Another lazy Saturday.

I got up, bummed around as usual, watched tv, archived some email.

I went and got the (real) mail that had arrived, that I'd been called about the other night. It was all the junk I'd alredy been through, along with some other junk mail, and bank stuff.

There was a package there too, I opened it, it was the 512MB usb memory thing I ordered.

I was just about to sit and start doing some blogging, when I got a call from my drummer mate, he wanted to go around to our other mate's place, and play for a while. I wasn't really in the mood, I wanted a lazy day, but I said I'd go.

He then told me that he hadn't heard from our mate, and wanted me to ring him up. Argh. I rang him up, woke him up, and then he was pissed off. I said I'd see him in a while.

I spent a little bit of time blogging, and then I went and had a shower, and got ready. My mate turned up, and made the first payment for the drums I bought the other week . I left, taking my bass guitar with me.

We jumped in the car, and drove to our mate's place. We sat and played for a while, we were actually doing some pretty good stuff for once, I was impressed, it some of the best playing we've done.

We decided to go out to Erina to get some lunch, my drummer mate went to the ATM, and got more cash out , and I added the amount I owed him for the bottle of JD he bought me the other day , and deducted that from the amount he owes me for the drums .

We went over to JB HiFi again, and wandered around for a while, I didn't find anything I wanted, though the Peter Gabriel DVD looks pretty good.

My mate who works for the ABC had turned up, I chatted to him for a while, and then we all went and waited outside for a minute, while we finished buying stuff, and then we walked back over to the main centre.

We went into a homewares shop, my mate (ABC) wanted to buy a set of shotglasses. He grabbed a cheap set, and then saw a cooler looking one, with a wire rack thing, which holds the glasses in a spiral, so he bought that.

We left that shop, and our mate (whose dad owns the aircon business) was there. He'd worked somewhere today.

We all went around to the food court, and got lunch, and went and sat outside, and ate our lunch. I went in to get a juice, but they didn't have any fruit juices, only useless ones with milk/yoghurt in them, which I can't drink.

We left there, and I just got a bottle of orange juice at a juice bar thing on the way out of the centre.

We went into coles, and I grabbed some cheese (blue vein), and crackers to eat. I went into the bottle shop after that, and found a noce looking bottle of wine.

We went back to the car, and drove back to our mate's place, where we'd been before. I shoved my food in my drummer mate's car, since he'd be dropping me home later.

We went in, and spent a bit of time playing, and we started playing CCR's Fortunate Son. It was pretty good, for a first attempt.

My mate's dad turned up, and we continued playing for a while, and then we packed up all the stuff, and my drummer mate and I left, and he dropped me at home.

I sat and listened to music, and blogged more, then I put the tv on, and watched for a while, before making dinner, drinking the wine, eating the cheese and crackers.

I decided to sit and watch "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" properly, since I'd only seen the last 20 minutes the other night, so I did that, and then I went to bed.

Woo, another Friday, got to go home.

I woke up, but then couldn't be bothered to get up, so I lay in a bit. I eventually got up, and went to get ready.

I'd forgotten about the fact that the water was supposed to be turned off this morning (like they'd told us when we checked in), but found that it was on anyway.

I had a shower, got ready, had breakfast, packed my bag, and went to work.

I expected the front door to open, when I got there, since it was 8am, but the clock must not be set correctly, or the front door doesn't unlock at 8am, so I had to swipe my card (well, not really swipe, it's an RFID, or prox card or something, what do you do with these? wave them?).

I did some work, and then the new guy asked me about updating the images on the splash screen of the MinView application. He'd updated all the images, but they wouldn't display correctly. I had a look, and found invalid height/width attributes on the img tags in the HTML, so I showed him a pretty easy way to fix it, and left him updating the content.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he wanted me to come and look at something to do with MinView. The script had run to update the images that display the spatial data, but because the spatial data wasn't there, the images were blank.

I went through, and found how to identify blank images, from the file size, deleted them all, ran the image generation script again (since it only generates images that are missing), and then we found that it fixed most of them, but a few came out blank again.

I sat and wrote a script, that loops through, deletes all the blank images, regenerates the missing images, does this about 3 times, and then populates the production system with the new (hopefully non blank) images.

It takes ages to actually generate the images, since it has to go through gigs of spatial data.

While we were waiting for that, the support guy asked us to burn up a DVD for him, so I went about getting some software (because the senior DBA had just got his DVD writer, and didn't have any software for it), and kicked off burning a DVD, but that was going to take a while.

We went out to lunch, we went with the sysadmin, and decided to go across the road to the Indian place.

We sat down, ordered our food, and waited. I ordered a drink, that was lemonade with spices in it. I don't remember what it was called, but it was awful.

After our food was served, we were eating, and the senior DBA saw a guy he recognised getting into a car parked in front of the restaurant, it was Gerry Harvey, the guy who owns Harvey Norman. He got in his Lexus, and drove off.

We finished eating, paid for lunch, and went back to work. It was my time to muck around, I activated "narrator" on the senior DBA's machine, which I'd accidently found the other day, when I pressed the Windows key and the U key.

That ended up in a whole bunch of mucking around, with insults being typed into computers, and announced in boring monotone back and forth over the partitions.

I left them mucking around, and went back to my desk to do some work. I put the script I'd written into cron (finally), and then starting working on rewriting one of the files in the new system I'm writing.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he wanted to leave, which suited me, I'd had enough for the week. I got off the phone, packed my stuff, and started heading back upstairs.

The new guy had asked for a lift (because his car blew up on the way up here), so I told him we were going, and he started getting ready.

I got back up there, the senior DBA was on the phone, so I sat and waited.

The sysadmin told me that he was still getting emails from my new script, when it didn't have to fix anything, because it did a wget, and that was ending up on stdout, or stderror or something.

I said I'd edit the crontab, and set it to redirect to /dev/null. I went to do a "crontab -e" to fix it, but accidently typed "crontab -r", and silently destroyed the crontab. Eep.

I asked if the senior DBA had a copy of it, for that documentation he was writing, about the crontabs on all the servers, but he didn't.

We grabbed one off one of the other servers, and I went about putting that back in, and then we emailed the colo guys where the server is, and requested that the crontab be restored from the latest backup.

We left the building finally, wasting I don't know how much time on that. On the way home, the senior DBA was called up by the contract DBA, about the blank images problem. Apparently he'd worked out what was causing it.

It took about 4 phone calls to get through this though, because the phone kept dropping out.

I got dropped at home a while later, went in, watched tv, and blogged. I found something to eat for dinner, watched a bit more tv, and then went to bed.

The radio woke me up at 6.50am this morning, for once I didn't wake up at 6.35am.

I slept in a bit, ended up getting up at 7.25am. The senior DBA joked that he was already ready for work, because he'd slept in his clothes.

He couldn't find his phone, so I tried calling it, and got some message about sending an SMS or something.

He was worried that he'd left it in the pub last night.

I started getting ready, went and had a shower etc. When I came back, the senior DBA told me he'd found his phone, it was in his car.

He didn't know what had gone on, because the car was unlocked, and the drivers seat was reclined, like someone had been sleeping in there.

I decided to iron my shirt, and the senior DBA said he was suprised to see me ironing, and I said I wanted to look good for when I go to the movies tonight (getting him wound up that I'm going to make him go to the royalty manager's dinner on his own).

I had some breakfast, and then we left, and headed for work. The senior DBA went the long way, so his car would warm up, and then I came to work.

I started doing some work, and then the project manager came to me with a diagram he'd done, based on the discussions we had in the meeting yesterday, I suggested a couple of changes, since I see the flow working a bit different, and then went back to work.

The senior DBA kept sending me emails, getting me to tell the royalty guy I'm going to dinner, and I kept winding him up, saying I wasn't sure etc.

I got another email, expecting it to be from the senior DBA, but it was from some busy body woman at work, telling us all about morning tea this morning.

I kept working, and then decided to go and see the manager in royalty, to let him know that I would be coming to dinner tonight.

I went out, and realised the morning tea was on, so I grabbed a bit of cake, and then kept going. I went upstairs, the manager from royalty was on the phone, so I went and spoke to the senior DBA, winding him up a bit more, that I was going to tell the guy I wasn't going.

I hung around for a while, but he stayed on the phone, so I gave up, and said I'd send an email, and went back downstairs.

Almost all of the food was gone by now, I grabbed a few biscuits, stood around, and then decided to go back to work.

I sent an email to the royalty manager, and told him I would be coming to dinner tonight.

I continued working on the script to look after the website, and put it in for a test. I had to be able to check the email, for the output from cron. I started looking through the email, but there's about 250 emails in there.

While I was looking through them, I got a call from the sysadmin, he said one of the big managers in Orange wanted to talk about the website issues, and did I want to go up there for a conference call, or him come down here.

I said I'd go up there, and I gave up looking through the emails, and I went upstairs. He was already on the phone, so he put it on speakerphone, and we sat and had a conversation for about 20 minutes, about the architecture of the webserving, other applications the servers run, and the issues we're having.

When I got off the phone, the little guy from royalty who we bag out for looking like he's 12 years old came over, and started having a go about making conference calls in the main area of the office, rather than going into a "quiet room" or something.

I wasn't having a bar of it, and I told him that he was welcome to go into the "quiet room" while the sysadmin and I had been on the phone, or that because the office is a large place, he could have taken himself elsewhere.

The sysadmin showed me an email he'd received, it was from the script I'd written, and I'd stuffed something up, the path wasn't set or something.

The manager of royalty came over, and the senior DBA was telling him that he can't eat fish or seafood, so I thought it a relevant time to mention that I can't have dairy products. The manager of royalty thought it was a joke, that we were trying to be funny, and make things difficult for him for a laugh.

We went out to lunch after that, and we all went down to subway, except for the senior DBA, who went somewhere else, and got a sandwich. We sat outside subway, and ate our food.

When I was finishing up my food, I felt that something was wrong. I looked up, and there was a bird perched on the street light directly above me, looking like it was going to take a crap.

I quickly moved my chair away from there, and then figured it had been a false alarm, but about a minute after I moved, the bird did indeed crap, right where I had been sitting before I moved.

We finished our food, and then walked back to work. On the way I mentioned about the fact I had to go to court, and I explained the situation to the guy that looks after the phones/comms stuff. He said his neighbour is a police sergeant (sp?), and when they get things like the registration details wrong, the case gets thrown out.

I said I might have to go and talk to another solicitor about that, since the one the other day told me not to argue about that.

I got back to work, and went back to my desk, when I got back, there was a message left on my mobile, it was from the guy at Shelley Beach whose computer/wireless stuff I went to fix up ages ago.

He wanted someone to look at his wife's computer. Well, that's a bit hard now, since I don't do that anymore, don't spend any time on the coast anymore, and don't have a license, or way to get to Shelley Beach.

I tried to ring my mate, who lives in Wyong, to see if he wanted to go and fix the machine, but he didn't answer his phone, so I left a message.

I fixed up the script I'd been working on before, to look after the website, and ran another test. It should work this time.

I took some time, and I wrote up the documentation about the script, and what the usual fixes for the website were, like the guy in Orange had asked me to do.

A while later, I got a call from the guy I used to travel on the train with, who I was going to start the ISP with.

He wanted to know if I could come and contract where he was, to setup some bluetooth stuff, because they're exhibiting at Cebit in a few weeks, and they want to be able to beam people contact details wirelessly or something.

I told him that I couldn't help him, because I know nothing at all about bluetooth, I've never used it, configured it, or anything.

I also had a bit of a chat, and told him how I'd been suspended, and had to live at work now, and had to go to court to sort it out.

While I was on the phone, the senior DBA kept trying to call me, on my desk phone (since I was on my mobile), and the 4th he rang, I made my excuses, got off the mobile, and answered the desk phone.

The senior DBA wanted to know about the stuff in cron on different servers, because he'd been asked to document it. I answered his questions, and then got off the phone, asking him to leave one of the servers until last, because I was working on the crontab file (adding in the script I'd written and tested earlier).

I finished the documentation I was writing, and then I emailed it to the sysadmin, and went up there, to go through putting it up on their intranet, and also to see if I'd fixed the script up. The output of the script was good, so that was fixed, and the documentation went into their technical intranet.

While I was up there, the little guy from royalty was mucking around, he'd made up one of those string/cup telephones, and was using it to talk to the senior DBA over the partition.

I couldn't handle all the nonsense, so I went back to my desk, and went back to work.

A little while later, I got a call from one of the guys in web services, he wanted the IP address of one of our servers for some reason, I think because DNS doesn't work across the VPN client they're using to connect to our LAN.

I got off the phone, and then he rang me back again a minute later, and explained that he'd rung the wrong number.

I went back to work, the senior DBA called me a bit later, saying that dinner was at 6.30pm (I still hadn't confirmed that I was going yet, was winding him up), and that he was leaving for the day, I think this was about 3.30pm.

I did some more work, and then I had a quick look at slashdot, and saw an article about the new a380, massive plane. I was looking at some pictures of that, when one of the indexers came past, and had a look, then he sent me an email about a huge rollercoaster, here.

I had a look at that, and then I got a call from the sysadmin, he told me that he was leaving, I told him I still had more work to do.

I did some more work, and about 1/2 hour after calling me, the sysadmin came down, and said that now he was leaving. I left with him, and we walked up the road to the pubs we were staying in.

I went into the pub I was staying in, noticed it was 5.05pm, I lay down for a while, until close to 6pm I think, and then I went down to the bar, with the senior DBA. I had a beer, and he bought a bottle of wine for us to take to dinner, I checked, and it didn't have preservative 220 in it, so I could drink some of it.

We sat down, I had a beer, and then we drove to the royalty manager's place. We couldn't remember exactly where it was, so we went to the house we thought it was, and it was right.

We went in, sat and had a few drinks (the royalty manager has stacks of different alcohols), and some chips and dip etc, while we waited for dinner to finish being cooked, a baked ham.

While I was sitting there, my phone rang, and the royalty manager joked that it was my mum. Close, it was dad. I went outside to speak to him. he told me that there was a few letters there, and did I want them opened.

It looked like there was a letter from QLD Transport, the Tax department, and the Red Cross. I said it was fine to open them, I wanted to know what the QLD Transport one was, another bloody fine or something probably.

He opened it, it was the rego renewal for my bike. Well, I'm not going to be rushing to pay that, considering I could lose my license when I go to court, and then I've paid rego for nothing. The Tax department letter was about my refund, which explained why my account had gone up yesterday, I thought I'd been paid.

The Red Cross letter was a blood donation card, and it said my blood type, which I don't even remember. Ahh.. I put the card in my wallet, here it is, I'm an A Negative blood type.

I got off the phone, and went back inside. The royalty manager asked what mum had to say, and I said it was dad, and explained that it was just some mail was there, including the blood donor card (since the royalty manager arranged the blood drive thing).

I had another drink, and then dinner was ready, and we sat and ate. The royalty manager, his wife, his 2 kids, the senior DBA, and I.

They cracked open the wine, and we drank that. After dinner, the royalty manager served the desert, a tiramisu (sp?), which I couldn't eat, so I was served a huge plate of fruit, ugh, I was full from all the ham. I ate it anyway.

After dinner we had a chat, and the royalty manager mentioned that one of the geophysicists at work used to be the drummer for Machine Gun Fellatio.

(I told a couple of people that since then, they found it hard to believe, but I did some googling, and could back it up. He wasn't the drummer, he was the original lead singer, who called himself "Adolph Mantovani", though that's not his real name).

We chatted a bit more, and then we left about 10.30pm, got back to the pub, and I went to bed about 11pm.

I had a shocking nights sleep, kept waking up every few hours, 2am, 4am, 5.30am.

I woke up at 6.35am exactly again, waited for the radio to come on. The volume had been turned right down, so I got up, turned it up, and went back to bed.

I ended up getting up a bit after 7am, after listening to the news, went and had a shower, got ready, had some breakfast, and we left to go to work at about 7.40am.

I searched the back seat of the car, when I jumped in, from the front seat, but couldn't see it, or feel it down the back of the seat.

We went the long way to work, so the car would warm up a bit. On the way, the senior DBA was telling me how the mail room woman was fed up with the CCB guy staying at her place, because he doesn't pay rent etc, and wanted to know if the senior DBA would give him a room in the place behind the pub when he gets it.

We got to work, and I searched more thoroughly through the back seat when I got to work, no sign of my pen down the back of the seat.

I looked carefully on the way into the building, not near any of the security doors, not at my desk, under the chair or anything. Damn.

I figured I'd call the service station and ask if they've seen it, it might be under the counter or something. I had to find their phone number.. oh, it'll be on the reciept for the juice I got yesterday.. which I threw away in the contract DBA's bin yesterday.

I don't recall my pen being in my pocket at that point either, so I must have lost it at the service station, or in the building on my way in, damn.

I eventually managed to find the phone number for the service station, called it, but there was no answer. Oh well, it must be gone this time.

I started doing some work, and a little while later got a call from someone in webservices again, about the stupid website. I looked, mysql was still running. Hmm. I tried to view the site, got nothing, and found that localhost had been blocked from connecting to mysql again. Argh.

I unblocked it, and the site was available again. I really need to write that script to look after restarting mysql and unblocking the connections, and save me doing it twice a day.

The woman who looked after the old system came around with a diagram of the new system, and the changes we might make, and started talking at me. I'm not in the meeting yet, I'm thinking about other stuff.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he'd spoken to the mail room woman about the CCB guy, and not wanting to give him a room, if he doesn't pay rent, and he told me that apparently the CCB guy had gone away for a week, and figured that he didn't have to pay rent that week because he wasn't there (but all his junk was), and he doesn't do anything but lie around watching tv.

Apparently the mail room woman had got the mower out, couldn't start it, had to ask him to start it for her, which he grudgingly did, and then just went back and lay on the lounge again.

I got off the phone, and waited to go into the 3 hour meeting I got the email about yesterday.

I went into the meeting, and we sat and I went through what I was working on at the moment, the new table structure etc.

We went on to speak about the changes we want to make to the scope of the project, getting rid of some major parts I still had to write, but instead of making the project easier, they've been replaced with new functionality I'll have to work out the logistics of, and then write.

It ended up taking over 2 1/2 hours, and then when we came out, after 12pm, I just wanted to go for lunch.

I went up and saw the senior DBA, and arranged to go to lunch, he was getting the helpdesk to create some tickets, to cover the work we've been involved in the last few days, including the stupid website falling down constantly.

The chick who drove us last night came around to go to lunch, got fed up with waiting, and left, saying we could catch up to her.

We went out to lunch, on the way down, the senior DBAs phone rang, it was someone from the temping agency he used to go through, trying to sort out the timesheet he missed in November, when they stuffed up, and lost a whole bunch of timesheets.

We kept going, and then the senior DBA called the chick from before, and she was just in the Reject Shop we'd just walked past, so we stopped, and she came out, but told us that she was with the annoying support guy at the moment, and had to go back to work anyway, so we kept going.

We bumped into the contract DBA having lunch, so we spoke to him for nearly 20 minutes, about the infrastructure changes that Orange are going to make, and screw everything up. They want to consolidate all the servers into a single big iron server, running multiple virtual machines on it, thinking they're going to save money on Oracle licenses, not thinking about the fact that you have to pay for Oracle licenses in regards to how many CPUs or virtual CPUs (whichever is greater) there are in a machine, regardless of how many the Oracle instance is running on.

We also spoke about the other project, that they've blown out to a huge task, instead of a few weeks work for the senior DBA and myself.

We kept going, went into the shopping centre, and I got a kebab for lunch, not in the mood for pies today.

We sat outside, chatted, more about the stupid stuff they're doing at work, and then we eventually wandered back to work.

I got back to work, and the new guy was trying to work on making some changes to the development version of one of our production systems, so I sat and got him setup to do that.

I came back to my desk, and I continued working on getting the new tables into production.

A guy from some other group came around, and was talking to the woman who looked after the old system, trying to find why he couldn't find a specific report, she wasted a bit of time looking, both in the web interface, and in the (wrong) tables, and couldn't work it out.

They called me over, I scratched my head for a bit, went back and did some queries, and found it was because of a broken join. For some reason a single id was missing, the foreign key in a separate table, so once I added that id into the table, the report showed up. Weird.

How the hell do people keep finding these things? out of about 120 000 records, one has a broken join, and they find it. Why don't these people buy lottery tickets?

The senior DBA called me, and told me he was leaving, I said I'd probably do another hour or so, and catch up with him later.

My manager came back from somewhere, came out to speak to some of the group, saying he had an important thing to discuss with them.. who was going ten pin bowling tonight. They chatted for a bit, and eventually asked me how I can bowl, if I can bowl 200 etc, and I said I didn't think so, I'm lucky to do 100, but then that was the end of that, I wasn't actually invited.

The bit about the "something important to talk to you about" reminded me of something though, the fact that I wanted to speak to my manager about the project I'd seen the functional spec for, that I'd been talking to the DBAs and the syadmin about at lunch.

I went in, and had a discussion, saying that I thought he was going about things the wrong way, in regards to what should be a couple of weeks work for myself and the senior DBA.

I ended up in there for about 45 minutes chatting to him about it. Basically he knows it's a waste of money and time doing it this way, but it's because of the Orange takeover, he wants the consultants in good with them, so he can get them to do the design on the next major project.

The next one relies on this small one being finished in a little while, and basically he knows I'm too busy to do it, so he's happy to waste the money on a small project, which he knows will take 3 times as long as it should.

Oh well. I came back to my desk, and kept doing some testing in development.

While I'd been in the office, a couple of times my phone had tried to receive a message, but was full. This reminded me to put my phone on charge, so I deleted a message, and plugged it into the charger.

I got a call from the manager in royalty, telling me that he was having a dinner thing tomorrow night, and had been rude, and not invited me. Ahh.. this is the dinner that the senior DBA was talking about when we got to the bottlo last night, asking me how I got out of it.

I told him that I wasn't sure if I was free tomorrow night (which is true), because I was thinking about going to see HHGTTG at the movies tomorrow night. He told me that there was a preview showing tonight, found something, and started reading it to me, about a charity preview showing tonight, wine and nibblies at 6.15pm, and the movie starting at 7pm.. if I've bought a ticket by last Thursday.

Hmm, there goes that then. I said I'd think about it, and he asked me to let him know in the morning, because he had to go and get the groceries.

I got off the phone, and went back to programming, once I was happy that the code was working in development, I updated the internal production server, which doubles as testing.

I asked the woman who used to look after the old system to do some tests, and a few minutes later, she found a bug. I don't know why it didn't show up in development, it was very weird. Basically, I was doing a case conversion on a variable at the wrong point, which was then breaking a string comparison. As soon as I removed the case conversion line (1 line), it all started working.

I eventually got that SMS, from the temping agency, whinging at me for not putting my timesheets in, and to have them in by 4pm today. Oops, it's now about 4.40pm. I finished off last weeks timesheet, and went to get them signed, but my manager had disappeared again.

A little while later, I got a call from the sysadmin. The website was down again. I checked it, mysql was still running.. but localhost was blocked again. "I'm sick of this, I need to write that watchdog script", I thought, so I started on that.

I got most of the way through that, and then I got an email, the woman from the mail room, sending around dumb jokes, funny, but groaners.

I did a google for some jokes, and started replying, that wasted about 1/2 hour.

I went back to working on the script again, and then the syadmin called me, telling me that he wanted to leave, I said I had about another 15 minutes of work to do, he said he'd park his car in the secure carpark, and then come back up.

My manager came back, so I got him to sign my timesheets, and then I went to fax them. The stupid fax machine wouldn't work properly, it dialled, and tried to send the fax once, and then just sat there. I tried to send it again, but it did the same thing.

There was a fax for the royalty group upstairs that had come in, so I took that, planning to take it up to them.

I went to the other fax machine, the one that's a scanner and photocopier etc, the sysadmin had come back, and I sent it from there, it took ages to go through.

Once it was sent, I grabbed my stuff off my desk, and went up and gave the fax from downstairs to the cranky old guy in royalty.

I went back down, (the sysadmin had waited downstairs, because he hurt his knee a few days ago), and then we left, and walked down the street to the pub.

He went in where he was staying, I said I was just going to drop some stuff off in my room (in the other pub), and I'd be back in about 10 minutes.

I went over, dropped the stuff in the room, and then walked back. As I was walking to the other pub, I bumped into the guy from CCB, we went into the pub. I ordered a drink, the guy from CCB disappeared, or I would have shouted him one.

I got some change for the pokies, went in, wasted a couple of dollars. The guy from CCB came through there, and said everyone was out the back, so I went out there.

There was a few people there, the old librarian, the support guy who's been in Orange, the guy from CCB, and the senior DBA.

I sat with them for a little while, and finished my drink. I didn't have much cash left, so I went to the ATM, and pulled out some money.

