I got up, got ready, and went to work.

I don't know what I did in the morning, something unremarkable.

We went for lunch, somewhere, and then went back to work, and I continued working on whatever unremarkable thing I was doing.

I got a phone call from home, a whole bunch of mail had been dumped in the mail box, and I was in a world of shit.

The main letters, were a letter to say that my license was going to be suspended for 3 months, or I could take a 1 year, 1 point license, (a "first and final notice"), a reminder that I'd not replied to the first letter (how is it a "first and final notice", if they've sent me a reminder? duh?), and the the result of my conviction.

Now I don't know what's going on. WTF do I have a choice of a 3 month ban/1 point license, when I'm supposed to be on a 6 month court ordered suspension. Hello?

Mum told me about the first letters, I was thinking I could be smart, elect to have a 1 point license, and then transfer it to NSW (though forgetting about the fact that I didn't have a physical license to transfer, since the police prosecutor took it).

Then she went through the other letter, the result of my conviction, which claimed that I had to pay a $500 fine (which was the first I'd heard of a fine, otherwise I would have paid it at the court, before I left), and went on to say that I had to hand in my license at a Queensland Transport office, or I'd be committing an offence.

Hello? they took it off me already.

WTF is going on here? A fine that no one said anything about before, and supposedly having a choice of a 3 month ban, or a 1 point license, when I'm on a court ordered suspension already. Don't these people know what they are doing??

It got even better from there, the fine had to be paid by the 6th of June, ie next Monday, or I have to go to jail for a month.

Terrific. I rang up Queensland Transport, to find out why they were asking me to choice what suspension I want, when I'm already on a court ordered suspension. Apparently they didn't know anything about the court ordered suspension.

Nice and organised. I then asked why I was having to make this choice, and they explained it was because of "accumulation of points". Here we go again, WTF points are they talking about? from the speeding fine? how can that be, I haven't paid it yet?

Obviously they work differently to NSW. I haven't paid the fine yet, I was waiting for the reminder, to argue about the rego plate details being wrong, but I never got it, and it went to SPUR, and obviously, up there, when it goes to SPUR, they treat it as accepted, by not even paying it.

Totally ridiculous, this means, that even if you want to go to court and argue, as I had been planning to, because I didn't pay it, they take it that I'm accepting it anyway, and would be suspending my license.

If I had been to choose the 1 point license, in order to keep my license, while I went to court to sort it out (if I'd not been suspended by the court), then they would have said by choosing the 1 point license, that I'd "admitted guilt" or something else, and not had a leg to stand on in court.

What a fucked system.

I told them that I would not be responding to the letters, since my license is already suspended (and if I had, who knows what will happen, perhaps their whole system will explode, because I have 2 suspensions on my license at the same time), and wanted to know that nothing would happen as a result of not responding.

I was told that nothing would happen, and then hung up on the person. I didn't want to speak to them anymore.

I called Mum back, and explained how disorganised they were, and what the story was.

I then called up Bundaberg courthouse, to find out where the hell this fine came from, which the magistrate had mentioned nothing about.

The woman asked me to wait, while she went and found the file. She told me that the magistrate wasn't their normal magistrate, he was just visiting, and that the fine details were written on the file.

I said that the magistrate had not mentioned it as part of the conviction, or I would have paid it right then and there, and get it over and done with.

She told me that I can get a transcript of the court room on the day.

Yeah, and I'm sure I'm going to get it in the next 3 days, and that if it's not in there, they're not just going to add it in there, by which time I've defaulted on my fine payment, and I got to jail.

I didn't bother to go into any of this, I just told the woman I couldn't be bothered, and hung up.

Yet again, what a fucked system. The magistrate definately did not mention the fine at the time, or I would have argued about the fact that it cost me nearly $2000 just to go to court on the day.

Maybe I should have gone to the minister about it.

I tried to call home, but the line was busy.

I got really pissed off. I must have almost had steam coming out of my ears at this point. Trying to think logically, to write code, just wasn't going to happen.

I went upstairs, to find out what was going on, and if we could go to the pub, because I really needed to drink something.

I waited around for a few minutes, and a couple of people asked me what was going on, because they could see I wasn't happy. I explained to the sysadmin, and the manager of royalty, how screwed over I was getting.

We left, and went to the pub. After a few drinks, I felt a little better.

I facetiously sent an SMS to my mate's ex gf, for dropping all the mail off at my place. If she'd done her usual trick, of hanging on to it forever, then I would have missed paying the fine, defaulted, and would be going to jail.

It's hard to convey sarcasm across SMS, or else some people aren't the brightest, and she immediately replied (for the first time ever, without it taking me 3 weeks to get in contact with her), with "no worries".

A whole bunch of guys from work came in, including a couple of guys who works closely with the minister. I hadn't met them before.

We chatted in the pub for ages, and then we all left. The senior DBA and I went back to the room briefly, and then we started heading to the club.

We got across the road, and the guys that work with the minister were waiting for a taxi, we chatted to them for a while, and one of the guys told me that they know I'm the blogger.

Ooh dear, my cover's up, I'm not as anonymous as I thought. He told me that the public relations people had come across the day I described when the minister and Bob Carr came to open the building.

I thought back to what I could remember writing on that day, probably it was the bit about me, wearing a hawaiian shirt, nearly bowled over the minister in the fire stairs.

I mentioned that, and the guy told me that they'd loved it, found it hilarous (not that action, my blog, and my description of the day).

We chatted a bit more, I was a bit distracted, worried about all the stuff I'd put in my blog, and if there was anything incriminating I'd have to go back and edit :-) (I haven't edited it, so if there is anything incriminating in this blog, it's still there).

They gave up waiting for a taxi eventually (useless taxi service in Maitland, there might as well not be one), and called for someone to come and pick them up.

The senior DBA and I left them, and walked down to the club, had dinner, a few more drinks, and then walked back to the pub, went to the room, and I went to bed.

I woke up at 5.50am, turned the alarm off, fell back asleep.

Was woken again at 6am, lay and listened to the news, then fell back asleep again.

I woke up again at 6.30am, realised I was probably going to be late getting ready. I dived out of bed, and into the shower.

I got ready, packed my laptop, and had a few minutes to have a piece of toast, and then the senior DBA turned up, about 7am.

I went down, chucked my stuff in the car, and we went.

We stopped off about 3/4 of the way to work, to get a coffee, because we were stuck behind some slow ass car on a one lane road.

I got my coffee, and drank it to quickly after getting it, and managed to burn my toungue. For a cheap and nasty coffee, it was better than the stuff I get from the cafe across the road, where you pay twice as much.

We got to work, and I went in, went to my desk. I setup my stuff, and did some work.

My phone rang about 10am, it was my drummer mate, I'd asked him to ring me, since I always forget to get organised.. he's been trying to get me to book some tickets to go and see "Southern Culture on the Skids" at the Gaelic Club for a few weeks now.

I couldn't hear him, because of the crap mobile reception in Maitland, so I called him back, and then went and booked 3 tickets, and a room in the Travelodge for the night. That was a stuff up, since only 2 adult rooms (ie 2 adults in a room) were available, not a 3 adult room, so the 3 of us will just have to pack in a room anyway.

I got off the phone, and printed out the receipts for the bookings, and went back to work.

I got called up about 11.45, the senior DBA was talking to the sysadmin, and they wanted to know about mail configuration, I told them that they needed to update the mailhost alias in DNS, and then I went back to work.

I went up at midday, to find out about going to lunch.

I spoke to the contract DBA, the annoying support guy was working on his laptop, and then it wouldn't reboot. We mucked around with it for a while, eventually getting it to reboot, after booting up in safe mode (disconnecting the usb hard drive he'd bought on the weekend), trying to defrag, having that crash.

We tried to run memtest86, but that just caused the laptop to reboot immediately. We gave up on that, managed to get windows to boot, ran a BIOS update, rebooted, and then it looked like it was working a bit better.

By then it was about 12.45pm. I'd gone up there 45 minutes before, to go out to lunch.

We went out, and walked down the street, and we went into the mall, to the bakery, and got pies.

I got a steak and kidney pie, I've had one of these before, we went and sat outside and ate them. The steak and kidney pie was gross, it had this huge chuck of something, with lots of fat on it, in the middle of the pie, I just ripped that out, and chucked back in the bag, and ate the rest of the pastry, and the few bits of meat left. I don't think I'll bother with those pies again.

We walked back to work after that, on the way we went into the pub, and checked into the pub for the week. When we got back to work, I was going back to my desk, the royalty manager was sitting under the stairs, talking to his wife (who also works there), they called me over, and we were invited around for dinner again this week, either on Tuesday or Thursday.

I said they'd have to sort it out with the senior DBA, since he drives me everywhere now, since I don't have a license. We chatted about the silly photos the senior DBA and little guy from royalty had done the other day, and then I went back to my desk.

I did another couple of hours work, until I got a call at about 4.20pm, the senior DBA wanted to leave. I'd had enough too, so I said I was just a few minutes behind. I finished up what I was working on, and then I went upstairs, and we left.

We drove down to the pub, grabbed our bags, and dropped them off in the pub. We sat in there for a while, and then went across to the pub. We found the support guy, and the old librarian in there. I had a couple of drinks.

I had a spare dollar, so I put it in the pokies, won nothing. I sat and chatted for ages. The social club guy turned up, and we chatted to him fo a while. He went back to work, because he had some stuff on eBay he was trying to win, and we arranged to go and get some noodles at about 8.30pm.

I sat around a bit more, had another drink, I wanted to play the pokies again, but at the same time I didn't.

I ended up putting another $5 through, I nearly won the feature. Then I found $10 in my wallet, and that went in. I didn't get anywhere there, but I could tell that the feature was going to activate.

I found another $10 in my wallet, and that went through, again, almost won. Now I had no cash left, after putting $26 through the pokies.

I went to the ATM, and pulled out more money, and then I went back, decided to go through another $20. I put it in a different one, wasted $10 of it. I took the other $10 out, went back to the pokie I'd been playing before, put $3 in it, bet 15 cents on one spin, and then $2 on the next spin.. the feature activated.

I won $41 something, I played a bit more, got it up to $44 something, I was going to take it at $45 or $40, it ended up going down to $40, then I went and got the bartender, and got a payout.

I sat and thought about it, and realised that I had to put $39 in, to win $40. Wow, I won a dollar, and risked losing $39. I don't think I'll play them much anymore.

The senior DBA had left a bit before, it had just been the support guy and I in there, playing the pokies, when I came back from getting my payout, the support guy was gone, so I went to find the senior DBA.

I went back to the pub, got my trench coat (it's getting cold in Maitland at night now), and then I hung around for a bit, waiting for the social club guy, since it's almost 8.30pm.

The senior DBA tried calling him, but he didn't answer his phone, so we started walking down to the noodle place, in case he was already down there. We got almost the whole way there, when the social club guy called back, said he was just coming out of the pub (where I'd been playing the pokies) now.

We went into the pub down there, near the noodle place, to wait for him. We were the only people in the pub. We got a couple of drinks, and sat down. I was about halfway through my drink, at about 8.45pm, when the social club guy got there. He got a drink, and then I realised the time, and I thought the noodle place closed at 9pm, so I finished my drink to make sure I could go and get some dinner.

We went to the noodle place, and I found the door locked. WTF? it's not even 9pm yet. I looked on the door, saw the opening hours, they are supposed to be open until 9.30pm. There were still people in there, but cleaning, they must have closed early.

The social club guy noticed a chick working in there attracting his attention, and pointing at the other door, which was open. Ah, they must have locked this one while cleaning or something. We went to the other door, in, and ordered our food.

We tried to work out what to do, I said we would probably be able to take it in the pub (where the senior DBA still was, because he hates noodles), since their kitchen was closed. The social club guy went back to ask, and I stood and waited.

I felt a bit like Dekkard (sp? Harrison Ford's character in Blade Runner), standing there in my trench coat, waiting for my noodles, especially since this place serves them in the little cardboard boxes with the wire handles.

The social club guy came back a couple of minutes later, and said it was fine for us to take our food in there, and it was served then, we grabbed it, and went back to the pub. We sat and ate, the social club guy had been in and got more of his chili corn.

If this is a medium, I'm glad I didn't get a hot, my mouth was on fire, and my nose was running. I finished eating, and got another drink.

The senior DBA took off, to go back to the room, and I sat and chatted to the social club guy for a while, until about 10pm, when the bartender had finished packing up every other table, and came and asked us to leave, because he was closing.

We left, and wandered back up the road, and then I went into the pub, to the room, and went to bed, a bit after 10pm.

I think I'll have to start on one of those "linux on Dell Inspiron" pages, to document how to get stuff working.

So far I've managed to get kernel 2.6.11.10 running, with X working, wireless networking with the ipw2200 (even for kismet use), sound, and compiled MPlayer (though the tivo support is broken).

I'll go through and document each of these things at some point.

I'm going to have to do it all over again I think, since I partitioned the disk too small, the 3gb /usr partition is constantly full, and I filled up /home last night, while trying to compile MPlayer.

I woke up at 7am, and the tv was still on. My drummer mate was sleeping in the chair, and my other mate wasn't there, assumedly he'd gone to bed.

I went to go to the loo, but my mate's dad was in there, so I just went back and lay on the lounge again, watching the tv.

My mate's dad came out, and the first thing he did was complain about the air conditioner still being on (heating), and turn it off.

My drummer mate woke up, and we chatted to our mate's dad for a bit.

We left, went and got in the car, and my mate dropped me at home.

I didn't go back to bed, I just sat and watched tv, and mucked around on my laptop.

The other day I decided to buy a 54Mbit Wireless Access Point, the WTR54g, so I browsed eBay, and found some guy selling them for $115.

I'd asked him what version they were, so I knew if I could run OpenWRT on it or not, and he'd gotten back to me, telling me they were version 2.2, which the experimental version of openWRT supports, so I bought one.

I was starving, had to find something to eat, I ended up making cheese on toast, but I had to use the smoked cheese I'd bougth for eating with crackers, and it stank.

I went and did the washing, and chatted to Mum for a bit, while I was in the laundry.

She told me they'd had a new kitchen put in, and to go and look. I went in, Dad was in there.

He asked if I was after a lift somewhere, I said no, that I'd been told to come and look at the kitchen.

He was there running power cables, and had put a loft ladder in, so they can stow crap in the roof cavity. I had a look at the kitchen, it's just the cupboards in so far, no plumbing, wiring, bench tops, tiles, anything like that.

I came back out, and sat on my laptop again. I did some blogging, and then I decided to tidy up a bit, because the place is turning into a bit of a bomb site again, because I just turn up for the weekend, and don't get around to tidying up.

I threw out the rubbish, and then I dragged the recycling garbage bin up from the driveway, and chucked out all the recycling stuff, stacks of empty cardboard boxes from frozen dinners, junk mail etc.

I took the bin back down, and then I decided I should start my bike, since it hasn't been run for ages, I came back up, got the key, and went down and started my bike.

I didn't want to sit on it, I'd be tempted to ride it. I let it run for a few minutes, it didn't sound too happy. The fuel in it is probably going septic, it's been in there so long.

I came back inside, got another reminder about my domain, tcpip.net.au expiring in a couple of months, and got around to moving my blog (which you've found, if you're reading this).

I was sitting around, and I got a call from my drummer mate, he told me he was on his way to my place, to pick me up.

While I waited, I ran webalizer across all the log files for my site, since I was mucking around with the content, I figured I'd run logs one last time for the domains I've let drop recently (or soon).

Now I'm at a loss.. I didn't put any more notes into this day. I have no idea where I went with my drummer mate, what we did on this Sunday night.

The only thing I do remember, is that at some point, when I was speaking to my guitarist mate, is that he asked what the first thing his dad did, when he came out this morning, if it was to complain about the air conditioner being on, and turn it off. Heh.

If I can remember what happened (the fact it's a Sunday night should remind me, but doesn't), then I'll update this day, but don't hold your breath. Whatever I did, I ended up getting home, and going to bed, since I woke up at home in the morning, to go back to work.

I'm trying to get organised..

tcpip.net.au is expiring in a month or two, and I'm not paying for a .au again, so I moved the blog.

I decided to run a last set of logs for another domain I had, that expired, and then I updated the ones for the new address.

When I looked through the referers, I found a stack of referrals from somethingawful.com. I wondered what was going on there, why my site would get linked to from there.

I found the page on the somethingawful forum (here, you might get some crud about it not being a "live thread", and have to look in the archives).

Basically, it's a thread about "hacking" google, by searching for stuff like "index of", and finding people's "hidden" files.

Whoop de do, someone found my directory of pictures of myself by doing it. Well, it's really hard to find /images/me. It's sort of named that way on purpose, so people know what it is. Oh, and if I was worried about people seeing them, then I'd hardly put them up on the web, would I?

I woke up, not sure what time, but around 10am I think.

I called the contract DBA, to remind him about the computer fair, that'd we'd been speaking about recently, because he wanted to get an external USB hard drive.

He told me that he was just getting there, so I said I'd speak to him later.

I got off the phone, and lay in bed for a minute, and then got up, put the tv on, and sat and watched it for a while.

A little while later, I got a call from the contract DBA, he told me that he'd managed to get a USB disk caddy, with a 200GB Maxtor disk, exactly what I was after, for using with my laptop, for about $200.

I asked if he could get me one too, but he told me that he'd got the last one. We chatted for a bit, and then I got off the phone.

I sat on the computer, browsing the net for a while, and at about midday, I got a call from my drummer mate.

We chatted for a while, and I said that I was really not in the mood to go around to our other mate's place today, but then said I would anyway.

I got off the phone, had some dry toast, since there was nothing else to eat in the place (and God knows how long that bread's been in the freezer).

I went and had a shower, and got ready, and then my drummer mate turned up, at about 1pm.

I packed up my laptop (since I'd put all my tab files on it, and a java app for using them), and grabbed my bass guitar.

We went and got in the car, and went to our mate's place, we sat and played for a while. My mate's dad went to the footy.

I mucked around on my laptop, since I'd managed to get the newer version of kismet going, I found a WLAN, with the ESSID of "v$X%7g9Cc)r@W1i74Ze35jb". It was encrypted though, so I couldn't connect. It had stacks of clients hanging off it too.

I packed up stuff, and got dropped at home, at 4.50pm.

I sat and watched tv, and did nothing, I didn't really have time to do anything, because my mate was coming to pick me up again, because we're going to the pub later, because someone from Target is leaving, or having a birthday or something.

I sat there, until my drummer mate called me, to let me know that he was on his wauy, and then he turned up at about 6pm. I grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels and some lemonade, and we went back to our mate's place.

I had a few drinks, and we sat and watched a Led Zeppelin DVD that my mate's got for a while.

After that, we walked to the pub, and had some drinks. The others (from Target) where already there, so we chatted to them.

I went and played the pokies, and broke even, so gave up.

We chatted for a while, more people turned up, and then we went out, and ordered dinner.

We sat and waited for that, and then it was served, and we ate, and chatted.

After dinner, a few of them wanted to smoke, so we went back in the section of the pub near the pokies, where we'd been before.

A little bit later, we went in to play pool, and have more drinks. We were there for quite a while, playing pool, running the jukebox, and drinking.

I couldn't believe how bad the pool playing was. I'd think that half these people had never played pool before. The table stayed open (nothing down) for about 20 shots, but then again, I was playing too, and I didn't manage to get anything down.

We had a couple of games, I bought a few rounds of drinks, and we ended up with a large collection of empty glasses, so I took them all back to the bar. The bartender jokingly asked if I wanted a rag (to tipe the counter), and a clean ashtray.

I ordered another drink, and the bottle of JD ran out, so he opened a new one, and put a full shot in it, so there was more than a standard shot in it.

I was waiting to tell the guy why I'd brought the glasses over, ie the fact I've been living in the pub, and spent every night in the pub for the last 3 months or so.

Before I got a chance to, I managed to knock my drink over, before I'd even drunk any of it. D'oh. The guy poured me another one, because I was still at the bar.

We left about midnight, when they closed, and I walked with my drummer mate, and guitarist mate, back to my guitarist mate's place.

We sat watching rage for quite a few hours. Some crap songs came on, like "Total Eclipse of the Heart", to which I recited the joke title, "Chocolate Eclairs Make me Fart", and then we sat there making fart noises during the whole song. Very mature behaviour.

We then had a discussion about the worst songs, and someone mentioned "Mungo Jerry", ie "The Pushbike Song", and "In the Summertime", and we sat there doing the "mmm, ch ch" noises for a bit.

About 20 minutes later, "In the Summertime" came on, on rage. I couldn't believe it. That stuff doesn't happen.

We watched for another 1/2 hour or so after that (well, I did, I don't know about the others), and then I fell asleep, on my mate's lounge, at about 4.30am or something.

I got up, went and got ready, packed my bag (since it's Friday, and we got to checkout again), and then went to work.

When I got to work, I knew the senior DBA wouldn't let me press the first floor button in the lift, so I tried to be a smartass, I ran up the stairs, and pressed the lift button to go up, on the first floor, thinking it would stop the lift anyway, I wasn't quick enough.

I dropped off my stuff at my desk, and then I went upstairs, and hung around for a little while. I explained why I'd gone up the stairs, and tried to be a smartass.

We decided to go for coffee, so we all went across the road, and got coffees, and then went back across the road.

This time I was able to press the first floor button in the lift, and when it got there, I got out, and the little guy from royalty followed me about, because he was busy telling me something, and he didn't realise that he was on the wrong floor.

I told him, but he wasn't listening, someone else in the left told him, then he realised, but they'd already pressed the door close button, and went without him.

He went up the stairs, and I went back to my desk. I setup my laptop, and spent a bit of time fiddling around with X, trying to get the proper drivers going, since I'd only managed to get the VESA drivers going so far.

I decided to update the BIOS, in case that's something to do with X not being able to identify the chipset.

Hmm, this'll be interesting.. I have no floppy drive, and I don't have windows on the laptop, so I'm going have a bit of difficulty updating the bios.

I googled around, and found other people in my situation, running linux without a floppy drive, and wanting to update the bios.

Apparently you can use a usb drive (like I tried before), to do the bios update. I needed to download a floppy image, which I did, from dell, I need to image a floppy disk, and then there's a way to copy the contents of the bios update floppy to the usb drive.

I didn't have any blank floppies, so I went up to the build room to find a couple. There were stacks of packs of 10, so I grabbed a pack. While I was looking in the cupboard, I spotted a USB floppy drive, for Dell even. D'oh.

I borrowed that, and went back down to my desk. As I came back down, someone was out setting up food in the common area, another morning tea?

I dropped off the stuff at my desk, spent a couple of minutes mucking around, and then went out to eat some of the food, and chat for a while.

I went back to my desk, imaged one of the floppies with the bootable floppy image/bios update.

I shut the laptop down, attached the USB floppy drive, put the disk in, booted up the laptop, brought up the boot menu, booted off the floppy, and updated the bios from A03 to A04.

I booted up again, and the bios update didn't make any change to the machine that I could see.

I mucked around, compiled a new kernel, managed to get kernel 2.6 running.

I went up to see the senior DBA, he'd told me that he had a spare laptop bag hanging around that I could have. I got the bag off him, nice, it's a Dell bag too.

