and alternate") dns servers.

I put them in, and it was all working.

I then connected the next machine. Immediately I'm getting "error in lsass.exe" and the machine is going to shutdown and restart in 60 seconds.

I assumed it was a worm, like blaster. I tried updating the virus scanner fast enough after it rebooted, but I just couldn't get it done in time. Once it was about 3 seconds short of finishing downloading the update.

I then found that if you put "shutdown -a" in run, or a cmd prompt, it aborts the forced shutdown, however "lsass" whatever it does, is not running, and then some really basic functions, like the ability to shut the machine down, are disabled.

The guy who owns the place rang, wanted to know how I was going. I said it was slow, I wasted 1/2 hour on the phone to tech support, because of the password, and that the machines were crawling with virii. He said he hadn't brought the laptop in, because he had to use it elsewhere, and that once I worked out how to get rid off the stuff, I could fix it. I arranged to fix it on Friday, along with the other woman's home pc who works there, who called me a few days ago (she'd been told to bring it in today, but she forget).

After doing that (aborting shutdown with shutdown -a), I was able to get Norton to finish it's update.

I did a full scan of the machine, it claimed it was clean. Great. {/sarcasm}

I downloaded Avast on the other machine (which I fixed for them a while ago, so it was clean, and had a firewall on it). I then was eventually able to install it (because even winblows name resolution wasn't working, and have the time connecting via IP didn't even work).

I updated it, ran a full scan, and it found about 300 files infected with Sasser. I cleaned that all up.

While I waited for that, I plugged the front desk machine into the network.

I thought I only had 1 rj45 left, and I was lucky to find a reasonable length of cable with one rj45 on it on the floor, so I crimped it up, and plugged machine in.

Immediately it started up with the lsass nonsense. Argh.

I aborted the shutdown on it. Removed Norton AntiVirus (waste of time program), and I installed Avast. It found Sasser, and NetSky.D all over the machine. I cleaned it all up, and installed all the windows Updates, XP SP2 or whatever, and then about 50 hotfixes.

I did the same on the other machine, and installed 2000 SP4 on the machine I had fixed, so they can install office on it.

It took me hours to get these virii cleaned up, and stop the machines from wanting to reboot all the time.

The same problem must be on the laptop that the guy called me about yesterday.

While I waited for updates to download and install, I went back to doing the cable run for the socket in the next room for the laptop.

I took the skirting off, fed the wire through a bit.

I pulled the skirting off the ohter side, then I dragged it out from under the desk, and drilled a hole in it for the cat5 to go through, and then realised the pieces are no where near the full length of the wall (like half) so I could have just slided it along a bit.

I pulled the cable through in the end, put the single rj45 socket wall mount things on (that I bought at the electrical place yesterday).

I put the other end on it, and I was pretty much done. The socket in the next room won't work, because it's not patched to the switch.

In hindsight, I probably could have got away with just getting a single rj45 socket, and mounting that for the laptop (or perhaps not even, just leave a bit of cat5 behind the desk with an rj45 on it that could go in the laptop), and just run normal patch leads from the switch into the pcs, but it wouldn't have looked very good.

I left the place about 5.30pm.

I got back to my bike, and noticed a piece of paper jammed between the seat and tank. Uh oh. Yep, great, a parking ticket. $68 for "standing my vehicle longer than allowed". At first the guy had filled out that I had NSW rego, and scribbled over it with QLD, and he'd also put the fine as $58 in one place, and changed it to $68. Too bad he worked out the state rego, or I would have got away with it.

Oh well, it's only like an hours work, not the end of the world.

I got on my bike, and I rode up the freeway (ran out of fuel about 2/3 of the way home, put it on reserve), I rode up to my mates place, thinking he would be home by now, but there was no one there.

I had a missed call on my phone, from my mate where my other bike is parked.

I called him back, we had a quick chat, he wanted to talk to me about our mate who's Mum died, and he also wanted me to look at his ADSL connection if I had a second. I said I would see him in a bit, after I went to dinner (lunch).

I called my mate, to find out where he was. Apparently he was just about to put his wife on the 6.50pm train back up the coast, and so he would probably be up here about 8.30pm. Hmm, don't think I'm hanging around waiting for him for an hour and a half.

He asked if I tried calling the woman from the club where I did the ADSL install (with the telco) the other day, which I keep forgetting to do.

Apparently her husband, they guy I work with there, had a heart attack a few days ago, and is in hospital. They are expecting to here from me to install network cable either tomorrow or Thursday. I tried calling her mobile, but there was no answer. Assumedly she's in the hospital with it turned off.

I went to dinner, I forgot I had my bag full of tools and stuff. Oh well, the woman at the counter should look after it for me, I don't trust locking it on to the bike, with a few hundred dollars worth of gear in it.

I dragged it in, she had no worries looking after it and my helmet.

She asked what it was worth, what she'd get for selling it, and I said it's worth a bit, but she'd have trouble selling it, then she asked if it was expensive photography stuff or something, and I said no, it was tools "boring" we both said together.

