Somehow I managed to get up early this morning, I was out of bed before 8am.

I got ready. I'd got an Amex bill in the mail last week, oops, forgot to pay it last month, it's only got my phone bill on it though, about $30 I have to pay now, so I grabbed that.

I left home about 8.30am, I got a little way from home, and thought it was all a bit bright. Hmm, I'd forgotten my sunglasses. Where are they? I thought, ah, I know.. I left them at my mate's place, on the table inside the door yesterday, crap.

Oh well, it's overcast, it's not too bad.

I got to the service station, got fuel. I thought about getting a pair of sunglasses, but decided not to bother.. there's the pair I won on eBay around Christmas, that the guy never got back to me about. I need to chase that up.

I took off, kept going, the sun came out a bit later, and then it was a bit hard to see.

I got to work, about 9.30am, before most of the other people in the office, wow, I haven't done that for a while.

I got to work, I spent a bit more time on the php version of the application for searching the database of backup tapes, put the email functionality in.

I configured it to send mail to the guy upstairs, then I let him know it was ready for testing, and I went back to working on the application I'm supposed to be working on.

About 12.30pm, he called me, and said they were going for lunch, so I went upstairs. We had to wait a minute for the sysadmin guy to finish on the phone, so we started having a conversation.

When the sysadmin got off the phone, he wanted to go to lunch, we joked that he could go, but we just had to finish our conversation, and would just be a minute.

We went out, wandered down the road from the building a bit. I wasn't sure where they were intending to go for lunch, not the cafe across the road, prehaps one of the pubs.

We went across the street, and into a little cafe, sat down, looked at the menu, looks ok. We sat there for about 10 minutes, and then a woman came to take our orders.

The food took a while, before it was served, about 15 minutes, I thought it was a bit long, considering we'd just ordered sandwiches and stuff, but it was good food.

We finished, chatted for a while, and then decided to go back to work, so we went over and paid. I grabbed a drink, and paid for that with my lunch, and then we wandered back to the office.

I went back to working on some oracle stuff, the guy who's acting as the manager on the project I'm working on asked me about sorting out a list of some of the detals in the database, to populate a dropdown box, I said that didn't sound too hard. Then a realised the column can have multiple options in it, so I need to find a way to split that up.

I said I'd go and talk to the assistant dba about it (they guy upstairs), so when I finished the bit of code I was working, I went up to speak to him.

He was on the phone, so I had to wait for him to finish, he was talking to someone who needed a vpn account, so then he had to ring up someone else to organise that, but we've run out of licenses for vpn accounts, so someone will have to have their account deleted to give to this guy.

When he got off the phone, I explained what I was trying to do, and he gave me a rough idea of how to do it, exporting the column to a file, and then using sqlldr to load it back into a new table, after putting a constraint on that table, to stop duplicate records.

Sounds like it'll work, I might try it tomorrow.

A couple of chicks from some other department were wandering around, and they came to chat to us, and gave us lollies.

We chatted to them for a minute, then they continued wandering.

It was now after 5pm, so we decided to leave. I went back down to my desk, to make a couple of notes about the stuff I had to work on tomorrow, and then I got a phone call, the guy from upstairs wanting to know where I was, I said I was at my desk, and I'd see him at the pub in a minute.

I grabbed my stuff, left, moved my bike down behind the pub, wandered in.

He was sitting at a table out the back, and had bought me a softdrink (or so I thought), I sat down, and said cheers for the drink. I chatted for a minute, had some of the drink, then a few minutes later, another guy from work turned up, and apparently my mate had bought the drink for the other guy, forgotten about me, and I'd pinched it, oh well.

We stayed there for a while, about 5.45pm, the guy at Wyong I go to dinner with every now and then called me, but there's terrible reception all around work, so I couldn't really hear him, I said I'd be home in a while, so he should call me back at home at about 8pm.

We stayed there a bit more, had more drinks. Another guy from work turned, the guy from Orange who's taking over the IT department, he'd been down the street to do his washing because he'd stayed up over the weekend.

Apparently a tanker truck of some description had tipped over on the roundabout just outside of the area, and he'd got stuck in a traffic jam, and it was all still there. There were cops, firetrucks, hazmat, ambulances, everything apparently.

I don't think I'm going anywhere in a hurry. We stayed there for a while more, it was now about 7.45pm. So much for being home now. They started talking about where to go for dinner. My phone rang again, it was my mate from Wyong again, I didn't answer it, I wouldn't have been able to hear him properly.

My phone rang again after that, my message service, I answered that, it said I had a new message, I thought it was a blank message, then I realised the call had dropped out because of the bad reception.

We kept talking about where to go for dinner, the phone rang again, the message service again, I answered, was able to get some of the message this time.

I got off the phone, and they decided where to go for dinner, we couldn't got to place we usually go to, because they don't have food or Mondays, they decided to go to the other pub, that we went to the night I stayed up there, apparently the restaurant has been closed to refurbishment the last few weeks, and they are just reopening tonight.

I wasn't too keen on it, since that's not a terrifically clean pub, I've heard several stories about cockroaches running around, including along the bar, and up the arm of a guy sitting at the bar.

I figured I'd go and have a look, and if I didn't like the look of it, I'd just go home. I went out the back of the pub, got on my bike, and started off.

The others were out the front, and the guy from upstairs at work flagged me down, like I was going to give him a lift, maybe, if I had another helmet.

I kept going, and they were walking, but now I realised I had no idea how to get to the pub, since the only time I went there, was a night I was already pissed when we went there.

I rode where I thought it was, nope, not right, not looking familar either, I went to a roundabout, that I end up on, on my way to work, I thought it was near there, went towards work, then realised it was the wrong way, now I remembered, I think it's near the station, where's that?

I went down the road, right back where I started, I went down a back street, ended up who knows where, came out, near the other pub we go to, ended up going down near the kebab place, then came back around, there were cops going up the street.

I followed them for a bit, they were going a bit fast, and then they ran up the foot path to drive through the mall, I went around, following the road.

I went back near the other pub again, had to wait at the lights. While I was waiting, I could see a cop car's lights flashing in the distance, I didn't work out what it was, but it must have been where the truck tipped over.

The lights changed, I went right, and I headed up to the roundabout, went the other way, it goes over to another roundabout, near the station, ah, there's the pub.

I went past, not seeing the entry to the car park, went down the street next to it, in case there was entry to the car park, nope, it's a dead end street.

I went down the end of it, to turn around, started turning around, then realised it was loose gravel, and the bike wasn't handling too well, slowed down, carefully turned around, went back up, on to the street, back, and into the carpark.

I parked, wandered into the pub. Got some fairly suspect looks from people in the pub, as I rock in wearing a leather jacket.

I headed into the pokie room, I thought there was entry to the restaurant area in there, couldn't see where though.

I called the guy from work, told him I was there, asked where he was, and then the door opened, and another guy from work came out, so I said I saw him, and hung up the phone.

I went through there, the guy I'd been speaking to was in the front door, he had it open, the others from work had just turned up. He asked them where I was (standing behind him), I didn't say anything, neither did they, and he raced off to find me. Heh.

I then had to race out to tell him I was there, and we went back in.

The others had gone in to order, it did actually look a lot better than the pub area in here, all nicely redone.

We ordered our food, and sat down to wait for it, and chatted. It was now about 8.30pm.

The food came out at about 9pm, I'd ordered chicken parmagiana, and was served first, a big plate of food. Then the woman said "oh, and here's your salad", and dumps down another huge plate of food.

My god, I'm never going to get through all this (and I was right). There was a huge chicken schnitzel, with tons of cheese on it, big chips, and a big bowl of salad. I started picking at the chips, not wanting to dig in whole everyone else was still waiting.

Once a couple of other meals came out, shortly after, we started eating. A couple of the other guys had ordered steaks, they got a huge slab of meat, looked terrific.

Another guy had ordered a chicken schnitzel, similar to my meal I thought, without the tomato and cheese on the chicken.

I started into it, it was really filling. I was about a quarter of the way through it, when I started to feel full already, I looked over, and the guy with the schnitzel had been eating the chips, I thought he had a big schnitzel that covered half the plate, it actually covered the whole plate, and had been covered with chips.

We sat and ate, the others slowly gave up on their meals, it ended up just being the guy with the schnitzel and me continuing to eat, like a competition.

I had to stop a few times, and wait for a minute before continuing to eat, the woman serving had come out and collected what was left of everyone else's meals, we kept chomping away at them.

I decided to give up, left a little bit of the schnitzel, most of the chips, and only the lettuce of the salad.

I sat and waited while the other guy continued, he didn't want to give up. I scraped the cheese off the chicken, and ate the last of that, and then I gave up, and the woman took it all away.

My god, I don't remember the last time I've been served more food than I can eat, usually I leave nothing on the plate, but a few scraps I can't be bothered to chase around the plate to get onto the fork, this was a huge meal.

With the chips, and cheese etc left, there must have almost been as much food left as I normally eat for dinner.

It was now about 9.45pm, I grabbed up my stuff, and what was left of my Coke, and followed the other guy out to the bar area, to find the others, just as we were about to go back in, I heard someone shout from outside, I looked, they were sitting out there.

I went out, found a seat, we ended up sitting and chatting for ages. Some drunk guy came up to us, asking where else he could get a beer, because they'd said last drinks at this place. At 10.15pm? I don't think so, we got thrown out at midnight, obviously this guy's pissed, and they won't serve him.

Someone asked him what he was doing in the area, and he said something about picking grapes. I don't have the patience to deal with drunk idiots at that time of the night, while I'm sober.

We continued our conversation, about computers I think it was at the time, ignoring the guy, and he went away after a minute, probably having no idea what we were talking about.

He came back about 10.25pm, had a beer this time, and wanted to have more a conversation. I put up with it for a couple of minutes (I didn't talk to him, just another guy from work), and then at 10.30pm, I decided I should probably go, to get home.

I got up, said goodbye, went out of the pub, got on my bike, and took off.

I forgot all about the truck, there wasn't anything at the roundabout now, headed for home.

Got on the freeway, it was a bit cold tonight. I got home at about 11.30pm.

I sat on the computer for a bit, there's been talk on the tivo mailing list the last couple of days, about an easy way to identify the ip address assigned to your tivo.

I sat and cobbled together a nasty bit of code, which is basically a parser for the output of ifconfig, to pick out the ip address, and display it on the screen.

It worked, so I posted it to the list. Since I had the tv on, testing the code (the first time I've turned it on in days) I decided to watch something, went to bed, and watched tv until a bit after 1am.

I was woken up by the phone at 10.40am.

I t was my mate in Newcastle, who pranged my bike. He wanted to know if we were coming up to the fair, and he'd meet us around there.

I said we were going to be up there about midday, and we see him then, and I got off the phone. Hmm, 10.40am, getting there for midday, I don't think so somehow.

I got up, had a shower, got ready. I was waiting for my mate to call, I gave up, and called his phone at about 11.40am. He didn't answer as usual.

I left a message, asking him to call me back, otherwise I'd have to leave, at about 12.30pm, and go on my own. I didn't really want to, since it was looking very overcast and crappy outside.

D'oh, I realised I hadn't charged my ipod, so I stuck that on to charge, 45 minutes of charge'll have to be enough to give it another couple of hours of playtime.

I sat and played the guitar, and waited. At 12.05pm, I got a message from my mate's wife's phone, asking if I was still going, because they were leaving now. I tried to call back immediately, but it wasn't answered. I left a message, saying I was still planning to go, and I'd head over to their place to see what was going on.

I was just about leave, when my phone rang, it was my mate's wife, I said I was still planning to go, and asked if they had left, they had, they were a few kilometres away, but could come back, I said that would be good, and then got off the phone.

My mate turned up about 12.15pm, I jumped in the car, and we took off.

My mate asked me how last night had been, I said it was good, and chatted for a bit. I said I'd sent him a message, but then he told me that he'd left his phone at the party in Sydney last night.

We got on the freeway, I felt like I was going to work. There were a few patches of rain on the way up, I'm glad I didn't ride up.

I said I had to go to an ATM somewhere, and get some money out, my mate said he did too.

A couple of minutes before we got to the Newcastle exit, my phone rang, it was my mate in Newcastle, he asked where we were, and I said we'd be at the basketball stadium (where the fair is) in about 20 minutes, so he said he'd meet us there.

We got off the freeway, and headed to the basketball stadium, just before we got there, my mate remembered about going to the ATM, there weren't any around here. We continued to the stadium, parked, went in. It was now about 1.30pm, we've got an hour before they pack up.

We figured we'd get some prices, then go and get cash.

We'd been in there about 5 minutes, were looking at the second stall or so, when we met up with our other mate.

He was after a dvd drive, and a hard disk or something, my mate was after parts to upgrade his pc. We wandered around, looking at parts and prices.

I suggested he get an AMD AthlonXP 3200+, and a good board, seeing as it's the fastest Athlon chip, that's 32bit. I figured it would be faster to get a 32bit CPU, to run 32bit code on, than a 64bit cpu, which'll be running in 32bit emulation mode the whole time.

I had to get a couple of disks, for the new tivo, and for my pc, (to replace the 60gb that went dodgy), 4 sound cards, and some blank dvds. I had $40 in my wallet, that's not going to go far.

We went to one stall, and it was a guy I know, who I bought all the stuff for the servers from, he lined up a deal for my mate, and discounted it a bit, looked like a good deal.

We kept wandering around, said we'd come back. We looked at more prices, it was now after 2pm, only 1/2 hour left.

We weren't finding much in the way of AthlonXPs, expecially not the 3200, and then the woman working on one of the stalls said that it was discontinued (it probably is), so my mate then somehow worked out that because something is discontinued, that it's crap, so he wasn't interested in looking for XPs anymore.

My mate went outside to think about the prices, I raced around looking for disks, and soundcards.

My mate finally decided to get the deal that the guy I know had offered, an AMD64 3200+ and some super motherboard with dual power supply and who knows what, a hard disk, 1gb of dual channel memory, some expensive video card, and a cheap and nasty case. It worked out to be a little more than he had, we tried to get the price down, got it down a little bit more, but I ended up putting it on my card, and my mate would get the cash and pay me back in a bit.

He got all that stuff, and while finishing off, I raced over to get the disks I needed, I was lucky to find a place that had a 200gb Maxtor in both ATA and SATA, so I bought one of each (and they were cheap, just a bugger about the 5% credit card charge).

While I was getting these, my mate who wanted the dvdrom and hard disk came over, I said I'd seen a 120gb Maxtor down the back for $135, so he went down to buy that. He came back with it, I was still finishing off paying for the disks, the guy was writing out some overly detailed receipt, with the drive serial numbers on it, and my drivers license details.

I then had to find the sound cards, by now it was just after 2.30pm, and everyone was starting to pack up, I raced around, found one place had some craptastic cards for $18, somewhere else had similar for $19, I was hoping to find something for about $15, since I needed 4 of them.

I ended up buying them from a guy who was slow at packing up, but ended up paying $22 each, d'oh. I was going to have to put it on my card too, making it even more. I was just getting that sorted, my mate came over, I asked if he had $48 on him to make up the difference, he said he might (his wife was looking after the money) he came back a minute later with another $40, now I need $8 more.

My mate scratched around, and found $3 in change, down to $5 left. My other mate, who I'd come with, went away, to his wife, and came back a minute later with a $5 note, sweet.

I paid, grabbed the cards, and away we went.

Now I had no money, and all the stalls were packed up. There goes getting some blank dvds.

I went round, and my mate and his wife grabbed all the bits they'd bought, and we went out and loaded up the car. My mate who I'd come with asked my other mate, if there was somewhere to get a drink, he said we could go to Darby St, to a pub.

We got in the car, he got in his car (he's back driving his unregistered car, now that he's wrecked my bike), and we went around to Darby St.

I pulled a jacket that was hanging around in the back seat over all the equipment, so it was a bit less obvious.

My mate went to the ATM, and pulled out as much cash as he could, and gave it to me, now he's just short by a couple of hundred bucks, and he'll get that to me later in the week.

We went into the pub, I asked if they had a menu, but they weren't serving food now, it was closed, (it was just after 3pm), so the woman said we could bring takeaway in.

We ordered drinks, and then went and sat outside. We chatted for a while, about 3.35pm, my mate went across to get a pizza. he came back a minute later, and said they'd be ready in 10 minutes, I went to get my mate and myself another drink.

When I went in, the woman behind the bar was cleaning it, including the soft drink tap things they have, I asked for a couple of Bundy and Cokes, she grabbed some glasses, put the Bundy in, then went to top them up with Coke from the tap.

She put the buttons back on the tap, and then pressed the Coke button, but only water came out, she put a bit more in, it wasn't getting any better, so then she grabbed another glass, put another shot of Bundy in it, grabbed a little bottle of Coke out of the fridge, and used that to top up the two drinks.

I went back outside, gave my mate his drink, and sat down, a minute later, he complained there was something in his drink, I had a look, and there was something floating around, under the ice, it looked like a bit of dough or something, yuck.

I took it back inside, complained, and the woman gave me another one (that's now four glasses, to give me two), I went back outside and gave it to my mate.

We chatted with my mate who lives in Newcastle, about him having to go to court, after being assaulted by the police, he's got a witness, so that's a start.

He went back across the road, and came back with 2 pizzas, from Pizza Hut, we were expecting a pizza from a little takeaway place.

We ate all that, and chatted more.

The woman from the bar came out, and collected the empty pizza boxes, and a couple of empty glasses. We chatted a bit more.

We left the pub about 5pm, went back, got in the car. We followed my mate back to his place, he had some stuff he'd borrowed that he wanted to give back to my mate.

We waited out the front of his place for a few minutes, and then he came out with the bag of stuff, and some photos, gave them to me, I put them in the back.

We took off after that, went back, got on the freeway, and drove back to my mate's place.

We unloaded all the gear from the car.

When we got inside, I took my sunglasses off, and put them on the table inside the door.

My mate wasn't sure about the video card he'd bought, an ATI Radeon 9800 XT or something, so we went into the computer, and googled it a bit, and found that it's a little bit old, the chipset was released in 2003, but apparently it was a top of the line card about a year ago, and it's still a prefectly good card.

He was happy after that, so we went out, cleared off the dining table, grabbed all the parts over, checked everything, and started to assemble the new PC.

I went in to the kitchen and made up a couple of Bundy and Cokes, and came back.

My mate wanted to have a go at putting the machine together, with me mainly supervising, that suited me.

I showed him how to mount the motherboard in the case (the cheap case we'd got didn't have a removable motherboard tray), and then putting the memory in, and the cpu, and the heatsink.

I put the heatsink in, because it was hard to explain the correct way to put the heatsink, without the heatsink paste on the bottom getting stuck on something, while my mate worked out my directions.

After that, we put in the video card, gees this thing must need some juice, it's got a 12/5v drive connector on it.

We put the disk in, wired up the front panel LEDs/switches, plugged the power on to everything.

The motherboard he got has a dual power supply thing, in case one fails, the other will keep the machine powered, I installed that, and put the retaining clip around it, that was a pain.

We were done at that point, so we went in, unplugged the old pc, plugged the new one in.

My mate pinched the DVDROM drive out of his old pc, that he didn't use much, and we mounted that in the new PC.

I booted it up, it came up first go, that was good, said Athlon64 3200+ etc.

I went into the BIOS, to configure it properly, my mate commented on the fact that the date in the BIOS was correct, but the time wasn't correct, it was 3 and a bit hours out, it said 4.30pm in the BIOS, but it was actually 7.28PM. I set it to 7.30PM, close enough, I'll use something like D4 and synchronise it later.

He found an XP disc, I booted it, went through the first couple of screens, expecting it to come back and say something about not having a hard disk, since it had a SATA disk in it, but I'd told my mate to connect it to one of the SATA connectors controlled by the motherboard chipset, rather than by the RAID controller (gees these Sil3112 controllers are on everything!), so it was able to detect the disk.

It was a 160gb, but it only came up as a 130gb from some reason, hmm, perhaps the BIOS needs updating.

I partitioned it as 130gb, formatted it, installed windows on it (yuck), and then once it was running, I installed all the drivers from the CD for the motherboard, to get the onboard ethernet going etc, and rebooted a few times to get it all right.

My mate had been using USB to connect to the ADSL router he's got, but I hate USB, so I had him find a patch cable, and I used that to connect the router to the PC.

After all the drivers were on, and the ethernet working (had no issues with getting the router to work via ethernet) I installed the @BIOS thing from the CD, and went about updating the BIOS.

That was an interesting exercise. I figured the first server you can use to get the updated BIOS file from would be overloaded, so I selected one of the alternative options in the list.

I had nothing but issues, one timed out, another was connection refused, another was full, one I connected to, got 1% of the file, and then was disconnected. I don't remember the issue with the fifth one was, but the sixth one I tried, actually first in the list, and the default, worked fine. Argh.

It flash updated the BIOS, and then I rebooted. I was half expecting windows to not boot up again, because with the newer BIOS, it would recognise the disk properly, and it would have a different drive geometry, but it didn't windows came back up fine, that was surprising.

I looked in the disk manager, and found that it could see the disk properly in here, there was 20 something gb of unpartitioned space on the end of the disk.

Either it's a better IDE driver been installed from the driver CD, or the real mode driver that the windows install uses is crap, and can't see more than 128gb.

I installed the proper drivers for the video card, and all the million windows updates available.

I read some reviews on the cpu/board, I wanted to find out why people would be buying a 64bit cpu, when there's bugger all software for it.

I couldn't really find a good explanation of that, only that once a ton of people had 64bit cpus, they'll start coming out with 64bit code.

My mate came in, gave me another glass of Bundy and Coke, and said he was going down the road to get a BBQ chicken, because it was a bit late for anything else (just after 9pm I think it was), he'd tried to cook a couple of steaks, but that had been a disaster he told me.

I sat on the pc a bit more, reading, looking at benchmarks. I heard my mate take off in the car.

He came back a bit later, then came, while his wife made up a salad.

We installed Doom3 on the PC, to see how it would go, but it took so long to install, that by the time it was installed, the dinner was already, and we were starved, so we went out to eat.

About halfway through eating, my mate put on the Farenheit911 DVD he'd borrowed from the video shop, which was due back today or yesterday or something, he figured that if he was going to pay a fine for taking it back late, he might as well actually watch it.

We all finished eating, and the moved across to the lounge to continue watching it.

Pretty interesting movie, some stuff about Bush I hadn't known about previously.

I sat and watched that until it finished, at midnight, and then my mate dropped me off at home.

When I got inside, I realised that one of the soundcards had come out of the bag, must be rattling around in the back of his car, d'oh.

I sat on the PC for a while, and then went to bed, about 12.30am.

I couldn't sleep, I tossed and turned for ages, I think it was about 2am I finally got to sleep.

I got up about midday, bummed around on the computer, had breakfast.

About 12.30, I went in the bathroom, I was just thinking, "my mate's supposed to be calling me to sort out going up to Newcastle", and about 1 millionth of a second later, the phone started ringing.

I couldn't answer it, I figured I just wait for the message, then call back.

There was no message, so I forgot about it.

I watched some tv, played the guitar, had some lunch.

About 2.30pm, I did some washing, and hung it out.

About 3.30pm, my phone rang again, it was my mate, wanting to know about going up to Newcastle, and I told him that I'd forgotten that I already had plans for tonight, so I'd be staying down here, and I'd either ride up to Newcastle in the morning, or if it was raining heavily, I'd get the train, since the fair is right near Broadmeadow.

I got off the phone, and a minute later, got a message to say that he was going to stay down here too, and not go up.

I checked my missed calls, and the call I missed earlier wasn't from him, it was from one of my other mates, the drummer. He probably wants to know if I'm still going tonight.

I watched more tv, played the guitar more.

The phone rang again, it was my mate, the drummer, again, wanting to know if I was still going, I said I was, that I nearly stuffed up etc, and then he said to be round at our other mate's place for 7pm, fine.

I went back to playing the guitar.

The landline rang this time. (Bloody phones!), it was the guy at Wyong I go to dinner with sometimes, (but not for ages now).

He went on for a while, about pcs he's had to fix. I'm not really interested, I don't deal with busted computers full of virii and spyware anymore.

He also mentioned that the fair had been at Terrigal today, d'oh, I could have just gone there instead of going to Newcastle tomorrow.

I spoke to him for about 1/2 hour, it was now about 5pm.

I played the guitar a bit more, and next thing, I noticed it was 6.15pm. Gees.

I went and grabbed some clean clothes off the line, had a shower, got ready, and left home about 6.40pm.

I got to my mate's place a bit before 7pm, went in and had a chat, my other mate turned up, we finished off the beers we'd left in the fridge from a couple of days before. I explained to him how I'd almost ended up going to Newcastle tonight, and then realised what a stuff up of a day it had been.

I'd forgotten about the tivo bqq in Sydney today, thinking that I wasn't available, because I had to go to the fair in Newcastle today, but then had moved it to tomorrow.

My mate went and had a shower and got changed, another mate who I haven't seen for a while turned up, he grabbed a beer out of his car, we sat and had a drink and a chat for a while, and then we all wandered down to the club from my mate's place, and got there about 7.40pm.

My mate and I got in the dinner line. It was stinking hot in here, probably all the heat coming out of the kitchen. There was a few people in front of us. We waited for a few minutes, and then ended up waiting behind the people getting served.

They'd been so busy crapping on, that they hadn't bothered to look at the menu and decide what they want, so they stodd there, looking at the menu, trying to decide, and holding up the whole line.

Eventually they decided, ordered, paid, and buggered off, and my mate and I were able to order. It took us less than a minute, we'd ordered, paid, been given the beeper thing, and were out of the line. Too bad there's a 45 minute wait on the food.

We went over and got drinks, it wasn't as hot over near the bar, but still not particularly comfortable. We had to wait behind a couple of people at the bar, nothing unusual.

Our other mates, who weren't ordering food, had found a couple of seats, but only a couple, so I had to stand there. I saw a free table, was about to go over, but someone beat me to it. A minute later, another one was free, so I went over and grabbed that.

It only had a couple of chairs, so my mates had to drag other chairs over.

We sat there for a while, had our drinks, finished them, sat and chatted more. It was so hot, yuck.

Another mate, the guy that works at the ABC, turned up, and then his sister and her boyfriend (another of our mates) turned up.

I went to get another drink, there was a few people in the line by this time, and it took a few minutes.