While I was up there, the senior DBA told me that he and the little guy were mucking around.. they'd got a digital camera, and taken a photo of themselves, posing to look the same as a photo the manager of royalty has on his desk, of his 2 kids.

I helped them with it, setting up the print settings, so the picture would print out at the same size. We printed it, and then they found some tape, and stuck the printout over the glass in the frame of the photo on the manager's desk, when he was away from his desk.

He came back, and we waited around for quite a while, not noticing it. The little guy got impatient, and asked the manager where the photo of his kids had been taken, at which point he looked at it, and immediately cracked up laughing.

The senior DBA told me that he was still looking for the port replicator for the laptop he's got. The last time we saw it, was when the idiot "spatial expert" was trying to fit his acer laptop on to the dell port replicator.

We went and looked in the build room for it, in case it got shoved in there at some point. We went through all the boxes of junk, but couldn't find it.

There was stacks more stuff in here when we first moved up here, the annoying support guy must have been chucking it out or something.

I went back to my desk, with the laptop bag, and dropped it off down there, and then I came back up, and we worked out going to lunch.

We decided to go and get Thai, but since it's so far away (almost a kilometre away), the others wanted to drive down there. I would have been happy to walk, but I wasn't going to walk on ,my own, and get there 10 minutes after them, they would have already ordered by then.

We got in the royalty manager's car, (the royalty manager, his wife, the senior DBA, the little guy and I), and we drove down to the Thai place.

We parked, got out of the car, and I realised I had no cash. Oh D'oh. I walked all the up the mall to the shopping centre, went in, to the ATM, waited behind some chick, slowly getting her money out, and then I got my money out, and walked all the way back to the Thai restaurant.

When I got back, the others had sat down, at a 4 person table, hmm, thoughtful, so I grabbed a chair, and sat on the end of the table.

I grabbed a menu, worked out what I wanted, and then we all ordered. We chatted for a while, and they started serving the food.

The guy serving us wasn't actually sure what he was serving, so he thought that the little guy's dish was the one that I'd ordered, so he served it to me.

I started eating it (normally I would have waited, but a couple of others had been served, and started eating), and then they came out to serve the little guy, and that was when the stuffup was realised.

Since I'd already started eating the meal, the little guy didn't want it (fair enough), and reluncantly ate the meal that I'd ordered.

We finished eating, chatted, and then paid, and just as we were leaving, the sysadmin came in. Oops, no one invited him.

We went and got in the car, we couldn't go anywhere, because a couple of busses of school kids had turned up, were parked blocking the road, while all the kids got off and went into the gym.

We saw the comms support guy from work, he walked into the gym, and came out again about 10 seconds later.

He walked across towards us (not realising it was us in the car), and we opened the windows, and heckled him about having a quick workout. He said he wasn't going in there with all thise kids in there.

We continued waiting to get out of the parking spot, while we were waiting there, a car stopped in front of us, and the driver picked his nose, and then looked at it, and put it in his mouth, we were all revolted.

We eventually got out of the parking spot, on the road, and drove back to work.

I mucked around on my laptop, I downloaded the Intel drivers for the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200 (IPW2200). I compiled these, and installed them, along with the firmware, and got the wireless going.

For once something was easy, and the instructions didn't have anything wrong, or missing.

I then tried to get kismet working, so I could sniff for wireless networks. There's a debian package, which I installed, but it's old, and didn't support the IPW2200.

I then went and got the experimental version, or the cvs tarball or something, and started trying to compile that.

The senior DBA called me, and told me that he was wanting to leave now. I told him I just had to pack up, and he said he'd come down to see me.

I got off the phone, and started packing up my stuff. The senior DBA came to my desk, I finished, grabbed all my stuff, and we left, and went and got in the car.

We drove back, and the senior DBA dropped me at home. I sat and watched tv, and mucked around on my laptop.

There was no food in the house to make anything for dinner, and I couldn't be bothered drinking anything.

I sat around watching tv, and then went to bed at about 2am.

I got up, and got ready, I was feeling ok, considering the fair amount I drank last night.

I went to work, and about 1/2 hour after getting there, I felt a bit crook. I didn't know if it was the drinks last night, or perhaps the rissoles we had for lunch yesterday, that the manager of royalty thought were suspect.

I spent a little bit of time working on my laptop again.

At 10.30am, someone said that there was a morning tea on. I really didn't feel like going to eat whatever sugary junky food was out there, so I didn't go out there, since I was still feeling seedy.

I stayed wt my desk working, until about midday, when the little guy from royalty came down to my desk. He told me that he'd been told by quite a few people to go away, because they were sick of his mucking around.

He asked if I was going to lunch or what, I told him that I wasn't sure what was going on, and then I chatted for a bit, and he decided to leave, he told me that he'd been told to go home, because there was nothing useful he could do at work today.

He left, I did a bit more work, and then I went I went up to see what was going on, spoke to the senior DBA, and then we left the building, and walked down the road to go and get some lunch.

I went to the bakery in the mall, and then when we came out, we saw the contract DBA, so we sat with him, ate lunch, and we chatted.

After that, we walked back to work. We got in the lift, and the senior DBA wouldn't let me press the button for the first floor in the lift. I waited until he moved his hand (he'd been covering the button), and then I pressed it.

I got out at 1, and went back to my desk, and spent a bit of time trying to get the video drivers going on the laptop.

I finally got X to start, at about 5.50pm, and decided I'd had enough, so I locked up my laptop, and left work.

I walked down to the pub where I'm staying, past the pub we drink at. Just as I got near the room, the senior DBA called me, to find out where I was.

I told him, and then I waited in the room for a while, and the senior DBA and the support guy turned up a few minutes later.

I went down to the bar with the support guy. and had a beer, while we waited for the senior DBA.

Then we left the pub, and walked down to the club. We got drinks, I started drinking Tanquay (sp?) gin and tonics. We ordered dinner, and then I went and played the pokies, lost my money.

We had dinner, and then I went and played the pokies again, lost more money. I came out and sat with the others after that.

The support guy grabbed the newspapers in the bar, and found the quizzes. He'd had a few drinks, and was being a bit obnoxious.

There were a couple of pretty attractive chicks sitting at a table near us, and the support guy started calling one of them "Bernice", and asking if she wanted to do the quiz. The other chick got a bit weirded out, and went off somewhere, or outside.

We sat and did the quizzes, the chick had a go at answering some of the questions, and got them right.

After that, the other chick came back, and the two of them played pool. When they finished their game, the support guy asked them if they wanted to play against he and I, and they said they would.

We played a game, the support guy started doing his usual mucking around, pretending the pool cue is a guitar, and dancing around, wasting time before every shot.

After this went on for a while, one of the chicks started joining in, and before her go, she was pretending the pool cue was a microphone, and jumping around, exageratingly pretending to sing into it.

A few more shots later, the support guy was lining up a shot, stopped, and asked the chicks if they were `looking at his ass?`.

The chick who'd been pretending to sing laughed at that, the other one didn't find it too funny.

When we finished the game, (we beat the chicks, but only because the support guy had been getting all the balls down, my effort during the game had been pathetic, I kept putting the white ball down. This wasn't all bad though, it had the advantage of causing the chick playing after me to keep having to bend over to get the white ball), the chicks left.

I had a few more drinks, and then we decided to leave. We walked back to the pub we're staying at, the support guy came back with us. We had a chat in the room for a while, and then the support guy left.

We realised that the support guy had left his phone behind, nothing we could do about it now.

I went to bed, and went to sleep.

Ok, it worked.

Here's how I got X running on the Inspiron 2200:

Get kernel 2.4.30
compile it with agpgart as a module

get the source of X, I downloaded this.

The you need to make sure you have a few things, to install them on debian:

apt-get install libexpat1-dev libfreetype6-dev libpam0g-dev libpng2

After that, the normal "make World 2>&1 | tee world.log" should work.

Wait about 1/2 hour, to 45 minutes for the install to complete.

do "mv /usr/X11R6/lib/modules /usr/X11R6/lib/modules.old", then "make install".

Now you should be able to just "startx", or reboot, and have X come up.

Update: I just recompiled 2.6.11 again, since I wanted to try to get other things working, like sound, and hopefully the wlan, and after recompiling 2.6.11, and rebooting, X continued to work.

Another Update: I've realised this had X running with the vesa driver, and not in dri mode, so it was slow. When I tried to play gltron, it was hopeless.

I mucked around, ended up pulling the latest Xorg source tarball down, and the latest mesa and dri out of cvs. I built a new kernel, 2.6.11.11, then booted it, built and installed dri, for the kernel modules, and then mesa, and then I built X. After starting X, I couldn't get the direct rendering working still, but was getting about 400fps in vesa mode, rather than 250 that I had before.

I realised the next day that I had managed to get dri working.. the kernel was still trying to load the old dri module that I built with the kernel, instead of the dri one from xorg's cvs. I had to do a "depmod -a" to rebuild the modules dependencies, and now the newer drm/i915 driver are getting loaded.

Xorg now runs in direct mode, and gxgears gets about 1150 fps.

Ok. Now I'm just at a loss.

I've spent another day trying to get X working.

I gave up trying to get kernel 2.6 working, since 2.6.11 is not supported by the drm drivers, and neither 2.6.10 or 2.6.9 setup /dev/agpgart properly.

I went back to 2.4.30, and thought I was getting close. I've managed to get a /dev/agpgart setup.

I even finally managed to get /dev/dri/card0 to exist, for the first time.

Now, X still refuses to start, but I can't see why, it opens the card, looks happy. then complains that dri failed, and the laptop screen just goes off.

If I try to start it a couple more times, the whole thing will lockup.

I've gone to try compiling the source of Xorg again, which I didn't have any luck with the last couple of times I tried, since the binaries I've been trying to use are from February, and maybe they've fixed them up a bit in the last couple of months.

Ok, not having much luck compiling X.

First the config file failed to compile, this was because I needed "expat" or something (apt-get install libexpat1-dev), then it got a bit further, until I needed "libfreetype" (apt-get install libfreetype6-dev) for something to do with fonts to compile.

I got a bit further (eventually, since it restarts the whole compile when the restart it). Until I needed some other weird file, turned out I needed libpam0g (apt-get install libpam0g-dev).

Now I need png.h, so I guess I need to install libpng2 (apt-get install libpng2-dev), which needs libpng10-0, libpng10-dev, and libpng2-dev.

One more compilation try (since it takes about 1/2 hour before failing now), and I'm giving up, and going to the pub.

I got up, and got ready. I went with the senior DBA to work, we drove the long way to work, so the car had a chance to warm up for once.

I went to my desk, and spent some time trying to get X/linux working again. I tried compiling a new kernel, but had no luck.

I gave up, did some work. We went out for lunch, went to the cafe down the road, and a few of us had rissoles. They weren't great, I've had better ones from here.

After that, we went back to work.

Apparently the manager of royalty felt a bit crook when he got back from lunch, and was trying to blame the rissoles, but food poisoning doesn't come on that fast, and I didn't feel any worse than usual.

I spent more time trying to get X working, I thought perhaps it was something to do with the kernel. I'd found a newer snapshot of the DRI stuff than Intel offers, including kernel 2.6 support, which the Intel provided drivers don't have, so I tried using a 2.6 kernel.

I went through a whole bunch of different kernel versions, trying to find one where the DRI stuff would load properly. I must have tried almost every 2.6 kernel, and 2.6.9/2.6.10/2.6.11 a few times each.

It just seemed like the whole thing was broken. I couldn't get /dev/dri/card0 to exist, no matter what I tried.

I eventually gave up, and left work about 6.30pm, locking up my laptop at work.

I walked down to the club, and got a drink, went and played the pokies, and won $10.

I got more drinks, and played pool, and eventually ordered some food, which was served not long after, and I ate.

I sat and watched the footy, State of Origin. QLD one, thrashing NSW.

After the game, I had a few more drinks, the people who own the club were in there, and they were chatting to us, and shouting us drinks.

I had to leave before I got carried away with that, and left at about 11pm. I walked back to the pub, went to the room, and went to bed.

I am going insane.

I have spent the last 3 days trying to get linux installed on the laptop I bought recently, a Dell Inspiron 2200.

It is a complete pain in the arse.

First it took me a day to try to get the install process going. I was trying to boot the install off a usb memory thing, but it wouldn't have a bar of that. It would only boot if I accessed the device directly, without partitioning it, and then when it booted, it couldn't find the netinst iso on the device with it.

I gave up in the end, on Monday afternoon, and just burned it on a cd, and used that. Then I didn't partition the disk properly, ran out of space in the /usr partition, and after fiddling around for a while, gave up, and reinstalled, after repartitioning the disk.

The next fun is trying to get X working.

I've gone through umpteen different kernel versions. Neither the 2.4 or 2.6 debian kernel packages are new enough, neither supported the graphics chip properly, and the 2.6 one had major issues with samba.

I went back to the 2.4 latest from kernel.org, thought I was getting close. I found the drm drivers for the chip on intel's site, but can't get these to work, it always fails trying to load agpgart.

I then went and found the latest 2.6 from kernel.org, because I'd seen references in the changelog to support for the i915 chipset.

I got this, compiled it, installed it, and it looked like it might work, agpgart was coming up happily, and the drm stuff looks like it should work.

Of course the debian package for XFree86 is bloody old, so I went and got the latest one from XFree86.org, and installed that, but I'll be buggered if I can get that to work, keeps complaing about not being able to load the drm module or something.

I tried out the commercial drivers linked to on intel's page for the drivers for the chipset, "Snap" didn't support it, and the other one, "scix" or something I think it was, worked fine. But it's only a demo, only runs for 25 minutes at a time, and I'm not paying $150 for a driver.

When I investigated the dri/drm stuff more, I found that apparently XFree86 is being dumped in favour of Xorg.

I tried installing Xorg, (that was a saga in itself, with apt-get getting it's knickers in a knot), got a little bit closer (or so I thought), but now it's complaining that it can't load the agpgart kernel module.. in 2.6.11 agpgart is not a module, you either have it or you don't, in the kernel, so it's possibly part of the problem.

Another part of the problem, seems to be that the drm kernel modules is supposed to create /dev/dri/Card0 or something, however /dev/dri is empty, so Xorg/XFree86 can't interface to the kernel module.

It tries to fall back to VESA mode or something, but then that won't even start, perhaps because the screen modes aren't defined properly, but I can't find them documented anywhere.

Argh. WTF is going on?

I got up, got ready, and went to work.

I got the laptop out, and spent a little bit of time trying to get the video drivers working. I'd downloaded them from Intel, and discovered that they were just an old tarball of the cvs stuff that the DRI people put out, an old snapshot.

I found a newer one, and tried those, but still wasn't haven't any luck. On the Intel page, I noticed links to a couple of commercial drivers that were available for X, for this chipset.

I went and looked, and downloaded one of them, the other company that they linked to, I couldn't find the driver package for my chipset.

I installed the commercial drivers that I'd downloaded, and bang, X just started straight up. Hmm, it's only a demo of the drivers though, and after running for 25 minutes, X just died.

Ok, so that's the demo obviously, and I'm not paying hundreds of dollars for a video driver. I'll have to try to get the open source ones going.

I gave up wasting time on the laptop, and started doing some work. I worked until lunchtime, when the senior DBA called me, and told me a few of us were going to the pub for lunch, the pub we drink at, that's just finished renovating the kitchen.

I went up, and then we walked down the street, and went into the pub, 4 of us, the senior DBA, the manager of royalty, the little guy from royalty, and myself.

We sat down, and waited, for quite a while. The senior DBA went and bought us all drinks, I ordered a beer, I suspect we're going to be in here for a while.

A chick eventually came and gave us all menus, while the senior DBA was still getting the drinks. He came back, and we looked at the menu, worked out what we wanted, (there's not much that grabs my fancy anymore), and then waited to order. Waited to order. Waited to order.

Eventually the chick came back, and we ordered our meals. Now we waited, and waited, and waited.

I finished my beer. While I waited, I started reading the label on the beer. I noticed that the beer was 3 months out of date.

The power went out. Hmm, this is going to be good. I hope they don't have electrical appliances in the kitchen, we might be waiting even longer for our meals.

I went to get another beer, expecting it to be rather difficult, since the power was still off, and hence the cash register was off, so I'd not easily be able to pay. I told the woman that the beer was out of date, and suggested that she check the other beers.

She found that the one I had was the last one. Someone came in (who worked there), and said he'd just been across the street to check, and the whole street had no power.

The power came back on at that point. I got another beer, a different beer obivously, since there were no more of the one I'd just had left.

I went back in to the restaurant, the others had been served their meals. I waited, and the waitress came over, and told me that mine would be a bit longer, because they'd forgot to make it. Uhh, great.

I sat and drank my beer, while the others ate. I noticed that this beer was out of date too, only a month out though.

Eventually they came and served me my food, which wasn't great, somehow I think it's been cooked in the microwave, and this is supposed to be an italian restaurant.

I ate, finished my lunch, the others didn't even eat all theirs, and then we got the bill, paid, and left the pub.

On the way out, I bumped into the email guy. I asked him what was going on, if there'd been power issues at work. He told me that everything had gone off, and I started chatting to him.

The other's I'd been with, just left me, and kept going, so once I finished speaking to the email support guy, I walked back to work on my own.

I got back to work, went back to my desk, and found my machine turned off. Obviously it didn't come back when the power did. I booted it up again.

I did a bit of work, and then I had another go at getting the graphics drivers working on linux, on my laptop, to try to get X working.

I ended up staying at work until 7pm, trying to get X working, and then I gave up, locked up my laptop in the drawer, and left work. I walked back to the pub, went to the room. The senior DBA was in there, he'd been asleep.

We sat around for a bit, and then decided to go to the pub (where we'd got lunch). We went there, drank, I played the pokies.

A woman that works in CCB was there, we chatted to her for a bit. We decided to go to the club for dinner, and we left that pub, and walked to the club.

We had some drinks, and ordered dinner, waited, ate dinner.

We ended up sitting at the bar, talking to the bartender again, and the others left, it was just the senior DBA and I, sitting chatting to the bartender, and then we left the pub at 11pm.

We walked back to the pub, went to the room, and I went to bed.

I woke up at 5am, hearing a loud crash noise. I realised it was the alarm clock falling out of the bed. I got up, put it back on the bed, and went back to bed.

I was woken again at 5.50am, by the alarm going off. I should have left it on the floor. I hit the silence button, and fell asleep again.

I got woken again by the alarm going off again, at 6.10am. I put the radio on, listened to it for a bit, and then got up at 6.20am, and went and got in the shower.

I got dressed, and packed my stuff up, the rest of my bag etc.

I unplugged the access point, to avoid anyone attaching to it, since I don't have any protection on it, while I'm not here all week, and getting up to who knows what.

I then remembered some stuff I wanted to copy on to the laptop, Miranda, and my history file etc, so I plugged the access point in again, booted up the laptop, and copied the files across.

Just as I finished, the senior DBA turned up. I shut the laptop down, and packed it back in my bag, and unplugged the access point again.

I grabbed my trenchcoat, and my bag, and went and got in the car.

We drove to work, it was freezing.

I got to my desk, and set my laptop up. I had a spare network patch, from when I had a laptop here, a few months ago, so I was able to just plug in there.

I then had to work out how to get internet access on it. I didn't really want to have to work out how to get proxy settings with authentication in there, so I found squid for windows, and installed that on my work PC, then I configured it to allow my laptop to connect through it.

After that, I copied anything I could possibly want, from my laptop, to my work machine.

I then started to install debian. I decided I'd try to do a network install, but I had to find a way to bootstrap it.

Usually I'd just use the boot/root floppies, but my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, and I didn't order one, when am I ever going to need it? (oops, now :-)

I tried to see if there was a way to boot off a usb drive. There is, it's even in the debian documentation. I followed the instructions, which was quite difficult to start with, as I had to get the laptop booted up with linux, knoppix worked here, giving me access to usb, and the network.

I copied the required files onto the memory drive (after copying all the files I needed off it), and tried booting off it. No go, it was coming up telling me that it couldn't find some ISO. That's strange, I shouldn't need one, I thought the whole idea was that I was installing over the network.

I read the instructions again, and found that I did need an iso, there's a netinstall iso, that's 50mb. I downloaded that, and copied it on to the usb memory drive. I booted again, it still couldn't find the iso. Damn.

I gave up at this point, I'd wasted enough time, and I started doing some proper work. One of the indexers came over, and told me about a report he'd found, where the documents weren't being identified properly. I went and had a look, and found that my identification process was a bit broken, there were a few big bugs in the logic I hadn't noticed.

I rewrote the process, and fixed up all the bugs I could find, and got the identification working on the report that had been identified. I used that code to update the internal production interface.

After that, I wondered if it was something to do with the fact that the drive is not partitoned, and the raw device is formatted, that was causing the installer not to be able to see the iso. Apparently some BIOS' can have issues with that. I redid the whole thing, after partitioning the usb drive, and formatting the partition.

This didn't help, I couldn't even boot off it now. I tried fixing the MBR on the drive, but I still couldn't boot. I spent a little bit of time on this, and then gave up, and then went back to work.

I got a call from the sysadmin, he'd brough his tv up, and wanted a hand moving it in to his house. I told him I'd help him. I got off the phone, and went upstairs.

The sysadmin and the senior DBA were mucking around, trying to fill in their flexsheets. I sat and waited while they did that.

Eventually we left, I went with the senior DBA, in his car, while the sysadmin drove his car (full of the tv) to the place he's renting. We got there, and the senior DBA and I carried the huge tv inside, and put it down, near the aerial socket.

We left there, drove back to work, and then the sysadmin jumped in the senior DBA's car, and we drove off to get some lunch. We couldn't decide where to go for lunch, we ended up deciding to go to the pub near the station, to get some lunch.

We went there, went in, got drinks, went and ordered lunch, then we sat out the back and chatted.

Our lunch was served, and we sat and ate. The senior DBA ate hardly anything as usual, not even half a sandwich, and offered me the other half of the sandwich, I was hungry, so I ate it.

We waited for the sysadmin to finish his lunch, and then we left, and the senior DBA drove us back to work.

I hung around upstairs for a little while. While I was up there, I noticed that the little guy from royalty had left one of those bracelets made of those chalky candies, and a few of those chalky heart candies on the senior DBA's machine. Heh.

I went back to my desk, and I noticed that he'd left some of them on my machine too, heh. Maybe he's realised that he really annoyed me on Friday afternoon.

I got back to work, for about an hour, and then decided to have another go at getting the install working on my laptop.

I tried reformatting the usb drive again, more mucking around. I tried to setup the boot environment manually, rather than using the image, which required booting up knoppix quite a few times, to make a little change, which was really frustrating, only because of the amount of time knoppix takes to boot.

While I was there doing it, some people that work around me were wondering around the office with a thermometer, trying to find the temperature at different points in the office, since it's so bloody cold in here.

They eventually found that the coldest part of the office was my desk, putting the thermometer on the partition in front of me, under the airconditioning duct that blows freezing air on me all day, they found it to be 17.5 degrees.

I gave up trying to boot off the usb drive, this is just a waste of time. I deleted the partition I'd created, and formatted the raw device back like it was, and trashed the MBR off the device.

I grabbed the net install iso I'd already downloaded, and just burned it on to a blank CD I had in my drawer, and then booted off that.

