I woke up, it was about 9.30am. I meant to get up, but I was tired, and the boring radio made me fall alseep again, until about 10.30am. Crud, very late for work now.

I got up, and got ready, had a shower, got dressed etc.

When I came out of the bathroom, my phone rang, it was a message someone had left. It was from my mate in Newcastle, something about calling his phone.

I called him back, and he answered. I spoke to him for a bit, and I found out that he'd called my phone, from a public phone, to ask me to call his mobile phone, because he'd lost it somewhere. Someone had found it, and handed it in, so I obviously didn't have to worry at that point.

He'd already rung our other mate though, who was up there with us, and woken him up, because he works night shift, so he wasn't terribly impressed.

My mate was actually in court today, to deal with the drink driving etc, when he crashed my bike. I left him alone, to deal with whatever he had to deal with there, I said I'd speak to him later.

I sat down on the computer, and checked my email etc. My phone rang again, it was the bike place where I've been getting my bike serviced. The guy hadn't been able to find the seal he'd lost, and so wanted to know which one they'd replaced, and which one he had to reorder.

I had to go around there for him to see, and I told him that I was going to be around there shortly anyway, because I wanted to talk to them. I got off the phone after that.

I had some breakfast, and finished geting ready, and then I headed out. I rode around to the bike place, and parked outside the entrance to the workshop.

The guy came out and had a look, worked out which seal he'd replaced, and not, and then we went inside and had a chat.

I told him that I wanted to book in to get my bike fixed this week, because I want to take off on Friday to go up to Queensland with my mate and his wife.

I said that I thought I might have been pushing it a bit, and if he'd agreed, then I would have had to take my bike elsewhere to get fixed up, but he said that he could probably fit it in this week.

I told him that all that needed doing was replacing the seal, installing new clutch plates, and a new back brake would be good too.

He said that didn't sound too hard, and that they should be able to fit me in towards the end of the week.

He got right on the phone to the wholesaler while I was there, telling the guy I needed the stuff to be fitted on Thursday, and he said he'd try to get the stuff out today.

The guy said he'd have a look for the seal, he'd misplaced it since Christmas, and he'd try to find it to fit it on Thursday.

I left there, and I went back home.

I'd seen on hackaday.com, something about a portable USB battery charger thingy, good for phones and ipods etc. I thought that something like this would be handy, since I'll be away from computers for a few days, and while on the road, I won't have any way to charge my ipod, and the battery only lasts for abnout 10 hours, and we could be going longer than that in one day.

I'd decided to make one, it's not all that hard, basically just a 5v regulator, a 9v battery, a usb socket, and a box to put it all in. I'd decided to add a power switch, and an LED (and dropping resistor) to show when it was on, so I went through the jaycar catalogue, found all the cat numbers off the parts, and took off to go and get them.

I rode out the Erina, went into jaycar, and started grabbing all the bits, no great issue, it was only about $15 worth of stuff.

I went into Erina Fair after this. There was a good looking chick having a smoke in the car park when I turned up, so I was trying to look cool, but the kickstand on my bike jammed, and I nearly dropped my bike while parking it, that must have looked really impressive.

I had some WD40 in the saddlebag, so I sprayed that on the kickstand to stop it from jamming again. After that, I noticed the chick was gone, so she probably didn't see any of it anyway, or had to go away to piss herself laughing.

I went in, and I went around to the hairdresser I go to. I asked the guy about getting a green mohawk done, but that it was probably a bit late in the day (now after 1pm), he said I should come back on Friday, and I said I'd be half way to Queensland then, so we arranged it for Thursday, at 12.30pm.

Hmm, I have to come back 3 days later, just because I'm an hour too late today, oh well, I'm not going to work on Thursday anyway, since my bike is in getting serviced, and I'd nothing better to do while I wait, I'd just be sitting around at home, like I usually do while I wait for my bike to get serviced, sounds fine.

I went around and got some lunch in the food court, and then I went back to my bike, and I took off, and rode home.

I spent the rest of the afternoon making up the usb charger, mounting it all in a box. While I was doing it though, I got a bit carried away with the superglue I was using to mount everything, and the switch ended up full of glue, so it wasn't a switch for very much longer.

Once it was done, it looked like it should work, I tested it with the meter, there was a bit more than 5v coming out of the regulator, but I figured that was because there was no load.

I plugged the ipod in, and it sort of recognised it.. it would change to the "do not disconnect" screen, but it wouldn't charge. Hmm.

I looked back at the instructions for the charger, and someone said that ipod minis need the usb data lines tied to ground to charge. I made that modification, and then tried again, but it made no difference, it did exactly the same thing.

I did a bit more reading, and found on some other page, someone saying that the ipod mini will only charge off usb when the data lines are connected to a host, ie it won't charge off a powered usb hub unless the hub is attached to a pc. Great, this is now totally useless, what a waste of time.

I had thought about the fact that the standalone charger that comes with it has a firewire socket, but figured it would still charge off usb, because I thought the power pins on the dock connector on the ipod would be common.

When I investigated further though, I realised that this wouldn't be the case, because usb is 5v, and firewire is 12v.

I looked around, and found that you can make a firewire charger too, similarly, it's just 2x 9v batteries, attached to a 12v regulator, and a firewire socket. I'll have to try to find a place to get the parts, and time to make it up, in the next few days.

I had a couple of drinks, and sat around watching tv for a bit.

I'd also bought a basic preamp kit at jaycar, I'm hoping it will boost the microphone level up to line level, so I can use 2 microphones in the line in on the sound card (in that recording box I still haven't got going properly).

I sat and put that together, but then couldn't be bothered to find a power adapter to run it off.

I watched more tv, cooked some dinner, ate it, and watched more tv.

I went to bed some time after that, don't know what time.

I woke up about midday, and I got up.

I could hear that the others were already up, and getting ready.

I went out, they'd got their stuff together. I got an sms on my phone, it was my mate (whose place we were staying at), just letting me know his new number, because he had got his new phone this morning.

The person had turned up at 9.30am, and rather than wake us all up, my mate had gone and waited outside, and dealt with the person out there.

I updated my phone book, and then I went back out with the others and they left a few minutes later, saying they were going down the road to get some breakfast.

I went and had a shower, and got ready to leave. As usual, I was feeling a bit seedy this morning, I felt better after the shower.

I went out, got ready, and went down to my bike. I called up my mate to find out where he and his wife had gone for breakfast, they were in a cafe down on Darby St. I said I'd be down there in a minute.

The people living in one of the other units in the building were moving out, so they had a truck parked out the front of the building, and they'd unloaded all the stuff they needed to secure all their stuff on the truck, ropes and tarps etc.

Once of the tarps had blown across, and was against my bike. They'd seen me come down, and it was pretty obvious I'd be riding, since I was wearing a leather jacket and holding a helmet, but they'd not bothered to come and move their tarp, so I kicked it out of the way, and left.

I took off down the road to find where my mate and his wife had gone for breakfast, I spotted them sitting at a footpath table at one of the cafes, I found a spot a little bit further up the street, where there were a couple of other bikes parked.

I locked my helmet to my bike, and then I walked back to the cafe they were at.

They'd already ordered, so I went in to look at a menu, worked out what I wanted, and stuck it on the table order at the counter. I went back and sat outside with the others.

I chatted to them for a bit, and a little while later the food started coming out. I knew my food would be a few minutes behind, since I'd ordered later, so I just sat and waited.

It got to the point where it was ridiculous though. My mate had ordered a big breakfast, sausages, eggs, bacon etc, and he'd nearly finished it, and all I'd ordered was some french toast.

I went into the counter, and asked what was going on, they said there was a bit of a holdup in the kitchen at the moment, but that they hadn't forgotten. My mate had asked me to order a glass of orange juice for him, so I did.

I went back and sat down to wait after that. My food came out another short while after that, along with my mate's glass of orange juice.

I ate the food, it was pretty good, but $10 is a bit rich for some french toast and a banana, anyway. When we'd finished, my mate went into pay, and I went across the road to an ATM, because I didn't have much cash in my wallet, and I might decide to buy something at the computer fair, and I'm sick of paying credit card charges, because of being disorganised.

I was just finishing up at the atm when my mate came across, because he'd parked over near here somewhere, he gave my my jacket that I'd left on the chair (thinking I'd be back from the atm before he was finished paying) and then I crossed back, walked to my bike, and got ready to go.

I waited for my mate to come out, because I was going to follow him to the fair. I waited there for a few minutes, and I was just thinking I'd go across to find out what was going on, when I heard him coming out, so I got ready, and then I followed him.

We rode to the basketball stadium where the computer fair, and looked for a parking spot. We started out on the grass, but then because we were worried that it would rain again (it had rained during the night), and the ground was a bit soggy, we didn't want to risk our bikes kickstands sinking, and falling over. (I wasn't that worried, since my bike has a proper foot on the kickstand, to distribute the weight a bit, but my mate's sports bike only has a silly little stand).

We rode up a hill, and into the asphalted area of the parking lot, into the back of a spot, so we parked there. We were getting off our bikes, and some woman in a bus (any vehicle that seats more than 4 in comfort is a bus, this looked like it seated about 10) in the spot next to us hung out her window, and said that we couldn't park there, because it was staff parking.

She just didn't politely ask us to move or anything, it was just "you can't park there" basically. My mate asked what staff were parking there, and she said "basketball staff", my mate asked if there were any working today, and she said yes. She then continued on bitching at us.

There was an empty spot just across from us, that wasn't staff parking, so we decided to move there. I was still on my bike, and would have just moved straight across, but my mate was parked in front of me, and he'd got off and locked his helmet, so I had to wait for him to get back on, before I could move.

He started to unlock his helmet, and the woman continued bitching, and my mate told her to keep her panties on, we were moving, and then someone came and swung into the spot we were going to move to. We both said, "oh well", and my mate relocaked his helmet, I got off, and locked my helmet, and we went over to the door.

We paid the entry, and went in, and headed across to speak to the guy we were getting the parts off, a monitor and a dvd burner and stuff. We spotted him out the back having a smoke, so we wandered over there to speak to him. My mate jumped out the back with him, and had a smoke.

While we stood there, we heard an announcement over the PA, "would people riding motorbikes.." and our number plates were read out "please move your bikes from the staff parking" or some crap.

Yeah, that announcement is going to make me race out and move my bike, I'm sure. We continued standing there, my mate kept smoking. A couple of minutes later, the security guard came over, and asked us if we were riding a yamaha and a honda.

My mate said that yes, we were, and then the guard told us that we had to move. My mate started going on about the silly bitch that had been whinging at us, but the guy didn't care, he just went on about how "they'd put a call over the PA" so we had to move.

"Yeah whatever" was our response to that. A few seconds later, the guard continued, "you'll have to move", and my mate's like "yeah, I'll just finish my smoke".

The guard shut up, and just stood there. My mate finished his smoke, put it out, and then we headed back to our bikes, the guard walking in front of us.

We jumped on our bikes, and moved them around to another spot that was free, and then we went back inside, and didn't acknowledge the guard, now standing back on the door.

We went back to see the guy we'd come to see, and sorted out getting some stuff from him. We were supposed to be getting a monitor from him, but he'd sold them all. He went around to see if any other stall holders had any stock left (which was pretty good) we went around looking as well.

We didn't end up finding anyone else with any left. We got the rest of the parts, a case, keyboard and mouse, dvd burner, and some other stuff.

While we were wandering around, I saw a guy selling a few IBM NetStations. They looked fairly interesting, $60 or something he wanted for them. They just looked like some sort of basic pc, diskless, that would probably be a pretty groovy X terminal.

I thought about buying one, but then figured it's just more crap that I don't need. I'd muck around with it for a while, getting it working, and then it would just sit there, and I'd never actually use it.

Once my mate had everything he needed, we left the fair. We went back to our bikes. I said I was going back to our mate's place (where we'd stayed) because he needed a computer fixed.

I said I'd go and sort that out, and then when I finished up there, I'd shoot down the coast to his place, and help him sort out computer stuff.

We both took off, and I headed back. I got in, and started working on the computer. My mate had put the hard drive in that I'd got him to buy a few weeks before, but he hadn't partitioned it, or formatted it or anything, so couldn't use it.

I sorted that out, and then went about installing windows on the drive. I'd taken a CD with me, just with 95/98 on it, because I thought he had been wanting to get going some crappy old computer, not a PII or whatever this was. Oh well, nothing else here to install, so got no choice.

I started copying the cab files to the hard disk, and that was taking forever, and then it crapped out all together. I'm pretty sure the cdrom drive in this machine is had it.

I got a cdrom out of one of the other old computers he had there, and started putting that in the machine. I noticed that the power supply was red hot. What the hell's going on here?

When I investigated, I found that the fan wasn't spinning in the power supply. My mate said he knew about that. Terrific, thanks for letting me know. I took the power supply out of another pc (we're not using that pc, because it's got filled with virii, and I don't have my usb thumb drive with the virus scanner on it, and I'm not waiting to download it over dialup).

I swapped the power supplies out, finished swapping the cdroms across, and had another go copying the files. This worked slightly better, but then it crapped out again. This cdrom is stuffed too.

I gave up, and I took the dvd rom out of the other machine, put that in this one, started all over again, and this time got a lot further, it was faster, but then right at the end, xcopy stuffed up yet again. I redid the whole thing, using copy, instead of xcopy.

This worked, and then I was able to start the install. I got most of the way through the install, and then windows came up with some error, unable to read a cab file. Terrific. I thought I was stuffed at that point, but it continued through, and the install didn't exit.

Who knows what happened there, it was probably copying something useless, like wallpapers or something, and so it didn't care. It got a bit futher, and came up and asked for the product key.

I used to be able to remember this, but now I wasn't sure, since I haven't had to do this for about 18 months now. I put in what I thought it was, but it wasn't right. Hmm, now how do I check.. it's in a text file on the cd.

I had to get the other pc going. First I wasted a few minutes trying to reoil the fan in the power supply, so the computer wouldn't blow up, running off an overheating power supply, that didn't even work, it had been seized up for so long, that the motor was burned out.

I gave up, just plugged it into the pc, put a cdrom attached, and booted up the other machine with a dos boot disk, and then I was able to look in the text file, grab the product key, and shut the machine off again.

I swapped the monitor and keyboard and stuff back to the other pc, put the right code in, and finished the install.

Once that was done, it rebooted etc, and I setup the modem. We had to get the internet settings, my mate didn't know the dialup number or anything, so we had to call up their support number (on Sunday), to find out the dialup number. Luckily, they'd changed it recently, so the new number was part of the message when you ended up on the menu system, so we didn't have to wait to talk to anyone.

They could have listed the dialup number in the phonebook (though it would have been the old one) that would have been a bit more organised.

Note: This is an incredibly long blog to write, I'm sick of writing it already, and I've still got hours of the day left to blog.

Anyway, we got the number, and I setup a dialup connection, but then my mate couldn't remember his username and password properly. We tried to connect 5 or 6 times, using different details, no luck, it just kept kicking us out.

Eventually my mate says "is the password case sensitive?" ugh. After we put it in with the correct case, we got on the first time.

I went and found the drivers for the video card (so I could get rid of the hideous 640x480 16 colours we were stuck in), found them, waited 15 minutes for them to download, installed them.

Rebooted at that point, and it came up fine. I fiddled around a little bit more with the machine, but everything was basically working, so I said my mate could install anything he needed, and work it from there.

I got all my stuff together, and I headed down to my bike to leave.

My mate came down with me, and we chatted a bit while I loaded up my bike.

I took off, and I rode down the coast home. I dropped off my stuff, and then I went out again, around to my mate's place, to fix up some computer stuff for him.

We spent a couple of hours mucking around with the computers, my mate had swapped his pc into a new case, but it didn't work (he called me about this on Thursday night).

I poked around in there for a bit, ended up basically pulling the whole machine apart again, it was only when I thought that perhaps the front panel switches/LEDs had been connected wrong, and were stopping the machine from booting, that I found the problem.

I've seen this before, working with a badly labelled motherboard, I connected all the front panel leads around the wrong way, since the 2 rows of pins were labelled ass about, and this resulted in all the wires melting.

I pulled all the front panel leads off, and then went to short the power switch pins, to attempt to turn the machine on, and then I found that the power switch pins weren't part of the main block, where the reset button and LEDs all connect.

The power switch hadn't been connected the whole time.. there'd been nothing wrong, except that there was no way to turn the machine on, not that it wasn't turning on.

Argh. I put the whole machine back together (I'd even pulled out the secondary voltage regulator off the board and everything), this time I connected the power switch, and it booted up first go.

After that I moved over to working on some other stuff he had there, getting a PC ready to go up to Bundaberg, for his brother in law.

This was easy stuff, we just had to mount a motherboard, and some drives, plug it all in. We'd already used this machine, so it already had an OS on it, I didn't have to worry about any of the software stuff.

I set that PC up, networked to the other PC, so my mate could make sure he'd moved all the data off it that he wanted.

We had dinner after that, I think we had Chinese, my mate went up to the local Chinese restaurant, and got takeaway.

I wouldn't have minded a beer, and my mate went down to the bottlo to get some (he'd already gone to the one near the restaurant, but they were closed), but the other bottlo was closed too.

After dinner, we chatted for a bit, and then I found my belt, that I'd left here from when I'd had a shower after getting caught in the storm on the way back from the beach, grabbed that, and I left, and went home.

I probably bummed around at home for a bit, and then went to bed.

I planned to go to the Bikes, Blues, and Tattoos festival in Maitland today, so I got up fairly early, around 9am, and got ready.

I bummed around for a bit, and I ended up leaving around 11am.

I headed to Newcastle, as I'd arranged with my mate in Newcastle to pick him up, and give him a lift over to Maitland to the show.

I went up the old way, via the Pacific Highway, rather than the freeway, because I'm sick of the freeway, since I'm on it everyday.

I got stuck behind a few slow drivers, and it ended up taking me an hour and a half to get to Newcastle, so much for it being faster than going up the freeway, and having to get across the link rd into Newcastle.

I parked out the front of the building my mate lives in, and went up, and knocked on the door. He came and answered it, half dressed.

Hmm, obviously not ready. Terrific. I was hoping he would be ready, so we could just go straight across to Maitland, and the festival.

He was in the middle of sanding a set of book shelves in the kitchen, and some other similar work, he'd replaced the shelves under the sink, and had done some painting.

I sat down to wait, he finished up what he was doing, and then he went and had a shower and got dressed. After that, he picked up his tools that were all over the place, and grabbed his helmet (the one that was damaged when he crashed my bike).

He was in the process of getting a new phone, someone was coming to get the contracts and give him the phone (and one for his wife) today, so he told his wife that he'd signed everything, and that she just had to give them the contracts, and get the phones.

We went down and jumped on the bike, and took off. It was now nearly 1.30pm, and I'd wanted to be at the festival by now.

We went down the hill, and got a short while away from his house, and he told me that he'd left his money behind. Argh. I said I didn't care, and then followed it up by saying that I would lend him money, and he could pay me back when we got back here tonight.

I kept going, and then got to a set of traffic lights, and ended up waiting for about 5 minutes to turn, After that, I got stuck stopping at every single set of traffic lights on the way out of Maitland, it was so annoying.

We finally got out, and went across the pacific highway, into Maitland.

We rode to the showground, it said that parking was a gold coin donation. I grabbed $2 out of my pocket, and gave it to my mate, to give to the biker on the gates collecting the money, he gave it to him, but then he didn't flag me in, and someone said something about $20.

I couldn't hear properly, so I ripped off my helmet, and took out my earbuds (I'd been listening to my ipod on the way across) and then I was able to speak to the guy.

He told me that this was also entry to the show, and that was $20 each. I gave him a $50 note, he gave me my change (I paid for both of us, because my mate didn't have any money on him), and asked if I could park in there.

The guy made some smartass comment like "you want to park _that_?", because I'm riding a Yamaha, and not a Harley.

I rode in, and parked amongst the cars, not knowing what was going on. I locked my helmet on, and we wandered across into the rest of the show.

We looked at all the bikes parked in the middle on the way, there was probably 200 harleys, and a few other bikes amongst them, a few jap bikes, yamahas, hondas etc.

We walked to the beer counter, and got a couple of cans of bundy and coke.

We wandered through a pavilion, in there was parked a couple of supercharged cars. Big V8 engines, with braided steel cables and hoses, looked pretty cool.

We went through there, and on the other side was the food place. We got in the line to wait, since there was quite a few people trying to get food.

We stood in the line and chatted for a bit. When I got served, I got a steak sandwich. We wandered back over to the main area we'd come through before, near the main tent where the tables and chairs were, and the grass, and the stage.

We found an empty table, sat down and ate, and finished our drinks.

We went and looked at all the bikes again, because a few more had parked up since we got there.

We wandered back over near the main tent again, past some stalls, having a quick look at the stalls. We walked back through the pavilion with the couple of supercharged cars in it, and went into another pavilion. This one was full of bikes, they were in there for judging.

We walked through there, and looked at all the bikes, there were a few that really stuck out as being cool, the paintjobs were terrific, one was yellow with purple flames on it, another was a terrific orange, and another was a really cool lime green.

We wandered back out of there, and back to the stalls. We had another quick look at them, and they announced a tattoo competition.

We went over and sat on the grass, and they had a few people go up on stage to show their tattoos, it was the blokes first, so I didn't look to closely at that, they all looked pretty much the same, just covered in tattoos.

After that, was a women's competition, only 4 women got up there, and they were all pretty rough looking.

After that, a band started up, so we sat and listened to some blues for a bit.

We wandered back down, and looked at the bikes for judging again, and we voted on them, because one of the awards was a people's choice award.

We wandered around a bit more after that, we'd had a few more cans too.

I went back and looked at the bikes parked again, and I was getting a bit hot, I was sick of walking around wearing my jacket, because it was too hot. I went back, and I moved my bike over to where all the other bikes were parked, instead of parking in the car section.

Once I'd done that, I took my jacket off, and stuck it on my bike, and we walked back over to the main area again.

When we got back over, there were 3 chicks wandering around with a 4L bottle of Beam, and selling raffle tickets to win it, I bought a ticket, and my mate did too.

We went and sat on the grass again, and listened to some more blues, my other mate who'd been planning to come up there today (and to go to the computer fair tomorrow) called me, he said he was leaving, and wanted to know how to get there.

I gave him directions, he said he'd probably be there in about an hour, and I got off the phone.

We listened to so more blues, and then wandered through the stalls again, having a better look this time. One place does custom exhausts and stuff, so we got a card off them, my mate spoke to them for a bit, finding out about getting an exhaust to fix my bike that he pranged.

We wandered around a bit more, went and got more food.

I had bugger all money left at this point, after paying for admission, a few cans, and food. I thought about going to get more money, somewhere in Maitland, but I'd had a few drinks, so I shouldn't have been riding anywhere.

We sat on the grass and listened to more blues. My mate kept going on about going to get more money, and he wanted cigarettes or something, but I said that our other mate would be there shortly anyway,

We just sat on the grass, and listened to the blues, it was about 45 minutes after that, a little before 6pm, that our other mate turned up.

We hung around for a short while, went down to look at the competition bikes, but most of them had been moved out of the pavilion, must be because they are about to draw it, and they'll have the winning ones up there when they present the trophies or whatever.

We wandered through the stalls, and back up to the grass, we waited there for a bit, and they started presenting the awards.

They didn't have the bikes up there, they were just saying the number of the bike (there were stickers on the bikes, with numbers on them, for you to specify which bike you wanted to vote on) that had won, and who was the owner etc, at which point the person responsible would wander up, get the trophy, and go and sit down again.

It was a bit rough, we didn't know which bikes had won (because didn't remember all the numbers), and the people didn't really do anything, just grabbed the trophy and went and sat down again, barely anyone was even clapping when they got the trophy.

They judged the tattoo stuff after that, and presented the trophies for that, once that was done, they picked the ticket to win the bottle of Beam, my ticket was about 40 numbers off, so I bought my ticket a bit early :-)

We stood there for a while after that, a few bikes were being ridden around, so we stayed out of the way of those, and then we left.

I went across to my bike, jumped on, and rode it to the exit gate.

A few other bikes turned up there at the same time, and went out the entrance, the bikers on the gate got annoyed, I waited, they opened the exit gate, and then I went out.

I wasn't wearing my helmet or anything, so I pulled over, and put all my gear on. I went back, and got a stamp to come back in, in case we decided to come back, because I thought we were just going to have something to eat etc.

I went back to my bike, jumped on, my mate jumped on the back, and then we rode through Maitland, and went to McDonalds in the shopping centre.

As we pulled up, and parked, a paddy wagon parked, the cops got out, and were looking at us. They didn't come over, or say anything, so we went in, ordered, got our food, and went and sat outside.

I'd ordered a Sprite, for some reason, through the lid, it looked yellow, when I took the lid off, I found that it was brown. WTF?

I went back in, and asked what was going on, apparently some idiot had connected the hoses for the soft drink machine the wrong way, and put Coke in the Sprite run.

They got me another drink, from the other drink machine.

I went back outside, ate my meal. I was getting a headache.

We ended up sitting there for about 1/2 hour, chatting, and then we decided that we'd seen enough of the festival, and we decided to go back to Newcastle.

We bummed around a bit more, and then we went and jumped back on the bikes, and we rode to Newcastle.

We parked up, went inside my mate's place, and sat down.

We poured ourselves a couple of drinks, and then just sat around for a while. We tried to put some CDs on, but the CD player needs the laser lens cleaned or something, and it wouldn't recognise whan any CDs were in it.

We ended up putting the radio on, Triple J, and just chilled out.

Apparently my mate hadn't got his new phone, the person had come to sort it out, but he had to be there, and had to sign something else apparently, so they couldn't do it, and the person was going to come back at 9.30am tomorrow.

About an hour later, my mate's wife, who was headed up there, called up (my mate) asking the way, she'd missed the turn, and got lost. She spoke to my other mate, whose place it was, since he lives in the area obviously, and got directions.

A few minutes later, she called me, because she tried to ring my mate (her husband) but his phone hadn't rung or something.

She was now outside, but didn't know what building we were in, or what apartment etc, so I wandered out.

I went up to the car, helped her grab stuff out that she'd brought up, food, and clothes etc, because we were all staying up here tonight, and then we went back inside.

We sta around for another while, and then we got ready, and we went out to get something to eat.

We decided to head down to Darby St, since there's stacks of restaurants along there.

On the way down the road (it was about a 5 minute walk), my mate (whose place we were staying at) gave his wife a piggy back ride down the road.

I was just walking along, and my other mate jumped on my back, and then I chased our other mate down the road for a bit, trying to catch up to him.

After that, I was a bit stuffed. We got down to Darby St, and wandered along looking for something to eat. No one could decide what they wanted.

I wasn't really hungry, because I had a bad headache, and was feeling a bit crook. We wandered up and down the road, I was getting fed up, can someone just decide what they want to eat.

My mate finally decided to get a pizza. He went in and ordered, and I sat on the seat outside on the street, and waited.

He came out a couple of minutes later, and then we sat there waiting for the pizza. We chatted for a while, and then the pizza was ready. My mate went in and grabbed it, and came back out.

He offered me some, and I realised that it was a thin and crispy base. Ugh. I'm not a picky eater these days, there are only about 2 things I won't eat, and that's fat, like hangs off a steak, and thin and crispy pizza base.

I can't stand it, it's like a SAO biscuit, with topping, disgusting.

I was now pretty pissed off. I didn't say anything though.

We walked down the road to find the others, they were sitting in a coffee shop.

My mate offered our other mate some of the pizza, he also refused to eat it.

We now all sort of had the shits with each other, but no one was saying anything about it.

We decided to go to the pub. We started walking down the road. I was now pretty damn pissed off. I had a headache, I was tired, I was hot, and I felt sick. Dragging round the pubs was the last thing I wanted to do.

We went into the pub, found a place to sit. I didn't get anything to drink, so I just sat there.

A few minutes later, my mate had finished his drink, and wanted another one, he gave me some money, and told me to go and get him another drink, and get myself something.

I went over to the bar, waited for ages, and got a couple of drinks.

I went back, and we drank them, he gave me more money, and sent me to get more.

This time it took bloody ages to get served, it was ridiculous. I was waiting at the bar for at least 10 minutes. I eventually got served, went back, and found that everyone had moved.

They'd found a better seat, so had moved, I sat down, we finished our drinks.

I was starting to cheer up a bit, and would have rathered stay there, but someone decided that we should move to some other pub (uh oh, here we go again).

We got up, left, and started wandering to another pub.

We went over the railway, and got into the line to go into a club called Fanny's. While we were waiting in line, someone started talking to the chicks waiting in the line in front of us, and asked them what the music was like in there, and they said that the music was mutch better at a pub in King St.

We realised at this point, that there was a $15 covercharge to get in. I don't think I had $15 on me even, and wasn't too impressed with the idea of paying that much to get in to some club that seems like it's going to be overcrowded, smoky, too loud, and playing shitty music.

My mate said he wasn't going to pay that to go in, so that was the end of that, and we got out of the line, and started wandering off.

I sent an sms to the assistant DBA, saying we had been going to go into Fanny's, because it's been a running gag at work, about going to Fanny's.

We walked over near the waterfront, there's a pub there, but it was totally packed out too. I didn't even want to think about squashing in there, and then having to wait ages for a drink.

We kept going. We were going to walk over another railway footbridge, but our mate who lives there said that the rails ended a little bit further up the road, and then we could just walk around.

We kept going, and we walked around the end of the rails, an back towards town on the other side. When we got near the railway station, there was barbecue setup.