When I got back, the food beeper had gone off, so my mate had gone over and got both meals and brought them back, my other mate, who'd ordered, was outside having a smoke. It was about 45 minutes later (now about 8.25pm), they were right.

The guy who'd come with my other mate's sister decided to get something to eat, so he went over and got in the long dinner line, just before 8.30pm.

The food was pretty good. The kitchen had signs up saying they closed at 8.30pm, but it was after that, and people were still lining up, I think it was about 8.50pm before they stopped taking orders.

We finished our meals, by this time, there was a huge line at the bar, about 1/2 the people in the place were lined up to get drinks.

I decided not to go and get in the line, it'd take about 20 minutes to get a drink, forget it.

The table we were sitting at, was on the dancefloor, so it had a sign on it, saying it would be removed at 9.15pm. About 9pm, some guy came and told us the table would be going away, yeah, whatever buddy, I can read.

He went away again, my mate who'd ordered food wasn't too impressed, he hadn't been able to order until just after 8.30pm, and they told him that the food was going to take an hour, so there'll be no table to sit at.

We sat there a bit more, the line got even longer at the bar, now about 2/3 of the people in the place were lined up for drinks.

The guy came around to move the table again, he wanted to put it off the dancefloor, near the kitchen, nowhere near the stage. I spoke to him for a bit, and convinced him to move it over near the stage, so he did.

The roadies had been setting up all the gear for nearly an hour now, they'd been mucking around on the guitars etc, we thought it must have been going to start soon.

We sat and chatted more, the bar line took ages to go down, once it got back to being about 10 people in the line, I went over to get another drink.

I went back, sat and chatted and drank, the food my mate had ordered was finally ready at 9.30pm, they were right again.

The band finally came out at 9.50pm, and started. The first couple of songs were a bit rough, the instruments weren't tuned properly, the amps weren't working properly, the cables were dodgy.

A roady kept running on the stage and fixing things, through the first couple of songs, and between songs he'd grab a guitar and run away with it, presumably to tune it, and then he'd come back and swap between songs again.

They had it all sorted out within the first 15 minutes, and then it was really good.

They played a set for an hour, and then they went off for a break, at 10.50pm.

I sat there to mind the table, all the others went outside to smoke and chat, and get out of the heat. Great. One of my mates (the drummer) had gone to get another drink, he came back with that, put it down on the table. I was just about to ask him to mind the table, turned around, and he'd gone outside, leaving me minding the table, and his drink.

I sat there for a minute, I needed to go to the loo, he came back in, again, I was about to ask him to mind the table again, turned around, he'd grabbed his drink and gone outside. Argh.

Another one of my mates came back with a drink and sat down. I said I just needed to go to the loo, and went in, I came back out, and went over to the bar. I bumped into another mate, who I hadn't seen earlier in the night, he'd just arrived.

I chatted to him for a minute, said we had a table, and as I turned around to point it out, saw 2 guys sitting down at it. Argh. My mate who'd come back had left the table, and now someone had pinchec it. Dickhead.

As they were about to sit down, my mate (the drummer) went over, and said something, I don't know what, but the 2 guys continued to sit down, and he'd gone back outside. There goes our table.

I got my drink, and went outside to find out what was going on. They were sitting out there smoking, I sat down there.

About 20 minutes later (at about 11.30pm) the band came back out again, this time in Sgt Peppers outfits, we went back inside, and we stood behind the 2 guys and what was our table.

Some woman came up from behind us, and asked us to move, because they were sitting behind us, and couldn't see. I was getting pretty pissed off by now.

I moved to the side slightly, and still stood there. Someone said we should get chairs and sit in the gap, so we went back to the table outside, grabbed all the chairs, and came back inside. I put a couple of chairs right in front of the 2 idiots who'd sat at our table, and a few minutes later, both of them got up and buggered off.

We reclaimed our table at that point.

The show went on, they did some obscure Beatles songs that the Beatnix don't do, that was good. A couple of times, my mate (the drummer) yelled out requests, he yelled "Doctor Robert" a couple of times, and the guy playing Lennon looked over, and laughed.

When the show finished up, at about 12.30am, we were outside, having a drink, and a chat. I was wanting to go home at this point, since I had to get up fairly early in the morning, to go to Newcastle to the fair.

We chatted for a while. A little bit before 1am, some guy came to our table, we looked over, and it was the guy who'd played Lennon. He started chatting to us, that was pretty cool. Turns out his real name is actually John.

We were talking about the songs they'd done, and songs that use backing tracks etc, my mate mentioned the Beatnix, and his reaction was one of displeasure. He then went on to explain that he'd actually been in the Beatnix, for a few years (and mentioned 1995), but he said he didn't like the way they do things.

One guy runs it, and basically schedules different guys to do different gigs, and he didn't like that, so they'd left, and formed their own group, where it was just the 4 of them, and they always did the gigs.

About this time, some woman came over and started chatting to him, "Sorry to interrupt" she said though. She went on, monopolising the conversation, going on about how her husband was a huge fan etc, and then just crapped on with stuff that no one but herself wanted to hear.

A bouncer had been around a bit earlier, asking us to move inside, because they were closing the area we were in, he came back again, and asked us to move inside. We stood up, and started to move inside, hoping it would get rid of the woman, her husband came over, and said something like "I thought you'd be over here talking to this guy", and he wasn't really interested.

We moved inside, and my mate had asked about their equipment, he'd started to tell us, and then the roady came over, and started talking to us, and then the woman monopolised the conversation again, and at that point we left, with the guy telling us to send him email.

We left, wandered back to my mate's place, and we got back there about 1.30am. Someone put the tv on, and we sat there have a chat, I left his place and headed for home, just after 2am, and got back home about 2.15am.

I sat and played the guitar for a bit, trying to learn "She Said, She Said", and then I went to bed about 3am.

Friday..

Got up late again, didn't get to work until 11am.

I was working on the Oracle querying stuff, for about an hour, then I got an email about an Oracle outage.

I emailed the guy upstairs to find out what Oracle instance it effected, and it was the one I was working on, but it was Oracle Application Server, not the Oracle tables themselves, so I was still ok, because I don't use OAS, because it's so dodgy.

I kept working, then I got a phone call from the guy upstairs, telling me they were going for lunch.

I wandered up, and we went across the road to get something.

There were a bunch of guys from Orange at work, so they followed us, and we set with them.

It took the cafe forever to make my burger today, useless. After lunch, I came back to work.

I went upstairs at one point, to find out about the tape archive database. The guy upstairs showed me the searching tool he'd made up in Jdeveloper. It took forever to load the form to get the details of the file you wanted to search for, it was hopeless.

I went back downstairs, and rewrote it in php, it took me about an hour, half that time was spent making my php version look like the java version.

I went back up, showed him, but then he complained that it took longer to return the results, once you actually get to the search form (which his took several minutes to do), and only because he was viewing it in Internet Exploder, and it wouldn't render the table until it had all the rows, and also because my search finds more files than his, because I'm using wildcard searching.

Anyway, he then complained that I didn't have the email function, which sends an email containing the details of the file to be restored (tape it's on etc) to the sysadmin to restore.

It was now 5pm, so we decided to leave.

I went back to my desk, and quickly put in the button to click on to generate the email, (but none of the functionality), then I burned the beta tivo image I'd downloaded a couple of days before on a cd, and we left.

I went down to the pub with them, I had the worst headache for some reason.

I had a couple of soft drinks, we sat in the pub until about 7.30pm, then we went to the pub where we went for dinner the other day.

I rode down there, so I got there early than the others, I waited around until they got there.

We went to order, and were then told that they don't serve food on Fridays. (Normally everyone goes home for the weekend, but a couple of the guys have to work up north over this weekend, so they were staying over the weekend, rather than going home.

We stood there for a bit, no one was really making a decision what to do, where to go for food etc.

A couple of the guys had beers, and then they decided to have a game of pool.

I was getting a bit fed up at this point, I was starving, and had a headache. If we don't get some food soon, I'll just go home I think.

They finished their beers, and then we decided to go back to a pub near work, where they were staying, to get some dinner.

I rode back up there, and the guys wandered back up a few minutes later.

We went in, grabbed a menu, and went and worked out what we wanted.

We went in and ordered, I think it was about 8.45pm now, the food turned up a little while later, a bit after 9pm.

We ate our meals, then they had more beers, and we chatted for a bit.

Just after 10pm, I decided to go home, so I went down, jumped on my bike, and took off.

Some of the the trip back was interesting. I got to the road which leads to the freeway, there was some idiot going 50 in the 60 zone, with a car sutck behind them.

I thought about overtaking, in the median turning lane, but it would just be my luck that I'd get busted doing it (since I'd have to be in there a while to ovetake 2 cars), so I just put up with it, I knew a roundabout with an extra lane where I could overtake was coming up.

We got to one roundabout, if I'd hammered on, then I could have got around, but it had been raining a little while before, so I decided not to push it, the proper roundabout where I could easily pass was coming up very shortly.

We plodded through the first roundabout, then as soon as the second lane to the next roundabout started, I got straight in there, sped up, passed the first car, was just about to get past the slow idiot, when without looking, they changed lanes, and I had to brake as hard as I could without the back wheel losing traction to slow down. Stupid idiot.

I was about to change back to the other lane, but the car I had just passed had sped up, and blocked me from getting in front of it. It managed to get around the roundabout in front of the slow idiot, leaving me stuck behind it, because the 2 lanes on the roundabout then merge back to one.

As soon as the second lane started again, I got in there, starting speeding up, and was just starting to overtake the slow idiot, when their blinker went on, and they started to change lanes on top of me, hadn't looked again.

This time I blasted the horn, they stopped changing lanes, I screwed on to full throttle, flipped my visor up, and as I went past the car, gave them a mouthful, and kept going.

GVees it was a thrill, I was still really annoyed though, stupid driver, get off the road.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, didn't see any cops.

I got to a couple of kilometres away from home, and I had to stop to wait for an oncoming car to pass me, before I could turn. While I was waiting there, I heard this terrifically loud noise. I didn't know what it was, it sounded like a truck thundering past, and the road was moving, but there was nothing there.

Once I turned, I realised it was a freight train going under the road I'd been waiting on, it scared the shit out of me.

I got home just after 11pm. I sat and mucked around on the computer for a while, started backing up an 8gb disk out of an xbox, to replace the 2gb or so disk in my proxy server, that the bearings have started to go in, and then I went to bed about 2am.

Ok, I've left it a few days again, and I can't really remember what happened the last few days.

On Thursday..

I slept late, got to work at 11.30am.

I was in a meeting, so I missed the email from the guy upstairs telling me that lunch was on (at about 12.30), so I didn't see it until 20 minutes later.

I went up, but they'd gone out to lunch.

A chick who used to work up here is back up for a couple of days, so I chatted to her for a while, and then we went across the road and got lunch.

I had stacks of work to do, so I got takeaway, came back to work, and got back to work.

I went upstairs again a couple of hours later, the guy up there wanted me to look at a script I'm helping him with.

When I went up there, the first thing I could hear was some alarm going off. Apparently it's a gas leak alarm, there's no gas leak, but the alarm needs to be manually reset, and it's in a cabinet that only the building manager has a key for, and he's not here today, so we had to put up with incessant beeping.

The guy who we took the photos for the benefit of last week was up here today, so this morning, they'd put the screensaver I made up on his laptop while he was across the road getting a coffee, apparently it had gone off pretty well.

I started looking at the script, and the guy showed me that he'd been sent a few silly things through the internal mail the last couple of days, including a bottle of talcum powder, by the chick we went to lunch with a few days ago.

while we were working on the script, she came over, and sat behind us, mucking around and annoying us.

The guy I was working on the script with grabbed the bottle of talcum powder, opened it, turned around, and sprayed it all over her.

She just sat there for a minute, and then she got up and went back to her desk. It was pretty funny.

She came back about 5 minutes later though, grabbed the bottle, tried to spray it down the shirt of the guy I was working with, but he'd closed it, so nothing came out.

They kept mucking around, and eventually went outside to have a smoke, I stayed there working on the script, trying to work out the issue with escaping dollar signs in the shell, but because they'd taken their noise away, now all I could hear was the alarm beeping.

They came back a bit later, and then the guy who we'd put the screensaver on his pc was complaining that some files were lost off the server he uses.

I said I'd go and run a disk check on it, since the machine keeps crashing, has to be hard reset, and doesn't check it's disks when it comes back up.

I went into the computer room, scheduled boot time disk checks on the server, and rebooted it.

There were errors on both partitions, but when it was all finished, there was no files magically reappeared, and there were no lost clusters files created.

When I came out of the computer room (I was in there for nearly 1/2 hour) my mobile reception came back, and I got a message, the other guy had left.

I don't think I'll go to the pub this afternoon anyway.

I spoke to the guy about his files, I said that perhaps the machine is backed up, and we could restore some old files.

I went over, spoke to the sysadmin, he had a look, we didn't think that machine had ever been backed up, but he looked anyway, and found that it had been, about a month before the missing files went missing.

We couldn't restore them though, the tapes aren't loaded, and we don't know where they are.

At this point, most of the people in the office had left (it was now nearly 7pm) so all you could hear was the alarm going off, incredibly annoying.

I went down, grabbed my stuff, and left.

I got home just after 8pm, had dinner, played the guitar for a bit, and watched some tv.

About 10.30pm, my mate who I'm supposed to be going to the computer fair with on Saturday called me.

He said there was a fair on Sunday as well, so he wanted to know if I wanted to go up to Newcastle on Saturday, go out in Newcastle on Saturday night, stay up there (at the guy's place who crashed my bike), and get up and go to the fair on Sunday.

I said that sounded ok, he said he'd ring me on Saturday and work it out, and then got off the phone.

I played the guitar and watched the tv a bit more, and then I remembered that I arranged to go and see The Beatels on Saturday night. I didn't call my mate back, I'd just tell him on Saturday when I spoke to him.

I went to bed a bit after that.

I woke up, not sure what time, thought about getting up, but ended up going back to sleep.

The landline started ringing and woke me up a bit later, it rang and rang. I got up and answered it.

It was my mate from last night, he wanted to know if I was up for going round to our other mates place for a jam session, I said it sounded ok.

He said he was ready, and would be leaving in a minute, I said I'd get ready, and see him when he got here.

I finished off the cereal, had a shower, got dressed, and starting reading my email, when my mate turned up.

I packed up the stuff, and then dragged the amp and guitar down, and chucked them in the car.

We went round to our mate's place, and I unloaded it all, dragged it inside, set it up.

My mate's guitar and amp were still in the loungeroom, setup from Sunday, so we both played guitar for a few minutes.

He decided he wanted something to eat, so he went to have a shower.

My other mate dragged the drum kit in, he's broken the foot pedal for the bass drum, he could probably get it welded, but not today.. Public holiday.

I had taken my ipod, and a cable for it, and my new amp has CD input on it, so I plugged it all in, and I put on "Urban Guerilla", that I'd downloaded.

I plugged the guitar in as well, and found that you can use both at the same time (pretty cool!) so I played bass along with it.

My mate came out from the shower, and we went out to go and get some food.

My mate who'd picked me up had parked in the driveway behind my other mate's car, which we usually go in, so we got in my other mate's car.

They wanted Red Rooster, I'm not a big fan of microwaved chicken, so I said I'd go to Hungry Jacks, or Burger King, or whatever it is near there (yeah yeah, it's microwaved too, but microwaved beef is better than microwaved chicken).

We drove round there, my mates went into Red Rooster, I went into Hungry Jacks.

I dragged all the loose change out of my pocket, bugger, only $5 something worth, not enough to buy the meal I want, it's $6 something.

I ordered, paid, great, more crappy loose change.

I made up my drink, and then my order was ready, I grabbed it, and went out.

I thought my mates were going to sit in Red Rooster, but they'd ordered take away too, and had just come out of Red Rooster, so that was good timing.

We piled back in the car, and went back to my mate's place again.

We sat and ate our food, chatted, then went back to playing the instruments.

I started playing the bass line from U2's Vertigo, and my mate started playing lead guitar, so then we decided to try to play that properly through.

We played it a couple of times, pretty rough, we kept losing place.

My mate went and got a microphone, and found a blank tape, and setup to tape us.

We played it again a couple of times.

When we listened to the playback, the stretched band in the tape recorder had made the tape run at the wrong speed, and the playback was slow, making it sound even worse.

I heard myself talking on the tape, I hadn't realised what a dumb voice I've got. Ugh.

The frequency response of the microphone is poor, it can hear the really low frequency bass, done on the E string, but you can't hear the stuff on the D string at all.

My mate asked if I had a tape recorder, I said I did, but had no idea where it was. I said I had a reel to reel recorder though :-) (I think only the left channel works on it, but we've only got one microphone anyway).

We played it another couple of times, then my mate decided that he wanted a couple of beers.

I went with him, we went and jumped in the car, and were going to go to the bottleshop nearby, but when we went past, it looked like it was gone.

We kept going, and went to another bottle shop.

I was just looking for some sort of vodka and citrus drink, that wasn't a chicks drink (bit of a contradiction in terms, I know, though you can get those "smirnoff black" things, which are vodka and citrus, but they hit me like a punch in the face).

Anyway, I was looking in the premixed spirits area, my mate came over, and said they had "Bluetongue beer" which apprently he'd seen on tv, getting lots of awards or something.

$19 for a six pack, it'll want to be good. I grabbed a 6 pack out of the fridge, and we went over and paid.

As we were going back to the car, my mate noticed it said ginger beer on in, hmm, I'm not a big fan of ginger beer, anyway.

We got back in the car, and went back to my mate's place, went in, I grabbed a couple of beers out, and put the rest in the fridge.

It was a fairly interesting beer, didn't taste very much like ginger beer at all.

We got back to playing, did Vertigo a few more times.

My mate who plays lead guitar decided to sing Vertigo, so we started the song again, and then when he started singing, I stopped playing bass, and he got the shits.

We did it again, and I kept playing that time.

We listened to that recording, it was pretty bad.

I got sick of Vertigo, my hand was sore from plucking the strings.

We stopped for a bit, listened to the bad quality recordings. Bugger, should have gone home and got a tape recorder.

We decided to play something else, I started doing the bass line from "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me", which we mucked around with a few minutes, my mate sang a bit.

We decided to play "Come Together" by The Beatles, but I haven't even looked at the tab for that.

My mate went in on the PC, and went about finding it.

He came out, said he had it, and I went in with the guitar, and practiced it. It's a ton easier than I thought. Just a lot of sliding.

I went back out, and we played that for ages, recorded it a couple of times, and it actually didn't sound too bad, the crappy tape recorder was the let down at that point, rather than poor playing.

My mate's phone rang, it was his Dad, he spoke to him for a minute, I just practiced the bass line, his Dad could hear it, but couldn't work out what it was.

He got off the phone, and then my phone rang. I answered it, it was my mate who does security at the hospital near where I used to work.

I went outside so I could hear him, spoke to him for a minute, he wanted me to go around to his place a bit later, I said that was fine, got off the phone, went back in.

We played another couple of times, getting better.

We talked about recordings, I said we should just build a pc to do it, with 4 sound cards in it, so we can have different channels, and mix the stuff properly.

I said I had a spare pc (3 actually, those stupid servers I built, that I still have to pay Dad for), I'd just get some sound cards at the fair on the weekend, and build a mixing box.

About 4.30pm, my mate started putting the drums away, then I played for a bit more, then he said he wanted to go, so I packed up, dragged all my stuff out, loaded up the car.

He dropped me off at home, and I unloaded all the stuff again, and dragged it up the stairs.

I grabbed my bike stuff, went down, jumped on my bike and took off, and went around to my mate's place.

I parked up, there was someone's car parked in the driveway, as well as his.

When I got up the front steps, my mate started talking to me out the window, then came anc opened the door.

I went in, we chatted for a bit, then he offered me a drink, I figured he meant coke or juice or something, but then he got out the bottle of Bundy Black, and cracked it open.

Gees it smelled nice, he poured a couple of glasses, neat, about 4 shots in each.

It was so smooth, I can't remember ever drinking a spirit that smooth before.

He wanted me to have a look at his computer, to see what could be upgraded on it.

We went in, I had a look, found the motherboard model, looked it up, and found what CPUs it supports.

We looked at a website with some prices on it, working out the rough prices we expect to see at the computer fair on the weekend.

We finished off the drinks, gees that was some good stuff. My mate said "smoke break", we went out, poured another couple of drinks, and we went outside while he had a smoke.

We had a chat for a while, he went inside and put a DVD on.

We sat outside and listened to it a bit, and chatted a bit more.

I said I probably wouldn't make it down to the party on Friday night, because I'd have to leave work, ride about 200km to get there, find somewhere to sleep, get up reasonably early Saturday morning, ride another 200km to get to Newcastle to go to the fair (or at least 100km to get home, and get in the car with my mate).

I went in to go to the loo, came back out, and he was sitting on the lounge, so I sat there and watched the DVD a bit, it was "A Perfect Circle", songs/videoclips.

My mate said he wanted a pizza, I was pretty hungry, so he rang up and we ordered, $30 something for 2 pizzas, garlic bread, and pepsi. gees.

I only had $40 left in my wallet, whatever.

We watched more of the DVD, and only about 1/2 hour later, the pizza guy turned up.

I paid, and we grabbed the pizzas.

To be funny, my mate offered the pizza guy a cone, he didn't have any, it was just to see what they guy would say, it's been a bit of a running gag apparently.

The pizza guy thought about it, and then he's like "oh, nah, I shouldn't" and he left.

We sat and ate the pizzas.

My mate had put the tv on, and "Liar, Liar" had just started. I hadn't seen it, since I hate Jim Carrey.

I sat and watched it anyway, and then it finished about 10.30pm.

I was feeling a bit rough, it's stinking hot, and I'm getting a headache.

I sat and chatted to my mate outside for a bit, and then I left just after 11pm.

I got home a few minutes later.

I had a drink of water, and was so thirsty, then I realised what it was.

After the couple of drinks last night, I hadn't had much water, then we were round playing the instruments, we were sweating, and I was drinking beer, then I went to my mates place, and drank all the Bundy, I was probably dehydrated, and spirits are probably not a good thing to rehydrate with.

I drank more water, sat on the computer for a bit, then I played the guitar a bit, and went to bed just after midnight.

I got woken up several times during the night, by torrential rain outside.

When the alarm went off, and I woke up again, it was raining again, ugh.

It stopped raining about 9.30am, and the road was starting to dry up, so I figured that I should go to work today.

I got up, got ready. There's not much breakfast cereal left, I'll have to get some on the way home, so I took my backpack with me.

I was about to leave, when I remembered that I was going to see the Beatnix again tonight, so I took my waterproof pants with me, in case it's raining this afternoon, when I come back from work.

I went out, shoved all the stuff in my bike, and took off.

I got about 5km away from home, when it started pouring with rain. I couldn't see anything, my pants got soaked straight through.

Oh yuck, I think I'll just go home again, I tried to go to work.

I got a little bit further up the road, and I felt water run into my shoe.

In true Homer Simpson style, when he's pulling on his "stupid itchy church pants", and he tears the ass of them, I decided "Forget it, I'm not going".

I figured I'd just go up to the intersection of the highway, and instead of going left, and to the freeway, I'd go right, to the supermarket, to get some food, and then go home again.

I got a little bit further, and the rain stopped.

I got to the intersection, thought about going home again, but then saw blue sky up north, so I decided to keep going.

I went up, got on the freeway, got a few kilometres up the freeway, before the service station, there was a cop sitting in the breakdown lane, because the road was all wet, I wasn't speeding, so that was ok.

I got to the service station, fuelled up.

Yuck, my pants are soaked.

I went in to pay, and my phone rang, it was a guy from work, telling me about a meeting they're going to have or something. I said I was on my way, and would be there in about 45 minutes. I got off the phone, paid.

I took off, kept heading for work, the road was all wet, and about 10km further up the freeway, it was dry.

I got all the way to work without issue, my pants were mostly dry when I got there, from the breeze/wind chill of heading to work.

The ass off them was still soaked though, which was pretty uncomfortable.

I got to work, at 11.30am. I finished off the code I'd been working on.

About 1pm, I went across the road, had some lunch, the weather was totally cleared up now. Stupid weather, sick of it.

I went back, did another few hours of coding, and I left work at 5.30pm.

It was an awful trip back, slow idiots all over the road. The weather had gone cold and overcast too. I hoped it didn't rain.

About halfway down the freeway, the sun came out, and it was nice weather again.

I headed to my mate's place at Wyong, I got there a bit after 6pm, he was just having a shower, so I sat in the loungeroom and chatted to his parents.

He came out, we chatted for a bit, and then we jumped in his Dad's car, a bit before 7pm, and my mate's Dad drove us to Mingara.

We went in, I showed my license, and the woman's like "Queensland? still live up there?" "yep, I certainly do". What else am I going to do? tell her "oh, no, I don't, here's my expired NSW license with the address where I'm living on it". Pff.

I signed in as a visitor, and then went to find something to eat.

There was a cafe place with a menu, so I was about to go and look there, I realised I only had some change, nothing in my wallet.

I went back to the ATM, and got out $60, went back, looked at the menu.

My mate had gone to the loo, he'd just come back. I worked out what I wanted, and ordered it, and the chick gave me a beeper thing.

We wandered over to the bar, grabbed a drink each.

After I'd got mine, and my mate was ordering his, I noticed a cocktail list on the bar, hmm, a Cosmopolitan looks good, I like Contreau.

We walked back over to the cafe place, found a table, sat and waited.

They came over the PA, and said that the doors for the concert were now open, and would be closing at 8pm.

My mate went to find out about paying for it, went down to the area, and then he came back, and told me that it was seated, and you had to buy a ticket from the ticket office.

Our other mate was supposed to be getting here about 8pm, and I was a bit worried about the doors being closed.

I gave my mate $40, and sent him to buy 4 tickets, while I waited for my meal (still).

I called him, told him the story. I got off the phone. My mate came back with 4 tickets, $13.50 each they were.

I was wondering if I was going to get my meal, the beeper finally went off at 7.45pm. 25 minutes to make a humburger? gees. I went over and got it, came back, started eating.

My mate called me back, I was eating, so I let my mate answer it, he spoke for a minute, then gave me the phone, I spoke to my mate, someone else was coming too (I thought it was just him and some woman from work) so he wanted another ticket. I said I'd sort it out, and got off the phone.