She gave me a dinner ticket, and I went in, had dinner. I came back out, to get my bag.

She asked me if "I wanted all that rubbish back", I said "yeah, but you can have the parking ticket" "hah, I don't want your parking ticket, I'll charge you parking before I take that".

I left, I went and got fuel.

I pulled out of the service station, got a bit down the road, and my stupid speedo backlight started flashing, and then went off. I punched it, and it came back on. Stayed on after that. Heh.

I rode to my mate's place, and I wandered in. He wasn't there, he just popped out for a bit to see one of our other mates (the guy that was in the US), so his wife let me in.

I sat and had a quick chat, but mainly just sat and watched tv waiting for my mate to come back.

He turned up about 45 minutes later.

We had a chat, talked about what had happened to my mate's Mum and stuff.

I was thinking about going down to see him tomorrow, but apparently there's a lot of people around there helping at the moment, so he probably doesn't want more people there.

I'll give him a call in the morning, and find out how he's going, and if he wants me to come down or whatever.

Otherwise I might line up to see him on Friday or the weekend sometime.

I had a look at my mate's ADSL connection, he had the same router as the install I did this morning.

He'd changed the username and password of the account, so I checked they were correct in the router, they were. The only thing I noticed was that it was set to PPPoE encapsulation. I changed it to PPPoA, and it went straight on.

I came back out, we sat and watched tv for a bit, and then I left.

I went to the supermarket, thinking that as usual I would end up starving a bit later, after eating all that MSG chinese food, (and having no lunch), but it's now nearly 1am (damn, I've been blogging for like 2 1/2 hours), and I'm fine.

I got some junk food, came home, shoved it in the fridge, and started blogging.

I'm pretty much taking tomorrow off now. I'll go into the colo, and fix the network, then I will post the serial cables I intended to mail yesterday, and today.

I think I might have some wine.

I got woken up about 8.30am. I got up about 8.45am.

It was freezing cold, I had a really long shower to try to warm up.

Some woman tried calling me to get me to fix her computer, while I was in the shower, she left a message. No time to get back her now.

About 9.15am, I realised it was probably a good idea to actually do a bit research into the subject I was going to talk about this morning, at the seniors club, of the history of the internet.

I googled around, found a couple of good timelines, started reading them. I realised I would probably need to make some notes, or I wouldn't remember if ethernet was invented in 1975 or 1976.

I scribbled down some notes (scribbled being the operative word).

I ate breakfast, got dressed, and left about 10am. I have to be at the club about 10.30, I should be ok.

I noticed the serial cables I'm supposed to send out today.. Oops, I don't have the addresses or anything, and there's no time now.

I rode there uneventfully, it was freezing cold though. I got to the bowling club about 10.25am.

I got there just as the guy I did the cabling for ages ago (on the Monday just before the Tuesday when all the passwords were changed) and his wife did. I had to park in the other carpark, so I did that, and got to the entry just as they did.

We went in together, I had to get signed in, the woman behind the desk asked where I was from, and before I could say Queensland (which is where my ID says), the others piped up where I do live. I filled out the slip and went in.

Oh well, I can't play the pokies now, because if I win anything substantial, they'll get out of it (although I do still have ID with my real address on it, I could probably use that).

I went in, most of the people were already there.

My phone rang, it was the guy from the place I'm going to tomorrow, to install a network. Apparently he's having issues with his laptop, and I still haven't fixed his other pc. He seems to think he has a virus on his laptop or something, and was there anything I could do. Not much right at this minute. I suggested he try to download his email before the connection drops out, and I'll have a look at it tomorrow when I'm down at his office.

I put my phone on silent, that's all I need.

I went into the next room, where all the club members were.

After a few minutes, one of the guys who helps organise the club (who I've known for a long time from the other computer club I used to go to, back in 96/97), started to introduce me.

There was a problem with the microphone they had, a wireless one, the batteries were flat.

Good, I hate using microphones, I much prefer to just speak loudly.

The woman who mainly organises the club got up after that, and finished introducing me. She mentioned that I was starting an ISP, something I wasn't going to mention, or perhaps would have made a small mention of at the end, but anyway.

I went up, and started talking about the history of the internet.

About 5 minutes in, the guy who had got up first, had gone to speak to someone from the club, and he'd got another microphone, a normal corded one, so they gave that to me. Great. I ended up holding it far enough away from my face that I was just able to continue speaking loudly, which I much prefer.

It might have been a good idea if I had tried doing a bit of research a bit earlier then about 5 minutes before. While I knew about ARPANET, and all that stuff, I wasn't sure of the timeline of stuff, and where everything fit together. As a result, there were a few umms and arrs as I looked at my notes to jog my memory about what I wanted to talk about.

My notes were scribbled.. to the point where I couldn't even make out my own writing, so I ended up omitting a few bits, but in general I think it was ok.