We got closer, and found that there was some good organisation going on, they had a free sausage sizzle going on, it said that "donations were not required, or expected", but we all put a couple of bucks in anyway, we got sausage sandwiches.

They had chairs setup, so we sat down and ate, and had a bit of a chat.

They also had a breathaliser there, and you didn't have to pay to use it, like you usually do.

It was also the nightride bus service stop, and there were people there to tell you which bus to get on depending on where you wanted to go.

Obviously they're targetting drink driving, and I think the way they've done it is going to work.

Once we'd finished our food, we kept wandering.

We started looking for the next pub to go into.

My mate and his wife (whose place we were staying at) had an argument, and my mate's wife took off ahead of us.

We kept walking along, we got to another pub eventually, with a huge line to get in. Ugh, I cannot be bothered, and I need to go to the loo. There were some public toilets, so I went there.

My mate got in the line to go in, his wife sat down on a bench. I sat down next to her, only because I didn't want to wait in the line, and didn't want to go in the pub.

My other mate, and his wife, had been in the line with my other mate, they got out of the line, and came over to find out what was going on.

Our other mate, by this time, had managed to get into the pub. We sat and waited for a while, hoping he would figure out that we weren't in there, and come out, because he was the only one with keys to his place, and our stuff was in there.

We were all so pissed off now, that we talked about going back and getting our stuff, and leaving, and going and finding a motel or something, because we didn't want to deal with their squabbling.

While we were sitting there, some idiots were hanging around behind the seat we were sitting on, and one of them fell over, or got pushed over or something, at any rate, he fell down behind the seat, and hit it on his way down, so we were all on edge, not knowing what was going on behind us.

My mate jumped up, he does security for hosptials, so he deals with this crap all the time. He ended up helping pick up the guy from behind the seat, and sending them all on their way.

He sat down again, and we continued waiting. Our mate's wife got up, and went over, and managed to get in the club, bypassing the line. She came back out a minute later. My mate said that he was thinking about going, and she said that she had the keys.

We got up, and started walking back, our mate had given her the keys, and stayed in there.

We got about 1/4 of the way back, and realised our mate was coming up behind us. We slowed so he could catch up, and then it was really tense, he was wanting to talk about stuff, but none of use were having a bar of it, and wouldn't say anything.

We got about 1/2 the way back, and we realised that our mate and his wife (who had been arguing) had dropped right back, and now it was just my other mate, and his wife.

We got back to the place we were staying, and we ended up sitting out on the footpath out the front, waiting, because we didn't have the keys, and couldn't get in.

I think we sat there for about 1/2 hour, and then our mate turned up, without his wife, and we spoke to him for a minute, and then we all went inside.

Someone put the tv on, and we sta and watched Rage for a couple of hours.

I felt a bit tired, so I went into the spare room (my mate and his wife were staying on the sofa bed in the loungeroom, and I'd been lying on the floor), I watched a bit more Rage on the tv in there, and then I turned it off and went to sleep, about 4am I think it was.

I woke up again about 9.30am (well, can't really call it waking up, I'd been half awake listening to the guy I was sharing the room with snore all night).

I got up, and I had a shower, and got dressed, I had a cup of tea in the hotel, and then I walked up the road with the email guy to work.

All the others jumped in the guy from upstair's car, and drove up to work, but the walk is only a couple of minutes, and I could do with the bit of fresh air and exercise anyway.

I got to work, and was able to get straight in to coding, picking up where I left off last night, before heading off down to the pub etc.

The DBA came to see me, and he said that I was looking rather healthy, a bit more so than the rest of the crew that had made their way to work.

He wanted to ask me something about the development instance of Oracle, because they wanted to do an update from production to development, but I told him that I wasn't using the development instance, so they could do what they liked in relation to the database the exists on their for my use.

I did a bit more work, and then I decided I needed some sugar, so I went across the road, and bought a bit of rocky road from the cafe. I came back to work, and was on my way to my desk when I bumped into the guy who had too much to drink last night, , he looked a bit worse for wear, after last night.

We just sort of nodded at each other, and kept going. I don't think he remembered (or wanted to) what had gone on last night. All I knew was, that I'd pulled a muscle in my arm grabbing him and stopping him from smashing his face into the brick wall.

I got back to my desk, worked a bit more, and then I went upstairs to see what was going on, in regards to lunch etc.

The chick had her farewell card there, and was going on at me to sign it. I was trying to think of something profound to write on it, some song lyrics or something, so I went back to my desk, and googled around a bit, while I tried to think of or find something cool to write on there, but I didn't come up with anything.

I went back upstairs, kept thinking about it.

We went for lunch, I went across the road to the cafe with a guy who was leaving today , and we picked up some salads, I couldn't stomach much more than that.

I wasn't feeling too bad today, compared to last Friday after going out drinking, because the difference this time, was that I'd stopped drinking before midnight last night (unlike drinking until 4am), and I'd spent the last 4 hours before I went to bed drinking water.

My guts were still a bit upset though, so I figured something light like a salad would be good.

We went back across the road, and I ate my lunch while I continued to try to think of something profound to write on the chick's card.

I gave up, I couldn't think of anything to write on there, so I just put the usual good luck etc stuff, that I'd been writing on the last few cards I've signed during the last few days, as a lot of people have left the department.

I chatted a bit more to them, and then I went back downstairs, and I cracked back into more work.

Most people left the office, I stayed until about 7pm, it ended up being just myself, and the woman who was finishing up today, whose dinner we'd gone to at Morpeth last night.

I said godbye to her, grabbed my stuff, and went down to the carpark, jumped on my bike.

I found that my card still did open the door, so the building manager was just being a smartass, and hadn't disabled my card's access to the car park.

I took off, and headed for home. I stopped in at the supermarket on the way home, to get some dinner.

While I was waiting in the checkout line, I felt like I was going to fall asleep on my feet.

I felt like I'd been up for three days, massively fatigued, I kept leaning, and then I notice, and pull myself back up straight, and try to stay awake.

I paid for my stuff, got on my bike, and came home.

I didn't do much when I got home, I ate dinner, listened to some music (no tv), and then I spent a little while working on the tivo image installation script I've written.

I fixed a bug that developed when the new cachecard drivers changed the parameter syntax, uploaded it into cvs on the development server, and then I went to bed, pretty early, 9pm or so.

I got up, got ready, and left for work. I don't think anything remarkable happened.

I got to work at 10am, and since I was planning to stay up here tonight, I parked my bike under the building, in the secure carpark.

I went in, and headed for my desk, when I went through the common area outside the section I work in, there was a bunch of people, and they were just about to have a morning tea, because there's a bunch of people leaving today/tomorrow, now that the relocations project is finished.

I went in, dropped my stuff off at my desk, did a bit of work, and then went out to find out what was going on with the morning tea.

The director came down, and they had a presentation for the people leaving, and they were given cards, and bottles of wine.

Once they'd done that, there was a laptop and projector and stuff setup, and they showed us a presentation that someone had put together, which showed the construction of the building.

There was a huge cake, they cut that up, and we hoed into that, and tea and coffee as usual.

I went back to work after that, and got a couple of hours of coding done.

I got a call from the guy upstairs, he wanted to know if I wanted to go for lunch, I said I did, and we headed off down the street, along with a couple of other people from work.

We went down to the pub, and went in, and found a bunch of other people from work in there.

The building manager was in there, and he was being smart, asking me what I thought I was doing thinking I'd get away with "it".

I asked what I'd done now (since he seems to enjoy having a go at me), and he said I knew what I'd done, and I figured he must be having a go at me for parking my "jap crap" bike in the car park.

I told him that I thought I'd get away with it, and then he made some smart comments, asking me how I thought I was going to get it out of there, and I said I'd just use my swipe card to open the door, and then realised what he was getting at, that he was going to disable my card.

I had a bit of cynical laugh (it wouldn't have surprised me if he had already removed access to the carpark from my card).

I finished my drink, had another one, played the pokies for a bit.

I went over and spoke to the building manager, and explained the only reason I'm riding it (the "jap crap"), and not a Harley or something, is because I have a P license, and I'm restricted to riding the 650, as it's the biggest bike on the learner approved list. (I had forgotten about the fact that while I had a Ps license, it wasn't engine restricted, so I could have ridden anything).

I had another drink, and played the pokies a bit more, and we all sat around chatting.

My phone rang, it was the college at Hornsby where I did some IT work ages ago. I went out into another section of the pub where I could hear, and spoke to them. They wanted to know about me installing a new PC for them, but I told them that I wasn't available, because I'm contracting full time, in Maitland.

I got off the phone, and went back in, we continued chatting for a while.

We'd been in here for about an hour now, and people said they were going back to work (people who were already in there when we got there, so who knows how long they were in there for).

The guys I went in there with decided to go back to work, I said I had to go and get something to eat, I was starving.

I said I was going down to the shopping centre to get some food, and I'd see them back at the office. As I was about to head off down there, the guy from upstairs said he'd seen this terrific hawaiian shirt in a second hand shop a bit down the road.

I took off, I decided I'd have a look for it. I went past the Samaritan's store, and I saw it in the window, I went in, had a look at it, XXL hawaiian shirt, looks terrific(ally tasteless).

I kept going, I went down and bought a couple of pies at the bakery in the shopping centre, and sat outside and ate them. I felt a bit better after that, the liquid lunch was giving me a bit of a gut ache.

I went into Lowes to look for a plain white shirt to wear under the hawaiian shirt, but I couldn't find one, they seem to only sell those dumb shirts with Lowes written on them now.

I gave up, and I went into Best and Less, I found a plain white shirt in there, but only medium, no large or anything, I looked at it, and I figured I could squeeze into it.

It wasn't the cheapest shirt, but I was a bit pissed after all the drinks, so I wasn't that worried.

I wandered back up the street, and went into the Samaritan's store again. I looked at the rack of shirts, there were a few more, but none as good as the one in the window.

I got an sms off my mate, he'd put the computer into the new case he bought the other day, but it wouldn't work properly, he wanted to know if I could stop in later.

I replied, and told him that I was staying up here tonight, to get pissed.

I went over to the counter, and I told the woman I was interested in the shirt in the window, she went over and got it.

It was still brand new, had the original tag in it. The original tag also had an $8 price tag on it, and there was a Samaritan's tag on it, for $12. The woman said that that was a bit rough, so she should probably give it to me for $8, I said I'd give her $10 for it (since I'd already got a $10 note out of my wallet, and what's $2 anyway), so I paid, stuck it in the bag with the white shirt, and I left.

I went back to work, and did a bit more coding.

I checked my email, and I got an email about one of my domain names going to expire soon. I went and looked, and the prices have increased ridiculously. It used to be about $10 AUD/year for a Christmas Island domain, and now they're up to $50 AUD/year. What a joke.

I went over to godaddy, browsed through a few different domain names I thought about, and ended up registering a .net domain for 10 years, for $82 USD, which probably works out around the same as a .cx domain for 2 years.

I did a bit more work, and then about 5pm, I got a call, that we were leaving to get ready for dinner.

I grabbed my stuff, this week I'd been organised, and brought a bag with me, unlike last week, where I left my clean clothes in my bike.

I went out the front, and waited for the guy from upstairs, he'd driven off down the road somewhere, and was coming back to pick up me and another guy from work.

I waited out the front for a while, while I was out there, another guy from work came out, and I spoke to him for a bit, and then the guy from upstairs called me again, he said he was waiting in the carpark around the back, so we both walked around there, and jumped in the car.

There were already 3 people in the car, so now it was full, and we went back down the road to the pub.

We jumped out of the car, I asked the guy from upstairs for his key, so I could drop my stuff off in his room. Then he drove back up to the office to pick up the other guy from work, who I'd been waiting for, before the other guy came out.

I went into the other pub (where the room was, not where we'd been dropped off) I put some BO basher on, and changed into the white shirt and the hawaiian shirt I'd bought, left the rest of my stuff in the room, and went down and scross the road to the other pub where the others had gone.

I got a drink, and sat down with them. We were there for a little while, and then a few more people turned up, including the building manager. He wasn't having a go at me for once.

I sat there and chatted for a while. My phone rang, it was my mate who'd sms'd me before, about the computer, he wanted to ask me a couple of things.

I wandered away from the others, into the carpark, where I could hear, and I spoke to him for a little while, he'd moved the stuff from one case across to another, but now it wouldn't power up.

I asked him a few questions, and had worked out that he'd shorted the power supply out somehow. (But I was actually wrong, it turned out he hadn't connected the power button to the headers on the motherboard, so it never tried to start when he pressed the power button).

I suggested he take the board out, and remount it, checking all the spacers and stuff.

I got off the phone, and went back to sit with the others.

Eventually the guy from upstairs and a chick from work turned up, and they had a drink, and then they got a call from one of the other guys from work, who was leaving today, he was across in the other pub, and had bought us drinks or something apparently.

When they finished their drinks here, we headed across to find out who was in the other pub, because we wanted to head down to another pub, to get dinner.

We went in, and grabbed our drinks. The chick had disappeared somewhere, so I ended up with her drink, a schooner of Tooheys New with lime in it, ugh.

We were in there for another short while, the Director was in this pub, and then we all left, and headed down to the other pub for dinner.

On the way, I was talking to the chick, and she was telling me that she meant to take me and show me a shirt in the window down the road, it was exactly like the one I was wearing.. yeah, because it is exactly the one I'm wearing.

When we got to the pub, I started talking to the guy who looks after the email systems, and then when we got to the pub, I sat out the back with him, on a different table than the others I'd been talking to.

The started calling to me, I said I'd be there in a minute, I didn't realise that they wanted me to go and sit on the table with them, and stop a woman from work that they can't stand from sitting with them.

Oops, too late, she sat down there.

I sat on the other table, with 4 other people from work.

The email guy and I had both ordered bangers and mash, they came out not long after. I know the bartender pretty well now, he used to be an A grade Newcastle Knight, so when the email guy asked for some bread rolls, he had no issue going and grabbing them for us, and we weren't charged anything for them.

After the meal, we sat chatting for a while.

The others, sitting on the other table, took off out of the pub. Seemed a bit strange.

I sent an sms, and asked if I'd been excommunicated because I'd made them sit with the woman they couldn't stand, (after being naive and not realising why they'd been calling me).

I didn't get any reply. Hmm.

About 10 minutes later, my phone rang, it was the guy from upstairs, I asked him what was going on, and he said that they'd gone back to the pub, but now realised they couldn't get in, because I had the key.

I said I'd be there shortly, and got off the phone, I told a few people in the pub that I'd be back in a bit, and then I took off to go back to the pub we were staying in.

I got back there, and let them in, and then we went into the room.

I was going to go back down to the pub, but they said they'd be heading back down there shortly, so I might as well sit around for a bit.

Someone opened a bottle of red wine, so I had a couple of glasses of that while I waited.



We sat around in there for a bit longer, and then we headed out again, and went to yet another pub, the one that's open to midnight.

We got in there, got some drinks, and had a game of pool. I was feeling a bit crook, I had a headache.

We hung around in there for a bit, the smoke in there was getting to me, so I went outside for a bit. I felt a bit better out there, then I went back inside, they finished their game of pool, and so then while they sat there, I had some practice shots on the pool table.

I worked out why my game is so shitty, it's because I've not been aiming properly. I've been trying to use the angle of the cue to aim the ball, rather than the placement of my thumb, once I worked that out, I was getting quite a few good shots.

We went and sat out the back after that, more fresh air, that was good.

I sat and had a conversation with the chick for a while, and then some more people turned up, people from work that we'd left at the other pub earlier.

One of the guys was pretty much pissed when he got there, and he had another few drinks in the time we were there.

We sat out the back for quite a while, and then around midnight, when the pub was closing, we moved outside.

The guy who was a bit drunk started going up the stairs inside, to where the rooms were. I asked him where he was going, and he said he was going to bed, I told him that he wasn't staying in this pub, and he had a bit of an argument with him, until I managed to convince him that this wasn't the pub he was staying in.

He came back down the stairs, and we all went and sat outside.

A few people had bought takeaway drinks, so they sat and drank those.

The woman from work that they can't stand was going on about getting a taxi, because she wasn't staying in town with the rest of us.

The building manager wandered off across to the railway station, assumedly to see if he can find a telephone number for a cab company or something.

I went over there too, to make sure he didn't get into any trouble, because he was a bit wobbly.

We couldn't find a taxi number, so we went back across the street to where the others were, sitting outside the pub.

When we got back across the road, a taxi went past, with someone in it, bit I tried to flag it down anyway. The driver hung out the window, shouted "10 minutes!" and then kept going.

We waited 'round for a few more minutes, and then we started walking back up to the pub.

I was walking ahead of the rest of the group, talking with someone, they called me back to wait, so I slowed down so they could catch up.

I ended up helping the chick basically carry the drunk guy up the street.

What's wrong with this picture? a 25 year old chick, and a 23 year old guy, carrying a 50 something year old bloke along the road.

We were about 2/3 of the way back to the pub, it ended up just being me carrying the guy along the road, he had a sudden burst of agility, and he decided to swing around a road sign pole, but in doing so, he tripped over the gutter on his way back on to the path, and nearly went face first into a brick wall as he fell down.

I stopped him from actually hitting it, by grabbing his shoulder and arm as he went down, and then I helped him to get back up again.

We got back to our pub we were staying in, he was staying in the other pub (where we started drinking), he said he was right, but I really didn't trust him getting back to the pub, finding the after hours entrance, getting the key in the door, getting up the stairs, finding his door, and getting it open.

The chick came back, and helped me to get the guy back to his pub/room.

He had his key, and we let him open the after hours entrance, but it took him a minute or so to get the key in.

I then had to carry him up the stairs, there was no way he would have got up them by himself, he was going up on his hands and knees as it was.

We got him up to the top, and walked him around to his room, and then let him open the door, but after a minute, I gave up, he gave the key to me, and I opened the door for him.

We put him on the bed, he said he'd be right from there, and we both went out, and I pulled the door around behind us. I didn't shut it, I just stood and listened for a minute, to make sure he didn't fall or anything, then I pulled the door shut, and we both left that pub.

We walked back to the other pub, went in, and went up and sat on the balcony of the other pub.

I was so hot, I went and changed into the shorts I'd taken with me to sleep in.

We spent the next few hours drinking, and chatting.

People slowly went off to bed, or left, and there were 3 of us left at about 4am.

I went in to the room the email guy was staying in, he had a spare bed.

I went to bed, he wanted a cigarette, and he'd left them in his car, back at the office, so he took off to walk back there.

He came back about 10 minutes later, he'd got half the way there, and realised he hadn't taken his keys with him, so he gave up at that point, and went to bed.



He wanted to chat for a bit, I was pretty tired, so I didn't add anything to the conversation, just acknowledged what he was saying, and then we went to sleep.

I was woken up again a couple of hours later, by the loudest snoring I've ever heard.

It didn't fully wake me up, just enough to be conscious, and lay there listening to him snore for hours.

Footnote: television is a terrible distraction. While listening to music, I was able to get through about 5 days of blogs in a few hours, after I turned the tv on, it's taken me about 4 hours to write one day's blog.

Ok, this is nice fast blog to write..

My notes on this day contain bugger all, and I don't remember much of it, so here we go..

I got up, got ready, and went to work, don't know any more details than that.

When I got there, the guy from upstairs told me that someone else from work had stayed in the pub last night, and this morning, while making breakfast, because the toaster has a screw in the adjustment knob stopping you from adjusting how dark the toast goes, had put the toast in twice.

There's a sign near the toaster that says "the toaster's adjustment is fixed, if the toast is not dark enough, too bad. Do not put the toast in more than once, or the smoke detector will go off, and the fire brigade will come out, at considerable cost to the pub".

So guess what happened. The toast was put in twice, no one was watching it, smoke started pouring out of the toaster, set the smoke alarm off, and the fire brigade came out.

I don't remember what happened throughout the rest of the day, I spent a lot of time coding.

At some point, I was upstairs, and the person who caused all the smoke was using the phone to call someone's mobile, and you have to dial 0 to get an outside line, so when they dialed the 0 to get out, and then 0 for the first number of the mobile, I jokingly asked if they were calling 000.

We went out to lunch, I think I hassled them a bit more about the toast incident, I don't remember what I said though.

I worked a bit more, I'd been working on the production code. I need to change the filesystem schema underneath the system I'm writing, because I want to get rid of a few fields in the database, legacy stuff from the jukebox system, that I don't need, and it just makes full table searching slow.

I worked on that, and I finally managed to get a working version written, tested, and implemented, at about 6.30pm.

There was a dinner on tonight, because one of the women from the section I'm in is leaving, it was at the pub over at Morpeth.

I rode over there, found a place to park, and went into the pub. There was no sign of the group yet, I was about to get a drink, when I decided I'd have a quick wander and see if I could find them, because I recalled something being mentioned about having some drinks in the park.

I went across the road, and they were all in the park. I had a light beer, and a chat for a bit, and then we all came across the road to go the pub to get dinner.

We got in, ordered our food, and waited ages to be served. It took so long for all the food to be done, that by the time some people got served, others had finished their meals.

When we'd all eaten, they had some speeches (2 people were leaving, and this was a dinner for both of them), and a bit of chat.

I left about 9.30pm, I was tired, and had to get home at a reasonable hour.

I took off from there, and was home about 10.30pm.

I went to bed not long after that.

I woke up late, slept through the alarm, it was about 8.40am.

I went out, and got the washing off the line (that's a good excuse, I had to wait for my washing to dry, or I had no clean clothes).

I had a shower, and got ready. I was feeling a bit crook, maybe I had a few too many long island iced teas last night.

I took off, and went to work. I'm a bit confused as to what happened here, I think I might have gone to the motorbike place where I get my bike serviced, but I don't know why, or what I did there. I need to blog more often.

There's a place on the way to work that sells motorbike clothing, I've been meaning to stop in there for ages, I decided I would, because my gloves are falling apart, and I'd like to get a new pair for the trip.

I stopped in there, went in, had a look, the guy didn't have much, a few pairs of fingerless gloves, totally useless, and a couple of heavy winter pairs, I just want something in a plain, light, leather style.

He did have something like that, but only up to a large size, which was too small. Hmm, I don't think I have huge hands, but my other gloves are extra large too.

He looked through his stock to try to find an extra large pair, but he didn't have any.

I asked him if he could order some in, and he said he could, and that they usually take about a week.

I gave him my details, said I'd wait to hear from him.

I took off, and went to work.

When I got there, there was a message on my phone, it was from the guy who looks after the email systems, he wanted to talk to me about something, probably more virus stuff from yesterday.

I went up to see him, and he told me that he'd already worked it out, whatever it was that he wanted to ask me about.

There was more virus stuff going on today still.

I went back to work, another email came out with a virus attached to it, I worked out who it came from, and I sent an email to the guy, and asked him to clean his machine off (because it didn't have VNC on it, so I couldn't do it).

I went back to working on the code I'd started doing yesterday.

I went upstairs a bit later, and saw the guy upstairs. His new car (a Mercedes 560 SEL I think) was parked in the parking lot, so I had a bit of a look at it out of the window.

I went back down, and did some more coding.

I got a call about 12.40pm, he wanted to go for lunch.

We decided to go for a drive, so we went out out to his car. There was 4 of us from work.

We jumped in the car, and went for a drive.

We went out to Bolwarra Heights, and then around through Lorn, and back to East Maitland.

While we were driving around, they were all mucking around with the seat adjustments, in the car, because it's got electrically adjustable seats, even in the back.

When we driving around through Bolwarra Heights, the guy showed us that it's got a 2 tone horn, and a switch to select between the 2 tones.

We got back to East Maitland, and we stopped on the road that goes out to Morpeth, and went into a little cafe to get some lunch.



We ate lunch, sat and chatted for a bit, and then we went and jumped back in the car to go back to work.

While we waiting at the lights, the guy was mucking around with the adjustment on his seat, and he moved it so far back, that he couldn't reach the pedals, and his foot came off the brake, and we rolled forward a bit, since it's an automatic.

He quickly adjusted the seat back forward, and put the brake on again.

We drove back to work, and I went back to my desk.

Not long after, the project manager told me that he was going off for the rest of the week. I said I'd see him next week.

My manager also left around the same time, for a week he explained, because he's going back to Wales, because his Mum passed away a few days ago. He wasn't planning on going back for the funeral, but he changed his mind today, and was flying out tomorrow or something.

I worked a bit more, a few more hours, and then I felt quite crook for some reason. I sent an email to the guy upstairs, telling him I was leaving. I didn't get a reply, grabbed my stuff, and left.

I was just getting on my bike, when I heard someone shouting to me, it was the guy from upstairs. I went over to speak to him, he'd been at one of the other sites, sorting out backup tapes or something.

He asked if I wanted to go to dinner with them, they were going to some water front restaurant or something, I told him that I was feeling sick, and going home, and that I'd see him in the morning.

I headed for home, I stopped in at the supermarket on the way, got something for dinner, and then I continued home.

As I got near home, a cop paddy wagon came right up behind me, I didn't notice, because I wasn't looking in my mirrors, when I turned to head for home, it went blasting past me, bloody close.

I don't know what happened for the rest of the day, and can't remember, I probably just ate dinner, and went to bed.

I woke up at 7.40am, and found that I hadn't turned the alarm clock back on (I would have turned the alarm off when I went to bed after I came home on Friday night having an asthma attack).

I got up, setup the machine to rescue more data from the disk with the corrupt partition table, onto the disk that was in the tivo.

I got ready, had a shower, dressed, breakfast etc. When I was getting dressed, I realised that my belt wasn't here. I must have left it at my mate's place, after I had a shower after the storm we got stuck in.

I dug out a crappy old belt, just need something to hold my pants up, and I left for work, I think it must have been about 8.30am I left.

It was a bit bright this morning, and I didn't have any glasses either, because I haven't had a chance to get a new pair, after I lost the lens out of the other pair at the beach on Saturday afternoon.

I got on the freeway, just a few kilometres on, there was 2 cop cars in one of the u turn bays, and 2 cops, one was holding a radar gun against the traffic, and the other guy was just standing there.

I wasn't speeding (for once) as I went past, and the guy standing there stared at me the whole time he could see me.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye, and when I'd gone past, I looked in my mirror, and saw him still looking at me.

I kept going, got fuel, kept going, got to work at 9.45am.

I sat down at my desk (I can't get in through the firestairs anymore, they've fixed the door so it shuts properly), and found that my machine had rebooted for some reason. Hmm, annoying.

I sat and did some coding for a while, no idea what I was working on.

I got an email about emails being forwarded around with virii attached to them, and ignored it, and went back to work.

A few minutes later, I got an email, with a virus attached. I forwarded it to the guy who looks after the email stuff, and then I realised that it hadn't been sent to me specifically, but that it had actually been sent to the allusers email address, so it had gone to everyone in the department, how terrific.

I wonder how many dumb users are going to click on the attachment, and infect their machines (even though they have norton antivirus on all the machines, it's as useful as tits on a bull at the best of times, letalone when the clients aren't configured properly, so they don't get updates from the management server, and you can't update them manually).

I went up to see what was going on, and the shit had hit the fan. There were virus infected emails going all over the place.

I went back to my desk, and looked at the one I had received, because I use Thunderbird, not lookOut, so I was able to easily look at the headers of the email, whereas when people using lookOut tried to look at anything to do with the emails, they were automatically deleted.

I found the IP of the machine sending them, it was at one of our remote sites.

I went back up, and told them what I'd found.

I still have the diskless machine up there, running knoppix, so I tried to kick off a port scan across the machine sending the virii out, but found that it was down (it wouldn't respond to pings either, and -P0 or whatever it is didn't help, someone must have turned the machine off).

A few minutes later another one came around the network, I looked at it, and found a very similar IP address, same site.

I port scanned that IP, and found that it had an smtp service running on it. Hmm.

It also had VNC running on it, so I remoted in, to find out what was going on, why the virus scanner hadn't found/cleaned it etc.

I'd just started poking around on the machine, found the virus definitions file months out of date, and was trying to find where I could force an update (it's not obvious when the client is configured to use a central server, "LiveUpdate" or whatever it's called is greyed out etc), when the session became unresponsive, and then VNC terminated.

I tried to ping the machine, and found that it had gone down, someone's turned it off.

The guy from upstairs wasn't in today yet, he was still sorting his car out. I called him, to find out, because someone told me that he'd be there around lunchtime (and I wanted to go for lunch), he told me that he'd been out to somewhere near Penrith to buy his car, and was just back at home now, and would be leaving in a bit, so he'd be up there tonight, but after work (to stay in the pub, and go back to work the next day).

I told him what was going on with the virii, that it was a good day to be out of the office, and that I might see him a bit later.

A few minutes after I got off the phone, another virus email came around. This time it came out of a machine in our building. Right, I want to go and find this machine, and give someone a kick up the ass for clicking on shit.

I went with the sysadmin, and we wandered around looking for the machine. We eventually found it, someone's desktop machine, they'd left it unlocked, so I was able to just sit down and start working out what the hell was going on.

I grabbed a virus cleaner application someone had downloaded, and I run that across the machine. While I waited for that, I went about working out why the machine didn't have up to date virus signatures.

I discovered that just like the other machine I'd been on briefly, they were both pointing at a management server in one of the remote sites which had been shutdown a few weeks ago. That would explain why they don't have up to date signatures, since the signatures distribution server they are using is gone.

I don't know why a machine in our building would be pointing at a server 200km away at a remote site, instead of the one in the server room upstairs though.