It wasn't as fast to boot into the installer as it had been off the usb, but at least now I could see all the files.

I kicked off the install, partitioned the disk etc, and then waited for all the required deb files to download, and install.

The installation didn't complete, I found that I'd badly partitioned the disk, the mount points were far too small, and /usr filled up, and /var was pretty close to full.

I mucked around a bit, trying to get the install to fit, by removing some applications/packages I wouldn't need. It didn't help much.

The console was only 640x480, filling up about 1/4 of the screen, stuck in the middle, with huge borders around it. X wouldn't even start. I found the graphics drivers I needed, they needed the kernel source, so I tried to install that, but now it wouldn't fit in /usr.

I didn't bother mucking around anymore, trying to make it fit. I just gave up, and I restarted the install again. I repartitioned the disk, making the mount points a fair bit bigger, losing a few gb out of the biggest partition, which I'd formatted as fat32, so I could use it in both windows and linux, when I'm dual booting.

I ran the install through again, it was faster this time, because of squid running on my machine, I had all the deb files cached, and they ran across to the laptop as fast as my desktop machine could serve them.

The install finished happily this time, and I installed the kernel source. I grabbed the graphics drivers I needed, again, and tried to compile them, but they wouldn't compile.

I gave up. It was now after 7pm, and I'd had enough of this. I packed up my laptop, put it in my drawer, locked the drawer, and found a place on my desk to hide the key, since I didn't want to risk losing the key somewhere, and having to break into the drawer to get my laptop out.

I left work, and walked to the pub. I found the senior DBA, and we went and checked in. The guy behind the bar gave us the wrong keys, so we went back and swapped them, and then went up to the room, and dumped our stuff.

We went to the pub, and the social club guy was in there, we had a couple of drinks, and I played the pokies.

While I was in there, my phone rang. I answered it, could barely hear who was on there, I worked out that it was some woman from Dell calling me, about the ticket I logged about the keyboard.

Why are they ringing me at 8pm? The woman obviously hadn't read the ticket I logged, because all she seemed to know was that it was an issue with the keyboard, so I had to explain the whole thing, about the key spring breaking. She told me that someone would call me about it later.

I bummed around in the pub for a while, and then went to find the senior DBA, he'd wandered off somewhere. I found him, around the back, out of the carpark, talking to the chick from work, and her boyfriend, in a "new" (secondhand) car they've bought.

Hmm, the boyfriend can't afford to get his car fixed, and the chick can't afford to pay for the rego on her car, but they can afford to go and get a new car. I don't understand how that works.

They left, and then the senior DBA and I went back into the pub. We told the social club guy that we were planning to go down to the club to get some dinner.

We left the pub, and the senior DBA wanted to go back to the room in the pub. I couldn't be bothered waiting around for him, so the social club guy and I walked down to the club anyway.

I started looking at the menu, trying to work out what I wanted for dinner. While I was doing so, a beer on the table behind the social club guy got knocked over. I'm not sure what happened, it didn't look like the social club guy knocked it over, and he said he didn't, but we couldn't work out what had happened, so he just bought the guy a new beer anyway.

Before I ordered my food, someone pointed out that the kitchen is closed. WTF? last week they were telling us that the hours have changed, and now they are serving dinner on Mondays, this week we get told that no, the kitchen is closed, and Monday nights are the only time the kitchen is closed.

Bugger. What are we going to do for dinner? We couldn't go anywhere else, since the senior DBA will be coming down here, we have to wait for him. While we waited, the social club guy and I had a game of pool.

The senior DBA turned up, we explained that the kitchen was closed, and tried to work out what to do. Just as we were about to walk down the road, the support guy turned up. The senior DBA and the support guy stood around, wasting time, trying to work out what they were doing.

The senior DBA called the pub near the station, to find out if their restaurant was still open, but there was no answer, he gave up, and hung up.

I told them I was hungry, and going to get some dinner. The social club guy and I headed off down the street. We walked down to the kebab place, and got a couple of kebabs, and the social club guy got some of the chili corn he always buys when we're here.

We walked back to the club, and we sat and ate our kebabs, and had a couple of drinks.

We played pool again, and then ran the jukebox for a while.

We sat at the bar, the other bartender was on tonight (not the footballer), and he was trying to make up a drink, so he gave us all a drink. He described it as having Southern Comfort, Midori, and Coke in it. I asked him what he was calling it, "paint thinner"?

He told me that he wasn't sure of the name, but that was probably a good one for it. We had them, and it didn't taste like paint thinner, but it sure had the same effect (or so I imagine), I had a headache immediately.

He made another one after that, I wasn't game to touch it, it was Southern Comfort and Midori again, but with lemonade, and some soda water or something, it was supposed to be a "pine lime splice".

We left the club after that, at about midnight, and walked back to the pub. We all sat on the balcony for a while, and then the others decided to go for a walk. I couldn't be bothered, was tired, and I went to bed.

I was lying in bed, trying to get to sleep, when I heard the others came back. The senior DBA, the social club guy, and the support guy, all ended up in the room.

They were having some conversation that I really didn't want to know about, so I pulled the covers over my head, and didn't listen to them, and got to sleep.

I got up about 11am, and bummed around for a while. I watched some tv.

I wanted to get the disks I've got hanging around sorted out, so I put the SATA controller back in my AMD machine.

This wanted to be more hassle than it should have been, for some reason the disk attached to it didn't show up. I installed the drivers for it, in case it was something to do with the fact I might have reinstalled the SATA controller in a different slot than it used to be in.

This didn't help, even after a reboot, the drive still didn't show up. WTF's going on here?

I fiddled around a bit more, and rebooted again. I noticed that the machine was going straight from the BIOS post screen, to the windows boot screen. I wasn't seeing the SATA controller booting, and detecting the SATA disk attached.

I pulled the controller out, and put it in again, making sure it was seated properly, and tried booting the machine again, still no sign of the SATA controller boot screen.

I shut the machine down, pulled the controller out, and put it in a different slot. I booted the machine up, and saw the SATA controller boot. Hmm.

I shut the machine down, and put the controller back in the original slot, turned the machine on, and this time it came up. God knows what was going on there.

I copied some more recordings out of the tivo, on to the local disk.

I went and had a shower, and then I went and did the washing. I had some breakfast, now about 11am.

I heard my phone beep, a message, I checked it, it was a message from my drummer mate. Apparently we're not going to the lunchtime session of Star Wars now, we're going to the 7.30pm session, so my mate won't be around until later.

I bummed around on laptop, and while trying to configure something, I noticed the enter key sticking, which was really annoying, when I'd try to type something, and have the shell output scroll off the screen, because the enter was stuck down, pumping in newlines.

I pulled the key off, carefully, to see why it was sticking, in case the mechanism was stuck in some way. In the process off taking the key off, I broke the really flimsy plastic spring under the key.

Now the enter was stuffed, and wouldn't even go back on, it was just floating all around. I noticed that the left shift key was exactly the same size, so I carefully pulled that key off, and almost broke the plastic spring under it in the process.

I took the spring off the shift key, and fitted it to the enter key, and replaced the enter key on the keyboard, which held, but I wasn't really happy with, it's going to break again at some point.

I then tried putting the shift key back on, with the broken spring from the enter key, but this just wasn't going to happen.

I then decided to try to find a way to fix the spring, gluing something on, to repair the tiny bit of plastic that had come off. I found some model cement, and tried using it to glue some small bits of wire on to the spring, to fix the pivot, but this didn't work.

Model cement is no good for attaching metal to plastic. I remembered that I had some superglue, somewhere, looked for that, and found it.

I then glued the metal bits on again, and left the whole thing to sit for a few minutes. I was impressed, I managed to avoid gluing the whole thing to my fingers.

Once I thought it had dried, I tried putting the key back on. It almost worked, but the bits of wire I'd glued on were too long, and in making them fit, one of them came off the plastic.

I couldn't be bothered regluing the whole thing, so I just used the one bit that had stayed glued on. The key stayed in place, and was usable, but it was all wonky.

I decided to email Dell, and log a ticket, since the fault with the keyboard, the key sticking, had been there since it arrived. I mentioned that I broke the key, while trying to stop it sticking, rather than trying to make them believe that the key was already broken.

I don't care, even if I have to pay to get it fixed, though I'd be annoyed, I just want it right.

I bummed around more after that, my drummer mate called me, and told me that someone else was going to pick me up, his cousin, who's going out with my mate who works for ABC's sister.

The issue with this, is that he doesn't know where I live, and wants me to go to the school around the corner. I don't think I'll be doing that.

I bummed around more, and installed a few games on my laptop, and then I sat and played "Duke Nukem: Manhatten Project" for a little while.

At 6.40pm, I called the guy who was coming to pick me up, he asked me to go around to the school, but I told him how to get to my place.

He told me he'd be there about 7.20pm, to pick me up, and I got off the phone.

I went and got the washing in, off the line, it was damp. Bugger, should have got it in earlier.

I put up the clothesline, the 6 core wire I've got spare, and hung up the clothes.

I made dinner, and ate it (no idea what it was), and then went back to mucking around on the laptop. I installed Carmageddon (the original one), and tried to configure that, the sound support under XP is crud.

I managed to get it installed, and configured, the sound I did get working was a bit crap, and the video was really poor. For some really fast laptop, with a so called superduper video card in it, I wasn't really impressed, when trying to run a DOS game, that I think I used to run on a P166 quite nicely.

I'll blame windows.

A this my point my mate's cousin and his gf turned up, I went and got in the car, and we drove to Tuggerah. We went into the cinemas, and waited around.

We mate's cousin tried to call my mate, but he didn't answer his phone. He's probably left it in the car as usual, so maybe he's already here.

A minute later, I spotted him come in. He came over, and then we got our tickets of the guy, and paid him, he'd already been in this afternoon, and got the tickets then.

My mate's cousin's gf went to buy something at the snack bar, I went over too, and bought some chocolates, peanut M&Ms. Ridiculous amount I had to pay for them, $6 something.

We went in after that, found seats, and sat and watched the movie. It was alright, better than the first 2.

After that, we left, and went out the car park, I chatted with my mate for a little while, and then we all decided it was too cold to be standing around in the carpark at this time of night, so we got in our cars and left.

My mate went home, and his cousin and his gf dropped me at home.

I mucked around, and copied more stuff out of the tivo, and filled up the disk with recordings from the tivo.

I got a bit of stuff ready, started packing my bag, and then I went to bed.

I woke up, at about 9am, lay in, and ended up sleeping until 10.30am.

I got up, and put the tv on, and went back to bed, and watched tv for a while.

I ended up getting up again about midday, and then checked my email, and made some toast.

I got a phone call from my drummer mate, he was on his way. I went and had a shower, cleaning up all the dead ants that had fallen into the shower, after I sprayed them with bug spray last Monday.

I got dressed, and then made more toast, and my mate turned up. He paid me for the DVDs I ordered for him a few days ago, and then I grabbed my bass guitar, and we left.

When I went out the door, I noticed that my laptop had arrived at some point during the week, and the box was sitting inside the back door, groovy. Wish I'd noticed it last night though.

We went around to our mate's place, and we played the instruments until after 4pm, and then we left again.

We went to Coles on the way home, I got some food. While I was in there, I bumped into a guy I worked for, back in 1998/1999. I spoke to him for a little while.

I bought the food, and then we went to the bottleshop, and I got a bottle of JD, and a bottle of lemonade, rather than buying cans of JD and lemonade, premixed.

I came home, and then went and got the laptop, and unpacked it. It looks pretty cool.

The first thing I did was take the DVD drive out of the unit, to find the model number, so I could find a region free firmware for it, since most of my DVDs are region 1, not region 4, and I want to be able to watch them all, not be limited to changing the region 5 times.

When I put the model number in google, NEC ND6500A I think, I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a dual layer DVD burner, I wasn't expecting that.

I found the region free firmware for it, and downloaded that.

I put the drive back in the laptop, and then I booted up knoppix on the laptop, since I'm not intending to use windows on it.

I had issues with that, I couldn't get the drive recognised properly or something, or the network wouldn't work, there was some reason that I couldn't use knoppix, since it's an old version.

I tried a few more bootable disks, but I couldn't manage to find one that gave me working network, and hard drive access.

I gave up, pulled the hdd out of the laptop, found my 2.5" -> 3.5" ide adapter, and connected the drive to the machine I use for imaging disks for the tivo.

I started a backup, using dd to bzip the hard drive contents, over the network to a different machine.

While I waited for this, I made some dinner, and ate it, and watched some tv.

I ended up using the laptop anyway, booting up "dynebolic" on it, a bootable linux distro I've not been able to use before, because it's always been incompatible with the BIOS' in my other machines, and refuse to boot.

It didn't have any sound support, which was a bugger, but I was still able to sit and play some games on my laptop.

I ended up playing some bubble game for 70 minutes, while I waited for the disk that was backing up.

Eventually, after 2 1/2 hours, the backup of the disk finished. I shut the machines down, and I put the disk back in the laptop.

I set it up, I decided to very briefly accept the license agreement of windows, and use it, since I had no way to install linux, I should have been smart enough to download isos of the first few discs of debian, and burn them at work last week.

I tried to get the wireless working, this was a ridiculously difficult exercise. It wasn't the laptop that was the problem, it was my access point.

I've got 2, I haven't used them for ages, and I couldn't get either of them working properly. One of them has a pcmcia card in it, which I'd taken out to use in a laptop at some point, and because it's not labelled, I couldn't remember which way up it was supposed to go (and the socket in the AP isn't keyed, so it fits both ways).

I worked that out, got the unit running, with an ethernet link up. I couldn't see any DHCP requests from the unit though.

I fiddled around, and eventually discovered that I'd used a patch lead that was plugged into a 10mb hub, that didn't have a backbone link to the rest of the network.

I moved it to the switch, and restarted it, but still didn't see a DHCP request. I tried using the other AP at this point, it didn't work either.

I was starting to get a bit annoyed. I tried another cable at that point, and then had a bit of luck, and I saw a DHCP request. I tried to bring up the admin web interface, but it didn't want to respond.

I scanned for networks on the laptop anyway, and was able to connect to it, and get a proper configuration, unlike the "limited access network" rubbish I was getting before, when DHCP was failing to configure the laptop.

I mucked around on the laptop after that, not really doing anything useful, just having fun browsing wirelessly, and streaming mp3s from my other machines, wirelessly.

I drank the rest of the wine I opened yesterday, and then I copied a few games on to my laptop. I sat and played GTA, 3 I think, but the video was really poor, like something's wrong with the video drivers, it's slow.

I found my flash drive, and used the laptop to burn the isos to CD, of the new tivo images, I'll muck around with that later.

I went to bed, at 5am.

I got up, and got ready, had breakfast.

I had to go back in room, there were far too many people in the pub. What are all these people doing in my house?

I didn't think that last night was particularly busy either.

I packed my stuff, and then we left the pub, for another weekend, before we're back in again on Monday.

I senior DBA had parked his car over at the back of the carpark, near the road works going on, and when we got over there, the workers asked if we could hurry up and move the car, because they were trying to do some work.

We loaded our bags, and drove to work, I went in, and went to my desk. I'd just got to my desk, when I noticed my phone reboot.

Oh here we go, has the power stuffed up again? I went up to the computer room, and found that everything looked ok, the UPS were all online, but it looked like a few of the servers had rebooted, including the big IBM multiVM machine thing, which had hung while booting the kernel.

I couldn't get into any of the servers, since the domain admin account had been locked out again, and all the other servers, the email support guy had logged into, assumedly yesterday after everything rebooted, and locked them.

I got really annoyed, so I went for a walk, across the road, and got some juice, and then I went back to the building. I went to see who was in the IT area, no one really, so there was nothing we could do about servers.

I sat with the senior DBA for a bit, and did some work on a script he was trying to get working, for archiving data off to tape. We were having problems, when trying to move files into directories that didn't exist, and had to find a way to create the directory before moving the file.

The senior DBA wanted to just recursively copy all the files, which would create the directories, and then delete the originals, but I didn't like this idea, it's going to require twice as much space, and if it breaks, we have to start all over again.

I tried to find a way to get the path from a filename, using awk or something, but I need to be able to cut from the end of the string, and I can't find how to do that.

The little guy in royalty was being really annoying, he'd found 4 rulers, and stickytaped them all together, to make about a 1 metre ruler, and had slipped it under the partition, and was waving it back and forth, hitting our feet.

I stepped on it, and then used my foot to drag it out of his hand, under the partition.

I then told him that if he continued to annoy me, he would regret it. A minute or so later a soft rubber ball came over the partition, and hit me in the head. I was very close to going over there and dealing with it, but I was too busy trying to work out what I was doing.

The little guy came around, and asked for the rulers back. I told the little guy that the rulers had been confiscated, and he'd get them back at the end of school (taking the chance to bag him out about looking young).

He then tried to argue, that they weren't all his rulers, he'd taken them off other people's desks in royalty, and I told him that he should have thought about that before, and that it wasn't my problem, he'd have to explain to the other people in his group where their rulers had gone.

He gave up, and went back around to his desk. I pulled the 4 rulers apart again, and hid them in the cupboard, on top of the Oracle books.

I gave up trying to get any work done up here, and told the senior DBA I'd work on it downstairs, where I could get something done.

I went back to my desk, and kept working on it, I found a perl function to reverse the order of a string, and then I was able to use cut on it, to cut the last bit of the string off, the file, and then reverse it again, ie back to the correct way.

The senior DBA called me, and told me he was about just do it the long way, and I told him to wait 5 minutes, while I finished on the script.

I finished it up, did a test run, and found that it worked, but wasn't efficient, because files that we were trying to archive had been deleted already, so it was wasting time.

I then put a few more checks in there, to make sure the file still existed, and then I updated it on the server, and sent an email to the senior DBA, that he could run it.

I then got on to working on the stuff I'd been doing last night again, and sorted out the busted insert function stuff I'd done yesterday.

I got a call from the senior DBA, telling me that they were planning to go out to lunch, because the South African support guy is in for his last day today. I told him I was just in the middle of writing an email, and would be up there in a couple of minutes.

I finished writing the email, and sent it, and then I went upstairs, and found that there was no one there. Thanks for waiting guys.

I then left the building, and walked down the road, with the South African support guy, and a couple of others, and went to the pub.

We all lined up at the bar, waiting to get drinks. The senior DBA came from the ATM, pushed in, and then wasted time, having the bartender check if we were booked in for the room next week.

Gees, I'm trying to get a beer here. Eventually the bartender finished up, and I got served, and I got my beer.

We went to the restaurant section after that, and ordered lunches, and then we went and sat out the back, on the back verandah.

The food was served a little while later, and we sat and ate, and then stayed there for ages chatting.

The so called "Analyst Programmer" left, to go and get a haircut or something, and left his phone behind.

A while after that, after we'd been there for over an hour, the email support guy turned up, and had ordered food. We sat and waited even longer, and then once he had his food, and was about halfway through it, some of us left, because we'd been away from work for almost 2 hours.

On the way out of the pub, we bumped into the manager of royalty, who had only just managed to get there. He decided to just get some lunch somewhere else.

We walked back to work, and on the way the little guy was collecting leaves. Someone joked that he was collecting them to use as something to cover his privates, which then led to us joking that the ones he was collecting were a bit big.

He continued collecting junk as we walked back to work, including a few soft seed things, a ball about an inch across, that come off the trees all along the road.

We walked into the carpark at work, and the little guy dared me to throw one of the seed things at the director's window.

I didn't think there was anyway I'd be able to throw one of them that high up the building, and with good enough aim, so I tried, and was terribly surprised to see it shoot straight up there, bounce off the window, and fall down on someone's car parked under the window. LOL.

We went into the building, and I went upstairs. There wasn't anything useful going on, so I went back to my desk, to do some work.

While I worked, I downloaded the new tivo images that had been put up a couple of days ago, so I could test the updated script I'd done yesterday afternoon.

I worked while I waited for them to download. The senior DBA called me, and told me that he wanted to leave. I told him I would ready to leave in about 5 minutes, which was a bit of a fib, because there was 10 minutes left on the download.

I waited, frantically wishing it would hurry up, and then once the download was finished, I copied the images on to my 512MB memory thing, which took more time.

I was expecting the senior DBA to call again, and have a go at me for taking so long, since it was now about 15 minutes after he called, and I told him 5 minutes.

I packed up, and then I went upstairs. The senior DBA was still talking to the contract DBA. Eventually he decided to leave, and realised that he couldn't find his keys.

He knew he'd left his cigarettes and lighter at the pub, when we'd been there at lunch, so we found the phone number for the pub, and he called them, to find out if he'd left his keys there, but they hadn't seen them.

We looked all around, and had about 10 people looking, and after about 15 minutes, the little guy, who'd left, called the senior DBA, and told him that he had his keys, and we looked out the window, saw him sitting in the car, and he flashed the keys at us.

After his shenanigans of the last couple of days, I'd really had enough of him. The royalty manager had been helping us look, and when he found out what had been going on, he told us to tell the little guy that if he didn't pull his head in, then he'd be in trouble.

We left, went down to the carpark, the little guy had gone around, and left the keys, in a can of coffee ground, on the back of the senior DBA's car.

He waited in his car a length away, and when the senior DBA started to go over there, he started to drive away. He stopped, and we were able to speak to him, and I told him what the manager had said.

He didn't take me seriously, and I was at wits end, the last thing I want on a Friday afternoon, when I'm trying to get home, for those few hours a week, is to get stuck at work for longer than necessary, so I was beyond dealing with him, so rather than do something I would regret, I just got in the car.

The senior DBA finished talking to the little guy, and then got in the car, complaining about the coffee all over his keys.

We drove back, and I got dropped at home. I bummed around for a while, and went and got the mail, nothing interesting arrived this week.

I watched tv, found a bottle of wine in the fridge, the bottle I got to take to the restaurant for my mate's birthday last weekend I think it was, and drank that, and then I went to bed.

The senior DBA got up long before I usually do, and went and got ready. I ended up lying in my bed until about 7.30am, and then went and had a shower and got ready.

I left the pub, and walked down to the bank, and got some money out, since I had none, and then I went to the cafe, and got a cup of coffee, and walked to work.

On the way, I saw the royalty manager's kids, on their way to the bus stop. I got to work, and sat at my desk and finished my coffee.

I started working, and then realised my arm was really itchy. When I looked, it looked like I'd broken out in hives. Hmm, somehow I think the guy at the cafe might have not given me a soy latte, and I'm having some sort of a reaction to the dairy milk in the latte.

I went upstairs, and I paid back the senior DBA the $50 I'd borrowed off him last night. While I was there, the support guy paid me back the $10 I'd lent him.

The external application, MinView, was broken again. I sat with the sysadmin and the senior DBA, and we got it back running again.

I went back to my desk, and got to work. At 10.30am, someone said that morning tea was ready. I went out, there had been a stuffup. and 2 groups had bought food, so there was stacks of junk food.

They saved some of it, to have tomorrow, and then we ate as much as we could. I went back to my desk, and kept working.

I had a brief chat with the project manager, arranged a meeting for later this afternoon, and then I went back to work.

A little while later, I got a call from the senior DBA, he told me there was a social club lunch on, which they'd forgotten to invite me to.

