I just found a link to a survey about blogging, while trying to find if there was anything in the blogger status blog, explaining why the dashboard keeps rendering all weird, with edit buttons that fill up the whole screen.

I didn't find why that is, but I did the survey anyway, here's a link to it:



I just tried to look at the current results of the survey, and it looks like the database server is having some trouble at the moment. See here.

Update, 4/7/05: I just went and had a look at the results at the moment, and I'm bang on average for almost every question they asked. Hmm, that's not very exciting. I'm not a statistic, I'm average.

I've just tried to get the volume keys working on my laptop again. I'd previously looked at this, but not spent much time on it.

I found that I needed a program called "hotkeys" (which apt-get has a package for), and then I had to create a definition for my laptop keyboard.

For anyone else running a 2200, here's the file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<definition>
  <config model="Dell Inspiron 2200 Notebook">
    <volup keycode="176">
    <voldown keycode="174">
    <mute keycode="160">
  </config>
  <contributor>
    <name>Simon Quigley</name>
    <email>squigley@squigley.net</email>
  </contributor>
</definition>

(It's really hard to insert xml into a blog, without it being interpreted, so the indenting is probably wrong, I had to replace the tabs with non breaking spaces).

Anyway, once I had that file in /usr/share/hotkeys, as inspiron2200.def, I was able to "hotkeys -t inspiron2200", and have my volume keys work.

It even has a groovy OSD, to show the volume going up and down.

The only issue now, is that it changes the master volume control, and this volume control has no effect when I'm using headphones, only the PCM 1 and 2 effect the headphones volume.

Hmm, oh well, at least I should have hardware volume control when not using headphone, which is a start, so that in the office if my laptop starts making noise without the headphones in, I can just hit the mute keyboard combination, and shut it up.

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

I shutdown the stuff (NSLU2, disk etc, since I'd left it running while extracting recordings from the tivo last night), and packed my bag.

I went in, waited around, and then Mum gave me a lift to the service station.

I hung around in the carpark for a little while, and then the email support guy turned up, and I got a lift to work.

I did some work, and then my mate in Melbourne told me that he'd got a new XBMC build.

I gave him my gmail login, and he used that drive mount hack thing to put the files in there, and I was able to get them out again, at work, using the same thing.

I did some work for a couple of hours, and then got called up by the little guy, he was asking if I was going to lunch.

I went upstairs, and hung around for a while. I chatted to the Senior DBA, about the stuff over the weekend.

He told me that the cops had told him not to go back in the laundry, they eventually turned up on Sunday, and took some fingerprints, and a report.

I doubt anything will happen though, the stuff is gone.

I went for a walk with the little guy, and we went to a cheap shop, he was looking for a piping bag, for making a cake.

While we were there, I bought some batteries, a power point timer (for the heater), and a cheap knockoff xbox remote.

We walked back towards work, and I went to subway, and ate it on the way back to work.

I hung around upstairs for a little while, and then went back to my desk.

I worked for a while, but I couldn't think straight. I went and got a drink from the vending machine, and tried to work a bit more.

Eventually I gave up, and packed up my laptop, to go. Then I remembered that I needed to get the tivo guide data slices, so I setup my laptop again.

I downloaded the guide slices, and then packed up my laptop, and walked back to the house.

I think this is when I put the bed together, but I'm not sure.

I setup the gear I'd brought back, the AP, and NSLU2/disk etc.

It was weird, the NSLU2 booted up, but was running off the internal config, instead of the disk.

I wondered if it was because I turned the disk on before I attached the USB cable to the NSLU2 or something.

I fiddled around for a bit, and after powercycling both the disk and the NSLU2, it came up properly.

I got the wireless working again, with one running as a client to the other, since only one has OpenWRT on it, and the other has the stock firmware on it, which doesn't do WDS.

I found that xbox routing doesn't work properly, it wouldn't connect to the NSLU2, which was on a different subnet, because of the wireless bridging.

I tried to install the new XBMC I'd got this morning, but I had disk space issues.

I fiddled around, and eventually, after moving some other stuff off the disk, had enough space to install the new XBMC.

I hadn't realised that it had run out of space while copying a couple of times, and I'd wondered why it didn't boot, or had errors about missing files.

Anyway, I finally got it running, but then I couldn't get it to connect to the NSLU2 anyway.

I put some stuff on the harddrive in the xbox, and tried playing that, but it didn't seem to want to play movies for some reason. I wondered if it was something dumb I was doing, pressing the wrong button or something, but I couldn't work it out.

I even tried using the xbox remote, but that wouldn't play movies either, I could only get it to play music.

The senior DBA had come back a little while before, and he'd arranged for us going to dinner at the mailroom woman's place.

The chick from work and her boyfriend turned up, and they hung around for a while, and then we all got in the car, and took off.

We stopped in at the bottleshop on the way, and got some grog, and then we went to the mailroom woman's place.

We chatted for a while, and then had dinner, and desert.

We sat around for a while, and then all the others ended up in the laundry smoking, and I sat and watched some of a DVD that was on.

We left, and we got dropped back at the house. I watched some tv, and setup the serial link, and loaded the new guide data.

It took ages to index for some reason. I went to bed after that, did a bit of blogging, and then went to sleep.

I woke up about 9am. The others weren't up, so I went back to sleep.

I heard my drummer mate come in to the room about 11am, and I spoke to him for a bit, but then fell asleep again, and I didn't end up getting up until after 1pm.

There was a message on my phone from my mate I'd seen yesterday, about a letter, he thought he'd left at my place.

I replied, and told him I was not at home.

We left, and I forgot to take my autographed poster. We went to McDonalds, and got some food.

They were totally disorganised, they put ice in the drink, when I'd ordered it without, and they forgot to give me part of my order, and when I asked about it, they said they'd bring it out, and they forgot, and I had to go back again.