I asked my mate to go and get another ticket, gave him $10 I had in my pocket, change from the food I bought.

He went off to buy the 5th ticket.

He came back with it, I finished eating, we quickly finished our drinks, and went down to where the concert was.

I was now a couple of minutes before 8pm.

The woman in front was telling the security guard that she had tickets for extra people, so he said that he'd take them, hold them, and the extra people could tell him who they were, and be let in.

Some woman came over to the door with a map, to show us to our seats, my mate went with her.

I stayed there, and told the guard I was in the same situation, and had extra tickets, I gave them too him, he wrote my name on them, and then I went over and sat down.

My mate went over to get a drink at the bar. I sat there for a minute.

I sent an sms to my mate, letting him know how to get in, when he gets here.

I decided that I wanted another drink too, then realised that I had no cash left, because I'd given it all to my mate to buy the extra tickets with.

I went over to the guard, and said I had to go to the ATM, he gave me some random ticket he'd collected off someone, I went up to the ATM, and got another $60, and then I went back down, gave him back the ticket, said I'd been in there, went back in, and went over to the bar.

My mate had just got to the bar, so he ordered his drinks, got them, and went and sat back down.

I got served by a guy behind the bar that looked like a total stoner, his eyes were bright red, and right around his eyes as well.

I asked him if I could get a couple of screwdrivers, I didn't want to drink any carbonated crap.

He said I could, but I'd have to remind him what they were. "Vodka and orange", "oh yeah", and he went about making them.

I paid, grabbed them, and went back to the table.

Ugh, these are going to be as bad as they look.

House vodka, and orange "drink". I had a sip out of one of them, yep, just as bad as I thought. The orange drink almost tastes like pineapple juice.

The Beatnix came on about 8.10pm. They were pretty good this time.

I turned my chair around, to face the stage, otherwise I would have had a totally stuffed neck after about 5 minutes.

The seat was a really crap position, because of the way the tables were set out, people kept going in and out in front of me, so I have to squeeze in so they'd fit, then they'd block the stage, and more than likely step on my foot.

The stepping on my foot didn't really annoy me, because I had boots on, it was just the "oh, sorry mate" everytime someone would do it, just shutup and get out of the way.

More people went in and out in front of me, this is really annoying now.

I moved the chair from behind me out of the way, and moved my chair back, so they were inside the area before the end of the table.

My other mate and the 2 people he came with (a woman and a chick he works with at Target) turned up about 8.40pm.

I had to move my chair forward again, so they could sit down.

The woman paid me straight away, a $10 note and a whole bunch of loose change.

The chick gave me $10, I didn't say anything, figured it wasn't worth chasing up $3.50.

She then asked if was $10, I told her it was $13.50, so she gave me another $4, I fished into the loose change (I hate loose change, and wanted to get rid of it) found change, and gave it back.

My mate gave me $5, said he needed to get change of a $20 note.

We sat and watched the show, while more people went in and out so I had to keep squashing up, and getting stepped on.

A couple of times, the woman who was sitting behind me, would start speaking to me, I'd turn my head around so I could hear what she was saying, and some idiot would trip over my feet.

We kept watching the show, they went off for a break at about 9pm.

We sat and chatted for a while, I went and got another drink (I'd finished both the other ones I'd got).

They came back on about 9.30pm, for the second half of the show.

They did a couple of songs this time, that I haven't heard them do before.

The woman spoke to me again, I turned around, someone tripped over my feet, and nearly went A over T, that was pretty funny, I must admit.

The show finished up, they went off, everyone made a bit of noise, and they came back on to do a couple more songs, then they went off again.

The curtains had closed, some chick climbed up on to the stage, and went through the gap in the curtains.

It was about 10.30pm now, we sat and chatted in there for a while, while cleaners went around and straightened up all the tables.

We moved out of there a bit after 11pm, to go and get more drinks.

We went up to the bar we'd gone to before, I ordered a Cosmopolitan, and the chick made it up, it'll want to be good, for $9.

The others got more drinks, then we found a table, and sat down.

Someone went off, and came back a few minutes later with a few packets of chips, we sat and ate those, and chatted.

There was "band" playing near there, just a couple of guys pretending to play guitars, and a chick singing, over a midi backing track.

We sat there chatting for ages, about 12.30am, my mate and the woman and chick who'd turned up late left, we didn't leave with them, because they had someone to come and pick them up, and we wouldn't have all fit.

I stayed there with my mate, we chatted until after 1am, then he wanted more food, so we went over, he bought a couple of packets of chips from the vending machine, and we went out and got in a taxi.

We chatted to the taxi driver about the Beatles and stuff on the way back to my mate's place, it was a $30 something cab fare when we got there, I paid $12, my mate had already paid $20.

We went inside my mate's house, I noticed it was 1.30am.

I grabbed my stuff, and took off, headed for home.

I got home just after 2am.

I sat and drank some water, mucked around on the computer for a bit, and then I went to bed just before 3am, watched an episode of The Office that was on tivo, turned it off and went to sleep a bit after 3am.

I woke up, and it was raining.

Ugh, bugger it, I'm not going to work.

I went back to sleep for a bit, woke up again, got up about 11am.

Hmm, it looks like it's clearing up out there a bit, I probably could go to work, but I wouldn't get there until after midday, and then it's not really worth it.

I didn't do much, dealt with email, watched a bit of tv.

I had breakfast about 1.20pm.

I played the guitar for a while, and watched some more tv.

I thought about going out to get some food, but then it started raining again.

I just watched tv and played the guitar for the rest of the day.

I got up about 11.30am. It was raining outside.

I started watching some tv, and going through my email.

About 12.45pm, my mate called me, and asked what I was doing.

I said I was just sitting around watching tv, and he asked if I was going round to ohter mates place to play the instruments, I said it sounded ok, but wanted to know if he could give me a lift, since it was raining, he said that was fine, and he'd be there in about 45 minutes.

I got off the phone, watched a bit more tv, then I had a shower, and got ready, and watched a bit more tv.

He turned up at about 1.40pm.

I went out to the car, then realised I had taken the theremin, so I went back inside and got it.

We went around to our mate's place, got there just before 2pm. We rang the doorbell, no answer, I tried ringing my mates phone, no answer. he's probably still asleep.

We stood in the doorway for a minute, and then my mate opened it, we went in.

I dragged my amp out, set it up, and had a play on it for a minute or so.

I asked how my mate went getting into the club last night, he didn' get in there, I knew it, I didn't think there was any way he was going to get in there, after 1am.

My mate said he wanted to go and get something to eat, some fish, and was going to go to the fish and chip shop down the road. He got ready, and we all jumped in his car.

We went down to the shop, ordered our food. I didn't think I had much money on me, since I only had a $20 note yesterday, and spent $17 of it on drinks. When I got the change in my pocket out, and counted it, I had about $14 in loose change.

I ordered, paid, and we sat outside to wait. We only had to wait about 10 minutes, and then our food was ready. We grabbed it, jumped back in the car, and went back to our mate's place.

It was pretty good food. I'd already had breakfast, but that was a couple of hours ago.

When we finished that (I couldn't eat it all, left the chips, might eat them later), we set up the rest of the stuff, drum kit and lead guitar/amp.

We played for a little while, maybe 1/2 hour, it wasn't very good, no one could really be bothered. If I'd printed out the tabs, we might have been a bit better, but we couldn't remember the tab/chords, and we couldn't be bothered to go and look on the pc.

My mate playing the lead guitar stopped, and lay down on the floor, he was obviously stuffed from last night.

I kept mucking around on the bass for a bit, with down low, and my mate played the drums quietly, then he got sick of it, and it was just me tooling around on the bass.

I can't remember any of the stuff I've learned, I still know it, but I can't think of the songs.

We just chatted for a while, went on about recording our noise. My mate who gave me a lift round there said he was going to go home, it was about 4.30pm.

My other mate got up and went away, came back a minute later with a couple of tapes, stuff they'd recorded months/years ago. He put one of the tapes on, and we started listening to that.

The belt in the tape player is stretched, so the tape was running slow, and it sounded funny. We listened to bits off all the tapes, and finally gave up about 5.30pm.

We packed the drums up, I packed my guitar up, and then I dragged it out to put in my mates car. He's got a 2 door car, so getting the amp in it was a bit of fun.

We left, and he dropped me back at home. I carried the amp in, and he carried the guitar up for me. We dumped the stuff.

I'd been speaking to my mate about a documentary about Rowan Atkinson, where he mimes playing the drums. It had been shown again a couple of days ago, and I still had it on tivo, so I showed him that, it's a pretty cool clip.

He left after that, to go home, I said I'd see him on Tuesday night, to go and see the Beatnix again, at Mingara.

I moved some junk around, got the amp out of the doorway, set it up, and had a bit of a play.

I sat and looked at tabs, and played a bit, then I watched some tv.

I couldn't be bothered to make dinner, I just ate a box of savoury biscuits instead, and watched more tv.

My mate wanted to learn a song "Urban Guerilla" by Hawkwind, I went looking for a tab, couldn't find anything. Went looking for the song, managed to find one copy of the song on eMule, queued it up, there was a source for the album it's off too, so I queued that up, didn't have much luck getting either of them though.

I played the guitar a bit more later, and then I went to bed a bit after 11pm.

Hmm, I can't see the blog for Sunday here.. I know I typed it up, I must not have uploaded it..

I'll put it in later.

I went to bed last night, watching a documentary about helicopters, I fell asleep some of the way through it, woke up again, it was still going, it was after 1am.

I paused it, and hit the button on the tivo remote that turns off the tv and the receiver. I love that functionality, it's no wonder the tivo remote won design awards.

Anyway, I went to sleep.

I woke up again about 9.30am, got up, relieved myself. I thought about staying up, but I felt a bit tired still, went back to bed, fell sleep again, for another hour or so.

I woke up again, 10 something am, put the tv on, rewound the documentary, and watched it again.

I put something else on after that, an episode of King of the Hill I think it was, watched some of that, then decided I was hungry.

I got up, made a bowl of Nutragrain and fruit juice (didn't feel like milk this morning) ate that, while watching King of the Hill. I was still hungry, so I had another bowl.

I went through all my email, and sorted it out.

I watched a couple more things on the tv, and mucked about with the guitar a bit.

About 12.45pm, I got a call, my mate wanted to know if I wanted to go get some lunch, I said that was fine, that I'd just have a shower and get ready, and head over to our mate's place, who lives in Gosford.

I had a shower, got ready, grabbed my stuff, and took off just before 1pm, I hoped to be there about 1.05pm, I got there about then.

I went in, my mate was doing something for work, I chatted to him for a couple of minutes, let him continue with his work.

About 15 minutes later, my mate who called me turned up.

We stood around and chatted for a while, while our mate jumped in the shower and got ready.

He got out, and my other mate told us how another guy we see every now and then had called him, and said "he hoped we weren't busy tonight, because he's having a cocktail party", my mate had told him that he was too late, thet we were busy, going to a party, and he'd got the third degree about that.

"who's party?" "where's it at?" "who's going?" etc. He said he'd talk to him later, because he was driving (on his way to our mate's place).

There was a catalog for Macron Music my mate had from Christmas, I had a look through it, and then took it with me.

We all jumped in my mate's car, and went out to Erina Fair.

We went in, went and got something to eat for lunch.

I got a couple of pieces of pizza, my other mate got a kebab, and my other mate went and got a hamburger.

I finished my pizza, and my other mate finished his kebab, the other guy was about 1/3rd the way through his burger, I wanted a drink.

I went to the fruit juice place, and ordered a "regular" "Fresh Start" drink, which was carrot, orange, wheatgrass, ginger, and celery.

The regular was like a large from any fast food place.

The chick made it all up, but she'd made far too much, the large could only hold about 2/3 of what she made, so she pored the rest into a small size cup (a regular fast food cup) and gave me that as well.

I headed back to the table, but found it empty, and no rubbish left, geez that was fast, my mate finished his burger, they stood up, and someone came and cleaned the table.

I was going to ring them, to find out where they went, but both hands were full, with a cup in each hand.

I wandered over to the CD shop near the food area, to see if they were in there, they weren't. I looked for somewhere to put a drink down, so I'd have a free hand to use my mobile and call them, but they had sale table set up everywhere, there was no where I could put a drink down.

I started drinking the regular drink, and when I finished it, I threw the cup away, and had a free hand. I tried getting my mobile off my belt, it was stuck, the clip got bent a few days ago, and now it's almost impossible to get off my belt.

I found a place to put the other drink down, and with both hands, managed to get my phone off my belt.

I called my mate who called me earlier, no answer. I called my other mate, who's place we'd gone fron, he answered. I aksed where they where, my mate told me that they were still sitting at the table, and I wandered straight past, and they'd been calling me, bust I jst kept going, as if I was in a daze. I said I'd be back in a minute, and hung up.

I walked back to the food area, they were still sitting right there, where we had been the whole time, I'd been looking at the wrong table, duh.

I went and sat back down, and explained that I'd thought they'd gone to the CD shop, I had my hands full and couldn't call etc.

We sat there for a couple more minutes, and then got up.

We walked towards JB HiFi, on the way across there, I saw one of the guys from the hair dressers I usually go to, outside having a smoke, I stopped and spoke to him for a couple of minutes, and then I continued on my way, catching up to my mate's who'd gone ahead.

We went into JB HiFi, had a good look around, we were in there for at least 1/2 hour.

I thought about buying the first season of "The Family Guy" on dvd, it was only 20 bucks, for like 5 hours of stuff, but I decided against it, I buy these dvds, and never watch them.

I saw Kill Bill on sale for $20, but it was volume 2, if they had vol 1, I would have bought both. I went right around, looking for vol 1, but didn't see it anywhere. I didn't end up buying anything in there, my mate bought something.

We left, walked all the way back to the car.

My mate asked if I wanted to look in Macron Music at guitar amps on the way home, I said that would be cool. We went down the road, parked again, and went into Macron Music.

We started browsing about, my mate grabbing guitars up, and mucking around on them (though playing properly) ignoring the million signs saying "please get assistance before playing any instrument).

We were looking at the keyboards, when the sales guy came over, "can I help you with anything?" etc.

I said we were just browsing at the moment, but would be looking at guitar amps in a minute, my mate then piped in with "bass amps", and the guy said "guitar amps, or bass amps, or both?" and I said "bass amps".

He said to ask him when we were ready to look, and he'd go through them. My mate said "they're in here aren't they?" motioning to the room behind us, and he said yeah.

We went in, to have a browse, and the guy came in, he started the sales speil, wanted to know what I was after etc, we went through it, he pointed out a couple of different amps, a practice amp, a 30 watt roland amp ($350), a 100 watt fender amp ($800), and a bigger nemesis amp (not sure of the wattage on that, could have been 150 or 200 watt, about $1200).

We chatted for a bit, and then he grabbed a guitar off the rack, plugged it into the roland amp, and let me muck around a bit, and went out and closed the door.

I had a good bit of a thrash, it sounded ok. My mate was fiddling with the effects on it, and made it sound alright.

The guy stuck his head back in, I said I was still looking, and then he said he'd leave us alone again.

My mate plugged the guitar into the fender amp, and I had a play on that while he fiddled with the settings, it sounded a ton better. I thrashed on that for a bit, it was cool, I liked that.

We plugged into the bigger amp after that, the nemesis, and I played a bit on that, I thought it was far too loud for the stuff that we do, it was just going to blow everything else away. While I was playing it, the whole room was buzzing, glass was rattling, I thought it was too loud.

We plugged back into the Fender again, and I had another play on that, the guy stuck his head in again. I said I'd tried the Nemesis, but that I thought it was too loud, and they all laughed, I didn't find it very funny, why spend $1200 on an amp, and then have to set it to 1 because it's going to blow everything else away? pointless.

I had another thrash on the Fender, the guy went away again, we played a bit more, I was liking it. We didn't even bother with the practice amp, or a 50 watt the guy had mentioned. I was liking the Fender, it was groovy, and made my playing sound not so bad.

They guy stuck his head in again, and asked if I wanted it, I said I was thinking I did.

He came in, and told us how this one lit up when you played really hard. He had a look, then realised it was the 200 that does that, not the 100, it's got neon tubes in it or something. I said I'd have the 200 for the price of the 100 if he wanted, but he didn't really even laugh at that.

I asked if they had another one in stock, I didn't really want the display one that everyone's been thrashing on, he said they don't have another one, but he'll discount it, and this one's only been there for a week and a half. Whatever. We've been mucking around on it, and I know this one works, so that's fine, and he said he'd do it for $700, sounds like a deal.

I said I'd have it. We went out, and he dragged it out to the counter. My mate asked about a microphone he wanted, the guy said he'd look.

We looked at the drum kits for a minute, while he went to find the manual and a cord. He came back, and then found the microphone my mate wanted, $210 or something he said he'd do it for. Geez, for a microphone.

I spoke to him, and started sorting out paying for the amp, he started making jokes about my name, I got a little bit annoyed, but just let it pass, while he was running my card through the machine, he said he'd behave , and I said he better, or I'd change my mind, and he'd have to drag the amp back in the room. He shutup afetr that.

I finished paying for it, all done, my mate said he'd wait on the microphone, the guy asked if he wanted us to hold it, since they only had one, I said to just hold it until next Saturday, so he said that was fine.

We left, I dragged the amp out to the car, and put it in the back seat.

We drove back to my mate's place. On the way there, a car came up beside us, and all the people in it started shouting at us, it scared the shit out of me, it turned out it was people my mate's work with at Target.

We got back to his place (the other went a different way at a roundabout before we got there), and then I dragged the amp inside.

Our other mate (who called me earlier) went home to get ready of the party later, he said to be at his place at 7pm.

My mate got his guitar and amp out, and pedals, and started playing. I was spewing, I wanted to play my guitar with the new amp, but I hadn't brought it.

It was just a bit after 5pm now, I really wanted to play. It was still really overcast outside, but hadn't rained. I decided to go home and get my guitar.

I grabbed my stuff, went out, and was just going out of my mate's driveway when I heard him shouting. I stopped, braking a bit hard, and the back wheel slipped on some loose gravel and sand, that was pretty cool.

My mate came running out, and asked me to print out the tab for Led Zep's "Sick Again", I said I'd try.

I took off, and headed for home. On the way there, some car coming the other way was flashing it's lights and beeping it's horn at me, I didn't recognise the driver. I was going a bit quick, so I slowed down, in case there were cops somewhere.

I had a look, and I noticed the front fender of my bike, that the metal is tearing a bit on, was wobbling all over the place. I really need to get it welded, maybe they were going on about that.

I rode home. Dad was in the driveway cleaning the car, so I couldn't park properly, I just parked on the street.

I came inside, started grabbing the guitar and stuff. I used VNC to connect to my parent's pc, since they've got the printer attached to it, to share it, so I could print the tab.

Mum was using the machine, looking up classifed ads about Mazda bubble cars, so I gave up, and just grabbed the guitar and left.

I was going back to get on my bike, when some kid came wandering up the street, selling chocolates, I said gday to him, he said hello, but then ignored me, and went to speAk to Dad who was hanging out of the car vacuuming it.

I don't know if he bought a chocolate bar or not, I just went about getting on my bike, putting the guitar on my back, and then as I took off, he was coming back down the driveway.

If he'd spoken to me, I probably would have bought a chocolate bar, because I had several dollars in loose change in my pocket, and I hate loose change.

I took off, and rode back to my mate's place.

I went in, and setup the amp and guitar, and we started mucking around, I explained why I hadn't printed out the tab.

I looked at it on his pc, practiced, and then we had a bit of a jam in the loungeroom.

The new amp goes pretty loud, I had it on about 2, and it was pretty good.

We played for a while, my mate's Dad came home, and said we were alright.

We played until almost 6.30pm, when my mate said we had to leave, to go to our other mate's, to get to the party.

He got ready, I just sat around for a few minutes.

It turns out a guy was coming to pick us up, we just had to wait.

I thought about riding it, and not drinking, but it looked like it was going to rain, and I didn't want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, on unfamiliar roads, with it raining, so I decided to go in the car, and then I can drink if I want.

He turned up at about 6.45pm. We jumped in the car, and he asked what the quickest way to The Entrance was, because he had to pick someone up there, geez, it's going to take hours to get to the party.

We took off, went back through Erina to get to The Entrance, stopped in near the music shop, since there's a bottle shop next door.

I bought a 6 pack of Bundy rum and coke, figured I might as well drink, since I wasn't going to be getting back for ages. It was $17, I had $20 in my wallet, paid.

My mate bought a 6 pack of beers, and a couple of cans of Beam and Coke, the driver just bought a Coke, then we left.

We went out to The Entrance, picked up some chick at her place, then we kept going, went to Wyong, and picked up my mate who we'd been with earlier.

We left there, and went to the party, we got there at about 6.40pm.

We went in, I had drank a couple of cans, then I got shocking indigestion, ugh, this is why I stopped drinking.

I went and got some food, that helped. I felt a bit better afetr that, so I had another can, and then another.

They'd hired a jukebox, and it had karioke function too, there was a bunch of guys hanging around that singing, so we just left it.

I had another can, and chatted to a couple of people.

It started raining a bit, so we went inside the garage where the jukebox was etc.

A while later, they brought the cake out, and we sang Happy Birthday, and then there were a couple of short speeches.

We had a good go singing karioke after that, and then I had another can (the 6th, last) while we sang a bit more.

We ended up hanging around for quite a while longer, had another sing on the jukebox.

A couple of kids where there, mucking around in the pool, one of them asked me to throw him in, so I mucked around with him for a while, he kept diving in and splashing me.

We sang on the jukebox a bit more, the guy who drove us out there wasn't drinking, and some chicks had asked him to drive them to some other party, so he took off and did that.

We waited around for him to come back, I saw him there again about 1/2 hour later.

My mate and I decided we should think about going soon, but we thought the guy who'd given us a lift had taken off, leaving us there, I said we should look for his car, we wandered out, and he was sitting in his car out the front, with the chick he'd picked up sprawled in the back seat.

We said we were glad he'd come back, and he said he wanted to go soon. I said I'd get our other mate, and then we could go.

The chick asked me to get her bag of drinks from inside.

I went back inside, to get my mate, and the bag of drinks, did that, started heading out, and some woman asked me to go back and get her bag, so I did that, then we all came out, and got in the car, and left. It was about 12.40am.

My mate got dropped back at his place at Wyong, and then the driver dropped my mate and I back at his place in Gosford, we got back there about 1.15am.

My mate was talking about going into the Leagues Club, but I said I wasn't interested, he went on at me for a couple of minutes, and I said there was no way he was going to get in there, his shirt was all disheveled, and his hair was a bit of a mess, I said they'd just tell him he was pissed, and to go home, I couldn't be bothered, I was tired and wanted to go home.

I grabbed my stuff, took off, and rode home carefully, because the roads were all wet.

I got home, a bit before 1.30am.

I've just sat and written this blog, and now it's nearly 2.45am. I'm going to bed.

Oh, one last thing, why is blogger so slow? it's painful.

I got up a bit after 8am, got ready, and left a bit before 9am.

I got on the freeway, and got stuck behind a bloody chicken truck, stink and feathers going everywhere. I got past it and left it behind.

I got to the service station, there was tons of people there for some reason, and a couple a bikes at the bowsers I usually go to, big Harleys.

I filled up, went in and paid, the Harleys were just leaving when I came out, the two guys rode off without wearing their helmets, must have been going to the McDonalds next to the service station.

I put all my gear back on properly, and took off, as I wwent past, there were about 7 bikes in the carpark, must be a group riding somewhere.

I kept going, got back on the freeway. About 40km north of the service statiom, there was a convoy of trucks, I started passing them, then I could smell something horrible, the bloody chicken truck was leading them, I got past and left it behind again.

The rest of the freeway was uneventful.

At the end of the freeway, where they are usually RBTing southbounders, there was a cop car, with a truck behind it, and it looked like the trucky was getting a ticket for something.

On my way to work from there, I'm in the 90 zone doing about 100, and some chick in a car came right up my ass, and then went rushing to overtake, and then pulled in front of me, what was the point of that.

I just kept going, then came to the first set ot lights, and her she was stuck behind a whole bunch of crap, and I just came rolling up behind, and as I got there the lights went green, and I kept going.

So what did racing along acheive? it meant that she got to wait at the lights for at least a minute, going nowhere.

I got to work, parked, and went inside.

It was a bit after 10am. I started looking at the javascript stuff again.

A guy developing one of the applications that the application I'm developing has to be able to talk to called me. It was about the requests I'd made to him, for being able to operate with my code, he said he'd start looking at making the changes I was after, and I should get something on Monday.

I went back to work. A few minutes later, the guy at Orange who's taken over looking after the website called me, apparently there's an issue, and he wants to know who he can talk to about it.

He said he'd called the vendor of the software we use, but the guy we deal with was away in Canberra. I said I'd have a look at it.

I found that the database that drives it had fallen over some reason, a process on the server had gone stupid again "Xsun", taking 50% of the cpu. I killed that off, restarted mysql, and then I had to do some "flush-hosts" or something, so it would work again.

All the meanwhile, the network connectivity was really poor, and every time I typed something, I had to wait a minute or so for it to echo back, it was pretty painful.

I managed to get it all working again, and went back to work.

Someone told me that there was cakes, something they do on Friday's, I went out and grabbed a bit.

A few more people wandered out, and then he said that the two new people they've hired both have Birthdays on the same day, today.

I hung around there for another few minutes, and then I went upstairs to talk to the guy up there.

He was on the phone, sorting something out, I waited until he was finished, and then I went with him to speak to someone, who'd been having a problem. It was the guy who posed in the boxers the other day.

They've just put blinds up in the windows in that section of the office, and they were all down, the chick who'd been calling him on the phone for a joke before, had sent him an email to open the blinds, but he wouldn't.

The guy from IT opened them, and then called the chick on someone elses phone, so she answered it, and then he asked for the guy who we're going to put the screensaver on his pc, she saw us out the window and laughed, and then hung up.

We were finished there, so we went back around, and saw the chick. I used her pc, and ran the screensaver that was on my pc downstairs on her pc.

It was so funny, pictures of the guy posing in boxers, with "I'm Too Sexy" playing.

I went back downstairs and did some work after that.

I then got stuck in some silly emailing group, I just forwarded a few funny pictures I'd been emailed, and went back to work.