I went out, and across to the bbq area. I grabbed a beer, and waited for the social club guy to finish cooking the bunch of sausages that were on the bbq at the moment.

The sysadmin came out, and I chatted with him, all the others were over, outside the carpark, smoking, and then they went back inside the building.

I had lunch, and chatted with the sysadmin for quite a while, and then I went back inside with the sysadmin, and upstairs. There wasn't much going on up there, so I went back to my desk.

I sat and did some work, and then I went into the meeting. I was in there for about an hour, and then I went back to my desk.

The aircon guy was wandering around the building, commented on the fact that my desk was freezing, and would adjust it.

I started going through some email, there was a stack of tivo related mails, stuff about the swap partition creation in the installer script. I started replying, and then the guy in Melbourne told me that I was replying to old stuff he'd already sorted, and asked for my phone number.

I replied, told him my number at work, he called and told me all the stuff that he'd found, and what he'd fixed. Basically, I'd screwed up, and not put the correct syntax into the install script, so he'd fixed that.

I realised a couple of other bugs while we were talking, relating to the DMA/byteswapping stuff, and we got those sorted, in theory.

After that, I finished going through the email, and then I left the building for the day.

I walked to the pub, and dropped off my stuff, and then I walked to the other pub. The old librarian and the support guy were in there, I sat and had a drink with them, and then I played the pokies, and won $10.

I had another drink, and we sat in the front room of the pub, now that it was too cold outside.

There were a couple of cute chicks in playing the pokies.

I sent an SMS to the senior DBA, to find out where he was, he replied, and said he would be there shortly.

He came in a little while later, and had a drink.

I decided to go and play the pokies again, and I went to the machine next to the one the chicks were playing. I lost $10, and then I gave up, and went back to the table, and sat and chatted.

I would have got another drink, but I had no money left.

The social club guy turned up, and we sat and chatted to him for a while. We all decided to go to the pub near the station, so we waited a couple of minutes, while the social club guy dropped off his bag in his room, and then we walked to the pub.

We got some drinks, and then we went in to order dinner. There was a tiny little chick working behind the counter in the restaurant area of the pub, the senior DBA quietly commented to me that the little guy in royalty would probably think that she was terrific.

I ordered last, the others went outside after they'd ordered. The chick asked me where we were planning to sit, and I said we'd probably sit in the bar, or outside or something.

She told me that if we were going to sit in the bar, that she'd have to give us a number, because she's not allowed in there. I figured that she must have been under 18, and the cook chick from out the back would be bringing us our meals in the bar.

I went out the back, and sat with the others, and then we realised it was too cold out there, so after they finished smoking, we went back into the restaurant, and sat at a table in there.

They came and served us our food, I got the wrong meal, I'd ordered a chicken fillet thing, and they served me a ginormous schnitzel. I ate it anyway, it was just more food than I had been after.

We all finished eating, and chatted for a while, and then we went back into the bar area again.

There was some chick in there, playing the guitar, accompanied by some guy playing the bongos.

We had more drinks, and left the pub at 9 something pm.

We walked back to the pub, went to the room, I went to bed, and put on my ipod, and went to sleep.

The usual.. got up, got ready, had breakfast.

I wanted to watch some tv, I usually watch the news headlines in the morning, and the reception was stuffed again, so I had to fiddle around to fix the aerial cable.

I walked to the cafe near the pub, this morning I was a bit later than yesterday, so they were already open. I got a coffee, while the senior DBA was off buying cigarettes from somewhere.

I went back to the car, the senior DBA was already there, and we drove to work, I was at work at 8.20am.

I continued rewriting the files, spent all morning on that, until I got a call from the senior DBA, he was going for lunch.

I went upstairs, to wait while people got organised, and we'd go to lunch. The new guy had to go to Orange for some training, and wasn't sure of the best way to get there from Maitland.

There should be a quicker way, than going down to Sydney, and then out west. We tried to find a map, or some directions to give him. I suggested he'd be better off not taking any of the advice from the three people that went on the last trip to Orange, since they managed to get lost both on the way there, and back, and added an hour on to the trip each time.

While we were there, the HR people from Orange were wandering around the building. I didn't have anything to do with them, since I'm not an employee of the Department, I'm a contractor.

We left, and walked down the street, we went to the mall, and into the shopping centre. There's a jeweller in there, so I went in, to find out about getting my watch fixed.

This was easy, as soon as I pulled the watch out of my pocket, the woman saw that the band had come off, and asked me if it was just the pin I needed to fix it. I told her that it was, and then she went over to find one.

I gave her the watch, and waited a couple of minutes while she found a pin the correct size, and put it in, fixing the watch.

The pin was $3, so I paid, and then left. The others were waiting out the front, and then we went around to the bakery, and got pies.

We went over to the service desk in Kmart, and asked if they had SIM cards. They told us that they do, they sell them from the section where the CDs and stuff are.

We decided to eat our lunch first, so we went outside, and found a seat in the mall. We ate our lunch, and then we went back into the shopping centre, into Kmart, and went to the CD section.

The senior DBA asked about a SIM card, and the staff said they'd have to find one, so we wandered around and looked at the DVDs while we waited.

The senior DBA went back to the counter, and I kept looking through the DVDs, with the guy from royalty.

He got his SIM card, and then we left, and started walking back to work.

We went into the pub on the way back to work, expecting the old librarian to be in there. He was in there, so we gave him the SIM card that we'd just bought for him.

He didn't have the phone, so we couldn't put it in for him, we told him that we'd sort it out later.

We went back to work, and I hung around upstairs for a little while.

The sysadmin told me that he was having problems with his flexsheet, this stupid application they've built in excel, that autocalculates people's holidays and flextime.

He'd moved it, since the network drive had been reorganised, and now the stupid thing was failing to open the data file, because it's got an absolute reference to the data file in the spreadsheet.

We tried to edit the settings of the flexsheet, but it's a protected sheet, and we don't know what the password is. I thought perhaps it was stored in one of the macros, but they were all protected and passworded too. Useless.

Eventually we worked out how to get it working, we recreated the original directory structure, and moved the files back where they came from, and it started working again.

I had suggested finding an unused copy of the application, since it must setup the path to the data file the first time you run it, and then replace the empty data file with the valid one, but the sysadmin couldn't remember where he got the application from.

I went back to my desk, and back to work, and continued working until the senior DBA called me to tell me he was leaving. I said I was working on a file, and I'd probably go when I finished that, and find him later.

I finished recoding the file I was working on, to find that it didn't work properly. I then went through to try to find where I'd stuffed up the coding.

I thought I found it, and made a few changes, but it still didn't work. I was scratching my head at that one, and kept going back and forth between making code changes, and testing it.

I then realised what I was doing wrong.. I was changing the code in one file, and uploading a different file to the server. As soon as I realised that, I uploaded the file I'd been changing, and then everything started working.

Now I created another problem though.. the function I was working on had to select a record from one table, insert it into another, and delete it from the original table.

My code wasn't exactly right, the select worked, but the insert failed, and then the delete worked, so I'd inadvertantly lost a record.

I still had all the details on screen, from the failed insert statement, so I was able to restore the record, by fixing the statement, and running it manually.

After this, I decided it was a good time to leave work, since I wasn't really working very well, it was about 5.30pm.

I walked down to the pub, and went to the room, and dropped off my stuff, then I walked across to the pub, to see who was in there. There were a few people from work in there, so I got a drink and sat down.

I wasn't there for very long, and I noticed that someone had been using paint thinner (there's renovations going on at this pub), and it was making me lightheaded. If I'd known that, I wouldn't have bothered to get a drink, and just would have sat here, inhaling deeply.

I couldn't handle much more of that, so I went out of there. I saw the chick from work, with her boyfriend on his push bike. Bugger, I should have stayed inside longer, and I could have avoided them.

I waited around for a few minutes, and all the rest of the people I was in the pub with came out, and then we walked down to the club.

We had drinks in there, and then I found that the ATM was out of order, so I couldn't get any more money.

I was about to go across the road, to the shopping centre, to get some money from the ATM in there, when the senior DBA told me that he had enough cash, and he'd lend me $50 until tomorrow.

I ordered dinner, bangers and mash, and paid extra for a bread roll with it.

We played pool while we waited for our dinner, and then it was served. A couple of times I reminded the guy about my bread roll, but I didn't get one.

We played pool again after that, and then the senior DBA left. I stayed in there with a couple of other people, and had a couple more drinks. I was about to leave, when the support guy asked to borrow $20.

I asked him if it was for a drink or something, because I thought he might be going to waste it in the pokies, but he told me it was to get a taxi home. I fished around, and found that I only had $10 left, so I gave that to him.

I left the pub about 9.55pm, walked back to the pub, and went to bed.

I got up, and got ready as usual. I decided to get a coffee from the cafe, where I got the coffee yesterday.

We walked over there, but they didn't open until 8am or something, so we had to wait around for 5 minutes or so for them to open.

I got my coffee, and then we got in the car, and went to work.

We got to work, and I went upstairs for a bit. The annoying support guy was making some huge issue about the South Afican support guy, that we saw in the pub yesterday. Apparently he didn't come back to work yesterday afternoon.

It was probably something with a reasonable explanation though, his wife has just had a baby, and there could have been some issue with his baby or wife, and he might have had to take off.

I spoke to the annoying support guy for a bit, and then while I was there, a big guy from the titles group came and said he wanted to have a chat with me.

I finished talking to the annoying support guy, and then I went and found the big guy, and chatted to him. He wanted to know about making a web page, and was telling me that he wanted to use it to expose a dodgy builder he's been ripped off by lately.

I chatted to him, explaining about the general idea of making a web page, and what he should be doing, after that, I went to my desk.

I started doing some work, and then I got stuck at one point, so I went through the output of the script I'd let run last night.

There were quite a few good hits in there, machines with thousands of mp3s on them. I ended up finding about 16GB worth of mp3s. I sent the list of machines to a couple of people upstairs, so they could go and collect any music they wanted.

Some of the files were on machines that were at different sites, (since the WAN is fairly transparent), which made accessing them a bit slow, so I copied most of the stuff I found to my machine.

I went back to working on code, while eating the lollies I bought at the lolly factory the other day.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he'd brought in an old mobile phone, to give to the old librarian, and wanted to know what he had to do to clean it up, internally.

I said I'd come and have a look, since I've mucked around in Nokia phones a little bit.

I went up there, he'd found a little kit of tools, and it had the correct bits for getting the torx screws out of the phone.

I went about dissassembling the rest of the phone, pulling all the boards out, taking it all apart, cleaning all the dust out, with an old toothbrush that was hanging around.

I cleaned all the PCB contacts under the buttons, they were looking a bit dull.

The bottom of the phone was a bit damaged, where it had been dropped, and 2 of the threads, little copper bits, in plastic, were snapped away from the rest of the frame. I found some superglue, and I fixed those.

I put the phone back together after that, and it was sort of working, but there was still problems with the screen, it kept going off.

I took the phone apart again, one of the bits I'd glued came away, and I must have got superglue in the thread, because I couldn't unscrew the screw.

I left that, and kept working, pulling the whole phone apart again. This time I took the screen off the PCB, something I'd avoided doing before, because of the fragility of the connections on most LCD screens.

When I pulled the screen off the PCB, I found that the contacts were all green and corroded. I carefully scratched the corrosion off, with my fingernail, getting it all shiny again. I put the whole phone back together again.

The phone was much better now, and all the buttons were working perfectly.


The contract DBA asked me about external hard drives. I told him that I didn't know very much about them, but suggested that he buy one from the computer fair, since they're a lot cheaper than buying one from a shop, and then worked out when the next fair was.

After that, we decided to go and get some lunch. It was raining fairly heavily, so we decided to drive to get some lunch. The manager of royalty, and the little guy from
royalty, and the senior DBA and I got in the senior DBA's car, and we drove over to East Maitland.

On the way over there, the manager of royalty noticed that the sunroof or something is leaking, since there was a damp spot on the roof of the car, above the door.

I thought we were supposed to be going to some schmick bakery, but then we ended up just going to the sandwich place near the RTA, where we'd been for lunch before, while we were waiting for the guy in royalty to sort out his license or something.

I wasn't too wrapped, I didn't think the food here was great. I got lunch anyway, and we sat and ate, while it continued raining.

On the way back, we went to the service station, because the senior DBA had the mechanic order a replacement wheel stud, for the one that got lost a few weeks ago, and it had arrived.

We went to get it fitted, and the mechanic found that it was totally wrong, and didn't even fit, but that was all he could get.

The car had wider tyres on it than it was supposed to have too, and they kept catching on the wheel hub guards. The mechanic suggested getting the correct width tyres fitted, to avoid that.

We left there, and drove to the tyre place that the mechanic suggested, and the senior DBA arranged to get new tyres on his car, they'd do it this afternoon.

We drove back to the office after that, and the little guy from royalty and I stayed at work, while the manager of royalty drove back to the tyre place in his car, while the senior DBA did the same, so the senior DBA could leave his car to get new tyres, and the manager would bring him back to work.

I went back to my desk, and continued working, until my machine came up and claimed "network cable unplugged". I waited a couple of minutes, annoyed, because all my ssh sessions to the servers were stuffed now.

I noticed my phone constantly rebooting, there's something wrong with DHCP I assume. I went upstairs to find out what the hell was going on. I went into the computer room, expecting to find a few people in there, either trying to work out what's going on, or having caused it, or trying to fix it.

There was only one guy in there, some guy from forestry. I asked him what was going on, he said he didn't know, but it was something to do with the UPS, and all the servers had rebooted.

I then went to investigate the UPS', and I found that one had gone into fault mode. I checked the breakers, and found that the 3rd unit had tripped it's internal isolation breaker for some reason, I put that back off, to put it back in use, and it held.

I then went to find out what the status of the UPS was. I read through the manual, to work out what I had to do. I tried running a diagnostic on the unit, but you need to enter a password to do that, and I couldn't find it written anywhere, and have no idea what it is.

While I was in there, the email support guy came in, to sort out the servers that had all just been hard rebooted. I told him I was trying to work out what the UPS problem was, and that he was right to fix the servers.

I then decided to just try rebooting the unit, so I went through the shutdown procedures, changing all the breaker configuration behind the front panel, waited a minute, and then started it up again, putting all the breakers back to the original configuration.

I forced the unit/inverter to go back online, it had to get back in sync with the other 2 units. After that, I forced the other 2 units to go online, so that everything would be in sync. It looked like it was sorting itself out.

The email support guy had finished getting things back in order, and had gone back out of the computer room.

I went back to my desk, and continued on the work I'd been doing about an hour before, before the UPS crapped itself for no apparent reason.

At about 5pm, I got a call from the senior DBA, he told me he was leaving for the day. I said I'd leave too, and meet him out the front. I finished up, and went out to the front of the building.

The senior DBA hadn't come out of the building yet, so I just waited near the car. The contract DBA and the woman from the mailroom came out, and they got in the contract DBA's car, and left.

I waited, and eventually the senior DBA turned up, we got in the car, and drove down the road to the pub.

We went in, I dropped off my stuff, and then we hung around in there for a little while, before we went across to the other pub.

The old librarian was in there, so the senior DBA gave him the mobile phone I'd fixed up for him this morning. We didn't have a SIM card for it, we'd have to get that sorted out yet.

We got some drinks, and then I played the pokies, and we had a chat for a good while, before we started to leave.

I thought the old librarian had left his jacket behind, so we went to find him, he hadn't got far, just to the loos, so when he came out, I told him about his jacket, he thanked us for reminding him, because it was his, and he had forgotten about it.

The senior DBA and I walked down to the pub near the station, and went it. It was really smoky in there, yuck,

The woman who owns the pub was sitting at the bar, we had a quick chat to her, and she told us it was only 2 weeks until the house will be ready.

She then told us a great long story about her online banking, how someone else had set it up for her, and then it had got locked out for some reason.

She'd tried to get it unlocked, but she couldn't, because she wasn't the person who set the online access up. She asked the person who set it up to call up, but they couldn't get it unlocked, because they weren't the account holder.

It was totally ridiculous. Typical bank.

We had some drinks, and then noticed the guy from CCB was sitting in there, so we went over, and chatted to him for a bit.

I had no cash, and wanted to get the next round, so I had to get some cash. I went over, and asked for $60, like I usually get out, but the woman working behind the bar told me that I could only get $50 out.

I know I've got more than that out before, but I couldn't be bothered arguing, and it only made $10 difference.

We decided to go and get some dinner, so we went in, ordered, and paid, and then came back to the bar.

We got served, sat and ate. After that I put a couple of dollars in the pokies, and I won $10. I had them give me the money (payouts are disabled on these machines, you can't even get $1 out).

We finished our drinks, and then we decided to go to the club, so we walked there.

The new guy was in there, we chatted to him, and played pool for a while. We ran the jukebox, and ended up leaving the club at about 9.30pm.

We went back to the pub, and then I went to bed. I couldn't get to sleep, so I lay there with my ipod on, until about midnight, when I finally got to sleep.

I woke up, I was having an asthma attack, there was no ventolin.

I got up, I heard Dad leaving. I went and had a shower, there were millions of ants in the shower for some reason, they were all over the top of the door, and around the top of the shower.

I noticed a small gap in the sealer around the top of the shower, and they seemed to be coming in and out of there, they must all be in the wall or something.

I grabbed some bug spray, and sprayed them all, and the gaps in the sealer.

I had a shower, and then when I got out, my phone rang. I came out of the bathroom, found the phone, answered it. It was the senior DBA. He wanted to tell me that he was going to be there early this morning, because he'd had a better run of traffic that usual.

I got dressed, and then checked my email. I found I had a whole bunch of new email, but 70 of them were spam.

I was having a really hard time breathing, I need some ventolin or something. I went in to the bathroom, and I used the nebuliser. I didn't have any ventolin nebules to put in it though, all I had was saline, which I really doubted was going to do anything, but perhaps the damp air would help.

It didn't do anything, was a waste of time. I checked, and now the senior DBA was there, so I grabbed my bag, and went and got in the car.

I just sat there, not having a good time, trying to breathe. I almost fell asleep in the car, I was trying to slow my body down so much, so that I could handle the small amount of air that I was getting.

We got to work, and I just sat there. I had to wait until after 9am or so, when the chemist would open, so I could go and get a new ventolin inhaler.

I thought I should probably go to the doctor, and get a prescription for some preventer medication, instead of just using ventolin like I have been, but to do that, I need a medicare card, and I never got one, when I applied for one last year.

I looked on the medicare website, to find if there was an office nearby, so I could reapply for a card, there was one, in a shopping centre down the road, but it doesn't open until 9am.

I tried to do some work, filling in time until 9am. After 9am, I slowly walked down the road, and I went to the chemist. I bought a new ventolin, came out, and took a few puffs from it.

I could breathe again. I walked down the road, looking for the medicare office. I looked in a shopping centre, where I thought it was, but I was wrong. It must be in the other shopping centre I thought.

I went in there, found the medicare office. I waited, went to the counter. I spoke to a woman working in there, explained that I'd applied for a card last year, but that it never turned up.

She told me I'd have to report it as lost, and apply for a reissue. This annoyed me a bit, since I didn't lose it, they did, but then again, maybe it got sent to QLD, and my mate's ex gf, who keeps screwing up my mail lost it, so I didn't argue.

I went over to the counter at the side, found a form to request reissue of a lost medicare card, and filled it in.

I got in the line again, waited, and spoke to a different woman. When she pulled up my record, she noticed the date, and told me that they'd had an issue with the card supply last year, and a whole bunch of card requests got lost. Great backup system they must have.

I showed her my ID, tried to get away with using my expired NSW license, but she didn't accept that, so I had to show her a couple of credit cards.


I told her that I thought there might have been some sort of a problem with mail, and briefly explained my issue with QLD transport mail, and losing my license, also to explain why I was trying to use an expired license as ID.

She gave me a print out, receipt thing, which is valid as a temporary card for a couple of weeks, until the proper one arrives in the mail.

I left. As I walked through the shopping centre, something smelled pretty good, like something baked.

I went over to the bakery, but I couldn't see anything really nice there. I decided to go into Woolworths, to see if they had anything nice in their bakery section, but they didn't.

I was about to give up, when I noticed a baker's delight shop near the other bakery, that I'd gone to first. I had a look there, and a date scone looked pretty nice, so I got one of those, and then walked back to work, eating it on the way.

I got back to the main road, and decided to go and get a coffee from the cafe here, I went in, got a coffee, and drank it walking the rest of the way back to work.

It was a terrific coffee, I don't remember the last time I had a good coffee, unlike that shit they serve across the road from work.

I got back to the office, and went upstairs to find out what was going on. I spent a little bit of time up there, and someone mentioned something about music, and mp3 files, and sharing them.

I suggested searching the network for mp3s on people's machines. After that, I went back to my desk, and I sat and wrote a shell script to generate a batch file to run on my windows machine, that mounted people's hard drives, searched them for music, and logged it all in a file.

I kicked it off running, and then I went back to work, recoding more files.

At about 12.45pm, I got a call from the senior DBA, he told me that they'd forgotten to invite me when they'd gone out for lunch. I said I'd be down there in a minute.

I checked the script, realised there was something wrong with it, and killed it off, I'll look at it again later.

I left the building, and started walking down the road. About halfway to the where the senior DBA and the others were, I bumped into the manager of royalty, and his wife.

I chatted to them for a bit, and then I continued to the place the others were.

I got there, found them already eating, so I went in and ordered some lunch. By the time I got served, they'd all finished eating. I ate my lunch, the senior DBA went into a clothes shop near the shopping centre, and bought himself a jacket.

When I finished eating, we all walked back to work. On the way back, we went into the pub, and checked into the room for the night.


The South African support guy was in the pub, we chatted to him for a bit, while we sorted out the room, paying, getting keys etc.

We went back to work, and I went upstairs and hung around for a while. I went back to my desk, fixed the mp3 scanning script, and set it off running again.

I went back to work, and continued coding.

At about 4pm, my phone rang, the sysadmin wanted some help to move some furniture into the house he's renting near work. The senior DBA and I agreed to go and help him, so I went upstairs, and then we all left work.

I went with the senior DBA to the sysadmin's place, and then we helped him move in a few bits and pieces he'd brought up, like a rug, and a couple of chairs.

After that, the senior DBA and I came back near work, parked at the pub, and went up to the room.

We sat in there for a bit, and then went for a walk while the senior DBA had a smoke.

After that, I finally went into the music shop, that I've been trying to go into for a couple of months.

I had a look around in there, for an acoustic bass, the guy had one, which he handed me. It seemed pretty nice.

It would want to be.. it's $600. I told the guy I'd think about it, and then we left.

We went into the pub nearby, to see if the old librarian was in there, but he wasn't. We had a drink, and then I went and wasted a little bit of money in the pokies.

I went back and sat outside again, and then another guy from work turned up. I chatted to him, and then I went back to the pub, where we're staying, the senior DBA had already gone back there.

I waited a bit in there, and then we walked down to the pub near the station. We had a drink, played a game of pool, and then ordered dinner.

After that, we sat at the bar, and chatted while we waited, and then we were served our dinner at the bar, and we ate.

The sysadmin came in, so then he went and ordered some dinner, and was served after we'd finished eating.