I thought I got ripped off by the ATM, since not all my money had come out. I looked up the slot where the money comes out, and a $20 note was stuck half up the slot, because the corner was folded over. That's bad design, I pulled it out, checked I had all my money, and went back out the back.

I gave the senior DBA half the money for the room this week, in front of the guy from CCB, who owes the senior DBA a few hundred dollars, that he borrowed months ago, and the senior DBA has been whinging about.

He took the chance, and he told the guy from CCB that he owed him some money, and while they had a discussion about it, I went to get another drink, wasting more money in the pokies on the way back to the bar.

I got another drink, and the bartender started chatting to me, asking where we all worked, and stuff like that, at which point the sysadmin came downstairs, ordered a lemonade.

I didn't tell him we were all sitting out the back, figuring the bartender wouldn't go on much longer, and we'd just go out the back.

But the bartender kept going on telling me how he worked in the Newcastle Workers Club, before and after the earthquake hit, and it got massively damaged, with a few people dying.

He was telling me that after it was fixed, a whole bunch of stuff wouldn't go upstairs, or wouldn't go alone. He didn't know what they were on about, until he went up there one night, and the chairs were moving around by themselves, and he nearly shit himself.

The sysadmin had been sitting watching the news or something, not listening to our conversation, he got up and wandered off, looking out the back I presumed.

Apparently one of the people killed was an old woman, and while the building was shaking, she'd dropped her glasses, and was looking under the tables trying to find them, when some of the building collapsed and she was killed, so they suspect that she's up their haunting, looking for her glasses.

I chatted to the guy a bit longer, and then some guy came in to sort out a bill or something, so I said I'd chat to him later, and I went back out the back.

There was still only 4 of us out here now, even though the sysadmin had come out here. The guy from CCB had disappeared, seems like he's done his trick from last night again.

We sat and chatted a bit more, and then the librarian went home, and we decided to go and get some dinner.

The support guy who's been in Orange went down to the other pub where we were going for dinner, he wanted another drink, and didn't want to wait around.

I waited with the sysadmin, while he finished his lemonade, and the senior DBA went back to the other pub to get something.

When the sysadmin finished his drink, he and I went and sat on the bench out the front of Radio Rentals, watching the tv through the window.

The senior DBA turned up a few minutes later, and we all walked down to the pub, the Grand Junction.

We went in, there was far too many people in here for my liking. I went to order a drink, realised it was Toss The Boss, and decided to get a beer, since I had a chance of getting it for free. I didn't. Now I had a beer I didn't really want, and had to pay for.

We found the support guy, went over, chatted there for a minute, and then went and sat in the beer garden.

The guy from CCB called the senior DBA, and asked where we were, and he told him. He came down a little while later, and gave the senior DBA the money he owed him.

We chatted for ages, it was now about 7.25pm, so I said I was going to go and talk to the guy in the restaurant, because sometimes they close early if it's quiet.

I went in, spoke to the guy, he said he was still on for another hour, I took the menus, and went back out the back, and worked out what I wanted for dinner.

I didn't really want anything to be honest, I'm so sick to death of all this pub food, but I have to eat something. I eventually decided to just get a cheeseburger, only $4.50, that can't be too much food.

I went in to order, along with the syadmin and the guy from CCB. When I got back into the restaurant, all the geosurvey group (that I work in) where there, having just got back from ten pin bowling.

My manager was there, and the project manager, the new guy, one of the indexers, the woman who used to admin the old system, and another guy, who I'm not sure what group he works in.

I ordered my meal, and the others I was with ordered theirs, and then he started taking orders from the geosurvey group.

I went back out the back, and told the senior DBA they were all there, because he can't deal with them, so I ended up going back in to order his meal. When I was in there doing that, the guy behind the counter was shtting himself, he couldn't handle making meals for like 10 people, he was thinking he was going to have an early night, so he had to call in the woman who usually works there.

I ordered the other meal (only a sausage sandwich, $3.50, cheap as), and then went back out the back.

We saw the woman turn up, and go in the kitchen, not looking too impressed at being called into work on her night off.

It was about an hour before our food was served, I hadn't even noticed though, we'd just been chatting.

When we were finished, the others went inside the pub, and just left the sysadmin and I outside, the woman came and collected the plates, and we said we were sorry for having her come in on her night off, but that it wasn't really our fault, because we'd only ordered burgers and sandwiches and stuff, it was geosurvey's fault, for ordering steaks, and mixed grills etc.

I sat and chatted with the sysadmin for a while, and eventually the others came back out, and then the new guy came out and sat with us.

We sat there chatting, and joking and laughing for ages, eventually the new guy said he was leaving, just after 11pm. I was tired too, so both the sysadmin and I took the excuse, and the 3 of us left, leaving the senior DBA and the support guy in the pub.

We walked back, the new guy lives only 100m or so from the pub, and then the sysadmin and I walked back to the pubs we were staying at.

I went back to the room, and went to bed, it was nearly midnight.

I woke up at 5.50am, listened to the radio for a bit, and fell asleep again.

I was woken up again at 6.10am by the alarm again, so I got up, and went and had a shower.

I got dressed, packed my bag, took the temporary clothes line down, had breakfast.

The other day someone needed a pen, and I realised I don't carry one anymore, so I grabbed my parker pen that's hanging around, shoved it in my pocket.

I looked at slashdot while I waited, I didn't have to wait around for long, and the senior DBA turned up, so I grabbed my bag, and went and jumped in the car. The guy from CCB was getting a lift up today, so I sat in the back.

We got on the freeway, and pulled into the service station, because the senior DBA had no fuel. I haven't been in here for ages, used to get fuel here everyday. The woman who was working everyday when I got fuel was in there, so I went in, to get a drink.

I bought a drink, there was a line, so I didn't get to speak to her very much, because she always wanted a bit of a chat in the mornings, when it wasn't particularly busy.

I went back and got in the car, and once the senior DBA had finished fuelling, and paid, we drove to work, listening to Nova until the reception dropped out, quite far this morning, we were on the back way to Maitland.

I got to work, grabbed some stuff out of my bag, and as I shut the car door, I busted my thumbnail. D'oh.

I went into work, and I need to find a pair of scissors to fix my thumbnail, because it's busted off right down low. I looked in a few sets of drawers at work, thinking someone would have a pair of scissors in their top drawer. No such luck.

I gave up, and started doing some work. I'd been sent a copy of the spec for a new project at work, that I've not been told anything about, but will probably end up doing. I looked through it, and found that they want to design something around Oracle Application Server, and in Java. Yuck, I thought the whole idea of these projects was to redesign all these crap applications we have now, and get them away from using borken stuff like Oracle AS, and J2EE.

I feel like prototyping the project in PHP, and then getting them to let me do it properly.

My thumbnail was annoying me again, I really need to fix it, so I went to the stationary cupboard to look for scissors, and found none.

While I was looking there, some woman came in to send a fax, and asked what I was looking for, I told her I was looking for scissors, and she said that I wouldn't find any there (yeah, I've figured that out actually), and told me that she had a pair, but no spares.

I'm not going to tell her that it's to cut my thumbnail, that's probably gross.

What the hell is going on? Did the useless OH&S guy deem that scissors are too much of a hazard, and we can't be trusted with them?

I realised I'd left my ipod in the car, and I wanted to get the new songs out of it that I loaded the night before, so I'll have to go and get it, and then I could use my leatherman to fix my nail.

I continued working, couldn't be bothered to go to the car, I figured I'd go later.

I saw something about an ad with John Cleese in it when I was looking at slashdot this morning, so I went and found that, and started watching the video.

One of the indexers came and asked me about scanning sizes, so we went and mucked around with the photocopier for a bit, because it can scan to TIFF and PDF, we worked out that B&W TIFFs are probably the best, because the file sizes I kept reasonable, and we should be able to OCR them.

I finished watching the John Cleese ad, pretty funny, and went back to work.

A couple of minutes later, the project manager came to me, complaining that the website was down again. I checked it, and found that yet again mysql had fallen over.

I started looking to see if anything was logged about it, as to why it shutdown. I found in the error log that it shutdown at 11.30 last night, but it doesn't say why.

I went back to work, and a couple of minutes later my phone rang, a guy from "Web Services", about the website being broken, and I told him that I'd just restarted mysql, and it was available again, so he got off the phone.

I went back to work, working on the new table design.

I got another hour or so of work done, and my phone rang again, someone from Web Services again, the website's down again. I check, yep, mysql is gone again. I restarted it, and looked through the error log.

I can't work out what the problem is, there's a whole bunch of stuff about communications packets, and then there's something about a Sig 10, and then it generates it's own Sig 11 so that it crashes, and there's stuff in there about memory allocation.

I think I might just write a watchdog script that checks that mysql is running every 15 minutes, and restarts it if it dies.

I went back to working on the table. The project manager came around asking me about the huge file from the other day, and I said that someone needs to put some sort of a PDF editor on their machine, and delete the 6000 photos out of the PDF that don't belong in it.

He then started asking me stuff about my license, and I really couldn't be bothered going through it all again.

The sysadmin came to my desk, so I started talking to him, he wanted clarification of what needs to be done to solve the issue with the mail relaying that we're having on the production server. I went through what I thought needed to be done, firewall rules, routing etc, and he said he'd contact the colo, and get them to make some changes.

I went back to work. I realised I'd forgotten to add a field I needed to the new table, D'oh. Oh well, at least these days you can add fields without having to drop and rebuild the whole table.

I added in the extra field, and then worked out how to find the details I needed to populate it.. I generated a couple of scripts, that end up having to update about 800 000 rows in Oracle, so it's going to take a while.

I kicked off the first one, waited for a bit, got fed up, and went to see about going to lunch. I went up, spoke to the senior DBA for a bit, and the sysadmin, he had to go and change some backup tapes, so we just waited.

The contract DBA came back, and said he loved the email about the dinosaur I sent the other day (Dino on the volcanic island), and told us about how he'd stayed there before, on that island.

The sysadmin came back, and we got ready to go down the road to the Thai place for lunch.

The support guy who wanted to come was on the phone, so we waited for a minute, and then he said he didn't know how long he would be, and told us to go, so we went without him.

We started walking down the road, first we stopped off at the locksmith, the senior DBA wanted to find out about getting a spare key for his limo/Merc, since it only came with one, but the guy said he had no blanks for it, couldn't copy it, and he'd have to go to the Mercedes dealer.

We kept wandering, and went into the pub we're staying at, and booked in for the next few nights, making sure to get it all sorted now, rather than get down here at 5.30pm to find they've buggered up the booking, and we don't have a room, like they've done before.

We paid, the guy telling us that the water is going to be off between 5am and 8am on Thursday morning (great, since I have a shower at 7am), we got our keys, and left, and kept heading down to the Thai place.

We got down there, took our time, ordered, chatted, ate, paid, and wandered back towards work.

On the way back, the senior DBA wanted to get some shoe polish, for his white leather shoes, while he was in there, I went into the newsagent, and bought a $1 scratchy. I won $2, I went back, and got a $2 scratchy with the winnings, and won nothing.

We walked back to work, and I went back to my desk. The first script had finished, 560 000 something rows updated, only a few hundred thousand more to go.

I ran the rest of the update scripts, they were a bit faster. Once it all looked ok, I went about modifying the PHP to use the new table.

It seemed to be working ok, so then I was able to implement the functionality of storing the results of analysing the files in the table, to avoid having to analyse every single file belonging to a report when someone looks at the report, in case they want to download it.

It took me a little while to get that in, eventually I got the logic right, I always forget to define global variables in functions, and then the value of the variables is NULL.

The project manager and the woman who used to adminstrate the old system I rewrote came around, talking about changing processes, and the scope of the project. The project manager was just trying to outline what we needed to discuss, tomorrow, at a meeting, but as usual the woman administrator always wants to get into technical details, about things that don't matter, and how the old system used to work. Argh. I don't care how the old one worked, some of it was really convoluted and dumb, the whole point of rewriting is to make it simpler, not just port the cruft to a new platform.

They arranged a meeting for tomorrow, and I went back to work.

About 4.15pm, the senior DBA told me that he was leaving, to take the guy from CCB back to where he's staying, since his computer is in the car.

I finally got around to going down to the car, to get my ipod, and the cable etc, and my leatherman to fix my thumbnail (which by this point I'd got fed up with, and just ripped it off already).

I grabbed the stuff out, and then there was a change of plans, the CCB guy was just going to load his computer into the car that belongs to the woman in the mail room, whose house he's staying at, and go back to work, so the senior DBA moved his car over near it, and we moved his pc to the other car.

I went back to work, along with the guy from CCB, and the senior DBA said he was going back to the pub, and that he'd drop my bag off in the room.

I said I'd see him later, and I went back to my desk, doing more work, while getting the new music out of my ipod.

I got an email, it was details of the meeting the project manager had been talking about earlier, damn, a 3 hour meeting. I'm going to go insane in there. I hope someone gets a cake or something.

About 5.20pm I got a call from the sysadmin, he wanted to leave, so I said that sounded good, and said I'd see him in a minute. I packed up all my stuff, and waited for him to come down to my desk, but gave up, went up to his, and he was just about to come down.

We left, went and jumped in his car, and drove down to the pubs, he dropped me off behind the one I'm staying at, and then he went and parked on the street near the pub he's staying at, across the road.

I went in the back of the pub, and up the stairs, there was some funky smell hanging around at the top of the stairs, I thought I was going to be sick. Thankfully it was localised to the the stairs, and the toilets, and wasn't so bad around near the room.

I went in, my bag was dropped off in here, I dumped the other stuff I had on me (ipod, sunglasses, floppy disk for laptop etc), and then I left the room, decided to use the loo not near the funky smell, and went back down the stairs.

I wandered through the bar, no one I knew was in there, so I left, walked to the pub where the sysadmin was staying, realised I didn't have his mobile number.

I got a drink, and some change for the pokies, $5. I went into the pokies room, and started playing the pokies while I waited for the senior DBA to call me.

I almost went through the $5, held on to a dollar, and had a couple of $2 coins. I thought about having a practice game of pool, by myself, but then couldn't be bothered, so I put it through the pokies.

As I was playing the last dollar, the senior DBA called me, and I said I was here playing the pokies, he asked what I was wanting to do for dinner, we'd been invited over to the woman who works in the mail room's place, and could order some pizzas or something.

I said that sounded ok, and I'd see him when he got back over here (he was driving around somewhere I assume), and he said to keep playing the pokies.

I ran the last dollar out, and figured I'd just slowly go through a couple of dollars out of the $20 note I'd got in change after buying the drink.

I put that in, and started playing it, not really getting anywhere. The other guy who'd been playing the pokies left, I kept playing.

I went and played the machine he'd been on, and put a few dollars through it, and managed to activate the free games feature twice, and won about $7 each time.

I fritted some of this down, accidently because I had it on 2 credits/line. The senior DBA turned up, and I pulled out what credit I had on the machine, about $8, which ended up getting me back to $22, down $3 from when I started.

The senior DBA gave me a dollar to put through the machine, which I did, and got the free spins again, winning him about $6. I took it out at $5 and gave it to him, he went and played a different machine, and just lost it all.

We got drinks, and went and sat in what was left of the beer garden out the back, not much, since the construction site has expanded, now there's just room for 2 tables, and a few chairs, and it was pretty dark out here, because the wiring's all been ripped out in the construction site while they're renovating.

We sat and drank, a few people wandering out to the toilets (in a portable building in the carpark behind the pub, because they've been ripped out too) commented on how dark it was.

The senior DBA called the sysadmin, he came down a little bit later, and said he'd been watching the news in his room, and fallen asleep.

We chatted for a while, we'd been thinking about getting him to drive some of us over to the woman from the mail room's place, since there were 5 of us going, but then he said he was tired, and couldn't be bothered, which was fine, because then there were only 4 of us (a chick from work, her boyfriend, the senior DBA, and myself) so we could all pile in the chick's car.

The senior DBA called her to arrange it, and she said she'd be there to pick us up between now (6.30pm) and 7pm. We waited, and chatted, and got another call from her at about 7.05pm, saying that she'd be there in about 15 minutes.

She did turn up about then, with her boyfriend, and the senior DBA had just got another beer, so the chicks boyfriend got a drink, and we had to wait for them to finish.

The four of us left, and the sysadmin said he was going to wander down to the pizza place near the cinemas, we said we'd see him tomorrow.

We left the pub, and went and jumped in the car, and drove towards the woman from the mail room's place, we stopped at the bottle shop on the way, because she'd sms'd the senior DBA that she wanted a pack of smokes, and we wanted grog anyway.

We went in, I was looking for JD & lemonade in a can, but they didn't have any, only a blank spot in the fridge where they may have been.

The guy behind the counter said they were almost out of everything. I couldn't find any other premixed spirits with lemonade (that weren't chicks drinks), and I didn't want anything with Coke, I can't stand the stuff anymore, it's just liquid indigestion.

I ended up getting a bottle of Riccadonna, and the senior DBA got a 6 pack of Becks, and the smokes for the mail room woman.

We realised the guy behind the counter was the useless guy from the pub we were staying in, who kept ballsing up the reservations, and leaving us without a room. We spoke to him for a bit, he doesn't have much to do with the pub anymore (I wonder why), and then we finished paying, jumped back in the car, and the chick from work drove us to the mail room woman's place.

We wandered in, the CCB guy was there watching the Simpsons, and the mail room woman's 4yo daughter was running around. I sat and watched the tv, the others were all out the back smoking.

We just sat around for a while, I opened the bottle of Riccadonna, and started drinking, and eventually we organised ordering the pizzas, and the useless pizza place tried to argue that what I wanted on my pizza (beef, ham, onion, diced tomato) counted as more than 4 toppings, because I also wanted cheese. Uh, since when is cheese counted as a topping? it's like asking "would you like a base with that?".

Eventually that got sorted out, and paid for with the senior DBA's credit card.

The chick from work on the phone noticed that the "e" from the end of his name was missing off his credit card, and apparently it's because his father had dropped the "e" on his birth certificate, because he was used to signing his own name (which had an "e") on architectural designs, and it was easier to fit his name without the "e" on the end, and now the senior DBA is trying to get his name changed officially, to include the "e", since the rest of his family has one.

Anyway, once that was done, we sat around and waited, and the pizzas turned up about 1/2 hour later. Some chick delivered, them, and the credit card had to be signed for. WTF? I've never had to do that before, it's a telephone transaction, it doesn't require a signature. Useless.

I went and found the senior DBA, he was out the back smoking, he came in, and tried to sign the receipt. The pizza delivery chick didn't have a pen, so we tried to find one, there was one on the floor. The senior DBA tried using it, but it wouldn't work. I remembered that I had my pen in my pocket.. I went to grab it.. and found that it wasn't there.

Oh terrific, I've lost the bloody thing _again_. That must be about the 10th time I've lost it, the last couple of times, it was lost in Mum's car for about a year, and then when I got it back, I took it a job I did at Hornsby, and lost it there for a couple of months.

Now I think it's gone. I can't remember the last time I felt it in my pocket today.. it was in with my wallet, so it could have come out at any of the times I've needed my wallet today.

Let's see.. first I bought the juice at the service station, so it could be there, or in the back of the car, then I got to work, and had to get through 2 security doors, with my access card that's in my wallet, so it could be in the car park, or in the building somewhere.

Then I went for lunch, and paid for the Thai, so I could have dropped it on the street there, I would have used it to get back in the building when I got back from lunch, or when I bought the drinks at the pub.

If it lasted that long, it could have ended up in the back of the chick from work's car on the way here, or maybe it's in the lounge I was sitting on.

Meanwhile, the senior DBA found a pencil on the floor, signed the receipt, and we got the pizzas.

I started looking around for my pen quickly, in the lounge, on the floor etc, no sign of it. It's probably long gone, dropped at the service station this morning.

I sat and ate my pizza, the chick from work sat down, and then her boyfriend came to eat. The mail room woman and the senior DBA were out the back chatting and smoking, they were out there for ages, because by the time they came in, I'd eaten 5/6 of the pizza, had enough, and nearly finished the bottle of wine.

I went and sat on the lounge, there wasn't room for all of us at the table anyway, and finished the bottle.

We sat around for a while, another hour or so, and then we left, since we were all getting a bit tired.

I checked around in the back of the car for my pen, but it wasn't there. Bugger.

The senior DBA and I got dropped back at the pub we were staying at, and went in, the smell had subsided somewhat, we got to the room, I looked through my stuff, I hadn't accidently emptied it out of my pockets when I was here before.

I went to bed, a bit after 11pm.

I heard the phone ringing. I ignored it, I couldn't have got up to answer it if I'd wanted to.

I slept more, and was woken again, by the phone ringing again, at midday, this time it was my mobile. It was the guy at Wyong that fixes the computers. I didn't answer it. I wasn't in the correct mental state to talk him at the moment.

I got up, and I felt massively hung over. Ugh. It was a tragedy, there was no panadol. I ventured outside, went to search my bike, since I used to carry some in there, but I must have eaten them all at some point.

I sat around, feeling like I was dying. I called the guy at Wyong back, and spoke to him for a bit, and worked out that he was having some problem with a motherboard, which he kept saying was a "Foxconn" motherboard.

Uh, hello, no. Foxconn make cables and connectors, not motherboards. I'll bet he's read it off the side of the PCI slot connector.

I eventually worked out that it was in fact a nasty SiS based board, and I told him to just get rid of it. He also told me that it had problems booting with the floppy drive, and I worked out that he didn't have it connected backwards, but that I suspected that the drive was stuffed.

I watched some tv, and then I got a call back a few minutes later, and the floppy drive was stuffed, as I suspected.

I went back to watching tv, while feeling like crap. I sent a message to my mate, about my ipod, and asked him to drop it around when he got a chance. Then I watched more tv.

I was felling really tired, so I lay in bed again, and fell asleep for a while, an hour or two, then I woke up, and watched more tv.

I called my mate, since I'd not had a reply to my message, and he said he would drop it over "later", there's that "later" crap again.

I decided to muck around with the development TiVo, for some reason the video quality is nasty, all black and white, and flashing colours.

I mucked around, and eventually narrowed it down to the FTA STB.. I'd set it up with composite out to start with, so I had the output on the STB set as such, and then once I had it working, I switched the TiVo over to use Svideo, and plugged the svideo lead from the STB in, but what I hadn't done, was switch the output format to YUV or whatever it had to be.

Once I did that, it was fine.

I went and got the washing in (that I'd hung out yesterday), but it was damp, so I found some alarm cable, 6 core stuff, that's useless, and strung it up like a clothesline, and hung all the clothes up.

My mate turned up a while later, and gave me my ipod, he didn't hang around for long, because he was on his way out somewhere.

I sat around, watched some tv, and then went to bed again.

So much for a day of drinking, and playing 2 up. Oh well, next year.

I got up, and watched tv, ate breakfast, went and did the washing.

I watched tv, and then hung out washing. I called my mate's ex gf again, about the letter, since she asked me to ring her on the weekend, to arrange a time to get it done, but as usual, she didn't answer her phone, so I just left a message.

I sat and watched tv more, and played the guitar. My mate's ex gf called me back, and arranged to come around "later", whatever that means.

I started cleaning up a bit, since the mess has got a bit out of control in here, it's getting difficult to move around without stepping on something.

While I was cleaning, the phone rang, it was my mate, the drummer, he wanted to know about giving me a lift to go to someome's place for drinks later, and I said I didn't know what I was doing yet. He asked if I wanted anything at the bottle shop, because he was going to go on the way, and I asked him to get me a bottle of Jack Daniels, just a 350mL will do I think.

I wrote a letter for my mate's ex gf to sign, explaining how she'd received the mail, and not given it to me. Then I realised that I had to install the printer drivers, for my parent's printer (because it's networked). I tried to install the drivers over the network, but they're still running 98, and I don't run that, so it didn't have the 2000 drivers.

I had to go in to get the driver cd (and work out what printer was what, since they have 2). Dad found the driver cd, and I went back and installed the drivers.

I did a bit more cleaning, and then I sat and watched tv, and played the guitar.

My mate's ex gf turned up, she read the letter, on the screen, said it was ok, so I printed it out, and then went and got it from the printer, came back, and she signed it. I don't know why I bothered, I might as well have just forged it, like some judge 1300km away is going to know that it really wasn't signed by who it says it is.

Anyway, once she'd signed the letter, she took off again.

I sat watching more tv, and then had a shower, and listened to "10cc - I'm Not In Love" twice, because it's been stuck in my head.

I put some pizza on, because I was starving, and hadn't had any lunch, then I put the tv back on again, and an ad for "Bridget Jones' Diary" came on, and it had "10cc - I'm Not In Love" in the background. Heh.