The woman who used to run the old database system (before it was decommissioned) is doing the documentation for the new one I'm writing, so she wanted to have a quick conversation about they logical design of the new system, so I spoke to her for a few minutes, and then went back to work again.

I rewrote the Oracle insert function I'd been working on, and put in an else clause, into another table, then the 135 records got put in there.

I don't understand it though, how can records be not either the right length, too long, or null? there's nothing else, yet 135 records don't meet that criteria.

A bit after midday, I emailed to find out what time lunch was, and then I wandered upstairs.

The guy was joking around, saying he was going to stalk the chick to lunch, because she was going to lunch with some guy, and we weren't invited.

We went outside to wait while the guy turned up. I would have rathered just get lunch and go back to work. Whenever anyone would come up the street, the guy would say "is that him?" when there was no way it was, like someone on a skateboard.

Eventually he turned up, she went off to lunch, and we went across the road to the cafe to get a sandwich.

There were some stupid kids on skateboards in the entryway of the carpark, and skating under the boom gates, I thought about telling them to bugger off, but I couldn't be bothered having and argument with them.

We had lunch across the road, and then went back to work.

I went back and worked on the javscript stuff a bit more. I found an example of what I was trying to do, and it worked in Firefox, I saw that it was using a slightly different syntax than I was, so I changed my code, tried it, and it worked, hooray.

I had to use InnerHTML, rather than InnerText, with a different syntax, and then it was fine.

Then I worked on the Oracle stuff. I couldn't see what was wrong with the 135 records (and it was hard to tell, just by running queries). I wanted to look at the whole table, but I couldn't be bothered to write a php function to dump the table out on a webpage.

I emailed the guy upstairs, to see if the Oracle client, and "toad" (an Oracle gui interface thing) cd were up there, he said he'd look, and then I got an email that they were.

I went up, he had the Toad cd, but not the Oracle client cd (and the one that comes with windows is broken of course). We went through all the Oracle cd boxes, I eventually found the Oracle 9i client cd in a box with 8i documentation.

I didn't take the Toad cd, since you can download it, and there's a new version apparently, you just need the registration key, which I had somewhere.

I went downstairs and installed Oracle client, I tried to download the new Toad, but I didn't have the "site id" to access the downloads area.

I took the Oracle CD back, and got the Toad CD, went down and installed it, no problem.

I started looking properly at the database table, now I was stuff as to what's wrong with these records.

I went back upstairs, took the Toad CD back. Someone else in IT wanted to the see the screensaver, so I ran it up on the guy upstairs' pc, we had a laugh, and then I went back downstairs.

I went back to working on the javascript, my patience
was restored a bit, now that I had a working function.

I refined it a bit more, had it working nicely, and finished rewriting the code I started on last Friday (when I was hungover, and it was crap code).

The guy from upstairs, and the chick were leaving, they went past and said bye on their way out, it was a bit after 4pm.

I kept working, I played with the javascript function code a bit more, and got it even better.

The building manager came around, and I started talking to him, he'd come to whinge that I'd parked my bike where he didn't want people parking. Oh, I didn't realise that was why there was an empty crate left in the parking spots.

I kept working. A little while later, I noticed that there seemed to be no one else in the office, it was a bit after 5pm.

I grabbed my stuff, and I left.

I rode towards home, on the freeway, there were stacks of idiots, people in the right lane, going bloody slow.

I got off the freeway, and there was some idiot on the off ramp going 50, I went around them.

Even between the freeway and the supermarket, more idiots. Two 4wd tanks going through a roundabout at about 30km/h, I overtook them.

I got to the supermarket, I went in and did my shopping, I got to the checkout, and the woman just looks at me. Hello, would you like to serve me so I can get the hell out of here?

She rang the stuff up, I paid, and left.

I was just reversing my bike out of the spot to take off, when this stupid woman with a trolley moves right behind me, where I need to go in order to be able to ge out of the spot.

I stop, to avoid backing into the trolley, and she just stands there. I mumbled "are you fucking right?" I don't know if she heard it, didn't move, so I just kept moving back, until I was back far enough to turn enough to go forward and get out. Spastic fucking idiot.

I was really agro now, I came home. It was about 6.30pm.

I put the dinner on to cook, watched some tv, and started blogging.

I kept working on the javascript, then a bit on Oracle, didn't really get far on either of them, it was for too hot to be able to think straight.

Someone came around, and said that if anyone wanted to leave, they were free to put 5pm on their timesheet, and go home, since it was too hot in the building.

About 3.30pm, I went for a walk around, and then went and hid in the computer room for a bit, since the air conditioning was fine in there, and it was comfortable.

I decided to have a look at a server in there that keeps having problems, and crashing (windows of course), I thought I'd have a look at the current memory usage, and it had already crapped itself, since I rebooted it yesterday.

I rebooted it again, and found that it had a bunch of services running on it, that it really shouldn't have, like iis, and all the other web stuff, smtp, nntp, dhcp server, dns server, sql server, project server (that no one uses), I disabled it all, and rebooted it again.

It still complained that something failed at start up, I found it was something to do with appletalk. WTF?

I went and looked at the network adapters, the one that was disabled had appletalk bound to it, I tried to uninstall it, but it wouldn't let me.

I went in to the windows components thing, and found that print services for mac, and for unix were installed. Why on earth are they on here?? I removed it all, and then found that appletalk has disappeared from the network adapters. I rebooted it again, hopefully it's fixed now.

I was about to go back out of the computer room, at a bit after 4pm, when the guy in IT came in, and wanted me to look at the script I'd helped him with again.

We went out and looked at that, I found that he just needed to trim some more off the path of the files to be archived, I just had a put an extra "cut" command in the script.

I put that in the script, ran it again, it looked like it was right.

He wanted to go for a smoke, so I went outside for a few minutes, going out in to the heat will make the building not feel so bad when I come back inside.

It was now about 4.15pm. We went back inside, I went back to my desk again.

I mucked around a bit more with the javascript, and I discovered that the stuff I had written was working in Internet Exploiter, but not in Firefox, I then discovered it was because the examples I was working off, that had "InnerText" in them, turn out to be IE specific.

A bit before 5pm, the guy came down, and said he was going to the pub, so I grabbed my stuff, and left too.

It was still hot outside, but now it looked like it was going to be a massive storm.

I moved my bike down behind the pub, went in, found a couple of guys from work.

One of the guys in there, who works in the IT group, commented on my Led Zeppelin shirt, and we chatted about that for a minute.

The guy from work turned up, with the chick from lunch, and I went in to buy them drinks, since the last few days while we've been out, everyone's been buying me drinks, and I never get a chance, and feel really slack.

On Thursday's they have a happy hour thing where you throw some dice on the bar, and if the dice add up higher than what the bartender throws, you get the drink for free.

One of the guys had gone in just before me, and bought me a lemon squash, which he'd got for free, I asked for the 2 drinks, and I got one of them for free,

I went back into the table with them, we sat down for a bit, and chatted.

Someone commented on how dark it was outside, and I thought "bugger it, I'm not sitting here until it starts pissing down", so I said I was sorry, but that I was going to be rude, and take off before the rain, I skulled the rest of my drink, and took off. It was now about 5.20pm.

I was over in the carpark behind the pub getting on my bike, when I saw another guy from work, He said he'd been looking on the Bureau of Meteorology website, on the cloud radar, and it was coming in from the west. I wasn't taking any chances.

I took off, and raced for the freeway, no worries.

I got on the freeway, and headed for home. It was unreal, huge lightning strikes coming down straight in front of me (though a long way away, I couldn't hear the thunder).

I got a few spots of rain, it was really dark behind me, what I could see in my mirror, so it was pretty much chasing me.

I'd made it about 2/3 of the way home, when it started pissing down, I rolled off the throttle a bit, stuck it directly in the wheel track of the cars in front, and just raced through it.

It was only raining for a couple of kilometres, and then it all stopped. The road was still wet for a few more k's, but after that, it was all dry, and my clothes started to dry out.

I got off the freeway, and got to the supermarket, there was just a light sprinkling of rain when I got there. I went in, got the stuff I needed.

I was at the checkout, when it started pouring down outside, it had been chasing me all the way home, and finally caught up.

By the time I'd paid, and was about to go, it stopped again, so I rushed out, chucked the stuff in my bike, and took off for home, it was just a little sprinkling again, I got home fine, it was about 6.30pm.

When I came inside, I realised there had been a blackout at some point, and the power had come back on at 3pm.

I went about fixing everything up again.

It started raining outside again, it was a weird night, a little bit of rain, then heavy rain for a few seconds.

Anyway, I put the dinner on to cook.

I'd meant to bring the photos of the guy at work home with me, to make up a joke screensaver, but I'd forgotten.

I remembered that I had vpn access, so I vpn'd in, zipped up the images, put them on a server where I could get them externally, and downloaded them.

In the meanwhile, I went about trying to find a program to make up a screensaver, preferably something free, I didn't have much luck at finding anything to do that.

I thought about finding my old copy of wise installer, and writing something in there, but I couldn't be bothered. I ended up finding a program that would do it.

Once the images were downloaded, I went about resizing them, added them into the program, along with an mp3 ("I'm Too Sexy" by "Right Said Fred" :-), and compiled it into a screensaver.

Dinner was ready by now, so I had that.

I mucked around with the screensaver files, but it was a pain, it had to be installed, created a directory, and the pictures and mp3 were all separate, it was a bit messy, I started writing a batch file to install it, since we need to be able to do it from the login script.

It was all too messy, I found another program, redid the screensaver, this one was better, it put everything into the scr file.

I then went about working out where the registry settings were, so I could install it from the login script, found all that, made up reg files to load.

There was an issue though, the registry setting that holds the time delay befor the screensaver starts doesn't take effect properly, until you reboot, but other things do. Oh well.

I worked out what had to go in the login script, copying files, merging the reg files etc, it all looked good.

I vpn'd into work again, and uploaded the stuff to my pc at work.

I tried to reimage the 2gb (test) disk for the new tivo, but it's too small now, so I gave up in that.

I watched soem stuff on the tivo, a U2 concert from a few days ago.

The guy who looks after the PAL mode kernel module had emailed me a beta version about a week ago, I finally got around to installing it (he'd given up waiting, and released it anyway), after I put it in, the recreated the node, and rebooted, my tivo UI sounds were back again, that was good, I was worried the sound chip was stuffed.

It was a bit late now, so I went to bed.

I got up a bit earlier today, just before 8am.

Got ready, ate the rest of the rice snacks for breakfast, and left.

I got to work a bit after 9.30am.

I started working on the javascript stuff again, not really getting anywhere.

I had another look at the Oracle stuff I had been trying to do yesterday, changed it back to just using "or field is not NULL" rather than mucking around with all the "NVL(field,0) = 0" stuff I had been trying to get to work, and then almost all of the records were inserted properly.

135 records disappeared, I don't know why, I have to try to work that out yet.

I went back to working on javascript.

It's really hot in the office, apparently the airconditioning is broken again.

I finally managed to get somewhere with the javascript.. I've followed the documentation, and examples, and managed to write something that works.. but only in IE, in Firefox, it just does nothing, no error, nothing.

I'm stuffed as to what the issue is. I'm working off Mozilla's DOM documentation stuff, and it doesn't even work in Mozilla. Geez.

A bit after midday I got an email from upstairs, I was asked if it was as hot down here, since it's horrible up there. I replied and said it was ridiculous down here, and asked if it was time for lunch.

A reply came back, saying it was even hotter outside. I got another email a minute later, do i want to go up to Hungry Jacks, in an air conditioned car.

I went upstairs, it was hot, but nowhere near as bad as downstairs.

I got bailed up by the photographer guy, he's got someone working with him, who's going to have something to do with the website, and he wants to know if I can answer any questions about it, I said I'd tell him whatever I knew about what he wanted to know.

I went with the guy I'd been emailing, we went out to the carpark, wandered around, and jumped in the car with the chick from yesterday.

We drove around to see a house that the guy's thinking of renting, instead of living in the pub.

We then went up to Hungry Jacks. It was ok in there, could have been a bit cooler.

For a laugh, we decided to go and look in Horseland, since they had a sale on.

We had to leave though, because we couldn't stop laughing, because I suggested that some of the stuff in there could have made good props for the photo shoot yesterday, a saddle, or a whip or something :-)

We started back towards work, but because the building was so hot, and the car had airconditioning, we just drove around Maitland a bit, and then we went past the old Maitland Jail (which I refuse to spell "Gaol"), then out to Morpeth, and out through some farm areas, "Phoenix Park", "Largs", "Lorn", and made our way back to Maitland again.

We went back into work, downstairs in the building is still pretty hot, apparently upstairs has got ridiculous now, and I was told that some guy in the legal department upstairs has changed into a pair of shorts.

There's hardly anyone left in here, I think a lot of people have left.

I might try and do a bit more work in Oracle (since I've lost my patience with javascript today), and then go home in a bit, and perhaps go to the beach.

I woke up at 7.15am when the alarm went off, and immediately went back to sleep.

I didn't wake up again, until about 9.15am, when a garbage truck came up the road.

I dived out of bed, got ready as usual, and went to work.

There was absolutely nothing remarkable that happened all the way to work.

The DBA and a few other people were at the cafe across the road, so I parked, and I started to go across there. They came over, so I just spoke to them then.

I swapped the DBA's access pass back for mine, he's had 24 hour access put on my card now too.

I went inside, and started working on some stuff in Oracle, rather than continuing to try to get the hideous javascript stuff to work.

I had an issue with the Oracle stuff I was trying to do, so I asked the guy upstairs what time lunch was, and we went for lunch shortly after that.

We ended up just going across the road, to the cafe, rather than wandering down the road to a pub, since the main good one, that's close, is closed for renovation, and all the other ones we couldn't be bothered to walk to.

We had lunch in there, and after that, someone was talking about the rubbish they have in their wallet, and cleaned it out on the table. Someone else then cleaned theirs out, I didn't think I had that much crap in my wallet at the moment, I checked, and there was a bit.

We ended up with a huge pile of papers on the table, receipts, dockets, ATM slips, old business cards, it was a ton of stuff.

We left, and went back over to work. The guy was having trouble with a script, so I had a look at it, and made a couple of changes to the logic, and then it looked like it was right.

We got to working on the stuff I was trying to do in Oracle, we worked out it was an issue with NULL values, since NULLS aren't able to be compared against.

We started trying to work out how to work around that, putting extra criteria into the query, and using the NVL function, but it just didn't seem to work, kept just hanging.

The guy got an email, someone had organised some nonsense in the office, it won't make sense unless I explain the situation..

The way the building is shaped, you can see out of the window, and in another window. One guy was staring out, and back in, at another guy. While pretending to talk on the phone, he had someone else dialling a different phone, and hanging up, and was watching the reaction of the other guy.

When the other guy found out, he wanted to get back at the guy in some way, so someone suggested that he pose in a pair of boxers, and someone take some pictures, and change the guys login script to display them on this pc.

Anyway, they'd arranged for the "photo shoot", so we went around to one of the small offices in the building, went in, here was the guy in his boxers, and another guy with a camera, about to take pictures of him.

We went in, along with the chick who'd suggested the whole thing, it was so funny, we couldn't stop laughing. The guy in the boxers jumped on the lounge, and posed around a bit, it wasn't lude or anything, just funny.

The other guy took a few pictures of him, and then he put his clothes back on, and we went back to work.

We mucked around more with the Oracle stuff, it was still hanging for some reason.

The chick and the guy taking the pictures went off to get them out of the camera, and they came back about 1/2 hour later with a CD with all the pictures on it.

We went about putting them on one of the servers, and modifying the guy's login script, to copy them down from the network to his local pc, and display one of them, immediately upon him logging in.

Once that was all done, we tested it, it should work, and then got back to the Oracle stuff again.

We put all the commands into a script, rather than running them interactively in sqlplus, since sometimes when you copy and paste a bunch of stuff, it can get confused, it still didn't work though.

Eventually we went into the enterprise manager, kicked out all the sessions to do with the stuff, managed to truncate the tables, and run it again, back with the original code which I had successfully run originally (but the result wasn't right).

I went back to trying to run my modified script, now it was having some sort of an issue with using NVL in the criteria.

It was almost 5pm now, and the guy and the chick from before wanted to go for a smoke, so I decided to wander outside with them, and think about it.

They lock the visitors car park at 4.30pm now, and some people had left their cars in there, and because the door is broken, it has to be locked with a chain and a padlock, so they had to try to find the building manager, to get the door unlocked. We didn't have anything to do with that though, we just came back inside.

It was now a bit after 5pm, we were about to have another go at the database, when the DBA said he's taking it down in a minute, to do a backup, so that was the end of that.

I went back downstairs, and spent a few minutes looking at something else.

The guy came through, said he was going up to the pub, to check in, so I should wait 5 minutes or so if I was going up there.

I kept working. I remembered that I had brought some blank CDs with me today, so I burned the iso image I downloaded yesterday. When that was done, I grabbed my stuff, and went and parked behind the pub they were going to (but not checking into).

I went in, there were a couple of guys from work there, but not the guy I'd been speaking to.

I sat there for a bit, and he came in there about 15 minutes later.

They had beers, I just had softdrink, and then a packet of chips.

A bit after 7pm, they decided to go down to the pub (where the fire in the kitchen was) to get dinner, I decided to stay for dinner.

I was going to leave my stuff (helmet etc) in the guy's room in the other pub, but he didn't have his key, turns out someone had locked it in the room.

When we went into the pub to speak to the bartender, we found a bunch of guys from work in there, so the others came in and chatted to them for a bit, we spoke to the bartender, and got the spare key for the room.

I went up, and dumped my stuff in there, and found the key for the room, on the counter.

I locked the door, went back down, gave the bartender back the spare key, and my mate the key to his room.

The others from work had left the table, and he was left there looking after someone's beer and pack of smokes and lighter.

I decided to move my bike from the carpark of the other pub, so nothing stupid happened, like my bike getting locked in there.

I couldn't be bothered getting my helmet out of the room, I just went out the back of the pub, through the carpark, across the road, and into the other carpark.

I started up my bike, and rode it out, and up to street (it's a deadend road) and into the other carpark, and parked up.

I went back into the pub, and now everyone was gone, and the pack of smokes,

I wandered out the front, to see if they'd just moved out, I couldn't see them, but I did see the chick and another guy who we'd been with, so I wandered down to where they were.

Someone had left a box from a doll on the seat, and the chick had torn part of it off, she showed me it, and it said "Plastic Head, Rooted Hair". heh.

The others came out of the pub then, and we walked down to the pub we were going for dinner.

We got down there about 7.30pm, and went in. The bartended joked that we were early, since this is where we came late (after 8pm) and weren't able to get anything.

We ordered dinner, paid, and then went and sat out the back.

The food came a little while later. It was ok, nothing terrific though, we finished that off.

I ended up sitting there chatting with them until just after 10pm, then I decided I should be heading for home.

I grabbed the room key off the guy, and walked back to the pub. On my way, I saw someone riding up the road on a pushbike, then I realised it was the crazy cowboy from the pub. He stopped and put his bike down about 50m up the road.

I went into the pub, went up and got my stuff, locked the door, and hid the key in the lounge in the common area.

I went back downstairs, and out the front door, I saw a cop car come up the road, and the cowboy dived behind something, and was jumping around to stay hiding behind it. Clown.

I went up the alley, jumped on my bike, and took off, it was about 10.15pm.

It was a pretty good ride home, nothing remarkable, I got home a bit after 11pm.

When I got off my bike, I remembered that I had my backpack in the saddlebag.. because I had to go to the supermarket, and buy breakfast cereal, since I finished it off this morning. D'oh, now there's nothing for breakfast in the morning.

I went in, checked my email. I found a packet of rice crackers I opened yesterday, ate some of them, and then went to bed.

I woke up, felt really tired, I managed to drag myself out of bed just after 8am.

I got ready, and left home, a bit before 9am. I took a couple of blank CDs with me, I downloaded a video clip "computerboy" which is supposed to be a matrix spoof the other day, and I thought I'd download the beta oztivo image to test on the new tivo I bought.

A couple of kilometres on the freeway, before the service station, there were 2 cop bikes sitting in the uturn bay.

I wasn't speeding then, so it was ok. I got fuel, and kept going.

I got to the end of the freeway, and the cops were there RBTing southbounders again. Honestly, who are they going to catch drink driving at 9.30 on a Tuesday morning?

I got to work, grabbed the CDs out of my bike, went in, dumped my stuff, unlocked my machine. It was about 10am.

I went upstairs to see the guy who sms'd me last night, to see what he needed to know with diff etc, he wasn't there.

The DBA wasn't there either, so I couldn't give him his pass back, and get mine back, I spoke to one of the other guys in IT, and he told me that the DBA wasn't in today, the sysadmin's on leave, but the other guy is there, wandering around somewhere.

I went back down to my desk, and started doing some work.

I got an email from the guy upstairs, he said he knew I was there, and asked if he could ask a question.

I replied, and said I needed a coffee first, he replied, and said he'd just been. It was nearly half past 10.

I went across the road and got a coffee. The chick in there thinks she remembers what I want, and starts making it. I paid the other chick in there.

She finishes making the coffee, and gives it to me, it's a regular, I paid for a large. This is the second time they've done this. I couldn't be bothered to argue, I need the coffee too much.

I opened it to put the sugar in, bloody chocolate on the top of it again. Damnit, it's a latte, lattes do not have chocolate on them. I put the sugar in, put the lid back on, and went back to work.

After all that, it was a shit coffee too.

I went up and saw the guy, he showed me the script he was working on, and trying to write.

My phone rang, it was my mate in Newcastle. He asked if I was at work, I said I was, but not at my desk. He said he was going to ask if I could call him back, I said I would when I got back to my desk in about 15 minutes, and I hung up.

I looked at the script a bit more, and I put a bit of code in there, to demonstrate how I would have done what the guy was trying to do.

20 something minutes later I went back to my desk, now a bit after 11am, and I called my mate back.

He told me he had a buyer for my bike (that I leant him). Oh yeah I thought, then he continued on to say it was him.

Now I started to get a bit worried, either it's been stolen, he crashed it, or something else I don't want to know about.

He then went on to tell me a long story, I just sat and listened..

Apparently he'd come back from somewhere last night, and it was late, so he'd turned the bike off up the hill from his place a bit, to roll down the hill and into the driveway so he didn't disturb people.

A car came up behind him while we was rolling it, so he pulled over so it could pass him. It stopped behind him, he was reaching down to turn the key back on, and he got blasted in the face with pepperspray.

He clutch started the bike, and took off down the hill, clicked it into third gear. The pepperspray took effect, and he couldn't see.

He tried to stop, but hit the gutter and crashed.

He came off the bike, and rolled over and over 5 or 6 times.

He was getting up, and heard someone behind him, he said "who is that?" "Who the fuck is that?!", and at the point someone said "the police".

This was the first time they had identified themselves, since they had not used their lights or siren, and they still weren't on.

Next thing, he was crash tackled, and punched in the head several times while someone held him down with their foot on his back. He was dragged up, and kicked from behind a couple of times.

There were 3 of them, and they grabbed his arms and were twisting them, and his hands and fingers, around behind his back, while he was like that, he was punched in the head again.

He didn't realise they were dragging his arms around so they could handcuff him, so he struggled, managed to get both his arms away from behind him, with a cop holding on to each.

He was told to stop resisting, and said he would when they stopped assaulting him, and one of them said they didn't see anything.

He realised his wedding ring had come off, because he doesn't wear gloves, asked to look for it, and they said no.

They handcuffed him, and loaded him into the paddy wagon, and while they were doing that, one of the kicked him from behind again, he managed to bite the guys hand.

He went on to tell me that at some point they breathalised him, and he was 0.075.

He went off to the police station, was charged with low range or mid range drink driving (he wasn't clear exactly), resisting arrest, and using offence language or something, and was released.

He went back, and the bike has been badly damaged on one side, the rear shock is ripped off, the footpeg's stuffed, the handlebars bent, the tank dinged in, and other damage, the blinkers etc.

He said he managed to get it ridable (I have no idea how, and his idea of ridable is very different to roadworthy) and take it to a bike place, and they said it's not worth fixing it. Great.

I didn't say very much, I was really pissed off, and didn't think there was anything to say, that I hadn't already said before I lent it to him, or that he wouldn't really want to hear.

He said something about "not doing anything stupid on it", which was something I had stressed, and was the condition on which it was lent to him, so my reply to that was just "yeah, that's why I'm not saying anything".

He said he'd pay for it, and was going to attempt civil action or something, to try to recoup some of the money, but he's going to pay something in the mean time, since that can take a while.

I know he doesn't have any money at the moment, since his brother took thousands of dollars out of the estate holding account, (his mother passed away, in May last year I think it was).

I just sorted of made a few "hmm" noises, didn't have anything to say.

He said he was going away for a week and a bit, to drop his little brother he's looking after since his mum passed, with some relatives, and going out to Orange to visit his father, and we said we'd talk after that.

I got off the phone, I'm not sure what time it was now.

I went back to trying to do some coding, rewriting all the stuff I did on Friday, since it's really crap code, because I was hungover.

I was working out functions, to rewrite the code, about 12.25pm I sent an email to the guy upstairs, and asked what time lunch was, he said he had to get out too, and we'd meet in one of the other departments upstairs.

I went up, and hung around there, chatting to a guy in that department, since he'd come and spoken to use earlier, about trying to fine a file on the pld file server.

A minute or so later, the guy I'd emailed turned up, and one of the guys from that department and I went out of the building. We had to go from the other department, because there's a guy in IT, who's being a pain, and minding everyone else's business.

We decided to go to the pub for lunch, we can't go to the close one, because it's closed for renovations. The other guys didn't want to go to the other pub (where wee stayed the other night), since the food is crappy.

We decided to go to the other pub, where we played pool, and drank beer instead of eating because we got there after 8pm the other night.

We started walking down there, and I started telling them about what had happened to my mate. One of the guy's phone rang, and he started chatting, so I just told the other guy.

We got to the pub, and the guy on the phone gave it to the other guy to chat to whoever it was.

We got in there, there was a wierd stinky smell, I figured it was just some cheap cigarettes someone was smoking.

We got to the bar, and started looking at the lunch menu on the counter. A minute or so later, the chick came over to serve us, and said that we couldn't have anything to eat, because they'd had a fire in the kitchen, and all the wiring was stuffed.