He sat at the bar and ate his dinner, while we watched the tv.

We had a few more drinks, and then we ran the jukebox for a while. We decided to leave the pub at about 9.45pm, so the sysadmin gave us a lift back up the road to the pub we're staying at.

I went to bed at about 9.55pm.

I woke up, about 9am, got up, and sat around.

I was absolutely starving, I had another, closer look, to see if there was any food in the place.

I found a tin of spaghetti in the cupboard. God knows when I bought that, oh well, it's in a tin, I can't find an expiry on it, that must mean that it never expires, good enough for me.

I heated the spaghetti in the microwave, and then ate the spaghetti (it's about 5 weeks later, and I'm still alive, they must have been ok).

I went to put my washing on, and found that the washing machine was full, someone else doing the washing, bugger.

I went back out, and sat and watched tv. I got a call from my drummer mate, around 1pm.

It was the usual, arranged to go around to our mate's place, to play the instruments.

I got ready, and then my mated picked me up, we went around to our other mate's place.

We went in, his dad let us in, and then he got up. We started playing, there was a soccer match going on in the stadium near our mate's place.

Apparently our mate who'd won the money on the pokies was going to it, along with our mate that works for the ABC, he called my mate, and he chatted for a while, we were trying to work out of we could see them sitting in the stand, but we couldn't.

We played the instruments until about 4.30pm or so.

I had a splitting headache.

We left, and on the way home, my mate went to Coles.

I got some bread, cheese, and juice, so I wouldn't die of starvation.

I forget to get panadol too, which I really needed.

I went home, ate cheese sandwiches, and drank juice.

I noticed that I still had some of those crappy cold tablets I bought a few weeks ago (most of them actually), and I noticed that they contain codeine and paracetamol. That's got to be as good as panadol, so I took a couple of those.

I sat around, and watched tv, thinking I'd have an early night, since I have to get up early to go back to work tomorrow.

I got a call from my mate who lives in Newcastle, he was down visiting our mate, whose wife left him, and he wanted to know if I wanted to go to the movies. I told him I wasn't really interested, since the only thing worth watching is HHGTTG, which I saw last week, and there's still the issue of having to get up early in the morning.

I got off the phone, and went back to watching tv. A litle while later, I got another call, my mate's had decided not to go to the movies, had got a DVD instead, and they wanted to know if I wanted to go around there for a while.

I said that was fine, and I went back to watching tv, and waited for them to turn up.

About 20 minutes later, When they got here, I went down and jumped in the car.

We drove to the supermarket, my mate went to go to the bottle shop to get some drinks, but on his way over there, he realised that he hadn't signed his credit card (he'd had it replaced recently).

I would have just asked for a pen in the bottle shop, and signed the card there, but he thought that would look suspect. He came back to the car, looking for a pen, couldn't find one, so we had to go all the way back to his house, so he could get a pen, and sign his card.

While he was inside, signing his card, my other mate (from Newcastle)'s phone rang, he got out of the car, and wandered around, speaking to someone.

My mate came out of the house, and my other mate got back in the car, and we went back to the supermarket again.

My mate went into the bottle shop, and my other mate and I went into the supermarket. He bought some fruit, I didn't need anything, so just hung around.

Our mate came back from the bottleshop, and then since he only had a 6 pack, we decided to go over and get some stuff, while he got a pack of cigarettes.

My mate grabbed the grog off our other mate, and then the 2 of us went over to the bottleshop. We went in, my mate not realising he was taking the grog my mate had just bought, back in.

I grabbed a 4 pack of JD and lemonade (that'll do me for the night), and while I'm here, a new bottle of Contreau.

My mate grabbed a longneck of beer, and then we went to the checkout.

I paid for my stuff, and it was at that point that my mate realised he'd brought the grog back in, so we had to explain to the guy at the counter that we'd already paid for it.

He took our workd for it, and let us leave, after my mate paid for his beer.

We went back to the car, our mate was already back there, after buying his cigarettes, we jumped in, and told him the story about the grog he'd bought.

We drove around to the video shop, my mate went in, and I sat in the car with my other mate (from Newcastle), and chatted, while we waited.

While my mate was in hiring the DVDs, his phone, which he'd left in the car, started ringing. My mate (since he was sitting in the front) grabbed it, to take in to our mate.

He ran in to the shop, and gave him the phone, then came back out, and took my mate's wallet, which he'd left in the car with his phone, in to the shop to give to our mate, so he could pay for the rentals.

I sat in the car and waited, and then both of them came and got back in the car. We drove to the pizza place, they'd already ordered pizzas, and my mate (from Newcastle) went in and collected the pizzas.

While he was in there, my other mate told me that our mate thought I was pissed off with him for some reason.

Well, I am a little bit, I'm still really annoyed with him for wrecking my bike, while drink riding, specifically after I only lent it to him on the condition that he didn't do anything stupid.

While I haven't said anything to him about it (which could be part of it), he's picking up on a vibe obviously. I just brushed it off, saying that I wasn't a very sociable person lately, with all the stuff with my license, and getting stuck having to live in Maitland.

Our other mate came back with the pizzas, got in the car, and we drove back to our mate's place.

I grabbed some of it, and helped carry it all inside, then we sat in front of the tv, had a drink, and ate the pizza.

My mate put the DVD on, and we started watching it. I can't remember what movie it was.

My mate's dog started barking his head off, for no apparent reason, and then my mate yelled "Shut the fuck up!" at the top of his lungs, and immediately after, someone knocked on the door.

My mate opened it, it's our mate, the guy who works for his dad, who owns the aircon business.

My mate went outside to speak to him, I just sat and spoke to my other mate, still sitting inside.

A few minutes later, both of us went outside, because my mate wanted to smoke.

I chatted with our mate, who'd just turned up. We ended up siting out there for ages.

While we were out there, my mate's guitar was out there, so he played it a bit, and then I grabbed it, and played a little bit of bass, difficult on an accoustic guitar.

I had more drinks. While I was sitting there, my watch fell off my wrist. I realised the pin had come out of the watch again. I felt around for it, but couldn't find it. At least I could find the little metal cover, that goes between the band and the watch.

I put it in my pocket, and kept drinking and chatting.

It was getting a bit late now, and our mate that had turned up wanted to go home, so I decided to get a lift back with him, I went in and grabbed the bottle of Contreau, and then we got in the car, and my mate dropped me home.

We chatted in the car for a little while, once we got back, because we rarely see each other these days, and then I went in, and sat around at home for a while.

I realised I needed my clothes, the ones I tried to wash this morning. I went inside, and grabbed them. I'm not sure if they've been washed, I think they have, but there's nothing I can do about that now, since I have to pack my bag to go back to work.

I found my 512mb memory drive, copied all the music off it (that I'd filled it up with at work), and then filled it up again, with music from home.

After that I packed my bag, and went to bed.

Saturday morning..

As I've done the last few Saturdays, I dragged myself out of bed at some point, probably around 10.30am, and then sat around.

There was absolutely nothing to eat in the place.

While I was sitting around doing nothing, my mate, the drummer, called me up, to find out what I was doing, I told him the truth, that I was doing nothing, since I was literally doing nothing.

He asked if I wanted to go and do something, and I said I was happy to do anything.

He said he'd come and get me in a little while. I then started doing something, I went and had a shower, and got ready.

My mate turned up, and I went and got in the car. We drove out to Erina, went to the music shop where I bought my bass amp, and we looked at the drum kit.

We're trying to work out how to mount the drums on the new drum kit that I bought for my mate properly, since it doesn't look right, but the drum kit they had, had totally different hardware.

We spent a little bit of time browsing around, I've been thinking of getting another bass, a slightly more expensive one than the one I've got now, and maybe a small practice amp, perhaps to take to Maitland, so I can play the guitar during the week.

I looked around, and decided that I'd buy the stuff once I was actually living in Maitland.

We left there, and walked next door, into the bottle shop. We had to find something to get for our mate (the lead guitarist), since it was his birthday a few days ago (on Thursday), and we're going out to dinner for it tonight.

We looked around, and eventually decided to get our mate a bottle of "42 below", which is a vodka, made in New Zealand, that's 42 percent alcohol, and made 42 degrees below the equator.

I found a bottle of wine (eventually), to take with me to the restaurant tonight. This place was hopeless, almost every bottle of wine had preservative 220 in it.

We paid for the grog, and then left. My mate wasn't too interested in having lunch, but I told him that I was starving, and wanted to go to the pub across the road to get some lunch.

We went over there, and got some lunch, I had fish and chips, and my mate just got some wedges.

We got a drink, and went and sat outside, drank, and then got the food, ate, chatted.

We left there, and my mate was going to drop me at home, but we decided to stop in at our mate's place on the way, to speak to his dad (since our mate was working today), to find out exactly where the restaurant was, since all we knew, was that it was "at Terrigal".

We stopped in, sppoke to our mate's dad, he explained where the restaurant was, and then we left, and my mate dropped me at home, and then he went home (assumedly).

I sat and watched tv for a while, and then I went inside, and collected the mail that had arrived during the week.

There were a couple of letters, the first was the fine, that Mum had called me about, I looked at that, but already knew all about it, and the fact I was screwed, even though the rego details were totally wrong (my mate's car, not my bike), it would have cosat me $2000 to go to court to argue it.

The next letter, was from Sydney City Motorcycles, where I bought my bike. The headline on the letter was "We want your bike!". I immediately thought "well you can fucking well have it!".

It crapped on about upgrading your bike, trading in etc. Well, I'd trade it in, but it's a bit hard to take it 100km for them to look at it, and buy it off me.

The other mail that had arrived, was a postpak, I opened it, it was the watches I'd bought off ebay the other day, to replace my watch, which had fallen apart.

I sat and fiddled with the watches. They're both silver, analogue watches. One has crystals to mark the 3/6/9/12 hour positions, and a dial around the outside, with minutes or something marked on it, and it comes with 4 different coloured dials.

The other is a bigger, chunkier silver watch, with a fixed dial.

I put the silver dial on to the other watch, rather than the red/blue one it came with on, and while I was doing that, the band came off the watch face, at one end of the band.

I managed to put that back on, I just had to put the pin back in.

I got a message on my phone, from my drummer mate, he said he was leaving his place at 4.30pm and would come and pick me up.

I waited around, and a bit before 5pm my mate turned up.

He came in, told me that he didn't know what was going on, because no one had rang him, and no one was answering their phones.

We sat and listened to music for a while, and I looked at the website of the restaurant we were going to, to see if it was BYO wine or anything.

By the look of the menu, it wasn't, and it looked bloody expensive too.

We eventually left my place, about 6pm I think, and went to the place where my mate who works at ABC's sister's boyfriend lives at (who's also the cousin of my drummer mate).

We parked there, went into the house. We had a quick chat, and I met the guy who's been living in there, the guy who burnt out their kitchen a few weeks ago.

It jogged my memory, and on my way out, I stuck my head into the kitchen, and saw that the burnt cupboards had now been ripped out.

The guy's parents were there, I haven't met them before, we usually only go around there when they are out, and we're having a party or something.

About 6.30pm, we jumped in the car, my mate who works at ABC's sister's car, her, her boyfriend, my mate and I.

The guy's gf gave us her ipod, it had a great long cable running from it to the stereo, this was probably better than the itrip.

I put some music on, and we started driving to the restaurant. Along the way, we went over a couple of bumps, and it would cause the ipod to pause. This was a bit weird I thought.

(I asked her about it a couple of weeks later, and she explained that it was to do with the cable coming out of the headphone jack a little bit, and causing the ipod to pause).

We got to the restaurant, about 7pm, maybe a bit earlier, and went into the carpark. My mate and his family had just got there, in front of us (they'd just got out of the car), and had taken the last car spot.

I told the guy to just park them in, since we'll be going at the same time, but he wouldn't do it, so I got out of the car, and the others mucked around going back out of the carpark, to find a spot on the street.

I'd taken the bottle of grog for my mate with me (I didn't bring the wine, since I couldn't drink it here), and then went into the restaurant.

I sat down at the table, gave the vodka to my mate, and explained that it was from our mate (the drummer) and I.

The others came in, they'd found a parking spot, and sat down at the table. There were 10 of us at the table.

We looked at the menus, looked like a bloody expensive place, ordered some starters, which we eventually got.

My mate who works at ABC's sister picked out the wine that she wanted, I said I'd go halves with her.

While we sat and waited for the wine, and starters, her boyfriend told us about how he'd won $2800 on the pokies the other week.

Apparently he'd been playing the dollar machines, and had one free spins, and it came up with 5 of the high paying things in a row, and won $2500 from that, and about $300 with the rest of the free spins.

He told us that he was going to go on a holiday with it.

We were brought out the starters, ate them, kept chatting, and then ordered our mains.

We chatted while we waited for those, and were eventually served.

The serves were tiny, for something I'm paying $30 for.

I ate all the meal, and then when we were all finished, we got the bill. No one got a desert, because the prices were ridiculous, a 350mL bottle of Cognac (sp?) was about $80.

I estimated that the bill would be about $500, and when it came out, it was $504.25. We should have run a pool on it.

We decided to pay $50 each, but our drummer mate piked out, saying that he'd only had his main meal, and one beer, so he was only going to pay $35, and did.

At this point I realised I had no cash on me, so I got him to lend me $50, so that I could pay for mine.

We paid, (they didn't work out who hadn't paid their $50), and then we went outside, and chatted for a while, this was about 9pm I think.

I decided that I'd go with my mate (the guitarist), rather than my drummer mate, since it got me closer to home, if I had to get a taxi to get back.

The other 3 I'd come with left, and I went with my guitarist mate, jumped in his mum's car, along with his mum, stepdad, dad.

We drove to the leagues club, and went into the carpark, and drove around looking for a parking spot.

I suggested that we park underneath, which most people think is staff parking, but they just continued driving up, looking for a spot.

Eventually, after getting right up to the roof, finding no spots available, and making our way back down, someone left, and we drove up the wrong way, and into the spot.

We went into the club, and immediately everyone went in a different direction. I went and got a drink, and then wandered around, looking for the others, but I couldn't find anyone.

I gave up, and started playing the pokies, that was a waste of time and money. I went up and looked in the pool room, in case they'd gone up there, but they hadn't.

I went back down, wandered around, and then ended up wasting more money in the pokies.

My mate's dad came up to me, asked me where the others were, and I told him that I had no idea, he hadn't been able to find them either.

He told me that he was leaving, going to walk home, and when (if) I found the others, to let them know.

I went looking around again, and eventually found my mate, in the bar near the noise room, with a few people he works with.

I sat down, and didn't really join in with their conversation, since it was about Target, where I don't work.

I had a couple of drinks, and then the others wandered off, and it just ended up being my mate and I sitting there, waiting for the others to come back.

They didn't so we gave up, and went back out to the pokies. I had another 3 drinks, and we played the pokies.

I wasted more money, ended up winning the feature on one pokie a few times, and pretty much ended up with my money back.

I decided to go home at midnight, so I went out, and got a taxi home. The taxi went past my mate, walking home.

I got home, about midnight, paid the fare, and when I got out of the taxi, I dropped more change on the road. I'm getting good at that.

I went inside, watched tv, and went to sleep.

I got up late, I was really tired. I went and had a shower and got ready.

The little guy from royalty turned up, and the senior DBA let him in. I had breakfast while the little guy looked around, since he hasn't been in the pub before.

Once we were ready, we grabbed all our stuff, bags etc, and left, and loaded up the car. Another Friday, going home.

We went to work, when we got there, we grabbed our bags out of the car again, and went inside. I went to my desk, and sat and rewrote another file, to avoid code duplication.

I spent a little bit of time mucking around with itunes, there's a new version or something.

One of the indexers came to me about a file on a CD, one of the archive images.

I sat and tried to work out what the story was. It was a JPEG file, but with a TIFF header in the file.

I eventually worked out what I had to do to fix it, how many bytes I had to strip off the front of the file, and fixed the file.

I inadvertantly opened the image, and for some dumb reason jpg files are associated with Internet Exploder, so it launched, tried to display a 20mb jpeg file, and promptly caused my machine to hang.

As soon as IE popped up, I tried to abort it, and kill the process, but I wasn't fast enough.

I sighed. I rebooted the machine.

Luckily this time I had saved my work before mucking around with the stupid files, so I didn't lose any work.

I continued working, and then got a call about lunch, I said I'd be ready in a bit. I was just finishing up coding a file, when the others came down.

We left for lunch, we all got in the royalty manager's car, and went for a drive. The first place we went was a lolly factory at East Maitland. They sell to the public, and they sell the seconds too. I bought a big bag of mixed lollies, and a big bag of aniseed rings.

The others bought jelly beans and stuff, we left, got back in the car.

We were going to go to Hungry Jacks for lunch, but it was closed, so we went to McDonalds near the shopping centre instead.

We had lunch, and then we left. As I was putting the rubbish in the bin, the little guy from royalty was being smart, and said "why don't you just put the tray in there?" so I did. heh.

We got in the car, and left, and drove back to the service station, were the senior DBA's car was in for a service.

He'd asked the mechanic to replace a wheel stud that had got lost a little while ago, but the one that Merc had sent was totally wrong.

I got in the car with the senior DBA, and we drove back to work.

I sat and worked, I finished off writing a function to delete records from a table, with an undelete function.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he wanted to leave, so I got off the phone, packed up all my stuff, and went upstairs.

We left, went down to the car, loaded our bags up.

On the trip back, the left side of the bonnet wasn't shut properly, and was lifting a little bit as we went on the freeway.

When we got back to my place, the senior DBA got out and fixed it, and then kept driving.

I got to the door, and I realised I didn't have my keys. Hmm. Either I didn't take them with me this week, ie I locked myself out on Monday morning, or I've lost my keys.

I wasn't sure if there was anyone home, so I dumped my stuff near the door, and went back down the stairs, to prepare to climb up on to the balcony.

Just as I was about to, Mum came out the side door, and asked me what I was doing. I explained that I didn't have my keys (and I didn't think she had any anyway, Dad has them, as far as I know, and he's not here).

She said there was a key. I came back up, and Mum tried to open the door, but the key wouldn't work, so she thought it was the wrong one.

I said it was right, but that the lock is all stuffed, and the key doesn't go in properly, you have to jiggle it all around.

I took the key, managed to force it into the barrel, and opened the door.

I dumped all my stuff inside, and sat down. I just sat there for a while. Then I made a drink, and sat and watched tv.

I just sat there, drinking, staring at the tv, until about 9pm, when I decided to make some dinner. There was bugger all food left, I found some frozen chips, so I shoved them in the oven, and waited.

My mate, whose wife left him recently, called me, wanting to know if I wanted to go around to his place. I said I wouldn't mind, but that it's a bit difficult to get there, since I'm not riding my bike, while on a court ordered ban.

He said he'd come and pick me up in a little while.

I ate my chips, and then waited around, and my mate turned up. I went to his place, and we sat and had a couple of drinks, and a chat.

About 11pm, my mate's sister gave us a lift down to the club (she was going down there anyway, and hadn't been drinking). We went in, to the pool room, and sat around for a while.

A couple of guys my mate works with were there, so he played pool with them. I played against his sister.

After that, she went off to wander around, or dance or something, so I went over to the table with my mate, and his workmates.

I chatted with them for a while, and ended up playing against both the guys.

My mate's sister had come back, and was playing pool on a different table with a pretty good looking chick.

We finished our game, I played against one of my mate's workmate's sons, and only just beat him.

After that, the guy that runs the pool room came over and asked if we were going to play another game. We told him that we were finished, and he then announced that it was last games.

We sat around a little bit more, and then moved downstairs.

We tried to find somewhere to sit, my mate wanted to sit somewhere that he could smoke.

We went and sat in the TAB area, as soon as we sat down, a couple of security blokes came in, and asked us to move out of there, because they wanted to close that area, and when I rolled my eyes, they said "I'll bet you just sat down too?".

We moved out of there, and found a table, but it was near the noise room, and trying to have a conversation was a waste of time.

We decided to go and sit back near the stairs, even though it was a no smoking area.

We moved back, found a table, sat down, and started chatting. I was sitting with my mate, and one of the people he works with.

My mate had put his cigarettes and lighter on the table, and a couple of minutes after sitting down, a security woman came along, and told us that we couldn't smoke there, that it was a no smoking area.

My mate told her that he was not smoking, and she said that she realised that, and was just telling us not to smoke. Well, believe it or not woman, we can read, and we can read the
"no smoking" sign about a metre away from us.

She went away, and we continued our conversation.

My mate's sister was still with the chick that she'd been playing pool with, they came to the table, and my mate's sister spoke to him for a minute, and then they both went to play the pokies.

We were having an discussion about debating, and arguing (ie, talking about arguing, not actually arguing), the guy that my mate works with was claiming that he could argue anything.

We then started having a discussion about "life commitments", and what a life commitment acually is, and a whole bunch of stuff like that. That went on for about 45 minutes.

At the end of that discussion, the guy said that we'd proved the point that he was trying to make previously, the fact that he could argue about anything.

At about 1.30am, my mate who works for his dad, who owns the aircon business, and my mate who works for ABC turned up.

We chatted to them for a short while, but there was something weird about them, like they'd been popping pills or something, and I couldn't handle them.

They weren't up for having a simple chat, like my mate and his workmate and I had been doing for the last couple of hours, so they decided that they were going across the road to a different club "Mojo's", or whatever they're calling that place this week, since it's had about a thousand different names.

My mate and I'd had enough of the leagues club, so we left too.

My mate and I went and waited in the taxi line, got in the next taxi, and headed back. We stopped at the side of the road, opposite my mate's house, and he jumped out, and then I got the taxi driver to drop me at home.

As I was getting my money out of my pocket to pay, I managed to drop a couple of dollars worth of change down the side of the seat. I said the taxi driver could have it.

I paid the fare, and got out of the taxi, dropping a bit more change, a few 10c pieces, on to the road.

I'm not even going to bother looking for it. I hate change.

I went inside, it was about 2.30am I got home.

I got into bed, put the tv on, watched it for a while, and then turned it off and went to sleep.

Same as usual, got up, got ready.

The senior DBA's car was still at the mechanic, so the little guy from royalty gave us a lift to work, though we really could have walked, since it's only a couple of hundred metres to work from the pub.

As we went through the boom gate at work, the little guy pulled the wheel around really hard, screeching the tyres. The contract DBA, and a woman from the mail room were standing there, and were a bit worried.

We went past them, and around to the back car park.

One of the geophysicists was walking through the car park, and someone said "run over him", jokingly. The little guy accellerated towards him.

The geophysicist wasn't paying attention, and it wasn't until we were fairly close to him that he noticed he might get run over.

His evasive action was to raise the umbrella he was carrying up over his head, like he was going to be able to stop or divert the car speeding towards him, with an umbrella.

The little guy slowed down, and the geophysicist kept walking, and we parked, and went into work.

I got a phone call from the little guy, asking if the geophysicist was at his desk, so he could apologise, he was sitting there.

Apparently the little guy had already tried to call, but the geophysicist wouldn't answer his phone.

All the permanent staff have to go to some "Building DPI" exercise, to try to get all the departments working together.

A couple of weeks ago, someone came around to find out if I was signed up to do it, but I said that I didn't think I had to because I was a contractor. Their reply was "no, and you've probably got more important things to do anyway".