I had intended to give non technical descriptions of how things like packet switching and dns work, but at the end, I couldn't bothered, and just general gabbing had taken a lot longer than I expected.

I remember having to write speeches in school, and being hard pressed to come up with 5 minutes worth, and ended up reading the whole thing off cards.

I thought I have about 20 minutes worth of "the history of the internet" as such, and then I was going to pad out my time with explanations.

I started the speech about 10.40am, and I went through until about 11.15am, when I started asking for questions, to provide answers to.

I received questions about virii, and spam, hackers, internet ads, and a few other things, mainly related to basic functions of the internet.

Someone asked me why I wanted to start an ISP, and also some strategic questions to find out if I knew what I was talking about.

I seemed to hold the interest of all the members (there were about 50 there), and after all the questions were asked, I noticed it was 11.35am. Not bad, nearly an hour.

Now I can answer my phone that's been vibrating for the last hour.

The woman who organises the club came over, and gave me a bottle of wine. Pretty cool.

We all started to filter out, but I wasn't getting away that easily.. next thing I knew, I had a line of people waiting to ask me questions.

I went through and answered all their questions, luckily most of them wanted to know the same things, since I had made recommendations of software to use, like AVG, and Ad-Aware, Thunderbird etc, they all wanted to know where they could get them from.

If I can find 5 minutes, I might type up a quick fact sheet or similar, and email it over to the woman who organises the club to hand out to the people that were interested.

We moved out, and into the dining area, the paid for my lunch, I had a half a baked chicken, it was pretty good.

I checked my phone, 10 missed calls. 8 of them were my message service.

I had one call from my mate I play snooker with, he wanted to know what was going on, and to let me know he'd got himself a temporary internet account, instead of using mine, he'd got it from the colo guy.

There was another missed call, from Mum. I called her back, she wanted to know where was a good place to get a cheap keyboard, and a power cord, for my cousin. The wholesaler at Berowra is the best place.. I said I might be able to chase one down.

I tried to call my mate back, to find out if he had any keyboards at the moment, but he was on the phone.

I ate my lunch. I chatted for a short while afterwards.

Part of the conversation, was about the projector they were having problems with, that the colour was wrong. The guy had fiddled around with it, and found it was the colour temperature setting doing it, and the factory default setting is to have the picture really bluish.

I left the club, I went back to my bike, and I tried calling my mate again, he was off the phone now. He had one keyboard at the moment, so I said I wanted it. I aksed what he was up to, he was at home, but going out shortly, and would be back after 5pm. I said I might get up there later to get it off him.

I called Mum back, let her know that I had found one, and that I would get it later. She asked where I was, and what I was doing, and I rattled off my plans for the rest of the day.

I took off, thinking I would just go for a nice scenice ride over to see the colo guy. Oops, I forgot that I turned off the main road to come to the club, so I ended up heading out towards a big dead end area. I followed what looked like a main road, thinking I would have to get somewhere, it then turned into this really narrow windy road up a hill, that I expected to come to a dead end, but it went back onto a main road, which I followed, the wrong way, and I ended up right back at the club I had just left, about 15 minutes earlier, realising where I meant to go (and if I had gone the "right" way, where I went the "wrong" way, I would have ended up on that road anyway).

Oh well, it was a fun ride, and I'm not in a rush to get anywhere.

I rode out near the beach, and then back in near where the colo guy's shop is.

I stuck my head in, had a chat for a while. We worked out you can do DNIS with freeradius, so I'll have to work out how to do that. I said I was going into the colo, to reconfigure the network interfaces (I have a skill of trying to do that remotely, buggering something up, and then have a machine sitting out there with no working network configuration). The colo guy mentioned that he was having the 32amp cable put in for the UPS today.

While I was in here, my phone went off again. Oh god, I'm so sick of this phone. I cancelled it, sent the caller to the message service. I'll talk to them later.

I left, I rode to a place that sells electrical stuff, and data cabling gear (where we got the 3 phase stuff when I fitted a cabinet out a few months back), to get the cabling parts I need for the network install tomorrow.

I wanted to find out what they had in rj45 wall mount stuff. They had these small wall mount units, Krone stuff, $12 something for a single port, and $19 something for a double.

The alternative was a punch down socket, the goes into a standard wall plate, but because it's so deep, it would need a mounting block too, so it ends up even more than the wall mount things.

I ended up buying 2 of each, 2 doubles to connect to pcs each, and the singles for the laptop run, one machine will get the switch installed, sitting on it, so it will just plug straight in..

4 units, giving 6 rj45 sockets, enought to connect 3 pcs.. $71 something, ugh. No way around it I suppose, and it's just a parts cost they get.

I rode over to the colo. There was no parking, and I knew I was only going to be here for 5 minutes, so I just parked in some stupid car park near there.

I went up to the colo, as I got up the stairs, there was a guy moving a ladder, I didn't think anything of it.
I went into the colo, noticed the light was on, and some tools on the floor. Oh yeah, the cable is being put in, that would have been the guy doing it.