I then noticed that the whole pub was blacked out.

There was still a bunch of people in there though. They said they had an electrician on his way, to fix the wiring, and they'd be operational for dinner tonight.

We had drinks instead, the other guys had a coke and a lemonade, I had a can of Bundy and coke, becuase I was so pissed off about what had happened.

I started telling the other guy about it (he'd been on the phone before), and then he was given the phone again.

I sat and chatted with the other guy for a bit, then the other guy got off the phone, and they had a chat.

We decided to go somewhere else to get something to eat, so we finished our drinks.

We went off, down the street, where we'd walked the other night to get the kebabs, we went into the pub down there, The Brewery. It was now just before 2pm.

We looked at the menu, it looked like good food, so we ordered, and then sat down. The other guys had more soft drinks, I didn't drink anything, I had indigestion from the can before.

The food came out shortly after, the plate was huge, and was loaded up.

It was really good food, I couldn't even finish it all.

We left the pub, and headed back to work. On the way, we stopped into the pub that has the kitchen closed for renovation, there were a couple of guys from work in there, we chatted to them for a minute, and then that annoying Tatu song came on the jukebox by itself, so we left.

We got back to work a bit after 2.30pm.

I went back to work, got a fair bit of work done, recoding stuff from Friday.

About 4pm, I went to download the beta of the new oztivo image, I started it downloading, and went back to work.

A few minutes later, I decided to check on buying plane tickets to fly to Brisbane next weekend for the oztivo bbq, I checked the virginblue website, but I've left it too late, the tickets are like $155 each way, instead of $69 or whatever they were when I looked about a month ago. Oh well, not going then. I could always ride up there though.

I got an email from the guy upstairs at about 4.30pm, saying "gone to the pub", I thought about going down there, but decided to keep working instead.

I had a terrible headache, thought about just going home.

I kept working, just before 5pm, the guys cam downstairs, and went out the fire stairs near me, I asked which pub they were going to, and said I might be down there in a bit.

The download finished just after 5pm, and I kept working. About 5.15pm, I decided to go down the pub, but I'd burn the image on a cd first.

I opened one of the cases, empty, gee, it was useful bringing that. I opened the other one, it had a cd in it, that's a start. I put it in the PC, oh look, it's got "Chris Rock - Bigger and Blacker" burned on it, just as useful as the other case.

I'll have to try again tomorrow. I locked my machine, grabbed my stuff, and left the building. I moved my bike down the road, and parked behind the pub.

I went in, and found the guys, there was only a couple of people in here.

I dumped my stuff, and went and got a soft drink. I went back and sat down, had a chat with the guys for a bit.

More people turned up. [ edited, text removed ]

The guy I'd been emailing and I decided to have a game of pool. I didn't play as bad as I usually do, and actually got down to the black ball before him.

I managed to put it in, but the white went in first.

We had another game, it was an attrocious game, there were 5 or 6 balls left on the table, and the other guy put the black ball down, end of that.

I had a couple of practice shots with the balls that were left, put the white ball in twice, and gave up.

It was about 6.30pm now, I thought about calling the DBA, and working out going to see him, and look at his network, on the way home tonight, but it looks like it's going to rain, I don't want to be committed to going there, if I get pissed down on with rain on the way home.

I grabbed my stuff, and left.

I got near the turn off to go either to the freeway, or to Newcastle. I thought about going over to Newcastle, to see what was left of my bike, but decided against it, I'd rather not see it right at the moment, or my mate for that matter, so I headed for the freeway.

Nothing much remarkable on the freeway, just half a house on the back of a truck, which had to drive in both lanes at a few parts of the freeway, so I had to time it right, and shoot past it when the road got a little bit wider.

I got to the supermarket at about 7.30pm, I bought some food, and came home, it didn't rain.

I put the dinner on to cook, and blogged the last couple of days.

I got an sms from my mate who works at Target, asking if I want to go to a party on Saturday. Maybe, depends if I go to Brisbane or not.

I did bugger all today.

Woke up, found it pissing down with rain. Ugh, forget it.

I went back to sleep.

I'm not getting up until there's some hint of the rain stopping, and the road drying up a bit.

I lay in bed, listening to the radio, checking outside very now and then, it didn't get any better.

About 11am, I put the tv on. I watched that for a bit, and then I got up, weather still no better.

I checked my email and stuff, and then watched more tv.

I mucked around with the new tivo a bit, and setup a spare satellite decoder on it.

I ended up just watching tv for most of the rest of the day.

I tidied up a bit in the afternoon.

I thought about calling up the DBA, and arranging to go out look at his network, and give him back his card, at about 6pm, but it still looked crappy outside.

I went to bed about 11.30pm, I got an sms on my phone (well, I'd tried to get one, the phone was full as usual), I deleted one and the new one came in.

It was from the guy I work I went out drinking with last week, he was telling me that tomorrow, rain hail or shine, I was going to help him with awk and sed and diff. heh.

I thought about replying, but I checked the timestamp on the sms, and it was from an hour ago (or was it?), so I just left it, and went to sleep.

I woke up again at 7.30am, the other guys were gone, and the tv was off. (See yesterday's blog for an explanation of why I'm sleeping on the lounge at a mate's place).

I thought about getting up, but was too tired, and dozed off again.

I was half woken up a bit later, perhaps around 8am, by someone rattling around in the kitchen area, and then the door closing.

I went back to sleep, woke up again at 8.30am. I couldn't get comfortable again, so I got up, grabbed my stuff, and went out.

It was still humid and warm outside, it had pissed down with rain, and was all overcast and crappy. I dried my bike seat off, put my gear on, and took off for home.

I carefully rode home, because the roads were all wet everywhere, got home, had a drink of water, put the fan on, and went to bed.

My watch beeped 9am just as I got into bed.

I went to sleep, and didn't wake up until midday exactly, there was a massive gust of wind, and something blew off the desk and made a noise, and woke me up.

It looked like a nice day outside, sunny, and the clouds had mostly buggered off.

I'm supposed to go and see the DBA from work today, and fix up his network at home, at Terrigal, I don't think I'm in a state for doing that today.

I lay there for a bit, noticed my phone said "no space for new messages" as usual. Went in, deleted one, and waited a minute, and the new one came in.

My mate (who was too pissed last night), asking if I wanted to get some lunch. I checked the sent time, an hour ago, so I didn't reply, but got up out of bed, it was about 12.30pm.

In hindsight, that must have been when he sent it, not an hour before, and there's a stuff up in the time stamping somewhere, we were talking about sms issues in the pub last night, when we were waiting for my mate, and I mentioned that I suspected there was something funny going on, because a message from my mate yesterday to see if I was still going, was timestamped an hour earlier than he sent it. Anyway..

I took a couple of panadol, and sat on the computer for a bit, went through my spam.

About 1.20pm, my phone rang, it was my mate who sent the sms, about lunch. I said I'd just got up, he had too, nd the other guy (who's place we were at) he too, and called him just before.

I said I'd have a shower and get ready, and go over there, so I'd probably be there in about 1/2 hour (around 1.50pm), he said he'd do the same, and I hung up.

I called my other mate, to let him know we were both going to get ready, and turn up in about 1/2 hour, and then I got off the phone.

I went out and got the rest of my clothes off the line. Don't know why I bothered washing them yesterday.. might as well have just hung them out, and let the rain wash them.

Anyway, I had a shower, got dressed, looked like a nice day, so I put on a hawaiian shirt I'd washed yesterday, grabbed my open face helmet, sunnies, ipod, keys etc, and took off.

I rode around to my mate's place, my other mate who called me wasn't there yet.

On the way, there was debris all over the roads, branches, sticks, leaves, it must have been bloody windy out here.

I went in sat and watched telly for a bit. I don't know why I bothered going home really, but I felt better after having a shower and changing my clothes.

My mate looked stuffed, he said he was too. We chatted briefly, and then the other guy turned up. We sat there for a little while, had a chat, then my mate got ready, and we left, just after 2pm.

As went out the door to get in the car, I mentioned that I had a sore throat this morning (and my asthma was stuffed up when I got up too), and they other guys said they did too. I said I thought it was probably all the smoke in the Bowling Club last night, but they said that one of the guys serving behind he bar had kept coughing on to his sleeve. Lovely.

He said he wanted to get lunch from a place at Erina, rather than going out to Terrigal, I thought about riding, since I could then go out to Terrigal to see the DBA, but I decided to jump in the car with them instead.

We went out to Erina, went into the pub there, got there about 2.30pm. The woman in the kitchen area said they were closed, so we went out, and got back in the car.

My mate started going back towards Gosford, my other mate and I asked where he was going, since there's no where in Gosford to get anything to eat. I said there was La Porchetta, but I really don't want pizza.

We decided Terrigal was the only place to get food, so he turned around, and we went out to Terrigal. We went and parked in the parking lot of the Bowling Club where we had been last night. I joked we should go in and complain about the sick guy working there last night.

We went over near the beer garden (I went up the ramp this time :-) and then went in. It was totally packed out, not a seat anywhere, we wandered around for a bit.

My mate wanted fish and chips from there, I didn't really want to pay $18.50 for a plate of fish and chips. I've had it before, and it was good, but not that good.

I said we could just get fish and chips from across the road, and sit on the beach, but he didn't want that, because it was too greasy, I worked out he was talking about the fish and chip shop across the road, it is greasy, there's a better one up the street.

We started walking up there, and then my mate said we could go to Hog's Breath, I haven't been there for ages, said it sounded good, so we went in there.

We sat outside, ordered, chatted for a bit, we all ordered the cheeseburger, they were served a little while later.

it was good to eat something.

There were a couple of chicks sitting at a table near us, one of them was going on and on and on. I put up with it for a bit, but about halfway through the meal, I nearly lost it, I couldn't stand it anymore, and just wanted to tell her to shut the hell up. But I didn't, I just kept eating, and finished my meal.

The waitress brought the bill out, we sorted out the money, and then went in and paid, $16.50 each, not too bad, for a huge burger, and 2 drinks (each).

It was now 3.45pm. I thought about calling the DBA, to find out if he wanted me to come look at his network, but he would have had to drop me back at Gosford after that, because my mates would have left me there.

I didn't call him, we walked back to the car. It was really windy, some guy lost hold of a kids floaty board thing, and it took off along the footpath, and across the road, with him frantically chasing it, with a little kid frantically chasing him, it was pretty funny.

Some chick droped her thongs she'd been carrying to put them on, they nearly blew away, hah.

We got back to the car, and my mate drove back to his place. We went back inside.

We chatted for a while, I was nearly falling asleep, so was my mate, so I asked him to make a coffee, and he cranked up the espresso machine. The grounds were a bit old, but it still did the trick.

After that, we got to talking about tshirt printing, and photos and stuff, and then he put on a video of another mate's 21st Birthday from a couple of years ago (which I wasn't invited to for some reason).

It was quite funny, we made comments on it, and were cracking each other up. After that, there was footage of some other party (again, which I hadn't been invited to), it ended up mostly being footage of my 2 mates (that I was there with watching it) and another mate, who's bass guitar I've borrowed at the moment, playing their instruments.

It was pretty bad, and we were laughing at how bad it was. They want to set up a camera the next time we play, I don't know about that :-)

The video went for about 40 minutes I think, and then my mate said he was leaving. I decided to go too, since the clouds had blown over, and it looked like it was going to rain.

I took off, and rode over to the supermarket, I went in and got some stuff for dinner.

As I was heading to the checkout, someone said gday to me, I turned around, and it was my mate that works at the phone place in the shopping centre.

I chatted to him for a bit, he asked what I'd been up to, then commented on my choice of food, a "Lean Cuisine" meal, and asked if I was trying to slim down, yeah, because I'm a fat bastard I told him.

I wandered along, and then said I was going home, see you etc.

I lined up at the checkout, and spotted a guy I did my motorbike Ps course with serving at one of the registers. The chick serving at the other register said "next please" first, so I went there.

She did the usual niceties of "how are you [even though I couldn't give a shit] ?" etc, so I just said hello, fine etc, then I turned around and said gday to the guy on the other checkout, and ended up chatting with him.

He asked if I'd been riding, what I'd been up to etc, had a bit of a laugh, then I turned back, the chick had finished ringing up the stuff, I paid, grabbed it, said bye to the guy on the other checkout, and left.

I got back to my bike, took off, and came home.

I put the dinner on to cook, even though I really didn't want it, started blogging, and just finished eating it.

I'm stuffed, I think I might go to bed early tonight.

What a night.

I went and got my clothes off the line, not dry, but near enough. Stuck the fan on them, and jumped in the shower, they were right when I got out.

I tried calling my mate to find out what the story was, since I hadn't followed up the sms he sent me last night, saying to meet at one guy's place at 7, and we'd go from there. I tried calling him, and was told that he was on the phone at the time, so I hung up.

It was now about 6.30pm, I grabbed my stuff, and left.

I went to McDonalds on the way, grabbed some cheeseburgers and chips, and kept going.

I got to my mate's place, no sign of the other mate's car, hmm. No sign of my mates (who's place it is)' car either, and no one home. It was about 6.45pm.

I had a couple of missed calls, my mate who was on the phone calling me back, and the message service.

I waited a minute for the message service to try calling me again, ate a burger while I waited, didn't ring. I tried calling him again, no answer.

I waited, ate more, and then my phone rang, it was my mate calling me back. I said where I was, and asked what was going on, he said he was on his way there, so I said I'd see him when he got here, and hungup.

I wandered around a bit, finished eating all the food.

Just after 7pm, my mate turned up, followed by another mate I haven't seen since the MC5 concert a few months ago.

They parked their cars, and said the other guy wouldn't be here until about 7.30pm, so we were going to wait in the Leagues Club for him.

I chucked my stuff (helmet, jacket), in my mates car, (since I couldn't put it in the house), and then we walked down to the club.

On the way walking to the club, my mate paid me $100 of the money he owes me for concert tickets.

We signed in, went into the cocktail bar area, the others got beers, I got a Bloody Mary. The bartender chick asked if I was a bit hungover, and I said it had been one of those weeks.

She made the drink, I paid, and she said "Good luck with it". Whatever, I'm not that hungover.

I went over to the table where my mates were, and we chatted and drank. The music in there was crap, bloody Village People.

They had another beer each, I was still drinking, we were waiting for our other mate to call.

While we were chatting, someone mentioned something about the Tsunami, and my mate that I'd gone to the Brian Wilson concert with mentioned that one of the guys from the orchestra that was with Brian Wilson had been washed out to sea, and they hadn't found him.

At 7.45pm or so, I called him, he'd got home, and got ready, and was walking down, we were going to get a taxi from there.

They finished their drinks, and we went and stood outside to wait for him.

We waited and waited, eventually we saw him wandering down the road. He got there just before 8pm.

We jumped in a taxi that was waiting there, and went out to the Terrigal Bowling Club. The fare to get there was $22 something. Not sure what time it was, but I'd guess about 8.20pm.

We went in, signed in, paid $10 to see The Beatnix.

We went to the bar, I shouted the first drinks, I had a Smirnoff Ice, I should have known better, those don't really agree with me, but anyway.

We had a look around, there were no seats or tables available.

We stood in the pokies area to wait, the show was supposed to start at 8.30pm, but it was past that now.

I played the pokies, wasted a couple of bucks, roamed around, putting a dollar in here and there, not really getting anywhere.

I got another drink, a bottle of JD and Coke, went back and had another go at the pokies. I played one my mate was sitting in front of, had played, but not won anything.

I got free spins on it, and won $5. I walked around, putting a few dollars of it back in here and there, pretty much just winning it back to a dollar, taking it out, and going to another machine.

I got another drink, another bottle of JD and Coke. $6 each they were, and I was given 4 $1 coins as change, bit suss.

I put it in the pokies anyway, on the last dollar, I got free spins on a machine, and won $7.

I gave up at that point, with a pocket full of dollar coins.

The show started, a bit after 9pm I think it was.

The setup here wasn't great, the drummer was up on some sort of makeshift "stage", which was just big enough for him and the drumkit.

It was so high, he was almost bumping his head on the ceiling, and he was crammed up next to a tv (that wasn't on).

The other guys were just on the floor in front of him, so when people got up to dance, you could hardly see them.

They did most of the same set from last time.

I went in and got another drink, I was sick of stuff with Coke, was getting indigestion, so I got a Gin and Tonic instead.

That was nasty, like sucking on a lemon.

It took me ages to finish it, and then one of the others went in to get another drink, and bought me another one, argh, I drank it anyway, I was past the taste by then.

The first half of the set was done, and the guys took a break.

I can't remember anymore drinks at that point.

Their break went for ages, like 45 minutes, eventually they came back out, in their Sgt Pepper's outfits, and apologised for taking so long.

The played more songs, more of the stuff they did last time, it was still good.

I went and got another drink, a screwdriver.

While they did more songs, we had a bit of a dance and sing, there were a couple of fat chicks near us, and one of them kept bumming smokes off my mate.

They finished up, came back out for an encore, and then went off again.

We were expecting them to come back again, and do Hey Jude, like last time, but they didn't.

We stood around for a bit. Just before we left, some guy made an announcement over the PA in the club, "The time is now 12 pm, uhh, 12 o'clock, and all poker machine service has ceased". Yeah buddy, I don't think it's 12pm somehow, it's bit dark for that.

Then we left, to go somewhere else in Terrigal. I think it was now about 11.50pm.

The fat chicks left at the same time, and as we walked along, they were calling my mate "The Fag Man", because he kept giving them cigarettes, hmm, not a nickname I would want.

We lost them in the car park, and kept going.

We got to the ramp to get from the car park up to the street, I was a smartass, and decided to climb up and over the railing, instead of walking all the way up the ramp.

After getting up there, and a getting a little bit down the street, I regretted that, bit of a pain in my back.

We stood here for a minute, and said "what are we doing" etc, I wouldn't have minded going in the beer garden for another drink, but my mate said that it gets difficult to get a taxi after 12.30am, and it was now midnight.

I was starving, and wanted a pizza, we wandered over to the pizza place, I asked what anyone wanted, someone said a meatlovers pizza, with bbq sauce. Suits me. I went in, they had an "all meat" pizza or something, so I ordered that, and paid, $10.90.

The guy told me it would be about 15 minutes, so I went back outside to wait.

There was a wedding party in the beer garden across the road, it looked like one of the guys was being asked to leave, so he was standing there arguing with the security guard, while another one filmed the whole thing.

We all knew what was going to happen, and next thing, there's a huge punch on.

There were about 4 or 5 guys in suits going at it, chicks, the security, everything, it was great. We were right across the road from it, far enough away for it to be fun, so we were cheering and clapping as it went on.

Next thing it was down the stairs, and making it's way up the street, people getting punched all over the place, chicks kicking people, terrific. I counted about 30 people involved at that point.

Then it made it's way into the street, and was holding up traffic, a few people got dragged off the road on to our side of the road, but about 30m up the street, and the rest went back off on the other side.

The fighting pretty much stopped now, a few guys wandered down near us, and stood there.

A chick up the road started shouting obscenties at someone, and with the stuff coming out of her mouth, even I was offended.

One guy on our side of the street went charging across the street, and up the stairs to try to get back in the beer garden.

Somehow I didn't think he was getting in there, there were now about 15 guards at the top of the stairs. He stood there for a little, bit and then came back down the stairs.

It was all over now, and the guy from the pizza place came out, and gave me the pizza.

We sat down at the table outside, and hoed into it, it didn't take long to finish it, I cleaned up the mess, bit's of pizza that had dropped on the table, back into the box, and then we went across the road, and jumped in a taxi. It was a bit before 12.30am.

I asked the taxi driver if he'd seen the squabble, and he said yeah, and then we both said in unison "How good was it?!" heh.

He asked where we're going, Gosford Leagues he was told. and he started the meter.

We chatted about the fight for a minute, he said he'd had a fare, a couple of chicks, and they'd made him wait so they could watch it, (and keep the meter running).

We were all laughing about the fight, and he said how good it was to see a bit of biffo, it's always fun.

We went on about it for a while, and then he asked why we were going to the Leagues Club, I said I didn't know, but that I'd been told we were going there (didn't really want to go back there).

Then we chatted a bit more, and as we came up to a set of lights, it went orange, so he stopped and waited, but the car next to us ran the red light.

A few seconds later, we saw flashing lights, haha, looks like he's getting busted, but then we noticed the cop car was coming the other way, and kept coming.

A white car in front of it changed lanes, to turn right at the traffic lights the other guy had run, and the cops got in behind him, he's busted for something.

Speeding I said it probably was, and the taxi driver said he'd been done speeding along there before Christmas, and now he only had 3 points left on his license.

I told him about my fun with police recently, all the fines and crap, and we went on about how they should be sorting out real crime, instead of just busting people for useless stuff.

We got back to the Leages Club, and the guy was a smartass (he was a pretty cool driver though), and drove up on the foot path to drop us off. It was now almost 1am.

The fare was $25 something. Don't know how that works, since it was a shorter trip than on the way out there. Perhaps there's an after midnight surcharge or something.

I paid, someone gave me $5 from the back, and we got out.

We went back into the club, I showed my card, went in, my mate (who was late before, and hadn't been in the club) signed in, and went in.

My other mate still had his sign in slip from the first time we were in there, showed that, and went back in.

The other guy had lost his, so had to sign in again. Apparently he just scribbled something on the slip, instead of writing his name, and the woman there motioned to one of the guards.

He came over and asked my mate how much he had had to drink tonight, he said "oh, a bit", and the bouncer asked what a "bit" was, my mate replied "oh, about 10 beers", and the bouncer asked him if he would mind not coming into the club. (I didn't find this all out until later, we just saw our mate looking like he was waiting to sign in for a while).

We worked out that he couldn't come in, so I went back out to find out what was going on, another guy there open the barrier, and tried to steer me out, I said I wanted to speak to my mate who couldn't get in over there, and then he let go of the sash so I could get over there.

The bouncer told me that he couldn't come into the club, and that we had to leave, I said that was fine, but we had another couple of mates inside, could we wait there until they came back, and we'd all leave, but they said no, we'd have to wait outside.

We went outside, and stood near the door, so our other mates would see us, one of them did, and came out. The three of us waited there.

While we were waiting there, some pissed bloke was arguing with 3 bouncers, he'd dropped his memebership card while being thrown out, and they wouldn't give it back to him. He stood there arguing with them for several minutes.

I felt like going over and telling him not to bother, since there was no way he was going to get his card back, the way he was carrying on, but I just decided to watch instead, it was more fun.


Eventually my mate got called by the other guy, to find out where we were, said we were outside, and then he saw us, and came out.

We stood there for a bit, I said I just wanted to go back to our mate'a place, and have a quiet drink, he said he had spirits, but no Coke.

My other mate, who was too pissed to get in, said he wanted beer, not spirits.

I wanted to go across to one of the other pubs, to try to get some takeaway alcohol, but they didn't want to, were waiting for someone else to come out of the club (some chick a couple of them work at Target with).

I walked across to one of the other pubs on my own, the bouncer came out, I asked if they did off license, but he said not after midnight, and no where else would either. It was now after 1am, oh well, thanks anyway, and I walked back to where my mates were again.

The chick they were waiting for had come out, a couple of my mates spoke to her for a few minutes. I went over near our other mate, and I said I'd had enough of waiting around here, and he agreed.

We eventually decided to go back to our mates place (just the 4 of us, that had been out to Terrigal and back, not the chick), so we started walking back there.

I said I'd go around to the service station nearby (about 600m away from my mate's place) to get some Coke, I asked my pissed mate what he wanted, a packet of chips or something, he said yeah, then the three of them went to my mate's place, and I kept going.

There were all sorts of dero people hanging around on the street once I got around the corner, to get to the service station.

Some guy said I didn't look too happy, and I told him about my mate that was too pissed to get back into the club, while I kept walking. He said "you know why [he couldn't get back in the club]?", and then said "because he's pissed". Thanks for the insight mate, tell me something I just told you.

I kept walking, went past more deros, some guy pushing an empty shopping trolley that someone had dumped, telling me he's just off to do some shopping. Great, thanks mate, I couldn't have lived without you telling me that.

There were more deros, a couple of guys with no shirts on, and about 6 feet of underwear visable, pull your fucking pants up idiot.

My phone rang, it was my pissed mate. He asked if I was at the service station yet, I said not yet, and then he told me that he wanted a pie, and someone else wanted a pie, and he wanted a sausage roll, I asked if he wanted a pie or a sausage roll, he said both, and the other guy didn't want anything.

I got to the service station, and was just walking through past the bowsers when I got off the phone.

I went in, grabbed Coke out of the fridge, and a couple of packets of chips (one for my mate, and one for myself). Then I said I had to get some pies, went over to the pie oven.

There was only one beef pie, so I grabbed that, and a Shephards pie, and a sausage roll, I dumped them on the counter, and asked if the guy had any sauce packets, and got some.

He rang it all up, $18.90 it came to. I paid, he chucked it all in a couple of bags, and I started on my way back to the house.

On the way back, I got bailed up by the deros again. The guy who'd said I looked angry, this time asked to bum a smoke off me, I told him I didn't smoke, and kept going.

He started to cross the road. I spotted a cigarette on the ground, and turned around and said "mate, there's one on the ground here", then I noticed another, and said, "there's a couple here mate", and then he turned around, came back off the street, picked them up, said "mate!", and went across the street again.

I continued on my way, got back to the house, there were a couple of spots of rain as I went up the hill.

I went up, dumped the food on the counter, cracked open the Coke.

I was going to have a bourbon and Coke, but then decided against it, and just had the Coke.

My mate had a pie, my other mate had his sausage roll. I opened the chips, and my other mate had a couple of them.

We stood there chatting in the kitchen for a while, I must have been at least 1.30am at this point, if not later.

A little while later, I said "what's on Rage", and we went over and put the telly on.

They were showing old episodes of Countdown, and an episode from 1984 was on. We watched that, and laughed, and then they showed an episode from 1981, and then from 1978, and then an episode of Music Arena from 1986.

I kept getting up and getting more Coke to drink, and then I started drinking water, was feeling a bit seedy, more tired though. I stood in front of the air conditioner for a bit, a few times, that was good.

About 4am, my mate (who's place it was) disappeared, assumedly went to bed. I went outside with the other guys. I wanted to get my stuff out of his car, in case he wants to go in a bit, the other guy came out to get a pillow from his car.