I sat and watched tv, and then ate the pizza when it was ready. I was only a bit of the way through when my mate turned up, so I quickly finished the food, and then I went through my music with him, trying to find songs he'd want to hear, and loaded them into my ipod.

While I was doing that, I was watching the end of "King of the Hill". We left, and went up to my mate who works for ABC's parent's place, where his sister and boyfriend were, where I thought we were spending the night, but we weren't.

We sat and watched the end of "Hot Shots", and then when that finished (it was a DVD), we flicked through the pay channels, and found the end of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" on one of the movie channels, so we watched that.

After that, we grabbed all the stuff, bottles of grog etc, limes, my ipod, and we went and jumped in my mate's sister's car, and took off.

Along the way, I realised that this was a different car to the one she used to have. Apparently a truck ran over the last one (while she was in it), and it was written off, so she got a new car.

We got to the supermarket (that I used to go to on my way home), around the corner from our mate's place. We went in, and started grabbing junk food, chips etc, to take. While we were in here, we got a call from our mate, wanting to know where we were.. umm, about 200m away mate.

We finished in there, paid for the junk, and jumped back in the car, and went around to our mate's place.

We went in, there was quite a few people there, my mate who works for Orange, and one of his mates, and a couple of other people I can't remember now.

We went into the kitchen, dumped all the stuff, and I started drinking, and we chatted for a while.

There was some ferrocious laughing coming from the front room, they were watching Evil Dead 3, so we went in there to watch that. It's pretty funny.

When that finished, we put some music on, I'd been drinking and snacking the whole time, and I finished the 350mL bottle of grog off, and then looked for something else to drink.

I found another 350mL bottle of JD, with a few shots left in it, so I finished that off.

A little while later, I didn't feel so good. I went to sit outside for a while, and ended up with my head in my hands (which my mate took a photo of, but I didn't know).

I sat there for a good 1/2 hour, then I decided it was pointless, I might as well get this over and done with.. I walked out the front, and spewed in the garden. I felt a bit better after that. I became a bit too confident though, and I went and ate a few handfuls of chips, and then realised that I wasn't as good as I thought, so I went and revisited the garden again.

I went back and sat down for a while, and then all these people came out, crapping on about nothing, and I couldn't handle the noise, so I went back inside, and decided to go and lie down on the floor. The loungeroom looked like the best place for that, so I just went and lay on the carpet.

It was freezing cold. I wished I'd brought a jacket or something, I was just wearing jeans and a T shirt. I lay there for a couple of hours, and then all the others came in, to watch the dawn service, which we were supposed to have been going to, so much for that idea.

Someone put the heater on, so I ended up almost sitting on that, trying to warm up.

We watched the dawn service, and then some of the news, and a bit after 6pm, everyone started working out what they were doing, going to bed/sleep etc.

The people I'd come with were leaving, so I grabbed a packet of chips I'd bought just before we got there (so I had something to eat when i got up, since there's no food at home), and jumped in the car, and got dropped at home (not realising I'd left my ipod at my mate's place).

I put the electric blanket on (full), got into bed, watched some tv, and then went to sleep at 7.30am.

I got up, and sat on the computer, then ate breakfast. I accidently put old milk on the cereal, from last weekend, but it's soy milk anyway, so nothing should happen.

I listened to music, and blogged. About midday, I got a phone call, from my mate, the drummer, he wanted to know about going to get some lunch.

I had a shower, and got ready, and then he turned up at 1pm. We went to Erina Fair, and wandered around the shops. I wanted to look for a new watch, because mine is falling apart, and it looks like crap, a plastic watch with a metal band.

I went into the jeweller where I bought my bracelet, the chick that sold it to me wasn't in there, but another chick was. I was looking for something with both analogue and digital on it, with a silver band.

They had a couple of watches, with both analogue and digital, but the bands were stainless, not silver, so they didn't match the rest of my stuff.

We chatted to the chick for a while, and then we kept going. I looked in a few more jewellers, but I still wasn't seeing what I was looking for.

We walked back out to where we wait for our mates, and waited, but there was no sign of them. My mate had left his phone in the car (as usual, I don't know why he has a mobile, he never carries it), and he didn't know our other mate's number, that we were waiting for, so we went back to the car to get it.

When he got there, there was a missed call, from the guy we were waiting on. He called him back, apparently he was there, with his gf (the sister of the guy that works for ABC), and they were looking around in Dick Smith.

We went down there, and looked for them in there, but they weren't in there. I had a look at the ipods, I've been thinking about getting a bigger capacity one. I talked to the dopey guy working in there for a bit, and then we left.

We wandered back to where we'd been waiting, and our mate and his gf were there.

We chatted for a bit, and then decided to go down to the pizza restaurant. We called our other mate, who works for ABC, apprently he's just leaving.

We decided to get some starters while we waited. We got to the restaurant, and looked at the menu, got drinks, ordered some starters.

They came, and we ate them, there was still no sign of our mate (and he was coming with my mate whose dad owns the air con business apparently), we called them again, they'd just left. Useless. We said that we'd wait a bit, and then we were ordering mains, and they could order when they got here, because we were already on to our second drinks, just waiting for them.

The woman came to take the orders, it said on the menu that all the pizzas were "thin" based. I hate thin based, assuming it's the same as a fast food pizza with a "thin" base, that is like SAO. I asked if they could do it a bit thicker, but she said they didn't, so I ordered spaghetti instead.

Eventually our mates turned up, and then we were served our mains, and they ordered theirs. We ate, and chatted. The thin base wasn't as bad as I had thought, someone couldn't finish their pizza, so I had a couple of slices of it, and it was pretty good.

When we'd all finished, we got the bill, $142 between the 6 of us, not a bad effort. We paid, taking the chance to get rid of shrapnel, I must have tipped about $4 in change.

We walked over to JB HiFi then, on the way, I was walking with my mate whose dad owns the air con business, and we spotted his aunt, so we spoke to her for a few minutes. I told her about my court case and all the rest of it, and then we kept going.

We went over to JB, and wandered around. I didn't find anything worth buying. I keep buying DVDs, and then it takes me 6 months to get around to watching them.

We headed back towards the main center (since JB is across the carpark), and I arranged to get a lift home with my mate who works for ABC, rather than have my other mate have to go so far out of his way taking me home.

We went back to the car, and I got a lift home. They invited me to go around to their place tomorrow night, for some drinks.

I went inside, watched tv, blogged, and eat cheese and crackers, and drank Riccadonna. I hadn't thought to buy anything to eat for dinner, so I went and lay in bed, watched tv, and went to sleep at 10.30pm.

I got up, got ready, came to work.

I tried to make some notes on blogger, but it was totally busted.

I went through my emails, and then I was looking at slashdot, and I saw a link to the hhgttg site, about the movie. I spent a little while looking at that. The movie doesn't look too bad, not as bad as I had expected.

I heard from the senior DBA, that the DR machine had crashed again. Argh, wasting all that time last night, fixing it up, for nothing.

The contract DBA and the sysadmin had gone over there this morning, to get it working again.

I downloaded itunes, and went through and cleaned out my ipod, I managed to get about 100mb of free space on it, so I could copy some files on to it to take home.

I went up and saw the senior DBA, I bumped into the email guy, and the contract DBA on the way up, chatted to them for a bit.

The senior DBA was on the phone, so I went around to annoy the little guy in royalty, to give him a taste of his own medicine.

While I was in the royalty area, I spotted the name sign, for the cranky old guy, it had "Cranky Old Fart" as his job title. LOL.

After that, something was annoying me (not the little guy, for once). The Novell server in that area is really noisy, the fan needs oiling or something. I spent a little while trying to work out how to open the case, since there's a thing of sewing machine oil hanging around, and I could fix the fan.

I couldn't work out how to open the case, so I just gave up.

I went across the road, to get a chocolate bar, because I was starving. On the way back, walking through the car park, the guy driving a garbage truck called me over.

He'd lost the opener for the garage door on the section where the bin is, and wanted to know if I could work out how to open it.

I went around inside the area, (since there's a separate door, for people chucking stuff in the bin), and looked for an opener button, or a function on the motor, but couldn't find anything. I just disengaged the motor from the door, and then pushed the door up manually.

The door weighs a ton, they've put all this perspex on it, to stop crap blowing in or out of there or something, but it's just ended up with the door being really heavy, and not balanced, so it took about 5 goes to actually get the door up (since it's pretty big too, so the garbage truck can fit in there), and stay up.

After that, I left the guy to empty it, and then I went back to my desk. I was pretty bored. I got a call from the senior DBA, he was working on someone's laptop, and the java VM was busted, because they'd installed some Craptusnet thing. He mucked around, but couldn't fix it.

I told him that they'd probably need to reinstall windows to get rid of that crap, I remember it used to be a real pain when someone would bring in a machine to the internet cafe, and they'd had craptus on it.

I went back to work, and continued working until about 1pm.

I'd been thinking about getting a bigger usb drive, for dragging files between work and home, so I went and looked at the website of the place I bought the FTA STB and stuff from recently. They had a 1GB for $120, and a 512MB for about $65, so I bought the 512MB, I don't think I need a gig.

After that, I went up to find out about going for lunch. Someone had put an icecream (in a wrapper) on the senior DBA's desk. He didn't know who had, and didn't want it, so I ate it, instead of letting it get wasted.

Anyway, I wandered around eating an icecream, while we went to see a woman about a problem she was having with TRIM. It seemed that she couldn't login, which didn't make sense, because we don't use passwords.

We spent about 10 minutes mucking around there, not getting anywhere, so we gave up, and decided to go and get some lunch.

Went we went back to the IT area, the little guy from royalty was there, and we asked him about the ice cream, and he told us that he'd put it there, he'd pinched it out of the freezer, and it belonged to the annoying support guy.

The three of us left, and walked down the road to get some lunch, on the way, we bumped into the sysadmin, and he told us that he had got the place he'd put the application in for.

The little guy got some money out of an ATM, so we waited for him, and then we went to the bakery in the mall, and go some pies. The senior DBA bought the little guy a tiny kid's pie.

The sysadmin got a kebab (I don't think he's big on pies, but I find that strange, they're both made of the same thing, crap meat).

We sat outside and ate, and then the senior DBA went to buy smokes, so we waited for him, and then we walked back to work.

I sat and worked a bit more, waiting to go home. I watched a video about ipod batteries these guys had made, when they found out that they couldn't get the battery replaced, and were supposed to buy a new unit. It was pretty funny, they went around spraypainting "ipod's unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months" on all the advertising banners.

I got a call from the senior DBA, that he was going to leave soon. I packed up all my stuff, and then I went an hung around up there. The new guy turned up, since he was after a lift to, and then the senior DBA realised that he wanted to copy some stuff to his laptop.. several gig worth, so we got to tait for that.

Then we went and got in the car, and headed for home. I was dropped at home a bit after 4pm. I sat around for a while, but I was hungry, and there was no food, so I thought bugger it, and I went and jumped on my bike, and I rode to go to the supermarket.

On the way, there was some useless guy waiting to turn right at a T intersection. He had huge gaps, could have easily gone tons of time, but just sat there. There was a big line of cars behind him. I got fed up, and I rode up the left of him, and then I took the next gap, and left the dickhead behind.

I decided to get some fuel, since I don't think there's much left, and I'm worried that what's in there will go crap.

I went into the service station, and I missed kicking the kickstand down properly, because it's seized up a bit, so it slipped out from under my heel, and flicked back up, and then I nearly dropped my bike, I had to use all my strength to pull it back up.

Luckily no one noticed, so I just nonchalantly (sp?) got off, and took the filler cap off, and put in $5 worth of fuel.

I went in to pay, and the chick working in there said that my hair was "unique", it just looks like a total mess.

I went across to the supermarket, and got some food, and then I went into the bottle shop, and Ricadonna was on special, so I got a couple of bottles of that.

I rode home, watched tv, and drank. I got a bit tired, so I went to lie down in bed, and watched tv.

I fell asleep at 9pm, and then woke up again a bit later, and the tv was still on. I fell asleep again, and then woke up at 4am, and it was still on, so I watched it for a little while, and then turned it off and went back to sleep.

I got up, and got ready as usual.

The senior DBA found the takeaway curry sitting in the room. The sysadmin had forgotten to take it, or put it in the fridge. I told him to chuck it out.

We came to work, I worked for a while, got an email from the guy I work with on the TiVo images, he'd sent me a picture of that slut Paris Hilton, at some red carpet thing, holding her dress out, and you could see her underwear going up her whatsit.

I got an email from my web host a little while later, asking how the hell I had the httpd processes running wget on his server, and I explained that I was using php to do it, and that it was a script to pull the info page of my tivo, parse it, and display the output in a little table on my home page, so people could see what my tivo was currently doing.

He wasn't terribly impressed about I could sense, so I told him I'd get rid of it if he wanted.

I finally took the plastic off my ipod. This is only of relevence, since I bought the thing about 6 months ago, and it's managed to stay on that long.

I went back to work, I got a call from the senior DBA, he was asking me about installing SP2 on a machine that keeps crashing. I told him No F Way, if it crashes now, SP2 is not going to fix it, and will most likely just make it massively worse.

I went back to work, and a little while later, we had a morning tea. My manager started out, saying that he didn't want any great long speeches (like yesterday), and we were just there to eat and socialise.

As soon as he finished, the new manager of the department who crapped on for ages yesterday turned up, and, you guessed it, crapped on for ages again.

After I escaped that, we went and had a meeting about the QLD counterpart system briefly, and then I went back to work.

Someone had left a message on my desk phone, I called up, listened to it. I have no idea who it was, it was just some great long message, with a little kid in the background somewhere, and then it hung up.

I went back to work, until I got a call from the senior DBA, there was a BBQ on today apparently, and they'd forgotten to tell me. I went out there, the others were just taking off to go off the property to smoke. I stayed near the BBQ area, had some food, and a couple of beers, while chatting to some other people at work.

We were having a discussion about the car that was in Bullit, whether it was a Mustang, or a Shelby GT etc.

A few minutes later, everyone started going back to work. I notcied that cute chick going back into work, I didn't even know that she'd been out there.

I helped the social club guy clean up, and pack up all the drinks/beers etc, and then I went back to work.

I updated the production system I'm working on, and then found a bug in the logic, which only occured when the code went into the production environment. D'oh. I quickly rushed to sort it out, putting in a kludgy fix, until I implement the new tables properly.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he wanted to know about comparing some files between servers.

I went up to find out what it was, it was that the TRIM system had been running on the disaster recovery machine while we relocated, and now a few files had ended up left on the DR machine, and not back on the production system. We had to find a way to compare them, but there's about 4GB worth of files, and the link between the servers is the same as IP over carrier pigeon, so diffing them is not an option.

I thought about it for a minute, and figured I could generate md5sums on all the files, and compare those, and then find the missing/different files.

I sat there, found md5sum for solaris (that was a task in itself), wrote a script to generate hashes for all the files, and then I copied these across, compared them, and had it generate a script to copy all the missing/different files across.

I kicked off the generated script, but it wasn't very happy, the scps kept coming back with I/O errors.

I asked if there had been something wrong with the filesystem on that machine (which might explain why the files were missing), but no one knew anything about it.

Next thing.. the DR machine disappeared. Couldn't ping it, and the sessions I had open all died. Somehow I think the machine has kernel panicked, or oops, or whatever Solaris does when it craps itself (because I don't think I've ever actually seen that happen).

We called the guy at Thornton, where the DR box is, the guy will wait for us. I went down to get my stuff organised to go, I bumped into my manager, chatted to him for a bit, and then went back up.

The sysadmin had gone to book a car, and they weren't here, so I went down where the government cars are. While we were getting the car sorted out, a cop car went flying past the front of the building, and a few seconds later a paddy wagon went racing along the back. Gees, something good must be going on.

We got in the car, and drove down the Thornton, parked, and went to try to get in the building. We got there about 6.01pm, so the access card didn't work, since it was after 6pm.

There was a cleaner in the airlock at the front, we tried to get her to open the door, but she couldn't work it out, that you had to press the switch to deactivate the electromagnet holding the door shut, and then push it open.

We eventually managed to explain how the door worked (she kept deactivating the solenoid, and then pulling the door, instead of pushing it open.

We got in, the gujy we'd called was there, we explained that the access card didn't work, but of course he didn't belive us, so then we had to spend a couple of minutes showing him that the card would not unlock the door.

We walked around to the computer "room", where the DR machine was. The door was wide open, because apparently there's something wrong with the airconditioning at the moment, and it keeps heating the room instead of cooling it. It felt like it was about 30 degrees in there.

I was led to believe there was a proper computer room here, this is just a cupboard with 2 racks in it, and a standard home air conditioner split system.

I plugged a monitor into the DR machine, but there was no output, it must have rebooted itself, and it's running in serial mode, since there was no keyboard attached when it booted.

The sysadmin had his laptop, he gave me the sun console lead, and I plugged it in. Yep, the machine had come back up in serial mode, single user mode too, because of the disk errors.

I pinched a keyboard off the server that controls the security access (since the others hanging around were all ps/2, and the sun box only takes usb input devices), I plugged that in, but it didn't make any difference, not that I expected it to.

The sysadmin kicked of a fsck on the stuffed filesystem, but didn't specify -y, so it was coming up about fixing every error, and there were tons of them.

The sysadmin had wandered off, so that left me sitting there typing "y, enter" constantly.

The sysadmin came back, and I left him sit there dealing with typing y, and I went and sat outside the "room", since it was so hot in there.

The fsck went through for a while without finding any errors, so we didn't have to type "y", and then because there was no input, the laptop suspended itself, and wouldn't come back.

We had to reboot it, we pulled the serial cable out first though, to avoid the "break" signal getting sent to the sun box (though I've had that happen when you unplug the cable), and waited for the laptop to come back up again.

We connected to the machine again, and the output of fsck continued. When it eventually finished, I suggested running it again, because the sysadmin had kept pressing "enter" to stop the laptop from suspending again, which results in the default answer of "no", to fsck's questions, so there would be some problems that hadn't been fixed.

He started it again, this time with -y, though it didn't work, and still asked for confirmation. I went and sat outside the "room" again.

The guy from Thornton came around, and started going on about the air conditioning problems etc. Finally the fsck finished again (it took about 20 minutes each time), and we rebooted the box.

Because the keyboard/monitor were attached, it came up on the machine this time, not on the console port. It looked like it booted up fine.

I took the keyboard off, and put it back on the security server, and then unplugged the monitor, and plugged it back into the machine it originally came from.

While I was doing this, the others had packed up the laptop, and wandered off.

I had a quick look around for them, stopping to get a drink from the spring water thing in the hall.

I noticed they had a lab in there, with fume cupboards. I couldn't see the certification stickers through the window in the door, but they must have been certified.

I found the others, we had a quick chat, and then we left, got back in the car, and drove back to Maitland. On the way back, some idiot was tailgating us, and we changed lanes to let him passed, he went speeding past, and then just dropped back to the same speed as us, so what was the point of that?

We got back to the office at 6.30pm, the sysadmin went in to drop off the folder for the car, and the senior DBA and I left, drove back to the pub we're staying at.

We dropped of our stuff, and then just sat in the room for a while. Some guy had fallen asleep in front of the tv in the common area, near our room, and started snoring.

We left the room, and were going to go across to the other pub, where we start drinking, but we bumped into the sysadmin on the steps.

We decided to go to the Clubhouse instead, when we got there, we saw the bartender was back (the guy who used to be the Newcastle Knight).

We played pool, I was playing like crap, must not have had enough to drink yet.

Some weird guy in the bar challenged a game of pool, I wasn't really interested, but I agreed to play anyway, and then after a couple of shots, he asked if I wanted to make the game for a schooner.

Not really, if I lose, I get to buy him a beer, if I win, I get a shitty beer I don't want. Oh well, it's only $3, who cares.

I lost the game terribly, so the guy asked if I wanted to play best 2 out of 3, said it didn't make any difference to me, he had ime to fill in apparently.

We setup the second game, and a few shots in, the weird guy was served his dinner, so I just waited, chatting to the guys from work while he ate.

When he finished, we finished the game, I was beaten again, but it was fairly close this time, I only had a couple of balls left on the table at the end.

We played a third game, even though he'd already won. He stuffed up this time, and sunk the black early on, so I picked a new black ball, and we kept playing, then my dinner was served.

We were pretty close to finishing, so we finished the game (again), like the second game, it was close, I only had a couple of balls left.

I shouted the guy a beer, and then I sat and ate my dinner.

After dinner, I went into play the pokies, I put a dollar in, and immediately won $6, so I just took it all out of the machine, and left.

We hung around for a little while, and then all walked back to the pub we're staying at. A few of us wanted to chat, so they were standing around chatting, while I watched the tv in the window of Radio Rentals.

I fired up the laptop, typed some blog, and then went to bed.

I woke up at 6.35am as usual, lay in waiting for the radio to come on.

It came on at 6.50am, wasn't tuned properly, so I got up and fixed it, and then lay in again. I probably could have just started getting ready at this point, but I don't really want to be at work at 7.20am.

I lay in, listened to radio until the end of the news at 7.10am, then I went and had a shower and got ready.

I brought the shirt I won at the Bundy factory up with me this week, so I decided to wear it today.

I'd just made some toast when some guy came out, I spoke to him for a bit, he works for DPI too, he's over from Armidale.

When I was nearly finished, I went around and knocked on the door of the room that the senior DBA was staying in, no answer, he's probably in having a shower or something, I just wanted to make sure that he was up.

I went back, finished my breakfast. The senior DBA came wandering out, he had still been in bed. I told him that I was going to work, and I'd probably see him there later, and then I went back in my room, grabbed the stuff I needed at work (jumper, ipod to charge it, floppy with blogs from last night, room key), and then I walked to work.

The senior DBA had to move his stuff from the room he was in last night, into the room I was in last night, because we're both in there tonight and tomorrow, so I left the door unlocked.

I got to work, sat and did some testing of the code I've written in the last couple of weeks. I need to get this into production at some point today.

I got an email telling me that there's a morning tea this morning, for the Director of the section that I'm contracted too. They had his dinner last night, which I didn't end up going to.

I went out there, thought I'd have a cup of tea.. hmm.. there's a box of leaf tea here, but no tea bags, WTF? I saw that a couple of the indexers had teabags, and I asked if I was blind, or if it was BYO teabag, they said it was the latter, and offered me one, they were on their desk.

I remembered that I had a box of teabags that the temping agency sent me on my birthday, so I grabbed one of them, went back and made a cup of tea.

Quite a few people commented on my shirt, apparently it goes very well with my fading green/yellow hair (I didn't fix it this weekend when I was at home, I don't see the point, I've got to get rid of it in a couple of weeks to go to court, so I'll just left it fade out a bit).

We listened to all the speeches, and the director was given a bunch of presents, a signed book, a mining report, a card with a photo taken in 1986 when the director started (the current time he's been working for the department), the first geological map of NSW printed, framed, a bottle of wine, (since he's going to work for the SA Minerals, near the Barrossa, instead of in the Hunter here).

He was also given the first Geological Survey shirt made recently.

The cute chick I keep seeing at these things was sitting under the stairs, with the women from the mail room, and the chick we were at the pub with last night, so when all the speeches finished, and we could eat, I wandered over to speak to them. The cute chick didn't say anything, I just chatted with the others, and then went back to work.

I did another couple of hours of work, about 12.30pm I sent an email to the senior DBA, asking if it was lunch time yet, because I was bored and cold, (the airconditioning is still not fixed, I'm waiting for ice to start coming out of the grill above my desk).

He replied, saying he was going outside for a cigarette. I wandered out to the front of the building, and bumped into him coming down the stairs. We went outside, chatted for a bit, while he had a smoke, and then we went back inside.

He didn't want to go to lunch yet, because there were people over from Orange, and he wanted to see them off before they left back to Orange, so I went upstairs with him.

I chatted to one of the big managers for a while, he rides a bike too, so we chatted about that, him telling me how one night on his way into Orange he'd hit a roo while going about 140km/hr, and had only ended up swerving onto the wrong side of the road, not coming off his bike, damn, that's lucky.

A few minutes later, the sysadmin, the senior DBA and I left to go to lunch.

We walked down the road, and went into the cafe we were going to for a while, both the sysadmin and I noticed the special on the board outside, chicken kiev, that sounds ok.

We went in, sat down, the senior DBA had to work out what he wanted, we chatted for a while. We ordered our food, the sysadmin asked what chicken kiev was, and the woman explained to him how it's chicken, went to say breast, but then said that it wasn't breast, was thigh, stuffed with garlic butter and crumbed.

Hmm, I'm pretty sure that chicken kiev is supposed to be chicken breast, whatever, so we both ordered that, and the senior DBA ordered a roll or a sandwich or something.