I noticed a big fat bit of 32amp cable hanging out of the ceiling too.

I went about reconfiguring the network interfaces, everything seemed ok.

While I was doing it, the guy putting the cable in, came in, we had a chat for a while.

He saw me working on the linux machines, and he chatted about that for a while.

Apparently he mainly does stuff working with embedded microcontroller software, and industrial electronics, and stuff like that, he said he rarely does cabling, but he's on a break from his main stuff.

I wasn't really interested in having a great long chat, mainly because I was parked in the wrong place, and I still had a bunch of stuff to do today.

I ended up chatting to the guy on and on, as I tried to get out the door. I mentioned the network cabling I was supposed to do later in the week, and he asked me if I'm Austel approved. Heh, yeah, well, that doesn't really matter, I don't charge these people anything for doing it.

He said that if I ever wanted a hand doing that, or needed something done Austel approved, to let him know. Yeah, that sounds ok. He offered me a card, but then he didn't have any, they were in the car.

We went down to get one, he gave me on, and we continued chatting for a bit.

I noticed a couple of cards mucking around in the carpark where I was parked, but I couldn't see exactly what was going on.

I eventually managed to finish chatting to the guy, and I went back to my bike.

Some idiot had gone out of there way to park at a stupid angle so I couldn't get out of the car park. Obviously I was in his spot.

There was a chick sitting in the passenger seat of the car, so I couldn't do anything. I sat on my bike to wait for the guy to come back.

He came out about a minute later (just as I was thinking about riding through the building he had gone into, since it only had a crappy looking screen door on the back, and a straight hall to out the front where the door was open).

He said something about "You got my spot" or something, somewhat jokingly, luckily for him, and I just said "yeah, well I was only going to be here for 5 minutes", "always the way" he replied, got in his stupidly parked car, and took off.

I rode off too. I decided to go to the bank, to find out why I have no money. I must not have been paid for that contracting work I did about 6 weeks ago.

I ended up riding around the block, and basically parking out the front of the building I was just thinking about riding through.

I started walking back towards the bank. There were some charity beggers in the middle of the route as usual.

The first one could see I was going somewhere, and left me alone. Not good enough for the second one, he came into have a go "how are you" and all the rubbish.

I was just going to ignore him, but I thought I would have some fun this time.

I let him rattle on for a few minutes, then when he got to the end, obviously begging for money, I asked if he had any pamphlets, "no, they're a waste of money", fine, don't expect to get any money out of me.. I'm just on my way to the bank over there to find out why I have none. "oh".

And then I walked away.

I went down to the bank. I got an interim statement from the beginning of March (the contract days were 16/17th March), until now.

I had a quick look on it, couldn't see any deposits/transfers of the correct amount of money.

The charisy beggers were sitting outside the bank as I came out. I just ignored them and went back to my bike.

I rode home, hoping to have enough time to get the addresses for the serial cables, go back to the post office, and mail them.

No such luck, I got home about 3.45pm. I'm not getting sorted and back to the post office in 15 minutes.

I went through the bank statement. Definately no pay for that work here.

I dug out all the paper work from the job. I had put my details on the forms correctly.

I rang to speak to the woman at the temping agency I dealt with, and left a message.

I tried to call back the woman from this morning, but her phone was busy, and she didn't answer the call waiting. Oh well, I tried.

A few minutes later, someone else from the place called me back. I said I wanted to speak to the other woman, but this woman said that she deals with the timesheets and pay for the work the other woman arranges.

I explained my situation, how I had done the work, but received no pay, and no payslip.

She said she would find out and get back to me.

She called me back again a few minutes later, and claimed that a "data entry error" was responsible for me not getting paid, thanked me for calling them (oh yeah, like, don't worry about it), and thanked me for being so easy going about it. Well, it's not like I can really argue or anything, I'll probably have some difficulty getting that month of contract work that may be on offer.

Apparently I will get my money on Wednesday.

I called back the woman from the neighbourhood centre, who called while I was in with the colo guy. She wanted to know if I had forgotten about them (since I was supposed to go out there like Monday or Tuesday _last week_). I told her I hadn't forgotten her, but just didn't have any time.

I told her I had spoken to the telco guy the other day, and had a CD to fix up their setup, hopefully getting rid of the stability issues they keep having (and are having again).

I told her that I would call her as soon as I had some time.

I thought I would take a power cord with me, then when I come back from my mate's place, I can drop the keyboard and cord off, in case my cousin is waiting to use his computer.

I sat and did some email, I remembered I had to redo all the DNS zone files, because I'd changed the IPs on all my servers.

I tried to ssh in, uh oh. I could ssh to the gateway machine, but then I can't get past it into my gear. I must have screwed up something really good. No amount of fiddling with the routing table on the gateway machine helped. I'll have to go back in there and have a look. I might go in later tonight.

I left again, about 5pm. I rode up to my mate's place, to get the keyboard. The batteries in my cd player ran out on the way. Bugger, I forgot to bring a power cord. I got one off my mate though, I'll have to give him one next time I see him.