Useless. After all that, I managed to get my food.

While we were eating, there were a bunch of noisy kids on the next table, I could have done without their crap.

We finished eating, and then left, and I got dropped at home.

I got the mail in, but there was nothing interesting.

My mate turned up, and picked up the letter he'd forgotten, and then I sat and blogged for a while.

I watched some tv, and then I extracted a bunch of tivo recordings on to the disk attached to the NSLU2.

I had dinner, and then Dad came in, whinging about DHCP being broken, so I restarted it on the router.

He said he still couldn't get his laptop working, so I went in, and fiddled around a bit, and it just worked.

I asked about getting a lift to the service station near the freeway in the morning, so I could get a lift with the email support guy, and Mum said that was ok.

I rang up the email support guy, and arranged a lift with him, and the time, and then I let Mum know.

I went back out, and watched more tv, and extracted more stuff on to the disk. I packed up my laptop, and then I went to bed.

I watched some tv, and then I went to sleep.

I woke up, and lay in for ages, watching tv. I eventually got up, at 1.15pm.

There was some really annoying noise going on, I thought it was a hard drive or a fan, and while looking to see where it was comeing from, I realised it was actually someone playing the drums in a garage nearby.

I sat around for a while, and got a message from my drummer mate, he said he was at his cousin's place.

I got a message from my mate, whose wife left him, he wanted to see me.

A couple minutes later, my mobile rang, and I started chatting, and then my landline rang, it was my other mate.

I got off the mobile, told my drummer mate I'd call him back, and answered the landline. I arranged to see my other mate, so then I called back my drummer mate, and I told him I'd see him later, at the show we're going to.

I had a shower, and then my mate turned up. We had a drink, and chatted for a while, and then my mobile rang.

It was the senior DBA. He said something along the lines of "don't freak out", and I initially thought it was something to do with the tivo I'd installed in the house, but then he followed it up by saying "we've been robbed".

Hmm, terrific. I imagined the place was ransacked, but then he told me "not inside".

We spoke for a couple of minutes, and basically someone had gone in the laundry, that wasn't locked, and pinched both our mountain bikes.

They'd also gone through the back shed, and pinched a whole bunch of the senior DBA's tools, including power tools, and some paint brushes.

They must have been there for ages, because all the boxes in the shed had been gone through, and they'd taken what they wanted.

They'd also pinched the washing powder, and the pegs, this was what had made him realise what had happened, when he couldn't find the washing powder.

It could have been days ago, because I hadn't been in the laundry since Tuesday, and the senior DBA hadn't ridden his bike to work all week.

My mate suggested that I tell him to go to the police station, and file a report.

I got off the phone, and went back to chatting with my mate. I wasn't that worried, I'd only lost my pushbike, that was pretty much stuffed anyway, and I was going to buy a new one.

We chatted for ages, and then sat and watched "Lock, Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels".

I called up my drummer mate, and arranged to go around to my guitarist mate's place, so my mate pillioned me over there on his bike.

I realised I hadn't been on a bike since before I went to court, months ago.

On the way, there were a couple of old farts driving really slow on the road, my mate blasted around them, and the old fart driving put his high beams on, so I gave him the finger.

Damn I miss riding.

I got to my mate's place, and went in, he was watching the end of "True Lies".

After that finished, we left, and got in the car, and drove to the service station around the corner.

My mate bought some smokes, I got some chips, because I hadn't eaten much all day.

We drove to Westfield at Tuggerah, and went in to the bottle shop, and I bought some grog.

We went to our drummer mate's place, and sat and drank, and watched some of "The Rutles".

We got a lift to the Doylo, and went in, and bought tickets to see the Led Zeppelin show.

Our drummer mate went to the loo, and my other mate and I went in to where the show was going to be.

We waited a while, and our other mate didn't turn up, so I went out to look for him. I played the pokies first, just putting a dollar through, and then I found him, wandering around looking for us, outside the concert area.

We went back in, and I got more chips from the vending machine.

The opening act came on, they did some stuff by The Offspring, and Blink 182 etc, I'm not a big fan of that stuff.

A while later, the Led Zeppelin cover band came on, and we watched the show, and got up for a dance.

I ended up having 9 drinks, and some more chips later on in the night.

Between every song, I was yelling "Ramble On!", and eventually they actually played it, last.

After they went off, I went over to the stage, and I pinched the set list, and a sheet with the verses of Stairway to Heaven listed on it.

(I just looked at the setlist, and Ramble On isn't on it).

We waited around, and the guys from the band came back on stage. We saw the guy who was Robert Plant, he came over, and we had a chat.

We went out, and I saw there were posters for the even in the foyer. I asked the chick on the desk when they usually take them out, and she asked someone else, and he said to just give me one.

She opened up the frame, and took the poster out, and then some Leb that was hanging around grabbed it.

I asked him what the deal was, and then a bouncer came over, and he must have seen me ask for the poster etc, because he told the Leb to give it to me.

He did, but there was another one, so the chick went to get that one for him I assume.

I went back in, the Robert Plant guy was hanging around near the mixing desk, I got him to sign the poster for me.

I thanked him, and then we left. A guy that my mate's work with at Target turned up, he's a bit of a designated driver.

He drove us over to Wyong Leagues Club, and we went to go in.

The others went in, and the guy on the door asked me for some ID. I showed him my NSW license, since it's the only ID I've got now, and he looked at it, and then said it was expired.

Yeah, so? I asked him if he didn't think the photo looked like me, and that I didn't look over 18 anyway, but he said he wouldn't let me in.

I didn't really care, I didn't want to go in there anyway.

My mates eventually worked out that I was still outside, and came back towards me, and I explained that I couldn't get in.