I didn't have to go on it as a result, but someone who did, the guy from royalty, was away. I joked that I'd say I was him, and go off for the day, and get him signed off, but I didn't.

I continued working, until going out to have some morning tea (usual Thursday), and then went back to work.

There was a huge storm, and it pissed down with rain for ages.

I kept working. I noticed that DNS seemed to be broken, and I was getting a bit hungry, so at about 1.30pm, I went upstairs to find out what was going on.

Hopefully, because of the rain, someone was going to drive somewhere to get some lunch, so I wouldn't have to drown, walking down the road.

The people had come back from the team building exercise, and they'd been given lunch, so they weren't going anywhere in a hurry.

I spoke to the comms guy, to try to find out what was going on with the DNS, apparently we were having some WAN issues.

Eventually the comms guy said that he was going for lunch, and was just going across the road. I went with him, we went and got some lunch, and then came back.

I hung around for a while, it didn't look like the network issues were going to get fixed any time soon.

The comms guy called SPTEL again, and was told that the Maitland exchange was having major issues.

I went back to my desk, and continued doing some coding. I got a call from an external customer, the guy at Woy Woy.

He told me he'd been in using TAS, and then his connection had dropped out. I told him about the exchange being stuffed, since the external production system relies on connectivity to a server in Maitland.

He then chatted for a while, about the functionality of MinView, of which there's nothing I can do about it, since it's a major project, and we know that it's really badly done, and needs to be redone.

I went back upstairs again, to find out what the current status of the network was, since it still wasn't fixed. I annoyed the comms guy for a while, jokingly asking why he was here, and not at the exchange fixing things.

He said that he was feeling a bit crook, and really didn't want to have to deal with this stuff today.

I gave up up there, went back to my desk, worked out some Oracle stuff. As soon as the internet access came back, I checked my mail, nothing exciting after all that.

Apparently the comms support guy went home as soon as the connection was sorted out.

I left work at 4.15pm, and went to the pub where I'm staying, I felt really tired.

I was worried about falling asleep, so I went across to the pub, and had a beer with the old librarian.

I played the pokies, with the little bit of money I had in my pocket. Wasted it all.

I went to the ATM, to get some more money, so I could have another drink, but found that it was out of order.

I went back to the pub I'm staying at, and got money out of the ATM in there, and then I went back up to the room for a bit, with the senior DBA, who'd come with me from the pub.

We sat in there for a while, trying to work out where to go for dinner.

While we were sitting in there, the 2 women from the mail room turned up. They came in, and told us that it was the guy from Orange's birthday, and they'd got pizzas, and they wanted us to come around to join in.

I wasn't really in the mood, since I was so tired, and we wouldn't all fit in the car, but we ended up going anyway.

The woman from the mail room's daughter sat on the lap of the other mail room woman, and her child seat was chucked in the back, so we could all fit.

We headed for the mail room woman's place, we stopped in at the bottle shop on the way, and found a bottle of wine to take, and then kept going.

We got to the mail room woman's place, unloaded the car, went in.

We sat and ate the pizza, and drank the wine, and then we all sat out the back chatting, while the others smoked.

Someone had got a cake, so we ate that, and then it was getting a bit late, so the 2 women from the mail room, the senior DBA and I jumped in the car, and headed back to town.

The guy from CCB stays with the mail room woman, and he was at the club, so they'd arranged to pick him up and give him a lift back, while dropping us off in town.

We decided to go around there too, before going back to the pub.

We parked the car, and the senior DBA and I got out of the car, and walked to the club. Both the mail room women had put on dressing gowns over their clothes, because it's cold, they got out of the car, and followed us.

We waited outside, to attract the attention of the CCB guy, the bartender (ex Knight), came over. He saw the mail room women in their gowns, and told them that "they looked lovely".

The CCB guy came out, and then we all piled back in the car, and the senior DBA and I got dropped back at the pub, and the others went back to the house we'd been at.

As I was going into the pub, there were a few more people from CCB (who were staying there for the night) on their way in. I chatted to them briefly, before heading up to the room.

I had a drink of water, I don't want a hangover in the morning after all that wine, and then I lay down, and went to sleep.

I woke up at 3.45am, I had the worst indigestion.

I got up, drank some more water, and then sat up in bed for a while.

While I was sitting there, it started pissing down with rain, I listened to that for a while, and then I managed to get back to sleep.

I woke up, got up, went and had a shower and got ready etc.

I left with the senior DBA, we drove to the service station, and he dropped his car off to get serviced.

The little guy from royalty was waiting there, I jumped in the car, and waited for the senior DBA to finish talking to the mechanic.

While I was sitting in the car with the little guy from royalty, we were making fun of what the senior DBA and mechanic were saying, since we couldn't hear them, we were ad libbing, things like "there's a door over here", and "that's a wheel", to go along with the gestures and pointing that was going on.

Eventually the senior DBA finished, came and got in the car. The little guy from royalty dropped his guts, I had to open the window and stick my head out, we drove to work, it seemed to take forever.

I went to my desk, and sat and cleaned up some data in the database I'm working on, trying to get some classifications right, so I can put support for filtering into the interface.

I looked on the Dell website, there was a special on the laptop I've been looking at, the 2200, you get the screen upgrade for free, and a bigger hard drive, and a DVD burner, instead of a DVD rom.

I finally decided to buy it, customised it as I liked, with a bigger capacity battery (Li-Ion, instead of NiMH), and wireless. I went to pay for it, and found their website to be broken. It didn't work in Firefox, I couldn't submit my payment.

I ended up having to "save the cart", and then use IE (yuck), so retrieve it, and pay. This should have been warning enough, that I should have been looking somewhere else.

What I didn't notice, was that an svideo cable wasn't available as an option, like it normally is. I didn't realise this also meant that the unit has no video out.

Anyway, I submitted my order, and then I went back to work.

A little while later, I was going through my drawer, looking for something, and I found the 32MB USB drive I thought I'd lost. Cool. I sent an email to the email support guy, letting him know I'd found it, since I'd thought I'd lost it in his car.

A while later I went out to lunch, someone had organised a farewell for someone at the leagues club. We walked down there, went in, and got food.

I realised that it was the cute chick from the office that was leaving. Apparently she's transferred her job to Orange, and is moving to live in Bathurst.

We sat and had lunch, there was a big group of us, close to 20, and then we went back to work.

I sat and spent the afternoon recoding a few more files, and had a short meeting with the project manager.

After that I went back to work, until I got a call from the senior DBA, he was leaving for the day. I said I'd do a bit more work, and find him in the pub later.

I continued working, and at about 6pm, the senior DBA called me again. I decided to leave work at this point, and walked to the pub we're staying in. I dropped off my stuff, ipod, glasses etc, and then went down, across to the other pub, and sat and had a beer.

I played the pokies for a while, and then we decided to leave, and went back to the pub we're staying in again.

While the DBA was mucking around in the room, I sat and watched the TV. The reception was even worse than usual. When I checked the aerial cable, I found that someone had tried to unplug it for some reason, and because the connector was tight in the socket on the tv, the cable had been pulled away from the plug.

I fiddled around with it, and managed to force the plug back into the moulded end of the connector on the cable, that the wires made contact again, and the reception was back close to what it was before.

I sat and watched the tv for a few minutes, and then when the senior DBA was finished in the room, he came out, and we walked down to the club.

The others from the pub were in there, we got some drinks, I noticed they had Havana Club, so I had some of that. I remember my mate that works at ABC going to great lengths to buy a bottle of that, since almost no bottle shops stock it.

We eventually ordered dinner, and then I went in and wasted some money in the pokies while I waited.

Dinner was served, and we ate, and chatted for a while. We played a game of pool, and then left the club, walked back to the pub, and I went to bed.

I woke up, I was hungover, I lay in bed until 7.45am. I got up, went and had a shower, and then got ready.

Even at that time of the morning, the shower was still dry, and there were no plates on the sink, so the senior DBA and I were the only people in the pub.

While I waited for the senior DBA to finish getting ready, I sat and read my book, I'd nearly finished it.

We went to work, and I sat at my desk, recoding more of the files, to avoid code duplication. I was asked to go to a meeting at 11am, I continued working, then went up to the meeting.

I found that there was no one in there, I waited around, with a couple of other people, all the others had gone across the road to get coffees apparently, they finally came back at 11.30am, and we started the meeting.

It was with some people they'd brought in to do another SOE, since the one we've got is crap basically. I just sat in mostly on the first half an hour, since that was mainly about the Oracle configuration, and dealing with version upgrades.

Some of the stuff did apply to the system that I'm developing, mainly the fact that the user account system is totally proprietry (I've written it in PHP), so the "single logon" thing they want to use won't work with it (nor any of the other Oracle applications we have).

After they got through all that stuff, I sat in for the next half an hour, with people to do with geosurvey, while we described what we needed in the SOE.

The geoscience guys decribed the issues they were having, and when the SOE guy started talking about the partitioning scheme they were going to go with, I suggested that they might want to have 2 configurations, since the GIS machines need a special configuration, and it would be inefficient to have that on "normal" machines.

The SOE guy wasn't interested in that, and said that they didn't want to end up with 50 images. I said that I didn't say anything about having 50 images, I said 2, one for the GIS machines, and one for everyone else.

It doesn't even have to be an image, it's just the partitioning and a few registry changes that differ, and these should be able to be done at the time the machine is built, automatically.

I spent about 18 months working in the SOE lab for CSC, and this sort of stuff is just basic, these guys are useless.

I couldn't be bothered having much to do with the conversation after this, since these guys had no idea what they were doing, and were trying to tell us what we wanted and needed.

I ended up getting out of the meeting at 12.30pm, and I went around to the senior DBA's desk. He was on the phone to the Systems Analyst contractor, that worked on MinView.

I spoke to him for a few minutes, while the senior DBA did something, because he's got a TiVo, so we chatted about TiVo.

While I was there, the email support guy came and spoke to me, he'd installed some software on his pc to generate reports about the exchange server, but he couldn't get it working properly.

I had a look at it, it was something to do with getting the ASP files to actually be interpreted, because they were only displaying on the screen.

I found a way around it, sort of, you could access the reports, but you couldn't configure them or anything properly.

While I was there, my mobile phone rang, I answered it, it was Mum. Apparently a bunch of mail had turned up, assumedly it was the mail that my mate's ex gf had mentioned a little while ago, when I saw her.

Mum had opened it all, there was a letter about the speeding fine I got, when they found my license was suspended. I hadn't paid that, because the rego details were wrong, and now it had gone to "SPER". I had to pay the in in the next week, or I could go to jail for a week.

I told Mum that I hadn't paid it, because I was waiting for the reminder, to argue about the rego plate being wrong, but that never turned up. Typical.

I said I'd just get the mail when I was there on the weekend, and sort it out next week.

Mum said she'd ring up about it, and I said she could if she wanted, but I didn't think she'd get anywhere.

I got off the phone, and went back to helping the email support guy, a couple of minutes later my phone rang again, I thought it would be mum, but it was the vendor of the software we use to host the website.

They wanted to know something about the ecommerce configuration, apparently it was broken after they'd done the upgrade yesterday. I thought about it for a while, it was a problem with the http/https redirection.

I remembered that because their way of doing was broken in our environment, I'd found a way to use mod_rewrite to trap the requests to the ecommerce via http, and force them to https, which was what we did.

This works, but their software can't work it out, and keeps forcing the connection to https, even though it already is. I remembered the setting we had to change, to disable that, told the guy, he changed it, and then it was fixed.

I got off the phone, and went back to helping the email guy again, for about a minute, until my phone rang again. It was Mum again, she'd called up, and asked about the speeding ticket, explaining that I wasn't there, and it wasn't my vehicle etc, but was told that there was nothing they could do about it, she'd have to ring up some "photo processing" place or something.

They also told her that they wouldn't be able tell her anything, because I'd have to ring up.

I just said again, that I'd just get the letter on the weekend, and pay it next week. I can't be bothered dealing with it, I'm not going to get anywhere. I'd have to go to court to argue it, and I'm not going to pay $2000 to go to court in Bundaberg again, to attempt to get out of a $250 (now $300) fine.

I went back to working on the asp thing again. I figured that it was either something to do with permissions in IIS, or to do with the file types npt being defined properly, and having an interpreter to run to parse them, rather than just serving the content/text of them.

The senior DBA told me that he was going out for lunch, so the email support guy, the little guy from royalty, and a couple of other people went out.

We walked down the street, and went to the bakery in the mall, we got pies. They don't make the pea pies anymore, I was a bit disappointed, they were nice.

We sat outside and ate, and then I decided that I wanted some annissed rings, so I went into the chocolate shop, and bought some.

we walked back to work after that, and someone asked me about TiVo, so I chatted about that as we walked back to work.

I got back to work, and continued rewriting the files, I'd been working on before wasting an hour and a half in the stupid meeting about the SOE.

A couple of hours later I got a call from the senior DBA, he wanted to leave. I said I was just finishing up coding a file, and then I'd come up.

I spent about 15 minutes finishing the file, and then I went upstairs, and we left the building, and we got in the car, and drove over to the chick from work's place.

We went in, sat and watched tv for a while. The senior DBA lent his car to the chick, and she drove off somewhere.

While she was away, the senior DBA and I were chatting to her boyfriend outside, while they smoked.

The chick came back, and then we went back inside, and I went in with her boyfriend, and we sat and played the playstation, while the chick and the senior DBA sat and watched the tv in the front room.

We were there for a while, and then we decided to go and get some dinner.

I went with the senior DBA, we drove back, and parked behind the pub we were staying at, and then went into the pub, to the room, and I dropped off the stuff I'd been carrying around.

We left there, and walked down to the club where the guy who was the Knight works.

We had a few drinks, I ordered some dinner, the senior DBA didn't eat anything.

I went in and played the pokies after that, and didn't win anything. Waste of time and money.

We left the club, about 8.30pm, the bartender asked us what was going on, because we never leave that early.

We walked back to the pub we were staying at, and sat in the common area and watched the tv.

The Bill came on, I sat and finished reading my book while the senior DBA watched The Bill, and then once I'd finished my book, I watched a bit of tv, and then went to bed.

I got up at 6am. The sat box had stuffed up, was saying "INF" as usual. I tried to fix it, but the remote control batteries were flat, and there's nothing you can do on the box to fix that, stupid design.

I mucked around, trying to find some more AAA batteries, but they were all flat, and no other remotes I have use them.

I ended up digging the proper remote for one of the UEC 910s out of the box, along with the batteries, put them in, and used that to fix up the sat box.

I went and had a shower, and got dressed, and finished packing my bag, with the clothes I'd hung up last night.

I watched a bit of tv, and waited for the senior DBA to turn up, then went and jumped in his car, and we drove to work.

We went the way I used to go this morning, to the end of the freeway, and through East Maitland. I haven't been this way for ages, not since the Wednesday before we went on holidays, the 2nd of March, over 2 months ago, the last time I rode to work.

We stopped at the service station, and the senior DBA booked his car in for a service. He didn't leave it, we drove to work.

We went to the cafe across the road, got a crappy coffee, and I spoke to the contract DBA, then we went across to the building.

I was cold, and I'd left my jumper in the car, so I went up to see the senior DBA, to get his keys, so I could get my jumper out of the car.

When I got to the top of the stairs, I heard some alarm going off in the computer room, I went in, and found that the airconditioner was stuffing up again. I muted the alarm, and went out again.

The senior DBA was on the phone, so while I waited to get the keys, I spoke to the manager of the royalty group, and the annoying support guy for a minute, about the case, and how screwed up it was.

The senior DBA got off the phone, and I got his car keys, and then I went down, and got my jumper out of the car. I came back in, and gave him back his keys.

I went to my desk, and went to work. I'd intended to call the building manager, and let him know about the airconditioning, but I forgot.

I got a call from the guy in webservices, about upgrading the website software this afternoon, and confirmed that I would be there. The guy asked me to sort out with the vendor (who were actually doing the update) for a time, which I wasn't really interested in doing, but I said I'd send an email. I got off the phone, sent the email to the vendor, and then I went back to work.

The sysadmin came down to see me and we had a chat about the website upgrade. They'd called him about it too apparently, but he didn't know much about it, because I look after it, I said I'd come up in a bot, because we were scheduling between 2pm and 3pm for the upgrade.

I took the chance now, to go to lunch, I went with the sysadmin, and the senior DBA, we went to the Thai place. On the way, I said I'd pop in and pay my Amex bill at the post office. They asked what I wanted to order, I said I'd order it in a minute, since it won't take me long in the post office.

I went across the road, and in to the post office, walked straight up to the counter, paid my bill, and then left again, and was back over at the Thai place, in about a minute, like I'd said.

We ordered, and then sat and chatted. The senior DBA mentioned a guy he used to know, who had a Cook Island's driver's license, hmm, maybe that's an idea, I could fly over there, get one of them, and then use it as an international license.

We got our lunch, and ate, and then wandered back to the office. On the way, the sysadmin asked me about TiVo, so I explained the whole thing to him.

When we got back to the office, I went upstairs, to sit there while the website upgrade went on. I waited for 2pm, and then I shut all the stuff down, apache, mysql etc.

The guy at the vendor called me on my mobile, and complained that he wasn't able to login through the VPN. I asked the comms support guy, who looks after the VPN, he said it was fine. I asked the guy at the vendor to call the comms support guy, which he did.

While they got that sorted out, I started the website back up again.

Eventually they sorted it out, the guy at the vendor had to reboot his machine. Since we were now going to get somewhere, I shut all the webstuff down again, and started backing it up, so there was an easy way to roll back, in case the upgrade stuffed up.

A few minutes through backing it up, I called the guy at the vendor, and he said he was running the upgrade now. Terrific, it means my backups are useless, because he's already making changes, while it's being backed up.

I left him on speaker for a couple of minutes, and then I asked him to call when he was finished.

I was terribly unimpressed. This guy has just started making changes to a production system, without informing us.

The VPN stuff wasted a bit of time, and it ended up being 3pm before it was finished. This time the senior DBA called the guy at the vendor, and was rudely told that the upgrade scripts were still running.

At about 3.20pm, we called him again, and he said that it was all finished, so much for him calling to tell us when it was done.

Luckily the upgrade worked, and the fact that the backups were totally useless didn't matter, but if there'd been a problem, it wouldn't have been me responsible for it.

I sat around for a bit after that, making sure that everything was working. The annoying support guy came over, and asked if I could do him a favour.

I wondered what it was, and then he explained that he'd left his lights on all day, and his battery had run flat, so he wanted a push start.

He also asked the "Spatial Expert" to help him, so the three of us went down to the carpark. We went to his car, and he rolled it out of the spot, and then we tried to push start it. The "Spatial Expert" told him to put it in 3rd or 4th gear.

WTF? you need to use 1st, or maybe 2nd gear to do a clutch start, I used to do it on my bike all the time, out of the driveway. There's no way you could do a clutch start in 4th gear. This guy must know as much about cars as he does about spatial data.

We tried clutch starting it twice, I didn't bother to push the issue of what gear it was in, I assumed it was in 3rd or 4th, and this wasn't going to work.

It didn't work, we didn't start it. After that I jumped in, and the two of them pushed the car into a spot, out of the way.

The annoying support guy said he'd go and speak to the building manager, since one of the government cars would have a pair of jumper cables in it, and he could just jump start his car.

Pushing the car up and down the car park was a bit too strenuous for me, and I ended up having an asthma attack. My chest was killing me.

I walked back into the building, and went and sat at my desk for a while, trying to calm down. I felt sick.

A few minutes later, I got a call from the senior DBA, he said he was leaving for the day, going to check in at the pub. I said I'd be down there a bit later.

I did some more work, and then spent a little bit of time looking up Cook Islands licenses. Hmm, I can just go into the Police station on Rarotonga, the capital island, pay a couple of bucks to do a riding test, and then pay $15 New Zealand dollars for a license.

I did a bit more research, Vicroads maintain the list of international licenses accepted in Australia, and it looks like that because the Cook Islands are a province of New Zealand, that the Cook Islands license is recognised as a New Zealand license.

I then went looking for trips to go over there, for about $1200 I can get a flight over there, a weeks accomodation, and a flight back. Maybe I'll have to go on another holiday.

The project manager came over, and I chatted to him for a few minutes, and then I left the office, at about 6pm.

I walked down to the pub we start drinking at, found the senior DBA in there. I chatted for a minute, and then we both went to the other pub, and I got the other room key from the bar, and then we went up to the room, and I dropped off my stuff.

He sat around in there for a little while, and then we left, and walked down to the pub near the railway station, we had a few drinks in there, and then went and ordered dinner.

We sat at the bar and ate dinner, while watching "MythBusters" on the tv in the pub. About halfway through this, the sysadmin came into the pub.

We played a couple of games of pool, the first I played against the senior DBA, and stuffed it up, I hit the black ball in, there was a few balls left on the table, so we managed to convince the sysadmin to have a couple of practice shots, since he's never played.

He wasn't too bad, and we convinced him to play the next game, against me. He was pretty good, for a first game, or else I was playing crap, because it was a fairly close game, but I ended up winning.

After that we put some money in the jukebox, queued up a load of songs, sat and drank more. We ended up leaving the pub about 11pm, and since the sysadmin doesn't drink, he gave us a lift back to the pub we were staying at, and then he drove home.

I went up to the room, and went to bed.

I got up, watched some tv, spent some time fixing up entries in the in tivo guide data.

I went and put washing on, and then came back and watched tv, and ate cheese and crackers.

Dad came in, to tell me that there's a mother's day lunch "if I want to come in", yeah, I've heard this "if I want to" stuff before, ie "you will, or will cop crap".

He asked me about the trip again, and I basically just told him the same stuff as last night. I was pissed off. The whole thing is a crock. It's not even my fault.

My mate's ex gf was lazy, didn't give me mail, I end up getting busted for unlicensed driving. The magistrate doesn't listen to anything I have to say, doesn't care, and I lose my license for 6 months, all nothing to do with me, their fault for sending mail to the wrong address.

The whole system is stuffed.

I had a shower, and then went in, and had lunch.

I went and hung the washing out, and then went back and watched tv again, and continued fixing up the guide data.

A few hours later, I went and got the washing in, and hung it up inside on the cable, since I need it all tomorrow, and it's not dry.

I watched tv, ended up eating some dinner at 9pm, and then packed my bag, to go back to work tomorrow, and went to bed.

I woke up, at about 7.20am, lay in bed for a while, didn't really want to get up.

I continued reading my book, and then got up at 8.15am, I went and had a shower, got ready, and packed my bag.

I went out to the loungerooom, sat around, and read my book. My mate's mother in law went and got ready, and then asked what I wanted to do, whether I wanted to sit around here all day, or go out to the shops etc.

I said I was happy to do whatever she was going to be doing for the day, so I went with her to the shopping centre.

She'd bought some slippers the other day, and her husband had liked them, so he wanted a pair (they're made in both men's and women's, but about the only difference is the size), we went into Kmart to find them, bought them, and then went over to the supermarket.

I recognised where we were, this was near the petrol station that we filled up at, when I was up here with my mate and his wife. This was where we were, about 20 minutes before I got pulled over, the cops found my license was suspended, and I had to get in the car, and feel sick for the next few hours.