I was up there for a few hours, I helped install winblows 2000 on someone's machine, it wouldn't shutdown properly, someone had fiddled in the bios, and set the power button to 4 second delay.

There were no modem drivers, we would deal with this later.

We had dinner, all his Chinese relatives are still there, they had made a ton of dumplings, that we had for dinner.

After that, I helped my mate setup his temporary internet account on his pc, and we found the drivers for the modem. They were too big to fit on a floppy, so I showed him how to use winzip to span a file across disks.

Most of the time I don't have the patience to go through this basic stuff.

I left his place about 9pm, it was freezing cold. I rode back, and went over to my grandma's place where my cousin is staying. It was about 9.40pm when I got there, it looked like they were still up.

I went in, dropped the stuff off, I was planning on just leaving, and coming home, and going to bed, since I have to be up to install the network early tomorrow, but I decided to sit down for a minute. My grandma made a pot of tea, and brought out some cake, so I sat and relaxed for a bit.

We started chatting, and next thing I knew, it was nearly 2 am (1.45am).

I had to get some sleep, because my stuffed up sleep cycle doesn't work with getting up early.

I left, I rolled my bike almost all of the way out of the retirement village, luckily it's all downhill or flat, so I was able to just ride out in neutral with the engine off, having to give a bit of a kick with my leg every now and then.

There's a little bridg right near the exit, so I just clicked it into gear, and dumped the clutch as I went over the bridge, and sped off, I thought it was really cool.

I rode home, and got home at 2.02am.

I went to bed. I put the electric blanket on it was so cold.

No time for a full entry now. I'll do it later today.

Just a spam watch: 13 new email, 12 spam.

Sorry, I lied. I just went to read the one non spam email (based on the from address), it's actually a worm email, and the from address is spoofed, so I managed to get 100% spam today.

I was woken up about 10am by my brother knocking on the door. Do I want to get up, my cousin is here. In a minute.

I went back to sleep.

I was woken up again about 12.30 by Mum knocking on the door, amd I getting up, no, why, can't be bothered.

I put the tv on, watched an episode of The Simpsons.

I got up, and I had a shower.

I was just about to get some breakfast, when Dad came in, I really wish he wouldn't just open the door, it's locked for a reason.

Am I ok, yes, I'm fine.

And he went out again.

I checked my email.. 22 new email, 18 of them spam.

I had some breakfast, and then I went inside.

I chatted to my cousin and my grandma for a while.

Just before lunch, My head got all stuffed up again from their house.

We had lunch, and sat around for a bit.

I came back out about 4pm, thinking I would go into see the equipment and reconfigure the network interfaces to get the mail working again.

My mobile phone rang, it was my message service.

There was a message from my mate where my other bike is parked.

Apparently he spoke to our mate, the guy who broke his wrist, who's Mum's in the hospital. Apparently she had had a stroke, and she got worse last night, and died some time last night or this morning, he didn't have many details, understandably.

He said he was going to go down and see our mate tomorrow, since he'll be down there.

I said I would go down on Wednesday.

I'll go to the funeral if I'm welcome, she was a nice lady.

I went back inside, and I told Mum, because I'd mentioned to her what was going on after I got the phone call on Friday.

I sat in there for a while, and then I came back out, when Dad was taking my cousin and grandma home.

I gave him my old DVD player to give to grandma.

I sat and watched tv.

I really need to go to the shops to get something for dinner.

I found some noodles in the cupboard, so I had those.

I watched more tv.

I just cleaned the visor on my helmet. I can't beleive how scratched the thing is.

I got my first visor out, it's not even in such bad condition, so I cleaned it, and put it on the helmet.

I need to buy a new one.. I need to buy a new helmet, the lining of the helmet around the bottom is all tattered, and it catches on my earrings when I put it on. There's a rubber belt thing around the bottom of the helmet, and it's coming away. I tried regluing it a couple of weeks ago, but the glue didn't work. Maybe I need to find siome stronger glue.

I drink a fair bit.

About half the 1.something litre bottle of Scotch I got on Thursday night is gone.

In the last three days, I've drunk about 500mL of Scotch.

I put 4 shots (and a splash) of Scotch in a pint glass, make the rest up with ice and Coke.

I usually have 3 pints/night. That works out to be 12 standard drinks/night, or 84 standard drinks/week.

I found this page.

Apparently more than 43 standard drinks/week is "high risk", and only 3% of people fit into this category.

I must be in my own category, "ultra high risk" or something.

Woohoo! it's good to fit in a low percentile of people.

I accomplished pretty much nothing today.

I spent the afternoon making up 3 tivo serial cables to send out on Monday.

I tested them, they worked.

Dad came in, asked if I wanted to come in for a chat. I said I would in a bit. He asked if I had got my mail from yesterday, no.

I went in, grabbed my mail. Some official looking letter, what's this, another fine of some decription for something? it's not a redirected mail from QLD, it can't be.