We all left, and went back to the car. The guy drove us back towards our drummer mate's place, we went to the servo on the way, and I got yet more chips.

We went back to our drummer mate's place, and jumped out of the car. I wanted to give the guy who'd driven us back some money.

He wouldn't take the $30 that I offered him (less than a taxi would have been), eventually he said he take $10, so I gave him that, and then I flicked the $20 at him as I shut the door anyway.

We went in, and out into the back room of the house, and we watched rage, it was pretty crap, so my mate went and got his Rutles DVD, and we watched that.

I ate my chips, and then we watched Spinal Tap, and I kept falling asleep through it, eventually that finished, and we all went to sleep about 3am.

I woke up, heard the senior DBA in the shower for ages, he came out, said he'd see me at work later.

I got up, went and had a shower. The new shower head I put on was crap.

I got ready, head breakfast, and I walked to work. I worked for a while, and then filled out my timesheets, and got the geophysicist guy to sign them, since my manager and the indexer's project manager was away.

I faxed them through, and then I called up the temping agency, and asked them to send through an invoice for my pay for the year.

I got a call from the front desk, some packages had turned up for me, I went and collected them, opened them, and went through them all.

It was the stuff from NetBro, damn, that was quick.

I didn't bother opening up the WRT54G, I knew what to expect there, I opened up the NSLU2, it was a lot smaller than I was expecting, looks cool though.

I looked at the hard disk caddy, it wasn't very exciting, considering it's just a box with a hard drive in it.

I did some more work, and then I got an email from the woman at the temping agency.

She needed my most recent timesheets, and I told her that they went through at 10am. She went off to try to find them, and found them. That should have been all sorted.

I went upstairs about 12.30pm, and asked the email support guy about getting a lift home this afternoon, and then I went to lunch.

I walked down street, with a few guys from work, we got pies, and ate, and then walked back to work.

I sat at my desk, and I mucked around with hard disk caddy a bit. I opened it, and put the drive in properly, because the guy hadn't mounted the disk inside, it was bouncing around a bit.

In the process of taking the case apart, I dropped one of the screws, which disappeared under the desk, taking me a few minutes to find.

I finished mucking around, and put it back together.

I went back to work, and then the woman chasing me for my invoice, so that they could pay me properly came around about the invoice that the temping agency had sent in, there was something not right about it or something. I couldn't help her with it.

I got a call from delivery guys, they told me they were waiting at the house, and there was no one there.

Crap. I told them I'd be there shortly, and then I pissbolted back to the house, having an asthma attack on the way, and felt like I nearly died.

The delivery guy asked how old I was, and then said I was unfit. Oh duh mate.

I opened the door for them, and they moved the bed in, then I signed for it, and they left.

I sat down for a minute, and I used the nebuliser, because my asthma was so stuffed up. I had a drink, and waited a minute, then I moved the bed upstairs.

I didn't put it together, I just dumped all the bits in the room.

I grabbed the serial adapter I'd meant to take this morning, and then I locked up, and walked back towards work.

I went in to the supermarket, and bought some soap, because I've got none left at home, and I got some bread and a scone from the bakery.

I walked back to work, and I bumped into the royalty manager's kids on the way, and chatted to them.

I got back to work, sat down, still puffed from running back to the house, and then I worked a bit more.

I went upstairs for a while, and spoke to the sysadmin.

As the senior DBA was leaving, I bumped into the woman chasing me about my invoice, she was now trying to get my invoice signed off, but there was no one around who was authorised to do it.

The email support guy came around to my desk at 4.30pm, so I packed up laptop, grabbed my bags, and the bread, and went and got in the car. We left work, and went to the service station just down the road.

There was a power blip, and all the service station bowsers and the traffic lights reset. That was pretty weird.

The email support guy got fuel, and then we got on freeway, and I got dropped at home, I said I might need a lift to work on Monday, and we sorted that out.

I grabbed all my stuff, and I came inside. I sat down, watched some tv, and ate some bread.

I setup the second AP, but I couldn't get bridge mode working on it.

I eventually found that I needed to be running OpenWRT on both APs, so I put it on the new one, and then I managed to get the bridge setup, and I installed some packages on the AP.

I grabbed the NSLU2, and I installed unslung on it, and installed some packages for it, and then I went to bed, at about 2am.

I woke up, and was just lying on the sofa bed.

The senior DBA's phone rang, he'd left it in the loungeroom, I didn't answer it.

The door bell rang, so I got up, and went and answered the door. It was the little guy from work.

He came in, and hung around for a while. I went and had a shower, and some breakfast.

I got a lift with the little guy to work, and the senior DBA stayed in the house.

I setup my laptop at work, and I mucked around with xscreensaver a bit.

I configured the webcollage screensaver, and after about 10 images through, it came up with this one.

Hmm, I can do without that going on at work, so I disabled that screensaver again.

I worked on the files I'm writing for a while.

I sent an email to the guy at NetBro, and asked about USB hard drives. He stocks them, so I ended up ordering a Linksys NSLU2, a Linksys WRT54G, the external USB drive caddy and drive.

It came to $500 all up. I went out to lunch, and saw a few people from work.

I went to the ATM, and I pulled out $800, to pay for the stuff I'd ordered.

I got some lunch, and sat and ate, and chatted with the people from work. I went to the bank on the way back to the office, and I deposited the money for the stuff I'd ordered, $500 worth.

I went back to work, and continued coding. I remembered about the registered mail I'd arranged to get forwarded to Maitland. Bugger.

I left work, and I walked all the way down to the post office.

I collected the registered mail, and opened it as I walked back to work, I found that it was the concert tickets I'd booked a few days ago, to go and see the Finn Brothers.

I sent a message to Mum, and let her know what the mail was.