It was massively humid outside, and warm. I got my stuff out of the car, the other guy got his pillow from his car, and he went back inside, where it was nice and cool, because the air conditioner was on.

They showed a bunch of INXS clips, and a few other clips.

About 4.50am, my mates went to lay down, we tried to shut the curtains first, but then realised they're only frame curtains, and don't cover the whole window.

They lay down, I put a newspaper on the lounge, and put my feet on it (didn't want to take my shoes off, requires too much effort), and put my head down to watch the tv.

I feel asleep lot very long after, around 5am I guess.

I'll put the rest of today in the next blog..

I had to go into work today, to replace apache on the production intranet server.

I'd arranged to do it after 10am today.

I woke up about 8.40am, crud, I meant to get up earlier. I got up, and got ready, and left a bit after 9am.

It was a really overcast, crappy looking day.

I got fuel on the freeway as usual, and kept going, nothing at all interesting on the freeway today.

About 2/3 of the way to work, I got past the clouds, and it was actually nice and sunny.

At the end, between the freeway and the highway, there were a couple of cops setup RBTing southbounders.

I kept going, got to work. I parked in the shade next to the building, no one to complain about my parking today :-)

I went in, I had the DBA's 24 hour access card, so there was no issues getting in all the doors. It was now 10.20am, not too late.

I got to my desk, and I started to do some work. It was really hot, the airconditioning wasn't on. I moved one of the fans near my desk, and kept working.

I was expecting a lot of issues, but it went well.

I was able to compile a new apache, and it started fine, got caught by the fact I configured it as a user, so it defaults to using port 8080, instead of 80, fixed that, it's all fine now.

I went about compilng php, I found the sources, and the sources for pdflib, patched the php source, tried to compile it, but it couldn't find libjpg or libpng or something.

I grabbed the sources for those, compiled and installed them, no problem. Went back and configured php again, it worked, compiled it, installed it.

It was now just after 11am.

I setup the symlinks for the content, looks fine. Tested the cgi-bin stuff, oops, broken.. found the stuff was sitting in the old cgi-bin directory (which I'd backed up) so I copied them across. I might change that to a symlink at some point.

I setup a virtual host for the stuff I'm writing (the whole reason I'm here, so it works), and put the content in.

Hmm, broken images, and it times out when trying to query oracle, and it can't find the oracle home directory.

Oops, I forgot to upload the images, that was easy, I checked the oracle tnsnames file, the service name I'm trying to use isn't defined, fixed that.

I remembered dealing with the oracle home directory issue before, I had to define it in the apache startup script, I went to edit that, and found that it was the standard script, with references to tomcat, so I got all that out, and tried restarting it, but it still didn't work.

I checked the startup script again, and found it had the wrong path to the apache binary, oops, missed that one.

Fixed it, restarted, and it was all working now.

I was even able to query the database now.

I then realised I didn't have any of the other stuff I've written my code around, I tried to compile imagemagick, but after waiting a long time for it during the compilation, it had an error, and spewed megs of useless error messages.

I decided to cheat, and I tarred up the imagemagick directory from the dev server, copied it across, and untarred it.

I tried to test it, but had errors about the libraries not being found when I tried to run commands at the command line, it took me a minute to remember I needed the LD_LIBRARY_PATH set properly, so I just queried it in the browser, and it was working now.

I checked the apache error log, and saw that it was missing tiffinfo, and because there was no output from that, it thought everything was jpegs.

I found the Solaris tiff package, and installed it, worked, then everything was working.

I found a bug in my code, it allows conversion of these silly images they have in there, that are a standard a4 page wide, but can be 50 feet long, all as one page. It doesn't work very well when you try to convert that to a pdf page.

I'll have to fix the logic at some point, but I'm not doing it now.

It was now just after midday, I went across the road to the cafe, got a sandwich and a drink, on the way back to the building, I noticed the sun was now in a different spot (as to be expected), but now my bike was in the sun, oh well.

I went back in, ate, did a few tests, it looks like everything's working, so I grabbed my stuff, and left just before 1am.

It was pretty toasty out now, I started to head back home.

A little way from work, some idiot started to change lanes on top of me, I was impressed, it was a reflex action to swerve away, my thumb was going for the horn button, and I was about to hammer the throttle on to get out of there, all done automatically, before I was even thinking about it.

Then the guy saw me, and decided not to change lanes, so I just continued on, after leaving him behind.

I was wondering if the cops would still be RBTing, and if I'd get pulled over, but when I got there they were gone.

I got off at the usual exit from the freeway, but instead of going to the supermarket and coming home, I decided to go to jaycar and get a keyboard extension cable to fix the Model M that's still in pieces.

I went across the ridgeway, it's pretty good when you don't get stuck behind some slowass.

I went to jaycar, bought a cable, $8, and a straight cable. Still a bit rich, for what it is, but I was at least able to get a male -> male cable, so I've got a spare length.

I got some fuel, and then I came home.

I put the washing on, taking the chance with the sun out.

I worked out the cable colours in the extension I bought, and soldered it in to the keyboard. I plugged it in to one of the pcs, tested it, worked fine. (I'm using it to type this).

This keyboard doesn't have any LEDs on it, but there's a pin header on the controller pcb for them (I guessed). I put the meter on the pins while pressing caps lock etc, and found that 5v comes through on the pins.

I grabbed an LED, put it across different pins, and worked out what each of the pin pairs was. At some point I might solder some LEDs in it.

Aftet that, I mucked around with the new tivo a bit more, managed to select the right stuff in guided setup, and get it indexing some data. I don't know why I bothered, since it's got a 2gb disk in it, and that gives about 1/2 hour of recording.

I need to get a brand new big disk for it, and I also need to modify it, to add the extra audio inputs, so it can have 2 non rf devices attached (since the tuner is a US, useless here tuner).

I'm going to see The Beatnix again tonight, at Terrigal. I need to make sure my trousers are dry, get ready, take off, and get some dinner on the way to my mate's place.

I woke up fairly early, about 7am, thought about getting up, but then realised I'd only had a few hours sleep, I lay there half awake for the next couple of hours.

The other guy didn't wake up until about 9.10am, he got up and went out of the room. He turned the tv on, some kids show was on, and jokingly asked if I could see it.

He went away to do something, so I got up, and got dressed.

I wandered out, and sat down, there were some newspapers, so I started looking at the local paper.

I felt really seedy. The guy brought me a glass of Tang, heh, and then he sat down with his. There was some stupid song on the kid's show on the tv, I was too busy looking at the chick on there bouncing around to pay attention to the song.

The guy went into the kitchen again, and a minute later brought me a cup of coffee, International Roast, ugh.

I finished that off, and then decided to have a shower. I had to get the shirts I bought out of my bike first though, so I went and did that.

I went out the back of the pub into the carpark, got the shirts, and then went to go back inside, but found that the door had shut. Luckily I'd brought the key with me, so I went around to the after hours entrance, and went in, the door didn't jam this time.

I went back upstairs, grabbed a towel from the room and went and had a shower. I felt a bit better after that, but I still felt pretty seedy.

I got dressed, and went back to the room, made sure I had everything, and we left.

The guy got a bit of a laugh out of my Lowes shirt, and bad hawaiian shirt over the top. I told him the story about going to buy them, and trying to keep a straight face.

We both went down to the car park, and he drove, and I rode back up the road to the office, we got there a couple of minutes before 10am.

I sat down, and continued working on the code I'm developing, it was very hard to concentrate.

I had a song stuck in my head, that had been there all night, "Alone Again or", by Love, so I put it on the ipod, and then just left it going on random.

I got an email from the guy I'd stayed with last night, something about the stupid show on the tv.

I replied, he sent another one back, and I went back to work.

I was having a hell of a time trying to work out how to put a basic javascript function on the form for loading new data into the system I'm building.

Javascript is hideous at the best of times, letalone when I'm hung over.

A bit after midday I replied to the email, and asked what time lunch was, there was no reply, I guessed he'd gone out to lunch already, and forgotten to tell me again (that's been the case the last couple of days).

I just went back to working on the javascript stuff again, and didn't bother to go out for lunch.

I got the function I was trying to write working finally.

I received a reply to the email about lunch, at about 2pm, apparently the guy had gone to one of the other sites, and not been there.

I kept working, really feeling crook. I know the code I'm writing at the moment is crappy, I'll have to redo it properly later.

The DBA came down from upstairs for a chat, wanted to know what I was doing over the weekend, and I told him that I was planning on updating apache on the intranet server tomorrow, so it has php and pdflib support, so I can put up the internal version of the system I'm writing.

He asked if I'd sorted it out with the guy from Orange, to arrange the outage (even though it's on the weekend), which I had not done yet, and I realised I needed to talk to the building manager, to get 24 hours access on my card, so I could get into the building tomorrow.

He wanted me to go to his place on the weekend at some point, and sort out the ADSL he's had installed, he's having issues getting it sorted out with a firewall he's got, and getting it working with his laptop.

I said I'd probably end up there on Sunday to do that.

I followed him up to find the guy from Orange, and the building manager, to arrange me doing the work. While goind up the stairs, he commented on my shirt (about time, I'm surprised no one else has) and I told him the story about the running gag of the bad shirts.

I got upstairs, to speak to the guy from Orange, who'd wandered off somewhere at that point, and the few people around the place, including a couple of chicks from Agriculture, then had a bit of a laugh at my shirts.

The guy we'd been sending silly sms to last night was in the office, and he had a laugh.

We wandered around to find the guy from Orange, we found the building manager first, we started speaking to him, trying to sort out me getting extra access on my card.

The guy from Orange came back in the door at the point, and stopped for a chat to someone else with us.

I continued speaking to the building manager, he said that I couldn't get my access changed, because the pc they've got for editing the access levels is not working properly (the software which interfaces with the security system). He's called up, and is waiting to here back from the vendor.

The DBA said he'd lend me his 24 hour access card for the weekend then.

We the went to find the guy from Orange who'd wandered off again, found him, told him the story, and he arranged for the outage.

I went back to do some more work, it was now a bit after 3pm. A few minutes later I got the email detailing the outage.

The guy who is leaving this week, who we went to lunch with on Wednesday, was just on his way out, so we shook hands, and I said goodbye. He's leaving to go and do some sort of a bible studies course.

I'd had enough at this point. I'm really hungover, feeling crappy, can't think straight, haven't eaten anything all day, I think I might go home.

I was just about to find the DBA to get his access pass, and he was just coming to find me to give it to me because he was leaving. I decided to leave to at that point, so we swapped cards, I grabbed my stuff, and then three of us left, (the guy I stayed with last night was with him).

We went out to the carpark, and I was blasted by the heat. It had gotten close to 40C outside today, I hadn't realised, because I'd been inside since 10am.

We all left, it was about 4pm.

The other guys took off in front of me, I had to wait a minute, because I'd parked in the sun, and the seat of my bike was red hot. I got organised, and I left.

I ended up only a couple of cars behind the vw bug of my mate, and I followed him around to head to the freeway.

We didn't get far, and got stuck in a traffic jam. I looked to see what was going on, there was a fire engine parked blocking one lane, and the guys were spraying the grass in the median.

It took several minutes to get around the corner, I thought I was going to die, it was so hot, and I had my leather jacket on, not done up, but it was still too hot.

I was silly, I didn't think about the fact I had my backpack with me, I could have just shoved it in there, instead of wearing it. I didn't realise that until I was halfway down the freeway.

Anyway, I got round the corner, and everything merged to get past the fire engine, the grass in the middle was all burnt, so there had been a fire there. Probably some idiot flicked a cigarette butt there, and lit the grass on fire, because it was all dry.

Got past that, and got some speed up, I thought that would make me cool down a bit, but it was actually worse, hotter, when moving fast. I've not experienced that before.

I passed my mate's vw a few minutes later, and he ended up just behind me when we turned to get on the freeway. He hung there for a while, and then dropped back a bit when we hit the 110 zone.

At one point, a few minutes later, I thought I saw him a way back in my mirror, I just kept cruising home.

About halfway down the freeway, I passed the DBA, heh, he left a good few minutes before me.

I thought about pulling over, and taking my jacket off, and stuffing it in my bag, but I couldn't be bothered, and I was nearly home anyway.

I kept going, got back, headed for the supermarket. The ipod's battery ran out about 1 minute before I got to the supermarket, pretty good timing.

I went in, and got some food, juice, milk (no more polystyrene breakfast cereal).

I was feeling really crook now, hungover, tired, hot, annoyed.

I paid for the stuff, came out, shoved it in my backpack, along with my jacket, and rode home.

On the way home it was finally a bit cooler, I noticed a bit of cloud cover, it might rain a bit later.

I had a cool shower, felt a bit better after that.

I bummed around with the tivo for a while, I need to reimage it, haven't got the latest image to put on it. I was able to reconfigure th disk, and the serial port works fine, I just can't access the boot menu for some reason.

I played the guitar for a bit, and then I put the food on to cook for dinner.

I decided to watch a bit of tv (tivo), since I'm almost a week behind now, and stuff will start expiring and getting deleted before I've watched it.

It's storming a bit now, thunder and lighting, not very much rain though. Typical, here we go for another weekend where I can't do my washing, and I've got no clean clothes left.

I got stuck into coding for the rest of the afternoon.

At 5.45pm, one of the guys called me up, to find out if I was still at work, and to let me know that everyone was going down the pub.

I said I'd go down in about 10 minutes, and he said he'd see me then, and we'd go down there.

A few minutes later everyone around me said they were going down, so I grabbed my stuff, and left with them.

I moved my bike down the road, and parked behind the pub.

Went in, and found tons of people in there, apparently 3 people are leaving, so they're all going to dinner.

I had a couple of beers, and then just before everyone left to go across to the Thai restaurant, one of the guys bought another round, so we had to drink those.

It seems they didn't want to go to dinner, and that was the excuse. We stayed drinking in there for a while, I think I had another beer.

We decided to go to the other pub where we played pool (just before Christma), to get some dinner.

I went up and dumped my stuff in the guy's room again, so I don't have to drag everything around. When we were in there, the guy said I could stay in there if I wanted, because there was 2 beds in there.

We locked up, and went back down, and started towards the other pub.

One of the guys had to get money out, so he went to the ANZ atm, since he's with ANZ. There's a Newcastle Permanent closeby, so I went down there to get some money out, and avoid a charge for using another bank's atm.

I went back, and then we headed to the other pub. We got there about 2 minutes after 8pm, and they stopped serving food.

We had more beers. We played a couple of games of pool, I was crap, and lost both games. We had more beers.

While I was playing pool, one of my mates that works at Target called me, to follow up on the sms from earlier, about me dropping in to pickup some of the money he owes me for concert tickets on my way home.

I told him I didn't know what time I'd be back, if at all, since I might stay up here.

After the games of pool, one of the guys I was with started sending silly sms to people, having a bit of fun with other people that work there (who weren't there with us).

I put some money in the jukebox, and put a couple of songs on. Something by the Rolling Stones, and The Who I think.

A bit after 10pm, we asked the bartender if he knew anywhere to get food, and said there was a couple of places down the end of the road.

We had more beers, and I put more songs on the jukebox.
Some Led Zeppelin, a Fleetwood Mac song, and a couple of others I don't remember.

After only a couple of them had played, we decided to go and get something to eat, down the road, apparently there's a pizza place down there.

We got down there, the pizza place was closed, there was a kebab place next door, so we went in there.

One of the guys I was with asked if they had pizzas, somehow I don't think so.

The three of us ordered beef kebabs, and the chick starting making them, then said she only had enough meat for 2, and did one of us want a chicken one, the guy who's room my stuff was in said he'd have a chicken one.

She asked what we wanted on it, sauce etc, he ordered hot chili, I'd ordered tomato sauce on mine.

She finished making them, and we paid for them. I asked to make sure which one was which, and she looked at them, then said "It's all the same to me".

We left, and started wandering up the road eating them.

I got a couple of mouthfuls in, and thought the tomato sauce I'd ordered was on fire, I then realised I'd ended up with the chicken one, with hot chili on it.

Oh well, I finsihed it. We kept wandering up the road, and a couple more sms were sent.

Someone called the guy I was with (who he'd been sending sms to), and he had a conversation while we wandered along.

We went back to the pub with the pool table again, it was still open until 11pm, and it was only 10.30pm or so.

We had more beers, and sat and chatted, the other guy was wandering around on the phone outside.

The bartender put a bunch of money in the jukebox, $12 I think, since he picked a song, and then told us there was a bunch of credits there, and there were 17 left when I went to pick some, and it was 6 for $4.

I put on Rocketman by Elton John, and then a couple of Brian Ferry and Roxy Music songs, Love is the Drug, and Let's stick together.

We sat and chatted a bit more after that, and then we headed off to another pub, since this one was closing soon, and the other one was open for a while longer.

We left, and wandered up to the other one, went in, we bumped into another guy from work, the guy from Orange who's taking over the IT stuff. The crazy cowboy guy from the other pub when we were in the before Christmas was in here too, but he left us alone.

I had been thinking about riding home, before the last couple of beers I had at the pub where we played pool, but then decided bugger it, I'll stay up here, so I had another couple of drinks, a couple of cans of Beam and coke, since this pub was really seedy, and didn't have any "exotic" beers, ie imported.

I put more songs on in the jukebox in there, a couple of The Doors songs.

Just before midnight, we were told it was last drinks, and they were packing up the bar. The guy we'd bumped into from work bought 4 cans of Beam, takeaway.

The pub had all foreign money stuck up above the till, which we were looking at, and I commented that it looked like my wallet, and got out the 4 USD notes I've got in there.

We started looking at it, and talking about all the crazy stuff on there, lots of triangles, the pyramids, the "all seeing eye", and the Latin which says something about "a new world order".

One of the guys had gone to the loo a bit before, and disappeared, the others went to find him, I just waited at the bar, they came back a couple of minutes later, he'd wandered into another part of the pub, looking at all the architecture.

They'd closed the doors, and packed up all the chairs, and were printing out the sales for the night from the til, so we left. It was just after midnight.

We wandered back to the pub we were staying in, one of the guys was in the other pub across the road, so he left.

We tried to go into the after hours entrance, but the key wouldn't work. We were there fiddling with it for a bit, apparently the door jams up. The guy from Orange managed to get the door unstuck by jamming his key inbetween the doors, while unlocking it with the other key.

The three of us went up, and sat out on the balcony, and we got into the cans he'd bought.

We sat and chatted about all the stuff that was going on at work, and then we talked about tivo, and then the guy's who room I was staying in mentioned about how people know my name from the tivo mailing list, and I think I'm some sort of a hero, that was pretty funny.

He then went inside, and came back a minute later with a glass of Tang for me, apparently it's some sort of a running gag.

I drank that, they'd opened the fourth can of Beam, which was for the other guy, but he'd gone to bed in the other hotel, so I filled the glass up from that, and we finished that off.

About 2am, the guy went in and made us cups of tea, we had those and chatted more.

We eventually decided to go to bed, about 3.15am.

I went in, and got into bed, it took me a little while to get to sleep, and it was a pretty restless night, it was too hot, even with the air conditioner on full blast.

Woke up really early this morning, it wasn't even 7am yet, I fell back to sleep, and didn't wake up again until 9.20am. Crap.

Got up, got ready.

D'oh, was reminded of the fact that I needed to buy milk, since it ran out yesterday. I put the dregs of the carton on my cereals, it wasn't even enough to wet it.

Trying to eat dry plain puffed wheat is like trying to eat polystyrene I think, you can't hardly chew it. When it's wet it's ok, since it goes a bit soggy, but dry was just useless.

I took for work about 9.50am, got on the freeway, got fuel.

About 14ks north of the the service station there was a speed trp, this one was a bit strange, the guy was just on the grass, facing south, they're usually in the breakdown phone areas, or the u turn bays, not just on the grass.

I was going a bit quick, so I tapped my brake when I saw him, but he didn't do anything.

I kept going. About 5 ks south of the Newcastle on ramp, on the southbound side, there was another one.

The rest of the trip was uneventful.

I got to work, did a stack of coding.

The guy who's taken over the website stuff (that I got dumped with) came round to thank me for helping him out, no worries.

Someone else came round to ask about photos that used be on the website, so I spoke to him for a minute, someone else heard me talking about stuff missing from the website, so then they came over to ask about stuff they thought was missing. Gees.

Then there was also a chick there who wanted her pc setup so she could access the development interface of the website, so I had to go and set her computer up.

I came back, and decided to go for lunch, since it's now almost 1pm.

I went upstairs to see if the guys were there, but they must have already gone to lunch.

I went out, and down the road. I went past the court house, and there was a cop waiting to cross the road. The lights changed for a walk as I got close, and we crossed the road.

I went slow, and let him get a bit in front of me, a kid riding a bike came past me, and then continued past the cop, and crossed the road without looking around.

Let's see, the kid's riding on the footpath, fairly quickly, not wearing a helmet, and dangerously rides onto the road but the cop just ignores him. Typical.

I went past a men's clothes shop that had some really hideous shirts in the window, were 25% off, now they're out of the window, on a rack that says 50% off. I went in and had a look, there are some shockers, then I checked the prices, that was even more of a shocker, $70 for these shirts! I assume the 50% means they're $35, but even that is far too much, when I can get shirts like this for about $10 elsewhere.

I kept going down the road, I got a couple of pies from the bakery in the mall, and sat outside and ate them.

There's a Lowes shop there, and we keep joking about the Tshirts they've got with "Lowes" printed across the front, like somebody's going to where it like it's a terrific brand, as opposed to it saying "Cheapass".

It even came up in conversation last night, and got better, someone said to where one, with a bad hawaiian shirt over the top.

I went across to have a look, the ones we've seen are white with Lowes written in black on them, but I'm not a big fan of white tshirts, I'm a grub, and always spill things on myself, I can get away with it on dark shirts.

I looked, and noticed they had some yellowy white ones, and black ones at the back with Lowes in white on them.

I went around to the other side of the rack, and looked at the bad shirts, there was one that wasn't too bad, but it was $20, too much for a joke shirt, I kept looking, and spotted a really bad one, black with shapes on it, for only $4! I grabbed that, and a black Lowes shirt, and went in and bought them.

The woman at the counter commented on the really bad shirt being a bargain (but not that it was really bad), it was hard to keep a straight face.

I paid, and was on my way. Not bad, $8 something for 2 shirts, and now I've got clean clothes to wear to work tomorrow.

I noticed this woman looking at me as I went up the road, when I looked at her, she started coming towards me, and I think I spotted a name tag, uh oh, not getting caught by some charity person, I made my donation, leave me alone, and I dived into the newsagent.

I got a drink from the fridge, paid, made sure it was clear, and continued on my way back to the office.

We left the office about midday to head around to the restaurant for lunch.

I started chatting to a guy from work I haven't had much to do with before on the way round there, when we got there, we went into the bottle shop across the road, and went halves in a 6 pack.

We went across and into the restaurant, I noticed it said "BYO wine only" on the way in, but it's a bit late for that.

Most people were already there, we grabbed seats, sat down and started drinking a beer while we waited for our food to be served (since it was already ordered by fax).

We were about 1/3rd the way through our beers, when the stupid woman comes over "I'm sorry, but you can't drink that in here, you have to buy our beer, we've got New, VB, Hahn Ice (and some other shit beer I can't remember)". The guy I'd gone halves with asked if we could finish these ones, and she's like "oh, yeah, I shouldn't let you, but I will". "Oh, and I'll have to charge you corkage" she added. "Yeah, whatever" was my reply to that.

Well it's your choice lady, if I can't drink my beer here, then I'll just leave now, and you won't get paid for the food I ordered. I didn't say that, just thought it.

They started bringing the food out, we continued drinking our beers. I put the rest of them under the table.

After about 15 minutes, everyone had been served, except for myself and a couple of other people.

I finally got served my food, an Antipasto pizza. "Cheese on toast" would have been a better description of it, and it was burnt.

I couldn't be bothered complaining, I just ate it. About halfway through, I'd finished my beer, the other guy already had, I asked him if he wanted another, and I said I'd just swap it under the table.

I grabbed a new one out of the pack, and did a quick swap under the table, putting the cap from the new one on the empty one, and putting it back in the pack.

I opened another for myself in the same way.

I finished my pizza, and then we sat and chatted for a while.

One of the guys from work got up to make a speech for the guy who's leaving, we chatted a bit more after that.

They came around to find out if we wanted coffee or anything. I don't think so, they'd probably find a way to burn it, or stuff up a simple request like a "black coffee" in some way.

A few minutes later people started to leave, and head back to work, it was about 2pm.

I got up, went over to pay for my pizza, I thought about not mentioning the corkage for the beers, but figured it would only be a couple of bucks, and not worth the shit if I tried to avoid it.

I was just about to pay, when I noticed a waitress going for the 6 pack under the table, I went over and told her to leave it, since I'm leaving in a minute (and I didn't want them to notice there were 2 empties in the pack, I can't be bothered arguing).

I went back to the counter, told the woman my order, and the corkage, and was expecting the bill to be about $12. $14 she said, $4 corkage? wtf?

I don't think I'll be rushing back here.

I grabbed the 6 pack, and left.

I noticed some of the guys from work a little bit ahead, so I walked a bit faster to catch up to them.

Some bogan walking the other way saw my carrying the 6 pack, and said "You've got the right idea mate!" and pulled 2 cans of Fosters out of his pockets to show me. I just laughed, and kept going.

We walked back to work, and I got stuck into working on the code I'm writing.

About 6pm, I was told that a few people were heading down to the pub, that sounds good.

I'm going to do it properly this time, not go down there for one beer, and then have to rush back to the building so I can get in before 7pm, when my card doesn't work anymore.

I did a bit more work, then grabbed my stuff, and wandered out.

I loaded up my bike, with the couple of beers that were left from the 6 pack, and rode down and parked behind the pub.

We went in to the pub, and there were a stack of guys from work in there, I went and grabbed a beer.

We sat in there until about 8pm, when they wanted to go for dinner, I went and dumped my stuff (helmet, jacket etc) in the room of one of the guys staying there, and then we all wandered down to the Leagues Club.

We signed in, went upstairs to the restaurant. $17.50 for all you can eat, bit pricey, but the food looks ok, similar to the tennis club.