We got drinks, sat and chatted, and our food was served a little bit later. While we were eating, the senior DBA saw the contract DBA go past in his car, strange, he's leaving early, but then the senior DBA said he'd mentioned something about going to get something done on his car, to do with the damage on the side.

I said that I would have thought that would have been all sorted out by now, paid for by the insurance of the idiot that ran into him ages ago. Neither of them knew the story about that, so I told them what the contract DBA told me, how the Toyota Echo had T boned him on the roundabout at Erina, and then the Echo had self destructed, leaving a scratch on the side of the contract DBA's car.

The Echo was written off, the engine ended up coming through the firewall, and ended up between the 2 front seats, the driver ended up sitting in the back seat, the back rest of the drivers seat just collapsed, he was still holding the steering wheel, that had come off the steering column, and both stop lights popped out the back of the car, and were hanging there by the wiring.

The food wasn't terrific, all brown chicken, I picked around all that, and it was a waste of time putting the leg or whatever bone it was in there, because it had no meat on it.

The senior DBA said he was just going across the road to the pub for a minute (where we were staying), and the syadmin and I continued eating, and chatting.

The senior DBA came back a few minutes later, paid for his lunch, and then sat outside and had a smoke.

We finished our lunches, went and paid, and went out near the senior DBA, and then we walked back to work.

The usual building manager (who's always having a go at me for something) is on holidays at the moment, his temporary replacement was in chucking stuff in the dumpster when we got back to the building. The dumpster is in a caged area of the car park, we joked that she'd been locked up, and said we'd come back with some food, things like Twisties, that would fit through the cage.

We went back in to work, I went back to my desk.

I'd been testing the new code I've written over the last couple of weeks all morning, and hadn't found any problems, so I decided to update the internal production system, which doubles as a testing environment, (there's only a few people using it at the moment), so I pushed the new code up there.

I asked the woman who used to look after the old system to go through it, and see if she could find any problems.

While I was standing near here, I heard a discussion starting up between the project manager, the indexers' manager, and one of the indexers, it was about that huge file that I didn't want to load into the system.

I just listened in for a few minutes, and it wasn't really going in a direction that I was liking, apparently they had rejected the reoprt once, and then it had come back again, slightly smaller, but still ridiculously over the spec that we say we accept, and now they were talking about just giving up and accepting it.

I'm not having that. We say we want files around 10M, with a maximum of 20M for a reason, if you start accepting 135MB files, then everyone is going to send them in, the system's going to become useless to people on slow connections (even basic broadband will have trouble with that), and people are going to be downloading bunches of stuff they don't want or need, to get the stuff they do want or need.

The saw my way, and said they'd reject the file again. At this point my manager came out, looking for a Nokia charger, I told him to use the one on my desk, and then we continued our discussion, he asked what we were talking about, the indexers' manager explained it to him, and he agreed with me, that we reject the report again, and again, until they send what we say we'll accept.

I went back to testing the new code with the woman who looked after the old system, I was trying to test a bit of code I'd put in, but it didn't seem to be working, I figured I must have stuffed up my logic.

I went back and looked at the code, found that the logic was right, it was my memory of what logic I'd put in there that was wrong, so I was able to test that properly after that.

My phone rang, I answered it, it was the senior DBA, apparently there was a couple of things up in IT they wanted me to look at, so I said I'd be up in a few minutes.

I briefly spoke to the woman again, and then I went upstairs.

The contract DBA who'd wanted to see me about a problem with cron wasn't there, so I spoke to the senior DBA for a bit. The tiny guy from royalty who we always bag out as looking like he's 12 years old was acting the age he looks, and making a real pest of himself.

He'd taken the senior DBAs cigarettes, and filled up the packet with coffee grounds, which he took great pride in showing me, and then he showed me the other nonsense he'd been up to, undoing the strap on the DBAs laptop bag, and strapping it around the desk, and then filling up his bag with junk, and taking his jumper, and putting a big P on the back of it with masking tape.

The senior DBA had enough of him at this point (even though he's responsible for encouraging him), and they started having a play fight, the DBA trying to wrap masking tape around the little guy.

He eventually was told to go back to his desk, which he did, and then found a holepunch, opened it, and put it in front of the fan on the DBAs desk, resulting in little circles of paper flying all over the desk.

The contract DBA came back at this point, so I started talking to him, to work out what the problem with cron was that he was having.

The senior DBA told the little guy to come and clean the paper up, and the little guy just wiped it all off the desk on to the floor. The senior DBA told him to go away again, and then picked up all the paper off the floor.

I looked at what the contract DBA was trying to do, we tried a few different things, but it just kept resulting in a java error, something about a class def not found.

I looked a bit more closely at the script, and noticed that the java line had a dot in it, refering to the current directory.. but when the script was run from cron, there is no current directory, or it's / or something, so that's not going to work.

I suggested that he put a cd command in the line above, so the dot reference might work, we ran it again, the next minute in cron, and it worked. Sweet.

The senior DBA asked me to help him now, there was a problem with one of the production systems, when it was supposed to be querying the database and returning some data, it would take ages, and then just come back with nothing.

Before we got a chance to look at this, the senior DBAs phone rang, it was the guy from Orange who's supposed to be looking after the website, telling him that the website was supposedly wrong.

We checked that, and yes, mysql had stuffed up again, and the host was blocked from connecting to itself, so we did the "flush-hosts" thing again, and got it back working.

We went back to looking at the other system. Now instead of taking ages and coming back with nothing, it was taking ages and coming back with a 404.

I went looking to work it out, but couldn't find where the file it was trying to access was, or was supposed to be. No wonder there's a 404, but the files haven't changed for months.

I mucked around, we stopped all of Oracle, the application server, the interface between application server and the tables, even the tables. We brought it all back up again, and it was still doing the same thing.

What the hell is going on here?

I had been checking prstat, thinking perhaps some http processes had gone defunct, or something was eating all the cpu or memory (like convert does sometimes when people try to convert A0 size pages between TIFF/JPEG in my system, but I blocked people from doing that months ago).

The only think that looked strange was the license server for some geospatial software, eating 40% of the cpu, so I restarted that, and then the production application magically started working again.

Hooray. I went back to my desk. I was hoping to get the external production code updated, but with all the other problems on that box today (the website and the application I just fixed, and the cron stuff were all on the same server), I decided to leave it for today.

I got an email from Dell, telling me about "up to $1000 cash off", oh yeah, so I went an looked, the laptop I'm interested in, that I customised up the other day, and was really tempted to buy, the 2200, only had $80 off.

The base price has dropped by $100 though, so after customising it again, with a 60gb disk, and a bigger capacity battery, it was less than $1400. There's a free screen upgrade on it too, to a 15" screen, but it was only 1024x768, I'm sure when I looked the other day it had a higher res screen in the 15".

There's no bag either.. and the backpack is like $100, so that ends up nearly $1500, maybe I'll think about it a bit more.

I did a bit more work, a few tests in the testing system, and then I went up to see who was left in the office.

The sysadmin was still there, just finishing up, I waited while he grabbed his stuff. I noticed the senior DBA had left his jumper and sunglasses here when he'd left, so I took those.

I went down to the carpark with the sysadmin, and he moved his car into the secure carpark under the building, leaving it here for the night.

Annoyingly, it was starting to rain, we walked down to the pub. The sysadmin asked me what I was doing for dinner, I said I didn't know, I speak to the others first, and work it out. He told me that he wanted to go to the Thai place down the road that we went to for lunch the other day, I said that sounded ok, a nice change from pub food.

The sysadmin was staying in a different pub this week (one that has a tv in the rooms!) and he'd told the people in the pub where I was staying (and he had last week) that he wasn't in town this week, as a way to avoid taking his booking in that pub.

He went in where he was staying, and I went into the other pub. I dropped off my stuff at the room, and then went back down, and found the senior DBA and a guy from CCB in the bar, so I sat with them, and got a drink.

The others had already been drinking, and got more drinks.

A few minutes later, the sysadmin called the senior DBA, I answered it, told him where we were, and it was at this point that he explained to me about telling the staff in here that he wasn't in town this week, so he couldn't really just rock in to the front bar.

I said we'd give him a call when we were planning to go for dinner.

I got off the phone, told the others what was going on, and that the sysadmin wanted to go for dinner at the Thai etc.

We sat and watched the news for a while. The guy who looks after the email systems at work popped in, we spoke to him for a bit, and then we went home.

We saw the social club guy from work going upstairs, so the senior DBA and I went across to the pub where the syadmin was staying, and the guy from CCB got another beer, and waited for the social club guy, and then they'd come across.

We went over, the senior DBA called the sysadmin, and told him that we were in the bar of the pub where he was staying, so he could come down there.

We got drinks, and then the senior DBA and I went in and played the pokies, waste of time and money, oh well, it was only $2.

We came back out, and decided to have a game of pool, so I paid, and racked up the balls.

The sysadmin came down, and the senior DBA and I played pool.

I was playing shockingly. Not enough alcohol yet to play acceptably. I kept making the worst shots, missing everything, putting the white in, putting the wrong balls in.

I ended up putting the black ball in when there was still about 6 balls left on the table, that was the end of that.

I spent the next few minutes taking some practice shots, and wasn't too bad then, after already having totally stuffed up, typical.

We chatted for a while, and then the guy from CCB and the social club guy came in. We all chatted for a few minutes, and then started heading down to the Thai restaurant. The social club guy had to go back and get his spray jacket, because it was "raining". Pff, raining.. it's not even sprinkling, there is a spot of water here and there.

I had to make the Bogan comment "what, are you fuckin' made of sugar?" in response to them saying it was raining.

We dawdled along, waiting for the social club guy, and then we walked down to the restaurant. There was some stray dog hanging around, and the senior DBA kept encouraging it. I didn't want a bar of that, I don't want some mangy animal hanging around.

The stupid dog ended up following us all the way down the road.

We got to the Thai, it was a BYO, so then we walked over to the pub nearby to get some takeaway grog.

As we walked across there, the social club guy asked if we'd been to the mexican restaurant in the pub a bit down the road from there. We told him that we had, quite a few weeks ago, when the guy from Orange who took over IT was supposed to be going back to Orange, as a farewall, and then he didn't end up going back anyway.

We told him how it had been very expensive, and the crappy banquet ended up with them just bringing out 3 or 4 entree dishes between us, with tons of cheese on everything, and carrot, and there was no main meal. it was totally greasy, and I couldn't handle eating all that cheese.

The sysadmin added in that it cost him an extra $100, because he bit down on something, and chipped his tooth, and had to go to the dentist and get it fixed the next day.

We got to the pub to get the grog, the others went in on a couple of bottles of red wine, but it undoubtedly would have had preservative 220 in it, and I don't feel like having a concussion when I wake up tomorrow.

I saw they had Becks, so I figured I'd get a couple of those, I got some money out of the ATM, and got 3 bottles of Becks.. $11.40, the guy must have stuffed something up there, seems far too cheap, especially since 1 Becks or Heinekin is $8 in the pub where we're staying.

We walked back to the Thai, sat in there, and looked at the menus. The social club guy asked what people thought of sharing, and I said that I wasn't really big on the idea, mainly because there wasn't all that much on the menu that interested me, and I didn't want to end up with everyone pinching what ever I did decide to get, and not wanting any of whatever they got.

We ordered our entrees, and mains, taking ages, because people didn't know what they wanted.

Once that was done, they opened the wines for us, and I started on a beer. D'oh.. pop top, and I don't have my keys, with the bottle opener on the keyring. I used the key from the hotel room to get the top off, shooting it across the room accidently, oops.

This lead the social club guy to tell us a story about the fact that Cascade Premium is his favourite beer, and it always came in a pop top, and then one night he was at a function, and it was provided. He looked around, and saw a couple of other people drinking them, so he figured that one of them must have had a bottle opener.

He went over, and asked one of them to open the beer for him, they looked at him a bit weird, took the bottle off him, twisted the twist top off, and then handed it back to him, making him feel like a dope.

Apparently it had only been fairly recently that it had changed from a pop top to a twist top.

The entrees came out, I'd ordered a chicken soup, it was pretty spicy, and a couple of times I sucked down a bit of chilli from it, and it made my eyes water.

The others all had pastry type stuff, curry puffs, spring rolls etc. They were all swapping (which I can't very well do with a soup), the senior DBA swapped a curry puff for some weird looking vegetable roll thing.

He's alergic to seafood, so he checked it, and found that it had a couple of prawns in it, so then he started freaking out about having it on his plate, so he asked me to grab that and eat it.

We finished our entrees, and the senior DBA and the social club guy went outside to have a smoke. The social club guy took his glass of wine outside with him, and then the Thai waitress went off her nut, about how he's not allowed out there with it. Why are you telling us love? we're inside, he's the one outside, we don't really care, so then she went outside and told him, and brought the glass of wine back inside.

Gees, how paranoid.

They started serving the mains, once all the mains were served, and some fried rice etc, the others came back in from outside.

I'd ordered a stir fried pork dish, with plum sauce, that was pretty good. The others had curries and stuff, which didn't interest me.

We sat there for quite a while eating and chatting, and then the senior DBA and social club guy went out for a smoke again, and the staff came and collected our empty plates.

There was still a bit of food in a few of the dishes, so they asked if we wanted to take it away, the sysadmin wanted it, but I said that we didn't really have anywhere to put it, but then remembered that there is a fridge in the common area in the pub, so he could put it in there.

He had them pack up some of the dishes. The guys came back in from outside, the senior DBA came to the table, threw down $30, and said he was going back to the room, but we just told him to wait, because we were leaving in a minute.

The social club guy had disappeared, he came back a couple of minutes later. Then they gave us the bill, and a few dinner mints.

It came to $119.90, not bad for a dinner for 5, we all put in. First we worked out it was $24 each, I put this in, because I only had $20 notes, and some gold coins that came to $24. I noticed $5 sitting on my jeans, it must have been floating around in my pocket and come out when I took my wallet out.

The social club guy then upped it to $25 each, so I was a smartass, and with the pile of money sitting there, I said "I'll see you 4, and raise you 1", like we were playing poker, as I put the $5 note in, and took the $4 worth of change back.

The social club guy counted up the money, and there was $120 there. Wow, a 10c tip.

We all went through our pockets, and dumped whatever shrapnel we had on there as a tip, they probably ended up with $5 or $6 worth of change.

There was still half a bottle of wine left, and it was a screwtop wine, so they got the cap for that, and I still had a beer left.

We left the restaurant, and wandered back up towards the pub where we were staying. I ate a couple of the after dinner mints, and then noticed that my tooth that I've had root canal done on felt funny.

The crap music was still going in the mall, that they play to stop gangs congregating there or whatever, and because they were all half pissed, they started dancing ridiculously to it as we walked through the mall.

We got back to the pub that 3 of us were staying in. The sysadmin didn't want to come in, because of the fact he'd told the staff he wasn't up this week etc, but we managed to convince him to come in, since he could sneak up the stairs without anyone seeing him.

The guy from CCB must have got a taxi and gone back where he was staying at that point, because he didn't come in.

We got upstairs, dumped some stuff in our room, I checked my tooth in the mirror, and I had chipped my tooth.

At least it doesn't hurt, I think they killed the nerve or ripped it out when I had the root canal done, I'll have to go to the dentist and get it fixed though, great.

We went and sat on the balcony, I took my beer, the social club guy and the senior DBA had the wine to finish off, and the sysadmin doesn't drink, so he just had a glass of the nasty tang out of the fridge.

The senior DBA was in the room rolling a joint, and he was in there for ages. The social club guy went to find out what he was doing, and then he disappeared for ages too. The sysadmin and I sat there chatting for a while, he couldn't stand to drink more than half the glass of tang, and I wasn't really in the mood for beer, but I drank it anyway.

The social club guy came back out again, and sat and had a cigarette. He couldn't get the lighter to work properly, when he finally did, I jhad a look to see if it was one of the adjustable Bic ones, it was.

I popped the guard thing off, and went about turning the adjustment dial around a bunch of times, and then tested it, and found the flame to come out about 10cm, sweet.

I haven't done that for ages. Used to be funny for watching people take their eyebrows off as they lit up.

The senior DBA came back a while later, he must have wandered off somewhere to smoke. We chatted for a bit, and then he went to have a cigarette. The social club guy started to tell him about the lighter, but then the DBA commented that it was the last cigarette, which annoyed the social club guy, because they didn't have any more, so I told him it was at that point he be quiet.

The DBA put the cigarette in his mouth, and grabbed the lighter, and went about trying to light his cigarette, because he knew it took a bunch of goes to get the lighter to work, he cupped his hands around it, and then flicked it a couple of times, and it lit, with a huge flame.

We pissed ourselves laughing, he hadn't burnt himself or anything, it was just the shock of the huge flame near his face.

We sat and chatted for a while, and then the DBA said he was going to bed at about 10pm, and the sysadmin said he was going too, so he left, forgetting to take his takeaway food from the restaurant, or put it in the fridge.

I chatted to the social club guy for a little while, and then said I was going to bed.

I went in, and went to bed. I'd been intending to get an hour or so of blogging in, but the DBA had gone to bed, and I doubted that he wanted me hammering away on the laptop like a machine gun across the room for an hour.

Oh well an early night'll be good for once.

I wake up to hear this hideous noise, spend several unconscious minutes trying to stop it, and realise it's the alarm going off.

I put the radio on, and lay there semiconscious for the next 20 minutes, and got up at 6.15am before I fell asleep again.

It was cold, I rushed into the bathroom, put the heater on, and jumped in the hot shower.

I really don't want to go to work this week, I could do with another week off.

Just as I was getting ready in the bathroom, I heard the phone ringing. I'm not dashing to get that. It'll be the senior DBA who's picking me up. I'll just call him back in a minute.

I finished in the bathroom, came out, got dressed, found the phone, and call the senior DBA back. He was a smartass, and said "I'm waiting outside", I'd already looked, and knew he wasn't, and said so, and then he told me that he'd slept in, was just leaving now, and would be there in about 45 minutes, that makes about 7.30am.

I got ready, ate the last of the breakfast cereal (which ended up being more milk than cereal).

I'd been thinking about taking a laptop to work with me, while I put off spending some money and buying a new one.

All I want is to be able to enter text, for blogging, so I figured that my old 286 laptop would do, it was pretty small, and if I recall correctly, the battery could even hold a couple of hours charge (though the last time I ran it off battery was probably about 8 years ago).

I found the box with the 286 laptop parts in it (because I ended up with a second one very much like the first, one's a TI, and the other a Sharp something). I'd gutted the Sharp one to upgrade the TI one slightly, adding the VGA output adapter etc.

D'oh, the first thing I realised was that the floppy drive was external, this big clunky unit that hangs off the back, I'd forgotten that, and thought it was an internal drive. Bugger.

Next thing I realised that the one which I had thought was usable, was not completely assembled.. all the screws were out of, so the clips kept coming undone.

When I opened it, I discovered that the plastic that holds the screen to the unit was all broken, so the screen just flapped around. Hmm, maybe I intended to replace that..

I went through the rest of the box, found the screen on its own from the Sharp laptop, and then the rest of the case of the Sharp, more broken than the TI.

Oh well, I give up on that. I loaded all the junk back in the box, and closed it again. I don't know why I keep crud like this.

I've got a small 386 TI laptop here somewhere.. I found that, pulled it out of the case, found the power adapter conveniently in the accessories pouch, plugged it in.

I turned it on, some lights came on. The screen didn't. Hmm. Turned it off and on again, this time the screen came up, that's better.

It came up and whinged about the CMOS settings being wrong - what a surprise, considering it hasn't been turned on for several years.

Hmm, the hard drive didn't sound too happy, spinning up and stopping again, and then trying to spin up again.

I went into the CMOS settings screen, and just accepted the default settings, it rebooted, but wouldn't boot, because the disk won't spin up properly.

I tried booting it a few times, and tapping on the hard drive, but it was stuffed. Eventually it times out trying to boot, it went back into the CMOS screen, and said something about a fixed disk error.

Oh well, this laptop has a floppy drive built in to it, so I can just make up a dos boot disk, and stick a dos port of VI on it or something, and it's enough for me to use for typing on.

I packed it back away, and shoved it in my bag.

Oops, I realised I hadn't packed my toiletries, so I went and did that.

I was just sitting around waiting now, so I decided to update the documentation on the tivo site for the instructions relating to making your tivo internet accessible, and I updated the section about the authentication.

A couple of minutes later the senior DBA turned up, I grabbed my bag, went down and jumped in the car.

We started driving towards the freeway, we got near the couple of roundabouts to get on to the freeway, and there was some weirdness on the other side. As we went around, we worked out what had happened, there had been an accident, an E type Jag looked like it been T boned, but there was no other heavily damaged car near it, strange.

There were a couple of cop cars there, and people on the road. We kept going, onto the next roundabout. As we went around it, we saw another cop car in the driver rest area, with a couple of other vehicles, perhaps the car that caused the accident tried to take off, and went in there or something.

Anyway, we got on the freeway, and kept going.

A minute or so later, we saw a paddy wagon flying along down the other side of the freeway, must be rushing to the accident.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, I put Nova on to listen to Merrick and Rosso, but then it dropped out not long after that, so I changed it back to CDs, because the senior DBA said he'd changed the CDs in the stacker.

He skipped through a couple, and had a Lemonheads CD in there, so we listened to that most of the way to work, and then he put some Something for Kate song on (I can't stand that band, "I was hanging upside down by my underpants").

We got to work, parked, went in to the building, and I went to my desk. I sat and started doing some coding, continuing the stuff I'd been working on on Friday.

The woman who's taken over for the guy who left last week (that we used to annoy in the pub with our noise) came and told me about a couple of meetings going on tomorrow and Thursday I've been invited to.

I continued doing some work. One of the indexers came and told me that the internal interface to the system I'm developing is broken. Hmm. I checked, oh yep, it is.. It's from when I accidently overwrote the production file with the development version on Friday, and I forgot to fix the internal production version.

I fixed that, and he went away happy.

He came back a couple of minutes later, and said that he couldn't select any files. I had a look at that, and discovered that it was the case, there didn't seem to be any files there, strange.

I went in and had a look, and found the data storage directory empty.. this is an NFS mount off one of the other servers, and they were all rebooted over the weekend, because of the power upgrade, when it came back up, this mount must not have been configured as a boot time mount.

I went to see the sysadmin to get it mounted, because I couldn't remember the NFS mount syntax, but found him not there, and some other guy sitting at his desk.

I spoke to that guy for a second, but he couldn't help me, so I spoke to the senior DBA for a bit. The other DBA came along, and told me about some issue they were having with the proxy server, which I'd heard about while I was downstairs, they were trying to download some flex time sheet, and the proxy server was saying it had a virus in it.

Apparently it was saying everything had a virus in it, even trying to go to oracle.com

I spoke to the senior DBA again, and he found an email someone had sent him with details of NFS mounting, so we got that fixed.

I came back to my desk, and configured the NFS mount to come up at boot time, in case this happens again. I wanted to check that I'd put the line in the file correctly, so I figured I'd just unmount and remount the directory, I couldn't unmount it..

The senior DBA had left his shell in the directory, so I just kill -9'd his shell (hehe) and then I was able to unmount the directory, and remount it, so I had got the line right.

I went back to doing some coding, and then I got invited into a meeting.

I went in, and we spent a couple of hours going over the development stuff, and some other related matters, then I came back to my desk.

I got a call from the project manager, he wanted to know what was going on, what all the issues were, and if I was getting things sorted out. i spoke to him for a short while, he asked me into the meetings tomorrow, we might end up changing the scope of the project (again) to actually entail less work, and then completion will be nearer, because my manager wants to get me working on some other projects soon.

I kept working, and the woman who used to administrate the old system came to speak to me. Her job actually expired a couple of weeks ago, and it took a week to get the extension sorted out.

She didn't know anything about my court case, so I told her that story.

When we finished speaking, I tried calling my mate's ex girlfriend again, no answer again, left a message.

I went back to work after that.

At about 1.30pm I decided to go and get some lunch, I went up to see the senior DBA, he wasn't there, and the contract DBA was having a meeting with someone there, so I figured I'd just go and get some lunch.

When I left the building, I saw the senior DBA coming back from lunch, must've forgotten to invite me again, oh well.

I wandered down the street, and I went and bought a couple of pies and a drink, and then I walked back towards work.

On the way back, my phone rang, it was my mate's ex girlfriend, I spoke to her for a bit as I walked back to work, explaining the situation I was in, having to go to Bundaberg with an unlicensed driving charge etc, and how I would like her to write a letter explaining that I was unaware of the suspension because she didn't give me the mail (which is the truth, I didn't know anything about it because she had the mail, and didn't tell me it was there).

When I explained this, she got her back up, saying that she couldn't be expected to call me everytime a piece of mail arrived. I bit my tounge. I wanted to reply, asking if I should just be pyschic then, and call her when mail arrived, but that wasn't going to help the situation.