I grabbed the file containing the configuration, plonked it in where it goes (some obscure directory) restarted the Norton Virus services (no point calling it an antivirus service, since it's not), it picked up the file, reconfigured itself, and then I was able to force an update of the signatures.

By this time the woman whose machine it was had come back, I told her I was cleaning off a virus infection that was attempting to infect other machines on the network.

There was no point having a go at her, she wouldn't have known what she was doing anyway, and probably just dumbly clicked on an email attachment.

The clean tool finished, it had removed a few infected files, binaries etc, and the smtp service was stopped now.

The sysadmin and I finally got out to lunch, it was now 2.20pm. I don't remember where we went for lunch, but I think it was the cafe up the road we've been going to.

After that, I went to look for a new belt, I need a new one anyway, I'm almost have to put new holes in the old one, because it's too small, which is really not a good look.

I went into Kmart, and looked at the belts, they didn't have any in the right size, all far too big, or far too small.

I looked around for sunglasses too, but couldn't find any in Kmart, so I left again.

I went into Lowes to look for a belt, they had a few, and a couple that didn't look too bad, but I wasn't sure of the sizes properly, and I couldn't look at them, because there was a woman in between the belt rack and the wall, sitting on the floor, sorting out shirts or something.

I stood there for a couple of minutes, waiting for her to finish and move, but she didn't, so I gave up, and left.

I went into Best and Less, they didn't even have a rack of belts, so I left there.

I'd pretty much given up, and started heading back to work. I went past a Reject shop, and figured they might have belts, or at least glasses.

I went in, looked around, found a belt. I looked at the sunglasses, but they were all really crap.

I figured I'd keep looking for glasses. I paid for the belt, and then I left.

I didn't get a bag for the belt, because I'd heard something on the radio that morning, about the amount of rubbish we generate, and the guy was going on in particular about when you go to the shop, and get a plastic bag to carry one single thing, which is a good point.

I continued heading back to work, and a couple of doors up, there was a Go Lo shop, so I decided to look at the glasses in there.

I went, immediately thought they all looked crap, but after looking closely, I found one paiur that were alright. I grabbed them, and went over to the til to pay.

Some chick came over to serve me, asked how I was, the usual bullshit chit chat that for some reason we all feel is necessary when talking to someone, ie "how are you?" "fine, and how are you?" "I'm fine".

Anyway, she asked me how I was, "fine" was my reply, I then asked how she was, and she replied, telling me that she'd rather not be in there right ow. Wow, I think that's the first time I've actually had someone give me an honest answer to that question (I've given people honest answers a few times, but never received one before).

I told her I felt the same, and that was why I was down wandering around the shops, and not at work.

I paid for the glasses, and she asked if the belt was from there too, and I told her that I'd got it next door.

I left, and I contined back to work.

When I got back there'd been a few more virus infected emails, more remote sites doing it now.

I found that the machine I'd been in earlier was back up, so I used VNC to connect to it again. I put the updated config file, and restarted the service to fix it, and then I was just about to kickoff the cleaner tool, when whoever was using the machine came along and closed all the windows I'd opened.

I logged out of the machine, and went upstairs to find out what else was going on.

I was hanging around up there for a bit, a guy in IT had written an email explaining how the users could check their machines, to see if they had a stupid virus update server, and to let us know, so we could fix it.

I read it, fixed it up a bit, and then he sent it out to everyone.

A bit after that, someone said something about Melbourne Airport, and I wondered what was going on. We checked Sydney Morning Herald website, and found an article about a gas leak or something, and people had gone to hospital, and then airport was shut down.

I checked the Bureau of Meteorology website while I was there, found they'd issued a massive storm warning, just up north, and it was heading south.

It was supposed to have high winds, and hail, and torrential rain.

I decided I wasn't hanging around at work for it to get here, that I'd race it.

I grabbed my stuff, raced down to my bike, and took off going south. It was only 5pm. I was quite overcast, but a little way down the freeway, it was fine.

I didn't see anything of the storm or rain or anything on the way home.

I went to the supermarket and got stuff for dinner, it was still sunny when I got home, so I ran a load of washing, and hung it out.

I went back to the machine I was recovering data off, and it had all finished, and I had everything.

I had dinner, and made and drank a couple of long islands, and then I went to bed.

I woke up, it was about 11am I think.

I realised the dog must sleep on this bed, because I had hair all over me (I hadn't got into the bed when I came in last night, I just literally crashed on to it).

I went and found what was left of the pizza from last night, and had a couple of pieces.

I just sat at the dining table, enjoying not having to do anything.

My mate's got a bunch of guitar books in the bookshelves there, so I looked at a couple of them. There's some pretty good songs in there, but there aren't any bass tabs, so it's of no use to me.

My mate's wife got up, and came out, she said she was going down to the supermarket, and asked if I needed or wanted anything. I couldn't think of anything I needed.

She took off, and I went back to just sitting quietly.

I sat there a bit longer, and then I decided to go an check my email, so I went into the computer.

I ended up sitting there for a couple of hours, until 1.30pm or so, when my mate came in.

I spoke to him for a bit, and then he went out to have a smoke or something.

I went back to clicking around on the computer, about 2pm, my other mate, from Newcastle, came in.

I spoke to him for a bit, he said something about looking for a flash cartridge for his brother, for GBA, because the games are so expensive, so I started googling around for that.

He came back in a few minutes later, with some more of the pizza from last night, and offered me some, but he'd heated it in the microwave, and I can't stand reheated pizza, I'd rather eat it cold.

I continued looking for flash cartridges, and the others made breakfast (though I didn't realise this, or I would have helped).

Someone came in a bit later, and told me it was ready, so I went out, and ate some of the food.

They said they were chucking anything that wasn't eaten, so I sat and ate as much as I could, after everyone else was finished, but a fair bit still got chucked, oh well.

My mate got ready to go to work (he works night shift, and was back on tonight, which is why he got up so late).

He took off a bit later, along with our other mate, on his pushbike, since now the tyre was fixed, they went to get a coffee down the road. After that, my mate from Newcastle was going to ride to the train station, and get the train back to Newcastle.

I went home, and I got my gearsack, and I went back to my mate's place again, and I loaded it up with all my wet stuff (which I had hung out on the line the night before, but because it rained all night, the humidity stopped it from drying), and then I went home again.

This time when I got home, I sat down for a bit, and realised that we'd had a blackout the night before, it must have been during the storm we got pissed wet through on our way back from the beach.

When I went to use one of my computers, it was sitting there saying it had no swap file. Ugh, this doesn't look good.. it wouldn't have no swap file unless a disk had gone bung or something.

When I investigated, I found that just like before, the partition table on one of the disks was stuffed.

I started to work out what I was going to do. I pulled the SATA controller out of the machine again, so I could Stellar Phoenix (which BSODs if the SATA controller is in there), and found that it could see both partitions on the disk (two 60GB partitions on a 120GB disk).

Dad came in, and told me that there'd been another hail warning. I'm getting sick of this shit.

I went down, and I shoved my bike in the garage next to the car.

I came back up, and continued working on the machine with the stuffed disk.

I don't have any more disks to recover this stuff on to.. except for the 200gb ATA disk in the tivo I've been setting up.

I ripped the disk out, it did have a couple of recordings on it I wanted, but so be it, I need to recover this data. I put it in the machine, booted up, windows reckoned it was a blank disk (even though it had all the tivo/linux partitions on it, typical).

I repartitioned it, and then I started rescuing the data from the lost partitions on the 120gb disk.

As soon as I'd started that, and was able to sit back and relax a bit (because I knew it was working, I'd been able to successfully restore all the data from the other disk that did this the other day).

I then realised that my mate had left his bike out on his driveway when we got back from the beach yesterday, and now it was going to hail (possibly).

I called his wife, and told her about the hail warning, and his bike, I told her that if she couldn't move it (because it might have been steering locked or something, or just too heavy to push), that she should call me back, and I'd go around and help her move it.

I got a call about 5 minutes later, and she said that she couldn't move it.

I asked Dad to give me a left around there (it looked like rain or hail was imminent, and he would have had to move the car anyway, so I could get my bike out of the garage, and then I didn't really want to be riding in hail), so we got around there a few minutes later.

I dragged my mates bike into the garage, having to turn it around on the kickstand a few times, because the steering was locked.

Dad helped me a bit with the last bit, and when we had it in the garage, I realised my mate's phone and smokes were sitting in there.

I came home again, and helped Dad to put covers back on the car, in case it hailed.

A massive storm came in a bit later, but there wasn't any hail, just stacks of thunder and lightning.

I was a bit worried that we'd have a blackout, because I was still recovering the data off the disk that's gone wobbly, but the power was fine.

I really wish I knew what was going on with the machine. I'll blame Windows, since I find it hard to believe that 2 independant disks, on separate controllers in the machine both corrupted their partition tables within a couple of weeks of each other, it just doesn't make sense.

I sat around, watched the weather channel for a bit, and some other stuff that I had recorded on tivo.

A bit later, my phone rang, it was my mate who'd gone to work, he just wanted to thank me for moving his bike in (his wife must have called and told him) and to aks what the brand of the case was that he'd bought at the computer fair yesterday (Antec), because he was talking to a guy at work that knows a bit about computers, and he'd mentioned it

I probably had some dinner a bit later, and I went to bed 11.40pm.

I was woken up about 9.30am, by my phone ringing. It was the guy from Wyong again, who'd called me last night. This time he was just telling me that there's a computer fair on today.

I got off the phone, lay in bed for a bit, and then I got up, and started getting ready.

After a shower, and getting dressed, I took off down to the local shopping centre (just a supermarket with some other shops), I went into the chemist to get a new ventolin inhaler.

While I was in the chemist, I decided to get some more polaramine (antihistamine), I didn't need any right now, but the last time I had, I realised I had none left.

I was looking all around for the polaramine on the shelf, couldn't find it anywhere. Eventually someone asked if I needed some help, and I said I was looking for the polaramine, and was told that it's kept behind the counter.

I went over to get it, and they had to ask me all these questions, had I taken it before, did I know that it might make me drowsy etc, gees, it's an over the counter medication for christ's sake.

Afetr I'd done all that, the pharmacist got it, and then ske asked me all the same crap again. I also got a ventolin, and then I went over, paid for the stuff, and left.

I stopped at the bakery on my way back to my bike, and got a couple of bread rolls. I ate one on my way to my bike, and then I rode to my mate's place, where I'd been last night.

I got in, they were all up.

I sat on the lounge, watched a bit of tv, and ate the other roll I'd bought.

They cooked up breakfast a bit later, and I ate some of that.

My mate and I jumped on our bikes, and we rode around to the computer fair.

My mate needed to get some parts to build a computer to take up to his mother in law's place in Bundaberg.

We bought a case, and a set of speakers, and a few other bits and pieces, keyboard/mouse etc.

The guy at the fair who I deal with (bought all the stuff for my servers from him) asked how we were going to move the stuff on our bikes, but we told him that we had the car turning up shortly.

We grabbed a couple of drinks, and my mate had a smoke. It was so hot, I was feeling sick from the heat.

A few minutes later our other mate turned up with the car, we grabbed the stuff (we'd paid and left it at the stand), loaded it in the car.

We decided that we'd go out to the beach, so I shot off, and went home to get my stuff. I grabbed my towel etc, and then went back around to my mate's place.

We grabbed all the stuff we needed, and some stuff that we probably didn't need, including a boogey board, and took off for the beach.

It must have looked pretty funny, I was riding, wearing a hawaiian shirt, my mate's sitting on the back holding a boogey board under his arm, and I think he was wearing shorts.

I used occy straps to put my mate's jacket on the back of my bike, since his backpack was full, with his towel and stuff.

We rode out to the beach, we didn't have any sunscreen, so when we pulled into Terrigal, I figured it was just to buy some sunscreen, but my mate said he wanted to go here. I said I'd rather go to North Avoca (where we usually go) he said there was a shop there, so we kept going, and went there.

We parked near the surf club, and went down to the beach.

Our mate went to the shop, to buy some sunscreen, and a few bottles of water. He came back about 15 minutes later, with a bottle off tanning lotion, (not sunscreen, big difference) and a bottle of carbonated mineral water. Ugh, carbonated stuff is the last thing I need to drink.

I put the tanning lotion on (don't know why I bothered), and then stank like a coconut.

We went into the water, and mucked around for a bit.

I took my sunglasses off, (which I'd worn in) and I put them in the pocket on my board shorts, wrapping the lanyard thing around them, in case the velcro on the pocket came undone, so I wouldn't lose them.

A few minutes later, I noticed the pocket had come undone, and my glasses were gone. Great.

I started looking for them, didn't find them.

Oh well, easy come, easy go, I found these glasses in the airport when I went to Melbourne, now I've lost them at the beach.

I few minutes later, I reached down, felt something, it was the glasses. "I'll bet the lens has come out of them" I thought, picked them up, yep, the lens has come out, and is gone.

(It kept falling out, after I stepped on them, skewed the frame, and had to solder it back together because I stripped the thread).

We mucked around in the water a bit more, and then I started feeling really weird, like I was going to pass out or something, so I got out of the water, went back up the beach to where our stuff was, I drank some of the nasty mineral water, and lay down for a bit.

The others came out not long after, we sat on the beach for a while.

It had come over really overcast, and looked like we were about to get a storm or a lot of rain or something, so we decided we'd head for the beer garden.

We packed up our stuff, and loaded up the bikes again. Just as we were about to take off, there was an announcement over the PA of the surf club, saying they'd just received a hail warning.

Oh crap.

We took off quick smart, to race home.

We got about 1/3rd of the way home, when it looked like it was hailing or raining off in the distance.

I raced off the road, and into Erina Fair shopping centre, to get out of the path of the hail, or whatever it was.

We'd just got in there, and it started pissing down with rain.

My mate jumped off the back, and was holding the boogey board.

Some chicks were walking through the car park, since 2 of us were sitting on bikes, and one guy holding a board, they were smart, and asked him what the motor was like on the boogey board.

We waited there for a minute, trying to work out what to do. It was about 5pm on a Saturday afternoon, so the shopping centre was closed, so we couldn't wait this crap out in there.

We decided we'd go to the pub nearby, so we got prepared to take off.

My mate jumped back on the back of my bike, with the boogey board, and then started mucking around, holding it over my head like a roof.

I told him I'd leave him behind if he didn't stop being stupid, I wasn't in the mood.

We took off, and headed for the pub, we got fairly close, and it was raining so heavily, I couldn't see anything, and I didn't have my jacket, and the rain was stinging so much, I thought it was hail.

We got to the pub, I parked, and then we both ran around the side, under cover, in an area where the empty kegs are kept, and the air conditioning exhaust fans are etc.

We started trying to wring our clothes out, my mate just stripped down to his boxers, and started wringing all his clothes out, and then propped them up near the exhaust fan, to have the hot air dry them a bit.

I called my other mate, told him where we were, he said he'd be there in a minute.

I got off the phone, and then a couple of seconds later a lightning strike hit just across the road, about 50m away, and everything lit up blue, I've never seen anything like that.

Our other mate turned up, and parked undercover near where we were.

He got off the bike, looked at our mate in his underwear, and started shaking his head.

I commented it was like the Hoodoo Guru's song "Miss Freelove '69", specifically the lyrics:

"You can't take me anywhere,
I'll strip down to my underwear,
if you give me half a chance".

After a few minutes we managed to convince him to put his clothes back on, so that we could go inside the pub.

We went in, I found that I only had a couple of dollars on me, and the ATM was out of order, wah.

I borrowed some money off my mate, and got a drink.

We sat around in our dripping wet clothes for a bit, it continued storming heavily outside.

They had some sports channel running on the big screen, and because it was a satellite channel, and the cloud cover was so heavy, it kept breaking up and dropping out altogether.

We decided to have a couple of games of pool, and then we had another drink.

We hung around a bit more, waited until the storm had settled down, and it was just sprinkling outside, and then we took off.

We went back to our mate's place again. I thought about coming home to have a shower, but realised I didn't have anything to change into, because my motorbike pants are the only long pants I have that fit, since I bought a new pair since I became a fat bastard, and unable to do up any of my other trousers.

I had a shower around there, and my mate lent me a pair of trousers he's got, that are huge on him, so I was able to fit into them.

We sat around for a bit after that, watching tv etc.

My mate's push bike was in the garage, with the flat tyre (when he ran over something, and got $800 worth of tickets on the train on the way home), he'd brought a new innertube for it, so I helped him fix the tyre.

We just chilled out a bit more, and then we decided to go and get some dinner.

My mate grabbed the wheel off his bike, and we jumped in the car, and went to the shopping centre, where the video shop is.

When we got out of the car, my mate (from Newcastle, who stripped down to his undies at the pub) had been drinking a VB, and went to throw the emtpy bottle in the bin, but missed the hole, and it fell on the ground and smashed, so we picked all the glass up.

I went into pickup the pizza's we ordered ahead (I had forgotten to bring the discount voucher, but the guy didn't care).

We went into the video shop after that, returning the dvds from the night before, and hiring out a couple of new ones, Shrek being one of them, because I haven't seen it.

I think my mate went into the supermarket, and got something, but I don't really remember.

Anyway, after that, we got back in the car, with the pizzas, new dvds, and whatever from the supermarket. We went across to the service across the road, and my mate inflated his bike tyre, and then we went back to my mate's place.

We put the tv on while we ate the pizzas, Black Hawk Down was on, we watched a fair bit of that, and then my mate got the shits with the ads coming on every few minutes, so he dug out the DVD, and put it on, skipping to the bit we were up to watching it on tv.

We watched the end of it, and then went the credits started, he turned it off, and the movie on the tv still had 20 minutes to go.

We went outside after that, I made myself another Long Island, and the others smoked.

We started having some conversation, and it went on for ages, turning into a political discussion, and getting a bit heated at a few points, as we expressed our differing opinions.

My mate's wife was inside using the computer, and had the window open, so she could hear the whole thing, and several times she cracked up with some of the ridiculous arguments we were having.

We eventually went back inside, and my mate put Shrek on. I think I watched the first 1/2 hour of it, and then I fell asleep again.

I seem to have lost the ability to watch a movie, probably because the act of sitting and staring so relaxed is the only time I actually get to stop thinking.

Anyway, when it finished, my mate woke me up, and I went into the spare room, and just crashed on the bed. I've no idea what time this was.

Ok, I'm now nearly a month behind on blogging, some of it due to being busy at work, and having to stay late, and not wanting to spend all night typing, some of just due to laziness, and a fair bit of it due to being so busy at work for a few days before I went off on a holiday for the last 10 days.

Let's try to catch up. These older blogs will probably be fairly brief, since I can't really remember all the stuff that happened almost a month ago. It is all pretty pointless stuff after all.

Ok, the Friday after going out and getting pissed last night..

I woke up in the hotel, about 9.30am, I felt like I was about to die.

I went and had a shower, I was felling a bit better in the shower, but then I felt really horrid all of a sudden, and I spewed in the shower. It was just bile or something, foul.

I felt a bit better after spewing though. I got ready, and then I sat down for a minute. I made myself a cup of tea, but I could only drink about half of it.

I went to work after that. All the others went home. The guy from upstairs had to get stuff sorted out, to find a new car, and get a loan from the bank to buy it, after he sold his car to a mechanic a few days ago.

Anyway, they all went home, and I went to work on my own.



I was back to feeling like I was going to die. All of my concentration was being used thinking "don't spew, don't spew, don't spew".

I sat at my desk, and just stared at the screen. I couldn't bring myself to even pretend to look like I was working.

I would have just gone home, but I didn't think I'd make it, riding my bike 100km to home, I was probably still way over the legal limit of a fully licensed driver, letalone with my license, which is now a zero alcohol limit, because I've got a Ps license. Stupid Queensland Ps.

I sat and stared for a while. When I could focus, I looked at a newspaper website, reading the news, but reading made me feel sick, so I went back to just staring.

I went and sat on the loo for about 20 minutes, with my head in my hands, just enjoying the dark and quiet in there.

I went back to my desk again, and continued to stare at the screen.

I had another cup of tea, hoping that would settle my stomach, it lasted about 15 minutes, and then I went into the toilets, and spewed again.

I went back and sat at my desk again. I think it was now about 11am, I've been here for an hour, acheived absolutely nothing.

I called a mate to sort out what was going on for the weekend, because there's a computer fair on tomorrow, and I think he needs stuff, I also think he's got confused, and thinks that the bikes/blues festival is on this weekend, when it's actually next weekend.

Yep, that was the case, he was thinking it was this weekend. I'll still go and pickup another mate from Newcastle though.

I called my mate at Newcastle, and sorted out picking him up. I told him I was pretty dead, and was just taking it easy, so I'd probably be over there about 1pm or something.

I went back to staring at the screen again, and watching the clock. A few minutes before midday, I collected my stuff, and I took off.

I went down, jumped on my bike, and took off for Newcastle. It wasn't too bad a ride over there this time.

I felt a ton better, just a few minutes after leaving the office, and getting on the road, I think the fresh air was doing wonders.

About 1/2 way across, I thought I saw a rock about to hit my helmet visor, I shut my eyes instinctively, heard a big crack as it hit, when I opened my eyes, there was guts all over the visor, it had been some huge fat bug.

I got to my mates place, and I had a glass of water, I wasn't feeling too bad now, it only took me about 45 minutes to get over here too.

My mate got all his stuff together to go.

While I was waiting for him, I found that I had $60 in cash in my pocket. Dunno where that came from

My mate finished getting his stuff together, and then we took off again from his place.

We got on the freeway, and I headed for home. I stopped off at the service station on the freeway, to get some fuel, and my mate cleaned the bug junk off my visor.

We kept going, and went to our mate's place, the guy who does security for a bunch of hospitals on the north shore. I think it was about 2.30pm.

He was having a look at fixing his bike, because it hasn't been running properly, or idling or something, and it's just been stuck in the garage for the last few weeks.

We spent the afternoon working on that, we pulled the fairing off, took the tank off etc, replaced the 4 spark plugs, cleaned out the carby, recharged the battery, and flushed the radiator out while we were there.

We put it back together somewhat, and it fired up without too much issue, and it seemed to be idling properly now.

We put the rest of the bike back together after that.

The others were having beers during all that, but I was feeling so seedy, that just the smell of the beer was making me feel crook, letalone drinking one.

We sat around for a bit, and then around 6pm, we decided to go and get some stuff for dinner.

My mate's wife got out some mince, and started making it up for hamburgers, she said she was going out to a club, and probably wouldn't be there when we got back.

My mate had a couple of videos he had to return, so we all jumped in the car, and he drove round to the video shop to return them. On the way, my phone rang, it was the guy in Wyong who does the computer repairs, I can't remember what he was asking me about (hey, this is a month ago), and the phone dropped out.

We got to the video shop, my mate dropped the videos off, and then we went around to where the supermarket is, the one I usuall go to on my way home.

There's also a video shop here, so we had a look in there. My mate asked if he had any fines at the moment (as he usually does), but found out that he didn't have any fines due at the moment, at that shop.

We looked around, and picked out a couple of dvds, I don't remember what they were, I think Alien vs Predator was one of them though.

We went in to the bottle shop after hiring the DVDs, I wasn't really in the mood for drinking beers or anything, but I decided that I could probably stomach a Long Island Iced Tea, so I grabbed all the bottles of grog to make that up.

Vodka, gin, white rum, contreau. We also needed tequila, but they only had some shitty looking brand, and it was expensive. We took the other bottles over, asked if they had any other tequila, they didn't, so I got the expensive shitty looking one.

It was about $150 for all the grog. We put it all in the car (my mate also bought a bottle of Bundy), and then we went into the supermarket to get stuff for dinner.

We got some onions and stuff like that for the mince, to make hamburgers, but then we just grabbed a bunch of junk food, and some lemonade and orange juice etc for mixing with the Long Islands.

We went home, ate dinner, and sat around chatting for ages.

I finally felt that I could drink something, so I made up a Long Island, and sat and drank that, no worries.

We started watching one of the movies, Alien vs Predator, I had another couple of drinks.

I started to feel really tired, I watched about 1/3 - 1/2 of the movie, and then I fell asleep.

I woke up again a few milliseconds before the credits started (I just saw a flash of the last screen before they started), and realised that my mate's wife had come back from the club, and was sitting on the floor in front of us, and assumedly had been watching the end of the movie.

I was so stuffed, I went into the spare room to sleep. I got in to bed, and lay down, but I was having an asthma attack, and I couldn't breathe properly, so I couldn't relax.

I lay there for about 1/2 hour, coughing and wheezing, and then gave up, I knew I needed some ventolin.

I got up again, got dressed, and took off for home.

I got on the road and headed for home, just as I made a turn, I saw cops continue past, lucky I didn't get pulled over and breathalised, though the fact I was having an asthma attack probably would have let me avoid the breathaliser.

I got home, found that all my ventolin inhalers are all but run out anyway, and there's only propellant left in them, so I took puffs out of all the inhalers I could find, hoping one would have something left in it.

I thought about using the nebuliser, but I haven't got any nebules of ventolin to put in it.

I went to bed after that, I've no idea what time it was, but I'd guess it was about 2am or something.

I slept in, through my alarm.

I was woken at 9am, my mate at Wyong calling to ask me something about a computer he's trying to install XP on, and it keeps shitting itself.

I don't really remember what I told him, I'd just woken up.

I got off the phone, dived out of bed, in the shower, got ready.

I grabbed some clean clothes, because I'm thinking about staying up in Maitland tonight, and left for work, about 9.40 am I think it was.

I was heading for the freeway, and went through a speed camera in school zone before the freeway. it went off as I went over the line, I checked my speed, about 42, in a 40 zone. WTF? Doesn't matter anyway, it took a picture of the front of my bike, so there's bugger all they can do about that.

I checked the other side of the road, behind me, I didn't see anyone speeding. Bloody thing's probably just stuffed.

I got to work at 10.45am, and went in the back fire stairs as usual.

I just got to my desk, and was told by a woman working that there was cake and stuff for me.

I went out, and they're all like "oh, good timing".

Someone had bought a mudcake for my birthday, but about 2/3rds of it was gone by now.

I grabbed a bit of one of the other cakes, poppy seed or something, and stood back to eat.

My manager said something smart, and then everyone got quiet, and someone said "speech". What? a speech? and I said that, "what? happy birthday to me?".

Then my manager said that he didn't mean for everyone to stop, so they all went back to chatting.

The guy from upstairs was there, and the chick hired for the relocations project, I spoke to them for a minute, and then they went back upstairs to work.

I stood around for a few more minutes, and then went out to get my mug to have a cup of tea.

I'd cracked into the tea bags yesterday afternoon, so I grabbed one of them and my mug, and went back out, made a tea.

I had another bit of cake.

I stood around for a bit, everyone started going back to their desks, now it was 11am.

I went back to my desk, and a few minutes later the guy from upstairs came and spoke to me, and said that both air conditioner units in the comms room were alarming.

I said I'd go and have a look (because I've previously had to open them and switch the breakers off, when the compressors wouldn't run properly).

We went up the stairs, to go in the comms room. The guy from Orange was there, and he asked the guy from upstairs if he'd found the building manager, and he said "no, but I've got the next best thing". "tss" I thought.

I opened the door, and went in, yep, both units are alarming.

I muted both of them, and then started looking through the menus on the LCDs on them. I went into the alarms on the first unit, it had both a "HP1" and "HP2" alarm. I noticed that the unit had lost power, and only come back on 1/2 hour ago.

I checked the other unit, it was the same, but just a "HP1" alarm.

The building manager came in at this point, and I told him what I'd found, and he said to ring the air conditioning place we deal with.

I said that was fine, and he pointed to the sticker on the front of the unit with their support number.

He said "there's a phone in the rack there". I opened up the back of the rack to get the phone, it wasn't patched.

I went around to the front, opened the rack, I looked for a spare port on the voip switch, none.

Ah, here's one that's patched, but there's no link light, must be no phone, I'll just pinch that for a second. I unplugged that patch, patched the phone in.

I went back around to the back of the rack, near the units.

I rang the service number, someone eventually answered, and I explained that we had 2 units they service, and that they were alarming, and the woman said she'd put me through to service.

I waited on hoild for a bit, then the phone was answered again. I explained who I was, calling from DoPI, and that we had two units, alarming, and the alarms etc.

The woman queried where I was calling from, and then said "oh, DMR", so someone's identified us as DMR to them, even though we're really DoPI in that building, anyway.

I asked if there was anything that we could do to sort out the issue, and she said, no, that she'd send someone out. I got off the phone, went and unpatched it again, and put the original patch back in.

I left the comms room, and headed back down the stairs.

As I went down, I spoke to the db guy, and just asked him to tell the building manager that there was aircon guys coming out, when he sees him again.

I went back to my desk.

I don't remember what I did then, I assume I was working on Oracle code or something.

We went out for lunch a bit later, went to the cafe up the road, and I had something substantial to eat.

We went back to work after that, and I spent more time working on something.

I went upstairs at one point, and someone said something about a guy who sit's up there's car.

I had a look, and on the pillar near his desk, there was an A3 print of Bob Carr speaking, and right next to him was the guy's car.

Ah, that's the car that was in the blocked off area, the guy's crappy old Toyota Corona, with the front bumper falling off, right in the shot of Bob Carr, that's a classic.

Above it, someone had made up a headline "Caption Competiton - What is Bob Carr saying?"

(I think I mentioned in later blogs, but in case I didn't, the captions collected over the next few days, and some were quite good, one being "would you buy a used car from this man?")