The first few people paid and went in, I didn't have any notes left, so I went to the atm to get some money, I saw another guy from work as I was at the atm, and told him we were in the restaurant.

After I got my money, I went back in, paid, and sat down.

There was only 6 of us in there so far, still another 5 or so making their way in.

We grabbed some food, and sat back down again, then the others turned up.

The food wasn't bad, it wasn't great either, about on par with the food from the tennis club, the difference being I pay $6 there.

We ended up eating/sitting in there and chatting until nearly 10pm. I had a shocking headache, and now felt crook from eating too much, not that I ate all that much.

They starting turning the lights up and down to make us get out, so a little while later we wandered out, and went into the pokies area.

I wasted a couple of bucks through the pokies, one $3 at one stage, should have stopped then.

The bar services and Keno stopped at 10.15pm, so then everyone wanted to leave, since they couldn't get any more drinks, and we left about 10.20pm. The pokies were stopping at 10.30pm anyway.

We wandered back to the pubs, I went up to get my stuff out of the guy's room. We went out on the balcony for a minute, a common balcony, there was a guy from next door out there reading a book, since it's stinking hot inside, we chatted to him for a minute, then I grabbed my stuff, and wandered out and over to my bike.

I left Maitland about 10.40pm, and it was a good ride home, almost nothing on the road.

I went past one spot, and suddenly saw flashing lights, great, here we go. I just kept going, didn't slow down, they were on the other side, I saw them go into the u turn bay, and thought they were going to come after me, but then I didn't see them again.

Perhaps they saw I was on a bike, and decided not to bother.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, and I got home, and in the door, at 11.40pm.

The tivo was there, so I unpacked that and had a good look at it, it's an ancient PTV100 Philips unit.

The guy sent me a proper Philips Series 1 remote with it, rather than the DirecTV remote I got with the other one. He'd also sent the power cable, serial cable (heh, last thing I need), and the ir blaster cable.

The ir cable with this one is different to the one I got with the first one, it's got a purple plug on it, and the ir leds are smaller, 3mm instead of 5mm I think.

I was just about to find the torx bit to undo the screws on it, when I noticed a torx key thing (like an allen key, but with torx drivers) taped to the back of the unit, handy, I undid the screws.

I opened the unit (that was a task, the case was on so hard), found it pretty good inside, little bit of dust, as to be expected, but also noticed it had a disk in it, didn't expect that at all.

It's a quantum disk, and I noticed it had the cable hold stuck to it, must be an original disk.

I also noticed it had a sticker on it "This disk has been uniquely configured for TiVo, it will not work in your personal computer".

I plugged the unit in to the av cords I've got hanging around for the xbox, and booted the unit up.

It's got a cool retro looking boot prom screen, followed by it saying "Almost there.. a few more seconds please", heh.

It booted up, and displayed the "Welcome to Guided Setup" screen, so it hadn't been setup. Bugger, I wanted to see if there was anything recorded on it. Perhaps someone did a clear and delete everything on it.

I tried to find how to skip the guided setup, just to see if there were any recordings on it. I need to use the serial terminal.

I got the serial cable that came with it, plugged it in, found the adapters I needed to allow me to plug in the null modem cable going to the DEC VT510.

I hit enter a couple of times, no prompt, maybe this isn't a hacked image.

I rebooted, and tried to access the boot menu, no luck, maybe I didn't get it in time. I tried a few more times, no luck. Strange. Perhaps there's something wrong with this terminal, or cable (the same ones I was trying to use on the Sparc) (But I just remembered I used them on my working Sparc a few days ago, so it's not the terminal or the cable).

Anyway, I decided to test it, I plugged the cable into my other tivo, and saw garbage come up on the screen, a ppp connection attempting to be established.

I found my tivo serial cable I made, and tried using that, along with a couple of serial -> cat5 adapters.

I grabbed the longest bit of cat5 hanging around, which I usually use for the xbox, and pinched that from connecting the switch to the hub from the other day, I'm not using now.

I put the cable together, plugged it all in, still not luck.

I then plugged it into my pc, instead of the DEC terminal.

Still no luck. Very strange.

Now I found that I couldn't browse any web pages either, what's going on here?

Then I realised that I still had the proxy server plugged into the hub, from the other day when I was trying to nmap the Sparc, and I'd temporarily used the cable from the xbox to stack the hub to the switches, which I'd pinched to use as a serial cable.. and isolated the proxy server from the rest of the lan, duh.

I tried a few more times to access the boot menu, I'm not having any luck.

I put the test disk I've been using while writing the installation script in there, and booted it up.. it has bash running on the serial port, so that should at least allow me to test that the serial port on the tivo works.

I booted it up, and saw a couple of bits of garbage come out of the tivo, (the speed on the terminal must have been wrong) but at least I know that the port can at least send.

I think I left the disk configured for ppp on the serial port, so I can't even access a bash prompt to test sending data, I can't be bothered pulling the disk out, putting it back in the pc, booting it, and using my install script to reconfigure the serial port use.

It's now just after 1am. At some point in the last hour I checked the tivo, as I though, no guide data, so I kicked off my dodgy guide data update script, then I noticed the tivo start recording something, good. The amount of stuff that's repeated on foxtel, if I missed recording for a whole day, I probably won't even notice anyway, because tivo will just record the next showing.

Anyway, I had a splitting headache, so I went to bed.

It was stinking hot, and I couldn't get comfortable.

I realised I hadn't put the ipod on to charge, got up and did that, and put the fan on higher, and moved it.

I lay down again, still uncomfortable, head killing me, I got up and got a washer and soaked it, then went back to bed with that on my head, ahh, that's better, it was now almost 2am.

Managed to get up a bit earlier this morning, just after 8am.

I realised my tivo had run out of guide data (don't know when, Monday perhaps), so I started downloading the new slices.

Got ready, and left.

I went past the Sara Lee factory, and it smelled terrific, like they were making all the cakes.

Got a bit further up the road, and there was a bit of a hold up with a truck loaded up with something, waiting to get onto the highway.

It eventually got on, and then all the cars stuck behind it got on, and then I got on.

We went a bit up the road, and then I saw something bouncing along the other side of the road, I thought it was a fast food cup or something, then noticed it was a big rectangle, oh, it's a big chunk of polystyrene.

Thene everything started to go slow, and I noticed bits of polystyrene all over the road.

The truck that held everything up had pulled over, and I now realised it was loaded up with polystyrene, and a couple of big bits had fallen off.

I got past that, got on the freeway, and headed for work.

I got to a spot, just before the Newcastle exit, where it stack horribly like dog shit, and it went on for about 2 kilometres.

Between the Newcastle exit and the end of the freeway, there was a speed trap, I thought the got had got me, he was standing out of the car, with the radar, and I was going at least 130 when I saw him, but he just ignored me, so I kept going.

I got to the end of the freeway, and started heading up the highway to work, a cop had just pulled over a truck, and the trucky getting out didn't look too happy.

A lit bit further down the road, there was a bike going the other way, so I signaled to him that there were cops.

The rest of the trip was uneventful.

One of the guys is leaving today, so we've just gone through the menus for the restaurant nearby, where we're going for lunch today.

Oh crap, I just realised that I downloaded the guide data slices for the tivo, but I didn't kick off the script to load them.

I tried running the script from the web interface I've got on the tivo, from work, but the script I wrote to load the data is really dodgy, and I relied on using the path variable for it find stuff, so it just fails, since it's not running in a proper environment. Bugger, unless I can get an ssh connection out somewhere, I'm stuffed.

I woke up even later this morning, about 8.30am.

Got up, got ready, and left a bit after 9am.

I got to work at 10.30am.

I started working on the database schema for the system I'm building. The whole database design just about needs to be redone from scratch.

I printed out the table designs, and then I had a meeting with a couple of other people in the group for their ideas, since they used the database heavily, and have ideas of the procedure for adding new data.

We spent a couple of hours, and worked out all the stuff we could do, move fields, dump fields, change sizes, all trying to make the whole thing a bit faster.

I went upstairs to chat to the oracle guy, to find out if there's a way to query oracle based on the length of fields, yep, easy too, ie:

select count(*) from table_name where length(field_name) > size;

and you get the total of records where a certain field exceeds a certain length.

I went down the road to get something to eat.

I went into the useless Dick Smith shop, to find out about getting a ps2 extension cable to butcher to use the cord on the Model M keyboard that's still in pieces.

Typical.. they have one ps2 extension cable, a useless coiled cord (which I hate), and they want like $14 for it. Piss off.

I think I've worked out how Dick Smith works now, they stock shit that people don't really want, and don't offer a cheap alternative. Because you went in there because you need something, you end up buying it anyway, and paying 6 times what you should. Not me.

I left, and kept going, got some money out of an ATM, went into the mall, bought a kebab, and ate it on the way back to the office.

I got back to work, queried the database, worked out the field sizes I could make changes to without too much grief, totalled it all up, and sent out a couple of emails about it.

I started working on the form for adding new entries.

At 4.10pm, I got an email from the guy upstairs, he said he'd had enough, and was heading down th pub if I was interested. Sounds good, I'll go down there and have a couple, then come back and get back to work.

I wandered up to see him, on the way up I noticed I'd spilt some krud from the kebab on the front of my pants, yuck. He'd wandered off somewhere. I went back downstairs, and hung around near the front of the building for a couple of minutes, to see if he'd come out, or drive his car out.

I didn't see him, assumed he'd already headed down there. I wandered down the street. I had a look behind the pub, his car wasn't there, he mustnt've come down yet. I called him, he was just about to leave.

I wandered across the road, and bought another scratchy. As I came out of the newsagent, I saw him driving down the road. I scratched the scratchy, won nothing.

I crossed the road to where he'd parked, he'd brought down another guy from the building who was staying in the pub too, and we went into the pub, and we grabbed beers, I had a Lowenbrau for a change. We sat out the back and chatted.

Apparently the other guy, staying in this pub, is only paying $25/night. Gees, it costs me $15 in fuel everyday. I might start staying up here a couple of nights a week, then I can get totally pissed, and also not waste a couple of hours riding to work and home again.

I finished my beer, and bought the second round.

More people from the building filtered in, and after chatting about a few different things, we ended up chatting about work. I just sat annd listened, one of th guys went on about the stuff I ended up working on until Friday night, how it was supposed to be done months ago, and still doesn't work properly.

At that point I told him that I'd ended up doing it, and was sick to death of the whole thing.

The other guy bought the third round, now we're square.

The conversation continued about other stuff after that, how people can't get vpn accounts because there aren't enough licenses, and other such stuff.

The guy who's taking over IT had turned up shortly before that, so I commented to him that if someone had been taking minutes, it would have been the most productive meeting we've had for months (mainly because we're all in different departments, and rarely speak to each other during the day).

I noticed it was almost 7pm, and I think my access pass only works between 7am and 7pm, so I headed back, to make sure I could get in to get my helmet and stuff.

I got back a couple of minutes before 7, no worries getting back in. I sat and did a bit more work on the data entry form, read some email and left about 7.45pm.

On the freeway on the way home, there's been a car dumped on the side for the last few days. As I got near it tonight, a big car carrier truck was just pulling in near it, they must be finally dragging it away.

I rode home, got stuff for dinner at the supermarket on the way home, and then came home.

No sign of the tivo again.

The cats were whinging around, I don't think they've been fed. My parent's aren't home, strange.

I went and checked the mail box, to see if there was any mail (telling me how long they'd not been home, or perhaps if there was a mail delivery card from the post office about my tivo) but it was empty.

I went into the house, couldn't find any mail for me, got some cat food, and went out and fed the cats.

I watched some tv, ate dinner, and typed this.

Hmm, it's 11.36pm, and my parents still aren't home, they didn't mention anything about going anywhere to me, usually they do, so that I'll feed the cats and the rabbit.

Update: Just after I wrote this, I went to bed (about midnight), and my parents turned up from somewhere. I heard Dad feed the cats again, heh.

I woke up late this morning, didn't get to work until 10am.

Had a 10.30am meeting, about the new system I'm writing, where we're at, and what the plan is.

That went until about 11.45am.

After that, I had another meeting with a guy, about server configurations and an apache upgrade I'll have to do.

I have to make changes to the production intranet server, so I'll have to do it out of hours, and because it takes ages to get apache/php/pdflib all compiled and working properly, and then configured, I'm going to end up doing it on the weekend, great, I want nothing more than to have to go to work on the weekend.

I went across the road to get as coffee, ordered, and realised I'd left my wallet on my desk, because I'd had it out of my pocket because my access card is in it, and I have to get through all the stupid security doors.

I went back across to the building, got my wallet, and went back to the coffee shop, paid, and then came back with my coffee.

On the way back into the building, I bumped into the guy from Orange who's taking over IT, he was at reception with a couple of other people.

He commented that I could have had a free coffee, I looked at the people he was with, it said "Mobile Coffee" on their shirts or something. I said maybe I'd have another one in a bit (the way this day's going so far).

I got back to my desk, and I emailed the guy I got the Sparc off, letting him know the problems I found.

It was now a bit after midday, I got an email from IT, saying there would be an email outage for 10 minutes.

At about 12.45, when it should have been back up, I tried to check my mail, the mail server wouldn't accept my logon details. Hmm.

My initial thought was that someone had installed a service pack or whatever for exchange server, and the major function/ulterior motive for M$ putting out the update, is that it stops Thunderbird from authentication against exchange.

A new guy from IT came down, and said they were having a problem with the network, and phones, and they were working on it, then jokingly asked what I'd done.

I just told him I couldn't access my mail, and said I'd fix it for myself if it wasn't fixed in the next hour, and then he went away again.

Our phones and network connections (downstairs) were fine.

I browsed the web for a little bit, and then checked my mail again, still couldn't connect.

I went up to the IT area, and it was empty. The only guy there was the guy who's taken over, he said that most of them were in the server room, so I asked him to open the door for me (I still haven't got around to getting access to the server room on my card).

There was a stack of people in there.

I asked about the mail server, apparently it had run out of disk space, one of the guys had deleted a couple of big files that didn't belong there, and rebooted, but it still only had 300MB free.

I wasn't able to connect to it, even locally on the exchange server, I checked the eventviewer log, and there were a ton of errors about "OpenMsgStr" or something.

I restarted a couple of exchange services, and then it looked like it was working again, I could connect to the webmail interface, and it was back logging a million errors about people not having a master SID or some nonsense.

I went back downstairs, and tested it, I was able to connect to the mail server again.

I went back upstairs, and at this point I tried to find out why everyone else was in the server room, it seems that there's a truckload of broadcast network traffic going on, on all the data/voice switches upstairs, and no routing/connectivity to other subnets.

The router is set up for redundancy, but both cable runs/cards/links are stuffed.

I went down and got a knoppix cd, booted it up on a laptop that was in there, manually configured the ethernet interface, since I couldn't get any dhcp details, and then went about packet sniffing.

There was a stack of dhcp requests going on, and some routing stuff, as well as some dns requests from the stupid 169 autoconfiguration range.


I'll bet all the broadcast stuff is just the dhcp requests, then I remembered about the voip phones, of course that's what it is, since there's no connectivity to the voip server, the phones keep rebooting.

There was a new guy there, he was trying to work out how to connect to the core router, to check it, since the links had gone down between the ports on it, and the switches connected to all the gear upstairs in the building (phones, workstations etc).

They managed to phone someone, and find out the passwords for the core router, then we had to find a way to connect to it, they were trying to use a cisco console cable, somehow I doubt that's going to work on a nortel router, it didn't.

I found a couple of nortel cables in the rack, and then we were right. The new guy went about logging in, but wasn't sure how to interact with it, I had a look, it looked a bit like cisco config, and also a bit like ericsson config.

We worked out how to navigate around the CLI, got in and found that if we switched the individual port states, to test, and then enable, then the links came back up.

There was still no routing going on though. I telnet to the router from the mail server, and poked around a bit, but couldn't really find anything, I tried disabling routing, and reenabling it, no difference.

I went back to dealing with the mail server.

The log directory had over 8000 5MB log files, over 40GB worth.

I googled, found a page detailing recovering from an exchange server data storage disk running out of space and went about following the instructions they recommended.

Apparently you run a util, and point it at the checkpoint log, it tells you the last log file you need to rebuild the database. I found out then that the log files are a transaction log, in case the database falls over, and can't be unmounted properly, when it comes back up, it checks the log files.

Anyway, I found the last log file I needed for that to work, it was from only a few hours ago, and the log dirctory still has logs from November last year in there.

I ended up moving 3GB worth of log files to another partition (would have moved more, but the whole machine is pretty full), I then rebooted the server again, it came back up, and all looked to be working.

I asked the new guy if he was getting anywhere with the routing issue, no luck yet. I suggested deleting the whole subnet, and recreating it, didn't work.

This is getting beyond a joke, we're down to a couple of options:

disabling/reenabling the slots (hopefully restarting the cards),
rebooting the whole router (which will cause massive connectivity issues, since it will disconnect everything, including remote sites)

If neither of those work, then perhaps the unit is stuffed. Seems strange that both cards would go, in the same way.

It was now almost 4pm, I hadn't been out for lunch, neither had a couple of the other guys. I asked the new guy if he wanted a pie or something, since he hadn't had lunch either.

We came out of the server room to talk to another guy, who's staying up there in the pub at night. He just wanted to finish the stuff he was working on, so we waited a few minutes for him.

Because of the network issues, he was working on another guy's pc, which is attached to the server subnet (which still has connectivity). The guy whose desk it was, was just packing his stuff up to leave, since he couldn't do anything.

He had one of the free coffees on his desk, which I commented on, and he said it was the worst thing he'd ever tasted. He'd only had a couple of mouthfulls out of it, and threw it away, and then left.

The guy we were waiting on finished up his stuff, and then he grabbed all his stuff, and we left.

We went down and jumped in his car, while he moved it around to park behind the pub, he's got a cool old vw bug, the inside was a bit rough, but the body was ok, had been resprayed a while a go.

We went into the pub while he checked in for the week, this is his first day back at work since Christmas, and when he went to check in, they didn't have his reservation.

We had to wait for a while for the manager to turn up, to sort it out. He eventually turned up, and was able to give the guy a room for the next 2 nights, and then they'll have to sort something out.

He finished checking in, went and dumped his stuff in the room, and then we wandered across to the mall. It was now a bit after 4pm.

I went to the bakery, and bought a couple of pies, one of the other guys got a kebab, and the other guy didn't get anything.

We wandered out, found a seat, sat and ate and chatted for a while. We were there until 5pm, and then we went back to the building.

The router had been sorted out, and the guys we left in there working on it/waiting for a phone call had left.

I sat there, and watched one of the guys working on some database stuff, showing me the application he's trying to fix up.

I ate the other pie, rather than waste it.

I went back down, did a little bit of work, and then grabbed my stuff and took off, around 6pm.

I went to the supermarket on the way home, got food for dinner, and came home.

No sign of the other tivo I bought last week.

I watched a bit of tv, drank some of the Bundy triple filtered (neat, something I can't do with normal Bundy), and went to bed about midnight.

I woke up about 9.30am, hmm, I should get up, get ready, and leave, since it'll probably take me close to an hour to get to the computer fair in Newcastle, and that would mean I'd be there by about 11am, but I went back to sleep.

I heard the phone ring, I ignored it, it rang and rang and rang.

Then it rang again, oh for god's sake, give up, I'm not getting up to answer the phone.

Then my mobile rang, "private number", not answering that, leave a message, if it's important, then I'll ring you back.

They left a message, so I got called back, I answered it. It was my mate I go to dinner with at the tennis club every now and then, can I call him back on some Sydney number.

Perhaps he's down in Sydney trying to fix the Craptus cable modem connection he's rung me about several times.

I got up, and went over to the phone, and called him back.

Yep, he was down at someone's place in Sydney, trying to fix up their internet sharing on their network. Apparently the guy had everything working, the cable modem they had crapped itself, Craptus came out and replaced it, and when they saw he had a network, did something to bollocks up the sharing.

I assumed it was just that they'd unplugged the hub, and put it directly in to the pc, so he just had to put the hub back.

I found out what he was trying to do, and eventually managed to work out that the new cable modem was connected via usb to one of the pcs, and was also a bridging device, so the routable IP ended up on the pc. Yuck.

I told him how to enable internet connection sharing, he'd already tried that, but done it on the wrong interface, he'd put it on the network card attached to the LAN, rather than on the virtual interface of the usb connection to the cable modem.

As soon as he put it on the right interface, it all started working.

I finally got off the phone, it was now about 12.30pm. Hmm, don't think I'm going to get to the computer fair now.

I put the Utopia concert DVD on.

I went back to mucking around with the Sparc.

I can get output from it on the serial terminal, but I can't type anything, hit break, or get a boot prom prompt.

While looking around for more serial pinouts, in case I had the TX line connected to the wrong pin.

While googling for serial port and keyboard pinouts I came across the pinouts for the Model M IBM keyboard. I've got the one I got off the side of the road a few months ago, that doesn't have a cord, and this page had how to make one up.

I heard the phone ringing, didn't manage to answer it in time. I got called back, it was my mate again, he wanted to know if he could get me anything at any of the computer shops, on his way back from Sydney.

I called him back, and said I was after a couple of hard disks, I looked on the website of the place he was going to, but they didn't have Maxtor disks listed. I tried to call them, on both phone numbers on their site, but just got a message about "alll our staff are busy, please leave a message, or call later", and then it would have gone to the prompt for me to leave a message, but instead I was told "this messagebank is full, goodbye" and then it hangs up on me.

I called him back, and said I couldn't get through, so I don't know if they have Maxtor disks. he said he'd go to another place then.

I then went about pulling the Model M apart, and desoldering the weird 6 pin RJ socket from the PCB in the keyboard.

I don't know why I bothered, since I don't have a cable to solder on there, and I don't have any dud keyboards I could steal the cord off.

I had dinner, and watched a bit of tv.

The phone rang again, it was my mate from before. He'd gone to the other computer place, but forgotten that they are shut on Sunday.

About 9pm, I went back to mucking around with the Sparc again, I can only ever get it to come up, display "not nvramrc", then the initial boot message, with the MAC address, and serial number etc, and how much memory, then say "testing", and not go any further.

I found that it will boot if I have the unit open.

There's something suss with the memory, I've seen it boot up and say 48MB (the first time), 51MB, and now all the time it says 36MB.

I pulled all the memory out, and cleaned it, and put it back in, still no difference, only 36MB, strange.

It will boot all the way up, but I can't login (or attempt to) since nothing seems to get sent to the unit, I can only see output on the console.

I googled for details about the ethernet not working, and keyboard not detecting, apparently it's to do with fuses. I looked, and found 3 fuses. From the documentation I could find, they are for ethernet, scsi, and keyboard. I wondered if there was anything to do with the serial port, in case the TX line was effected somehow.

I pulled all three out, and tested them, 2 of them are blown, the ones from ethernet, and keyboard, only the scsi one works.

I replaced the keyboard one with a piece of wire as a test, and turned the unit on. The first thing I noticed was that the ethernet transceiver lit up, strange. The keyboard also beeped, and the lights flashed, ah, getting somewhere.

On the console it said something about "no keymap for keyboard model 21, using USA keymap".

I turned the unit off again.

I put the ethernet and scsi fuses back in (around the wrong way), and turned it on, a puff of smoke came out of somewhere, I immediately turned it off again.

I couldn't see exactly where the smoke had come from, no components looked damaged, I thought perhaps it was just arcing through dust, because power hadn't gone there for a while.

I cleaned all the dust away with a paintbrush, and powered it up again, no more smoke.

I pulled the ethernet and scsi fuses out again, tested them, both were blown now.

I put wire in the ethernet fuse socket, and turned it on. A huge amount of smoke came out of a capacitor, I turned it off again quickly. Hmm, something seriously wrong here. That explains the little puff from last time, and the one working fuse getting blown.

I put wire in the other socket, the scsi one, where the one working fuse had come from, turned it on, no smoke, started booting.

Now I'm confused. The ethernet fuse is not in there (because of the smoke), but the transceiver is powered. I shut it down, and pulled the wire out of the keyboard fuse socket, and tried again.

Now the transceiver is not getting powered. I don't know what's going on here, why would the keyboard fuse be effecting power to the ethernet port?

I put the wire back in, and left it in the scsi socket. I left the ethernet one empty, because of the smoking.

I booted the unit up, it booted all the way up.

I got the IP address it was trying to set as the default gateway.

I did a whois on that IP, and it belongs to a range assigned to a QLD Government Department, Department of Vocational Education, and Industrial Relations or something.

I setup a virtual interface on one of my linux boxes with that ip.

I tried ping scanning that subnet, to see if I could find the ip of the Sparc, I thought I found it, .125 was up, and the default gateway was .126. I port scanned .125, and found a few services running.

I tried to telnet to it, and discovered that I had just telnetted to myself, hmm. Oops.. I typoed when I put the virtual interface up. I changed it to 126.

I ping scanned again, all I can find up is myself.

Maybe the switch is blocking the stuff, or stopping me from tcpdumping properly.

I dug out an old hub, and plugged it all into that. Still no luck.

Perhaps that extra fuse is actually for ethernet, but the signal lines of the ethernet, rather than the transceiver power.

A bit after 11pm, I gave up.

I think this thing is stuffed. It doesn't detect all the memory properly, I the receive line on the serial port is stuffed, I found I can send a break by unplugging the serial terminal, and when I plug it back in again I see the boot prom prompt, but I can't type anything.

The ethernet doesn't seem to work, even though the transceiver gets powered, and the link comes on.

I give up. I'll use the keyboard and mouse on the IPX which does work, and I might just pinch the disk out of this unit, and put it in the IPX as well, since the IPX's disk's bearings are going.

Oh, the IPC has a floppy drive too, I might be able to put that in the IPX as well, not that I need it.

Other than that, it can just sit there and do nothing.

I'm not really impressed that the eBay auction said the unit had been removed from a working environment, I find that hard to believe, since:

Unit doesn't always detect memory properly, (saw lots of "memory data line test bad, try replacing Uxxx" messages).
Unit doesn't get past "testing" unless the case is open.
keyboard fuse is blown, so it can't have been used with a keyboard attached (and it came with one).
Receive line on the serial port is blown, so you can't use a terminal.

I only paid $29 for the unit, with keyboard and mouse (the keyboard/mouse go for close to that on their own) but I did pay $35 to have it couriered, I might was well have paid more for just a keyboard and mouse. Oh well.