On the way back to work, I went into Harvey Norman across the road from work, and I bought the bed I looked at yesterday.

I arranged to get it delivered, but this meant it would come tomorrow, meaning another night sleeping on the sofabed. Ugh.

I asked them to let me know about 1/2 hour before it would be delivered, so I could be there to let the delivery guys in.

I went back to work, and I sat and cleaned up the data in the database I'm working on.

I added in support for some "WordPro" files that are in the dataset. Someone's put the description of them as "wordpad" files, so I had to sort that out.

I added in some code to detect WordPro files, but I couldn't get it to work, there was something suspect going on.

I got an email back from eksys, the guy wanted to know if I wanted an X-factor network card, instead of a Turbonet card, since they're cheaper, and also how I wanted the stuff sent, I sent an email back, saying the cheaper card would be fine, and wanting clarification if the prices were Aussie dollars, or US dollars.

I continued working, while I waited for the reply, I looked for the problem I was having with the new code.

I eventually found it, I was working in a switch/case, and I'd missed adding in the break, so it was falling through into the next case, and bollocksing up the variable values.

As soon as I found that, and fixed it, I decided to leave. Before I could do so, the senior DBA called me, and said that he wanted to go to McDonalds to get something to eat, so I said I'd go too, and he said he'd come and pick me up.

I started packing up my stuff, and then the indexer's manager asked me if I'd got my timesheets/invoice sorted out yet.

I said I hadn't, because I had to put in timesheets for the rest of the financial year first, and have them sent the invoice back.

I told him I'd get it sorted in the morning, and get my invoice in.

I put my stinky jumper on, I grabbed my laptop bag, and went outside to wait, the senior DBA got there just as I got there to wait.

I got in the car, and we drove to McDonalds. We sat and ate, and then drove back to the house again.

I sat around watching tv for a while, and then I went and put the shower head on that I bought, it should be a bit better.

I sat and did some blogging, and we watched tv.

I went and made a cup of coffee, the soy milk had gone a bit rough, understandable, since it's been in the fridge for a week and a half, so I just had a black coffee instead.

The tivo hadn't been changing the channels for some reason, so had recorded all the wrong things. I mucked around, and found it was something to do with the ir emitter, it wasn't changing the channel at all, but the other one did, so hopefully that fixed it.

I sat and watched some tv, stuff that tivo had recorded from the wrong channels.

The senior DBA went to bed, I watched some of tivo suggestions, "the complete cosmos". I tried to setup a season pass for this show, but it didn't show up in the guide. Maybe there's no more episodes in the guide data I've got.

I downloaded the new data today, but I couldn't be bothered to setup the serial link, and manually load the data, just for one day. I'll wait, and do it all again on Monday night I think.

I went to sleep.

I got up, pulled on a shirt, went down, outside (brr, cold), and got the washing in from the drier. I should have done this last night, to avoid having to go out in the cold.

I went and had a shower, and got dressed, then I had breakfast. The senior DBA had just finished getting ready, so I got in the car with him, and we drove to work.

I went to my desk, and started working. A little while later, I decided to go and see if I could find a USB -> serial adapter, Ive seen a stack of them at work.

I went to the build room, saw quite a few hanging around, so I just grabbed one to borrow for a couple of weeks, to use with the tivo, until I get an ethernet adapter for it.

I went back to my desk, now I had to work out how to get it going. I plugged it in, and nothing happened, as I expected.

I checked the kernel modules, and I hadn't build any of the modules for serial adapters. I ran up the kernel configuration, went in to the section for the serial adapters.

There's quite a few different drivers, I had to work out which one I needed. I looked at the device, there's bugger all information on it, but maybe "UC-232A" will help (I hope).

I googled, and unfortunately, I didn't find this page, but I did find a site with a driver cd for the adapter available.

I browsed through the directories, found the linux driver directory. I downloaded the C source of the kernel module, had a quick look through it, and saw a reference to "Prolific". I checked the kernel configuration menu, and saw an option for a Prolific USB/serial adapter.

Groovy, I selected that option, and then I exited the configuration. I really didn't want to have to rebuild the whole kernel, just for one lousy kernel module, so I did a "make modules". This seemed to work.

Now, I had to get it in the right directory. I thought about doing a "make modules-install", but I didn't want to do this, because I've got custom DRI kernel modules in there, and the wireless drivers, which might get effected.

I decided to just grab the module manually, I did find for the pl2303.ko file (or whatever it was), and then manually copied it into the kernel modules directory, did a "depmod -a", plugged the adapter in. I loaded the module manually, and it seemed to work.

Now I had to test it. I found that it had created /dev/ttyUSB0, so I symlinked that to /dev/ttyS1, since my laptop has no serial ports, and then I started up minicom.

I configured it, found a paperclip, and used it to short pins 2/3 in the db9, but I couldn't see the loopback. Hmm. I could see the led on the adapter flashing, when I shorted pins 2 and 7 or something, and I would get a bit of crud printed on the screen, but I couldn't get the loopback to work.

Oh well, since I'm doing something (shorting the pins), and seeing a result (the crud), it's at least half working, I can receive, if not send.

After this, I got an email, it was from someone at Orange, about the ecommerce stuff, which had been forwarded to me by a guy in titles upstairs. I went up to see him, to see if I could answer the questions he had.

While I was chatting to him about it, one of the spatial guys came over, because he'd been roped into it as well.

Basically, the woman at Orange wanted us to modify the details of the merchant ID being used for the credit card transactions, or disable the credit card payment stuff.

I'm not doing that, because I've not been given proper instructions to do it, letalone the fact that I don't want to touch it again, and if I was to just "disable" it, then major functions in a production system would be broken, so I'd have to develop a way around it.

I'm not doing anything, and the other guys agreed with that. It stays as it is, until we're properly told otherwise.