I got a copy of that picture. It's just brilliant. here's a link, but I never got around to resizing it.

I hung around up there for a while, while they worked out what we were doing, because we were planning to go for dinner, because the guy from Orange who's taken over, is going back to Orange, and it was only a temporary arrangement, and now they've hired a guy to run the IT department.

A few of the people from work were down waiting in the car park to go, they called me, I said I'd go down in a bit, because I was going to move my bike.

They said I should park it in the secure parking under the building, and leave it there. That's a good idea.

I ran downstairs, grabbed my key, and went out to the carpark, I jumped on my bike (don't need to worry about a helmet riding in the carpark, gees I love riding without the stupid helmet), I rode over to the secure parking entrance, swiped my card, and rode in.

I stuck it next to another bike in there, and then ran out and jumped in the car.

It's one of those hybrid cars, a Prius or something, and it has this stupid screen display thing on the dash for economy, below it, there's a row of buttons, and they're huge, it makes the whole thing look like a poker machine.

So much so, that while we drove down the road to park behind the pub, the guy sitting in the front seat was slapping all the buttons with 2 fingers, like you do when you play a pokie.

We pulled up out the front of the pub, jumped out of the car, and went in.

We all went up to the rooms, I sat on the lounge and waited, while they dumped their bags and stuff, and got changed.

After that, we went down, and out the front, and across the road to the other pub, we usually drink at.

We sat out the back, and then a few more people turned up, so we dragged another table over.

We sat there for quite a while, until about 7.20pm, and then we decided to go down to the other pub, one I haven't been to before, where there's a Mexican restaurant.

One of the guys from work had a work car, so we decided to jump in that to go down there.

We went to the car park behind the other pub, and wandered over, it's a 4wd. It's a 5 seater, and it's got a couple of extra seatbelts in the cargo area, but there's no seats there, or it would be a 7 seater.

5 of us piled in there, leaving 2 other guys, they stopped, and then decided to go and get in another car, instead of getting in the "dog box" (as someone called it) at the bag of the 4wd.

We drove down to the other pub, on the way, there was this really fat chick walking, with this really bad shirt on, that might look good on someone about 1/4 of her size, we started pissing ourselves laughing.

We got to the other pub, parked, crossed the road and went in.

There were only a few us in here at this point, we ordered drinks, and sat down.

I got a "7" of JD and Coke.

We sat and chatted for a while, more people turned up. I had another drink, same again.

We waited more. Someone said something about going in to eat, but the restaurant was full at the moment, but there was a large group leaving soon, so we decided to wait for that, and I had another drink.

We waited, until about 8.30pm I think it was, and then we went in, there was a big table organised for us.

We all sat down, they came and gave us menus to look at.

A few minutes after that, they came and told us that it had already been ordered as a buffet thing, where they'd just bring out food, and we ate what we wanted, and they took the menus away again.

A little while later, they came out with some starters, corn bread to start with, and butter.

We finished that off, and a little while after that, they brought out corn chips and some sort of molten cheese dip thing, we finished that off too.

A little while after that, some plates of enchiladas came out, beef, chicken, and seafood. With gobs of grated carrot on the side.

The guy from upstairs went outside for a smoke at this point, so I mucked around with his phone, and put the menus all in Chinese for a laugh.

We finished those, I'd had more than enough cheese at this point (I was thinking about the Weird Al song "A Complicated Song" where he goes on about cheese pizzas and constipation), so when the next plates came out, (I can't remember what it was, mainly cheese though), I just skipped them.

There was more grated carrot on the side of that dish, and then the relocations chick started being smart, and putting on the shoulders of the people next to her.

It was then moved from their shoulders to hers, and at one point we played "pass the carrot", where a couple of single pieces of grated carrot were moving from one shoulder to the next person's shoulder.

There were olives on this last meal too, so they ended up someone shoulder too. "How long is a whole olive going to survive on someone's shoulder?" we thought, but evidently, it was a long time, the sauce on it had stuck it to someone's shirt.

We sat there for a while more, no more food came out, oh well. I can always eat something later.

The guy from upstairs went out to have another smoke or something, leaving his wallet on the table, I put it in my pocket to look after it, in case he forgets about it.

The guy who runs the social club organised us all chipping in to pay for the meal, $20 each it worked out to be, gees.

While he was sorting that out, the relocations chick put a piece of carrot in his shirt pocket. He didn't notice that, so then she got another olive, and put that in his pocket.

Only because the guy next to me and myself were watching so intently, about 5 minutes later he cottoned on to something funny going on, and found the olive in his pocket.

We sat at the table for a while after that, chatting, someone got a desert, the rest of us couldn't be bothered.

There was a huge sombrero (sp?) hanging off the door, the social club took it down, and put it on the head of the guy from royalty, he just sat there wearing it, continuing the conversation he was having with someone sitting near him.

I went and played the pokies after that, had a spare dollar. On the first spin, only betting 5c, I got 15 free spins, won up to $4.

I thought I'd just take it and go, but when I pressed collect, it said "hand payout only", argh, that shits me, like I'm going to call the guy over to pay me $4.

I just tried to get rid of it after that, spinning 20c a go, but I kept winning, not very much, just enough to make it last for ages. Eventually I spun it down to nothing.

I went back out to the front bar, and ordered another drink, JD and Coke. The woman (a bloke had been serving me before) grabbed a can of Beam and Coke out of the fridge, I told her it was Beam, before she opened it, and that I wanted JD.

She put it back, and got a bottle of JD and Cola out, and asked if I wanted that or a glass, the bloke heard, and said to make a 7, since they're cheaper, and stronger. Whatever, she made another 7 up.

I sat down near a couple of people from work, and polished it off, and ordered another, that's 5 now.

We decided to leave now, the guy from upstairs finally worked out he didn't have his wallet, after I'd had it in my pocket for like an hour.

I gave it back to him. The guy with the department 4wd wanted to go home, he hadn't been drinking, we managed to convince him to give us a lift to the other pub we go to, so we all piled in the car.

This time there was 6 of us. 4 of us got in the car, and then some smartass locked the doors, so a couple of people were locked out.

We joked they had to get in the dog box in the back, so they did, opened up the back door, and climbed in, and pulled it shut behind them.

We pissed ourselves laughing, and the guy drove us to the other pub.

The 4 of us in the 4wd piled out, the 2 were stuck in the dog box in the back, they couldn't open it.

We just waved to them, and pretended to go inside the pub, then someone opened the back door of the 4wd for them.

We went in, and ordered drinks.

I wanted a Long Island iced tea, but the bar tender wouldn't make it, said he didn't know how. Someone piped in that it's just all the white spirits, and then the bartender complained it was too much mess to clean up.

What mess? Apparently, the other night they'd managed to get him making up margeritas for them, that must be the mess he's thinking off, oh well.

The others ordered a bottle of wine, and got a glass for me, so I drank it.

I really wasn't in the mood for red wine. We had a game of pool, I was a bit shitty, they asked why, and I said it was because I didn't get my Long Island.

I saw a bottle of Contreau behind the bar, so I decided I'd just crack into that. I finished my glass of red wine, and ordered a Contreau. Ah, much better.

I put a couple of bucks in the jukebox, picked out 6 songs. I put on some Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Doors, Beatles, more Led Zep, and something else I don't remember.

I sat down with my Contreau, and listened to the first song, Stairway to Heaven I think I'd put on.

Someone from work commented on how good a song it was.

I played another game of pool, while LA Woman was on, when it finally finished, someone asked if that was the longest song in the jukebox.

I got another Contreau. More songs came on, Come Together by the Beatles, and then Money by Pink Floyd, and the support guy was going on about how good that song was.

Afetr that, another Led Zep song came on, Heartbreaker I think it was, and the support guy was going off, saying he couldn't believe my taste in music was so good.

I got another Contreau, the third now.

I played another game of pool. We listened to a whole bunch more songs the support guy had put on, more Pink Floyd, and some other terrific stuff.

The social club guy came up to me, and he commented on my taste in music too, saying that it was really good to see young people enjoying such good music, and he told me a story about how his son had come to him, asking where his Deep Purple LPs were, and it had brought a tear to his eye.

At this point it was almost 11.30pm, and the bartended had wanted to close at 11pm, so we started trying to drag our large group that had assembled in there by that time out to another pub.

About half of use left, the others had started another game of pool.

We started walking to the other pub, on the way, there was a shopping trolley abandoned, and someone was like "oh, get in there" (not to me, to someone else walking with us), and I said I wasn't interested in having that go on, because it's all fun till someone gets hurt.

We kept walking, but then someone climbed in, and someone started pushing him along the footpath.

We kept on our way to the other pub, about a minute later, the trolley tipped over, and the guy riding in it came spilling out.

Hmm, what did I just say? he wasn't hurt though (or too pissed to notice) and we just kept going, leaving the trolley tipped over in the gutter or wherever it was.

Someone walking with us called someone else who was still in the pub, and asked them to drag the rest of them out. It went on for a bit, and eventually we told them to put the bartender on, so that we could tell him to throw them all out, but they wouldn't do it.

We got to the other pub, went in, ordered drinks, I got another contreau, someone shouted it for me.

They wanted to have a game of pool, there was another pool table out the back, but they'd already started to pack the pub up, and there were stools on it.

We asked if we could take them off and have a game, if we put them back, they said it was ok.

We took all the stools off, racked up the balls, and started playing. Some clown from work took the triangle, and put it on his head.

He did that a few days ago too, and it wasn't found to be particularly funny then either, anyway, he proceeded to keep that on his head while playing.

Eventually the rest of the crew turned up, they'd either left or been thrown out of the last place.

I finished my Contreau, and ordered another (that's 5 of them now), and then we were told that it was take away only now.

I had a look, and saw an unopened bottle of Contreau on the shelf, I asked if they'd sell it to me, and how much, the chick said she'd have to find out.

We kept playing, and then went around to the front of the bar to order our takeaway. Someone bought my another glass of Contreau (I'd forgotten about that one until now), and then I asked again how much the bottle would be.

The chick asked the other one working there, and I was told that they couldn't sell it to me. Bugger.

I said I'd just have 6 cans of Bundy and Coke then, and she grabbed them out of the fridge (6 individual cans, not a six pack or anything), and put them in a bag. She rang them up on the till, $33.

Fark, I'm used to paying $15 for 6, but that's bottle shop prices.

Oh well, at nearly midnight, in Maitland, I don't have much choice, I grabbed a $50 note out of my wallet, and paid.

We hung around for a few more minutes, and finished our game of pool, and then we put the bar stools back up on the pool table, and we left.

We started walking back to the pub we were staying in, on the way, a guy with us complained he wished he'd got some takeaway. I asked if he wanted a can, and I gave hime one of mine. I think I got carried away, I won't really need 6 cans.

We walked the rest of the way back to the pub. When we got there, I was with guy who'd had the triangle on his head, and we weren't sure if the others trailing along behind us had a key, so I grabbed a receipt or some rubbish bit of paper I had in my pocket, and stuck it against the security tab on the door, to stop it from shutting properly, so they could get in, if they didn't have a key.

By the time I'd propped the door open, they got there, so we just went in, and upstairs.

We all sat out on the balcony, but they'd put blood and bone, or some other really offensive fertiliser on the plants out there, and it really stank.

It was actually worse inside though, in there it smelled like cheese, out here, you got used to it after a minute.

We started drinking, and chatting.

We were there for a good while, I had a can, and gave another one to someone siting at the table, because they'd finished all their drinks.

[ edit, text deleted ]

We kept drinking, and chatting. A couple of people left. [ edit, text deleted ]

[ edit, text deleted ]

We sat there a bit more, but then someone was whinging about the smell, so we took our drinks, and we went and sat on the bus stop seat out the front of the pub, and watched the widescreen tv in the window of Radio Rentals.

Apparently they'd done this a few nights ago too.

We sat there for a while, about 15 minutes after we went out, a taxi turned up, so someone jumped in, and went back to wherever he was staying.

The rest of us stayed sitting there.

A cop car went past, and a security vehicle, both had a good look at us (4 of us out here) and kept going.

We sat there for another while, I went and got another can (the door still had the paper in it, so I could open it), they were in the fridge in one of our rooms.

I came back with another can, sat and started drinking.

[ edit, text deleted ]

I finished my drink, and went inside to get another one. When I came back out, the others had gone inside. I sat there on my own for a bit.

A cop car went past, slowed right down, I turned around and looked at them, and then they kept going.

[ edit, text deleted ]

A car came screaming up the road behind me, I looked, it was a persuit cop car with it's flashing lights on, followed by a paddy wagon.

As the paddy wagon went past, it put it's lights on too, and the continued speeding up the street.

[ edit, text deleted ]

I went to the room I'd been given and I went to bed.

Just as I got into bed, the clock changed to 4am.

Ugh, let's have a drink total..

5 x 7s of JD and Coke
1 x red wine
6 x shots of Contreau
4 x cans of Bundy and Coke

that's 16 drinks, and the cans are 1.5 standard drinks each, and I know the bartender wasn't giving me single shots of Contreau, so I must have had close to 20 standard drinks in the last 10 hours.

I got up, about 8am I think, got ready.

I dug out a hawaiian shirt, I haven't got much else left that's clean anyway.

I took off for work a bit after 8.30am.

I got on the freeway, and got fuel as usual.

When I got to the service station, I realised I didn't have my phone. Crap, I don't remember getting it this morning, it must still be sitting there on the bed with the charger plugged in.

I fueled up, paid, and continued to work. A bit further up the freeway, I passed an amusement ride truck, "The Twista" I think it was.

I kept going, and about 30km further, I passed another one, the "Supa Spinner" or something like that.

I got to the end of the freeway, and started on my way between there and work.

About halfway to work, I was waiting at set of lights, and I realised I was sitting next to another ride, the "Magic Wizard" I think that one was.

I assume they're dragging all these up for the Maitland Fair, on Friday and the weekend.

I got to work at 9.45am.

It's lucky the time they wanted to have the thing this morning was changed, it was originally 9.30am.

I got into the car park, went to park around the back where I park now, there was stacks of cars there. What's going on here?

Then I noticed that a couple of the utes and 4wds had been parked in the way of getting to the side of the building, where most of these people usually park.

There was one car parked in that area though, over near the bbq area, must be someone who got in early.

I'm suprised the building manager hasn't told them to move their car.

I parked, had a quick look over near the bbq area, there was a few chairs setup, and a podium.

I went inside (found the fire door open as usual), and went to my desk and sat down.

I started doing some work, and saw a few people going down the fire stairs to go across to the bbq area.

A few minutes after 10am, a bunch more people went outside, and I was told to go outside, so I went out with them.

I wandered across, found a place to stand, with a few of the guys from the section I work in. I stood there for a few minutes, someone kept being smart and going "I'm giving them one more minute" etc.

It was several more minutes than that.

I spotted a few people I know, so I wandered over to speak to them.

I was there for a few more minutes, and then some important looking people started coming out of the fire stairs.

They started walking across to where we were all standing, and I noticed that one of the people was Bob Carr.

Once they'd all walked across the carpark, Bob took his jacket off, and some guy came running in to grab it off him. Gees, he can't even look after his own jacket.

The Director General came to the podium, and spoke for a few minutes, and then introduced the Mayor of Maitland.

He came up, and spoke for a few minutes, and introduced the Minister for Mineral Resources, Kerry Hickey.

Kerry spoke for a minute, and then introduced Bob Carr, who spoke for quite a while.

Across the road, there's been some road works going on, they're putting in extra car parking or something, and the road workers all stopped to listen to Bob's speech.

During the speech, there were a couple of photographers taking pictures, and a guy with a video camera.

When he was done, everyone clapped, including the road workers across the road, I found that quite humerous.

Bob and Kerry then walked up and opened the curtain, showing the plaque to represent the opening of the building (that we've been in since November).

The guy with the video camera rushed in to film that.

After it was all done, a lot of people just went back into the building, the rest of us just stood around. I'd recalled them saying something about food.

A couple of people commented on my bad shirt, and I said I'd threatened to do it (I don't usually make idle threats).

Someone came up to the mic, and said that there was scones in the bbq area for anyone who wanted them.

A stack of people rushed over there, the rest of us just stayed where we were, chatting.

We eventually went over to get some food, and hung around in there for a bit.

I spoke to a couple of people I hadn't seen this morning before, they were talking about bikes, and commented on mine, so we chatted for a bit.

We all went back inside after that.

The couple of guys I've been speaking to about bikes work up on the second floor, and wanted to go the quick way (up the fire stairs) but the doors are shut, so they can't get out.

I can, because my work pass has 24/7 access to all doors, so I said I'd open it for them.

I went up to the top of the fire stairs with them, and found that the door wasn't shut properly anyway, so I could just pull it open, and didn't need to use my card.

I went back downstairs, and I nearly ran straight into the Minister as he came out the door, oops.

I waited for him and the rest of his group to come out, and then I went back to my desk.

I did some more work, and then we went out for lunch about 1pm.

We went to the cafe down the road again, and hung around in there for a bit, and then went back to work.

About 2pm, I got a call from the woman at reception, she said there was a package there for me. I hung up, and went out to collect it.

I assume it's the birthday thing from the temping agency I'm with, the DBA mentioned it on Monday.

There was a reasonable sized box there, the woman came over, and I signed the book for it, and went back to my desk.

I opened it up, it's some food and stuff.

There's some sort of cheese and pistachio savoury snack biscuit things, a box of tea bags, a big bag of coffee grounds, a box of chocolates, some packets of biscuits, and some loose chocolates.

Pretty cool.

A couple of days before, when the DBA mentioned it, on Monday, he'd said I should call up the woman at the temping agency, and try to wind her up, because she's getting married soon.

He told me that I should ask her things like what colour my mohawk should be, and to confirm the date and venue, because we're still arranging the minibus to get there.

I wrote an email to her, thanking her for the gift, and asking to confirm the date of the wedding, so we could finalise the minibus.

I went back to work, and did a few more hours work, and then I left, and headed for home.

I went to the supermarket, and got some dinner, and then I came home.

My phone was there, sitting on charge like I thought.

5 missed calls, not too bad. I moved it to the computer, so that I could answer it when it rang again, assumedly it's the message thing trying to ring me back.

I looked through the missed calls, and found that I'd missed a call from the guy from upstairs at work, at about 5.30pm.

I went into the bathroom, and of course the phone rang while I was in there, so I missed it again.

It rang me back again, and I finally got the message at about 9pm.

The guy from upstairs was just telling me that he'd left, and was in the pub down the road if I wanted to go there.

I mucked around on the computer for a bit, watched some tv, and went to bed.

I got up, got ready, and went to leave, about 9am I think it was I went out of the house.

I opened the garage door, and checked the paint job on my fender. Hmm, crap.

It looked quite good when the paint was wet, but now that it's dried, it looks totally crap, compared to the stock paint, it might as well be matt black. Oh well, I suppose it's better than covered with rust.

Mum came down, to take my brother to school or something. She asked me what I was looking for (in the garage) I said I wasn't looking for anything, that I had to put the fender back on my bike, because I'd got it welded yesterday.

I took all the paper off it, and found the bolts and spanner, and I went about refitting it to my bike, I suppose it doesn't look too bad, now it's back on the bike.

I took off. It had been raining, so the roads were a bit wet, and it was raining very slightly when I got on the freeway.

A couple of kilometres up the freeway, there was a car parked in the right side breakdown lane, hmm, looks a bit suss, I slowed down, then I realised it was just a wombat car* (Mitsubishi Mirage) , so I kept going.

(*wombat car: the back of the hatchback mirage looks like a wombat's bum. I can't find a very good picture to illustrate that, since it seems that no one takes pictures of it. The best I could find is this picture).

As I got closer, I saw there were also cops sitting in the u turn bay there, crap.

They didn't do anything, so I just kept going.

I went into the service station, got fuel, and kept going.

I got to work at about 10am.

I did a couple of hours work, and then I went to see the guy from upstairs, to sort out going for lunch. He said he had to take his car to the mechanic, because the wheel was vibrating a bit on the freeway on his way up yesterday.

We waited around for ages, to arrange a guy giving us a lift back to work, he was in a meeting. When he eventually came out of the meeting, we went around and saw him, and arranged for him to come up and pick us up in a little while.

I went down with the guy from upstairs, and we jumped in his car, a VW Bug from the 60s, we drove up the road from work to the mechanic, and dropped the car off. On the way up, the guy from upstairs was asking if I could feel it, when he'd put the accelerator on a bit, it did feel like the car was vibrating a bit.

The mechanic looked at it, and was saying that it was probably the tires or something, because they look a bit worn. The guy from upstairs said that it had the same tyres on it as when he bought it, and that was 4 years ago.

The mechanic said they were classed as light truck tyres, and cost about $100 each, he said he'd ring around and find out the exact cost however, and call the guy from upstairs to let him know.

We stood there chatting for a bit, and then the guy from work turned up, got a bit of fuel, and we jumped in his car and took off.

He had to go to the RTA, to sort out his rego or something, so we went there, as we drove there, we saw the mechanic taking the guy from upstairs' car for a drive, to see if he could work out what was wrong. He was a few hundred metres behind us, then we made a few turns, and he went a different way.

We got to the shops where the RTA was, and parked. I went with the guy from upstairs to find a shop to get a sandwich or something for lunch, while the other guy from work went in to the RTA to do whatever he had to do.

We walked around a bit, the shops didn't look promising. We wandered up a ramp, to another area, found a fruit shop and a buthcer and stuff, and then a cake shop.

We went into the cake shop, they had sandwiches, so we ordered them, and got drinks, and went and sat outside.

We'd been there for a few minutes, when the guy from upstairs' phone rang. He answered it, it was the mechanic. I went about eating my sandwich while the guy from upstairs spoke on the phone.

When he got off the phone, I asked him if the mechanic had worked out what was wrong with his car. He said that the mechanic had worked it out, it was rust, the car was stuffed, it couldn't be repaired, and we should go back there to look at it.

Oh great.

We finsihed eating our food, just as the guy from work walked up, finished in the RTA.

The guy from upstairs told him the story, as we walked back to the car, and then we went back to the service station where the car/mechanic was.

He had the Bug jacked up a bit, and when we looked in there, there was a huge amount of rust all around the back of the wheel hub, behind the front right wheel.

There was so much rust there, and the tear was about 60 cm long. When the mechanic put his foot on the floor of the car (the jack was under the body, rather than the floor) the floor went right down, and the tear opened up enough for fingers to fit through inside the car, from the wheel hub.

It was totally stuffed, the body had come right away from the floor. The mechanic said that it couldn't be fixed.

The guy from upstairs said that he didn't want it then, and asked if the mechanic wanted it, he asked what the guy from upstairs wanted for it, and he said about $100. The mechanic said he would give him $100 for it.

We then went through the car, getting out everything of value, loose change on the floor and under the seats etc, the steering lock, I found a figure eight power cable stuck down the back of the passenger seat, and there was a garage door opener in the glove box.

There wasn't much else of value left in there after that, there was an old rego paper from 2003 in the glove box, so the guy from upstairs signed his details for transfer of rego on there, gave it to the mechanic, and he gave him $100 cash.

We got back in the guy from work's car, and went back to work.

I went back to my desk, and did another couple of hours work, and left work at 6.30pm.

The guy from work who'd given us a lift before, went up to the pub to check in, and then once he was done, the guy from upstairs and I walked up there.

We sat out the back, having a couple of drinks, and chatting.

Someone commented on the Minister and Director General coming up tomorrow, for morning tea, or a BBQ or something. We joked about last time they planned that, and the Minister didn't turn up.

It turns out that he'd gone to St Leonards, since no one had told him that we'd relocated. That's pretty funny, when you're not aware that your own department has moved 200km away.

I joked that I'd wear a hawaiian shirt up for the event tomorrow.

We eventually decided to go and get some dinner. It was getting close to 8pm, when they stop serving at the place we wanted to go to.

One guy took off, saying he'd tell them we were on our way, so we could still order when we got there. I took off a few minutes later, and rode my bike down there, and went in.

The other guys got down there a few minutes after 8pm, so the bartender still let us order.

We got our food, ate it, and had a couple of games of pool.

I left the pub about 9.30pm I think it was, and took off for home.

On the way home, there was massive gale force winds on the freeway, I was getting blown all over the road, it was unreal.

I got back, got off the freeway, between the freeway and home, there was all leaves and bits of tress all over the road, it must have been pretty windy down here too.

I got home about 10.30pm, or 11pm or something, sat and watched a bit of tv, and went to bed about midnight.

Back to work..

I got up, and got ready for work, and went to take off.

I decided I'd have to find out about getting the front fender welded or something.

I rode around to the welding place at West Gosford, where the air conditioning guy I used to work for got stainless steel welding done. Halfway there, I realised I'd forgotten to bring a spanner to take it off again, I'll have to try to borrow one.

I went in, spoke to a guy, he sent me over to another guy, he came and had a look at it, said he might be able to do it, if I took it off the bike. He offered me some tools, I just grabbed a 12mm spanner, and went out and took it off.

I took the fender inside, and the guy had a look at it. He was worried that it was so thin, that it wouldn't weld, it would just melt.

I said it didn't matter, since it was already totally stuffed anyway, it can't get much worse.

He got a bit of scrap metal, stuck it inside, put a couple of clamps on it to hold it back together.

He did some TIG (I think it was TIG) welding on it, checked it, and said that it was actually welding, much to his surprise.

He spent the next 10 minutes or so welding up the big tear, and then he welded up the bits where the bolts go through to hold the fender on, since they had torn right off, and were acting like washers.

He also welded up a couple of tears starting on the other side, and then once it was all welded, he used the angle grinder to clean it all up, and it looked fine, except for the fact it was bare steel.

I asked what the guy wanted for doing it, he ummed and ahhed for a minute, and then told me to go and see they other guy, who I'd seen first.

I went over, he was on the phone, when he finished, he came out and spoke to me., I asked him what I had to pay for the work, and he said it had only been about 10 minutes, so $10 would do. I said I'd give hime $20, since it had been a bit more than 10 minutes, and he said that was fine.

I chatted to him for a minute, he asked what I was up to these days, since I don't work for the air conditioning guy any more etc.

I went back over, grabbed my fender and the spanner again, and went out and put it back on my bike, it looked fine.

I took the spanner back, and thanked the guy again for fixing it.

It was now about 11am, I went to the service station nearby, and got some fuel, since I didn't like my chances of getting to the on the freeway with the fuel that was left.

I put $10 of fuel in, about 2/3 of a tank, and then I took off, rode up the hill to get on the freeway. I haven't been up this way for months, now that I go north on the freeway instead of south, since work relocated.

I had to make a right turn at a set of lights to go north, I ended up waiting behind a taxi.

The lights to go both straight, and turn right were red, since it's a T intersection, and the rode to the right had the green lights.

When the light to go straight went green, but the right turn stayed red, I revved my engine, and the taxi went to turn right, but then stopped again.

Haha, I love doing that to people, this guy's been the best yet, most people just take their foot off the brake, and then put it back on again, this guy actually started to go.

When the light did go green, I think he was trying to be a smartass, and wait, but because he didn't go straight away, his passenger in the front seat pointed at the lights, and then he went.

I followed him around the corner, overtook him, and then turned right again, to get on the freeway.

I rode to the service station on the freeway, filled the tank up, could only get $5 of fuel in.

I took off again, and went to work.

I thought about stopping in at the place near work that sells motorbike clothing (I keep seeing a sign for it) and buying myself some new gloves, but the sign wasn't out, so I just went to work.

I got to work at midday, I found the fire door open again, that was good.

I got to my desk, and started looking at something (I don't remember what, this was a week ago, gimme a break).

I got a call from the guy upstairs, he asked what was going on, and said it was my birthday yesterday, hmm, how'd he know, I asked, he didn't tell me.

I went upstairs, hung around, waiting to go to lunch, and then the DBA told me that he'd been speaking to the woman at the temping agency (we're with the same one, along with the db guy), and she'd told him it was my birthday.

They'd decided we'd go and get lunch, we all left, about 6 of us, and walked to the Leagues Club.

On the way down there, I was chatting to the guy from work, who looks after email mainly, and he asked me if I'd been at Hungry Jacks yesterday. I said I had, he'd been in the pub near there, and seen me turn up with my mate, in his car.

We went into the all you can eat Chinese/seafood etc, and we were down there for about an hour.

We walked back to work after that, and I went back to my desk.

I sat and did some work for a while, and at about 3.30pm, I decided I should go down to Kmart, and get some paint and stuff, to fix up my fender, so it doesn't rust.

I walked down there, found their paint section. It was a bloody shambles. They were doing some renovations or something in a couple of aisles there, so there was stuff everywhere, it had been unloaded from the shelves, and was all stuck in a stock trolley, and the stuff that was on the shelf, was totally disorganised.

I went and looked at tools first, I bought a small wire brush attachment for a drill, I can use that to clean the rust of the front of the fender, where it's gone down before (I might as well fix that, while I'm painting it).

I went to look for sandpaper, couldn't find any. I went back to look for paints.

I went right through all the spray cans I could find on the shelf, and semi-gloss black was the best I could get. I couldn't find gloss black (if there's such a thing) only matt black, which I knew I didn't want.

Reading the can, it said that bare steel should be prepared with primer first, so I looked for a can of that, but didn't find one.

I was just looking for sandpaper again, when I spotted more cans of paint on a stock trolley.

They had more stuff piled on top of them, including sandpaper, so I couldn't really go through them, but I found a can of primer in the front, so I grabbed that.

I looked at the sandpaper, and then I saw sanding blocks, so I got one of them.