The phone rang early while I was asleep, not getting up to answer it. If it's important, someone'll ring my mobile next, and I'll see who it is.

They didn't ring again.

I got up about 10am, and mucked around on the computer for a while, and put some tv on.

About 12.45am, my phone rang, it was my mate I went to the Brian Wilson concert with, we wanted to know about going to JB Hifi. I said I'd get ready, and meet him out there about 1.30pm.

I had a shower and got ready, and left about 1.20pm. Doubt I'll get there in 10 minutes.

I went to Jaycar on the way, and got the 8 pin mini din plug I needed for the Sparc.

I went to JB Hifi, my mate and I wandered around for a while, I ended up getting a couple of cheap DVDs, a STYX concert DVD, and a Utopia concert DVD.

After that we went across the main shopping centre, and I got some lunch.

On the way out, my mate wanted to go to the bottle shop, so we went in there, I bought a bottle of Bundy triple filtered.

We left from there, and went our own way, I went to the supermarket on the way home, got food for dinner, and some OJ to drink the Bundy with.

I got some fuel, so I'll get to work on Monday, and came home.

On the way past the showground, I thought I saw a guy packing up computer stuff. Bollocks, I need a couple of hard disks.

When I got home, I checked the wesbite, yeah, there had been a computer fair today. There are 2 on in Newcastle tomorrow, I might have to go up there.

I put the STYX concert DVD on.

I looked on the web, found the pinouts of the serial port on the Sparc IPC, and sat and made up a serial adapter, so I could plug the serial console in, that took me an hour or so.

I plugged it in, and was surprised that I'd got it right first go (the pin numbering of the 8 pin mini din socket/plug was a but cryptic, I thought I had it all arse about).

The Sparc boots, but never detects the keyboard (not that I want it to, since I don't have a monitor to plug in, I'm bidding on one on eBay though).

I realised that the Sparc only has an AUI port, no 10bT port. I've got a transceiver here somewhere, that'll let me put it on the LAN.

The transceiver used to hang around on the desk, but now I can't find it.

I spent the next hour or so looking through boxes of crap to find it, no luck.

I gave up, and sat back down, and then I spotted it on the floor under the desk. D'oh!

I plugged it in, and tried booting again, hmm, no power/link lights on the transceiver come on, after all that, it might not even work, or perhaps it's not compatible.

I gave up at this point, now after 8pm.

About 8.20pm, my mate whose birthday it was last week called me, he and his wife, and our mate from Newcastle and his wife are heading down to Iguana Joes for a drink.

If we get there before 9pm, there's no cover charge, so I sat around for a bit, thought about having some dinner, but there's not time. I ate half a packet of rice crackers, and then took off.

I went in, they weren't there yet, but they got there about 10 minutes later.

We went out to the pool table area, and had a couple of games of pool, and a couple of drinks.

There were some chicks commentating on the first game, so we invited them to play the second one, and then I played the third game against one of the chicks, and she totally beat me.

Someone had put some money on the table for the next game, so that was the end of that. She took off and said that she might have another game later.

All my mates had slowly filtered away, except for my mate's wife, I sat and talked to her for a bit, then my mate came back, and we moved away from the pool tables.

We sat outside for a bit, then my mate decided it was time for some Long Island Iced Teas, so we all got one. We were about halfway through them, when the band that had been playing took a break, and the DJ put some songs on, classic 80s stuff, it was terrific.

We hurridly finished our Teas, and then went inside to dance. We only got about 1/2 a song, and then the band came back, so we sat down again.

They did a couple of songs, and then did some 80s stuff, so we got back up to dance.

We got a couple of good songs, and then sat down again.

The chick singer in the band asked if anyone knew the Nutbush, most of the people on the dancefloor got off, and it ended up with only a couple of chicks left, then a couple more got up there.

They started the song, and only a few seconds in my mates were egging me on to get up there, so I did, it was pretty fun. Hard work though, I was stuffed at the end of it, and sat down again.

The band took another break, and there were more 80s songs, so we all ended up dancing again.

It was the same setup for the rest of the night, have a bit of a dance, the band would come back, sit out a couple, dance more etc.

We finished up about 1.30am, and all left.

I got home, played a bit of guitar again.

I checked the eBay auction for the Sun monitor I've bid on (and was winning), that finished a couple of hours ago. I got outbid by $2.50. Bastard.

I went to bed about 2am.

On the ride to work this morning, there was some sort of weird speed trap setup in one of the breakdown phone areas, there were 2 cop cars, and some device setup, looked like a surveyors camera (or whatever those things are surveyors have) I suppose it could have just been the radar or whatever though.

They were busting someone driving a Commodore as I went past.

At the end of the freeway, there were more cops, RBTing southbounders. Why would someone be driving pissed at like 9am on a Friday morning?

Got to work, finally managed to get some work done on the stuff I'm supposed to be doing, instead of the silly website I'm sick to death of.

I wandered down the street for lunch, I went into the useless Dick Smith shop nearby to get the parts I need to make an adapter for the Sparc, since it's got 8 pin mini din serial ports.

I wandered in, looking for plugs and sockets. The guy asks me if I need help,
"No, but I'm looking for mini din plugs, and a db9" I say.
"Oh, svideo" he says,
"no, 8 pin mini din" I reply.
"Oh, I don't think we have those, only in normal. What's it for, ps2?", no, that's 6 pin idiot.
"It's for a Sparc serial port" I reply, knowing damn well he has no idea what a Sparc is.

They didn't have any, they didn't even have ps2/6 pin mini dins anyway. I just bought a db9 and a backshell, and left. I don't know why I even bothered getting those, I still need to go to Jaycar to get the mini din.

I then went to the bank, and paid for the Sparc. Then I went across to Subway and got some lunch.

As I wandered back to the building after that, I went in to the newsagent and bought an instant scratchy, won nothing, what a surprise.

I left work about 5.30pm, and headed for home, I stopped in at got some food for dinner on the way home as usual. I decided to buy a bottle of Bundy for my mate, I haven't seen him since before Christmas, didn't get him anything, and it was also his Birthday on Wednesday.

I stopped in to drop off the bottle, and he was there, so I stayed for a bit, we had a couple of drinks.

My mate from Newcastle was coming down apparently, so I hung around, he turned up about 10pm.

We ended up sitting there drinking and chatting until about 3am, when my mates got into a political discussion I wasn't interested in, so I went home.

They'd mentioned going to beach tomorrow a bit earlier, so I said "give me a call in the morning" as I left.

I sat and played the guitar for a bit, and then I went to bed.

Slept late again this morning, didn't matter too much though, because I finished off the breakfast cereal yesterday, and didn't take my backpack with me yesterday, so I couldn't buy anymore last night, so there was nothing for breakfast.

I was about to take off about 8.30am, I noticed a parcel next to my bike, I think it's the SparcStation IPC I bought off eBay a few days ago.

I dragged it inside, and opened it up, yep, SparcStation, Sun mounse, and keyboard.

Wow, I haven't even paid for this yet. I sent an email chasing up the payment details yesterday, haven't heard anything back from them yet.

D'oh, the F10 key cap is missing off the keyboard, oh well.

I left it, no time for playing with it now.

The eBay auction is here.

I took off, and headed for work.

There was a speed trap on the freeway, but aimed forward, so there was no worries with slowing down for that, then a few kilometres up the road, a truck had a tyre blowout, so I had to navigate through all the bits of steel belted radial all over the road.

As I got towards work, and was waiting at the traffic lights, I was daydreaming a bit, so I didn't notice the lights turn green for a couple of seconds, I just started to take off, and some idiot with a Uhaul trailer on his car came blasting into the intersection from the right, running a red light.

If I'd been watching the lights, and taken off as soon as they turn green, I don't want to know what would have happened.

After that, the road was covered in some sort of pebbles or gravel or something, like a landscaping truck had been losing his load all along the road, but it covered the whole road.

I had to be careful to stay in the wheel tracks that had been cleared by cars driving through it all. It went for about 5 kilometres, god knows how much of it there was.

The rest of the trip was unremarkable.

I emailed a guy on the tivo mailing list about buying one of his spares a couple of months ago, but they were all gone by the time I got around to emailing him. Turns out he sent me an email about them weeks ago, but I missed it.

I emailed him to find out if he still had any, and he did have a couple, so I worked to buy one off him.

I wandered up to the bank to pay for it, the CollectingWealth Bank doesn't allow you to put a comment on a deposit, only a number, so I quickly though to put "710", the best I could spell "TIVO" with numbers :-)

I couldn't think of how to do the V with numbers, I even looked up leet speak documentation, and apparently ">" is sometimes used as a v, but it's not really a number.

I mentioned it to the guy I'm buying the tivo off, he suggested using a carat symbol (^) as a v, but I really doubt my chances of explaining a carat symbol to a bank teller, and again, it's not really a number.

It dawned on me on the way home.. 5. V being the Roman numeral for 5 :-)

I mucked around with the SparcStation a bit when I got home.

I went to plug the serial terminal into it, but found it has the two 8 pin mini din serial ports on it, instead of the single 25 pin combined serial port like the LX. I don't have any way to plug anything into the serial ports on this.

I grabbed the 13W3 adapter from my LX, that allows using a vga monitor on a sun, and plugged in one of my 17" monitors, since it has a better hope of supporting the weird Sun frame buffer resolution (fixed frequency, 1152x900, at 66Hz), than any of the other crappy monitors I have hanging around.

I tried booting it up, no video output. Hmm. The unit has the onboard B/W framebuffer, and also has an sbus framebuffer card. I was trying to use the card, so I tried using the onboard framebuffer, still no picture.

I plugged in the other 17" monitor, but it was the same.

Hmm, now I don't know if both monitors can't support the Sun resolution (quite probably not), or if there's something wrong with the Sparc. I'll have to get some parts and make up a serial adapter.

I saw a Sun monitor on eBay for $100, (shipping up to $65 though), perhaps I should just grab that, then I can run it properly.

Ok, I just went across the the infringements building across the road.

It wasn't anywhere near as bad as I was expecting.

The door was locked, so I stood there for a second wondering if they were open today, and then it was opened by the receptionist.

I went in, explained the situation, how I had tried to pay it, and then not received the letter/refund/reminder until a couple of days ago, after they were due, that I had tried to pay the reminder on the internet, but I couldn't, because it said I already had paid it, I couldn't pay at the post office, because it was overdue.

She asked me my license number, and which fine I was talking about.

I explained that I had contacted Queensland Transport with an alternate postal address, thinking it would effect all communications related to my license, but evidently not.

"Two $579 fines?" she asks,
"Do you still have your license?"
"Yes, I do" I reply.
"Are you sure? How?"
"It's an interstate license" I answered.

That made her quiet.

She said that it would have gone to State Debt Recovery, and there wasn't anything they could do at that point.

She was about to give me the number, when she decided to call someone else.

I think there had been an issue with getting some reminder notices out, effecting specific due dates, she asked the guy if the notice could be brought back from SDRO. It didn't sound promising, but when she got off the phone, she said they could get it back, if I could pay it as soon as possible.

I said I could pay it now, but they don't accept cash payments (gees! do you want me to pay this or not! I've tried to pay it three times, and you won't take my money, now, for the 4th time, you're still having problems taking it!).

I said I could go and pay it at the post office if they give me a new barcode. The woman called some other woman in, and she said something about a faxed credit card payment method, and she had to get a form for me to fill in.

While the other woman went to get the form, she asked me what sort of car it was, I told her it's a motorbike, but then said "I suppose it doesn't make any difference".

She then asked what I did for a living, "I'm an IT Consultant" I told her. "The money must be good" she commented. "Yes, it is" I replied.

The other woman came back with the "form", I was expecting some typical great long form with a million questions on it, but it was just basically:

Infringement number
Name
Credit card number
Credit card expiry
Credit card type
Amount
Signature

I was just about to start filling it in, and the woman joked that I should just give her like a thousand dollars to hang on to, and she can pay the next fine for me.

I filled the form in, and that was it. They didn't fax it or anything, gave me the reminder letter back, and said they'd sort it out.

I thought it was going to go up by $50 as a result of going to SDRO. That's what it was when I didn't pay a train fine on time, back in 2000. She told me it's $90 extra now. Jesus.

If someone had made no attempt to pay a fine, then I could understand going to SDRO and charging extra, but I tried to pay this, within a few days of getting the fine.

There was a stuff up, and then because they don't use the mailing address I advised Queensland Transport of, I don't get the reminder until after it's due. Argh.

At least it's sorted out now.

I might have to look at getting a proper mail redirection setup or something.

I woke up late this morning, after 8am.

Oh well, I was going to go in late today anyway, since I need to sort out this fine crap.

I got ready, and went to the bank, I deposited the refund cheque, and withdrew $580 to pay the fine.

I went across the post office. Lined up for ages as usual, finally got served. The woman scans the barcode on the reminder letter. "Sorry, I can't accept payment for this, it's overdue".

Terrific, thanks for nothing.

Let's see, I can't pay it online because it says I've already paid it. I can't pay it at the post office because it's now overdue, which is good, since I didn't get the reminder until after it was due.

They're totally useless. I contacted Queensland Transport in June last year, with an alternate postal address, they have no issue with mailing things to the correct address.

So let's see, they've probably gone to State Debt Recovery with this now, meaning I have to pay more, but i won't even get their fine until after it's due, and I end up back in this situation again.

I have been trying to pay this fine for three months now. I paid it within a few days of getting it, and then because they can't bother to check an address, the letters end up stuck in the mail until it's too late for me to pay. Useless.

I think I'll go across the road to the infringements bureau, and try to sort this out. I'll bet they're like the RTA, and I end up in there for an hour.

I woke up to get up and ready for work, to find it pissing down with rain outside. Ugh.

I waited for a while to see if it would stop, since I can't go anywhere, because I can't get my bike out of the driveway when it's wet, because it's so slippery. I've gone down it sideways a couple of times (sideways, not on my side, luckily) and I'm not a big fan of that.

The rain didn't stop, and the road dry up, until about 11.30am. No point now, I wouldn't get to work until nearly 1pm.

I decided to clean up instead.

I spent the day moving all the junk around, and vacuuming the carpet.

I've got a lot of junk I need to get rid of. I should start selling stuff on eBay. I'd rather give this stuff away than throw it away, it just seems like a waste.

Anyway, I spent the day cleaning, and didn't go out at all.

I changed all the ringtones in my phone, I'm sick to death of them all. I couldn't find any of the ringtones I made up ages ago, which is annoying, because there were some really good ones, and I don't have the patience to do it anymore.

I found a website with some ok rtttl tones, so I just used them.

I went to bed about 11.30pm.

Ugh, back to work..

Got up and got ready, left home about 8.15am.

Hmm, this seems very strange, there are hardly any cars on the road, I've gone about 5ks, and only seen one other car. What's going on?

I got on the freeway, it was as busy as usual, same at the fuel station, then I got back on the freeway.

I got to work, to find the carpark empty. Hmm.

I walked up to the front door, and it opened without me having to swipe my card, that might be a good sign..

Nope. Walked all around the building, not a single person in here anywhere (besides myself obviously).

I don't know why the front door opened then, that seems a bit wrong, anyone can just walk in off the street, and they've access to the stairs, lifts, the car park downstairs.

I rang one of the guys I work with, and got the building manager's mobile number, called him to let him know the door was open, and then I took off again.

I thought about going for a ride, but it was overcast, and might rain, I don't want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere if it starts raining.

I got back on the freeway again, and headed for home. I didn't want to go home though, so I got off and went to a shopping centre.

I wandered all around, looking at DVDs, I couldn't find anything worth buying. I thought about seeing a movie, but didn't see anything worth seeing.

I wandered around in there for about an hour and a half, and the only thing I bought was a cheeseburger.

I went to the supermarket on the way home, and got some food for dinner.

I came home, watched tv for a while. TiVo had recorded Gattaca from last week, so I watched that. The last couple of minutes were cut off though, because it ran late. Annoying. I thought I had it in DivX somewhere, I looked all over my lan, but couldn't find it. Hmm.

Did nothing much else for the rest of the day.

Sometime while I was asleep this morning my phone rang, it only rang once for some reason, so I couldn't have got to it in time anyway.

Whoever it was didn't leave a message, because it didn't ring again.

I got up about 11.30am. I was just mucking around on the computer, reading email etc, when it rang again. I answered this time, it was my mate, wanting to know if I wanted to go out to Terrigal today. Why not, not doing anything useful here.

I got dressed, took off, and went around to another mate's place near the station where I parked the other night.

We hung around there for a while, my mate got a coffee machine for christmas, so we had coffees, and then we all left in his car.

We went out to Terrigal, couldn't find a table in the beer garden, it was too packed out, so we just sat near the garden in the middle, near the band.

We got food, and waited for the band to start. They finally started about 2.30pm.

We sat and listened to them for a couple of hours, I went for a walk to the chocolate shop nearby, that sells chocolates from other countries, I bought a "Boost" bar, from the UK, and then walked back to the beer garden and ate it there.

We took off from there about 4.30pm.

My mate stopped in at a shopping centre on the way home to get a milkshake or something, but it was close to 5pm, all the shops were shutting, and they'd already cleaned up.

We got back in the car, and went back to my mate's place.

It looked like it was going to rain, so I grabbed my stuff and took off.

I went over to the supermarket, I didn't get a ticket this time, that's a nice change, bought some dinner, and got fuel on the way home.

I sat and watched tv for a while (tivo's full of episodes of Futurama), had a couple of beers.

My phone rang, it was my mate that works at the phone place. He was trying to back some files up from one hard disk to another.

I'd spoken to him briefly the other day (on NYE) when I was in the shopping centre, and suggested he use knoppix to copy the files.

He'd downloaded it, but couldn't work out how to burn the iso, I told him how to do that, and thought (hoped) that would be the end of it.

About 9.30pm, I was going to put Gattaca on go to bed.

My phone rang again, my mate had managed to burn the iso, boot knoppix, and mount the disks, but it wasn't copying the files. He was trying to copy all the files at once, so it was taking a while before starting.

He called me back again a little while later, still having problems. I eventually talked him through using fdisk to partition the other disk, then we tried to format it (with fat32) but it didn't seem to work properly, so I told him how to create an e2fs partition and format it, mounted it, had to chmod it so he could write on it, and he went about backing up his files.

I was just finishing on the phone when the battery ran out, end of that.

It was now about 10.30pm.

I went to bed, watched a couple more episodes of Futurama, and turned it off about 11.30pm.

I couldn't get to sleep, I put the radio on, and listened to them go on about the tsunami for about an hour and a half, I eventually got to sleep a bit atfer 1.30am.

I forgot to put a money tally in for last night..

Let's see:
Shirt, $13
6 pack of cans of Bundy/coke, $16
McDonalds dinner, $4.60
Petrol for my mate's car, $10
Bus ride, $2.60
Cover charge, $10
Heinekin, $5 something
JD and cokes $6 each (about 4 of these)
Contreau, $6
Cigars, $15.60
Water and chocolate bar, $4 something

Total: About $110. (Probably closer to $120 though).

I should have just stayed home with a few beers, watched tv and a few dvds. I think my mates are up for that next year.

Oh, someone posted on the list about making a donation to the Tsunami fund. Google have something on their front page about it too. I went to Care Australia's website, and dontated $25.

Let's see, NYE 04. What a fuck up.

I was up until 5am this morning, rescuing data from the 60gb disk in one of my pcs, with a bunch of stuff on it I need.

I got up again about 11.30am, rescued more data. I had a shower, got dressed, and went and got some McShit to eat because I was starved.

I called up my mates to find out what was going on tonight. We're going to one of our mate's places, jumping in his car, and heading down to my mate's ex gf's place near the city.

It was now 2pm, I went out to the shops to find a tacky shirt to go with my green suit.

I saw my mate in Target, chatted to him for a while, went through a few shops, eventually found a shirt, and bought it.

I saw another mate working on of the phone stands, so I chatted to him for a while.

I went back and saw my mate in Target again, chatted a bit more, then I took off and went home.

I sat around for a bit, got my stuff ready, called up my mate. I organised to ride to his place, park up there (he's right near the train station), get changed, jump in his car, and go from there.

I left, went and got more McShit on the way to his place, got there, ate it, he turned up (had been out) We both got ready, he called a couple of people, and organised for us to get picked up from his place.

I brought some drinks, so we sat and had a couple while we waited.

My mate was supposed to be there to pick one of us up (since we won't all fit in the other car) shortly.

Over an hour later (now after 7pm) the other car turned up, we all packed in to my mate's Celica, (really more of a 2 seater than a 5 seater) and we took off, now spewing about the other's not turning up.

They'd said "yeah, we'll pick someone up", and then they'd taken off, and said "pick the both of them up". Terrific, we all don't fit.

We went to McDonalds again, I didn't get anything, we couldn't find the middle seat belt when we took off, so we had a look when we got to McDonalds, turns out it's not a 5 seater it's only a 4 seater, and there is no belt in the middle. Great, we can't go like this, in case we get pulled over, with this double demerits rubbish.

No one else could drive because we'd all been drinking, and my mate driving can't drive a manual.

We went back to his place, and swapped into my other mate's car, a 5 seater automatic, and we took off again.

It's now after 8pm.

My mate's gf got an ipod for Christmas, and an itrip, so we sat in the back and played with that, it was ok, probably the best part of the whole night in retrospect.

I drank a few more cans in the car on the way down.

My mate wasn't sure of where we were supposed to be going, and went the wrong way, and we got lost.

We eventually found our way to my mate's ex gf's place outside of the city. It was now almost 10pm.

We headed in, "here's some mail" she tells me, and gives me three letters (they get sent to her place in qld, since it's where my license/rego are, since rego/insurance is cheaper).

Ah, great, a letter saying that part payment of fines can't be accepted (when I accidently put the wrong ofence code in when I paid online), another letter with the refund of the amount I paid (a cheque, great, now I have to go to the bank to deposit it to get my money back), and the third is a reminder of the fine needing to be paid, by the 22nd of December.

(I tried to pay it online this morning, but it tells me that I've already paid it. I suppose I'll have to pay it at the post office or something instead).

I had a beer, and then we decided to go around to the bus stop to get a bus into the city.

It was late, we got into the city.

My mate had been telling me about the Gaellic Club at Surry Hills, they're having a 60s/70s night, I wanted to go there.

We got off the bus, and we all started heading up the street. We're not going to get in anywhere.

It's now after 11pm.

Some chick came up and asked for directions to the "Space" nightclub. I've never heard of it. My mate start's giving her directions "go down there, left, then right", she then looks at me, so I told her the same thing, she asked how far down, I said just past the Burger King sign, she says thanks and takes off down there.

My mate and I look at each other, and both say "I've never heard of it". LOL.

It's like what Homer once said "I'm such a nice person, I gave someone directions, even though I didn't know they way".

We kept going, my mate going on about going to the Gaellic Club, I said we'd go to the first pub, find that we can't get in there, and then we'll take off.

We got to the first pub, St Patricks, and we were able to get in there, $10 covercharge.

We grabbed drinks and sat down.

There was hardly anyone in here, and not much going on.

I had a few more drinks.

It got towards midnight, no one was keeping track of it, I was watching the tv in there, and they did the countdown and the fireworks started. Couldn't hear it of course, just see it.

About 30 seconds later they stopped the music, and sid happy new year.

Why did we bother coming down here, I could have watched the fireworks on tv at home.

I had a couple more drinks, and then wanted to go down to the Gaellic Club. It took me about 10 minutes to convince my mate to go down there, we came out, and decided it was futile. The street was a sea of people, the cars weren't going anywhere, so we're not going to get a taxi down there.

We went back inside, had more drinks.

I went across the road a bit later, and bought a couple of cigars, and went back. We smoked them, they were cheap and nasty. I started to feel sick not long after.

I went out again, got some water across the road, and had a chocolate bar while I got some fresh air.

I went back in, felt sick again.

The music was now really crap, I said I was going home, and left just before 3am.

I walked down to Central station, got there, relieved myself, came out, checked the board, the train goes at 3.17, it's now 3.18. There was a line at the ticket machine, and I only had a $50 note. It can't give me enough change.

I looked, the train was there, I was about to go for it, and it left. Great.

I went back to the board, the next train is at 4.50am. An hour and a half away.

I've nothing to do, so I wandered back to the pub again. It took me nearly 20 minutes to get back, so I figure it's almost 2 kilometres.

When I got back, some of my mates had come outside. I went over, they were trying to work out what to do.

We stood there for a few minutes, I said the next train was now about an hour away.

We eventually started heading back to the station.

On the way back we went into McDonalds, I was feeling too seedy to eat anything. They got their food and we kept going.

We got a couple of minutes down the road, and some people started punching on. We got away from that as quick as possible.

The cops went running in, and shut it down.

One of my mate's had piss bolted across the road, my other mate and I had just gone back up the street a bit, so we started back down again.

We walked right past it, there were 4 cops in there, one cop was holding a chick that was out of control, he eventually had to slam her against the wall to control her, 2 other cops were on top of a guy on the ground, one of the cops with his knee on the back of the guy's head, as they handcuffed him.

The other cop was just holding someone else back.

We kept going, got back to the station. There was now a massive line for the ticket machines, I still don't have small enough notes, and the train goes in less than 10 minutes. Bugger getting a ticket then.

I checked my wallet, I had a couple of old tickets in there, so I just held one while I walked through the open ticket gates, since there were train guards standing near them.

We got on the train, found seats. The train left a few minutes later. There were no ticket inspectors on the train last year, and everyone's asleep anyway, and I doubt they have tickets. A ticket inspector would get lynched.

About halfway home the sun started coming up. We got to Gosford station just before 7am, we staggered up the stairs.

No one had tickets, everyone was climbing over the gate, and the ticket gates, idiots, you just push the barriers open.

The gates made a weird grinding noise when you did that, which my mate found hilarious, and was unable to speak for laughing for several minutes.

We got back to his place, about 2 minutes later my mate's car turned up, the others we gave up waiting for had gone back, got in his car, and driven home, and ended up only a few minutes later, so after all that, we could have come back in the car.

I got changed, and rode home. It was now just after 7am.

I sat around for a while, drinking some water, I eventually went to bed just before 8am.

I got back up at about 2.30pm.

I still feel seedy, and I can still smell the nasty cigar. I'm sure I said this last year, I don't think I'll bother with cigars again.