I opened it, it was just some government spam about the new superannuation donation thing they've got going on. Like I care. I've got superannuation, it's a waste of time, the fees just eat up all my contributions anyway, by the time I can actually use it, I'll end up owing money to pay fees. I hate superannuation, I have money management skills, I don't need the government to force me to save money.

Why don't they do something useful, like establish a fund where you can put money and you don't have to pay fees. I wouldn't give a shit if the thing returned no interest whatsoever, it would just be a way for me to humour them, with their stupid compulsory superannuation.

Also, why couldn't they just send me an email I could delete, why did they have to waste this possibly useful paper on sending me spam.

The other letter, a registered mail envelope, I had no idea what it was. It felt like it had a card (like a credit card) of some description in it. I opened it, pulled out the contents.. concert tickets, ah, to The Who, I'd almost forgotten I'd ordered these.

We chatted. Dad just asked me a bunch of questions about the billing for the ISP.

I got a bit fed up, because it was just asking me questions about things that are the default behaviour of freeside.

He asked me if I got anywhere last night. I told him how we didn't get anywhere, I have to build a new radius server for the colo guy, and that I'll have to find some time in the week to do it.

Mum asked me if I was going out tonight. I said I had no idea, possibly. She asked if I wanted to take an extra person, I guessed my cousin who is staying with my grandma. I said I had no idea if I was going out, and that chances were I would not be, because I didn't go out last night, and no one rang me (although I always have to ring people and find out what is going on anyway, no one bothers to tell me anything unless I chase them).

I said if I was going out, then we would work something out.

I was in there for about an hour, some of the time spent playing with my brother with some lego he wasy playing with, and then I had to leave because the air or the cat around started attacking my head and I couldn't breathe.

While sitting watching tv, I thought about the fact I had not done anything about the hardware control lines in the tivo serial cables I had just made up.

Undoubtedly some weenie will try to use one of this cables with winblows xp, and it won't work, because xp apparently refuses to work properly with serial cables that leave the hardware control lines floating (while every sane OS on the planet can work out for itself what's going on).

I pulled the cables apart again (well, took the backshells off), and I spent about 45 minutes tying all the hardware control lines together in the three cables I had just made up.

I didn't bother to test them again, as long as the rx/tx/gnd lines work, who cares.

I think I need to change my prices on the tivo twiki page. I expected to have about 3 people in total ask me to make cables for me, but now it's turning into a part time job almost, and I'm not making a cent out of these cables, in some cases they cost me money, and it's not like they take 2 minutes to make and test.

I also have to go to the post office to mail these out, I should be charging $20 just to go to the post office alone, the pain that causes. I hate the post office.

The telephone rang, it was the guy I play snooker with, (and I'm supposed to be at his place fixing the alignment of his sat dish). I chatted with him for a bit, said I wasn't coming up, because I felt a bit crappy today (true, my nose hasn't stopped running all day, I porbably have some contagion, and I don't want to ge spreading it around). He said his tv wasn't mucking arounfd too much anyway.

He complained that he couldn't get to the mail server, and I told him that that was because the mail server was not currently routable, because when the ups ran out, and the gear went down, it wiped out my static routes I have to add in manually, and I haven't got around to putting them back yet.

I said I was going in to see the gear tomorrow, I am moving the subnet the equipment is on again, to fix the routing/subnetting issues, and perhaps reconfigure radius and get it working.

I looked at some cisco docs last night, you can have multiple radius servers defined, but it doesn't appear that you can specify to use a different radius server based on the telephone number someone connects to the nas on.

Anyway, I watched some more tv, I ate the last of the frozen food from the freezer.

Dad came in a while later, to tell me that HHGTTG was going to be on in a bit, and I said "yeah, and it's on DVD in the shelf there".

I was watching some of the music channel tivo had recorded at the time, after the song finished I was watching, I ended up fast forwarding the rest of the hour of the tivo recording at tripple speed, because all the songs were shit.

I setup tivo to record HHGTTG, and I watched the first half of the episode of the Benny Hill show I watched the second half of last night, after tivo went back to live tv because I left it idle in the menu for 15 minutes of however long it takes.

I then watched HHGTTG.

I browsed around the net, downloaded some new binaries on the tivo, top, lsof etc. I put a new version of the telnet daemon on, because when I portscanned my tivo, it caused tnlited (the telnet daemon on tivo) to crash, and I had to reboot to get it back.

The replacement one I found, has a wrapper to respawn tnlited if it crashes, so I won't need to reboot the tivo.

I pulled out the paper work from the contracting work I did a little while ago (at the place that wants to get me in again), I checked my details.. yeah, I put the correct bank account details on there, they just must not have processed my payment.

I'll have to go to the bank on Monday afternoon, and get another interim statement to check, and see if I was paid, otherwise I'll chase it up on Monday afternoon (if there is time) or at some point on Tuesday.

About 11.30pm, I decided to watch Reservoir Dogs.