Anyway, we went into the supermarket, and saw my mate's step father in law, he works in the butchery in the supermarket, and he was bagging up offcuts of meat, for dog food or whatever, my mate's mother in law got a bag of it for the dogs.

He went and found a few empty boxes, I grabbed these, they'll use them to pack stuff for moving. We got some stuff for lunch, and then went through the checkouts, and back to the car, chucked the shopping and boxes in.

We drove off, back towards their house. On the way, we decided to go to "The Hummock", which is about the only high point in Bundaberg, the rest of it is almost dead flat.

We went up there, my mate's mother in law telling me that this was where she had to come when she was renewing her bus license, to be tested doing a hill start.

We got up the top, and parked near the edge. The view was brilliant, you could see at least 180 degrees of ocean. There was a stack of radio towers, with aerials, parabolic antennas, microwave dishes, all sorts of communications gear up here. I would have loved to have a laptop with a wireless card.

The stuff must have good range, because I couldn't even see the gear at the other end, of wherever the dishes/antennas where aimed at.

We sat up here for a few minutes, and then drove back down again, and back to the house. I helped unload the car, and then I sat and continued reading my book again.

A little while later, my mate's step father in law came home, we made some lunch, and then sat out on the back verandah and ate.

It was weird, I was 1300km away, but I felt like I was home.

I realised it was because sitting here was the last thing I did, that felt normal, before starting the trip home, at the end of our holiday, when I got busted, and my life was turned upside down, having to live in the pub during the week, and only getting home on the weekends, which didn't feel like home, because I spent less time there, than when I was in the pub, and it definately didn't feel like home.

We sat around chatting until about 2pm, and then my mate's step father in law had to go to soccer, he's a coach, so we all decided to go.

I finished pcking up my stuff, grabbed my bag, chucked it in the car, and then the 3 of us went to soccer, in my mate's stepfather's car.

I sat with my mate's mother in law, and we watched one of the games that her husband coaches one of the teams. When that finished, we moved to another field, to watch the end of another game, a higher age/grade.

A couple of minutes after getting there, one of the players was hurt, and they stopped playing for about 15 minutes, eventually they came out with a stretcher, and carried the player off the field.

We watched the end of that game, and then moved around to the other side, where the stands were, and watched a bit of the A grade team play.

The was one player, that was the spitting image of a guy I used to know, who got married, and buggered off to Adelaide, owing me $700.

It was now a bit after 4pm, and I had to be on a 5pm flight, so my mate's mother in law and I left, and she drove me to the airport. We got there about 4.30pm. I thanked her for her hospitality the last couple of days, lifts etc, it was appreciated, making my trip a little bit less expensive.

I went, went to the counter, and checked in. I showed my expired NSW license again, as ID, since I didn't have anything else now. It was lucky I put my NSW address on the booking, or I would have been buggered, not able to get on the plane, and not able to get an ID from QLD transport, because I had no other ID with me.

The guy asked if I wanted window or aisle seat, I asked if the emergency exit was available (because of the extra leg room), he said it was, and that I could have either the front, or the wing exits. I'd rather the front over the wing, because of the engine noises.

I got that, seat 1a. There was no security check, no xrays, nothing, I went and sat down, and read my book while I waited. It got close to 5pm, and I wondered what was going on, so I got up, and went and waited outside, in the garden area between the terminal and the tarmac.

A few more people came out, and eventually they boarded the plane, we showed our passes, walked out, and to the plane, getting on the little jat assisted prop plane.

I continued reading my book, and then we took off, and I sat and looked out the window for a while. It was getting dark now, so I didn't get to see all that much.

I went back to reading my book. They came through and gave us the little snack boxes again, I sat and ate, and drank the water. A few minutes later, the attendant asked "Who'd like a Chardonnay? or a Shiraz?" I thought they were joking, looked up to see her holding the Chardonnay, and the male attendent with the Shiraz. Cool.

I said I'd prefer a Shiraz, but that I'd need another cup, because I'd poured my mineral water into it, rather than drinking it out of the container it came in. The guy said he'd come back.

I waited a couple of minutes, and then he came back, gave me another cup, and filled it.

I sat and drank my wine, and read my book, and finished eating. As crap as this whole thing has been, time of work, hours in airports, losing my license, this bit was nice. They came through again, and asked who'd like more, so I had another cup.

It got really dark now, couldn't see very much at all out the window, until a while later, when we started to descend, and I could see all the lights of Brisbane, that looked really cool.

We landed in Brisbane, all hopped off the plane. We were about 100m from the terminal, we had to go and get on a shuttle bus to get back to the terminal. We all crammed on, with our carry on luggage, and then went on about a 20 second bus ride, as we were driven back to the terminal.

We all got off the plane, and went into the terminal, right near gate 1, where I'd come out to get on this plane on Thursday. I think it was about 6pm.

I went straight around to the check in desk, there weren't very many people here, so I was able to go straight up to the counter. I showed my expired NSW license again, they didn't say anything, allowed me to check in. Again, I asked for an emergency exit, the front one, and ended up with the same seat, 1a again.

I went over to go up the escalators, to the gates, where I'd come off the plane from Sydney on Thursday. I went through the xray/metal detector, didn't have any issues, but then as I went to go up the escalator, I was stopped by a security guard.

He said that he wanted to randomly check my carry on luggage for explosives. He gave me a sheet to read, that explained it, which said at the bottom that I could refuse it, but by the time I'd got that far, I realised the guy had already scanned my bag. Pff.

Obviously I didn't have any explosives in there, so then I picked up my bag, and went up the escalators. I walked along, into the Virgin Blue gates, and went to the blue room.

I went to the counter, asked to go in, the guy asked if I was checked in for a flight, I showed him my boarding pass, paid $5, and went in.

It looked pretty schmick in here, lounges everywhere, a darkened area with a projector running a movie, a few computers for internet access, including ports for laptops, a food bar, a bar area.

There were only a few other people in here, about 15 maybe.

I went in to use the internet, then realised that you had to pay for it (gees, I would have thought that would only be at peak times). I didn't have any change.

I went over to the food bar, and asked if the bar was open (since there was no one up there), the chick said that it was, and aked what I wanted. I asked for a JD and lemonade, and then she called another chick, who went up and made it. I paid, got my change, including a couple of $2 coins, so I could use the internet, and then the chick came back down with my drink.

I went over to one of the computers, put a couple of bucks in, and got 10 minutes of access. I started going through all my email, since I haven't checked it since I got back from court yesterday. I only managed to get through about 2/3 of it, before my time was going to run out, so I put the other couple of bucks in, finished up going through my email, and then had a couple of minutes to spare.

I checked my tivo was still running, yep, good, then I looked at slashdot for a minute, and then my time was up, 20 minutes of access.

I went out of that area, went to where the projector was. It had been showing some Adam Sandler movie when I first came in, which was now finished, and "The Footy Show" was on. I sat and watched that.

I finished my drink, and then went over and ordered another one, and a toasted bagel and salad. I paid, and the chick said I could sit down again, and they'd bring it to me.

I went back to watching the tv, a minute later my drink was brought over, and a few minutes later my food. I sat and ate and drank. Except for the fact I've got a plastic knife and fork (damn terrorists, now I can't even use proper utensils in the terminal), this was pretty good.

I managed to snap the tip off one of the fork prongs, which I then couldn't find, I hope it's not in my food somewhere. I ate the next few mouthfuls carefully, expecting to find it, but didn't, and then didn't worry about it.

A few mouthfuls later, it ended up in my mouth, I bit down on it, and it hurt like hell. I managed to fish the bit of plastic out of my mouth, and finished eating my food.

I continued watching the tv, and drinking. A little while later they came and collected my plate, and empty glass, and asked if I wanted another one, because they wanted to close the bar. I said I was right (I can still get another drink on the plane on the way back).

I ended up sitting watching The Footy Show until about 7.50pm, my plane was supposed to board about 8pm.

I went out, and went and sat in the gate, and waited, until the boarded us, a bit after 8pm.

I got on, found my seat (pretty easy, when it's the first seat on the plane), grabbed my book, ipod etc, and sat down.

They finished boarding. There was a bit of a kerfuffel going on between the attendants, and some staff in the boarding tunnel thing. Apparently some people were trying to get on the plane with tickets in other people's names, and they were trying to work out whether or not to let them on.

We waited for a couple of minutes, and eventually they said that they weren't going to let them on, so they closed the door, and we got ready to take off.

We taxied out, and took off, the view was pretty good. I went back to reading my book, and a little while later they came through with the food trolley. I got a Bundy, Dry and Lime, and a KitKat finger thing. They came and told me they didn't have any KitKats, but some other chocolate, which was similar.

I said I wasn't worried, and they gave me the other one, which was exactly the same. I sat and drank, ate, read my book, and listened to my ipod.

We got back to Sydney, just before 9.30pm (I think), I got off the plane, wandered out of the terminal, which was now pretty much empty, because I don't think there are any more flights today, and went down to the train part.

I bought a ticket home, and then went down to the platform, I got on the next train, to Central, and then hopped off, wandered around to the platforms where the country trains run from.

There was 10pm train to Newcastle, so I went over and got on that, found a seat, and waited a couple of minutes, and then it left.

As it went through Strathfield, or somewhere like that, a ton of footy idiots got on the train, and packed it out. I sat and read my book, and listened to music.

My phone rang, as I was somewhere between Berowra and Cowan. It was Mum, she wanted to know where I was. I said I'd probably be at Gosford around midnight, or Narara a couple of minutes after that.

I went back to reading my book. A few of the footy idiots got off at Woy Woy, but most of them didn't get off until Gosford.

I gave Dad a call when we got into Gosford, said I'd be at Narara in a few minutes.

I sat and waited, and after we started going again, I wandered down to wait near the doors. Some ticket inspectors had got on, but they didn't ask to see my ticket.

I waited near the doors, we got to Narara, I got off, wandered over, and got in the car.

We drove home, Dad asked how I was, and I said I was pretty pissed off. Which was true. I wasted days, it cost me nearly $2000, I had to travel about 3000km, and for what, to end up losing my license for 6 months.

We got home, I got out of the car, went inside, and went to bed.

I got up at 7am, and went and had a shower, then went and ironed my shirt, and finished putting my suit on.

I grabbed my folder, of paperwork, and then I got in the car, and my mate's stepfather in law gave me a lift to the court house. I got there at 8am, to find that it wasn't open yet.

I walked around the corner, and went into a little coffee shop, and I went through all the paperwork again. I finished my coffee, sat for a while, went back to the court house, it was still closed.

I went for a wander around, not many of the shops were even open, I wandered around until about 8.20am, and then went back to the court house again, it was still closed.

I was sick of wandering around, so I decided to just wait until it was opened. At about 8.30am, a guy came out of the office, and opened the door.

I went in to the front office with him, and explained that I was there for the summons, he looked up my details, and found me to be in court 1 this morning, and told me to go and wait in the waiting area.

I went and sat in there, and waited, and waited. More people came filtering in, and then the court opened at about 8.50am, and a whole bunch of people went in there, which I thought was strange, because no one had told us anything.

I waited a few minutes, and then at 8.55am I went in, since I was supposed to be in there at 9am, to find out what was going on.

I waited around, and then the police prosecutor had us all line up, and one at a time she asked who we were, the charge, found the file, and asked what we were pleading.

I got there, did all that, and told her that I was pleading guilty.

After that, we were all told to go out of the court room again, because there were too many people in there. I went out, and sat in the waiting room again.

A little while later, at about 9.30am, someone came out, and asked all the people who'd seen the prosecutor to go in there again, so I got up, and went back into the court room, and found a seat.

I sat and waited, while they went through a couple of cases in front of mine.

One was for a chick who'd been arrested, with drug charges, possession of morphine, and a few other things. She was asking for an adjournment, to get legal advice, and the magistrate told her that she'd had several weeks already, but gave her a month.

After that, a guy got up, who was there for a drink driving charge. He'd been pulled over, and found to be at 0.069 BAC. He was told that he was elligible for a restricted license, that allowed him to drive between work and home, and he needed to apply for that now. He said he couldn't be bothered, since he could just get his apprentice to do the driving.

The judgement was that he lost his license for 6 weeks.

The next case was drink driving as well. This guy had been picked up with a BAC of 0.223. The magistrate told the guy that he had obviously been "drunk out of his brain", and he received a 2 year ban, and a $2000 fine.

After that, the case was against an Aboriginal person, who was being charged with being a public nuisance, drunk in public, and vandolism, smashing a shop front or something. A solicitor got up, and said that he was representing the Aboriginal, and then the police prosecutor read out the allegations, and said that she was presenting no evidence, and the magistrate immediately said that all charges were dropped, and the case was dismissed.

How's that work? because you're an Aboriginal, and can get representation, for free no doubt, you can go around drunk, smashing up shop windows, and get away with it.

I was up next. I went to the stand. I think it was about 9.50am.

The read out my details, I had to confirm who I was. After that, I asked if I could say something, "your worship, may I say something?", and the magistrate got his back up, "I'll run the court thankyou!". Jesus. I apologised, and then the police prosecutor read out the charges.

They said something about there being one item of "history", and a sheet was given to the magistrate. The magistrate asked if I knew what it was, I said I did not, that I'd not seen the sheet, and then I was shown it, it was the speeding ticket offence I had received, in October, that caused the whole thing.

After that, I was allowed to speak, and I calmly explained that I had been working out of the state, which I had a letter from the temping agency to explain, the magistrate said he would take my word for that.

I continued, that I did not have a fixed address, have been living in a pub, and I have credit card records to show that, again, he said he would take my word for that.

I then explained that I had contacted Queensland Transport with an alternative mailing address, but it was not getting used, and then as a result the mail went to the wrong address, and that it was passed on to someone to give to me, who forgot, and that I had a letter from them to explain. Again, he said he'd take my word for that.

At this point he told me that I should have known that exceeding the speed limit by 20km/hour was a 4 point offence, and would result in the suspension of my 4 point license. I replied that I had thought it was a 3 point offence, though in all honesty, as far as I was concerned, it should have been a zero point offence, because no other fines I've got in the last 18 months since changing my license to QLD have ever gone interstate.

He wasn't interested in this, and told me that as a license holder, I was responsible for knowing the penalties of offences, and that I didn't need to receive any mail to be told that my license was going to be suspended. I'm also supposed to be psychic, and know when the suspension would start and run till apparently.

He then aked me what I was pleading, and I said that because of the expense and time involved with travelling to court, I was pleading guilty, to avoid having to come back, for a trial, or hearing, or whatever proceedings would occur if I was to plead not guilty.

I was then asked to confirm that I was pleading guilty off my own free will, and that I had not been coached or coaxed or something into pleading guilty, and I confirmed that I was pleading guilty of my own free will.

At that point the judgement was made, the magistrate said something like "let my record show that I have been convicted, and I lose my license for 6 months." I was dumbstruck.

He also told me not to apply for a license in NSW, because even though they can't pass interstate bans, they'll know if I do, and it will result in "consequences I don't want to know about", or some similar threat.

The police prosecutor asked if I had my license. I took it out, and put it on the table. She took it, I assumed to copy the license number off it or something. I asked if I could have my license, since it's my ID, and she said "No. It's gone.".

I collected my paper work, and I stepped away from the stand. I was just lost. I walked out of the court room. I felt sick.

I went to the front counter, and I asked the clerk if there was anything I had to do or sign before I left.

He asked what had happened, and I told him that I had been banned for 6 months. He asked if there was a fine, and I told him that the magistrate had not said anything about a fine. He said that was unusual, but that I would receive a letter in the mail, explaining the result of the conviction.

I then left the court house, stumbled down the stairs, not able to think straight. Some Bogan sitting outside the court house, smoking, asked if I was hot, since I was wearing a suit.

I walked across the road, to the pub. I went up to the bar, and asked for a drink. The chick checked her watch, it was just after 10am, so she was able to serve me. I asked if they weren't allowed to serve until 10am, and she confirmed that.

I took my drink, and I went and sat down. I just sat there. I couldn't do anything, or think about anything.

In the span of about 5 minutes, I lost my license, and was banned for holding one for 6 months. I felt sick again.

I sat and drank about half my drink. I called Mum, to tell her what happened, and went through it all. I said that I would just have to live in Maitland for the next 6 months.

She said something about me quitting my job, and going and getting one in Sydney or something, so I could just go back to commuting on the train everday.

I chatted a bit more, and then I got off the phone. I called the senior DBA, to let him know what had happened. We chatted for a minute, and then I got off the phone.

I called Dad after that, but then it turned out that he was at home, so I didn't need to bother, Mum could explain it all to him, so I hung up.

I tried calling my drummer mate, but he didn't answer his phone as usual, neither did my mate that plays guitar.

I wrote an SMS explaing what had happened. Something along the lines of "I was convicted. I'm banned for 6 months, and they took my license". I sent this to a few people in my phone book, who knew about the crap I was going through.

I sent it to about 10 people, none of them replied.

I got another drink, and sat and stared at the tv, musicmax was on. Hoodoo Guru's "1000 Miles Away" came on, and I sat and sang along with it softly, it sort of summed up the whole thing, except I was only 800 miles away. Spending hours in airports, in bars, lonely.

After that finished, some crap song came on, I went in to play the pokies, wasted about $5, and then came out again.

I got another drink, and sat and watched the tv again, and after about an hour, and 3 drinks, I decided to wander around Bundaberg a bit.

I wandered down the road, and then crossed the road. A huge truck came around a roundabout, without it's blinker on, and nearly ran over me. I almost didn't care, it would have been the perfect end to a perfect day.

I wandered back down the other side of the road, looking in the windows of the shops as I wandered along. I ended up going into another pub, got another drink, sat and drank it, on my own, and then went and played the pokies again, didn't win.

I continued wandering around Bundaberg, looking in a few shops, the book shop, Cash Converters. Gees there's a bunch of crap in there. Some woman came up to me, trying to sell me stuff, and I said I was just filling in time, until I fly home tomorrow, and explained about going to court, and losing my license.

She told me that if there was anything in the shop that I was interested in, that I could make an offer, and they'd do a deal. The shop was full of junk.

I looked around for a while, and then I left, and kept wandering.

I wandered all around the streets, then went into another pub, and got some lunch. I ordered it, and said out the back, to wait for it.

While I was sitting there, I rested my head on my hand, and just stared off, at nothing.

My food was served, and the chick that served it told me not to go to sleep. I just smiled weakly, and then sat and at my lunch, and then continued wandering around.

I'd had enough, I went to get a taxi, but I couldn't find one anywhere. I went around and around and around the streets, for about another hour, looking for a taxi. This is ridiculous.

It came overcast, and it rained a little bit, as I wandered around. I found the taxi rank, but there were no taxis. I sat and waited, for quite a while, but no taxis came. I wandered around again. This is hopeless. This is supposed to be the CBD, and there's not a single taxi anywhere.

I went back to the taxi rank again, and waited, eventually one turned up, but a guy came out of the pub, and got in it and went before I got there. D'oh. Another one turned up a minute later luckily, so I jumped in it, and told the guy the address.

We were going for a minute or so, when he got a call on the radio from the base. The last fare he had, had thought she'd left her shopping in the back. I had a look, yep, there were a couple of bags of shopping in the back, behind the driver.

He told the base that he'd drop it off after he dropped me off. He asked me something, and I had to explain that I was just up here to go to court, and the details of that. The driver told me how he'd been booked that morning, and the cop had been a real dickhead, didn't know what he was on about, because the taxi driver has a Victorian license, but that's fine, because you need any valid state license to get a professional driver's license, which he had, and the cop was telling him that he needed a QLD license, which is crap.

His fine was only $100 or something, so I told him not to bother, it's not like going to court achieves anything anyway. You end up with some dickhead magistrate that's not interested in anything you have to say, or any paper work, and just gives you a ridiculous penalty, for something that they caused, because the mail went to the wrong address.

We got back to the house, I paid the guy, we finished our conversation, and then I got out of the car. I went around to the back of the house, and unlocked the door, and went in.

I went and got changed out of my suit, and then went to use the computer, to check my email. I had a world of difficulty trying to get connected to the internet.

While I was doing that, my mate's mother in law came home from work, and I chatted to her for a while, told her what had happened. She told me why they were moving house, a reason that I won't put here.

I went back into the computer, continued trying to get on the net, and eventually it worked.

I used the computer for a little while, and my mate's mother in law came in, and said she was going out for a while, and would be back later, and then left.

I went through my email, put some notes on blogger. A little while later, my mate's brother in law turned up, and since I had his keys, I went and unlocked the door for him. I chatted to him for a minute, told him the story, then went in, and finished up on the computer, and went and sat in the loungeroom and chatted to him.

His mum came back a little while later, and then he went and got his xbox, and sat and played it. I went and got my book, and continued reading it.

My mate's stepfather in law turned up then, and I chatted to him, let him know what had happened.

I went back to reading my book, and then my mate's mother in law took his brother in law to work, I told him that I'd see him the next time I was up here, since I won't see him tomorrow, and I'm going home.

They left, and I continued reading my book. She came back about an hour later, and then we got ready, and went out to get some dinner.

We went to Bargara for dinner, on the way we ran over a cane toad, sweet. We went into a pub. I ordered a pizza, and while we were at the counter, my mate's stepfather in law commented to the woman serving us that I looked like Fatty Vaughton again, and made me show her my access card.

We got drinks, and then sat outside, and waited for our meals. The ticket number came up a little while later, and I went and collected my pizza. I'd thought I was hungry, but as soon as I started eating, I realised I wasn't. I only ended up eating a bit over half the pizza.

We sat and chatted for a while. Some chick came around, selling raffle tickets for a 1L bottle of grog, I think it was a bottle of Bundy. I bought 3 tickets, picked them from around the outside of the sheet, rather than 3 consecutive numbers. I sat and chatted with my mate's in laws, and waited for the chick to sell the rest of the tickets.

Eventually she did, and came around to find who won, it wasn't me, I'd picked a number that was 20 off, two rows down, so only 2 tickets away, on the sheet. D'oh.

We continued chatting, the chick came around again, to sell tickets for a bottle of Beam. I didn't think we were going to be there long enough for that one, so I didn't buy any tickets in that, but then we did end up sitting around until after it was drawn. Oh well.

We left the pub, and went for a walk around the block, near the waterfront, and around and back to the car. Before we left, my mate's in laws looked in the window of a real estate agent. I'm so over looking in real estate windows, it's all we seem to do in Maitland, and I'm sick to death of it.

We finished there, got in the car, and drove back to their house. We sat and watched the tv, "Unbreakable" was on, I read my book, and then we turned it off, and all went to bed about 10pm.

I got up, at 6.30am, went and had a shower, and finished packing my bag (with the toiletries and stuff).

I had been expecting to be taking the train to the airport, like the last few times I've flown anywhere (actually, everytime I've flown anywhere), but Dad was going to drive down this morning, since he works in the city, to give me a lift.

Dad came and knocked on the door, and I went and got in the car, we left, stopped at the service station nearby, to put air in one of the tyres, that has a slow leak or something, and then we got on the freeway, and drove to city.

As we were heading towards the toll booths, to go through the tunnel, there was a prang, a truck went into the side of a rental car, which went into the back of a station wagon, which went into the back of a ute, and the station wagon's bumper got caught on the towball on the ute, and it ripped it off.