I said I would speak to her on the weekend when I was home, and try to get a letter sorted out.

I got off the phone, and continued walking back to work. I went back to my desk, and ate my lunch.

I went up to see the senior DBA, or whoever else was up in IT, to find out about getting a couple of floppy disks, so I could make up a boot disk for the laptop I'd brought.

There was about 7 people having a meeting with the DBAs, and I'd seen the guy who looks after the email systems wandering out for lunch when I was coming back, so he wasn't there.

I went around to where IT used to sit, in case there was some floppies or junk left around there, but someone's cleaned it all out.

Perhaps I'll go and look in the store room. I went in there, there was some guy working in there, I said hello to him, and then checked the shelves, and found a box of floppy disks, and pinched a couple of them.

I went back to my desk, and started looking for some sort of a floppy based linux installation.

I didn't manage to find what I was looking for, there doesn't seem to be anything as simple as a disk that will just boot a kernel, and dump you at a shell prompt with vi or something available, and gobs of disk space.

I gave up, found a dos boot disk image, used that, and then stripped everything I didn't need off it.

I managed to boot the laptop off it, good, the floppy drive at least works.

I went back, found a few dos ports of vi, a couple of them would actually fit on a floppy (why are some like 40k, and others like 600k?), and checked that that would work, so then I packed the laptop away again, and went back to work.

I continued working on code, and testing stuff.

I got an email from the guy who looks after the tivo images, wanting a couple of minutes spent on some changes to the install script, related to dialup connections on the tivo if I had time.

I figured it would only take me a couple of minutes (and to fix a bug related to using the "-f" test on files instead of "-s", in relation to empty files), so I made the changes.

I used that gmailfs thing to mount my gmail account as a drive, copied it in there, and then gave the guy my login details, and he was able to get the file out again.

I could have just emailed it, but this way is much cooler :-)

It was now after 5pm.

I was being asked if I was going to the farewell dinner of a big manager who's leaving, I said I didn't know.

I did a bit more work, and then I got a call from the senior DBA, he came down a few minutes later.

Apparently one of the guys from royalty who had planned to stay in the pub tonight had to go home to Sydney, because his wife and baby are sick with a virus.

I grabbed all my stuff, and went and jumped in the car, we drove down the road to the pub, and went in to check in.

The guy explained to them that he was going home, so the senior DBA would have his room for the night, so we could have separate rooms, making the other room a single instead of a double for tonight, and then a double for the rest of the week as normal, but this was all terribly confusing for the bar staff, and we had to explain it to them several times.

It's not that hard. The only change is that the room that has been booked as a double for 3 nights, is now a single for one night, and a double for 2 nights.

They eventually managed to work it out, and then we paid, and got our keys.

We went up to the rooms, on our way up, I mentioned that when I was in the bottleshop the other day, I'd seen JD and lemonade in a can, since that's the drink we've been having a lot lately. I got to my room, dumped all my stuff.

I got the laptop out, and checked the distance from the power point. Crud, I should have brought a longer power cord, I'm going to have to hang off the end of the bed, or sit on the floor to use the laptop (since the battery died years ago, and I ripped it out, maybe I should get it redone, since there's a battery place down the road, anyway..)

I went out of the room, and then just sat on the chair near the tv and relaxed.

I didn't turn the tv on, I've just stared at a screen all day, I don't want to do it now.

About 10 minutes later, the senior DBA came out of his room, and we walked down to the Clubhouse, the pub that we usually go to for dinner, and play pool there etc, and run the jukebox.

We got in there, the other bartender is still on holidays, the guy that used to be a Newcastle Knight, and the guy that's stsanding in for him is there, he's a pain.

We got our drinks, I started with a can of Bundy and Coke. Some weird looking guy, looking like a trucky wannabe, started going on at me about my green hair, and then he was telling me how he'd had gay tattoos done, but his excuse was that they were free, not mentioning the fact that it was going to cost him a lot to get them fixed.

Whatever, I really don't want to talk to you anymore, the senior DBA asked if I wanted to sit outside, so we escaped out there.

We sat down, drank, and chatted, talking about the guys from Orange that are here at the moment, and the meetings they were in all day.

Apparently I'm getting mentioned around the place, because people from the merger are finding out about the stuff that I can do, and trying to work out what I do here, and how long I'm here etc, to see if they can get me working on stuff for them.

Apparently someone questioned if I was a security risk, heh, only if you piss me off, hehe.

Damn, I'm hungry, I went in and got a packet of chips and sat outside and ate them.

We saw the guy who used to work in the library wandering along, we tried to attract his attention, but he either didn't see us, or more likely pretended not to.

I went in to get another drink a scotch and dry, and the ex librarian was in there buying a beer.

I chatted to him briefly. The bartender was trying to ask me if I was working at Minerals, and I told him that I was, but then the librarian started batting my ear, and before I could get back to speaking to the bartender again, a few people came in, so he had to serve them.

We went out the back again, I figured I would just come back in and speak to the bartender in a bit.

We sat out here for a while. The senior DBA went to get another drink, and asked me what I wanted, I told him that I was right, I was just taking my time with my scotch.

I spoke to the librarian for a few minutes, and then the senior DBA came back with a bottle of JD and coke. He told me that he couldn't remember what I'd asked for.. what, nothing?

He said he'd asked the bartender what the guy with green hair was drinking, and he'd said he didn't know, that I was always getting different drinks, and the last one had been a scotch and dry, so the senior DBA asked for a bottle of JD and lemonade, and then the bartender gave him a bottle of JD and coke instead. Whatever, so I drank it.

Around this time, a few more people from work turned up. It was the woman from the mail room, and the chick from around near where I sat (whose place we'd gone to a couple of weeks ago, and played playstation with her boyfriend), and the social club guy who posed for the photos in his boxers a few months ago.

We started chatting to them, they got drinks, and we were there for another while.

The social club guy went in and ordered more drinks, and when he came back, he asked if I drank beer, I said that it wasn't my preference, but he asked if I'd drink one, because the bartender had stuffed up, and poured an extra one, and he didn't want to complain, so he just paid for it anyway (what's a $2 beer, who cares).

So I said I'd go to the loo, and then have a go at it. When I came out of the loo, the bartender wasn't busy, so I went over to speak to him, and he'd been wanting to complain about some people from Minerals that had been in there last night.

On the bar they have a couple of newspapers, and to stop them blowing around, there's a couple of small rocks sitting on top of them.

The people from Minerals that had been in there were being real smartasses, and asking the bartender what sort the rocks were, and he just replied with something like "paper rocks", (since they hold the paper down, heh), and then the people from minerals in there had started going on about "no, it's a quartzite something or other with a twist of something" they were telling him.

I told him that they were the people we call "rockheads", the people I get to sit near everyday. Thank god they're only obnoxious like that when they're pissed, they're silent in the office.

Some more people came in the door at this point, so the bartender had to serve them, and I went back out the back and sat down.

I drank the beer, over the next few minutes, and then ex librarian left to go home, and a few minutes later the chick from work left (though she just disappeared), and then the rest of us decided to go up to the Grand Junction for dinner.

We walked up there, and when we got there, the guy from Orange who took over IT was there, he'd just got back from Orange. We went in, and started ordering our dinners.

I went in to get a drink, the senior DBA was in there, and the people who own the Grand Junction, and the house behind it (to avoid noise complaints) were there, and he was speaking to them.

He was trying to find out about renting the house next door again, he'd organised to see it on Thursday, but now they were changing their plans so it didn't suit them.

While he discussed it with them, I ordered a drink. Some weird guy started crapping on to me, because I was wearing my Atari shirt. God, can I get away from weirdos in this town.

Eventually the said they would show us it now, so the guy gave the woman the keys, and we wandered next door.

We went through the house, it's being renovated at the moment, all the electrical wiring is being replaced (that's nearly been finished, so there were lights in all the rooms etc).

It's a reasonably big place, a big room downstairs, and a kitchen and a bathroom, upstairs there were 2 more big rooms.

The window in one of the rooms looks into the beer garden, and we could see the people from work there, so we opened the window, attracted their attention, and then waved to them.

We went into the other big room, it has a balcony coming off it, we went out there, it seems nice.

All the rooms have fireplaces, and there's no carpet in there at the moment, we told them not to carpet it, because the floorboards are terrifically rustic, really wide planks, all joins all over the place, looks terrific, we told them to just polish the floorboards.

We stood around chatting for a bit, and the woman offered it to us for $220/week, bargain, that's what we're paying to stay in a tiny box in the pub for 4 nights week, now we could have a house for 7 nights a week, with 4 rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom.

We closed up all the doors and windows again, turned off all the lights, and left.

The renovations haven't been finished yet, the woman said there's still about a month worth of work left.

We went back to the pub, and when we got their, our dinner had been served.

We ate dinner, and chatted for a while, then we all moved out to the beer garden, chatting.

A little while later, the weird guy from before came out, and started crapping on, he was really annoying me. I was trying to have a discussion with a guy, and this idiot just kept interjecting with crap, and swearing, and the guy I was trying to talk to was there with his wife and little kids, and he didn't want this guy swearing all the time.

Eventually I had enough of him, at about 9.50pm. I knew that Woolies would be open until at least 10pm, so I wanted to get in there to get an extension cord, so I could use the laptop.

I made my excuses, and left. I walked across to Woolies, bought a 5m extension cord, and then I walked back to the pub.

I plugged the laptop in, sat on the bed, booted the laptop up, and started using vi to do some blogging. I got a bit bored, so I found my ipod, and put that on.

I managed to blog 2 days in the next 2 hours, and turned it off and went to bed at midnight.

Just looking at my own blogger profile, no I'm not vain, I wanted to see if it had anything old that I needed to change or update in there.

Anyway, I ended up looking at the stuff listed as "recent" posts, strange, since the latest one it has there is September 9 last year.

Anyway, getting to the point finally, in one of the posts it lists there, I'd linked to a quiz to work out which matrix character you are (you can search my blog for the original post if you want the URL, I can't be bothered finding it).

Last time I did the quiz, I ended up being identifed as Agent Smith, this time, it said I am Neo. Strange, I wonder what has changed about my personality since August 30 last year to make me become similar to a different character.

Here's a link to the Neo picture thing: here.

Oh, and the rest of the blogs are slowly turning up. I've brought a crappy old laptop to work with me, so I can spend my time blogging at the end of the day, instead of sitting in the pub drinking and turning into a fast bastard, eventually all the gaps will get filled in, not that anyone actually reads this blog or cares.

I woke up at 6.45am, ugh. I don't have to get up this morning, but it must be force of habit to wake up around now.

I went back to sleep again, until I got a phone call at 9am. It was the senior DBA, calling me about going to work tomorrow, and confirming that I didn't go to work today, and that he'll cancel the room booked in the pub.

I lay in bed for a bit, and then found that the tv's remote control wouldn't work, so I couldn't be lazy, and watch tv, since I'd have to get up to turn it on first.

I got up, bummed around on the computer for a while, and then went and had a shave, and a shower.

When I got out of the shower, my phone rang, there was a message from the contract DBA at work. He'd tried to call me, apparently there was a problem with the website.

I tried to bring the website up, it was broken, I looked at the source of the page, and saw the mysql error I keep seeing. I called the contract DBA, to talk him through restarting mysql (it's not that hard, but it's not something he's had to do before).

We had a quick chat, and I told him I was calling to help him fix the website up, he told me he needed a coffee first, so he'd call me back in a minute.

I finished getting dressed, and then I started getting my stuff organised to go and do my tax return for last year, it's only about 9 months late.

The contract DBA called me back, and I went through how to restart mysql, and unblock the hosts, or whatever I hed to do, and then I got off the phone.

Mum took off out of the garage, going somewhere.

I finished getting all the tax stuff together, put my bike gear on, jacket etc, and I took a backpack.

I rode to ITP, went in to find out about getting my tax done, and the woman was able to do it immediately, that was sweet.

I went in, filled out the form, the woman said I'd probably get a refund of around $3300, since I didn't work all of last year, and when I did work, I paid a lot of tax.

I chatted to her for a while, and then left, rode out to Erina Fair. I went into Lowes, and tried on a couple of suits, found one that looked ok, it was $200 down to $80 or something (or so they claimed).

I had no idea about getting a shirt, a woman working in there did that for me, and then I paid, $80 for the suit, and $30 for the shirt, and left.

I went around and got some lunch, and then on my way back to my bike, I saw a guy from the hairdresser, I just gave him a nod.

I got back to my bike, shoved the suit into my backpack, and then I jumped on my bike, and rode home. I sat and blogged for a while, and listened to music.

Blogger was stuffed up again, with "internal server error" crap again.

I was going through my email after that, and I found a renewal notice for tcpip.net.au, from the 11th. The address on it, 55 Clarence St, looked strangely familiar. It dawned on me, that's the PowerTel building at Wynyard, where I worked for Qi in 2001.

The internet connection was dead slow, I noticed the 10Base2 segment was flashing away, I'll bet it's dad's laptop saturating the connection as usual. I would put some QoS on here, but I'd need some S first.

Dunno what I did for the rest of the day, would have packed my bag for work, eaten something for dinner (maybe), and watched some tv, before going to bed.

Oh, it's Melissa's birthday today.

I got up, felt a bit crook, I wonder why, maybe it was the bottle of Ricadonna, and 4 cans of JD/lemonade last night.

I bummed around on the computer for a while, watched some tv.

The TiVo stuffed up, did it's trick of the remote refusing to be accepted. I haven't seen it do this for a while.

I just left it going, since it was recording something.

I went and put the washing on, and while I was in there, Dad crapped on to me about going up to Bundy too, but it wouldn't have been worth it. It's so late, the tickets would cost him a lot, we'd have to get accommodation somewhere, since I couldn't have him staying with my mates parents in laws etc.

I'll only end up being in court for 5 minutes anyway, and there's nothing he can do for me.

I finished putting the washing on, and then went and watched more tv. The watchdog process finally kicked in on the TiVo, and it rebooted itself. I continued watching tv.

I went and hung the washing out, I heard the phone ringing, I jogged in, and answered it. It was my drummer mate, and he was coming to pick me up to go around to our mate's place. I went back out, and finished hanging out the washing.

I jumped in the shower, and got ready, and then my mate turned up. He gave me back a DVD I'd lent him, and then we went around to our mate's place.

We had to knock on the door for ages, he came staggering out, and let us in. We sat around for a bit, I played the guitar, and then we went to get some lunch.

We went and got fish and chips, and then went back to our mate's place again, I couldn't eat it all, I was feeling a bit crook.

We played the instruments for a while, our mate (the lead guitarist) was just mucking around, and wouldn't try to play anything that my other mate and I were, so we put up with that for a while, and then my mate got fed up. We listened to some recordings we'd made, but they were just noise pretty much, we packed up the drums, and left.

I had intended to take the left over lunch home to eat for dinner, but my mate threw it out, oh well.

My mate dropped me at home, and I sat and did some blogging, then watched tv for a while, and felt really tired.

I went to bed about 7pm, lay there watching tv for a bit. I'm supposed to be getting ready for work, and going back tomorrow, but the senior DBA is going to a meeting in Sydney tomorrow, and so won't be going up to Maitland until Tuesday, I might take a day off.

I got a call from the project manager, wanting to know if I wanted a lift, but I told him that I was going to take the day off tomorrow, because I felt a bit crook.

I went back to watching tv, and I fell asleep watching tv, at about 10pm. I woke up again, around midnight I think, but I was too tired to do anything, like get up and turn off the light, and the tv, so I just went back to sleep again.

I woke up again, about 3am, got up, turned off the light, and the tv.

I got up about 10.30am, and mucked around on the computer.

I wrote a php script to parse the info page from tivoweb on my tivo, to make it accessible on my homepage.

I got a call from my mate, the drummer, asking what I was doing, I said nothing much, and organised for him to pick me up.

I had a shower, got ready, and then listened to some Led Zep while I waited for my mate to turn up.

When he did, I grabbed my guitar, and went to jump in the car. I noticed the damage on the back, from his prang the other day, and had a bit of a look at that. I don't know how they're going to fix it, since the damaged bit is basically the whole car, it looks like it's pressed out of a single bit of metal.

We jumped in the car, and drove around to our mate's place, but he wasn't there, his dad was, and let us in though, he told us that our mate was out somewhere, buying something for the fancy dress tonight.

We sat around, I played the guitar for a bit, while we waited, and then our mate turned up.

We were all invited to a fancy dress party tonight, an "F" themed fancy dress, as a Fiftieth birthday for a woman that my mates work with at Target.

My mate was going as "Freaky Jason", or "Friday the 13th" or something, (I'm not big on horror movies, they're just cheesy). He had a pair of overalls, and he splashed red paint all over the front of them, to look like blood.

He'd bought a halloween hockey mask thing, so he scratched that up a bit. There was an old sicle (sp?) (thing you use for cutting long grass), so he splashed a bit of red paint on that, to take as his weapon.

While he was doing that, I spotted some school photos in the garage, and had a look at them, heh the photo of all the staff was there too, the one I pinched out of the staff room.

We went inside after that, and played for a while, then we went to get some lunch, out to Erina Fair.

My mate who works for the ABC called, and we said we'd see him out there. My mates and I went around the shops, looking for fancy dress stuff, I still hadn't decided what to go as, I'll probably go as a frog though.

I didn't have much luck with that, and then we went to wait for our other mate to turn up. He eventually did, and then we went down to the noodle place, and had noodles for lunch. It was pretty good, they use a PDA of some decription to take your order, it gets radioed to the kitchen, and they start making your meal immediately, and it's served as soon as it's done.

I ended up having to wait until last as usual though, but the food was really good.

We had a chat, and then got the bill, $98 between the 4 of us, but I did have a couple of beers. We paid, left, and continued wandering.

I thought about finding something for fancy dress over at Toys R Us, so our other mate took off again, and the 3 of us went over there.

I didn't really find anything useful, ended up just getting a little rubber frog, and then it didn't have a barcode on it, so I had to wait for a price check, for them to find that it was $3, which I paid and then we left.

We got in the car, and started heading for home, there's a party shop on the way, it might be a place to look, so we parked, walked over there, only to find it had closed a couple of hours earlier.

We went to the bottle shop near where we'd parked, and I bought a 4 pack of JD and lemonade, and a bottle of Riccadonna.

We went back to our mate's place, and then our mate (the drummer) left, to go home, and get ready for the fancy dress.

My mate and I sat and played our guitars for a while, and then my mate gave me a lift home, I ran in, grabbed my green leisure suit, and a green Tshirt, and got back in the car, and we drove back to his place again.

We sat and watched some of Yellow Submarine, there's something seriously wrong with that movie, our mate turned up again, and then we all got changed.

I ironed my shirt, and found that it had a big stain on the front, oh well, too late now.

After we were all changed, my mate (lead guitar) done up as Freaky Jason or whoever he was supposed to be, our other mate done up as Frankenstein, and me as a frog, I loaded up the esky.

We were about to leave, when my mate decided he wanted to burn a CD to take. I still had my ipod, so I decided to take that, with a cable to connect it to an amp, in case we get a chance to use that.

We went in, worked out what songs we wanted on our CD, and then burnt it. I put my ipod in plastic bag, tied it up, and shoved it in the esky with all the drinks.

We left, headed for the party, our mate's dad was giving us a lift out there. We wanted to get some ice, so we stopped off at the servo, but none of the others would go in. I would have been sure to go in, if I'd been wearing a pair of overalls, with what looks like blood all over them.

Anyway, I went in, got some cash out of the ATM, bought some ice, and 2 bottles of coke, I went out, chucked the stuff in the car, and then we kept going, to the party.

We grabbed the stuff out of the car, our mate's dad took off again, and we went into the party, we sat around, chatting and drinking for a while, and then the food was served, and we ate.

There were some fairly interesting looking people at the party, here's a few of the F themed things I can remember:

A Fembot
Foxy Cleopatra (who looked more like Kath Day-Night, and could have been a "foxymoron")
The Flintstones
A couple who were "Fifty years married"
Flight Attendants
Fashion Police
First Fleet Captain

Anyway, after we'd all eaten, a woman stood up, and announced that she was a marriage celebrant, and was there because the woman whose birthday it was had decided to get married, on her birthday.

We sat around as they did the ceremony, I'm not sure what she was done up as, maybe a "Fairy Princess" or something, and her fiance/husband was the "First Fleet Captain".

After that was all done, they put the music up a bit, and quite a few of us got up to have a dance. We sat down for a while, and then we put our CD on, and more people got up to dance.

We stayed there, dancing and drinking, until about 12.30am, when my mate's dad turned up to give us a lift back. I'd chucked my bag in the car, with my "normal" clothes in it, so I got dropped straight at home, grabbing the bag out of the boot, and got home a bit after 1am.

I wrote some blog, and went to post it, but blogger was screwed again, with internal server errors, so I gave up, and went to bed.

The usual crap goes here, ie, got up, had a shower, got ready.

I was making toast, when a woman came out of one of the other rooms, and asked how I got the toaster working, so I explained the fan, and button you have to press, and make sure the toaster is on.

The whole thing's a bit dumb. I would have wired the fan in parallel with the switch on the powerpoint, so you'd press the button, and then the fan and toaster would only work if the power point was on, as it is, you press the button, and then the fan runs for like 10 minutes, and you have to make sure the toaster is switched on.

Anyway, I ate my toast, and then went to work. I worked on more code, until about 2 in the afternoon, I didn't bother to go for lunch, not on a Friday.

I got a call from the senior DBA, saying "Pack your stuff!", to which I retorted "Pack your shit!", like Rocco says in The Boondock Saints, in that hilarious scene, where he starts grabbing all sorts of crap, like LPs, pots and pans, and a candle.

I said I'd be ready in a minute, I worked a bit more, fixed up an sql query I was working on.

I packed my stuff, and then went out to the car, just as I left the fire stairs, I saw the senior DBA come wandering out, the chick from work following him.

We got to the car, and loaded our stuff, and then we had to wait for a bit, because the senior DBA had offered a lift to the support guy, and he'd buggered off somewhere.

We tried calling his mobile, but it was out of range, and we tried calling his desk phone, but he wasn't there. The senior DBA called his desk phone a bunch of times, hoping that someone would answer it, and then we could tell them to go and look for the support guy.

We gave up, and sat and waited in the car, eventually he came out, got in the car, and we left.

We drove down, got on the freeway, and a short while down the freeway, since we had no music on, the support guy fished a Led Zeppelin CD out of his bag, and said to put it on.. but we couldn't, because the stacker is in the boot.

If it had been me driving, I would have pulled over, and loaded it, but instead we got to listen to The Smiths again, for the 50th time.

When we got near home, we decided to go and look at the citrus research station, because apparerently it's an Ag (Department of Agriculture) facility, we looked, and yes, it did have an Ag sign on it. Apparently the annoyimng support guy comes down here every now and then to do support for them.

I got dropped at home after that, and went inside. I sat around for a few hours, and drank the bottle of Ricadonna I bought last week.

I was starving, so I put a pizza on, but while it was cooking, I ate some breakfast cereal that was hanging around, then I ate the pizza when it was ready.

I watched some tv, and after a while, my brother came in with some mail. Great, what shit have I been sent now. There was bugger all there, a bank statement, for one of my accounts, terribly exciting, and a letter from the tax department, telling me that I haven't done a return for last year, and if I don't do it in the next few weeks, then I'll get fined. Great.

I sat and played the guitar for a while, and then my brother went and got his violin, and he played for a while, but it was pretty rough, I think he needs a bit more practice. Apparently he doesn't play it very much anymore.

He went back inside to eat his dinner, I went back to watching tv, and then cooked the other half of the pizza, and ate that.

I played the guitar a bit more, and then I went to bed.

I'm getting sick of writing these blogs, no one reads them anyway, so I'm going to get a bit less verbose. I'll need to, if I want to catch up the 50 days or so I am behind now.

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

I left for work, I walked to work this morning, instead of waiting for the senior DBA, to get a lift in his car, since he left me there yesterday.

I was about halfway to work, when my phone rang, it was the senior DBA, and I told him that I'd decided to walk to work, instead of waiting, like he did yesterday.

I got to work, and worked on something until about 10.30am, when I went out to have morning tea.

After that, I went up to chat to the senior DBA for a bit.

I decided to go and get some legal advice, the guy I've been emailing has been giving me advice, but it takes a few days to get a reply, and he doesn't tell me all that much, so I'd like to go and speak to someone directly.

I wandered off down the road, there's about 10 solicitors in Maitland, I went to the first one I came across, went in, spoke to the woman at the front counter, said I was after speaking to one of the solicitors, for a bit of advice, and would like to make an appointment, or whatever I had to do.

The woman told me that they would probably have someone available to speak to me, so I waited, she rang in, and a solicitor came out a minute later.