I fiddled around behind the tv, getting some a/v leads so I could plug my "new" computer in.

I set it up, and kicked it off, lets see how long the divx will play before the machine crashes..

It got all the way through. The issues I had with divx before, must have been caused by that dodgy board with the stuff capacitors on it, and the CPU load of playing a divx must have pushed the tolerances of those stuffed caps.

I paused the movie halfway through, to make my second drink of the night, containing shots 5 - 8 of Scotch.

I thought about my Missed Connection (craigslist reference) from 2001.

While I was at TAFE in 2001, I used to get a coffee from Starbucks every morning, immediately after getting off the train. A bit before halfway through the course (maybe 7 or 8 weeks in) a cute chick that worked in Starbucks started trying to crack on to me.

I was too naive to notice, the fact that when she would give me my change, she would sort of caress my hand. I thought it was weird at first to be honest.

I remember mentioning it to one of the guys I was at TAFE with, a couple of weeks later. He said that he had gone in one morning too, after I had been in there, because he said that a couple of the chicks in there (including the one that kept serving me) were talking, and mentioned "The latte guy", assumedly me, because I ordered a large soy latte everyday, and how he was "cute and funny".

This conversation took place in the last week of TAFE before the break, and the chick who served me only worked a few days/week, and wasn't working in the couple of days after this, before the end of the week.

During the week after the holiday week (I didn't realise we only had a single week break) I went on a holiday up in QLD with a couple of my mates, the guy who works at ABC, my mate's ex gf (she was his gf at the time) her mum, and my mate's parents (who own the aircon business I used to work for).

During the holiday, I decided I would ask the chick out when I got back.

When we came back, and I started back at TAFE the week after, I went in to get my latte as usual, the chick wasn't there, hmm, she's usually in on Mondays I thought. Oh well, maybe she's off sick, or the roster changed or something.

Days went by, I didn't see her in that week, or the next week, or the rest of the 7 weeks or so that was left of the course.

I never saw here again. Oh well.

My Missed Connection.

I finshed pouring my drink, went back and finished watching the movie.

I noticed the machine that got dropped off here ages ago I'm supposed to fix, oh yeah, that's one of the things I'm supposed to be doing this weekend isn't it. Too bad, I'm too close to having a nervous breakdown. It can wait, I already said I'm not going to charge for the work when it eventually gets done.

It's 2 am again.

I'm depressed. I need to finish this drink (nearly there), so I can make the next one, containing shots 9 - 12 of Scotch, and then I will perhaps not be so depressed.

I accomplished pretty much nothing today.

I spent the afternoon making up 3 tivo serial cables to send out on Monday.

I tested them, they worked.

Dad came in, asked if I wanted to come in for a chat. I said I would in a bit. He asked if I had got my mail from yesterday, no.

I went in, grabbed my mail. Some official looking letter, what's this, another fine of some decription for something? it's not a redirected mail from QLD, it can't be.

I opened it, it was just some government spam about the new superannuation donation thing they've got going on. Like I care. I've got superannuation, it's a waste of time, the fees just eat up all my contributions anyway, by the time I can actually use it, I'll end up owing money to pay fees. I hate superannuation, I have money management skills, I don't need the government to force me to save money.

Why don't they do something useful, like establish a fund where you can put money and you don't have to pay fees. I wouldn't give a shit if the thing returned no interest whatsoever, it would just be a way for me to humour them, with their stupid compulsory superannuation.

Also, why couldn't they just send me an email I could delete, why did they have to waste this possibly useful paper on sending me spam.

The other letter, a registered mail envelope, I had no idea what it was. It felt like it had a card (like a credit card) of some description in it. I opened it, pulled out the contents.. concert tickets, ah, to The Who, I'd almost forgotten I'd ordered these.

We chatted. Dad just asked me a bunch of questions about the billing for the ISP.

I got a bit fed up, because it was just asking me questions about things that are the default behaviour of freeside.

He asked me if I got anywhere last night. I told him how we didn't get anywhere, I have to build a new radius server for the colo guy, and that I'll have to find some time in the week to do it.

Mum asked me if I was going out tonight. I said I had no idea, possibly. She asked if I wanted to take an extra person, I guessed my cousin who is staying with my grandma. I said I had no idea if I was going out, and that chances were I would not be, because I didn't go out last night, and no one rang me (although I always have to ring people and find out what is going on anyway, no one bothers to tell me anything unless I chase them).

I said if I was going out, then we would work something out.

I was in there for about an hour, some of the time spent playing with my brother with some lego he wasy playing with, and then I had to leave because the air or the cat around started attacking my head and I couldn't breathe.

While sitting watching tv, I thought about the fact I had not done anything about the hardware control lines in the tivo serial cables I had just made up.

Undoubtedly some weenie will try to use one of this cables with winblows xp, and it won't work, because xp apparently refuses to work properly with serial cables that leave the hardware control lines floating (while every sane OS on the planet can work out for itself what's going on).