I went up to the register now, they only had one open, with about 6 people in the line.

Terrific.

I got on the end of the line, waited for a couple of minutes, more people got on the line behind me.

They opened another register, and some of the people from behind me went over to it. I thought about it, but whenever I do that, I end up on the end of the line, losing my place, and usually waiting longer, because some idiot will clog up the register.

I stayed and waited where I was, a couple of people went through the register, I was now third in line, there were 2 people being served, and a woman waiting in front of me with a trolley full of crap.

I waited and waited. The guy being served was arguing about something, he's buying a couple of DVDs, and perhaps the price is wrong ("the price is wrong bitch!" :-), or something else, so he's standing there squabbling, the checkout chick is looking all over the dvd cover, and shaking her head.

I couldn't hear any of what was being said, but I was getting really annoyed now, a couple of people have gone through the other register in this time.

Why do people argue? if the price is wrong, or something else, and they aren't sorting it out, then just don;'t buy whatever it is. Tell them you don't want it, and someone will go and put it back on the shelf for you, and you can go somewhere else.

Don't stand here clogging up the line, and pissing me off.

Eventually they sorted out whatever the problem was, and the guy left, I don't know if he took the DVD or what, I couldn't look at him any more, because it was making me too angry, so I just stared at the floor waiting.

The woman pushed her trolley up to the counter, and started uploading her crap, pairs of shoes, a backpack, and some other stuff.

The checkout chick started ringing it up, and then found that the backpack didn't have a barcode/tag on it anywhere. Oh great.

She started looking all over for it, didn't find it. She went to the PA, and asked someone from sporting goods to come down. We waited. No one came.

She asked the other checkout chick for the number of the sports section, and then she called them on the phone at the counter.

She spoke with someone for a couple of minutes, explaining what the bag looked like, the colours etc, and then had an argument with the person on the other end about the colour of the bag.

Who gives a shit, if it's the same bag, just put the damn code in.

Eventually she got off the phone, and typed a code in, rang it up, and the woman paid with a card, wasting more time.

Eventually she took all her crap, and left, and I got to the register. Bloody ridiculous, I've spent more time in the line, then wandering around through their abysmal mess of a shop looking for the stuff I need.

The woman asks me how I am. I was very tempted to tell her, but I just refrained from saying anything, I couldn't bring myself to say "fine", since it would have been a complete and utter lie.

She rang my items up, it came to about $30 or something, I got a $50 note out of my wallet, gave it to her, and got my change, and headed back to work.

It was now a bit after 4pm, on my way back to work, the guy from upstairs from work went past, with another guy from work, a support guy. He bipped the horn, but he'd gone past by the time I worked out who it was.

I went back to work, and back to my desk.

I did a bit more work, I'd got an email from the guy upstairs, asking if I'd gone to buy a cake (since they'd told me to, but I said I couldn't really be bothered, at least not today), I replied, even though he'd already left.

I did another couple of hours of coding. I had intended to leave work at 6pm, so I could get home, and still have some light, to work on my bike, but I didn't end up leaving work until 6.40pm.

I left, headed for home, I went to the supermarket on the way home, bought some pies, and then went home.

I dumped all my stuff inside, grabbed the long extension cord I'd been using to run the fridge out of the house, plugged it in, and went and chucked it over the balcony, so I could work down in front of the garage with the drill.

I found my drill, got the other tools I'd need, and went down to my bike.

I took the fender off, and then I started griding the rust off it with the wire brush in the drill, once that was done, I grabbed a newspaper to mask it off to paint, but it was getting too dark.

I decided to work in the garage, the car isn't in there, because my parents have bought a stack of wood to put down another floor, and it's in the garage instead of the car. (Some of it is too long to fit in there, and sticks out under the door, that's how I know what's in there).

I tried pulling the door up, figuring that the automatic opener had been disengaged, so the door could be pulled down, and left up a bit for the wood to stick out, but it hadn't been.

I went around to the side, to check if the door was unlocked, so I could open it, reach in, and press the garage door opener button on the wall (there's so much junk in front of the door, it only opens about 3 inches).

Nope, that was locked too. I went to the side window, it was open, and the cats have destroyed the flyscreen, and it was out of the window. I pushed it open all the way, and climbed in there.

I went over, pulled the cord to disengage the door opener, and then I pulled the door up.

I dragged all my junk inside, fender, drill, paper, tape, paint etc.

I finished off getting the rust off the fender.

Once that was done, I stuck newspaper all of the fender, to mask off where the paint is still fine.

I sprayed primer on the bare steel, but I hadn't done as thorough job masking as I should have, being lazy, and overspray had gone on the front where the paint was still fine.

Oh well, I'll just have to paint over it.

I started masking off the sides, where the welding had been done, to prime them.

While I was doing that, the cat came in. It took me about 2 seconds, and I some some horrible stench. Cat shit. The cat's arse and tail was covered with shit, and it stank.

I got up to shoo the cat out of the garage, when I went near him, I got a full whiff of it, and it nearly made me spew, I had to get out of the garage, to get some fresh air, and I was gagging.

The cat went away, I went back to masking, it still stank horribly in there.

I finished masking the sides, doing a lot more thorough job, and then I primed them.

My phone rang, it was my mate from Wyong, he said happy new (Chinese) year, and happy valentines day, and I said "one more", and he said "what?", and I said, "my birthday, yesterday", so he said happy birthday.

He wanted to know something about a computer he was working on. I spoke to him for a few minutes, and then I got off the phone.

I checked the priming on the front, it had been on there a while, but was still pretty wet.

I decided to leave it sit for a while, and I want inside. I pulled the garage door down, to make sure the stinky cat couldn't go in there.

I sat inside for a bit, watched a bit of tv, probably about 1/2 hour.

I went back down, opened the garage, and sprayed the black paint over the top of the primer, it doesn't look too bad at all.

I pulled the door down as I went out of the garage, and left it to dry overnight.

I came back inside, and went about making some dinner. I grabbed the pies, checked the instructions, and found I had to cook them for an hour. Gees, I should have put these on before going to paint the fender, oh well.

I put one in the oven, and then I sat and watched more tv, I ate my pie when it was ready, sat round a bit more, and went to bed about midnight.

Ok, I'm a week behind on blogs, so these are going to be a bit brief.

It's my birthday.

I'm woken up by the phone ringing at 10.30am. Oh yeah, my mate (lead guitarist) wanted to start playing guitar at 11am today, instead of like 1pm or 2pm like we keep doing, ugh.

I ignored the phone. About 10.45am, I dragged myself out of bed.

I called my mate (the drummer) back, told him that I was up, and getting ready. He'd left his place, and was on his way to my place.

I got ready, had a shower etc, I was just eating breakfast when he got there.

I finished eating, grabbed the guitar, and jumped in the car.

We went around to my mate's place, he was up.

We dragged his pc out to the loungeroom, while he had a shower, and setup the instruments again, we mucked around for a bit.

I hadn't brought any of the cables/adapters stuff, because I'm sick of mucking around with this crap. We were getting somewhere now though, with this new software.

About 12.30pm, we decided to get some lunch.

My mate wanted to go to a florist at Erina, and we'd decided to go and get the cables and stuff from my place, and a couple of soundcards.

My mate who picked me up took me back to my place, while our other mate went to Erina.

I went in, grabbed all the cables/adapters/microphone/soundcards etc, and went back to the car.

I tried calling my mate to find out where he was, but he didn't answer his phone.

We went back to his place, waited in the car out the front.

He called me back a few minutes later, was just at Erina, so my mate and I decided to just go and get some lunch at Hungry Jacks a bit 'round the corner.

We went there, got food, started eating. My mate rang me, asked where we were, and I told him that we were at Hungry Jacks, so he said he'd come there.

We kept eating, he turned up just as we finished our meals. He went through the drivethrough, so my mate and I dumped our rubbish in the bin, and went and jumped back in the car, and then followed our mate back home.

I didn't realise it, but a guy from work was in the pub near there, and saw me.

We went back inside my mate's place, he ate his lunch, I went about putting an extra soundcard back in his pc.

I don't have high hopes of this working, since last time windows wouldn't even boot with them in there.

Very surprisingly, it did boot.

I went about configuring the software to record from 2 cards, it claims to be doing it, but you can hardly hear anything, even using microphones in the mic inputs.

I mucked around for a while with that, trying to get the line levels set correctly, but it just wasn't working, it was so low, it was pointless.

I went back to using the creative card, it was fine, it must have a preamp on the microphone input or something, and the cheap and nasty cards I bought don't.

Oh well, I'm back to thinking about building that preamp box again, with 4 mic/instrument inputs, 4 separate preamps in parallel, and combined into 2 x 3.5mm stereo jacks to go into the line in on a couple of sound cards.

It was now about 3pm, because I remember checking my watch, to see if there was time to go to Jaycar, I think they shut at 4pm on Sunday, so we could have got there, but it would have been a waste of time, and it's not like I could have put them all together this afternoon anyway.

I ripped the soundcard out of the machine again, and then I then mucked around with the onboard soundcard, trying to see if I could use the mic input on it. I fiddled around, managed to get that detected (my mate had just disabled it in windows, rather than in the BIOS, which I only found after rebooting and going into the BIOS).

Once I got that configured, I tried to use Sonar with it, after selecting it, and restarting it, it would just complain that it was not supported, when I tried to use it anyway, and record, it would just refuse.

Crappy onboard thing.

We gave up at that point, and just put the one microphone in the Creative card, stuck it in the middle, and played a few songs.

I think we finished up a bit after 6pm, and then I packed all my stuff up, and my mate dropped me at home.

I took off again, and went to the supermarket, bought some dinner, and went home again.

On Saturday night, when I rode to my mate's place, I noticed the front fender wobbling around everywhere, when I looked at it, I saw that the tear had gone right up the side, and was starting to go backwards, through the forks. The whole thing is going to tear off soon.

I took it off, and looked at it. It looks like it could be welded, but I'm not sure, since I'm not a welder, and don't really know anything about it.

I put it back on the bike again. I tried to find if there was a way to stop it wobbling so much, and wondered what would happen if I stuck something in the tear, to stop the fender from shearing back and forth across it.

I looked around, Dad's throwing out a bunch of old computer crap, I looked for a bit of cardboard. I didn't find any, but I found a Microsoft license agreement book, and it was printed on think paper.

I grabbed the cover off that, folded it up, and jammed it in the tear, it seemed to work.

Wow, I think I just found the first practical use for a Microsoft product.

I don't remember what I did for the rest of the day, not much, probably just ate dinner, and watched some tv.

I woke up about 10am, got up about 10.30am.

I was just bumming around on the computer, watching a bit of tv, my phone rang.

It was my mate, the drummer, he wanted to know if I wanted to go over to our other mate's place to practice a bit.

I said I wasn't sure, since my fingers were so stuffed up, I didn't know if I'd be able to play today, I spoke to him for a minute, and then decided I'd go around there anyway.

He said he'd be here in about 1/2 hour, so I got off the phone, had a shower, and got dressed.

Just after that, Dad came in with a furniture catalog, asking if I wanted a set of shelves or an entertainment unit or something.

I looked at it for a minute, not really seeing anything in there. We did some measurements to work out the size of the tv, and other equipment.

He went out after that, a little while later my mate, the drummer, turned up.

He came in, I chatted to him for a bit. I realised I had to burn a CD, so I started doing that, and while I waited for that, I started packing up all the stuff I needed.

I didn't bother to pack in any soundcards, or the microphone or anything, I'm sick of mucking around with that stuff.

I still need to get the linux box working properly, I need to chain all the cards of one crystal, and because the microphone input on the cards is so poor, I still need to preamp the mics anyway, so I might as well just use 4 preamps, boost the mics to line level, use the line ins, instead of the mic ins, and then each card gives me two channels in instead of 1.

Anyway, I grabbed the stuff I did need, guitar, and cable, power cable for the amp etc (I don't know why I brought the amp home, it's just sat inside the front door all week).

I also grabbed the guitar pedal from my mate's Marshall stack that I replaced the switch in, on Thursday night.

Dad came in, and asked my mate to move his car, because he'd parked in or across the driveway, blocking the car, and they had to go to take my sister back to the airport or something.

He went and moved his car, and when he came back, the cd was nearly finished. I waited for that, grabbed it, and the stuff, went down and loaded the car, and we left.

We went around to my mate's place. When we got there, there was another car in the driveway, my mate who works for the abc was there.

Our mate's Dad let us in, saying there'd be no band practice today, since our mate had broken one of his guitar strings.

I went in to look, saw his guitar, he'd taken all the strings off it.

We bummed around there for a bit, and then decided to go and get some lunch (It was around 1pm I think), and my mate had to go and get some new strings anyway.

We went out, had a look at our mate (who works for abc)'s car, it was parked at the station when it hailed the other day. He's got quite a few dings in it.

We jumped in the cars, and headed out to Erina Fair to get some lunch.

We got lunch, I went and got a burger from KFC, ordered it with cheese, without mayonnaise. I got it, then couldn't find my mates. I sat down at an empty table, called my mate, they were sitting outside.

I went and found them, sat down, started eating. Great, not only is this burger cold, and squashed, it has no cheese (that I paid extra for) and disgusting mayonnaise all over it.

I couldn't be assed to go and complain, so I just ate it. Gross.

We sat and chatted for a while, and then we decided to go, we left our mate that works at abc out there, and the three of us went back to the car, left, and went to Macron music, where I bought my amp, so my mate could get some guitar strings.

We looked at the drum kits and stuff first, and while my mate was looking for strings, I looked at the guitar picks, I like the ring picks, but I don't think they'll work on a bass very well.

The guy who sold me my amp was there, but was busy, so I didn't speak to him at all. On the way in, my mates had been joking I should tell him that it wasn't loud enough, and that I wanted one that went to 11.

My mate got his strings, and then we lef, went back to the car, went back to my mate's place.

We went about installing the software I'd burned on the cd, while my mate put the news strings in his guitar.

We went out and played for a bit after that, I could only play for a little while, and then I had to stop, because my fingers were killing me, and I was getting a blood blister on my right index finger.

We finished up about 5pm, and then my mate asked if I wanted a lift home. I left my amp and bag and stuff there, just brought the guitar home, I might try practicing some stuff later.

I got a lift home, and then just sat around for a bit.

I couldn't play the guitar, it hurt too much.

There was no food, I couldn't be bothered to go and get any, and it looked like it was going to rain out there, it was just waiting for me to come out to go and get food before it starts, I'll bet.

I mucked around on the computer, and on the tivo a bit.

I started writing a script to run on the tivo, to shift all the channels to lineup with the strange configuration on my sat decoders, because the silly uec 910's have to have aurora's channels on there first, even though I have no vertical feed from the lnb.

About 9pm, my phone rang, it was a mate I haven't seen for ages, since about Christmas, the guy I used to work with, for his dad.

He said that apparently it was my birthday tomorrow, and I should go around there. Oh well, I'm not really doing anything here.

I said I'd been round in about 1/2 hour, I got off the phone. I had a shower, and got ready, and then I left.

I rode to his place, it had been raining.

I went in, had a couple of beers, my mate who I went to the computer fair with the other week was there, he'd taken his Bundy black with him, so I had some of that too.

He suggested getting some pizzas, so he called up, and we all ordered pizzas. My mate who works for the abc was there (he lives there), and he hadn't been drinking much, so he went to get the pizzas.

We sat around chatting, listening to music for a while, and then he came back with the pizzas, and we all hoed into pizza.

We sat around more after that, more drinks, chatting, music.

my mate I went to the fair with asked to borrow the motorbike jacket my other mate's got (since he never rides anymore), he'd taken all the padding out of it, and started putting it back in there.

There's a couple of big shoulder pads, and I joked he could put them inside his shirt, so he did, and it looked he'd been taking steroids, these huge shoulders.

Someone was in the kitchen, so he walked in there for them to see, and came back, holding a spray bottle of Mr Muscle. It was pretty funny, I nearly had an asthma attack laughing.

We just sat around talking and laughing for the next few hours, just before 2am, we decided to go to a club in Gosford.

We all piled into my mate's car (he hadn't had anything to drink for ages), and took off. We went to a service station on the way, they got smokes and stuff.

My mate got money out, and gave me more of the money he owes me (that I lent him at the fair), and then we kept going.

We got to Gosford, parked, went to the club, I didn't bother trying to argue the cover charge because it was my birthday, I just paid the $7, and went in.

It was about 2.30am now I think. My mate, who works for the abc, bought a couple of drinks, one for me.

We stood on the edge of the dance floor for a bit, the music was crap.

My mate's ex girlfriend turned up, with his sister, they didn't see us to start with, then his sister came over and spoke to him for a bit.

Some people moved off a lounge at the side, my mate went and sat over there. I didn't want to sit down, since I knew I'd just end up sitting over there for the rest of the time we were here, but then the others moved over and sat down, so I did too.

I didn't feel like drinking anymore, I'd had a screwdriver when I first came in, and they'd used that shitty "orange drink" instead of orange juice. Christ I'm getting sick of that shit, it's worse than Tang.

We just sat there. My mate asked me to go and get him a drink, and gave me the money, since he couldn't be assed. Suited me, I was sick of just sitting there. I asked what he wanted, and he showed me his empty bottle, Wild Turkey and Coke.

I walked over to the bar, straight up to the bar, and ordered a Wild Turkey and Coke. The chick got a bottle out of the fridge, popped the top, and put it on the bar.

I went to give her the money, but she instead grabbed a glass, filled it with ice. I wondered what she was doing, and then she filled it with Coke.

Ahh.. Wild Turkey and Coke I ordered, I'm getting Wild Turkey and _a_ Coke.

Oh well, I paid, and carried them back.

I gave my mate his Wild Turkey, I had the Coke.

I sat and drank that. About 3am, my mate who'd driven us down here said he was going to go about 3.30am, I said yep, he asked if I wanted to stay, I said nope.

I sat there bored again, and at 3.15am, my mate said he was going, so I stood up, and we left.

I jumped back in the car, and he gave me a lift home. A couple of kilometres away from home, he said "oh crap, I didn't ask if you wanted to go and get your bike". (I'd left it round at my mate's place).

I said I didn't want to, since it was raining (not a lot, but enough that we needed the windscreen wipers on), it was now nearly 3.30am, cold, I'd had a few drinks, and my helmet and stuff was locked in my mate's house anyway.

He dropped me at home, I sat on the computer until nearly 5am, and then I went to bed.

I got up, not sure what time (don't remember), got ready, and left for work.

It was quite a nice day.

I got to work about 10.30am I think it was. I found that the fire door wasn't shut again, so I was able to go in there again.

I got to my desk, and went back to the stuff I'd been working on last night (again, not sure what it was, must be exciting).

I wanted a cup of coffee or tea or something, so I went out to get one, and found they were having a morning tea.

I made a cup of tea, and then I sat down where the indexers (the people who'll load data into my application, when I finish writing it), to chat with them.

The woman who does some of the web content for our section asked if I was coming up for the "Bikes, Blues, and Tattoos" festival, I said I was planning to come up for that.

Then we started talking about tattoos, and body piercing, we sat there for a little while going on about that, and then I started talking to one of the guys about bikes.

After that I went back to work, and I got stacks of work done, I found a couple of bugs in my logic of some old code, rewrote it, replaced some dodgy code with some stuff much better written.

I finished up an interface for maintaining an oracle table, that's used to populate a dropdown box on one of the forms, to force valid input.

I just sat there and worked until about 3pm, my boss came out to see how the development was going, I showed him the stuff I'd got done, the state of the loading interface, and the tape archiving search engine I wrote.

He said he wanted me to try to get the loading interface basically working by the end of next week, so that the indexers can start loading some stuff in, since they currently don't have any work to do.

I said I would concentrate on getting that done.

I have to reload the Oracle tables again, and I have to do a bit more javascript form validation.

I've still got another Oracle table that needs to be redesigned, and the web form for adding new records.

I've got a "3 of 9" barcode font that I downloaded a couple of days ago, since that's what they use for their existing codes, at some point I have to write a module for generating pages with barcodes on them, so the users with barcode readers can just scan them, instead of typing.

There's no way I'm even going to start on that last bit, I'll be lucky if I have the form for editing reports working by the end of next week, that's my aim though, then the indexers can do something, and I can concentrate on the next part in the meantime.

After that, I have to write functionality to generate text files that go with the hardcopy documents to the scanning bureau, describing what resoluting the images are to be scanned at etc, gees, there's so much stuff still to be done.

My boss had gone away by this point, I'd gone back to the code I'd been working on. I noticed the machine was running a bit slow.

I switched back to the firefox window where I had been showing the boss the archiving search engine, and it was still rendering the table, gees. They must have been doing a lot of archiving recently, and now my reasonably generic search term was returning far too many results.

I'll have to revisit that code, and add in paging, like I did in my application, and limit the results to 200 lines/screen or something.

I tried to abort it, couldn't stop it. I pulled out the network connection, thinking it would cause it to stop, and error, but it just kept going, it must have a big cache, and is baglogged trying to render it.

I watched the memory usage of my machine go up and up, I've only got 512mb in this machine, and it was using over 800MB. I minimised/closed everything else, to try to get more ram available, but it was no good, and the machine locked up.

It said 3.57pm on the clock.

I decided I'd leave it a while, and see if it came back, and I was starving, so I went for a walk up the street, to the post office, to pay the Amex bill I've been carrying around for the last 2 weeks, that's a month overdue.

It must be about half a kilometre to the post office, I went in, paid the bill, and then on the way back to work, I went into the shopping centre, and bought a couple of pies.

I ate these on my way back to work, and then when I got back to my desk, found my machine still sitting there, not moved, clock saying 3.57pm still, and it was now almost 4.30pm.

I reset the machine, plugged the network cable back in, and when it booted up, I got back to coding again.

I started putting in functionality for the help system, the help files have been written, I've just not got around to actually putting them in, and it something the project manager's asked me about a couple of times.

I worked out a way to do it, started coding, then decided that wouldn't work, that I had to add a new variable, and went about editing all the pages. It was a pain, but I had to do it.

I sat there until nearly 7pm. In the end, I'd added the new function in, every page supported it, but there was still no help content, I hadn't got that far, I'll do it on Monday.

I'd managed to implement a few major code changes tonight though, so that was a start.

I left, and I headed for home.

I went to the supermarket, bought food, came home, ate it.

I imaged the disk I bought for the tivo several weeks ago (using my groovy installer menu :-), and installed it in the new tivo. I went through the guided setup, configured it.

I had to wait for the guide data to index after that, so I just left it sit there, and I watched the other tivo, and I played the guitar for a couple of hours.

My fingers were so sore by the end of it, I couldn't play anymore.

I sat and watched a bit more tv after that, and went to bed about 3am.

I got up, about 9.30am I think it was, and got ready for work.

I took my time, since it was looking really yucky, and I was in two minds about actually going today.

I decided I would go, so I put my waterproof pants on over my trousers.

I'd parked on the street when I got back last night, so that if it was raining, I could go to work, and not worry about dying while getting my bike down the driveway.

The postie had just done a lap of the street, delivering the mail, as I went out the door, I heard him come back up the street. Must have found a letter he missed.

When I went down, he was actually stopped looking at my bike, he said "just come back for another look", I laughed and said gday, and then he took off.

Hmm, leaving my bike out on the road wasn't such a bad idea, the torrential rain through the night had washed most of the crap off it, all the muck that was left from the carpet being on it during the hail storm like a week ago.

I got my stuff together, and I took off.

It was only very lightly raining, so I wasn't that worried.

The front fender of my bike is all torn, and wobbles around, it's really starting to annoy me now.

I got on the freeway, it started raining a little bit heavier. I got fuel, and then I took off again.

It stopped raining a bit further up the freeway, then the road was mainly dry, about halfway to work it started raining again, so I had to slow down a bit.

I was going along, came around a bend, and saw yellow flashing lights. I didn't know what was going on, could have been an accident or something (though they aren't usually yellow flashing lights) so I slowed down a bit, and when I got closer, I saw it was a tar gang fixing up potholes.

It was the stupidest thing I'd seen, it's raining fairly heavily, some roadworker waited for a gap in the traffic, ran into the middle of the freeway with a shovel full of tar, dumped it into a pothole, and then ran like hell back off the freeway again because cars were coming.

I went past at that point, but I assume he waited for another gap, and then ran back into the middle of the freeway to pat the tar down flat into the pothole with the shovel or something.

There's a time and a place for fixing pot holes, in peak hour, when it's raining, on the freeway, is not the time or place.

I got to the end of the freeway, and started going up the highway to work, that bit was annoying, with it being quite wet now.

I got to a set of traffic lights, and I put my foot down, then I felt my leg get all wet, yuck.

I got to work, parked around the back of the building.

I wandered over, and I was lucky, the fire exit door doesn't fully close itself, so I was able to pull it open, and go up the back fire stairs, and in pretty close to my desk, rather than going all the way through the carpark, into the basement, and up the front stairs, through reception, and to the back of the building where my desk is.

It was about midday now, I sat down at my desk, and took my wet clothes off, gloves, jacket, waterproof pants etc.

I didn't realise just much water had got in when I felt my leg get wet at the lights. Now that I had my waterproof pants off, I realised that the whole length of the back of my left leg was soaked, it must have leaked in the side, since that's where the zipper is on the pants.

I've got a huge desk area at work, but I don't use any of it, bar the small bit where I have my pc, and a few papers, so I was able to put the pants up on the desk behind me to dry, and try to dry my gloves etc.

That's one thing I don't like about these LCD monitiors, I can't put my wet gloves on the back of it to dry, like I used to do with CRTs.

I did a bit of work, and then the guy upstairs asked if I wanted lunch, I went up, hung around up there for a bit, and then we went out to lunch.

We went down the road to the cafe, when we went in, the guy from Orange who's taken over IT was in there, sitting by himself, on his phone.

He was only at a 2 seater table, so my mate from upstairs and I sat at a 4 seater table behind him, when he got off the phone, the guy from upstairs made some crack about him being antisocial, and not sitting with us, so then he moved over.

We looked at the menu, then the waitress came and took our orders, we chatted for a bit, and then the food came, we ate that, chatted a bit more.

The guy from upstairs went out for a smoke, I stayed inside with the guy from Orange. It was raining heavily outside again.

We chatted for a bit, and then the guy from upstairs came back inside when he finished his smoke, and we went to pay. The guy from Orange paid for my lunch, that was cool, I'll have to buy him a few drinks or lunch next time or something.

We went out, were debating what to do, since we'd get soaked walking back to work. The guy from Orange had been to a meeting at Thornton, so he'd driven there, and stopped for lunch on his way back, so he still had the company car, it was parked behind the pub across the road.

He said we could wait there, and he'd go and get it, but we decided to go for the walk to the carprak, since it was mostly undercover.

We went past a florist, and they had all stuff out for Valentines day, including a whole bunch of little chilli plants.

The guy from upstairs decided to get one for the librarian, a funny old man who's retiring this month, after working for the department for 43 years or something, since he goes on about chilli.

He went in and paid for that, and we continued to the car park.

We got near the pub, went across the road, the rain was letting up now, and walked through the car park to where the company car was.

Oh, it's a ute, a 2 seater ute, this'll be interesting.

It had almost stopped raining, so I said I'd just walk back to street, but the guy from upstairs and the guy from Orange are like "nah, we'll all fit", so we did.

The guy from Orange got in to drive, the guy from upstairs got in, jammed himself up in the middle, mostly sitting on the centre console, (holding on to his chilli plant all the while), with his head up against the roof, and then I got in and squeeze in between him and the door.

As we were all piling in, I noticed 2 chicks watching us all cram in, I think they were staring, bewildered.

I should have waved.

We drove back to work after that, the guy from Orange almost running a red light (about the only set of lights in the place) to avoid us sitting in the car like that on the main street for too long.

We got back into the car park, and he went around to park in the security parking, having to swing right around to get the car in the right place to be able to reach the card sensor thing.

He swung around pretty fast, and the guy from upstairs asked if he was trying to make him spew.

We got in, parked, piled out of the car, and then went into the basement.

I went back to my desk, the guy from upstairs got out of the lift on 1 too, instead of 2, he said he wanted to give the librarian his chilli, I went in with him, but he wasn't there, so he just left it on the counter.

I went back to my desk, and I did more work, I can't remember what I was working on (since I'm writing this 4 days later).

The guy from upstairs was taking Friday off, he left about 3pm.

I stayed working in the office until about 6.30pm, and then I left, and headed for home.

Annoyingly, I'd not brought my backpak with me, so I had to wear my waterproof pants home, even though the sun was out, since otherwise I'd have nowhere to put the dinner I bought at the supermarket, because the saddlebag would be full with the pants.

Anyway, I wore them back, went and bought food, and then came home.

I ate the food, watched some tv, played the guitar for a bit.

I put on "And Now, For Something Completely Different" that I recorded the other day, and had started watching, I watched the rest of it while I replaced the switch in my mate's Marshall stack foot pedal.

After that, I watched a bit more tv, and went to bed about midnight.

Old habits die hard..

I'm back to waking up late again, got up about 8.30am, got ready, and left a bit after 9am.

As I was going through Ourimbah, to get to the freeway, I saw a flash from the speed camera in the school zone. Haha, some idiot driving a Holden Commode just got busted speeding in the school zone.

When it went to two lanes, I raced straight past him, and got on the freeway.

I got to work at 10.20am.

I did a bit more work on the form I'd been doing yesterday, and prepared to reload the tables.