We went into his office, I sat and explained the whole situation, from start to finish, about going on holidays, getting pulled over, being told that my license was suspended, getting the summons (eventually), not having known about the suspension.

I also mentioned the fact that the registration details on the summons were wrong.

He looked up what the penalty was, looked up something in a legal book, and then told me that the best course of action would be plead guilty, by writing details of the whole thing on the summons, and returning it.

He told me not to argue about the registration details being wrong, because they have a bit of leniency in things like that, and it would just get people's backs up,and then I might not get treated as well as I could.

I told him that I thought I would be better off attending in person, which he agreed with, and told me to get letters and paperwork backing up that I've been out of the state, don't have a fixed address, and a letter from my mate's ex gf, who had the mail and didn't give it to me.

I thanked him, and left.

I walked back to the office, and worked for a while, then I went up to find out about going to lunch, but there was no one there.

They must have all gone, and forgotten to tell me or something. I decided to go and get noodles, so I started walking all the way down to the noodle place.

I got about halfway there, in the mall, and saw all the others, at one of the cafes, well, they saw me, I was too busy avoiding being run over by a kiddies train driving through the mall.

I went over, spoke to them for a bit, they'd all finished their lunch, and were chatting, and a couple of them decided to go back to work, so I finished chatting, and continued walking down to the noodle place.

I bought some noodles, and then carried them back to work, hoping the silly little wire handle would hold up for the few hundred metres (probably nearly a kilometre) back to work.

I saw and ate my noodles, and then continued working. I took a bit of time in the afternoon, to book my flights to Bundaberg and back (first I have to fly to Brisbane, and then get a connecting flight from there to Bundy).

I tried calling my mate's ex gf again, to find out about getting a letter from her, explaining that she had my mail, and didn't give it to me, but as usual, there was no answer.

The sysadmin came down to see me, wanted to copy a couple of files across between a couple of servers, but he can't ftp them, because the firewall blocks it, and he can never remember how to use scp, so I scp'd the files for him.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he was leaving for the day, I continued working. I ended up leaving at 4.40pm, making for a 9 hour day.

On my way out, I bumped into the guy from royalty, and the building manager, he didn't have a go at me for once.

The guy from royalty gave me a lift up to the pub, I went to the room, at senior DBA was lying down, the guy from royalty was with me, the 3 of us sat in there having a chat for a bit, and then the sysadmin came in, and we continued chatting.

The relocations chick called up the senior DBA, and he chatted to her for a while. While that was going on, the sysadmin was talking about having to move rooms in the morning, because he's in a different room tomorrow night.

We went down to the bar, to see if we could organise him moving rooms tonight, but the room he was in tomorrow night was taken tonight, so there was no luck. The woman at the bar told us to just pack all his stuff, and leave it in the room, with a note for the cleaners, and they'll move his stuff to the other room, but the whole point of the exercise was that the sysadmin didn't want to have to pack all his stuff up, just to unpack it all again.

We went back up to the room, and the others had just come out of the room. I checked that the door was locked, and then we all walked down to the Grand Junction.

On the way, the sysadmin went into the shops, since it was late night shopping, the rest of us continued walking. I noticed that the hairdresser was still open, and I needed more hair gel, since my stuff had run out this morning.

I went in, bought some, the guy wanted to crap on for a while, but I wasn't interested, and so I just paid, and left.

I went to the pub, the others were there, I got some cash out, and then sat out the back. We waited for ages for the sysadmin, and when he turned up, we went and ordered dinner.

I had another couple of drinks while I waited, then the food turned up, we ate, and chatted for a while, and we left the pub at 8.30pm, and went back to the pub we're staying at.

We sat and watched tv for a couple of hours, and then I went to bed.

I got up at 7am, had a shower and got ready etc.

I got to work at 7.45am again.

I spent a little while looking on the Dell site, at the laptops. Didn't do anthing again, too expensive.

I did some work, I finished recoding the file I started doing yesterday, to make it easier to work with, and it ended up about 40 lines bigger. D'oh.

I kept working, and around lunchtime, the sysadmin came down, and said he wanted to go and look at some houses available for rent.

I went out to the car with him, he showed me the bits of maps he'd printed out so we could find them, but no real idea of where they were.

I said I had a map of Maitland, so I went back inside, to my desk, and got the map, and then went back to the car again.

We drove around looking at the houses. A couple looked ok, but some were too far away, and some didn't look very good.

While we were looking at one of the last houses to check out, my phone rang, I answered it, it was a guy from the relocations project that left a few weeks ago.

I told him that I was out of the office, so I'd call him back later.

We finished looking at the houses, and then we went to get some lunch. We went to the place on the road to Morpeth, where we went with the senior DBA when he got his new car.

We went in, sat down, ordered our food. I sent a message to the senior DBA while we were waiting for our food, to find out where he was, if he was on his way back from Orange yet etc.

I didn't get a reply, he's probably asleep in the back of the car.

We got our lunch, and ate it. I realised I didn't have any cash, and they don't split bills at this place, so I paid for both the sysadmins and my lunch on my credit card, saying that I'd shout lunch, and he could shout me dinner.

We left, got back in the car, and drove back to work. I was back at my desk, doing some work later in the afternoon, when I got a message on my phone.

I read it, it was from my drummer mate, apparently he'd been in a prang.

I called him up, to find out what the story was, basically some silly woman hadn't been looking where she was going, and ran up the back of him, when he stopped at a roundabout.

He was ok, just pissed off, because his car was all stuffed up. He'd been to the bottle shop to get some grog, and was going home.

I got off the phone, and then remembered that I was supposed to call back the guy from the relocation's project, and I'd totally forgotten about it.

I called him back, and he was telling me that he was starting a new job next week, and he needed "Microsoft" on his laptop.

I eventually figured out that he needed Office, and Project. I told him that I didn't have either of them, I'd have to try and chase them up.

I said I'd call him back in a bit. I hung up, and I called up my mate, who's dad owns the aircon business, because he's probably got that crap. I don't use any of it. OpenOffice suits me.

Anyway, I called him, he said he didn't have it, but he'd try and download it or something.

I called back the relocations guy again, but he didn't answer his phone, so I left a message. A couple of minutes later, he called me back on my mobile, but neither of us could hear each other, because the mobile reception is useless in Maitland.

I called him back again, on my desk phone, and I told him the story, basically that I wouldn't be able to get it for a few days (well, not until I'm home on the weekend anyway), so then he arranged for coming up to see me on the weekend, to get me to fix up his bloody laptop.

That's the last thing I want. I'm going to that party on Saturday night, and I'll probably be hungover on Sunday, I don't want to be mucking around fixing someone's computer, I don't do that shit anymore.

I got a message back from the senior DBA, telling me he was on his way back, was sick to death of the dopes he'd been sent with, and they wouldn't let him drive, because he hasn't got a replacement license yet, after losing his wallet.

I sent back a message, and told him that I'd buy him a beer when he gets back later.

I just finished with that, and I got another message, this one from my mate's brother in law, in Bundaberg. He wanted to know "how much gig is computer supposed to have?".

WTF? Oh well, it gives me an excuse to call up, and ask if I can stay there when I have to go to court.

I called him up, and spoke to him for a while, eventually worked out that he was talking about hard drive space (because "gig" could have been cpu speed, or memory size, or hard drive space, or anything), and he didn't realise that the disk was partitioned.

Once I'd explained all that, I asked him if he could ask his mum if I could stay up there, and he said that she was home, so I could speak to her, and went and gave his phone to her.

I spoke to her for a few minutes, explained about getting busted on the way home (no one had told her about that), and getting charged with unlicensed driving, and summonsed to court up there. I asked if I could stay there for a couple of nights, and she said that was fine, and they'd even pick me up from the airport.

I got off the phone, and did a bit more work on recoding the files, until I got a call from the senior DBA, he was back, he was in his car, and leaving the car park, to go to the pub.

I said I'd see him in a bit, and spent some more time working.

I eventually left the building at 6pm, I got a couple of steps out of the door, and I decided to check if the sysadmin was still there. I went up to the IT department, he was still there, so I chatted to the sysadmin, and the email support guy for a while.

We left there, and then sysadmin gave me a lift down the road to the pub, we went in, and up to the rooms, the sysadmin told me he was going to lie down, and to let him know when we were going for dinner.

I went into the room, and found there was only 1 towel in there, that's pretty good, considering there are 2 of us staying in here tonight. I went and asked the sysadmin if he had 2 towels in his room, but he didn't.

I went down to the bar, and explained how they'd stuffed up, and I needed another towel in the room. I had to wait a few minutes while the chick behind the bar got someone else to come and serve for a few minutes, so she could go to get another towel.

Eventually someone else came to run the bar, and then we went up the stairs, and she got a towel, and gave it to me, I explained they probably got confused, because the last couple of days it's only been me in there, using one towel, there were 2 towels in there on Monday, and then only 1 towel last night, and now there's only 1 towel again, because only 1 towel has been getting used.

I dumped the towel in the room, and then went back downstairs. I had a beer, and sat with the others, the senior DBA, guy from CCB, and a couple of other people.

We decided to go and get some dinner, so I said I'd go and tell the sysadmin. I went up, dropped my jumped off in my room, and knocked on the sysadmin's door, told him we were going for dinner in a couple of minutes.

I went back downstairs again, and waited, and just as we were about to leave, the sysadmin came down.

We walked down to the club, where we'd been last night, had a few drinks, ordered dinner, ate it, chatted for a while, and then bought some takeaway drinks, and walked back to the pub we were staying at.

There was just three of us, the senior DBA, the social club guy, and myself. We all sat out on the balcony of the pub, and drank our takeaways (which we're not supposed to be doing, but anyway).

While we were out there, the guy from the bar came around, to check the breakfast stuff etc, and nearly locked us out on the balcony. We opened the door just as he was about to bolt it shut, and he told us to lock it when we were finished out there, ignoring the fact that we were drinking out there.

After we finished our drinks, I went to bed, was tired. The senior DBA and the social club guy wandered off somewhere, to go and smoke a joint.

I went to sleep, I don't know when the senior DBA came back.

All the usual, I got up, got ready etc, and got to work at 8am.

I worked until 12.45pm, and then I went up to find the sysadmin, to find out about going for lunch.

He wasn't at his desk, I wandered around a bit, and I found him in the computer room.

He was mucking around with a tape drive, apparently there'd been some issue with it, and the South African support guy had found that the drive wasn't mounted properly in the unit, and so the robot arm was putting in the tape in the slot of the drive, but it couldn't push it in far enough for the drive to load it.

Now they'd found that, and fixed the drive mouting, it should work. They were running a test, to see if it could properly load a tape into that drive.

While we were waiting for that, the email support guy came in, and bitched and whinged about the annoying support guy. I don't remember the details of it, I don't bother worrying about other people's bitching.

When we saw the tape unit work properly, we came out, the sysadmin went back to his desk, and called someone. I waited around, and spoke to the annoying support guy while I waited.

He wanted to come along to lunch, I didn't want to look like a bastard, so I said he could come with us. The sysadmin got off the phone, and the three of us left.

We walked down the street to get some lunch, on the way the annoying support guy bitched and whinged about the email guy, the other side of the squabble they were having.

He went into the bank, and then told us to keep going, because he wasn't going to have lunch, he only needed to go to the bank.

The sysadmin and I kept walking down the street. I didn't know what I wanted for lunch. The sysadmin suggested that we go and get kebabs, from the kebab shop we were at last night.

Hey, that didn't sound like too bad of an idea, maybe that good looking chick will be working in there.

We walked all the way down there, went in, she wasn't in there, d'oh. We ordered our lunch, and then sat and ate the kebabs in there.

We had a bit of a chat, and then we started walking back. I remembered that I needed to buy shorts, so about halfway back, I told the sysadmin I'd see him back there, because I was going to Kmart.

I went into Kmart, to look for shorts, and didn't have any luck, they only had 2 different styles, and I didn't want either of them, one style was tiny little shorts where your arse hangs out of them, and the other style wasn't as bad, but they didn't have any in any size near what I would need.

I left, and I went into Lowes, but that was a complete waste of time, I couldn't find any shorts at all in there, so I left, and I went to Best and Less, and looked around.

They had the same style as the ones in Kmart, but they had some that looked like they are close to my size, so I picked out a pair of those.

I went to the counter to pay, and got stuck behind some woman whinging about the shirts she's bought, with her kid's school's logo embroidered on them, and they keep getting stains on them or something.

How is it the shop's fault if your kids are grubs lady?

Eventually they finished dealing with the woman, and I paid for the shorts, and left.

On my way back to work, I stopped into the Reject shop, and bought a bag of lollies.

I walked back to work after that,and continued on the stuff I'd been doing this morning.

The guy from CCB came down a while later, to tell me what was going on later. Apparently we're all going to the pub as usual, and then after a few drinks there, we're all going to go down to the club where the bartender was the footballer, and get dinner.

I went back to work. The sysadmin came down a bit later, about 5.30pm, to find out what was going on.

I told him I was thinking about going to movies tonight. I looked at the movies, and the session times, but I wasn't interested in anything showing at the moment.

I went back to work afetr that, until about 6pm.

I left work, taking the shorts I'd bought, and the phone charger from work, because I forgot to charge my phone today.

I walked up to the pub, had a look, but didn't see anyone from work there. Just as I was about to leave, the bartender told me they all left about an hour before.

I went back to the room in the pub I was staying at, and dropped off the shorts, my jumper, the phone charger, and my sunglasses.

When I came out of the room, a manager from CCB was there, so I spoke to him for a few minutes, telling him what was going on tonight.

I walked down to the club the others were going to for dinner, it wasn't a great turnout so far.

The guy from CCB was on the phone to the woman from the mail room, and the old librarian was in there.

I got a drink, and spoke to the old librarian for a while, until he left.

I played a game of pool against the guy from CCB, and I lost, just, we were both going for the black ball at the end.

The woman from the mail room, and the social club guy got there, and we chatted to them for a while.

I had another game of pool (don't remember the details of that one), and had a few more drinks.

The sysadmin came in, I chatted to him for a bit, and then had another game of pool, and more drinks.

The guy from Orange who took over IT arrived about 7.30pm, we'd been talking to him earlier, and we worked out he must have been going about 140km/h to get there that fast.

We played pool again, and drink a bit more, and then we eventually ordered food, at about 8pm.

I played yet another game of pool, and then the food was served, and we ate.

We all sat out back and chatted, and I got tired, and left at 10.40pm.

The sysadmin and I walked back to the pub we were staying at, and went to our rooms.

I put my phone on to charge, noticed that the messages were full again, and had "no space for new messages", so I deleted on, waited a while, and then got a new one.

It was a message from my drummer mate, reminding me about the "F" themed fancy dress on Saturday night.

I went to bed, put my ipod on again, it was about 11pm.

Ugh, this looks like a massive day to blog. Here we go..

I woke up, at 6am, and lay in bed in for a bit, listening to the radio.

I didn't need to get up too early this morning, I had a shower last night, so I don't see the point of having another one this morning, when all I've done since then is sleep.

I fell asleep again, and then woke up suddenly at 7am for some reason. Shit.

I looked out the window and the senior DBA was there to pick me up. Holy crap!

I dived out of bed, quickly pulled on my jeans and a shirt, and then I piss bolted down to the car.

He was giving the guy from CCB a lift this week, I told them I'd fallen asleep, but just needed 5 minutes to get ready.

I pissbolted back up inside again, finished getting dressed, put shoes on etc, gelled up my hair quick as, then packed up all the bathroom stuff I needed for the week, and chucked the toiletries bag into my backpack.

I grabbed my bag, ran out door, went and jumped in the car, it was less than 5 minutes later, pretty good.

I listened to Merrick and Rosso, as we headed for the freeway.

We got to Lisarow, and nearly had an accident where a truck was turning right from a T intersection, and a car turning left from behind it just came out, and the senior DBA had to swerve around the idiot.

We kept going, heading for the freeway, and then I realised I hadn't brought my shorts. Bugger, I'll have to buy some when I get to work.

We got on the freeway, and continued listening to Nova. There were cops parked on the freeway, busting people, near Toukley.

We kept going, listening to Nova, up the freeway until it dropped out after we took the Cessnock exit from the freeway.

The senior DBA changed to Triple J after that, and we continued going to work.

We got to work, the contract DBA was there, at the cafe across the road, so we waved to him as we went into the carpark, and then we parked, and went inside, and I was at my desk at 8.10am.

I did some work, and then I got a call from the manager of royalty, confirming that I'm going to the blood bank this afternoon still (that I volunteered for at some point last week).

I told him that I was still planning to go up there later, and he told me that the bus would be waiting for us in the carpark about 1.30pm, to take us up to the hospital.

I did more work, until the sysadmin came down at about 11.40am, asking about lunch.

I told him I was just working on something, and I'd come up and see him about midday.

The little guy from royalty came down to see me just before midday for a chat. I told him that I was supposed to be going to stay over at Newcastle tonight (my mate who lives over there asked me to go and stay over there). The little guy offered me a lift to Newcastle later.

I told him I'd let him know, because I'm still in 2 minds about whether to travel all the way over there, and back again in the morning, or just stay here.

I went up to see the sysadmin about lunch, and bumped into the senior DBA, on his way out, since he's driving to Orange this afternoon, and will be over there for the next few days.

I chatted to him for a bit (he was supposed to have left already), and then he went.

I went with the sysadmin into the computer room, he had to check some tools he needed for swapping a disk in one of the arrays out. The tools were right.

We left the building a bit after midday, and we decided to go and get some Thai, so we walked all the way down to the Thai place near the post office.

We went in, and sat down. The guy who usually takes the orders was outside putting up some big umbrellas, with advertising for iced tea on them.

There was some kid working in here, it must be the school holidays or something.

We ordered our lunch, and were served, it was pretty good food. I didn't want anything off the lunch menu, so I'd ordered a Pad Thai, which was at the normal price, instead of the lunch price.

While I was eating, I was looking at the building across the road, through the window upstairs, I thought I could see someone opening and closing a door constantly, before I realised that it was the gym, and it was that bit of gym equipment where you use your arms to build up your chest, pulling them together in front of you from the side.

We finished eating our lunch, and paid, it was pretty pricey, $16 or something for lunch.

We started walking back to work, I remembered about the registered mail I'd asked to have redirected to Maitland.

I didn't know if there would even be anything in there, since I'd heard that the mail had been left at the place of the guy I used to work for, who owns the aircon business. I decided to check anyway.

I went in, asked about any registered mail there for me, and the woman went away, and came back a minute later with an envelope. I signed for it, and then left.

It looks like as I suspected, the court summons for my unlicesed driving charge. I opened it, and confirmed that.

I continued walking back to work, with the sysadmin, reading the summons on the way.

It went on about how I was accused of riding my motorcycle while not licensed to do so etc, and I'm summonsed to appear in Bundaberg local court, on May 6th, at 9am.

Christ, Bundaberg court??

I continued reading it, and in the facts section, I noticed they had my rego details wrong. At one place it said the rego of my bike was "VD527", and somewhere else it said "VD5271", neither of which are correct.

Oh good, this should get thrown out then, for having incorrect facts.

I continued walking back to work, and bumped into the chick from work, and the annoying support guy. I spoke to the chick for a bit, saying I'd just got my summons, to appear in Bundaberg court, and that the rego was wrong.

I didn't have much time to hang around, since we were still a bit away from work, and it was getting close to 1.30pm, when I'm supposed to be getting on the bus to go to the hosptial.

We kept walking, and we got back to the office at 1.25pm. I checked in the visitor's carpark, and the bus was already there, with a few other people from work already on it, so I jumped in, and then we were driven to the hospital, about 2 minutes up the road.

We got out of the bus, and walked into the blood bank. I got a form, and started filling it out, meanwhile, and the woman in there kept going on about my hair.

I filled out most of the form, there were a couple of extra things added in there, including something about people who'd been to north Queensland not being able to give blood.

I finished filling out most of the form, there were a few questions I wasn't sure of the answers to, so I left those, figuring they'd go through the form.

I went into the waiting room, and sat and watched the tv, while I waited. King of the Hill was on, new episodes I haven't seen.

They were running late in there. There were people from work who'd come in the last trip from work, still waiting to go through their forms, letalone give blood.

While we waited, they had bottles of water, and juice, and cheese stuff to eat, to prepare for giving blood. I just had a bottle of water, since I'd just eaten.

A couple of good looking chicks turned up, and waited in the waiting room.

I eventually went in to go through the form, all the others from the group I'd come with already had. I did all that, it was fine, so the woman checked my haemoglobin level, which was 155, which is normal, or good or something.

She asked if I'd been eating and drinking properly all day, in preparation, I hadn't but I fibbed, and said I had, since I figured that I wouldn't need to worry about that.

I'd also already wasted an hour up here, I'd rather just give blood, than come up here for nothing.

I went back and waited in the waiting room again, watching more King of the Hill, until there was a free bed thing to lie on while they took the blood.

Someone finished, and came out, so then I was asked to go and lie down there. I went in, and hopped up on the bed.

I noticed that one of the units they use for extracting the blood was manufactured by Baxter, one of the places I used to work at when I was working for the aircon guy.

The woman came in a bit later, who'd gone through my form, and checked my blood pressure, it was fine.

One of the chicks who'd turned up came in, and lay on the bed opposite me.

We both had boots on, and the woman who's been going on about my hair before starting going on about us wearing big boots, and I explained that they're for when I'm riding my motorbike (if I ever ride it again), and the chick explained that she had to wear hers for work, she said she worked at the kebab place, and it was an OH&S thing.

The woman looking after me put the needle into my arm, it was huge, it has to be, to stop the platelets from getting stuffed up or something, and then she set it all up, with the pint bag etc, and started my arm draining.

The woman started going on about my hair again, what did my girlfriend think about it, and I explained that I didn't have one, so then she figured that I was gay or something, and was asking if perhaps another "partner" had feelings about it, so I had to set that straight right there and then.

They checked the chick's blood pressure, and found that it wasn't high enough or something, so she wasn't able to give blood, and was told to come back in a few days, after spending more time during the day eating and drinking, and then she left.

I sat there for a little while longer, I'd nearly filled the pint bag.

I finished it, and then they came over, and took a few samples out of the line, and took the needle out of my arm.

A minute or so later, I felt really seedy, like I was totally pissed, and was going to pass out.

They asked me how I was feeling, and I told them that I wasn't right, and the jacked the end of the bed up, with my feet on it, above my head, and put a pillow under my feet.

They gave me a wet cloth to put on my head, some water to drink, and a bag of jelly beans to eat.

I sat there for about 10 minutes, feeling pretty rough, but then I felt ok again, so I got up.

I went out, they'd packed up all the biscuits and stuff from the waiting room, that you're supposed to eat after giving blood, because we were the last people for the day, and they were packing up.

I went out to the bus, and all the others were already on it, waiting for me. Oh well, they'd shouldn't have made me be last.

I got in, and the guy dropped us back at work, we got back about 3.30pm, cool, only wasted 2 hours there.

I did some more work, and then I got a phone call, from my mate's brother in law in Bundaberg, telling me that the computer was stuffed, and it wouldn't turn on at all.

I called him back, and then I sat on the phone for quite a while, talking him through trying to fix the problem. We ended up pulling the whole machine apart basically, pulling all the cards out, disconnecting the drives, and then eventually, after removing every card, and reinstalling the video card, and unplugging all the IDE devices, the computer booted up.

We then went through putting all the cards back in, one at a time, checking it was still booting, and then connecting all the IDE devices back again, and it continued working, so it was sorted.

He told me that it was still turning on when the phone rang, but I told him I don't know what to do about that, since the wake on ring/wake on lan settings in the BIOS don't make any difference, regardless of what they are set to, and I also don't have modems in any of my machines, or turn any of them off.

I got off the phone at 5.20pm, and decided that I really didn't want to have to rush across to get the train to Newcastle, I'm feeling seedy still, after giving blood.

I went and saw the sysadmin, and we left work, he gave me a lift down the road to the first pub we go to.

We went in, to find out about getting a room, because neither of us had anything sorted, the sysadmin hadn't checked in, and the senior DBA didn't have to, because he was now in Orange, and there for the next couple of days.

I've got the shits with the pub we usually stay in, because they're overcharging us, and they keep sticking us in a tiny little room.

We went into the pub, to find out about getting a room, they guy had one, he gave us the key to go look at it. We went up, and had a look.

The room was a bit stinky, but I figured we could open the windows, and put the fan on full while we went out for dinner, and get rid of that, it also had a tv.

We went back down to the bar. We talked to the guy about getting it for the week, but it was only available until Wednesday, because "Steamfest" is on this weekend, and every room is booked out for that.