I pulled the cables apart again (well, took the backshells off), and I spent about 45 minutes tying all the hardware control lines together in the three cables I had just made up.

I didn't bother to test them again, as long as the rx/tx/gnd lines work, who cares.

I think I need to change my prices on the tivo twiki page. I expected to have about 3 people in total ask me to make cables for me, but now it's turning into a part time job almost, and I'm not making a cent out of these cables, in some cases they cost me money, and it's not like they take 2 minutes to make and test.

I also have to go to the post office to mail these out, I should be charging $20 just to go to the post office alone, the pain that causes. I hate the post office.

The telephone rang, it was the guy I play snooker with, (and I'm supposed to be at his place fixing the alignment of his sat dish). I chatted with him for a bit, said I wasn't coming up, because I felt a bit crappy today (true, my nose hasn't stopped running all day, I porbably have some contagion, and I don't want to ge spreading it around). He said his tv wasn't mucking arounfd too much anyway.

He complained that he couldn't get to the mail server, and I told him that that was because the mail server was not currently routable, because when the ups ran out, and the gear went down, it wiped out my static routes I have to add in manually, and I haven't got around to putting them back yet.

I said I was going in to see the gear tomorrow, I am moving the subnet the equipment is on again, to fix the routing/subnetting issues, and perhaps reconfigure radius and get it working.

I looked at some cisco docs last night, you can have multiple radius servers defined, but it doesn't appear that you can specify to use a different radius server based on the telephone number someone connects to the nas on.

Anyway, I watched some more tv, I ate the last of the frozen food from the freezer.

Dad came in a while later, to tell me that HHGTTG was going to be on in a bit, and I said "yeah, and it's on DVD in the shelf there".

I was watching some of the music channel tivo had recorded at the time, after the song finished I was watching, I ended up fast forwarding the rest of the hour of the tivo recording at tripple speed, because all the songs were shit.

I setup tivo to record HHGTTG, and I watched the first half of the episode of the Benny Hill show I watched the second half of last night, after tivo went back to live tv because I left it idle in the menu for 15 minutes of however long it takes.

I then watched HHGTTG.

I browsed around the net, downloaded some new binaries on the tivo, top, lsof etc. I put a new version of the telnet daemon on, because when I portscanned my tivo, it caused tnlited (the telnet daemon on tivo) to crash, and I had to reboot to get it back.

The replacement one I found, has a wrapper to respawn tnlited if it crashes, so I won't need to reboot the tivo.

I pulled out the paper work from the contracting work I did a little while ago (at the place that wants to get me in again), I checked my details.. yeah, I put the correct bank account details on there, they just must not have processed my payment.

I'll have to go to the bank on Monday afternoon, and get another interim statement to check, and see if I was paid, otherwise I'll chase it up on Monday afternoon (if there is time) or at some point on Tuesday.

About 11.30pm, I decided to watch Reservoir Dogs.

I fiddled around behind the tv, getting some a/v leads so I could plug my "new" computer in.

I set it up, and kicked it off, lets see how long the divx will play before the machine crashes..

It got all the way through. The issues I had with divx before, must have been caused by that dodgy board with the stuff capacitors on it, and the CPU load of playing a divx must have pushed the tolerances of those stuffed caps.

I noticed the machine that got dropped off here ages ago I'm supposed to fix, oh yeah, that's one of the things I'm supposed to be doing this weekend isn't it. Too bad, I'm too close to having a nervous breakdown. It can wait, I already said I'm not going to charge for the work when it eventually gets done.

It's 2 am again.

I woke up at 12.35pm.

I watched some tv, and I got up.

I think time needs an overhaul. We need to go to metric time, with 100 minutes in an hour, (at least then Bart would be right when he said his watch said it was 12.80), and 18 hours, giving us 1800 minutes in the day, or 30 of our "normal" hours.

This would probably require changing the days, as 6 of the new metric days is equal to 7.5 imperial days.

We could start by getting rid of Monday, because nobody likes Mondays.

I don't know what to do about that extra half a day, unless every second week we had the opposite of a leap day, and we skipped a second day, maybe Thursday, to keep everything working.

Or perhaps we could get rid of the whole idea of an odd numbered day week, and make 10 day weeks.

This would result in changing the months too, but that wouldn't be too bad, because having to rememer when a month is 30 days, or 31 days, or 28 days, or 29 days, is really annoying. Let's just make it all the same.

If this was done properly, I thnk it could really increase productivity.

People would be working less days, and the work day would be long enough, that people could put a "power nap" in the middle of it, that other cultures claim increase their productivity by a lot, but we don't take seriously, because the standard work day isn't long enough to have time for that.

Anyway, that's just my idea, and I it's somewhat for my own purposes, since my sleep/wake cycle doesn't fit into a normal day, I just get later and later of getting up and going to bed, until eventually I'll end up getting up at midnight, and going to bed afer lunchtime for example.

Anyway..

I checked my email, 60 new emails, 42 were spam.