I went back to my desk, and went back to work. I got a call about going to lunch, the senior DBA said he was going to go to the hardware shop.

I went up, we hung around for a bit, and the little guy from royalty came with us. We went to the hardware shop, I got a tape measure, so I could measure the mattress that Dad and I brought up the other day, which is still leaning against the wall, so I can buy a bed to put it on.

The little guy looked for drill bits, he wanted allen key bits you can put in the drill.

We wandered all around, it's like a big supermarket. I decided to buy a new showerhead, one with a bit of pressure, since we just have a big showerhead now, and because of the position in the shower/bath, you have to turn it sideways.

I figured I'd get one with jet spray or something, and it might be a bit easier than turning the showerhead sideways, I only paid about $20 for one.

We continued wandering, and found a doormat. I wanted to look for an antislip mate thing, to put in the bath, since I keep nearly going A over T while having a shower, because of the round shape of the bath. I couldn't find one thought, and gave up.

We went to the checkout, and I bought my tape measure, the showerhead, and a roll of teflon tape, to put the showerhead on with.

The senior DBA bought the doormat, and something else, that I don't remember.

After that, we drove to Hungry Jacks, and had lunch. After that, while heading back to work, I asked to be dropped off at the house, so I could go and measure the mattress, and look for a bed later.

I got dropped off, and went inside, measured the mattress (I don't remember what the size was, but I found out it was just a double bed), and then I went out and measured my bike's rims (21.5"), so I can buy some new tyres, because the ones on it are perished.

I locked up the house, and started walking back to work. I stopped at an intersection, waiting to cross the road, and a truck driver hung out of the window of his truck, waiting at the lights, and asked if I knew where some street was.

I told him, since it was the street we live in, and then I continued walking back to work.

Before I got back to work, I decided to look in the furniture shops across the road, to find out about a bed. I went into Forty Winks. I wandered around, just looking for a basic bed. I wasn't seeing much. I saw one I didn't mind.

Some guy came to help me, and I explained that I needed a bed, for a mattress I already had. I told him the size, and he went over to look at a chart, and work out what size it was. This is when I found out that it was a double bed mattress.

The bed I'd liked, was too big for the mattress. The guy suggested another bed, which I didn't really like, which was $400.

I thanked him, said I'd keep looking. I went across to Sleep City after that, and browsed through there. I looked at the metal beds, I just wanted a basic steel bed or something.

Eventually a woman came over to help me, and I told her that I was looking for just a bed, for a double mattress. I asked if their packages were available as just the bed (since everything was a package, with bedside tables, and bedding etc, which I don't want). She told me they were, but all the stuff was Queen and King size, not double.

She showed me one timber bed they had, which wasn't bad, she asked what I wanted to spend, and I told her "a few hundred dollars", and she told me that I wouldn't get much for that, and that this bed was on special, from $700 or something, to $499.

She asked me if I was going to be making a decision today, and I said I probably was. I looked around a bit more, and then I went to leave. The woman told me that she wanted to sell as much stuff as possible, so if I came back today, they'd let me have the bed for $400.

Hmm. I walked next door, into Harvey Norman, and browsed their beds. There was a cute chick working in the beds section. I looked at the beds, saw a basic steel tube frame bed, on sale from $299, to $199. That's fair, and it was a double bed.

I kept looking, there were some better ones, but a fair bit more. I left, and walked back to work, and sat and thought about it, while I went back to work.

A little while later, my desk phone rang. It was the little guy in royalty. He told me he was down in a cheap shop, near the club, and they had beds in there.

I got off the phone, and I walked down there, to have a look. They had basic beds, black steel, but I didn't like them, but they were cheap, only $99 or something.

I wandered around the rest of the shop, while I thought about it.

While wandering around in warehouse, I ended up going through the electrical section.

I was looking for some sort of an FM transmitter, to use with my laptop, so I don't have to run a lead to the reciever. I didn't find one, but I did see that they had a third party xbox remote control.

I thought about getting that, since it would be nice to not have to use the xbox controller to run XBMC.

I then looked for an svideo cable, remembering that I needed that to use with the tivo, but they didn't have any. This place is a bit useless.

I had another look at the bed, decided that I didn't want it, and then I left.

I walked back towards work, I went into Dick Smith, and I bought an svideo lead, bloody expensive, $14 for a 1.5m cable.

I left there, and then walked across the road to the bed shop near work. I asked the guy about a double bed frame, but he didn't have anything in a double bed at the moment, apparently the container had gone missing or something.

He then asked if a double bed was what I wanted, since a double bed is only 6 foot long, and I'm over 6 foot tall.

I said that was a good point, I don't actually know if the mattress is big enough, the ones in the pub weren't, and my feet always ended hanging over the end.

I left there, and walked back to work, I sat and thought about what to do, whether I should go and buy the bed that the woman had offered for $400, or get the steel bed from Harvey Norman for $200.

I thought I should go and check the size of the mattress before buying a bed, in case I find it is too small, and have to buy a mattress.

I was sitting at my desk, when the senior DBA came down, I would have thought he would have left ages ago, it was almost 5pm. He said he was leaving.

I asked for a couple of minutes, I'd just remembered to get the pdfs with the codes for the tivo remote, so I could configure it to control the tv, and the receiver.

I downloaded them, copied them on to my laptop, and then packed it up, and went out and got in the car.

We drove home, and went in. The first thing I did was go upstairs and check the length of the mattress.

The guy was sort of right, a double bed is a bit small for me. I can't lie out fully, since my feet will be off the end, but I could lie in it diagonally, and I'd fit.

I grabbed the heater (that I'd put in here, and left on last night to dry the mattress), and took it downstairs.