We said we'd get it just for tonight then, and try to find something else to deal with the rest of the week, and then the guy said it would be $35.. each. $70?? It doesn't even cost that much in the other pub, when they are overcharging us, and they had air conditioning.

The sysadmin wasn't impressed with that, so then the bartender suggested that we might want to look at motels up the road or something, if we wanted to try to find something for the week (the sysadmin has to stay up Friday night too, because he's working on Saturday), and that he'd hold the room for us anyway.

We left, and went to the pub we normally stay at, to find out about booking in for tonight. They'd stuffed up the booking, it was supposed to be a single booking for Tuesday night (for me), and then a twin for Wednesday (when the senior DBA comes back from Orange) and Thursday , but they had it as a single on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I got it sorted, I booked it as a single for tonight, and tomorrow night, and then a double for Wednesday and Thursday, and paid for it.

The sysadmin was able to book in for 5 days as well, but the Friday night was in a different room, so he'd have to move around, which was a bit of a pain.

We want back to the car after that, and moved it around behind the pub, since it was still parked near the other pub we'd gone into, and then we unloaded all the stuff, and brought it up to the rooms.

I dumped all my stuff in the room, went out, and the sysadmin had realised he'd left his key in the car, so I watched his stuff while he went down and got his key.

He came back, put his stuff in his room, and then we left the pub, and went for a walk.

We went back to the pub we'd been at before, and told the guy we managed to book a room in the other pub for a week, which wasn't entirely true, but close enough, and it was just to let him know, since he didn't have to hold the room anymore (if he was even intending to).

We kept going, we went to find the Thai place across the road from work that the contract DBA had mentioned.

I think he was confused, because there's an Indian restaurant over there, not a Thai.

We wandered all around, through the shops in that area, across the road, but there was no sign of a Thai restaurant.

I recalled the pasta place I'd seen when I was near the post office the other day, paying my Amex bill, the guy from royalty had pointed out that they had all you can eat pasta for $10 or something.

We decided to go there, so we walked all the way down the street to there. On the way, we went past the gym, I looked in, and saw a woman sitting on a lounge reading a magazine, and thought to myself "I could do that exercise!", we kept going, got to the pasta place, only to find that it's closed on Mondays.

The sysadmin suggested that we get a pizza or something, since there are a few more food places not far from here. We walked around there, past a pub, past the kebab place (that the chick works at), to the pizza place.

Before we went in, we kept looking, there's a tattoo place (no food there!) and a Yummy Noodle, and the cinemas.

We went into the Yummy Noodle, looked at the menu. I'd rather something from here than a pizza to be honest, so we decided to get this instead.

I worked out what I wanted, ordered, and then the sysadmin ordered, and I sat and read the paper while I waited for my food.

We got our food, and went and sat outside to eat.

While we were eating, some cops turned up, went in, picked up a bunch of food, and left again. When they got back in their car and left, they just pulled out, without indicating, and then went around the roundabout without indicating. Typical.

We finished eating, and then just sat and chatted for ages.

While we were sitting there, it started raining, heavily.

We didn't want to walk all the way back in the rain, so we sat there chatting a bit more, and then when it started to lighten up, we got up, and wandered around a bit, under cover.

We went and looked in the cinema, I noticed a sign for HHGTTG movie, wow, didn't know they'd even made that.

We wandered around a bit more, there weren't session times displayed anywhere, so we left, and continued wandering.

We went into the kebab shop, and the sysadmin was telling me about the lebanese sweets they have, so we got some and sat and ate them, they were pretty good.

We left there, and wandered back through the town, looking in the shop windows on the way.

We got back near the pub, but we decided to go for a wander along the river for a bit. When we went to the carpark, the sysadmin checked that all his car windows were up, because of the rain, they were fine.

I wandered over, and looked in the window of the music shop, I still haven't had a chance to get in there.

We walked back to the street, and spent some time looking in the real estate windows. I was bored with that, but the sysadmin wanted to, so I just stood there.

I saw the music shop advertised in one of the windows, the shop will be for rent.

We finished looking in the real estate windows, and then went into the pub, it was about 8.40pm.

We went upstairs, to where the rooms are, there was some guy sitting there watching the end of Pizza, on the tv.

I sat and watched that, and then he went away, and South Park came on. The sysadmin and I sat there and watched it, I had a cup of tea.

When that finished, I went to bed, at about 9.30pm. Crud, I forgot to go and buy shorts. I put my ipod on.

I went to sleep, but had a stupid dream about being awake and not able to sleep.

I got up, watched some tv, and bummed around on the computer, going through my email.

I went and did some washing, so I've clean clothes to take back to work tomorrow.

I ordered some DVDs off Amazon, "MacGyver - The Complete First Season", "Neil Finn - Sessions at West 54th", and "Mac and Me".

I started watching the Hoodoo Gurus DVD that my drummer mate had lent me, it was pretty good. I might have to copy it.

I sat and ate cheese and crackers, nothing else edible in the place.

I hung the washing out, and then came back, and finished watching the DVD, and eating the cheese and crackers.

I had nothing left to drink in the place either, so I rode around to the bottle shop. I could have walked there, but it's a 15 minute walk away, which means 1/2 hour, plus the time in there, and having to carry the stuff back, it's all too hard.

Anyway, I rode around there, and since I was only going around the corner, I didn't bother to put all my proper gear on, just sneakers, and my helmet, to go with the shorts and tshirt I was already wearing (oh, and I did wear my gloves).

I parked up, jumped off my bike, and immediately some guy started chatting to me, which distracted me, and I left the key in my bike, which I didn't realise, until the guy who'd started chatting to me told me that I'd left my headlight on.

I grabbed the key out, chatted to him for a bit, continuing as I went into the bottle shop, worked out what I wanted, and bought it.

After that, I put the bottle in my bike, and got back on it.

I got the key out of my left pocket, and as I did so, the change from the bottle came out, and fell on the ground, on the left side of my bike.

I bent down to pick it up, and as I did so, I put my bare leg on the exhaust on the other side, and didn't realise for about a second, until I'd managed to give myself a pretty nasty burn (which I can still see, a month later) on my leg.

I rode home, and as I came into the street, I could smell smoke, and saw a huge plume of smoke going up in the air, from just behind my house.

I parked my bike, and went up behind the house to see if I could see the fire or whatever. I couldn't see over the fence to see where it was coming from, so I jumped up on the roof, and then I was able to see clearly.

Some idiot had a bonfire in the frontyard of their place, just behind my house. He was standing there watching it though, at least that's something.

I went back down, and noticed that some mail had arrived for me in the last week while I've not been here. I went into the house and got it, and then went back out to where I live.

I went through the mail, nothing exciting. There was another Dell brochure, that they spam me with every couple of weeks.

I looked through it again, at the laptops, and ummed and arred again about buying a laptop.

I watched some tv, and drank some alcohol.

I sat and watched "Seems Like Old Times", a movie with Chevy Chase in it, that the guy who looks after the TiVo images recommended to me a few weeks ago, that I bought at Jb HiFi before I went on my holiday.

I wanted to watch another DVD after that, but it was getting a bit late, so I just went and fixed the colour in my hair again, had a shower, and went to bed.

I woke up, lay in bed for a bit, got up, and then bummed around on the computer, and watched tv.

About midday, my phone rang, it was my mate, the drummer, he wanted to know if I wanted to go and get some lunch.

I said it sounded ok, and I'd see him in a bit, and got off the phone.

I continued bumming around on computer for a while, and then I went and had a shower, and got ready.

I sat around and waited, and my mate turned up. As we went to leave, I went to take my sunglasses, and realised that I'd stepped on them at some point, D'oh.

I'm not having much luck with glasses. I bought this crappy pair to replace the ones I lost the lens out of at the beach a few weeks ago.

I decided I'd just buy another new crappy pair when we were at the shopping centre.

We jumped in the car, and headed out to Erina Fair. On the way, my mate's phone rang. I answered, since he was driving, it was our other mate that goes to concerts with us everynow and then, and who also works in Maitland sometimes.

He told us that he was already out there, in HMV, so we said we'd see him in a few minutes, and got off the phone.

We kept going, got to Erina Fair, parked, walked in, and found our mate.

We went into get some lunch, I realised I needed cash, so I went to the ATM, and then went and bought some lunch, and sat and ate it.

After that, I went to the juice bar, and got a drink, and then the three of us wandered around the centre a bit.

We went into the ABC Shop, and we looked at The Goodies stuff, there's some good stuff (bad pun).

Didn't get anything, it's all a bit pricey. We walked over to JB HiFi after that, and browsed around.

I wasn't going to get anything, but then I saw "National Lampoons Vacation" cheap, and decided to get that.

We came back across to the centre after that, and went into Coles. I don't remember if I bought anything, but I probably did.

Then we went into the bottle shop, and decided not to buy anything, and went out again.

My mate dropped me off at home after that, and I sat and watched some tv, and just generally bummed around, on the computer, playing the guitar etc.

At about 6pm, my phone rang, it was my mate's brother in law in Bundaberg again.

I spoke to him for a minute, and then I called him back, since his phone had no credit, and spoke to him about the computer.

We went through using LSPFix, but it couldn't fix the problem with the DNS issues, it's something else doing it.

I tried doing some nslookups, (or asked him to), which fail when DNS is b0rked, but they were working, so it can't be a DNS problem.

I got him to telnet to a webserver, and do a "GET /", which worked. Hmm, this is getting weirder.. there doesn't seem to be a TCP level issue, but neither FireFox or IE will work to web browse.

I knew I hadn't put a firewall on there, so it can't be that.

The only other thing that I thought about, was that perhaps it was something to do with the Avast web protection, since it acts as a transparent proxy.

We mucked around with that for a bit, pausing it didn't help, but terminating it did. Once we stopped it altogether, the browsing started working again.

I couldn't find how to permanantly disable it, it would restart the next time the computer was rebooted, so we went through the configuration, and I found where to change the port it was intercepting requests to, ie 80, and had him change it to 8080.

That all seemed to be fine, so then I got off the phone.

A few minutes later, I got an SMS on my phone from him, telling me there was a timeout while trying to get to hotmail or something.

Ugh. I don't have the patience to deal with this write now, I figured I'd call him back later, but then totally forgot about it.

I made a Long Island Iced Tea, but for some reason it tasted horrible. I drank it anyway, can't waste perfectly good alcohol.

I put on dinner, a frozen pizza, waited for it cook, and then ate the pizza, and had another drink.

I watched tv, and then decided to watch Blues Brothers.

Once that was finished, I went to bed, watching tv, and fell asleep, and left the tv on.

I woke up, got up, got ready, had a shower/breakfast etc.

I left the pub, and went to to work. I did some work for a while.

About 9.30am, I decided to go and see what was going on upstairs, and see if I could annoy the cranky old guy with the bouncy thing he stomped on and broke, that I sort of fixed.

When I went up there, I bumped into the contract DBA, spoke to him for a minute, and then went across the road with him to the cafe, and got a crappy coffee, and chatted for a bit.

He wanted to know about what some of the production servers are doing, because I have more to do with them than he does.

We finished our chat, and went back across the road, the DBAs and a few others from IT went into a meeting, with some people from Orange, to talk about the servers.

I went back to my desk, and continued working, until about 10.30am, when we had a morning tea, so I wandered out to get something to eat.

All the IT staff were still in the meeting, I had some food, and then went back to work.

I didn't end up having lunch, just kept working all afternoon.

I spent a little while working on some javascript for the TV guide database, and then sent it off to the guy who looks after the server for that.

The senior DBA was leaving a bit early today (which is why I didn't go for lunch). We left about 2.40pm.

I jumped in the car, and we left, I got dropped at home, the trip back was unremarkable.

I sat around at home for a bit, but then I got hungry, because I hadn't had lunch, and there was no food in the house, because I don't bother to keep anything here, when I'm not here during the week.

I rode to the supermarket, and bought some cheese and crackers. There's a healthy lunch.

I went into the bottle shop to get some alcohol, I was paying for it, and the woman at the counter was going on about my green hair, after saying something profound like "your hair is green".

I would have stayed to have a bit of a conversation, but my phone started ringing.

I answered it, it was a message from someone, so while it crapped on "You have one new message, message received at 3pm this afternoon" etc, I picked up the alcohol, and walked out of the bottle shop, and started walking back to my bike.

I got back, put the stuff down, and listened to the message. It was from the guy at Orange that looks after the content of the Department's website.

He was going on that there was a problem with the site, it seemed to be down. There was nothing I could do at this point, I couldn't write down his number or anything, because I didn't have a pen.

I hungup, packed the shopping into my bike, and I rode home.

I sat around for a bit, and then I found the guy's number, and I called him back, and explained that I couldn't do anything, because I don't have a VPN account, or any details for anyone else's account.

He told me that it seemed to be working again at the moment, must have been some strange issue that fixed itself.

After that, I sat around for the next few hours, eating, playing the guitar, watching tv, and I wentt to bed about 3am.

I've been trying to make some notes on Blogger, all day it was broken, time outs, errors, rubbish.

I googled around to see if I could find anything out, I found the status blog, but it hasn't been updated for 4 days.

Anyway, while I was googling, I found the following page: http://www.leatheregg.com/bloggercode/.

After answering the questions, my blogger code is:

B5 d+ t k-- s u-- f+ i- o++ x e l- c++

I got up, had a shower, got ready, had breakfast etc, and then went to work.

I worked, and realised that I'd left my ventolin in the room at the pub. D'oh.

I spent some time looking for a crack for the MP3 software at the pub, but I could only find one for an old version of the software.

I went back to work, working on some javascript for the TiVo tvguide web interface.

We went out to lunch, the senior DBA went into the pub we start drinking at, to do something, or look for someone.

While he was in there, I went back to the room, and I found my ventolin, it must have been in the bed, and that's why I didn't see it this morning.

I grabbed, and went back out, caught up with the senior DBA and the sysadmin.

We went into the cafe across the road. I only ordered a sandwich, ate it, and was still starving.

The senior DBA only ate half his sandwich, said he wasn't hungry, and went outside to have a smoke, so I ate the other half of his sandwich. I was still hungry.

We paid, and left the cafe, and started walking back to work. On the way, I went into the newsagent, and I bought a chocolate bar, and an instant scratchy.

We continued walking back to work, bumped into a guy who's responsible for the data in one of the production systems, he was whinging about a problem with the link between that system, and the one I'm writing. It doesn't work in all cases, because there is data in a format I wasn't expecting, so I have to rewrite part of one of the files, to deal with that, which I haven't done yet.

I got back to my desk, scratched the scratchy, didn't win.

I went back to work, continuing on the javascript I'd been working on before.

I remembered about the problem my mate's brother in law was having with the computer, so I went and found the details I needed, the url to lspfix.exe, but I had to find it on a webserver that I could access via IP address, because dns was broken on the machine.

I found that, wrote the details down, and then I went to see what the senior DBA was doing.

When I went up there, someone had a toy from KFC, a "Patrick" from Spongebob Squarepants, which was getting thrown around, because it had a circuit in it that went "boing boing boing", whenever it hit something.

There was nothing useful going on up there, so I went back to my desk, and kept working.

There was a problem with one of the production systems, so while it was down, they decided to take a couple more down, and while they were all down, we were able to move a sun box that lives on the sysadmin's desk, part of the production systems (they use it as their display).

I got called up, went up and helped the sysadmin move the machine around to his new desk, get it patched, booted, reconfigured ("xhost +" etc), and then we were able to start all the production systems back up again.

When I got back over in that area, I noticed it was a bit quiet. No more "boing boing boing". I asked the senior DBA what had happened, and he told me that the cranky old guy in royalty had got fed up, and stomped on "Patrick".

The little guy in royalty got it, and cut it open, and took the circuit out. The manager of royalty was there, he had a look at it, and then eventually I was able to look at it, and saw that a part of the pcb had been snapped.

It was a little part with a crude motion switch on it, a spring inside a metal cyclinder, so that when the ball hit something, the spring would wobble, and contact the cyclinder, shorting a pin on the chip on the pcb.

I traced the tracks, and found that was all that was on that bit of the pcb, so while I tried to straighten it back up, it snapped off. It didn't matter, because there were only 2 tracks it needed, so I found a paperclip, and used it to short the tracks, and the pcb continued with its "boing boing boing".

The cranky old guy had gone away though, along with most people, so there wasn't anyone there to know it was fixed.

I went back to work after that, did a bit more work, and then the senior DBA called me, and told me that he was leaving.
I said I had a bit more work to do.

I finished up the javascript, and emailed it to the guy who looks after the guide data, for testing.

I decided to leave, so I called the senior DBA to find out where he was, he said he was driving, and would come and pick me up.

I left the building, and waited out the front for the senior DBA to turn up. I jumped in the car, and then we just went for a drive around, out to Bolwarra Heights, and then back into Maitland.

We parked behind the pub we're staying at, and walked across the road, and went to the pub that we usually start drinking at. The old librarian was in here as usual.

We sat and chatted, had a drink etc, and then we all decided to go down to the pub we'd ended up in last night.

One the way, walking down there, the alarm on my phone went off, ah, 7pm, have to ring my mate's brother in law.

We got to the bar, and the librarian said he'd shout all the drinks, and put $10.40 on the bar, and then he went to the loo.

I put $1.50 in change I had in my pocket, because I wanted a spirit, and figured it would push the cost out a bit.

The bartender came over, and I ordered, and the total came to $11.90, the exact amount we'd put on the bar.

The old librarian came back, and got his beer, and then we all went and sat out on the verandah.

I tried to call my mate's brother in law, there was no answer.

We sat and chatted for a bit, I tried calling again, still no answer.

I then sat there, trying to call every few minutes, still no answer.

I gave up, and decided to order dinner while I waited. I went in and ordered, the senior DBA didn't know what he wanted, but I told the bartender that he did want something, so a few minutes later he came out to ask the senior DBA what he wanted.

I tried calling my mate's brother in law again, still no answer.

This is ridiculous.

We had our dinner served, so the old librarian left, to go home, and we ate our dinner.

After dinner, we continued sitting outside, I tried calling again.

Some weird looking lady wandered past on the footpath.

I went and got us some drinks.

A little while later, the weird lady came back again, asking us what we were doing there, and if we'd driven there, and to leave, and "not come here", and weird stuff like that.

Eventually we got rid of her, and then we decided to go back inside before she came back.

There were some of the staff in the bar tonight, just drinking, so they were behind the bar, making their own drinks. They were making Mohitos at one point, which looked pretty good.

I played pool against the senior DBA twice, he won the first game, and I the second.

After that, he asked what I wanted to drink. I said I wanted a mohito, but the bartender (the guy who used to be the Newcastle Knight) refused to make me one. D'oh.

I tried calling my mate's brother in law again, this time it was answered.

I went outside, spent a couple of minutes on the phone, but it dropped out. I called him again, and managed to get his mobile number, since he had to be dialled up while we were trying to fix the computer.

I called him back on his mobile, and spent over 20 minutes on the phone to him.

I was talking him through using wget (which I'd put on their machine to download itunes when I was there) to download the fix. It was very difficult, he was less computer literate than I thought, didn't know what a tilde was, and other basic stuff.

Eventually, just as we were getting somewhere, (I thought), the senior DBA brought me another drink (thank god, I need it), and then my phone's battery ran out.

I went back inside, and after waiting a couple of minutes, I was able to turn my phone back on, and there was enough charge to send an SMS, I told him to download the file on his laptop, and use a usb memory thing to copy it to the pc, and run it.

A couple of minutes after that, my phone rang, he was calling me back. I answered, was able to get out "my battery is dead!", and then it went "beep beep beep", and turned off again.

I sat around for a bit, drinking and chatting, and then I turned my phone back on again, with the tiny bit of charge left, and sent another SMS to him.

I had another drink after that, and then we left the pub at 9.20pm. The bartender couldn't understand it, us leaving so early.

We walked back to pub we were staying at, and sat down to watch the tv. It only gets three channels, so we ended up watching SBS.

A weird show called "Happy Tree Friends" came on, some sort of violent cartoon. It was quite funny.

They showed an episode of Harvey Birdman in the middle of that, and then another episode of "Happy Tree Friends". The start of this was particularly funny, because this episode had the characters "Petey", and "Toothy", nicknames we use for people at work.

After that finished, the senior DBA tried to annoy the sysadmin, who was in his room, but the light was still on.

He was whispering under the door, and shining his laser pointer in the window above the door etc, but the sysadmin didn't respond.

"Erotic Tales" came on SBS then, and I turned off the tv, and went to bed.

I couldn't sleep, so I put on my ipod, with a 60 hour sleep timer.

I woke up about 6.50am.

I asked the senior DBA if he recalled 3am, and he told me he had no recollection of it.

I told him that I was woken up by the sound of water, and then he worked out what I was talking about.

I went and had a shower, and got ready, and then went to work.

I worked all morning, and then I went out for lunch, with the senior DBA, and the guy from royalty, we went to a cafe down the road, near the shopping centre.

While we were waiting for our food, after ordering, the senior DBA realised he needed money, so he went to get some cash out. It was after he walked away that I realised I'd got money out to give him for the accomodation.

While we were waiting for him to come back, we saw the old librarian, so we spoke to him for a bit.

The senior DBA came back, and then we ate our lunch.

When we finished, we were just sitting chatting, and the cops drove through the mall, no reason for it, probably just because they're too lazy to drive around.

I had to go to the post office to pay my American Express bill, the guy from royalty and the senior DBA said they'd be in the auto place down the road.

I went into the post office, and paid the bill, didn't even think to ask if my mail was in there, and then I left, and I went down to the auto place, and found the others.

We wandered around in there, looking at all the stuff, thinking some of it would be handy, but then the senior DBA pointed out the fact that he doesn't drive anywhere except on the weekend, and I commented on the fact that I don't even have a license now.

The guy from royalty got what he was in there for, car seat covers or something, and then we headed back to work.

On the way back to work, the guy from royalty noticed a tag in with the car seat covers, which we found funny, because it said "inspected by Jenny", and we call the annoying support guy at work Jenny.

We got back to work, and after a little while, the sysadmin called me, and asked if I could go and give him a hand to move some stuff (because it had all been left behind, on his old desk, when the rest of IT moved, because he wasn't there).

I went up, and found a trolley, and helped him move some stuff off his desk, his PC etc.

After we'd moved all the small stuff, I went back to work, because we wanted to move some cupboards, and we weren't supposed to move them until after hours.

I went back to my desk, and kept working.

At about 4.30pm, I went back up. The senior DBA left, and I helped the sysadmin move the cupboards around to his new desk, because they were filled with backup tapes, and Sun software etc.

When we'd finished, I left, and walked down to the pub near work, the old librarian and the senior DBA were there, I sat and chatted for a while.

The guy from royalty turned up, and a little while later the chick from work and her boyfriend turned up.

We sat and chatted for a while, eventually we decided to go and get some dinner, so we all walked to the pub near the station.

I stopped in at the pub we're staying at on the way, and I dropped off my glasses, and grabbed my jumper, since it was a bit cold.

When I came out of the room, I bumped into the sysadmin, he'd left work a few minutes before, and was just checking into the pub.

I waited for a few minutes, while he dropped all his stuff off, and then we walked down to the pub where the others had gone, to get dinner.

We got down there, looked around, and found the others all sitting in the beer garden. The chick from work and her boyfriend had gone home or something, but were coming back, so we sat and waited for them to come back.

Once they came back, we all went in and ordered our dinner.

While I was sitting waiting for my dinner to be served, my phone started ringing, it was my mate's brother in law, calling from Bundaberg about the computer. Oh crap. I totally forgot about him, I didn't get the details I needed.

I answered the phone, explained that I'd been slack, and forgotten, and that I would ring him tomorrow night, and we'd get it sorted out. After I got off the phone, I set my alarm for 7pm tomorrow, so I'd remember to call him.

We sat and waited a bit more, and then our food was served, so we ate, and chatted.

After dinner, some hideous music was blasting out of one of the rooms in the pub, they have people that live in there.

It was some bikey guy (I've seen a fair few Gladiators in there, I think they have something to do with the ownership of the place).

We sat and put up with that for a while, then the chick from work and her boyfriend left. We sat and chatted for a while, putting up with the crap music, and then we decided to go to another pub.

When we left there, to go to the other pub, the sysadmin decided to go back to the pub where we were staying, so he left.

We got to the other pub, and had a couple of games of pool, and then the guy from royalty left, and it was just the senior DBA and I.

We had a few more drinks, and then we walked back to the pub we were staying at, and went to bed.

I got up, got ready, and went to work, and got there at 8.15am.

I spent the morning working on a script to rename all (600 thousand) files under the system I'm writing.

The IT department had moved, they'd been thrown out of their area, that they designed in the new building, because of people coming in from Dept of Forestry.

I went to the new area, and we went out for lunch at midday.