The wrapper from the kitkat I bought the other day had a competition on it, I'd sms'd the code in, to see if I won anything, but not received a reply. Because of the terrible phone reception at work, it kept dropping out when I tried to sms the code in, so I eventually got a reply, saying that the code had already been used (obviously when my phone said "message not sent this time" one of the times, it did actually send it).

I got an sms, saying the code I sent in had won a ring tone, and they claimed it was worth $2.95.
How can you put a value on that? I've got millions of tones in RTTTL format, which I usually load my phone with, or I can just make my own with "nokring" or whatever it's called, from midi files, that you can download for free.

Anywat.. "Oh great" I thought. I went to the website, put the code in, and was then told I could claim a "top 20 ringtone", I looked at the list, and they were all crap songs.

The only one remotely passable was "Call on me" which is the remake of Steve Winwood's Valerie.

I previewed it, pretty crap, listened to a few other ones, they were all just crap, so I selected that, received it, and saved it over the top of "Inna Gadda Da Vidda" that I had in my phone already.

I went back to work. The project manager came and saw me, going on about a plugin they wanted in the browser so they could view the TIFF files from the application I'm developing. They need to be administrator on the PC to install it apparently, and one of the PCs they have, has had the admin password changed on it.

I went to look at it, the first thing I noticed was that the red gun in the monitor was gone, and the screen was a hideous shade of blue, instead of white, ugh, I couldn't look at that.

I sat down, tried to run the users/passwords thing, but it wouldn't accept any of the passwords I tried.

I decided to just use the "Offline NT Password Change Utility" thing, which is a linux boot disk that mounts the NTFS partition, and lets you edit the SAM file.

I went back to my desk, found that, downloaded it. The project manager found me a floppy disk, so I rawrite the image on to that.

I went back to the PC, by this time they were swapping the monitor for a non stuffed one, and once that was done, I rebooted the machine, off the floppy disk.

It booted up, I mounted the partition, changed the Admin password, saved it all back to disk, unmounted it, and rebooted. It said Windows would do a disk check when it booted, so I let it do that.

After that, it rebooted again, and Windows started. I again tried to run users/passwords, but it wouldn't accept the password. Weird. I looged out (of the user's account) and tried to login as local admin, but that wouldn't accept the password either.

I've never had that password change util not work, I wonder what happened. Anway, I got the user to login again, and then I tried running the users/passwords util, and this time I logged in as the domain admin, and it accepted that.

I added the user in as a local admin, then logged him out and in again to test it, this time I saw the login script fix the time properly, which it had previously been complaining about "the user does not have sufficient privileges".

I went back to my desk. A few minutes later the project manager came to me again, anothet guy needed the plugin on his pc, so I went and did the same thing (just logged into the users/passwords app as the domain admin).

After that plugin was installed, the project manager asked if the users should be removed again, I said that would be a good idea, so he removed him again, but now was unable to use a plugin.

I said they'd have to get another plugin then, because it's not going to be acceptable that users have to be a local admin to use a piece of software.

The guy upstairs called me, said that some of the consultants we'd been dealing with were there.

I went upstairs to see them, chatted for a while, and then we decided to go and get some lunch.

We went across the road to the cafe, I didn't really want to go there, I'm a bit sick of their food, anyway.. we went in, sat down, and prepared to order.

My phone rang, with my craptastic new ring tone. It was my mate in Newcastle, who pranged my bike. He asked if I could talk, I said in a minute, and went outside the cafe on to the street, where I'll get better reception, and be able to hear him, and not be rude.

I spoke to him for a few minutes, he wanted to know if I could find some time to come over and setup the hard drive I'd helped him buy at the fair a couple of weekends ago (when my mate bought his new computer).

I said I'd try to get away from work a bit earlier today (around 6pm) and head over to Newcastle.

I got off the phone, and went back in the cafe. A few more people from work had come in there, and the DBA had pinched my seat. Apparently someone had told him I was sitting there, but he didn't care, typical :-)

The waitress came and took our orders, we chatted for a while, and then the food came out. Both myself and the guy upstairs had to wait for ages for ours, and I was served last again.

I'd ordered fish and chips, not terrific, but then none of the food in this place is great, especially not for what you pay for it.

After that, half the people left to go back to work. I would have left too, but I was stuck in the corner. When the others finished chatting, we got up, paid for lunch, and went back to work.

I went back to working on the database, the guy had worked on the file I needed checked, so I went about loading that into Oracle.

It was looking a bit dark outside, I checked the Bureau of Meteorology website, and saw that there was supposed to be heavy rainfall over Maitland.

What are they talking about? it's not raining at all.

About 2 minutes later, it started pissing down with rain outside. I went over to the window to watch it.

Then it started hailing, it wasn't the ridiculous tennis ball size hail like the other day, this was just the standard pea sized stuff.

I stood watching out the window for a bit, and then the guy who sits at the desk near where I was standing, goes "Oi! What's going on here?", and at that point I realised the window was leaking, there was water coming in everywhere.

We looked, and there was about 5 spots along the top of the window, where water was just streaming in.

There were quite a few people watching the rain out the window now, so they started grabbing stuff and moving it away, so it wouldn't get wet.

The guy at the desk tried to call the building manager, but he had his phone on away mode.

I got bored of watching the rain (the hail had only last about a minute) and the window leak, so I went back to work on the database again.

I'd managed to load the file in, but once that had gone in, I realised that the field wasn't big enough, I'd truncated a few records, so I altered the table, made the field bigger, reimported the file, still not big enough.

I think it took me 4 goes in the end, before I'd made the field big enough to hold the longest records.

I reloaded the other tables after that, because I had to make a couple of columns larger. Once I'd done that, I was trying to work out why records were not being accepted as being the right length, when they were.

I fiddled around with that for a bit, didn't really get anywhere, so I left it, and went back to working on the other table I'd done, with the edited file.

I had to design a form that would allow for adding new records, as well as editing and deleting existing records in that table, so I sat and did that for a while.

While I was working on that, the guy from upstairs come down to install some software on the project manager's pc. He kept asking me for things, to email him files he needed (like Oracle's tnsnames.ora file) which I did, and was then asking me about the username and the password for the generic account to be used.

I didn't know, the DBA created all that, and I am supposed to grant privileges on that account, but I haven't done it yet.

I was a bit grumpy, I had a terrible headache, and I was annoyed that I had to go to Newcastle to fix a bloody computer, and would end up seeing what was left of my bike, instead of just going home.

The guy from upstairs came through and said he was leaving, at about 5.15pm, and said he'd been in the pub if I wanted a soft drink or something.

I kept working on the form I was going, and I decided to leave work at 6pm, as I'd planned.

It had stopped raining a while before, and because it was so hot during the day, the rain had all dried up.

I thought my bike maight have been looking a bit cleaner (since I still haven't cleaned all the muck from the carpet off it), but it looked worse if anything.

I got on, and took off, I rode all the way into Newcastle.

I got the Darby St, took the turn, and was trying to remember which road I had to take. Last time, I'd gone straight past it, so this time, I took the first left turn. D'oh, no, that's too early. I turned left again, and because of the layout of the roads, I ended up back on the main road, so I turned left into Darby St again.

I went a bit further up this time, I recognised a street, but I had passed it again, it's ok, I can take the next turn, so I did, and then headed back.

I knew where I was now, so I had no trouble getting to my mate's place.

I parked out the front went in, it was about 6.45pm. I knocked on the door, he came and opened it.

I went in, we chatted for a while. He went into the kitchen to continue preparing dinner.

His wife was there, I chatted to her as well. My mate offered me a drink and some cake he'd made, we chatted a bit more, while he kept preparing food.

I started looking at the PC for him. He'd told me he'd put the disk in, and it showed up in device mangler, but I told him that he needed to partition and format it before he could use it.

I took the disk out again to check the jumper settings, it was all correct, and I installed the DVD rom drive he'd bought.

While I put the parts in, he went and had a shower, because he'd just got back from the shops, and ridden up the hill on his push bike, and was all sweaty.

I booted the machine up, checked that everything detected properly in the BIOS, then let the machine boot up XP.

It came to the login screen, I picked my mate's login (there were 4 on there) because I thought he had no password, nope, he does. I checked the password hint, and then I had a couple of guesses, picked it on the third attempt.

I went in to disk mangler, and some silly wizard popped up, I went through that, and initialised the disk, then once that was done, I created a partition that filled the whole 120gb disk, and formatted it.

I mucked around with the drive letters after that, to get some sort of a sane lineup, instead of having a couple of disks, then cdrom and dvdrom drive, and another disk.

Once that was done, my mate came back from the shower, I showed him it was all done.

The PC was making a bit of noise, I think the CPU fan needs cleaning.

My mate's wife called him, and he went into the kitchen to help here more with preparing the food.

I shut the machine down, and took it out, full of dust. My mate came out of the kitchen, got his vacuum cleaner, and cleaned out most of the muck. I took the fan off the heatsink, and got more dust out.

When it was cleaned, and I'd put the fan back on the heatsink, I went to reinstall it, but found that taking it off had caused the little plastic clip on the CPU socket that the heatsink clips onto to break off.

I tried clipping it back on, there was enough that it would grab, but when you let go of the heatsink, and it moved a tiny bit, the clip would pop off. Crap.

I took the fan off again, and turned the metal clip around 180 degrees, put the fan back on, and found that the way the metal clip was shaped, it was now able to clip onto what was left securely.

My mate's wife had been given a digital camera recently, a 5MP Minolta, which my mate showed me, and he decided to take a picture of me. (Watch out the camera doesn't break! :-)

He found the install CD for it, they hadn't installed it previously, because there was no room on the hard drive.

I powered the machine back up, and I showed my mate how to install software, changing the destination directory, to install it on his new disk.

Once it was done, he plugged the camera in, and we looked at the pictures on it, including the picture of me. The red eye reduction hadn't been on, on the camera, so I had these evil looking huge red eyes.

He then decided to be smart, and opened it up in paint, and decided to fix my eyes, but just replaced the red with huge black circles, with little white ones in the middle, saying it looked like I was on acid.

About this time, my mate's wife had finished making the dinner, and served it to us.

My mate decided that he wanted some wine with it, he had a bottle of red wine, but no opener.

I went down to my bike, to check if I still had my old pocket knife in the saddle bag, with a corkscrew on it. Nope. D'oh.

I went back up, and after mucking around for a bit, we got it out. I suggested screwing a big drill bit into the cork, and then using pliers to pull it out, this didnt work, the drill bit just drilled a hole in the cork, not right through though.

My mate got a bit of coathanger wire, and thought he could use it to pull the cork out, but it was just pushing it in further.

I said stuff it, we'll just fish the bits of cork out, said to drill a hole right through, then push the wire right in, with a sharp bend back on itself, and reef the cork out.

We did that, and it worked, and when we poured the wine, there wasn't any cork floating in it, it must have all got stuck in the drill bit.

I finished my meal, it was really good, a stirfry, I don't remember the last home cooked meal I had. When I finished that, and my wine, my mate managed to convince me to go and look at the bike.

We went down to his storage area, and it was parked in there, along with his 250 Ninja that doesn't go, and a couple of pushbikes, and a stack of boxes and stuff.

He pulled it out, so I could have a look at it. Ugh. The tank is totally stuffed, the side has a big ding in it, and the top is all crushed in, god knows how that happened.

All the damage was down the left side of the bike:
the rubber off the footpeg was gone, and the springed metal bit was in the wrong position, all stuffed,
the clutch lever is gone,
the mirror is smashed,
the bolt that holds the rear shock to the swingarm is snapped off,
the engine case has really deep scratches in it,
the sissy bar backrest cushion is gone,
the tailight is smashed,
the headlight is smashed,
the front wheel isn't straight, the front guard is almost rubbing on it.

He said he'd pay me some of the value of it in a little while, when his inheritence from his mother's estate comes through, and then he wants to repair the bike, try to seel it, and pay me the rest after that.

I said that was fine, if he wanted to pay the first bit soon, then I'd give him a year to get it sorted, and sell it, or else pay the rest of the money I wanted for it (if he had been able to sell it, before wrecking it), and then chuck it away, or do what he'd liked with it.

We went back up to the flat after that.

He made me a coffee, and I looked at some papers he'd prepared to take to court with him (he'd gone to court last Tuesday, and had it adjourned for a month while he seek legal advice).

I looked through that, it had pictures of his injuries, and my bike, and where the accident/assualt from the police had occured.

It also had a bunch of character references he'd had people write for him, I only brieffy looked at those, but they all basically said the same things, that was good.

There was also a statement from the witness in there, it was really good, it backed up everything that my mate had said had happened.

After that, he gave me some papers he'd got from the court, including the police's statement of what had happened. I read that, and you could tell that it wasn't right, it just didn't make sense.

(Besides being badly written, and full of spelling mistakes). At least it said in there that one of the police had punched my mate in the head.

Their explanation of the situation, was that they'd seen him pull over and turn the bike off, and the roll it down the hill (which he had done, to be considerate, since he was coming back late), and they'd seen that as suspicious, so followed him.

They claimed they'd identified themselves as police then, but it didn't say that they'd turned their lights on, or used their siren.

It mentioned how the woman had unloaded the OC spary into his face without warning, apparently because she thought he was going to throw the motorbike at her. Yeah, sure.

After he took off down the hill, became unable to see because of the spray, and then crashed, he was saying "who are you?" several times, and the police woman said "I don't have to tell you!", and only after asking several more times did she say that it was the police.

Their statement didn't say anything about that, but the female witness' statement said exactly the same thing as my mate.

In her statement, she also said that after he had been loaded in to the paddy wagon, a cop was wandering around, and had stopped in his tracks when he saw her window open, obviously he knew they'd been seen assualting my mate.

She said that the cop then peered in the window, trying to see if anyone was there (perhaps her light was off), and then turned around and walked away.

Oh well, it certainly looks like they are definately in the wrong, but it only all happened because of my mate's suspicious behaviour, turning the bike off and rolling it.

I did tell him at the time, that I thought that was probably something to do with it, and that I don't do things like that. Bugger people, when I come back late from somewhere, I just make sure to just idle along past houses, and keep the light on low beam.

The only time I push my bike around (and never with the light off) is when I'm parked at someone's house, outside their window or whatever, and they've gone to bed.

Anyway, I finished looking at all the paper work, my mate had made me a coffee, so I drank that, and chatted with him a bit more, and then I went down to my bike to leave.

I really had a headache now, I just wanted to go home, to bed.

My mate came out with me, just as I got to my bike, my phone rang, it was a woman whose computer I fixed up ages ago, put a new hard disk in it (over a year ago), she'd rung me on Saturday, when I was in the shower, and I'd got the message just as I was heading out the door, so I meant to call her back, but I'd forgotten all about it.

I spoke to her for a few minutes, she knew someone that wanted me to fix their computer, and I told her that I don't do that stuff anymore, I pass all the work to my mate at Wyong, but they wanted me to go and do it.

Well, that's all good and well, but unless they want to pay me a day's wage, then it's not going to happen, I just don't have the time or patience to deal with that stuff anymore. (I didn't say any of that of course).

She said that she hadn't seen me for ages, and if I was ever down near her place, I could pop in.

Hmm, I have to go and see another guy near there (the guy who runs the plastering business I did a couple of days work for), who I'd seen at the shopping centre on Saturday, when we went to get lunch, perhaps I should line up going to see her, and then going to fix his bloody computer.

I got off the phone, it was really cloudy, and I could hear a lot of thunder, I hope it doesn't piss down on the way home. I spoke to my mate for another few minutes, and then I put my gear on, and took off. It was about 8.55pm I think.

I got back on the main road through Newcastle, saw a turn off for Sydney, but thought it was down the Pacific Highway, and I don't want to go that way, if it's raining. I kept going, to look for the way that goes to the Newcastle Link Rd, and to the freeway.

Next thing, I was thinking I must have missed it, because I was heading back the way I came from work. Bugger, I don't want to go all the way back across to Maitland, just to go south, to get on the Freeway, it'll add ages to the trip.

I saw Wallsend Rd, I knew that going down there would take me to the Pacific Highway, and at this point, it has to be faster than going back to Maitland to get on the freeway.

I went down there, and next thing, I was back on Newcastle Rd, which leads to the Link Rd and the freeway, woo.

I went along there, got on the freeway, and headed south. There's nothing at all on the freeway, weird.

I kept going, I came to the odometer check, and thought that I was about halfway home at that point, since my trip counter is on 40km when I get there in the morning, not thinking about the fact that I reset the trip counter at the service station in the morning, and the odometer check is only 10km before the end of the freeway, I'm back only 30km away from work, 70km away from home.

I kept going, the weather was mostly ok, hit a spot with some big rain, but only for a few seconds.

I needed to go to the loo, I know the service station on the southbound side is not far away (again, not thinking about my trip counter reset). I kept going, and going.

I went through the two night roadworks, and that stupidly bright light in the first one, and kept going.

I hit more rain, now it was coming down in huge drops, but the road wasn't really wet.

I finally got to the service station, pulled in, parked at the bowser, and went straight in to relieve myself. I was in pain walking in there. After that, I came out, put $10 worth of fuel in (to make up for the fuel I used going to Newcastle from work, and back to the freeway), and went and paid, and then took off.

I got to the stop sign, where the truck service station exit road merges with the car service station road to get back on the freeway, there was a truck coming, so I stopped to wait.

If it had been dry, I could have raced out first, but I'm not trying that in the wet (the road was soaked here). I waited, it went past, but another had come out, and was following it closely.

Then another. I turned my bike off to wait, because they were going slow, big semis with extra trailers. Another one came out, and then another. My god, how many are there. I crossed my arms and sat to wait.

Another one started to follow out behind, but was going even slower, so I quickly started my bike up again, and raced out behind the one just going past, before the next one could catch up.

I followed it out on to the freeway, and overtook it, and was away.

I got off the freeway, and came all the way home, got in the door just before 10.30pm. Bloody hell, nearly an hour and a half to get home.

I took some Panadol, and I went straight to bed, at about 10.30pm.

I couldn't get to sleep though, my head was aching too much. I remember tossing and turning, kept waking up at horrible times like 1.48am, and 3.36am.

I woke up early this morning, lay in for a bit as usual.

There's something funny going on with the radio, the signal keeps dropping out, and just leaving a blank carrier signal, because I can retune the radio and get static, or another station, then put it back, and it's blank, and then the signal will come back again.

I listened to this for a while, waiting to hear the weather, and then the guy crapped on for ages, and just as he was about to say the weather for Sydney, the radio dropped out again. Argh.

I got up, and went to have a shower. I turned the heater light on in the bathroom, and 3 seconds later it went off again, uh.. along with the rest of the power.

What the hell's going on here? Did the heater light blow the breaker? it can't have, because it should be running off the light circuit, and that's totally separate to the stuffed one.

Argh. I had a shower, bloody annoyed about the power. I knew this crap was going to happen.

I finished in shower, got dressed, and went out to the fusebox to turn the power back on.

Hmm, both breakers are in the same position, it can't have blown both the power and the hot water. No, it hasn't they're both still on, along with everything else in the box. But the power usage meters aren't moving at all.

What on earth is going on here? I tried using the test button on my breaker, didn't trip the breaker. Perhaps it's a blackout, it's the only thing I can think of now.

I went back through the garden again, I looked in the window, looked like all my parents' av gear was off. I saw my brother, he came and opened the door, I asked if the power was off, and it he said it was off until 1pm.

Oh, terrific. I am sick to death of this. I need to buy a UPS.

I finished getting ready, and left for work. I didn't bother to eat breakfast, because I still haven't been to the shops, and I really don't feel like eating dry ceral.

It was about 8.20am when I left for work.

I saw my mate (who runs the plastering business)'s van in the service station on my way to the freeway, he must have been inside the service station though, I didn't see him.

I got on the freeway, got fuel, and kept going. On my way out of the service station, to get back on the freeway, it was the same thing as the last few days.. some idiot just rolling along the onramp.

How do they expect to get from 30km/h to 110km/h to merge into the traffic, in 1 second?

Yet again I overtook the idiot in the breakdown lane, got up to 110, and merged, leaving them far behind. This is about the 5th day in a row this has happened now.

I got about halfway up the freeway, not really paying attention, and I noticed a cop moving along behind a group of cars ahead, whoops, I slowed down.

It was a station wagon, one of the dog handlers I think. I sped back up a bit, to just hang behind him, he over took a few cars, I was having trouble catching up.

At one point, I was going over 140, and still not making any ground up on him. I'd get stuck behind someone, and he'd get further away, then I'd get past them, go full throttle, and only just start to make up some ground on him.

That was pretty groovy, since I got to do that, riding at full throttle, until he got off at the Newcastle exit, and he was still a way ahead of me, I hadn't managed to catch up to him, going over 140 for several kilometres.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, got to work, about 9.30am.

Went in, started doing some work. I have to work on populating a dropdown box on one of my forms with valid selections, and I need to get this from exisiting records in Oracle. I've got them out, but now I need to process them into a format I can load into a separate Oracle table, I started on that.

The project manager came over, and I showed him, he watched me run a few commands across the file (after getting sqlplus to stop forcing line breaks, I was then able to use sed to replace all the "\n" in the file with real line breaks, separating the values into lines, and then run sort/uniq on the file).

The project manager suggested we go to get some morning tea. The Director General and Deputy are here today, went out for morning tea about 11.30am, and after a few speeches, I had some food, and then spoke to the Deputy Director General for a bit (I had a few meetings with him previously, while trying to get the website and the ecommerce stuff working).

I came back to my desk, went back to work, on the file. Haven't looked at the java stuff today, I think I might just write something else, export the data from Access, write a parser for it, and load it in to the Oracle table manually.

Once I had the file done properly, I filtered it to only give me values that had appeared more than 5/10 times in the file. Once I spoke to the project manager, he wanted the one with more than 5 references, so then I emailed that file to him.

He gave it to one of the new employees to check, get rid of the odd comma, and duplicate entries (with different spacing/commas etc).

I did a bit of work on a form, and then got a call from the guy upstairs, wanting to know if it was lunch time, I went up to see what was going on.

I hung around up there for a bit, and then we went down the road to the cafe for lunch.

He told me he'd sorted out the issues we were having with the java database loading the other day, turns out the problem was nothing to do with the java, the issue was in the PL/SQL that gets run after.

We both thought that the java was populating the temporary table, and then once that was done, completely, the PL/SQL would process the temporary table.

It turns out that after each line was appended to the temporary table, the PL/SQL was being called to process it, rather than loop through afterwards.

This is where the problem was, the field that the data was supposed to go into after the temporary table, had a smaller field size than the temporary table, which explained why we were getting the "field too long" (or whatever Oracle's obscure message for that error is).

The guy had changed the PL/SQL, forced a truncation while moving the data from the temporary table to the final table, and was then able to load all the records.

We had lunch, and then went back to work.

I did a few more hours work on the form I'd been working on earlier, got that working properly.

I discovered that the field sizes I want to use are too small though, the records that don't fit, can't be edited to make fit, because they contain all valid information.

I'll have to rebuild the table with bigger columns, and load the data in again.

I went to see the guy upstairs for a while, we left work at about 5.45pm.

I came down, grabbed my stuff, and left, I rode down the road, and followed his car, we parked behind the pub where he's staying.

We saw a few guys from work up on the back balcony. We went into the pub, got drinks, and went up to sit on the balcony with them.

We chatted for a while, a woman from work turned up, someone wolf whistled at her, and she came up and sat and chatted.

Someone asked why the pool table from work had been moved into the carpark, and apparently it's because the OH&S guy at work complained that the pool cues and balls etc present a risk of injury, so we're not allowed to have it.

What a waste of money, brand new pool table they bought, never been used (the cues are still wrapped), and now it's been stuck down in the carpark with a tarp over it (and today it had section divders in front of it, so it wouldn't be so obvious while the DG and DDG are there).

I went down to get another drink, decided to get a beer for once, since I knew I'd be here for another while, and I saw they had Laffe Blonde.

I went back up, and sat down again, continuing the conversation.

Across the car park, we noticed some intoxicated woman having an argument, perhaps in the window of a car, or perhaps with the car, she was pretty drunk, looked like almost falling over a few times.

We sat and watched that for a few minutes, it was so far away we couldn't hear anything of what was being said.

After that, the car reversed ouot of the parking space (oh, so there was someone in it), and headed off to go out of the car park. It slammed on it's brakes, and then reversed right back to where it had been.

It sat there for a few minutes, the woman had moved away behind another car, then a guy got out of the car, went over speaking to her.

We lost interest at the point, and recommenced our conversation.

A little while later, maybe around 7pm now, someone suggested we go and get some dinner.

I said I'd be up for that, if they got organised, and I didn't end up leaving at 10.30pm.

They squabbled a bit over where to get for dinner, I didn't want to stay where we were (which was one choice) they ended up tossing a coin, to go to the other pub, where the kitchen's been redone recently.

We started getting organised to go there, a couple of the guys staying in the pub wanted to get changed.

I followed the guy from work, dumped my jacket/helmet etc in his room, then went to the loo while he got changed.

We went back downstairs, we had to wait a few minutes for another guy from work. I went in to put a couple of dollars through the pokies, didn't win anything.

Just as I was finishing wasting my money there, the guy we were waiting on came down, so then we walked down to the other pub.

We went into the restaurant area, ordered our meals (I ordered a small one this time, this being the place that served the food I couldn't finish the other day), and then went back into the bar area to get some drinks.

The guy from work we'd been waiting (the guy from Orange who's taken over IT) shouted the drinks, that was cool.

We went back into the restaurant, sat down, to wait for our food.

We chatted for a while, and about 15 minutes later, the food started coming out.

The steaks they serve there are huge, about 6cm thick, I could never get through something that big. I'd ordered the nachos, they came out last.

Lots of chips, not much meat, oh well, there's still a lot of food anyway.

We sat and ate, then once we were finished, we went and sat in the bar area.

It was now after 9pm, I was just thinking about heading back to the pub to get my stuff and leave, when one of the other guys said he was tired, and going to bed, so I said I'd go too.

The guy from work, whose room my stuff was in, gave me his key to get in and get it.

I left the pub with the other guy, and we walked back to the pub.

On the way back, he was telling me that a guy he works with had lined up for both of them to be at a meeting in Orange, at 9am on Thursday, gees, it takes nearly 5 hours to get to Orange from here, he wasn't terribly impressed about that.

We got back to the pub, went in, I grabbed my stuff out of the guys room, locked the door, and hid the key where he could find it.

I went down, jumped on my bike, and took off, about 9.30pm.

I got home a bit before 10.30pm, sat on the computer for a bit.

A guy at work had mentioned there was a Monty Python movie on tonight, I browsed the program on the tivo, and found "And now, for something completely different" on channel 10 between 11.45pm and 1.45am.

I set that up to record, and went back to mucking around on the computer.

At 11.45pm, the tivo changed channels, started recording the Monty Python movie, I half watched a bit of it while I was still on the computer.

I went to bed about 12.30am, watched a bit more of the movie, and then turned it off a bit before 1am.

There's an electrician coming this morning to fix the dud breaker, that my fridge keeps tripping.

I got up at 7.35am, checked my email, then went about shutting everything down properly, in preparation for the power going off.

I really need to get another UPS.

I left the tivo on, it's designed to handle abrupt power outages, and I left the card server machine running, so the sat decoder will keep working.

I had a shower, got ready.

It was now 8.15am, no sign of the electrician, as I expected.

I ate more dry cereal (really must get to the shops, I'll have to do it on the way home today).

I left home at 8.30am, still not there. Oh well.

The trip to work was uneventful, didn't see any cops on the way.

Just got to work, it's 9.30am. The sun is blaring in the window, and I can barely see my monitor.

OK, I did some work for a while. About 11.30am, I was starving, I emailed the guy upstairs, asking what time lunch was, he said soon.

I went upstairs, ended up sitting up there for an hour, doing work on the diskless machine I've got up there, before started to head out to get some lunch.

First we went and saw the guys in another section, spoke to them for a couple of minutes.

My phone rang, it was Dad. He said the power was fixed, something about a broken terminal block, and a loose wire. The electrician hadn't fixed the breaker, because he didn't have a replacement, he just "fixed" it. Great, so it'll stuff up again.

Dad asked how to put the stuff on to use the internet, and I told him, he asked if I wanted anything turned on, I said he could put the card server on if he wanted, then the tivo won't record "waiting for NIT acquisition" all day, (oh but it will, because he won't fix that anyway).

He tried to do it, but it just kept saying "waiting for reset from IRD" and wouldn't work, he pulled the card in and out a few times, and the cord (argh, don't do that), but it still wouldn't go. I said I'd have to look at it later.

I said I'd see him later, and got off the phone. I'm really not impressed that it just got "fixed" and not replaced, it's stuffed. Argh.

We went out, the DBA and the guy from Orange who's taking over IT were sitting outside the cafe across the road. We went over, and spoke to them for a few minutes, and then we continued down the road, going to the other cafe.

We had lunch in there, and then went back to work. Got back about 1.20pm.

I got back to working on a file I need to write a parser for, to load it into Oracle.

About 2.30pm, I got an email, from the guy upstairs, saying "help, come upstairs for a bit". I went up to find out what was going on. Probably the website or something again.

Nope, he was working on an application that's been broken for a while, it's a fairly complex application:

It has a java component that the webserver runs, which connects to an ODBC server on a workstation, and pulls the data out of an Access database, it then inserts this data into a temporary Oracle table.

After that, a PL/SQL script is run, which processes the data in the load table, and puts it into the correct tables.