I setup my laptop, and mucked around for a while, getting the serial adapter working, and eventually managed to get it working, I had to reboot the tivo a couple of times in the process, I think something I was doing while trying to establish the connection was causing pppd on the tivo to fall over, and not restart.

After that I sat and configured the remote to control the tv, that was easy, it was about the 3rd code for Sony stuff that worked with the senior DBA's tv.

I tried to configure the remote to control my Kenwood receiver, but I went through all 6 of the Kenwood codes, and none of them worked. Hmm.

I then put in the code to search through all of them, and went through all of them, 3 times, but none of them worked with the receiver.

I noticed it said something in the pdf with the codes that it was an ammended version, because there was a newer remote with new codes in it.

I don't think this is the new remote, because it's a standard stand alone remote, and it's not the directv remote like I got with my other tivo.

I new the codes were in the setup on the tivo, but you can only access that screen when the tivo is running in NTSC/PAL GS mode.

I used tivoweb over the serial link to set the tivo into NTSC mode, and then rebooted it.

I went into the screen that showed the codes, there were more codes in here.

When I tried to enter some of the codes shown here, that weren't in the pdf, the remote wouldn't accept them, the LED would just go off, instead of flashing.

I figure I just need a directv remote, and it'll have the newer codes in it.

The senior DBA asked me to go and help him, I went upstairs, he was hanging his mirror up, with the hooks and wire he'd bought at the hardware shop.

We hung that up, and then I came back downstairs again.

I sat and mucked around with the tivo a bit more, I'd downloaded new guide data, so I worked out how to load that manually.

I copied all the slices across to the tivo, in /var/packages, ungzipped them (gzip -d *) and then just did:

ls *slice |while read SLICE; do
dbload30.tcl $SLICE
done

I opened another telnet session, and watched one of the log files, as it dbloaded all the slices.

After that I forced an update, and the new guide data turned up. I need to get an internet connection at the house, it's a bit of a pain having to load the data manually.

After that I sat and watched tv. The footy was going to be on again tonight, so at 7.30pm we decided to walk to the club to watch it.

It was freezing outside, I found my trenchcoat, and we walked over there.

We got in there, there were a few people from work in there, one of the indexers, his wife (who also works at the department), the guy who looks after the data in geosurvey (the new guy), and another guy from work.

We chatted with them for a bit, and then got drinks, and ordered dinner.

I went in and played the pokies, the other bartender was in here, I chatted to him. I got the feature on the machine, and won $6. I took the money and went.

We sat and watched the lead up to the game, while we were sitting there, the chick from work was in the car with her boyfriend, and a couple of other people from work, the social club guy, and the woman from the mailroom.

They saw us, and the senior DBA went out and spoke to them. They'd got pizzas, and were going to go back to the woman from the mailroom's place, but now they were thinking about staying here.

They asked the bartender if they could eat the pizzas outside, they were allowed to.

They sat and ate their pizza, and we sat and watched the footy (state of origin).

Our dinner was served, and we sat and ate while we watched. NSW got the lead to start with, and when QLD caught up, and took the lead, the people from work (who'd had the pizzas) decided to leave.

I took off my jumper, since I was wearing my Bundy shirt, and I hadn't let on who I was going for until that point.

When it got to halftime, I went in to play the pokies.

I put $20 in, and lost it all. I had another $20, I figured I'd just play another $10. I ended up wasting the whole $20, trying to win my money back. No such luck.

Now I had no money left, and the ATM in the club was broken, so I went across the road, to the shopping centre, to use the ATM in there. I got $60 out, and went back to the club.

I went in, and wasted $20 more, now up to $60 wasted. I went and got another drink, and went back in to watch some of the game. NSW was far away, something like 30 - 16.

I went back into the pokies, put another $5 in, and lost it. I then went and got another drink, and then went back to watch the game, but it was finished, QLD had lost.

I went back into the pokies again, put a couple more bucks in, won $10. I thought about just giving up, and going, but I couldn't help myself.. I put the $10 in, had 2 $5 bets (25 credits/25 lines), and won nothing, lost $10 in about 3 seconds.

Now I'm up to about $75 wasted in the pokies. I give up. Bastard things.

While I'd been in there, there was 3 or 4 other people playing, and there were big features and stuff going off, I thought I'd have to get a win at some point. I saw someone win $130, and someone else got the jackpot, which was $90.

I'd been playing $1 bets on one machine, getting nothing, then when I dropped back to betting 10 cents, I got the feature, and won $4 something, bugger, that would have been $40.

Now I had no money left again, just a bit of change, so I went out to hang around.

We played a game of pool, I had a bit over a dollar in change, so I got a dollar coin, and used it in the pool table.

We played pool, and I finished my drink.

We lost the game of pool, I stuffed up, and after putting one of our balls down, I hit the black down when the white bounced off. D'oh.

The senior DBA asked to borrow $5, to pay for a couple of beers. I told him that I had no money, and I took my wallet out to show him that it was empty. When I did so, $10 I didn't realise I had came out.

I lent him the money to pay for the drinks, bought myself one, and then gave my last 25c to the bartender as a tip.

We played pool again, and lost again, this time it dragged on for a long time, both of us going for the black, and the other team ended up getting it in.

It was now after midnight, and the bartender had been saying that he wanted to close, so we started getting our stuff together, getting organised.

The bartender pretended to pick up the senior DBA to throw him out, I realised how big of a blok he actually is.

We left the club at 12.45am, and walked back with the new guy, who looks after the data in geosurvey.

We walked around to his place, he went in, and we kept going. As we were walking back to the street (he lives in a set of units, down the back), some weird guy in a dressing gown was hanging around in the driveway, and asked "what are you doing here?", I said that we were just going for a walk, and then ignored him, and kept going.

We got back to the house, went in, the senior DBA went to bed.

I setup my bed, on the sofa bed, because I still don't have a bed, and sat and made some blog notes.