The senior DBA went into a real estate agent, and then the guy from royalty went to the bank, after they came back, we bumped into the guy from Orange who looks after IT, we spoke to him for a minute, and then he went back to work.

We went to a cafe, and a ordered a "Big Kahuna" burger, which came out a few minutes later, and was one of the biggest hamburgers I've seen.

There was no cutlery, so I had to pick up and eat the burger, which was very difficult, since it didn't fit in my mouth. I managed to eat almost all of it, before what was left of it became so soggy from the sauce and meat juice and whatever that it fell apart, and I couldn't pick it up.

We sat and chatted for a while at the cafe after finishing, and then we continued walking.

I had in my notes for this day that I paid my Amex bill, but I think that actually happened tomorrow..

I don't know what happened on this day, I think we walked back to work.

We stopped in at the pub on the way, and we confirmed the booking of a room in there for the sysadmin from tomorrow night, because he's coming back to work tomorrow.

We went back to work after that, and I continued working on some table design I was doing before lunch.

Some woman from some other group came around after a file, I left the project manager to speak to her, but then I ended up getting roped into getting the file.

I pulled it down on to my desktop, but then realised that I wouldn't be able to send it through email, since it was too big, so then I copied it into the production server.

I emailed the woman with the address of the file, and then I went to delete it off my machine. When I clicked on it, stupid windows tried to put the thumbnail of the image in the left pane of the window, and in doing so crippled my machine, trying to open a 40mb TIFF file.

I was in the middle of writing some scripts when the woman came around, and I hadn't saved them, so I didn't want to reboot my machine.

It was a bit responsive to start with, while I frantically tried to get the task manager up to kill off explorer.exe, which was spinning out of control, using up to 700MB of memory, and growing (when I only have 512MB in the machine).

Even after trying to kill it, it kept growing, and then the whole machine stopped, but the hard drive was still thrashing away as it tried to page around.

I figured I'd just wait, and see if it was able to kill it off, and then have the machine come back responsive so I could save my files.

It said 4.15pm on the clock at that point, and I sat and waited for 5 minutes, but got fed up, and didn't want to sit waiting, because it was obvious I wasn't doing any work, and I was tempted to just reboot and be done with it, but then I'd have to spend about an hour rewriting the scripts.

I decided to go and see the senior DBA, and see if I could do anything useful up there in the meantime.

While I was up there, he was telling me that the chick from work was going on about going over to Newcastle tonight, and I was like "what for?", but she hadn't given him a good reason either.

It was to go and do something that took 5 minutes or something, and then come back. What's the point of that? If we'd been going to go to dinner over there, or something like that, then fair enough, but to go over there, and then come back again, forget it.

I stayed up there for a while, ended up being almost an hour, and then I went back down to my desk, to find that my machine had not recovered, still had 4.15pm on the clock, and the hard drive light wasn't flashing away anymore.

I gave up, and turned the machine off, and back on again, and started rewriting the scripts I'd lost.

I was really annoyed, so I took a break to put some notes on blogger, and vent a bit, but that was even more frustrating, because Blogger was so fucking slow, it was painful.

I gave up, and went back to see the senior DBA again, and then we left, and went to the pub we were staying at, rather than the other one we usually go to after work.

The was because I was pretty annoyed, having lost all that work, and I didn't want to deal with talking to the guy who was the librarian before, who almost drives me up the wall at the best of times, and I couldn't have handled him today.

We sat and had a beer on the back balcony of the pub, and then we went up to the room, and I dropped off the stuff I didn't need.

We decided to walk down to the pub we go to for dinner sometimes, where the guy who was the Newcastle Knight works.

On the way, we bumped into this wierd guy from work, he was saying that the others had gone to the Leagues Club for dinner, but he didn't know where it was, so we told him and then we kept going.

We didn't want to get stuck with him for the night, and we kept going where we were going.

We got there, and I ordered my dinner, because I was starving.

The bartender knew that I liked screwdrivers, and he told me that they'd got a new vodka in, so I had one of those, and it was a bit nicer than the other vodka they have.

We waited a while, chatting, and then the senior DBA decided what he wanted for dinner, and ordered.

We played pool, and just after starting to play, some other people in the bar came and put their money on the side, wanting to play the next game.

We finished our game, and then I went to the loo, while I had a chance before our food was served.

When I came back, the senior DBA had disappeared, I looked around for him, but I couldn't see him.

There were a few people from the CCB group at work, so I sat with them, and then about a minute later my phone started ringing, it was my mate's brother in law from Bundaberg.

I spoke to him for a few minutes, apparently he's having a lot of problems with the computer we took up there, the internet doesn't work properly on it or something.

I told him that I was in the pub, and couldn't hear him properly, and I needed some details to give him (thinking he needed to use LSDfix or whatever it's called to fix DNS problems), but then the phone dropped out.

I went back in, and continued looking for the senior DBA, but I still couldn't find him, so I decided to go and play the pokies instead.

I was just starting to play the pokie when my phone rang again, it was my mate's brother in law calling me again.

I answered it, finished explaining how I neeed some info before I could help him, and arranged to call him tomorrow night.

I got off the phone, wasted the end of the dollar I'd put in the machine, and went to another one.

I was just going through the end of that dollar, when the bartender came in and told me that my dinner was ready.

I finished wasting my dollar, and then I went back out the back, where the CCB guys were, and sat down to eat my dinner, the senior DBA was out here now too.

When I sat down, the senior DBA had shouted me a drink, that was good.

While we were eating, the chick from work and her boyfriend turned up.

We finished eating, and then we all went inside. I put some money in the jukebox, and queued up a bunch of songs.

The senior DBA and I played against a couple of the people from CCB, and beat them, twice.

After that we sat around chatting, and I went to put some more songs on the jukebox, and the bartender told me that they'd just had a new sound system installed, and he could put a CD on for us.

He did, and we played against the people from CCB again, 2 more games, and beat them again, making 4 for 4.

The left after that, and it was just the senior DBA and I left.

The bartender closed the bar, with us still in there, we sat and chatted with him for a while, and had a few more drinks, and then we left the pub at 11.20pm, and walked back to pub where we were staying.

We got in the room, the senior DBA passed out on his bed, and I just turned off the light and went to bed.

I was having a terrible sleep, I lay there for ages, got to sleep, I woke up at 2am, and then managed to get back sleep, but I was woken up again at 3am by the sound of water pouring.

I opened my eyes, and saw the senior DBA standing near the end of my bed, and I thought "fuck, he's pissing on the floor!", and I said "What The FUCK?!", and then he stopped pissing, and went "oh".

I jumped out of bed, and threw him out of the room, then I turned on the light, and found that he'd just pissed on my towel that was on the floor at the end of the bed, so I moved that away, washed my hands, pinched his towel, and went back to bed.

The senior DBA came back from going to the toilet, after I'd thrown him out of the room, and went back to bed.

I lay there, and I didn't get back to sleep until 4.30am.

I got up, at 6.10am, had a shower and got ready. It was a shitty day, pissing down with rain, and I felt crook.

I had some breakfast, in the few minutes I had before 7am, and then waited.

7am came and went, with no sign of the guy from working giving me a lift. I checked the messages in my phone, and found the one he replied with yesterday said that I should let him know by 7am if I wanted a lift, I hadn't read it properly yesterday.

I called him at 7.15am, asked where he was, he had gone past, was on the freeway. He was about 15 minutes up the freeeway, so he said he'd come back and pick me up.

I waited, and he got back to my place at 8am, I went and jumped in the car, and we took off again, I was really appreciative of him coming back to pick me up.

We headed to work, and before getting to the exit from the freeway, to go the back way to Maitland, (which is slightly quicker than going the full way on the freeway), we saw the email guy.

He didn't see us though. We got off at the exit, and headed the back way to work. Before getting to work, the guy wanted to go and look at a house that he'd seen was for rent on the internet, so we went over to Lorn, and looked at it, didn't look too bad, had a tennis court, but with all the rain, it looked more like a swimming pool.

We drove to work after that, and when we got there, the email guy had just got to into the carpark at work, so it must be about 10/15 minutes faster to go the other way, because we were able to go and look at that house and come back in the same time.

I went to work, spent the morning working on something (don't remember what, it was a month ago), and then I went up to see the guy upstairs about going to lunch, but he had to change the tapes in the autoloader first, because the sysadmin is on holidays at the moment.

We went in, and changed the tapes, but weren't terribly successful, because the tapes that someone from Orange had told us to replace, were mostly not in the autoloader, only 2 out of the 8 tapes were loaded.

We went to lunch after that, along with another guy, and on the way we went into the pub, and checked into the room, and got our keys.

From there we went to the bank, and the guy upstairs went to pickup his replacement credit card.

We went into a cafe, and got lunch after that, and then when we were finished in there, I said I'd see them back at work.

I went to the chemist to get something for my cold or flu or whatever it was I had, because my nose kept running, and I had a sore throat.

I ended up with some generic brand cold and flu tablets, and they were totally useless, I found out later after taking them, and having no effect.

I walked back to work, and took some tablets, and then continued working.

A couple of hours later, I found that the internet access was busted, it didn't effect me much, since I was busy working on a file, but had wanted to check my email.

I got a call a few minutes later, from the guy upstairs, he told me that he was leaving for the day, and I asked "Why, because the Internet is down?" and he said "Something like that", and he left.

I continued working, and then I remembered about the mail from QLD again, apparently the guy in QLD had brought some mail down, and had left it at the place of the guy that owns the aircon business, because my mate's ex gf was staying there or something.

I tried calling the guy, to find out if there was any mail for me at his place, but he didn't answer his phone, so I left a message. (He never got back to me).

After that, I called my mate in Newcastle, who'd been trying to get me to go and stay at his place, to let him know I wouldn't be over there, because I'd already booked the room in the pub for the week.

He didn't answer his phone either, so I left a message.

I went back to work, and a little while later I noticed that the internet access was fixed. I checked my email, and then went back to work.

I got an SMS from the guy upstairs, said he was in the pub, and wanted to know what I was planning to do.

I worked a bit more, and then I decided to leave, I'd had enough of work for today, so I walked down to the pub we start drinking in.

The old librarian was there, but no one else. I decided to sit and speak to him for a bit, rather than be rude and keep going, looking in other pubs, so I did.

I was chatting to him, he told me the others had left a while before, and then I got a phone call from the guy upstairs, telling me that they'd left, gone down to the pub near the station, and he'd come back and pick me up in a bit.

I got off the phone, and continued chatting, and then about 5 minutes later, I went to wait out the front for the guy.

While I was waiting out here, 2 fire trucks came down the road. One stopped out the front of the pub right near me, and a couple of the fire fighters jumped out of it, and the other truck did a U turn.

The truck that had pulled over near me put it's siren on, and it scared the shit out of me. The fire fighters jumped back in, and then the truck did a U turn, badly, having to make a 3 point turn, and raced off after the other one.

The guy turned up right then, and beeped his horn, I went across the road, and jumped in the car, the chick from work was in there.

We drove back to her place, and we all sat in the loungeroom chatting, her boyfriend and I playing the playstation, some GTA game, San Andreas I think it was.

The chick's boyfriend said that it was the new one, but I joked that I thought the new one was "GTA: Macquarie Fields", like the picture I'd emailed around work a couple of days before.

We ended up hanging around here until nearly 8pm, when I said we needed to get back, if we were going to get dinner anywhere, so we left.

We drove back, and parked behing the pub we stay in, and then we walked down the road to the pub near the station, where he'd been before, to get some dinner.

We went straight into the restaurant, and the guy said I should get the pies, which was the special of the day, because he'd had them before, and they were really good, so we both ordered that.

Once we'd ordered, we went into the bar, and got drinks. It was really quiet in there, only a couple of people in there.

We sat in there for a bit, and then I said that dinner was probably ready, so we went back into the restaurant, and the woman was just bringing the plates out of the kitchen.

We sat and ate diner, the pies were really good, I ate the whole lot, but it was a huge meal.

We went back into the bar after that, and the annoying cowboy guy was in there.

We had a game of pool, I don't remember what happened there, if I won or lost, but after that, we watched the end of Pizza on the widescreen tv.

After that we sat at the bar, and watched South Park, and then the chick changed the channel, and we watched a bit of "Who Wants to be an Old Age Pensioner" (by the time they answer the question).

After a few minutes of that, the chick changed to "Battered Housewives" (Desperate Housewives, but the guy I was with had inadvertantly called it "Battered Housewives" a few days before).

Anyway, we watched the end of that (after explaining the story about Battered Housewives to the chick behind the bar), and then the show with the guy who used to be in Sliders came on, so we started watching that.

I was feeling tried, and feeling pretty crap, so we left, and walked back to the pub we were staying at, and went to bed, at about 10.30pm.

I woke up about 9am, and I got up. I wasn't feeling to great, I must have been a bit hungover from last night I thought.

I bummed around on computer, and then got ready, and I was ready for 11am, the time I'd arrange with my mate last night, to pick me up.

I waited, and waited, but there was no sign of him, so I called him at about midday, to find out what was going on, and he said he'd be there shortly.

I continued waiting, bumming around on the computer.

I went and got my phone, noticed I'd received a message, it was from my mate, whose wife left, saying "it's over". Obviously that's the end of him trying to sort it out.

My mate eventually turned up, at 1am, and we went to our other mate's place.

We knocked on the door, and waited. I was just about call my mate, when he came and answered the door, and let us in.

He said he was going back to bed for a while, and did.

We sat around for a while, and I played my guitar acoustically for a bit, and then I helped my mate setup the drum kit.

He played really softly for a bit, thinking it would get our mate up, but it didn't.

We decided to go out get some lunch, a bit after 2pm. We just went and got takeaway, and then drove back. I hadn't locked the front door, so we could get back in.

We ate our lunch, and then we sat there reading the paper.

Eventually our mate got up, and came out, and asked what was going on, if it was a library or something, since we were just sitting there reading.

I got an SMS from the senior DBA at work, asking if I needed a lift to work tomorrow. I replied and said it would be good, and arranged for 7am.

Our mate that had just got up went to get some lunch, so we waited for him to come back, and eat, and then we finally started playing at about 3pm.

We were playing like shit, some of the worst playing we've done. I felt like shit, and I couldn't concentrate, I'd thought I was hungover, but now I was wondering if I was crook or something.

The guy at work watching the soccer match the other night had been coughing and sniffing and stuff, I probably caught whatever the hell he had.

Anyway, we kept playing, or trying to, until about 4.30pm, and then we packed up the stuff, I took my guitar, and my mate gave me a lift home.

I sat and watched tv for a while, a couple of hours, and then my mate (whose wife left him) called, and said he wanted to see me, since he hadn't seen me for a while, so I rode around there.

My mate whose dad owns the aircon business was there too, so the three of us sat and chatted for a while.

My mate (aircon) decided to go and get something to eat, so he and I left, to go pick up some pizzas, leaving our mate at his place, because his wife had his car, and he'd asked her to bring it around, because he needed for work the next day, and we didn't want to be there for that.

We ordered pizzas, and chatted for a while, while we waited for them. While we were waiting there, I saw my mate's wife drive his car past, going to his place to drop it off.

We picked up the pizzas, and we drove back to our mate's place.

Our mate's wife had been followed by one of her friends, to give her a lift back, so we went and chatted to her, while our mate spoke to his wife, away from us.

A couple of minutes later, my mate's wife came over, and said something like "look what the cat dragged in", referring to my mate and I, standing there with our pizzas, and all I could bring myself to say to her was "hello", not a "gday" or to talk about anything.

We stood there for an uncomfortable minute, and then she got in the car with her friend, and they left.

My mates and I went inside, and ate the pizza, and we decided to watch "Nothing to Lose", I think it's almost been a sufficient length of time since I watched that last.

When it finished, we watched the tv, the "Melbourne Comedy Festival" was on, we watched that until the end, and then I decided to go home, a bit after 11pm, because I had to get some rest, to get up early to go back to work tomorrow.

I got home, and I packed my bag, and then went to bed a bit after midnight, feeling bloody awful.

I woke up at 3.30am, I thought I was dying.

I had a pounding headache, I had the worst indigestion I've ever had (I thought I was having a heart attack), and I was having an asthma attack as well.

I sat up for a bit, took some ventolin, and some panadol, and ate some indigestion tablet things.

I went back to bed after that, thinking I was going to wake up in a few hours feeling like crap.

I woke up later, but I didn't feel too bad.

I got up, got ready, and then my drummer mate turned up, and we went around to our mate's place.

We spent about an hour and a half putting the drum kit together, finding all the parts, working out what went where, and actually putting together, and then tuning it all.

We moved it over, and set it up, and then we had a bit of a play for a while, and we actually sounded quite good for once, I think the new drum kit makes a world of difference.

The old symbols sounded like someone mucking around with baking trays, and the new ones sound like symbols.

We played until about 3pm, and then we packed up, and my drummer mate and I left, because our other mate was going to a bbq this afternoon (some family thing).

We'd see him again later, because we were all going to the tennis club at Tuggerah, because someone who works at Target is leaving, and they reckon that I'm entitled to go, because I've shopped at Target before.

Anyway, my mate and I left in his car, and went around to Hungry Jacks, to get some lunch.

While we were in there, my mate called our other mate, to find out if he had the number for the courtesy bus of the club we were going to, and he did, so I keyed it into my phone.

We finished eating our lunch, and then my mate went back to my place, and we came in, and found some DVDs to watch.

While we were here, my mate called up the club to book the bus, and they told him that the bus bookings head their own number, so he got that, and then called them, and booked for the 2 of us to get picked up from his place later, and dropped at the club.

We finished at my place, grabbed the DVDs, and jumped in the car.

We headed back to his place, going to the bottleshop near his place on the way, and getting some grog.

We got back to his place, and started watching DVDs and drinking, I put the Styx DVD on first, because my mate said he didn't know them, but after I put on a couple of their well known songs, he realised he did know of them.

After that we watched about 2/3 of the Rush in Rio DVD, I skipped a few of the songs, so I could listen to more of the ones I wanted to hear.

Then I put in the second disk, and showed him the hidden video, from the 70s, and then we watched a bit of the documentary about the DVD.

My mate want in to have a shower, and I watched the scene from Trainspotting with Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" in the background.

After that we put on the Allman Brothers DVD that my mate has, and watched a couple of songs off that.

We were about to put some other DVD on, when the bus arrived, at 6.50pm, so we went and jumped in, and we were the only people on the bus, the guy drove us to the club.

We hung around out the front of the club for a few minutes, waiting for our other mate to arrive, from the bbq.

A few people from Target turned up, and we chatted to them, and eventually gave up waiting for our mate, and went into the club.

I was a bit pissed at that stage, after drinking about 5 cans of Bundy Dry and Lime, and a beer, and was worried they were not going to let me in, but I pulled myself together, and looked as sober as I could, and I got in to the club.

I waited around for a little while, and then decided to go and get a drink. I went to the bar, and I asked for a screwdriver, and the guy is like "What's a screwdriver?".

Here we go again, so I explained it, and he started making it. He then asked if it was a philips head, which I've heard used before to respond to a double, and I said that was fine, but he didn't know what he was on about, and it was just a single.

We found a table, and all sat down, and chatted, waiting for more people to turn up.

We gave up waiting, and my mate and I went and ordered, since other people had started ordering, and we had no idea where our mate was.

When we got back to the table, more people had arrived, and pinched our seats, so we dragged another table over, and put it on the end of the already quite long table.

Our mate eventually turned up, and went and ordered his dinner. While I waited for the food, I went and played the pokies, put a couple of bucks through, but didn't win anything.

I went back and sat and chatted, and then the food arrived, and we ate.

After dinner, we continued chatting for a while, and then we all moved away from the dining area, and went and sat near the dance floor.

They had these annoying pair playing music, they were'n't too bad, except there was no drums, and it was all midi backing, with the guy playing guitar (not too badly) over the top, but they were doing really bad songs.

I went and played the pokies again, and wasted $10.

I went back and sat down again after that, and continued chatting.

They played Nutbush City, and I got up to do it, because I was the only guy up there, not that any of the chicks were any good, but it's a chance for me to make a dick of myself, in a fun way.

They did some requests after that, and my mates starting being smart, and requesting songs that we thought they wouldn't do, and they didn't do all of them, but maybe 1/3 of them, including Sultans of Swing etc.

We sat down again, and had a few more drinks, and then I started feeling really tried.

At point it got so boring that people were cleaning out their wallets at the table.

I just wanted to sleep, I was really tired. It just seemed to drag on, and eventually we all left, a bit after midnight.

My mate had called his dad to come and pick us up, so everyone left, and it was just the 3 of us, waiting in the carpark, in the freezing cold, to get picked up.

My mate's dad turned up, and we piled in the car. First we dropped off our drummer mate at home, and then I got dropped at home, and assumedly my mate and his dad went home after that.

I came in, and sat on the computer for a while, mucking around with something to do with TiVo guide data, and then I went to bed.

I was lying in bed, and I could feel phlegm or something stuck in my throat, so I coughed it up, and then had to get up to spit it out.

While I was in the bathroom, I had a coughing fit, and ended up spewing from coughing too much.

I went back to bed after that, and managed to go to sleep.

I got up at about 9.30am.

I dragged myself out of bed, and went and sat on the computer for a while, I ended up having a shower at about 10.30am.

My mate (the drummer) arrived just as I was getting out of the shower, so I finished getting ready, and then we left, and we around to our other mate's place.

He bummed around for ages, and finally finished getting ready, and we left his place about 12.30pm.

I was starving, and so was my mate, so we drove around to McDonalds, and went through the drive through.

We ordered our meals, and then had to wait, because there was a hold up at the next window, to collect food.

We chatted to the chick working at the window for a while, but because of the logistics of a car at the drive through window, I couldn't even see her, so I couldn't speak directly to her.

My mate (who was driving) ran out of things to say after a little while, so then we just sat there in an uncomfortable silence until the car in front got their food and left, and we rushed to the next window.

We got our food, and left, and headed for the freeway.

We drove down the freeway, down the highway, into the city, and to Surry Hills. We couldn't find a park very close to the drum shop, ended up in a parking spot on a hill about 300m away, that took my mate 3 goes to park in.

We walked to the shop, and started looking around. We were in there for ages, before I gave up and asked someone to help us.

My mate wanted to look at the drum kit at the front, since the guy last night had told us that they could set it up with the Ziljian (sp?) set of titanium symbols my mate wanted.

The guy said he'd be with us in a minute, and we could look at the drum sticks until he was ready. We went and looked at the sticks, and waited.

They set the kit up, and he had a bash on it for a bit, it sounded pretty good, a ton better than the pile of shit kit he's got now.

He said he wanted it, I'd told him last night that I'd lend him the money for it, and he could pay me back, rather than getting a personal loan, and paying interest.

We didn't like the colour much though, and asked if it was in other colours, and the guy said they had a black set, in the boxes, good, we'll have that then.

They went and found it, checked it was all there etc, and then I went to pay.

They threw in one of the sets of sticks, which was pretty good.

I tried to pay with eftpos first, since it's easy to put my PIN in than to have to sign, but it didn't work, must be because the cost is over my daily limit or something.

I put it on credit instead, that worked, so I signed, and then we were set.

We asked if there was somewhere to park while loading up the car, instead of carrying the drum set to the car, they said we could just park out the front, on the road, while we loaded the car.

My mate walked back to his car, and my other mate and I moved the kit out on to the path to wait for him.

We chatted to the guy who served us while we waited, apparently he'd been on tour with some band, and was taking a break for a while, to work in the drum shop.

My mate turned up in his car, and we went about loading it up.

We got some stuff in the boot, but we ended up having to put the bass drum (with another drum in it, in the box) and a smaller drum box in the back of the car.

This ended up with my seat moved forward, and my drummer mate sitting in the back with one of the drum boxes on his lap the whole way home.

I'd wanted to go into Parramatta, to go to the full music shop, rather than just the drum shop, but now it was too late, Parramatta is the last place we want to be on a Friday night.

We headed for home, and stopped at a service station on the north shore on the way. My mate who was driving complained that he couldn't see out the back with the bass drum box there, so my mate jumped out, and I moved the box to the other side.

We kept going, and headed for the freeway. As we got close to the on ramp, some guy sitting in the back of a car hung out the window, going "great hair mate!" and giving me a thumbs up.

We got on the freeway, and headed for home. We got back to our mate's place, and we unloaded all the drums from the car, and carried them into his place.

We unpacked them all, and started assembling it, we spent about 20 inutes on it, but we really couldn't be bothered, and then when we realised we'd put the bass drum skin on sideways or upside down or something, we gave up, and decided to do it tomorrow.

My mate gave me a lift home, and on the way we stopped at the bottleshop, and I got a bottle of Riccadonna.

I got home, watched tv, drank the bottle, and spent some time modifying the TiVo install script, before going to bed.