They issue is caused by the Access database (what a surprise), the data in it is too long for the Oracle fields. The java, which retrieves the data from Access, and insterts it into Oracle, seems to be broken, while it has functions to truncate fields that are too long, it just doesn't seem to do it.

I looked at the code, we did some debugging, worked out that for some reason the java stuff was evaluating some if statements, and working out things like "1 = 2" (or 3, or 4).

We bodged around with that for a while, I then decided to do something nasty, and changed the logic from "if [variable] == 1" to "if [variable] > 0 and [variable] < 2" (ie, == 1), and we compiled that.

It actually worked, it fixed up a lot of the errors we'd been seeing. I have no idea what the issue with the logic is though.

It got a bit further loading the data into the Oracle table, but then failed with trying to insert a record, that was too long.

We found the record in the Access database, and it wasn't too long.

We put some more debugging outputs in there, and found that half the fields it was inserting were NULL anyway, so this gets better.. first 1 = 3, and now NULL is too big.

I mucked around with the logic again, it had a couple of "and" conditions, so I moved those to a nested if, that worked for some of the records, but not the one that was failing.

I tried to work out if we could output the SQL statements that java was running against Oracle, but because it uses "PreparedStatements", there's no way to output the actual statement.

I googled around, found a few classes you can use instead, and it's supposed to give you a debugging function, where it will trap the variables being used in the prepared statement, and output it.

I changed the code to use these, but then had no luck compiling the java again, I thought it was issues with the classpath or something, but no amount of mucking around could get it to compile, perhaps because there was a package or something missing.

I have no idea, this is the first time I've done something with java.

I suspected perhaps there was something funny going on with the data coming from Access, perhaps there's a single or double quote or something, and it's stuffing up the logic of the SQL statement.

I put some string replace commands in there, to make sure there were no quotes going through, but it didn't help.

I kept looking, changing things, compiling it running it. Not getting anywhere.

I tried setting up tracing in Oracle, so I could see exactly what was going, but then, when it was supposed to be tracing/logging, we couldn't find the trace file.

It was now after 8pm. Gees, I've been working on this for almost 6 hours.

We decided to go and get something to eat. I went down, jumped in the guy's car, we drove down the road to the pub. He checked in to stay there, I wandered up to the room and back.

I got us a couple of beers, I figured I'd be here for another hour or so.

There were a bunch of people from work out the back having dinner, we went up there, looked at the menu, I picked what I wanted, and the guy from work shouted me, for helping him all afternoon. I would have felt a bit better if I'd actually got it working though.

Anyway, the food came, good stuff, I ate that, had a chat for a while, and left to go back to work to get my stuff, at about 9.10pm.

I got back to work, grabbed my stuff, and went out to my bike. I was just getting ready to leave, when another guy from work turned up, he'd gone to another guy's place for dinner, and had just got back. I spoke to him for a minute, told him where the others were, and he took off down there.

I got on my bike, and took off for home, it was about 9.20pm.

I got home, got in the door at 10.20pm. Hmm, there's a meter and some screwdrivers sitting on top of my guitar amp.

The power was on, I booted up the other pcs, I looked at the card server, he'd half started it.

I wrote a batch file to copy the stuff into a ramdrive, so the hard disk can stop spinning, and it can run off memory, because a few times the disk would stop, and then have to start again, and in the meanwhile the sat decoder would break up, because the keys would take too long.

Anyway, when this batch file runs, windows is crap, and if it copies all the files, and then runs them, it's too fast, and they all crash, so I had to put pauses in the batch file, after copying the files, and between running the server and client applications.

He'd started the server, which connects to the card, and one client (which my box is attached to), and then stopped, he hadn't launched the second client, or connected it to the server, (the one that runs their box).

I sorted that out, went inside to fix their setup, just pulled the card out and in, and it came up.

I told Dad that he hadn't finished starting the machine, he had to run a client for their box "I did" he argued, "no, you started one client, attached to my decoder, you then need to start another one" "i did" "no, there was only one client running" "oh, well I mucked around with the com port it's attached to, and stopped and started it" (argh, I'm glad it was running off a ramdisk, where it doesn't save the config changes, it would have taken me ages to fix the results of that).

I then asked him what the electrician had done, and asked if he was coming back to fix it, and get his tools. Dad said "it is fixed", apparently it was the terminal block in the hot water heater that was the problem, it was all corroded, increasing the resistance, and it had been drawing more current, then because the breaker had issues (and still does) it was tripping at 21A instead of 30A.

He hadn't replaced the breaker, because he didn't have one, he'd just "fixed" it somehow, and if it stuffs up again (great, just what I want) then he'lll come and replace it.

Not really acceptable. I should have stayed home to deal with it, and made sure he replaced it.

Mum said that the electricity bill would probably go down now, if the hot water heating wasn't drawing as much current. I said that I suspected that was the problem, months ago.

Dad said "well I didn't have time to get around to doing anything about it", and I asked "what, to call someone to come and look at it?", and then Mum said "Don't say anything".

I suspect they'd already had that conversation.

I said that the guys tools were still all there, and then I went back out.

I checked my email, and then started mucking around with the linux box I'm trying to use for audio sampling. I downloaded a couple more tools, a GUI interface to JACK, that lets you connect specific inputs and outputs.

I need to find an application that can record via JACK now. I started mucking around with ecasound. I found some examples of recording from multiple channels, so I kicked that off, did some test records, managed to get one card recording happily.

I couldn't get anything out of the other one, I mucked around with different input settings, device names, but still wouldn't work.

I went back to using audacity, which has preview VUs,so I can see the input levels, they were fine on one card, but none on the other card.

I mucked around a bit more, with both the mic and the guitar plugged into different cards, I can still only get one card to record.

I eventually found, after switching the mic and guitar around, that regardless of which card I select as the input device in audacity, I can here the mic on both cards (or the guitar, if it's plugged into that card).

When I use ecasound, it'll record from one card, but just silence from the other.

Bugger, I'm going to have to muck around more with this. Perhaps there's actually something wrong with the input on the second card. I know when I had 2 cards in my mate's windows machine, we couldn't get any input through either of the cards.

It was now after midnight, so I gave up and went to bed.

I got up early again, 9 something.

There's nothing to have on my cereal, only the manky milk that was in the fridge for 8 hours while it wasn't plugged in. Not consuming that.

I ate dry rice bubbles.

I mucked around on the computer a bit more, trying to get the multichannel stuff going.

I'd managed to download a copy of the n-track thing overnight. I installed it on one of my windows machines.

While reading yesterday, I'd realised that I can use the line input on a single card, for 2 mono devices (which is what our guitars/microphones are anyway).

I looked in the Jaycar catalog to find splitter cables and stuff, yeah, I can do that, 3.5mm -> 2x rca sockets, and then an rca -> 6.5mm socket in each rca will allow for a guitar and a mic etc in the line in.

I also looked in there for switches, to get something to replace the dud one in my mate's Marshall amp's foot controller. I found this one, here.

It's exactly the same on top, just the solder tabs are a different design, but who cares about that.

I went out to Jaycar, bought 2 sets of those, if I can get 2 cards going, there's 4 devices, and that's enough (we've only got 2 guitars and the drums). I got an extension cable and a 3.5mm -> 2x rca cable, so I can use my guitar amp as the speakers for the pc, and I also got the replacement switch.

I came home again, got fuel on the way, because otherwise I'll end up running out before I make it to the service station on my way to work tomorrow, and then I came home.

I mucked around with the pc again, plugged in the splitter cables, adapters, the microphone and the guitar.

The input level is pretty poor though.

I did a couple of test records, couldn't hear anything much on the playback, something's dodgy. (I know the 6.5mm socket on the guitar isn't great, has a couple of dead spots, but it's being really pedantic now).

I found about a command line recording thing, ecarecord I think it is, which supports specifying the device, and ALSA devices.

Perhaps I can just write a shell script to kick off 3 or 4 instances of that, each using a different card/input as the source, and then import the wave files into something later.

I started downloading that, and then my mate called me, and said he be there shortly, so I got off the phone, and packed everything up to go.

I burned a cd with the software I'd managed to download, to muck around on my mate's pc, and asee if we could get something to multicard record.

He turned up a while later, I jumped in the car, and we went to my mate's place.

We set the gear up, my mate went to have a shower, I moved his pc back to the loungeroom. I put the extra card in it (had left the one I put in yesterday in there). Now there's 4 sound devices in his pc, onboard sound (shit, disabled) a creative sb128 card I gave him, and 2 of the cheapy CMI cards I bought at the fair.

I went to install the software, but my mate has a password on his xp account, and I didn't have my NT password change disk with me, or I would have just changed it.

He came out of the shower at that point, and logged in, I started installing the software.

I mucked around, configured it, but couldn't get any input level, it was wierd.

I tried checking the recording levels/selections, I could access the settings of the first CMI card, but the second one, only had "recording" as a valid selection in the mixer properties, it showed no controls, and I couldn't click ok on it.

Something's buggered up here.

I went back, mucked around with the settings in n-track again, not getting anywhere. Selected the SB card as an input, that worked slightly.

I thought perhaps the driver cd would have some sort of mixer application, and bypass the broken windows one. I installed the applications. During the install, the directx installation crashed. I tried to run the 3rd party mixer, but it wouldn't launch.

I rebooted the PC, it didn't boot back up. Got past the XP starting screen, and when it should have displayed the login screen, it just did nothing, and the machine locked up.

I powered it off, took the card out, booted up, no good. Reset it. booted in "Last known good config", that came up. I shutdown, put the card in again, didn't boot. Took it out, still didn't boot. Tried last known good config again, nope, broken.

Tried booting a few more times, not getting anywhere. Took the first CMI card out, now it's back to the original config, and this time it booted.

We mucked around for a bit, and I setup cakewalk to use left/right of the input on the creative card, but the microphones had bugger all volume, I'm pretty sure you have to have a mic in the mic input, not the line in, but my mate says he's done it before.

I plyed around with that for a bit, I put my guitar amp in the line in, that was ok.

We recorded some stuff, but the volume was useless.

We decided to go and get some lunch, it was nearly 3pm.

We went to Hungry Jacks, bought food, and went back to my mate's place and ate.

We had another go with the pc, eventually I tried the mic in the mic input, that was fine, and the volume was what my mate had before, so he hadn't been using the mic in the line in.

The mic input is only mono too, so there goes the idea of the splitter for 2 devices/card.

Argh. I gave up, we put one mic in the mic input, and set it up in the middle of the room, and all moved in close to it.

We jammed for a while, testing the recording, it wasn't too bad for line levels.

We practiced a few songs, Led Zep's Sick Again, The Beatles' Day Tripper, and Come Together, U2's Vertigo.

Then we just started mucking around, and ended up doing some 15 minute song we just made up.

We listened to the playbacks, it wasn't too bad. The lead guitar was a bit loud, and the microphone's frequency response is pretty poor (the drums sound really tinny), but it didn't have too much distortion.

It's too bad that it's only 1 channel, and we couldn't mix it. I still might get a copy, chop it down a bit, and play it at work, see if anyone asks who it is :-)

My mate who picked me up wanted to go home (it was now after 6pm), so I packed up all my junk, grabbed all my cables etc, and the 2 cards I'd had to take out of my mate's pc (i'll try to get 4 cards going in the linux box), and then loaded up the car.

As we were going out to the car, I suggested that if we use a preamp on the microphones, we could then put them in the line in. Now I'll have to find some sort of a stereo preamp, so I can run 2 mics into it, then then split the output, and put it back into the same line in as left/right.

My mate headed for my place, on the way we went to the bottleshop, and I got another 6 pack.

He dropped me at home, about 7pm, I dragged all the stuff in.

I sat and had a can, and then realised there's no food. Oh well, there's some dried fruit there, that'll have to do for dinner.

I thought about mucking around with the linux box, trying to fix the alsa config for the virtual sound card, or writing the shell script for the multitrack recording program to kick off against each card, or imaging the 200gb disk I bought a week ago for the tivo, but instead I've sat here for the last 2 1/2 hours blogging.

I browsed around the net a bit, reading about alsa stuff, and using multiple sound cards. I tried a few different configurations of the asoundrc file, to make a virtual multichannel sound card, but then I couldn't find any software that supported the alsa/jack interface directly, they wanted to use /dev/dsp, and I can't find a way to make that into the virtual multichannel device.

I found another program, ecasound, it will allow you to specify an alsa device to use as the source, so I could probably just run 3 or 4 copies of that simultaneously, streaming different inputs to separate files.

I kept coming across references to using different cards being a waste of time, because the crystals won't be the same, and the recording will get out sync.

I had been wondering if it would be possible to remove the crystals from all the cards, solder wires on to on of them, and connect it to all four cards, but I'm not sure if crystals work that way.

I found a link in a forum about alsa, to a page on geocities, which described exactly that, remove the crystals from all but one card, and then daisy chain all the cards of that one card.

It said that it wasn't terrific though, it could take a few goes to get jackd to start without erroring, and sometimes a couple of reboots, but once it started, it was fine, and the guy had recorded 6 channels for 10 hours, and it stayed in sync.

Ah, I just found a mirror of the page here.

I think I've got everything to do it. I might go and buy some pin headers though, instead of hard wiring the cards together. I could get extra sockets, and put the crystals I remove in them, and then I can change the cards back to standalone if I need to.

I mucked around with software configs until about 12.30am, and then went to bed.

I got up reasonably early, before 9am.

I dragged out one of the servers, plugged it all in, booted it up, I started downloading stuff I needed, so I could get X going on it.

I looked for the windows cd, couldn't find it, oh well.

I had a shower while I waited for stuff to download.

I managed to get all the stuff for X, configured it, got it running.

I downloaded a linux multitrack recording program "audacity", but it complained it couldn't access the soundcard. Not suprising, since I didn't compile the kernel driver for it.

I started looking at details of getting the sound working on that board it looks like a pain.

I started downloading the kernel source, so I could build the sound drivers.

While I waited, I went to Jaycar to get the cables.

On my way there, since I was right near my mate's place, I stopped in to look at his amp, see if it had a line out port on it, and what type of connector it had.

It was about 11am when I got there, my mate's Dad was there, he left me in, then told my mate I was there.

He came crawling out, saying I was a bit early, and I said I was just on my way to buy cables, and wanted to check his amp, and then he could back to bed.

It was just a standard 6.5mm jack on the back, not an XLR socket like I expected.

I took off, and went to Jaycar. I got a stack of cables, XLR cable, adapters, extension cables, a microphone, another guitar cable.

I also got some batteries and stuff to make up a proper serial adapter for the 95lx, instead of the bits of wire and paperclips I was using last night.

I headed back for home, stopped in at McDonalds on the way, and got a couple of cheeseburgers, I thought about staying there to eat them, but then saw there were no newspapers, and there was also some soccer club having what looked like a garage sale there.

I came home, ate the burgers, changed the batteries in the 95lx, great, it still says low battery. Must be something wrong with it.

I played the guitar for a bit, got a call fro my mate, he was on his way down, and would pick me up on the way. gees, it's nearly 1pm now.

I packed up all the cables and stuff, sat around for a bit, listened to some music, he turned up a little while later.

I loaded my amp and guitar and stuff into the car, and we went around to my mate's place.

We sat down for a bit, I didn't even bother setting my stuff up, we went out to have some lunch.

We went out to Erina, we were meeting another mate. We waited for him, and waited, and waited.

He eventually turned up, and then we went in to get some food.

I ate lunch, and then went to get a drink, I went to the juice place again, ordered a regular (small) drink this time, and again, there was more than a large drink worth, so the chick poured it, I drank some, and then she put more in, but I couldn't be bothered mucking around, she was about pour it into another cup, and I said not to worry about it.

I went back to the table I didn't get lost this time) sat back down for a while, then we went to JB Hifi.

We browsed around in there for a while, still no copies of Kill Bill volume 1, I didn't get anything, and then we came back across, went back to the car, and went back to my mate's place.

It was now about 3.30pm. We set the gear up, and started playing. We practiced Sultans of Swing for a while, and then at 4.30pm, my mate, who gave me a lift over, wanted to go home, because he was going to a party later.

My mate (who's place it was) said he'd give me a lift back later if I wanted, so I could stay there a while.

We played the guitars a bit more, and then we decided to muck around with the computer, I took 2 soundcards with me.

We dragged the pc out, and set it up in the loungeroom near all the gear. I put an extra card in it.

We booted up, started trying to find where to tell Cakewalk to use 2 cards, couldn't find it, or anything in the help.

I said we should just google. The phone line didn't reach to the computer, so we dragged it all back into his office again, and set it back up.

He'd had a power surge on the phone line a couple of days before, and it had blown his modem up, he'd bought a new one, and put it in, but it had trouble connecting.

He connected, while dialing, it was making all crackling noises. He said the phone (in the loungeroom) didn't do that.

It only connected at like 16k. We tried browsing, it was painful, but were able to find that the version of cakewalk we were trying to use doesn't support multiple soundcards.

The connection dropped out. We connected again, 12k this time. Browsed a bit more, found that the newer version (cakewalk became "sonar") does support it.

The connection dropped out again.

I told my mate to get the phone, he did, we plugged it in, instead of the modem, it was all crackly. Hmm, sounds like the line is stuffed.

I checked the extension cord he was using, inside the connector looked fine, no corrosion. perhaps it's the other end, or the socket on the wall.

He plugged the phone straight into the wall, it was fine.

I took the cover off the connector on the other end.

One wire was just barely contacting with the pin that went into the socket, and the other wire was all corroded.

I fixed both of these, put it back together, and then the phone sounded fine through it.

We connected to the internet again, this time windows reckoned we'd connected at 963k, hmm, somehow I don't think I did _that_ good of a job fixing the cable.

I suggested that he get an 802.11b/g card for his pc, since he's close to the cbd, there's probably a few open APs he could connect to, bugger this dialup.

We looked around the net a bit more, I noticed my mate's Marshall amp foot switch board (it's not really a pedal, what do you call these things?), picked it up, and started looking at it.

My mate told me that the Overdrive 2 switch is stuffed, it's stuck on. I played with it a bit, yeah, feels like the action in the switch is broken. The others go down a bit, then click, and it changes the state, this one just goes up and down, doesn't click.

He told me that it stuffed up before, and he took it back and had it fixed under warranty, but now it was out of warranty. I said it probably just needed a new switch.

I grabbed a screwdriver, and opened it up, oh wow, I think I'll need an oscilloscope to work this circuit out.. there was almost nothing in there. The only components were 4 LEDS to show the state of the 4 switches, and a bunch of wires. There was no PCB, nothing, just wires and LEDs soldered to the switches.

I figured I could just get a heavy duty switch of some description, that would have the same barrel size, and replace it. Probably wouldn't look terrific, having and odd switch, but it would work.

I put back together, and then my mobile rang, it was my mate from Wyong. He was at a guy's place in Sydney, the guy with the Craptus cable modem that stopped working, and the tech stuffed up his network config when he replaced it.

This time he was having connectivity issues. I tried to work out what the problem was, it was a very strange one, the client pcs could get ips (dhcp) from the one running ICS, but they couldn't ping it, or get any traffic through.

I stayed on the phone, suggesting things he try, removing/reinstalling the lan card in the ICS machine etc, but nothing would fix it, it ended up the same, could get DHCP off it, but couldn't ping it or NAT through it.

I suspected a firewall on the ICS machine, that's bollocksed things up, but he said nothing had been installed on there.

I got off the phone, afetr 25 minutes.

I spoke to my mate a bit more, he'd worked out that sonar 4 would probably do it, so I suggested getting eMule, and looking for an "evaluation" version. (I'm not going to spend $1000 on a program, only to find it doesn't do what I need).

He started downloading it, I said I'd get though, at that point he gave me a lift home. I took my guitar, ro practice, and a few cables, and the microphone, left my amp and a bunch of stuff there, since I'm coming back tomorrow.

I got home, my mate said he let me know if there was anything happening (going out to a club or whatever). I couldn't be bothered to go out to get any dinner, so I just had a couple of cans of Bundy and coke that were left in the fridge from Wednesday night, after the hail.

About 9.30pm, I was feeling a bit hungry, realised there was a packet of rice crackers on the counter I'd bought days ago, and ate them.

I was mucking around on the server, I kicked off downloading the kernel sources, so I could compile the driver for the sound card. The current kernel version I was using isn't latest anymore, so I was worried I'd have to muck around to get the RAID driver etc all working again.

It took ages to download 30M.

When it finished, I couldn't find where the sources were.. found them, in with the sources to the current kernel I was running. D'oh, waited a couple of hours for nothing.

I went into the current kernel source, compiled the sound driver, and the driver for the cards I've bought. I didn't worry about the driver for the onboard sound, since while doing some reading on the internet about sound recording, I found details of sound sync getting out, because the crystals on different cards aren't all the same.

I figure that by using similar cards, it should minimise that.

The drivers compiled, I loaded them, got an error, but that was becuase the card wasn't in the machine yet.

I rebooted, to make sure it would come up properly, yep, fine. Shutdown, put a card in, booted.

Strange, didn't see the card listed as PnP device in the POST screen. Tried loading the kernel driver, failed, no card.

Shutdown the machine, took the card out again, put one of the other cards in, booted up, it showed up, loaded the driver, card came up. I shutdown, put the original card in as well, in a different slot, then 2 cards showed up, and the kernel driver found both.

I started trying to work out how to use both cards, with audicity. Hmm, doesn't look promising.

I mucked around a bit, couldn't find how to use multiple cards, read a stack of stuff on the internet. Found out about some windows program that'll do it, "n-track", started downloading that.

I was IMing the guy that looks after the oztivo images at the moment, he suggested that I use ALSA instead of OSS, since it's more flexible. He asked what card it was, and then gave me a link straight to a page telling me how to install the driver for that card.

I went about going through that, but I couldn't find the kernel driver modules. Eventually found I had to download "alsa-source", instead of "alsa-modules" (which it is now apparently), once I had that, I compiled the driver for the card, tried loading it. Failed.

I'd done a make install, but it was referencing /lib/modules/2.4.25/kernel/sound, instead of /lib/modules/2.4.25/kernel/drivers/sound.

I copied all the compiled drivers in manually.

When I tried to load it/them, I kept getting errors about "can't find cmipci.o", I then found I had to run "update-modules", and then it could find it.

I tried loading again, still failing.

D'oh, I still have the OSS driver loaded, dopey. rmmoded that, insmoded the new one, some error about a post install script failing. Poked around a bit, loaded the other modules, then came back and tried loading the driver again, same error.

Did it again, this time it worked. Hmm. I ran alsaconf again (which I'd done a few times, only to have it tell me that it couldn't find any cards). This time it found both cards, so I configured them.

I went back to mucking around with audacity, still didn't have any extra options. Less in fact, now there's only /dev/dsp, no /dev/dsp1 for the other card.

I ran "snddevices" at some point, it mucked around in /dev, and I think that might have put dsp1 back again.

I started reading about making a virtual device using the alsa configuration files, apparently it has a "multi" mode, where you can use multiple sound cards to make a single, multichannel device, though it says "this won't allow you to use several cheapy sound cards to make a multichannel input device".

D'oh, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. I'll try and do it anyway. I think it's because of the sync issues, (which it did mention) but as I said, since I'm using the same cards, that should be minimised.

I wrote a config file, tried to run audacity against it, but then found you can't specify the device to use, and it doesn't support ALSA mode natively.

I changed the default device to be the multichannel virtual card, but then audacity just complained it couldn't open the sound system.

I gave up, and went to bed. It was about 2.30am I think.

Got up late again, but not too late for once, got ready, left for work.

Got to work at 10.30am. There was a missed call on my phone, from someone at work.

I went into the building, they were just getting ready to have morning tea. I dumped my stuff, I was about to send an email to the guy upstairs, and ask if he'd called me, but I decided that nothing could be that urgent.

I went out and had some food, and a chat. A new guy at work commented on the ding on my tank from the hail, saying it was surprising, because where it hit is the hardest part of the tank.

I went back to my desk about 11am, and was just starting to do some work, when I got a call from the guy upstairs, I had to go up there urgently.

The guy who posed in his boxer shorts the other day had come to see me about something, so I spoke briefly (haha, pun not intented) with him, while going upstairs. I was busy thinking about what was so urgent, I don't remember what he was speaking to me about.

I got upstairs, and I was told the website was down again. Oh, is that all, I thought it was something important.

I got on a machine, and looked at the server, all the processes look fine, what's the problem? The guy showed me, "it does this", and showed me a page saying "page not found" (not the generic internet exploder one, but one generated by the software we use to run the website).

Hmm, something funny going on here. I logged into the editing interface of the software, and discovered that the URLs had disappeared, it wasn't listening on any address. I put the correct address back in, tried again, now it was working internally, but not externally.

I logged into the secure machine that sits between the server and the internet, checked the configuration there. It had been changed by someone. I put back what was supposed to be there, restarted apache, and then it was back working again.

There's something very strange going on here, 2 servers have had configuration changes made.

We sent an email to the guy who'se looking after the website now, to let him know what's going on.

He called back a few minutes later, and I spoke to him in a conference call, explaining what I'd found.

We suspected that the vender, who has root access to both servers, had changed something, because they've been trying to implement another instance of their software.

The guy said he'd call and find out.

Now that the fire was out, we decided to go across the road, they wanted coffees, I'd just had one downstairs with my morning tea.

I went across anyway. The got coffees, I just got a chocolate bar. We moved outside after ordering, because the guy from upstairs wanted to have a smoke.

I'd worn my Lowes shirt and ugly pattern shirt over the top, for a laugh again. While we stood outside, I saw a guy walking up the street wearing a white Lowes shirt.

They got their coffees, and we went back across the street to work.

My old pc is still hanging around up there, they had Dell come out the other day, and they replaced the motherboard and the cpu. geez, about all that's left of the machine now, is the case.

The new guy there, who keeps himself busy dealing with helpdesk stuff, has been going on about a disk for it. I told him that I'd use it without a disk, with a bootable disc (knoppix) (since I'm sick of him whinging about the disk).

I got the machine, took it around the other side, and started setting it up.

I went downstairs, and burned another copy of knoppix, then I came back and booted it. While it did that, I went in and got a bit of cat5 to patch it, and then I went into the computer room to patch the data port on the desk.

I patched the right one to start with, but with a dud patch lead, when I found that I couldn't get a link up, and I went and changed the patch to the other rack, but this was the wrong one, downstairs instead of upstairs, so then I used a different cable, patched the original port in, and it worked.

D'oh, I forgot that the video card in these dells is crap, and knoppix doesn't support anything more than real mode 640x480 on it. Oh well.

At this point, my old boss came in, it's his last day today, he told me that my beard is the stupidest looking this he's seen, it looks even worse than the one I had when I started there. (When I started there, it was just a bushy mess, now it's still like that, but there's a bit of a goatee).

I started doing some work, they had backed up some data to tape, and restored it, and I had to verify that the backup/restore had worked correctly.

I grabbed a couple of TIF files that had been backed up and restored, but they aren't valid TIF files, I had to work out what they were, (perhaps containing JPEGs) and work out how to convert them.

On the whiteboard behind me, someone's drawn up a calendar, and IT staff write what they're doing for the next couple of weeks on it. The sysadmin had written "Ho Ho Ho Ho" in his (4 days, next week), and someone said "what's that supposed to mean? he's going on Christmas leave?", ("Ho" being "Head Office").

The boss asked why they weren't using a collaborative calendar, (on their pcs), I said it was a collaborative calendar, I've seen everyone scribbling on it.

At that point he said something about "I can do without wit from temporary Australians", and booted the chair I was sitting on.

It was pretty funny. (Temporary Australian being someone who rides a motorbike).

I went back to working on the TIF files. The guy next to me, had been sent more junk in the internal mail. This time it was a fluro yellow/green safety shirt, to go with the hard hat and safety glasses he's already been sent.

Someone started joking that all the IT staff should have to wear them, especially when going to fix someone's pc.

Someone found a safety vest, and gave that to me, so I put it on. The guy next to me then put the hardhat on me, and we all had a bit of a laugh.

I just left it on, and kept working.

The helpdesk guy showed us a HP 95lx he'd dug out of somewhere, in the box, complete with manuals. It was going to get thrown out, along with a whole bunch of other good stuff.

The boss asked if anyone was going for lunch, but a lot of the guys were leaving early today, and didn't want to waste an hour getting lunch, so no one went.

A lot of people left, it was now about 2pm, I just stayed working on the TIF files, found that if I hexedit the file, remove the first 512 bytes, it's then a valid JPG, and I found that the files had backed up and restored properly.

I went back down to my desk, and took the HP with me.

I kept working downstairs, working on Oracle stuff, and some more of my application.

More people left, about 3pm.

My old boss came round, he was on his way out, I shook his hand and said bye, and then he went back upstairs.

There was an email from him to all users a little while later, explaining that he'd been fired, and it would probably be the last job, he'd retire etc.

I ended up being one of the last people left in the office, and was asked "don't you have a home to go to?". I wasn't getting much done, so I decided to leave, it was about 5.30pm.

I took the HP with me, and I went home.

I went to the supermarket on the way home, got dinner etc, and came home.

I sat and played with the 95lx for a while, pretty cool. I'd read on the internet about the pinouts for the serial port on it, so I found a cdrom audio cable (they fit) and went about making an adapter for it.

I had some issues getting the serial stuff to work properly, in the end I found it was a couple of problems. The adapters I was using for db9/25 -> cat5 had different pinouts, the rx/gnd were around the wrong way in one of them, and even when I got that right, there was some sort of crosstalk or something going on, so that when the rx and tx were both connected to the remote end, I was getting loopback.