I sat and watched that for a while, as all the people got out, it didn't look like anyone was injured.

We got to the toll booth, paid, went through the tunnel, and down to the airport. I jumped out of the car, and went in.

I went to the check in, I only had my backpack, no luggage, so I could use the express check in. I went through the metal detector, I had to take my belt off to get through, so then it was the usual thing, of going through holding my pants up, and trying to get dressed after everything had gone through the xray machine.

I went down, into the terminal, and went to the mcdonalds, and got a mcmuffin or something, and then I went around to the coffee place I'd gone to when I was in the airport last time, I think when I flew to the TiVo BBQ last year, since I was able to get a soy latte last time, but now they don't have soy anymore, so I ended up with a black coffee.

As I wandered around, because I still had about 1/2 hour to fill in, I noticed another place selling krispy kreme donuts, so I got one of those, and then I went and sat in the gate, waiting to get on the plane.

I drank my coffee, which was too hot, and I burnt my mouth, then it was time to get on the plane, I got on, found my seat, grabbed my folder, book, and ipod out of my bag, and stowed my bag.

I sat and ate my donut, waited for the plane to take off. I started reading my book, "Snow Crash", by Neal Stephenson. Eventually we taxied on to the runway, and then I sat and looked out the window as we took off.

I spent ages staring out the window, because there was actually stuff to see. I've flown north before, I've been to the Gold Coast, but I didn't get a window seat that time, and there was actually tons of stuff to see, compared with when I flew down to Melbourne a couple of times, which is boring.

When we got high enough, that it was hard to make anything out, I went back to reading my book, put my ipod on, and then I stopped reading my book, and went through all the paperwork for court again, and my letter, getting my defense straight, so I knew exactly what to say when I got a chance.

They came around with the food trolley, I got a can of Bundy and Coke, nothing like drinking at 10.30 in the morning. I finished going over the court stuff, and went back to reading my book.

We got to Brisbane, and I wandered off the plane, and into the terminal. I wandered around, trying to fill in the time. I had about an hour and a half before the next flight.

I had a bit of change, so I went an played a pinball machine, I think it was a Lord of the Rings machine. It wasn't terribly impressive.

I walked into the Qantas gates, and wandered around a bit. I had to check in for the next flight, and I figured that since I'd got off a plane, I was inside the secure area, and if there was a way to check in while in here, I wouldn't have to go out, check in, and then strip off and putting all my stuff through the xray machine again.

I found the information desk, spoke to a woman, and was able to check in in there, and she told me where the gate was, but then when I went down there, I found that there was no way to get there without going out, so I had to go through the xray machine again.

I did that, got dressed again, and then headed for the gate. On the way, there was a chick on some Amex stand. I figured that she was trying to sign me up for an Amex Blue, which I've already got, so as I went past, I let her start her spiel, and then told her that I already had an Amex.

It turns out that she wasn't trying to get me to sign up, and couldn't actually sign me up anyway (is that because she's under 18 or something?), and was just wanting to tell me about some new rewards program, with frequent flier points.

I took the brochure, since it would probably make her shut up, and then I kept going. Yeah, like I want to pay extra, to go into some frequent flier rewards program, when this is the 4th trip I've ever been on, via plane.

Hopefully I'll be getting my license back in a few weeks anyway, and won't have to worry about flying anywhere.

I went into the gate, and sat and read my book, and listened to my ipod, while I waited for my flight.

I wasn't looking forward to this bit, the planes were tiny, little jet assisted prop planes. A few flights went before mine, and then eventually it got time for mine to board.

I went and got in the line, and then we waited outside, on the tarmac, before being lead to the plane. These planes are so small, you just walk out on the tarmac, and step on to the plane, like it's a bus or something.

I found my seat, (I'd got a window seat again), and again, grabbed my book and ipod. I didn't bother with the paperwork for court, I'm sick of looking at it.

I sat and read my book, and then we took off, and a few minutes after that, they came through and offered us food, a little snack box with cheese, crackers, biscuits, water etc.

I finished that, and sat and read my book, and then stared out the window for the last bit of the trip, as we came in low to land.

We got into Bundaberg just before 2pm, and I walked into the terminal.. wow, huge, not. I found a seat, and sat and read my book, and waited for my mate's step father in law to come and pick me up.

He came into the terminal at about 2.50pm, asked me why I was sitting in there, and I said it was better than sitting outside waiting for an hour.

He'd only been waiting for 5 minutes, so that was ok. I wlked out, jumped in the car, and then we drove over to Bunnings, to look at flooring, because my mate's in laws are moving house next week, and they went to get the floor fixed up before they move in.

We looked at a bunch of stuff in there, and then went back and got in the car, and drove to a shopping centre. We went into Kmart or something, and my mate's stepfather in law bought a whiteboard for his soccer team, and then we went to the butcher, got some stuff for tea, and into the bottle shop, to get some alcohol.

As we left there, his phone rang, I waited around for a few minutes while he chatted to someone, then we went and got in the car.

He was trying to get the purchase of the house sorted out, we were going to drive to the solicitors to sort it out. On the way, his phone rang, it was the solicitor, after some details, to contact the seller's solicitor. He spoke to them for a few minutes, and then we kept driving, and went to the solicitors.

We went up, he spoke to the woman at reception, sorted out some details, and then we left again. We drove around to the house where his wife, my mate's mother in law, was working, looking after someone. I just sat in the car, while he went to speak to her.

After that, we drove around a bit, and went and looked at the new house they're buying, and then just drove around a bit more, and he showed me a block of land he owned, sold recently, and now was worth a fortune.

After that, we drove back to the house, and went in, and sat and watched tv for a while, a couple of hours.

We made dinner, and sat and ate, while watching more tv. The Footy Show came on, and after watching it for a while, my mate's stepfather in law commented that that I looked a bit like Fatty Vaughton. In response to that, I showed him the ID card I had when I was at CSC, where I look very much like him, and keep being told to mail it in, as a look a like.

Then my mate's stepfather in law went to clean up the garage, ready to pack the stuff up. I sat and watched some tv, and then went and got my court paperwork, and went through all that again, and then watched more tv.

My mate's mother in law came home, with my mate's brother in law, her son, the guy I'd been dealing with about the computer problems, about 10.30pm. We chatted for a while, and had a couple of drinks, and then we all went to bed.

I got up, and was sitting on the computer, going through email or something, when Mum came in. She asked when I wanted to go out to Erina (because I have to get a haircut, to get rid of my green hair). I said in an hour or so.

I continued bumming around on the computer for a while, and then I went and had a shower and got ready. I went inside the house, and said I was ready to go. I had been intending to ride out to Erina, to take the last chance I might have to ride, even though I'm suspended, but not a court ordered suspension.

I waited around, Mum got her stuff, and then we got in the car, and she drove out to Erina. I went and sat in the hairdresser, and waited to get my hair cut.

Eventually they got around to me, and the guy did the best job he could, to take all the green out, without me ending up almost shaved. There were still a few bits of green left, but they weren't obvious, unless you were up close.

I paid, left, and wandered around to the food court to get some lunch. I sat and ate, and then went to the supermarket, and bought some toiletries, to take with me, since my deodorant is an aerosol one, and I wasn't sure if you can take them on planes (you can, but I wasn't sure), and the shampoo's run out, and my toothbrush is all worn out.

I left there, and started wandering, and then I called Mum, and said I was finished. She told me where she was, but I had no idea where it was, so I just waited where I was. Mum came around a little while later, and we went back to the car, and came home.

I sat and played the guitar all afternoon, feeling anxious and depressed about the next couple of days.

I sat and watched some tv, did some blogging, ate a pizza, had a few drinks, continued watching tv, then ate a bit more, and drank a bit more, trying to make best use of the time, before I'm stuck in airports, on planes, 1300km away from home, and in court.

While I was sitting there, my mate's mother in law called me, and told me that her husband would be able to pick me up from the airport tomorrow, but it wouldn't be until about 2.45pm, and then I'd have to drag around the shops with him.

I said I was happy to do that, since I already had to spend hours in the airport, an extra bit of time is nothing, if I'm going to get a lift, and have something to do in the afternoon.

I got off the phone, and went back to watching TV. The senior DBA called me, from a pub, he wanted to wish me luck in court in the morning, I told him that I wasn't in court tomorrow, I'm still at home, I'm flying up there tomorrow, and I'm in court on Friday.

I chatted a bit more, not very much, because it was very hard to hear, with him in the pub, and then got off the phone.

I checked again that all my paperwork was ready, and found a tie to go with my suit, worked out how to tie it (since the only time I wear ties is at funerals these days), and then packed my bag.

When I was packing my bag, I realised that my 32mb usb memory thing wasn't in there. Hmm, I'm sure it was. Maybe I lost it somewhere? though the bag was open when I took it out of the email support guy's car, maybe it's in his back seat or something. Oh well.

I went to bed a bit after that, and couldn't sleep, worried about the next couple of days.

The usual.. got up, got ready. The shower was a nightmare this morning, the water kept going freezing cold, and scalding hot, within a few seconds. It was horrid, I couldn't win. I hate living in this pub.

I decided I needed a coffee this morning, after that shower, so I made one, and sat and watched the news, and then headed to work.

I did some work for a while, and then I sat and got my court stuff in order. I went and found a folder to put all paper work in order, and highlighted all the payments for accomodation on the senior DBA's credit card statements.

I tried calling my mate's brother in law, in Bundaberg, to confirm getting picked up, when I get there on Thursday afternoon, but there was no answer on his mobile, or on the house number.

I went and sat the senior DBA, and then we eventually went out to get some lunch, at the cafe down the road.

After lunch, I went to the bank, to pay for the watches I'd won on ebay the other day, and then I walked back to work.

When I got back, I called up my mate's mother in law, in Bundaberg, to arrange getting picked up. I would be arriving at 2pm, and that was when she was starting work, so she wasn't able to pick me up. I got their address, so I could get a taxi back to their place when I got there.

I got off the phone, and went back to work, until I got a call from the web services guy, something about the website, but for once not that it was stuffed. I was expecting him to say that, so as soon as I answered the phone, I started checking it, and found it to be down, but because he didn't mention it, I left it, figuring that I would just fix it anyway.

I answered his questions, and then got off the phone, and went about trying to fix up the website. This time it was caused by something running away, and eating all the memory again, and the machine running out of swap, and the cpu getting pegged trying to swap stuff out.

I couldn't even log into the machine, it was so busy swapping, it took ages to get a login prompt, and then even longer to spawn a shell.

While I was waiting for a shell, so I could start killing stuff off, and getting some memory back, to sort the machine out, the external guy at Woy Woy called me, to find out why he couldn't get into TAS, and I explained about the fact that the whole server was in a bad state, so all external services would be unavailable at the moment, TAS, the website, MinView, DIGS, it all runs off that one server.

I told him that I was trying to fix it, and just to give us a bit of time. I got off the phone, and then immediately called up a few people in IT, the senior DBA, the contract DBA, the sysadmin, but none of them answered their phones. I'm left to deal with this one on my own this time. I hoped I could remember the process for shutting down oracle, because the senior DBA usually does that.

I was still waiting for the shell to spawn, from a login attempt about 15 minutes before, when the web services guy called me. I gave up waiting, and went upstairs to find who was there, or where they were. They were back by now, and I explained that we were having problems again, and we spent about the next 1/2 hour restarting all the services, once we could login.

After that, I went to speak to the email support guy, to confirm that I could get a lift home with him this afternoon, and that was fine, he was planning on leaving at about 5.30pm. I had a quick chat with him, and then went back to my desk.

I spent a bit of time mucking around with the music in my ipod, because it's going to have to keep me entertained for quite a few hours over the next few days. It'll take me about 7 hours to get to Bundaberg on Thursday, and a little bit longer to get back on Saturday.

I got a call from the web services guy, he wanted to arrange updating mysource in the next couple of days. I told him that it wouldn't be possible, because I wasn't in for the rest of the week, because I had to go to court. We arranged to do the upgrade early next week.

I got off the phone, and went back to work, and worked until about 5.30pm, and then I packed up my stuff, and went upstairs to hang around, and wait for the email support guy to finish, to get a lift home with him.

He was busy, working on something and talking to someone, so I just went and sat in the sysadmin's cubicle, who had left for the day, and used his Sun machine to fix up the crontab on the production server that I accidently trashed the other day. We'd had the backup of the crontab restored, so I went through and compared the files, and added in a few missing lines.

Just as I finished, the email support guy finished up what he was working on, and said he was leaving, so I grabbed my bag, and left.

I got a lift home, and when we got back, I sat in the car chatting to the email guy for a couple of minutes, finishing up our conversation, and then I came inside.

I went and got my mail from my parents, nothing interesting there. They offered me some dinner, I didn't have any food to eat, so I accepted the offer, sat and ate, and watched some tv.

Some rubbish show came on, so then I went back out to where I live, watched a bit of tv, and went to bed.

Woo, after 5 hours sleep, I woke up at 6am, listened to the radio.

They said that Rene Rivkin had died, hmm, wouldn't have expected that.

I sent an SMS to the senior DBA, at about 6.10am, asked if I was going to see him at 7am, for a lift to work.

I waited a couple of minutes for a reply, didn't get one, so then I got up, and went and had a shower. Ugh I feel a bit crook this morning.

I got dressed, packed my bag, which I hadn't done last night, being too lazy, and then had some breakfast.

I waited, I checked slashdot while I waited, and then the senior DBA arrived, and I went and jumped in the car.

We drove to work, nothing eventful on the way, except for a bit of rain.

On the way, he told me there were some major issues with the production system we'd been mucking around with on Friday afternoon.

As we got near work, the senior DBA said he wanted to go and look for a house that was for rent that he'd seen on the internet last night. He didn't have the address, he'd just seen a picture of it, so we looped around some back streets of maitland looking for it.

We didn't find it, so we gave up and headed to work.

We got to work, and went into the building, I went and dropped my stuff off at my desk, and then I went up to see the senior DBA, and try to work out what was wrong with the production system.

From the error he'd told me he'd seen, it sounded like Oracle Application Server had crapped itself again. Yep, that's what it was.

We tried restarting it, but kept getting errors.

I had a look, and the license server for another application had run away, eating 75% of the cpu. We shut that down, and the restarted everything, including the Oracle table space, and it all came back working.

We went across the road and got a coffee after that. I really didn't want a nasty coffee, but I was cold, and tired.

The coffee wasn't as bad as usual, the chick who usually ends up making my coffee (who has no idea how to make a coffee) wasn't there, so the other chick made it.

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

I finished rewriting the module from the system I'm developing that I started on Friday afternoon, finding a couple of big bugs, that are now in production, because my testing is lazy. Oops.

I copied all the music off my new USB memory thing that I loaded up last night, finding that I already had 30 songs, (112MB worth) of them on my machine at work. D'oh, I could have brought other stuff.

Maybe I should have taken a directory listing home with me on Friday. I wish I had a VPN account, I could have logged into my work machine from home, and checked what was on it.

I continued working, and the web services guy called me, talking about the upgrade procedure for the software we use to serve the website, since it's been having a lot of issues lately.

As soon as I answered the phone, and realised who it was, I started checking if the website was up, because the only time this guy ever calls me is when the site is down. When I checked it, I found that it was down again, but I didn't let on.

When I got off the phone, I started investigating more, and found that there was something seriously wrong with the server. The website was not responding, usually it gives an error, trying to use the application served by Oracle Application Server was returning all sorts of weird errors, and when I tried to ssh to the server, I could login, but it wouldn't spawn a shell.

WTF is going on? some dumb process has run away eating all the cpu and/or memory.

I tried for a while to get in, actually managed to get a shell, but then the prompt became totally useless as soon as I tried to work out what the problem was.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he was there with the sysadmin, trying to work out what was going on. I stayed on speakerphone to them for a while, and after not getting anywhere, I gave up, and went upstairs.

It took us almost an hour to get it sorted, eventually we managed to get in, but the shell was useless. There was a guy at the colo facility working on the console, apparently it was coming up with swap error messages.

His local console had a slightly higher priority than our remote shells, so we were telling him what to run, to try to shut stuff down.

When we got a shell that was responsive, we killed of apache, giving us a bit more memory, and then we killed all the instances of oracle, and mysql for good measure.

When we had it like this, with everything stopped, we figured we might as well just reboot it, since we already restarted all the processes this morning, but the machine still fell over again.

We asked the guy at the colo facility to reboot the machine, (so he could watch it come back up properly). The senior DBA went for a smoke while he waited for that, and when the guy at the colo called the sysadmin to tell him the box was back up, we went about checking it was all ok.

The senior DBA came back, and had to go through all the procedure of starting up the license server, Oracle, Oracle Application Server, and a few other things.

Once it all looked like it was back working, we decided to go for lunch, only an hour and a half after I wanted to go in the first place.

We went and jumped in the car, the senior DBA had called the real estate place responsible for renting the place we'd looked for this morning, and he'd got the address.

We went and found it, and wandered around looking in it. I didn't like the look of the place at all, and it was too far from work, too close to the train line, too close the main road, with trucks thundering along, and too close to a church.

We got back in the car, and the senior DBA drove down the back of the house, and there were some weird people hanging out of a door, of a part of the house that was for rent, so it had some attached, separate residence. I don't like it at all.

We headed back towards work, trying to work out where to go for lunch.

Eventually we decided to go to the Grand Junction for lunch, so we drove there, parked, and wandered in.

We went and ordered our lunch first, and then went and got some drinks. I decided to have a beer, ordered it, and shouted both drinks.

While we were waiting for our drinks to be poured, I told the senior DBA that I was going to the movies tonight, because I hadn't been able to last Thursday.

A couple of the guys in the bar started talking to me about my hair, and I briefly explained about doing it for my holiday, and then st pat's day, and then leaving it until I had to get rid of it for court, otherwise I would have already got rid of it.

I went outside, and sat with the others, we chatted for a while.

They were served their meals, and the chick said that she'd stuffed up, and only cooked on schnitzel (both the sysadmin and I wanted schnitzel burgers), so it would be a few minutes.

I continued chatting, and drinking my beer. A little while later my food was served, and the senior DBA went in and got me another beer.

We finished our meals, and the chick came to collect our plates, and asked if it was lunch, or if we were finished for the day.

It was now almost 3pm, so the senior DBA said he was finished, I'll go back and do another couple of hours.

I finished my beer, and then we headed back to work.

On the way, the senior DBA got an SMS from the little guy in royalty, saying "long lunch ha?", since we'd been gone a little bit over an hour.

I grabbed his phone, and replied "short man ha?", to which his witty reply, about 5 minutes later, was "ass clown".

Hmm, that reply is about on par with a Guybrush Threepwood "I am rubber, you are glue" response.

We got back to the building, and went in, and got in the lift. The senior DBA wouldn't let me press the button for level 1, until it was past level 1, since he's sick of me making them wait while I get out on the floor below them.

I decided to go and annoy the little guy in royalty for a while.

As we went past the director's office, we noticed a jar of jelly beans on the counter, the senior DBA asked a (large) woman working near there if we could have any, and she said "the more we eat, the less she has to".

I got around to the area near the little guy from royalty after collecting some jelly beans, but found him to be doing some work (for once), so I left him alone.

I came back to my desk, and continued working.

Some guy came around, complaining about how cold it was, though it was colder on this side of the building than his side.

I said we could swap if he wanted, and then commented on the fact I was sitting here all rugged up, and I said that I couldn't stand to be here otherwise.

I told him about the fact the aircon is not adjusted properly, it thinks it's 24 degrees, when it's more like 16, but the guy who looks after it doesn't want to come up from Sydney, travelling for a couple of hours, to do 10 minutes work and go home again, so we're still waiting on an analogue line, so he can dialin and fix the machine remotely.

I don't want to think about how much money is being wasted running the air conditioning at full pelt all day every day.

I sat and wrote a letter for court, basically what I was going to say in my defence, when I got a chance.

I was just finishing this up, when I got a call from the senior DBA, he was leaving for the day. I asked him to get the credit card statements sorted out for me, as proof that I've been living in the pub, and don't have a fixed address (even though it's crap, and I've been living at home).

He said he'd do it now, so then I went up to get them, he printed them out for me. While I was up there getting them, I spoke to the royalty manager, he was suggesting I get a letter off one of the bartenders (since they all know us all by name), to say I've been living in their pub for the last 6 months, but I don't really have time to do that.

We left the building after that, and went to the pub we're staying in. I dropped off my bag, and was feeling really tired. I wanted to lie down for a while, but couldn't be bothered, I probably wouldn't want to get up again.

We went across to the pub, saw the support guy and the old librarian, and had a few drinks. I played the pokies, and drank a bit more.

On my way to the bar, I saw the email guy in the pub, playing the pokies. I played a bit more, won a few dollars, and when I went to take my money out, the machine stuffed up, and didn't give me the full amount, but it stuffed up even more, and gave me a dollar that it didn't count.

I went in and complained, and the guy came and fixed it, giving me the rest of the money, I didn't mention the extra dollar, big whoop anyway.

I'd decided to go to the movies and see HHGTTG tonight, so I walked down to the cinema, to see the session times, because I'd forgotten to check on the internet before I left.

I walked all the way down to the cinemas, looked around, couldn't see the session times anywhere. I asked a chick working in there, who was changing the name of the movie displayed over one of the cinema entrances, where the session times were.

She told me that there's a green sheet on the counter with them on it. I found that, took one, had a look as I wandered back up to the pub.

I got back, had another drink. There's a couple of sessions I could go to, 7pm, or 9.15pm. The later one is probably better, so there's time to have dinner.

We eventually finished up in that pub, and walked down to the Grand Junction, and had another drink, and ordered dinner. We waited, were served, and ate. I sat chatting until about 9.05pm, and then I walked back to the cinema again.

I bought a ticket, went in, and sat and watched the movie. This was the first time I'd been to the movies since I saw the third Matrix movie.

When the movie finished, (which I though was ok), I wandered back up to the pub I was staying in.

I saw the senior DBA on the way back, he was staggering back up the road. I opened the door, and we went into the pub, and back to the room, and I went to bed, and had a terrible sleep, restless.

Nice lazy Sunday (like I wanted yesterday).

I got up, and did the usual bumming around, on the computer, watching tv etc.

I sat and wrote a PHP parser for tvtome, that extracts the expisode title, year, director, plot etc, from each episode, so that I can populate the guide database with the data easily.

I sat and did some blogging, and then continued on the parser. I sent an email off to the guy looking after the guide database, to find out about a format for batch loading episode data (which I could generate with my parser).

I sat and watched some tv, and finally got around to making some lunch at about 4pm.

I finished off the bottle of wine from last night (since it's not going to last in the fridge for a week, after being opened), and played the guitar for a while.

I got a shocking headache. I don't know why, I'd blame the wine, but I drank more of it last night, and I felt fine when I woke up.

I watched more tv, and then made and ate some dinner. After that I watched "Mac and Me", that I'd bought off Amazon a few weeks ago. I didn't remember it being such a big ad for McDonalds and Coke. It was years ahead of its time, product placement in a movie in the 80s.

After that, I packed my bag, ready to go back to work tomorrow, and went to bed.