Before shutting my laptop down, I decided to run kismet for a second. I'd plugged the ac adapter in, I wanted to see how the battery life estimate in kismet reacted when I unplugged it..

I did so, and it came up and said that my battery was going to last for 563 thousand something hours.

I worked this out to be about 67 years. It'd be good to have a laptop with a battery that would go for 67 years.

I turned off the laptop, and went to sleep.

I got up, and I got ready, having a shower etc. I went to make a coffee, but I couldn't find the jar of coffee that I bought the other day.

I looked all around, in all the cupboards, including the one under the sink, and then I saw the jar, empty. Hmm.

I asked the senior DBA where my coffee was, and he told me that is was "gone". Seems strange, since one of those jars usually lasts me a few months.

(It was used though, since the senior DBA usually made the coffees, and when I went in with him one time, I saw that he was putting 2 heaped teaspoons of coffee in, and I usually only put 1).

Anyway, I had a coffee, because he had a huge jar of coffee, some brand I'm not a huge fan of. I finished getting ready, and I left the house. There was a bunch of junk mail in the letterbox, so I grabbed it out.

I put my ipod on, and I looked at the junk mail on the way to work.

One of the catalogues had a really cool looking bike in it. I wondered if it was just easier to buy a new bike, rather than pissing about trying to fix my other bike, which needs new tyres, the handlebars fixed, and something done about the gear change mechanism.

When I got near work, the woman from the mail room that's going out with the contract DBA was going somewhere, we said hello, and kept going.

I got to work, and sat at my desk, I set my laptop up, and I put some music on. I'd listened to "Rocket Man" on my way to work, and I wanted to hear it again, so I put that on.

After I'd listened to it, it randomly selected the next song from the playlist, strangely, the same song came on after as when I walked to work. Maybe the random code from xmms is the random code used in the ipod.

I worked on some code for a while, and then I went up to see the senior DBA, to talk about going to the shop to look at the bike I'd seen in the catalogue. I shoved the catalogue in my pocket.

I went up, and found the senior DBA on the phone, I spoke to the manager of royalty for a while, he told me about a restaurant he'd been to, where they have a mechanical bull.

He'd been on the bull, and someone had videoed it, so he showed me the video of that on his laptop. He lasted a fair while on the bull, and then got thrown off, and ended up on his head or something, quite funny.

The senior DBA got off the phone, and we all decided to go across the road, they wanted coffees, I don't drink the shitty coffee they serve, but I went across anyway.

We had a chat while we were over there, and on the way back to work, I showed them the bike in the catalogue.

I went back to my desk, and I did a bit of browse to find an NSLU2, because I'd decided to buy one, so that I could setup more disk space for my laptop, and not have to worry about dragging it around, and connecting it to my laptop.

I also wanted one because I'd seen them mentioned on hackaday a couple of times, and were supposedly very hackable, which sounded like fun, and the WRT54G I bought recently is supposed to be pretty hackable as well.

I also browsed for a wireless bridge, so I could setup the access point and the NSLU2 (if I got one) in another room, and still have the xbox and the tivo in the loungeroom connected, without having to run wires between the rooms.

I figured I'd try and find Linksys' wireless bridge, because equipment (especially wireless) usually works better together when it's the same brand.

I didn't really find what I was looking for. (sorry for the overlapping blog posts).

I'd received an email from someone upstairs, about going to lunch, but I'd missed it, I hadn't noticed it arrive, or checked my mail.

A little while later, someone from upstairs called me, asked me about going out to lunch. I went upstairs, and waited around for a little while, and then a few of us went out to lunch.

We walked down the road, the senior DBA, the contract DBA, and the woman from the mail room he's going out with. As we walked down the road, a guy rode past on a bike, the same as the one I'd seen in the catalogue, it looked pretty groovy.

We went to Subway. The senior DBA waited in the line with us for a minute, and then left, and went and got food somewhere else, but sat outside with us to eat.

After that we walked back to work, and I went back to my desk, and worked for a while.

A couple of hours later, I sent an email to the senior DBA, and asked about going to the sports place to look at the bike this afternoon. He replied immediately, and asked if I wanted to go up there and look at it now.

I said I'd do a bit more work, and then we'd go. I did a bit more work, and then I packed up, and I went upstairs.

When I went up, I started talking about the bike I was going to look at, and the annoying support guy mentioned that he'd recently bought a couple of bikes at an auction house recently, and didn't really need 2, so was going to get rid of one of them.

We went down to the carpark, the senior DBA, the annoying support guy, and myself, and we looked at the couple of bikes, since they were in the back of the annoying support guy's car. He said he still had to work out which one he wanted, and which one he was going to get rid of yet.

The senior DBA had ridden his bike to work today, so I started walking back to the house, and the senior DBA rode back, since his car was there.

We got back, and I dropped off my laptop and stuff, and then we got in the car, and drove to the sports place at Green Hills.

We went in, and I went and found the bike, it looked a bit smaller than I expected. I dragged it off the rack, and sat on it, and found that it was much too small, I couldn't even peddle it, because my knees hit on the handlebars. Useless.

I got off, put it back on the rack, and we started to leave. Some guy asked if we needed help, and I told him I'd come in to look at that bike, and found it too small, expecting the guy to say they had a bigger one, but he didn't.

We left, and got back in the car, and I then I commented on the fact that Strathfield car radios was next door, and I was still looking for speakers, so we drove over near there, and went in.

The senior DBA mentioned that he was after a new CD player for his car, I said he was looking for a head unit that's compatible with Sony stackers (since that's what's in the car already, and just the head needs replacing).

We browsed around for a while, I didn't see much in the way of speakers worth having, and then we left. On the way out, I noticed they had a DVD/disc player thing for about $60, that played divx, and xvid etc.