Not sure what's going on there, I mucked around for a few hours with it, trying to be able to use it as a simple serial terminal on the tivo's port.

I googled for info on multitrack recording on linux, and read a bunch of stuff, I want to get one of the servers I built running as a recording box for when I play my guitar round at my mate's place, and I really don't want to put windows on it.

I looked at the Jaycar catalog, working out cables I'd need for my amp, an XLR cable to 6.5mm, and then a 6.5mm to 3.5mm so it'll go in the sound card etc.

I sat up until 3am, and then went to bed.

Thursday.. was a fairly unremarkable day.

I got up a bit late, got ready, went to work.

Worked more on the application I'm developing.

Can't remember much about Thursday at all, we went for lunch at the cafe a bit down the street, then I went back and did some more development, and I left work about 6pm.

Had dinner, watched some tv, played the guitar etc, went to bed about midnight.

If I can remember anything at all remarkable about this day, then I'll update this entry.

I don't like the way blogger is all ass about when you add new entries on the same day, and it puts them above the last post for that day, it all ends up out of chronological order, so this is an edit of yesterday's several posts.

Oh what fun.

In retrospect, this is just one of those days where "everything that can go wrong, does go wrong".

I'm sleeping, I wake up. It's dark and quiet. We've had a blackout, I have no idea idea what time it is, I check my watch, 4.30am.

I need to relieve myself (that's why I woke up), hmm, I'm going to have fun doing that in the dark.

I check outside, the street lights are still on. Hmm. I see up the street a light in someone's house is on. I check my lights, they work. Oh great.

I relieve myself, and think about what to do. The fuse must have clicked off for some reason, do I go outside, at 4.30am, to go to the fusebox, in the sprinkling rain (through the overgrown garden, meaning I'll get all wet), or just wait, and fix it in the morning?

Hmm, if I do that, I'll have to spend an hour getting everything running again, and then I'll be even later for work, and my alarm won't got off. I guess I'll have to go out there,

I got dressed, grabbed my torch, and wandered out, through the garden, getting all wet, and walking through several spider webs on the way.

I get to the fusebox, open it, only a daddy longlegs in here for once, no huntsmans.

I locate the breaker for my power, it's off.

I click it back on, it goes off again about 1/2 second later. Hmm, either it's the usual silly buggers this breaker does (it also has the power for my hot water heater on it) or there's something wrong.

I click it on again, and it clicks off again. I did this a total of 5 times. Normally after the second time, of it not staying on, you could work out something was wrong, but, the hot water heater breaker, will click off for no apparent reason, and I will have to turn it back on, have it click off again, and only once I've repeated this process, sometimes up to 15 times, will it stay on.

I figured it was just because of all the stuff coming on when the power comes back, and drawing too much power. It starts to rain. I wander back through the garden, getting more wet.

I get back inside, I turn off all the power points (or so I thought), I went back to the fuse box again, tried turning the breaker on again, twice, but it still just clicks off. Hmm, I must have missed a power point, I wasn't sure I made sure the fridge was turned off, but maybe there's water got in the roof, where the power comes in.

I went back through the garden again, now pretty much soaked. I checked the power run along the beam outside (but I now realise that's an extra run, just for the hotwater heater anyway), it's got a bit of water on it, but it still looks like the seals/insulation is good.

I checked, the power point the fridge is in is still on, since that's the only thing plugged in there, and it's hidden behind a cupboard under the bed, I crawl in and turn it off.

I decided to check the roof space for leaks, it's been raining pretty heavily for the last 5 hours. I grab the ladder from the bed, lean it up against the entertainment unit, carefully climb up, push the manhole cover up, climb up further, peer around the roof cavity, no water that I can see.

I got back down, putting the manhold cover back into place. I wandered back out through the garden, to the fusebox again. This is the third trip now. I turn the breaker back on, it stays on.

Aha, must be the fridge. Have to test that theory though, maybe it's just the motor coming on, drawing too much current, too quickly after the power is restored. I went back inside, I turned on the power point with the microwave in it. It came on, the display came on.

I waited a minute, it was still on. I crawled in under the bed, turned on the power point with the fridge in it. I heard the motor come on, run for about 3 seconds, and then go quiet. I got out, and found the microwave display was off.

Yep, the fridge is fucked. Terrific. I went back to the fusebox again, for the fourth time, I turned the power back on, it held again. I came back inside. I turned on everything but the fridge this time, no issues (yet). (Though as I wrote that, I decided to copy all this text into vi, and save it locally, instead of losing it if the machine goes off again).

I booted all the pcs up, got everything back running, dns server, router, gateway, card server, video editor, this pc. I'd forgotten to put the tivo and sat decoder (along with the rest of the entertainment gear, tv, vcr, receiver etc) back on, so I did that, watched them boot up.

It's now 5am, I'm all wet, I'm getting a headache. I just checked the weather prediction (guess) for later today, there's one issued at 4.30am, I'll just repeat it here:

For Wednesday
Showers and thunderstorms with possible hail, squally winds and heavy rain.
Strengthening north to northeast winds ahead of a gusty westerly change in the evening.

Lovely.

Now, I'm probably not going to end up going to work tomorrow, considering that, should I even bother going back to bed, or just watch some tv, and do something useful, like image the hard disk I got on Sunday for the new tivo, and install that, or should I put the soundcards in the spare pc, and setup the mixing box?

I think I'll go back to bed, it's only 5.23am, I can still get a couple of hours sleep in, before deciding what to do.

Oh, and I don't know what annoys me the most about the fridge going, the fact it took all the crap above to sort out what it did, and work out it was stuffed, the food in it, having to get it fixed, or have to get it replaced.

If I have to replace it, I think I'll just get a barfridge, but I need a reasonable size freezer, I live on frozen food, I wonder if they make a bar freezer.

So much for going back to bed. I'm just bumming around on the computer..

I start chatting in irc, mentioned it was 5.30am, and all the issues I'd had, and a guy starts going on about how he's thinking about killing himself, because his palm stuffed up, and lost his data, and because he made a mistake, and didn't move his pc side backup out of the way, it got wiped.

I'm here trying to get him to calm down, but he's not being at all logical, or making any sense, but this guy's like that.

Oh, and some mongrel cats were squablling on the front verandah, I went out with the torch, Dad had come out to go to work, so he sorted that out, and I cam back inside. Now it's nearly 6am, and I've already been outside in my underwear (I took all the wet clothes off). Fucking cats.

This is going to be a shit day. (I didn't know just how right I was).

I went back to bed, a bit after 6am. I put the tv on, and watched an episode of Futurama, then when it finished, I went back to sleep, that was about 6.45am, and it was still raining, so I didn't bother to fix the time/alarms on my alarm clock.

I woke up again at 10.30am, the noise of the garbage truck in the street woke me up.

I put the radio on. Just as I put it on, they were talking to some guy from the Bureau of Meteorology, he was saying the rain would be staying until midday, and then would just build up, and storm again later.

I went back to sleep. I woke up again at 11.30am, the stupid woman next door having an incredibly loud conversation with someone. Shut up!

It's not raining, or even overcast now. I put the pillow over my head, and lay there for a bit, then decided I should get up, and do something about the fridge. I think I'll just buy a new one, a smaller one.

I got up, at 11.45am.

I might try running an extension cord from the house though, and running the fridge of that, to see if it's a problem with the fridge, or my crappy power.

I know the voltage was low, because I've got a monitor, and the tube doesn't stay on properly in a brownout, the picture loses sync, like when you run a frequency a monitor doesn't support, and then the tube keeps losing power like being turned off, he picture disappears, and then it comes back on, and repeats the process.

Perhaps because the voltage was low, the fridge was drawing extra current, and tripping the breaker.

I found an extension cord, ran it out the door, and in the other door to the house, plugged it in. Mum's there, says "where are you going with that?" and I said "to run my fridge". I went back in, dragging the cord behind me. Now I had to get the power cord from the power point, to plug it into the extension cord.

I crawled under the bed, pulled the plug out of the powerpoint, crawled back out from under the bed.

I went to the back of the fridge, found a black cord, carefully pulled it a bit, it started coming out. It got stuck, so I put a little bit more force on it, and then it came a bit more, got stuck again, I pulled it again, it came loose.

The cord came out from behind the fridge, and then I noticed something strange. There's no plug on this cord, there's just bare wires on the end. This also isn't a power cord, it's a bit of coaxial lead. Great, this is my aerial. I've just reefed the aerial cord out from behind the fridge, and ripped the plug off the end in the process. I wonder where the hell that is.

I got back in under the bed, oh, here's the plug, still in the wall. I pulled it out, and chucked it out from under the bed.

I traced the power cord to the fridge, ah, it comes out the other side of the fridge, that's not really accessible. I reached in there to try to find the cord, and put my hand in a huge mucky puddle. Ugh.

I got out from under the bed, and got down to pull the fridge out, I pulled it out a bit, then was able to reach in, find the cord, and start pulling it, it got caught. I got back under the bed, unstuck the cord, Mum pulled the rest of it out.

I said that if it didn't work, off the other circuit, then I'd have to buy a new one, because no one's going to want to fix a 20 year old fridge, and Mum corrected me, a 26 year old fridge. Gees, it's older than me.

I plugged it in to the extension cord, the compressor started, I was expecting it to go for a couple of seconds, and stop, as the breaker for the circuit in the house trips, but it just kept running. Great, perhaps nothing wrong with the fridge, it might be the breaker, since the same unit has the breaker for the hot water heater on it, and it just clicks off all the time for no reason, and takes tons of attempts to stay on (but I already mentioned that).

I left it running like that.

I watched a bit of tv, ate breakfast. The milk was all gross, having sat in the unpowered fridge for at least the last 8 hours.

Mum rang Dad, to find out about getting an electrician to fix/replace the breaker, Dad suggested some guy, the same guy that installed it. Great. He said he'd sort out getting him out to fix it. Dad suggested running the fridge off the circuit in my parent's bedroom, since it has an earth leakage protector thing (and the extension cord isn't in that circuit), so Mum found more extension cords, and ran it off the other circuit, the fridge kept working.

The project manager from work rang me on my mobile, I explained that I wouldn't be in, because of the fridge, and power issues, (and it was now after midday, so I wouldn't have got ready and got to work before 2pm, not much point). He told me there was a problem with the application I'm developing (it's being used in production) the intranet version has issues connecting to Oracle, and something about error retreiving text for error message, ah, I've seen this before, it's when the Oracle environment variables aren't set properly, and php can't find the Oracle home directory, and the Oracle client libraries.

It must be from all the mucking around with apache yesterday, someone's restarted it using apachectl, rather than the init.d script, which force sets the Oracle environment variables. I told him to get someone in IT to restart it, using the init.d script. He said that was fine, and I'd see him tomorrow.

I went back to watching tv. A couple of minutes later, the phone rang again, work again. I answered it, this time it was the guy upstairs, the project manager had gone to see him to restart apache. He wasn't sure what I'd told the project manager to tell him to do, so I explained to him how the init.d script forces the environment variables.

He restarted apache using the init.d script, and went to do a test query in my application. I said it should come back in about 5 seconds. It didn't, we waited, and waited, it was taking far too long. I heard the project manager say that it would take about 5 minutes, and then come back with the error message.

I suggested that he cold restart apache (stop/start) rather than warm restart it, so he used the init.d apache script to full stop apache, and then cold start it. He did the test query again, and it came back in about 5 seconds. All fixed.

he asked me where I was today, I said I was at home, and explained the power issues, and the fridge packing up, and all the rest of it. I asked him yesterday to replicate some Oracle tables between a couple of servers, so I had the data on a development server, rather than doing development on the production server. I said I'd see him tomorrow, and I got off the phone.

While I was on the phone, Mum had come in, seen I was on the phone, and gone away again. I went back to watching tv. Mum came out again a bit later, said that Dad had arranged for the electrician to come back to fix the breaker.. 8am Monday morning he'd be here. Great, my fridge is running off 50m of extension cords for the next 4 days.

I sat and played the guitar for a bit, and watched the tv.

I'd recorded "Wave Aid" that was on tv on Sunday, a concert to raise money for the Tsunami victims, and my mate (the drummer) was interested in seeing it, so I said I'd put it on a tape for him. I mucked around, getting the tivo connected to the vcr, and all setup to record, did a couple of test recordings.

Oops, I had the VCR on the wrong channel, tried again, still didn't look to work. Then I realised I didn't even have one of the outputs of the tivo attached to the VCR anymore, so I fixed that, did another test recording, this time it was fine.

I sat back, and started watching the concert. It got a bit cold, and windy. I looked out, it was overcast, here comes the rain back again.

I went back to watching the concert. Bloody Kasey Chambers came on, I can't stand her, so I muted it, and while I waited for her to bugger off, I played the guitar a bit.

I started to ascii art a tab, to tab what I'd worked out of "She Said She Said", I only managed to get the first bar staff ascii drawn, when I heard a couple of specks of hail hitting down.

I looked out, and saw someone out in the street covering their car with blankets. Hmm, probably not a bad idea.

I grabbed a spare quilt I've got, went down to my bike, I moved it back, and dragged it towards the garage door a bit more, to make sure it was under cover of the balcony more.

I put the quilt over the tank, and the front of the bike (handlebars, front fender, mirrors etc).

I stood down there to wait. A couple of huge chunks of hail came down. One landed on the grass across the road. I'd never seen such a huge bit.

I ran back inside, (since going up the stairs is uncovered) grabbed my motorbike helmet, pulled it on. I ran down, and across the street, grabbed the chunk of hail, it was the size of a baseball.

It was all tiny little bits, about 6mm across, stuck together to make one big ball, but it was stuck together well, because it bounced on the ground a few times, and stayed together.

I ran back across the street, and went up and gave it to Mum.

I few more were coming down, smashing on the road. They were more of these little hail stones stuck together.

All of a sudden a huge solid one crashed down, hitting something metal, and making a massive bang. A few more of these came down, I got hit on the elbow by one of them, it hurt like hell.

I grabbed some carpet underlay that's hanging around near the bin, from where my parents recently ripped up the carpet in one room, and I threw that over my bike, got another couple of bits, did the same.

At some point, I got hit on the hand by a piece of hail, my index and middle fingers copped it, and were bleeding.

All of a sudden there was truckloads of these huge stones coming down. I got hit on the shoulder, and the back (I still had my helmet on).

I got in between my bike, and the garage door, and crouched down for shelter, they were coming in straight at me, and I was getting hit all over.

I saw one of the cats come out of the drain (probably a good idea, since it will be filling up with ice and water) and pissbolt up the road.

My sister came down, and said to go and get the cat. I went down, not expecting the cat to be there, perhaps she went under the car. I couldn't see her (wasn't getting down to look under the car, and get hit on the arse), and I was getting hit on the legs and feet with hail. I copped a couple of big hits on my helmet.

I went back up, and got undercover again.

The huge hail stones continued. The cloth shade cover thing over the driveway had tons of them hitting it, and the front edge, where they were all pouring off, was torn by them.

I ran back upstairs, and inside, to find that because I'd left the door open, it had all come inside. I grabbed all chunks of ice, and threw them out the door.

I went out on the balcony to watch the rest of it.

When it stopped, it was still, and quiet, not raining even.

I went for a walk around. Mum came out and said the skylight in their bathroom was smashed.

We went and looked at the Jag, that's parked on the street out the front, the boot was all marked, all dinged in.

One of the sheets of laserlite roofing on the front verandah had a bunch of big holes in it, other bits were just pushed right down, and had to be popped back up.

I went and uncovered my bike.

I pulled all the wet carpet underlay off my bike, great, as I thought, the rubber's all gone weird, and some of it's stuck to the bike seat, now I'll have to try to get that off.

I pulled the quilt off the front of the bike.. oh.. that's new, a huge ding in the tank near the filler cap, on the curve of the tank. Terrific.

It started raining, I went back inside, and continued watching the concert I'd left on, while standing on the balcony.

It stopped raining again, and the weather was weird again. It might hail again.

Mum and my sister went down the garage for something, I just stayed up on the balcony. They started covering my bike up again. I went downstairs, and told them not to bother, since it's stuffed anyway.

Lets, see the current damage to my bike (from all previous accidents/drops):

The exhaust is scratched,
a heat shield is missing off the exhaust,
the left side of the tank is scratched, and dinged in,
the back left blinker is held on with tape,
the front fender is all torn, and wobbles around,
the front right fork is dinged in,
the steering head isn't straight,
the headlight mount is broken, and the light is fixed in place with wire and tape.

That's all I can think of at the moment, but I'm sure there are a few more things, not to mention the new hail damage.

I wandered around the front and back yards, they were still covered in ice, some huge chunks. My brother was putting them in the freezer.

I went back inside, and sat and watched the concert. It started pissing down with rain, I just stayed watching the concert.

I think it was now about 6pm.

The rain stopped, and the sun came out, and dried the road up, so a little while later, I went down, and I dragged the wet carpet and underlay off my bike, it was now filthy from the carpet, and I went out for a ride to see the damage, and get some dinner.

As I went 'round the corner, an emergency glass repair truck was on it's way somewhere.

There were leaves and branches covering the entire road, I had to be careful to stay in the narrow wheel tracks through all the mess.

I got around near the main road, there was a puddle of water that covered the entire lane, so I had to ride on the wrong side of the road to get around it.

I got onto the main road, and rode to the supermarket, a couple of kilometres away from home, there was nothing, just a few leaves down.

I got to the supermarket, got some dinner, and headed for home again. When I came past the local bottleshop, I noticed it was still open (the door anyway, all the shutters were down), I might get a drink.

I pulled over, "chucked a uey" (did a u turn), went back, into the carpark. I went grabbed a 6 pack of Bundy and Coke, paid, and left. I couldn't be bothered chatting with the guy.

I thought I'd have to stick it in my jacket or something, since the saddlebag was full with my dinner, but the other one had enough room to shove it in.

When I got home, I mucked around on the computer for a bit.

I looked out the window, and saw people on the roof of a couple of the houses around the corner, changing roof tiles.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. I ate my dinner, watched some tv.

Nightline came on, and they had a story about the storm, including some home footage from Gosford. I recorded it on tivo, then I copied the recording to my pc.

I mucked around, trying to make it into a small divx file, but didn't have much luck, I gave up in the end, and just used tmpgenc to reencode it smaller (got 29 seconds from 20mb to 6.5mb).

I uploaded it here.

(I downloaded this at work to show the guys the next day, and had issues, the pcs at work couldn't play mpeg2 files natively, so I had to find a codec for that, and then once that was on, it turns out the movie file is in the wrong aspect ratio, all stretched. I found that if I play it with "Media Player Classic", that it plays it find though. Weird).

I gave up on the video file, and went to bed about 1am.

I started tabbing the bit of "She Said She Said" that I've worked out, and then it started raining, and hailing. I'll come back to that story.

Anyway, after all the hail, I sat and tabbed it, I don't know how it'll go in a blog, but I'll try to put it here anyway..

1 |   |   |   |   2 |   |   |   |   3 |   |   |   |  
|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|
|---------------8-|---3-6-7-6-------|---3-5-6-5-6-8---|
|-------------6---|-6---------6-6-6-|-6-------------6-|
|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|

4 |   |   |   |   5 |   |   |   |
|-----------------|-----------------|
|---3-5-3---3-----|-----------------|
|-6-------6---4-4-|-6-4---6---------|
|-----------------|-----6-----------|

let's see how that looks..

I woke up about 6am, I got up, thought about getting ready for work, and going, I'd be at work at around 8am.

I went back to bed again, and thought I'd get another hour of sleep or so. I didn't wake up again until just after 9am.

I got up, got ready, and took off for work.

It was quite sunny today, that made it a bit hard to see, since I didn't have my sunglasses.

Nothing at all remarkable on the way to work, got to work at 11am.

I started working on the application I'm developing, was getting somewhere with that, spent about an hour and a half on that.

Some guy from some other section came around, speaking to the project manager, to find out about procedures for accessing the data in the application I'm developing, "when it's down".

Well, it's not going to be down, when the development is all done, there are going to be 2 separate systems, so one of them will always be available.

Even if both systems are down, it's because Oracle is down, and then there's not going to be any alternative access to the data anyway.

The guy was just being beligerant, and I wasn't in the mood for an argument, so I just ignored him, and continued working on the code.

The woman who used to administrate the old system came round to show me some of the schema design she's been doing.

We had a discussion about the table design, and then the project manager came and joined in the discussion, and then once we'd dealt with that, we ended up just having a chat.

We finished that, I noticed it was 1.30pm. I went upstairs to find out if anything was happening for lunch.

Most of the guys were about to go into a meeting, which I wasn't involved in, so I decided that I was going to lunch.

The guy from Orange who's up for a week to fix pcs etc was there, I asked if he wanted to go for lunch, he said he just had to watch something on another pc.

I milled about for a minute, there were a stack of old sparc machines on a desk, some of the old production systems we decommissioned when we relocated.

I was just hanging around, looking at that stuff, when the guy came over, and we went across the road to the cafe.

I was expecting to sit in there and eat lunch, but I'd only ordered a roll, and wanted a drink, so I stood and waited while the other guy ordered his stuff. By the time I got to the counter to pay for a drink, they'd already made his sandwich, take away.

I waited for my roll, and then we went back across the road to the building.

The area outside where I sit is a kitchen, with a few tables, so we sat there to eat, and had a chat.

About 2.30pm, I decided to go back to work. I started working on changing a bit of logic in my code, to enable viewing of some records that have a required field (that acts as a foreign key) missing.

I had to speak to the project manager about that, found out the details that I needed, and then went back to coding.

I managed to make all the changes, do some testing, it looked like it was all ok. I decided not to update production though, in case I've introduced a bug, and not found it.

I'll get someone else to do a few quick tests tomorrow.

I got called up, there was an issue getting to the website as usual. I tried to ssh to the web server, I couldn't do that either. As far as I know, it's because of network issues in the colocation facility where the web server is hosted.

It fixed itself, the web site loaded, and the login prompt appeared, I didn't worry about it, and I got off the phone.

I got called back again a bit later, there was more issues. I checked, and Xsun was running away using 50% of the cpu again.

I eventually managed to kill it off, and then the machine became responsive again, for a couple of minutes. I got off the phone again.

The DBA came to speak to me, and before he got to say anything, my phone rang again, the sysadmin. I answered it, starting talking to him, the DBA said he'd speak to me later, I said I'd come up and see him when I got off the phone.

I'd been looking at the processes by cpu time, not by memory size, the sysadmin (who I was now on the phone to) said that there were a couple of huge apache processes, using 800M of memory each. Geez.

The shell was totally unresponsive, I managed to run the apache shutdown script eventually, and slowly the processes went away.

I changed the configuration, in the httpd.conf there's a setting relating to how many requests each child process should serve before going away. On Solaris, they recommend this be set to a limit, rather than umlimited, like on Linux etc.

I changed that setting from 10000 (the recommended amount) to 1000, hoping that might fix it, and started it back up.

It seemed fine, so I got off the phone. I noticed there were a couple of imagemagick convert processes taking gobs of memory, 900M or something, I killed them off, even "kill -9" took ages to get rid of them.

Damn, I might have to find something else to use, imagemagick is being a real pain.

I went upstairs, it was now just after 5pm, to speak to the DBA, but the sysadmin called me over, the website was still down. I looked, and it was the "mysqladmin flush-hosts" issue again.

I used the sysadmin's sun box, which was logged in, to fix it up.

I went over to speak to the DBA, we started going to see some guy, and then I realised it was the beligerant guy from this morning, so I said there was no point, because all the stuff he was getting at, was a waste of time.

The DBA told me that if he comes to request anything to be done, to make him speak to the manager of the section I'm in.

He then was going to leave, I thought about leaving too, and going to his place, to fix up his adsl that I still haven't done, but there was more work to be done.

I heard the pc guy from Orange speaking to the sysadmin, and another guy from Orange I dealt with to get the DNS for the department sorted out, when OzEmail ballsed it all up.

He was asking if you could boot dos on a linux machine, and being told that you could, since it was a pc etc, and can use a boot disk, then when he finished the conversation, and went to leave, I piped in with "unless it's a sparc machine", I'd like to see you boot dos on a sparc.

He said "what's that [a sparc]?", and we said, "the sun machines over there", which is what he was wanting to use it on.

He needs to wipe the disks in the machines apparently, I wasn't too impressed with that idea, oh well, I'd probably just install linux on them anyway.

I said he could just login, and "rm -rf /" but the DBA asked if that actually wipes the files, or just deletes inodes, and I thought about it, and then remebered that it doesn't wipe the whole disk anyway, it just wipes everything until rm rms itself, and then stops, if you reboot, it's not likely that the machine will boot, but there still could be sensitive stuff on the disk, depending on the order the directory structure gets wiped.

I then said you could boot up a cd compiled for sparc, like knoppix or something else (assuming there is a linux live cd for sparc), and dd the disk.

Ah, there's a stack of Solaris install cds, that should do it.

They also had an old dell server they needed to wipe, this I had no qualms with, I'm always happy to see a windows install get blown away.

He was trying to use the wipe program, it's a bootable disk, but the disks in the server are scsi, and the wipe program/boot disk doesn't have support for scsi.

We logged into windows, but then when he tried to run it, it just crashed. I said that we could take the scsi disks out, put them in a sparc machine, and dd them.

Then I remembered that we could use knoppix in the pc, since it'll support the scsi controller. I went downstairs, got my knoppix cd out of my drawer, went back up, booted the machine off it.

It took a couple of minutes to boot, I think because of all the scsi detection stuff, but it worked, the disks were accessible.

I tried to cfdisk the scsi disk, but was getting permission errors, then I tried to dd to the disk, but the same thing, then I realised, I wasn't root. I su'd and then I could partition the disk, I deleted the partitions.

I found that something like:

yes 0|dd of=/dev/sda

should write a stream or zeros across the whole scsi disk. That was going to take a while (yes was taking up half the cpu, the dd the other half, there's probably a better way to do it though). We stood there chatting for a bit, it was now 5.30pm, and I thought about going home, most of the others had, or were going.

I went back down to my desk, and my phone rang, it was the guy from upstairs (who'd already left before I went up there), he said he'd forgotten to say bye, and would see me tomorrow. I tried to tell him something, but the phone reception was crap, and he couldn't hear me.

It was only some smartass comment, and I don't remember it anyway.

I finished what I was doing, grabbed my stuff and left, it was right on 6pm.

I took off, I got around near the roundabout, geez, the fence on the opposite side is destroyed, that must be where the tanker went over. I went right, so didn't go anywhere near that.

The middle of the road was all burnt, this is where the fire truck had been a few weeks ago, and caused a traffic jam because the middle of the road was on fire, I'll bet it was some idiot with a cigarette butt.

I got on the freeway. It was really sunny, I was having a terrible time, because I didn't have my glasses.

I didn't know what wass going on, I was going 130/140, but it felt like about 70km/h. Perhaps the contrast has something to do with perception of speed, since the last few nights I've been coming back late, when it's dark, with low contrast, going 120 feels like 160.

Anyway, I was about 2/3rds of the way home, coming up a hill, there was a cop car on the crest of the hill, lights on, I jammed on my back brake, slowed right down to 110, went past, the cop had pulled over a ute, and was busting the driver for something.

I went back up to 130, I figure, if the cop's seen me speeding, by the time he finishes booking the guy, gets in his car to chase me, he'll have to go 200 or so, to catchup before I get off the freeway.

I got off, went to the supermarket. It was now about 7pm, and the sun was getting lower in the sky, and now the glare was shocking.

I went into the supermarket, grabbed all the crap I needed, went and paid. It came to more than I had in cash. I used my card to pay, and since I didn't have much cash, I pulled out some.

Duh, I've got all the cash my mate paid me back for his pc from Sunday sitting at home. What a dope.

I went out, and was walking back to my bike. A couple of kids were mucking around on pushbikes and scooters in the carpark. One of them asked me if the bike was mine, I nodded.

He said it was a cool bike, and then asked if I'd sell it to him. For $10. Yeah, I'm sure idiot.

I went about putting my stuff in my backpack, and getting on. All the meanwhile they're asking me dumb questions, what did I pay for it, how fast does it go, is it a Harley.

I took off, and headed for home. I decided to pop in to my mate's place, to see if anyone was there, so I could get my sunglasses, and maybe the soundcard out of the car.

I got there, his car was in the driveway, I parked, went up to the door, he came and opened it, he said he'd be back in a minute, and ran back into the computer, and I could hear some silly game.

He came back, and he asked if I was there to get the soundcard, I said yeah, but mainly to get my sunglasses, they were still on the table, I grabbed them.

The phone rang, he started having a conversation. His cat was on the back of the lounge, I still had my gloves on, so I patted the cat, I think he had a tick on him, he arced up when I touched near it.

My mate came back, I told him I thought the cat had a tick on it.

We went outside, my mate had a smoke, and we had a conversation. After a while, he asked if I was going home to just chill out, and I said I was, since it'll be the first day for about a week I have.

I thought about it, Sunday I was at his place until midnight, Saturday I was out till 2, Friday I didn't get home until 11.30, not sure what I did on Thursday, I think I was out late on Wednesday.

I grabbed the sound card out of the car, and took off from my mates place about 7.45pm.

I got home, put the dinner on, watched a bit of tv. I tried to call my mate in Wyong, his phone was busy, must be on the internet.

I finished eating, blogged a bit, played the guitar a bit, tried to call my mate again, still busy.

It started raining heavily about 11pm. I went to bed about midnight.