We got back in the car, and drove back to the house. I sat around for a while, and then I setup the access point in the loungeroom, and connected the xbox to it.

I still had to run the serial cable to the tivo, since I didn't have an ethernet interface for it yet. I'd breifly looked for a serial to ethernet adapter, but I couldn't find anything reasonably priced, they were all hundreds of dollars.

Anyway, I ran the serial lead, and loaded some guide data into the tivo, a little while later, the guy from Orange who looks after the IT group, and the woman from the mail room he's going out with turned up.

We chatted for a while, and the 4 of us decided to go to get some dinner in the restaurant next door. We left the house, went to the pub, and found that the restaurant was shut.

We stodd there for a minute, trying to work out what to do, and decided to go to the club for dinner, so we walked over there.

When we got there, the guy from CCB was in there, we spoke to him for a little while, ordered drinks and dinner, and sat down for a while.

I went in and played the pokies, don't recall winning anything. I came out, and sat down for another while, and then the senior DBA and I decided to play pool.

There was some really crazy woman in the club, claiming that her mother had passed away a few days before. Either it was effecting her badly, or she was just a nutbag.

Before we started playing pool, our food came out, so we sat and ate. When we'd finished, we played our game of pool.

The crazy woman had sat with the guy from Orange, and the woman from the mail room, and they didn't look too impressed, trying to eat their dinner with this crazy woman sitting at the table.

The senior DBA and I couldn't handle her any more, we got more drinks, and then we snuck away, and went and sat outside.

I went back in and played a couple of dollars I had through the pokies, and then we left, and headed back towards the house.

On the way, I remembered that I needed to buy breakfast cereal, so the senior DBA and I headed towards the shopping centre/supermarket.

We got near the door of the shopping centre, and there were a couple of odd looking people hanging around there, a guy and a chick.

The chick came over, had all shit in her face, piercings etc, and asked if we'd buy her a pack of cigarettes (so they were both under 18). The senior DBA said he wouldn't, and while I briefly thought about it, the thought of it possibly being a sting, and me getting busted and a $10000 fine wasn't really worth it, so I told her I wouldn't.

We went in, and I bought a box of cereal at the supermarket, and then we walked back to the house, and the senior DBA went to bed.

I put the tv on, and watched it for a while, and I mucked around with the access point a bit.

I decided to move the heater up in to my room, to try to dry the mattress out, that was still leaning against the wall, so I took it up, plugged it in, and set it up to try to dry it, figuring I'd just leave it going all night.

I went back down, sorted out my clothes, and went and put a load of washing on.

I continued mucking around with the access point, there wasn't much I could do with the standard firmware, and I wanted to be able to use some of the extra features the device could do, that I'd read about (and saved a bunch of files about on my laptop).

I had a copy of "freeman", I put that on there, since it still retained most of the standard features, and a web interface, that "openwrt" doesn't have, and I wasn't prepared to put that on yet.

I have no problem with "freeman", I think "talisman" is the problem, since there's a company trying to make money out of Linksys' GPL firmware, and not releasing their code under GPL.

Anyway, I found that the boot_wait hack documented in the openwrt twiki worked, and then I flashed freeman in, and fiddled around with that for a while.

I went and put the washing in the dryer, watched a bit of tv, before I went to bed, on the lounge again.

My WRT54G turned up this week. The ebay seller sent it to the wrong address (to home, instead of to work like I requested), but I got it anyway, just a few days later, when I got home, so no biggie.

I haven't much of a chance to muck around with it yet, I plugged it in on Saturday morning, and couldn't connect to it, assumedly because it's not configured (and I didn't plug it into the wired network, so it didn't have access to the dhcp server.

I'm now looking for a wireless bridge, instead of drilling a hole through the wall, I thought I might stick with linksys stuff, since manufacturers usually have better luck with stuff working with their own gear.

I figured I'd get a WGA54G, but then I found them not to be as cheap as they should be. It's actually more expensive to get this silly little 1 port bridge, than to buy another WRT54G.

Also, while looking around, I've found that the WGA54G seems to have a lot of problems, and I've read quite a few stories of people having no luck getting it to connect, spending hours on the phone to support, and ending up having to return the unit for a replacement before it will work.

I don't think I'll be doing this.

I might as well just get another WRT54G, put the alternative firmware on it, and run it in client mode. I also get 4 ports that way, so both the xbox and the tivo will be able to use it, without needing a switch to get more than 1 device connected to it.

There's also a WET54G I've just seen, a slightly more expensive unit than the WGA54G, which I think might be a 4 port unit. Still, I got the WRT54G for $126, and the WET54G is $150 before I've even got it shipped, so it would end up costing half the price again.

Also, it only says that it supports "Wireless-G (draft 802.11g)", not IEEE802.11G, the published standard.

Hmm, I'll do a bit more research, but somehow I think I'm going to end up with another WRT54G. I should have done this earlier, and just bought another one at the same time.

Oh, I'm also looking for an NSLU2. I don't want to get one off ebay, because they're in the US (there's no local ones), so then I'd have to pay extra to replace the power adapter, on top of the shipping, and waiting time.

I googled around, found a few places in Australia that stock them.

It's a bit suspect, I went to the "sponsored links", ie ads that google brought up, and it looks like "Dycom Business Systems", "DPI Systems, and "AlphaOnline" are all the same site (the same products, in the same order are displayed), but the prices are all different.

It doesn't matter anyway, I found that a place called "minidigital" is cheaper than the three of them (on the nslu2 anyway, it's more expensive for some stuff).

I can have the nslu2 from minidigital, including the shipping, for about $160. Have to think about that.

Ooh, I just found the nslu2 even cheaper, at "oztechnologies", and the shipping is only $11, so I could have it for $158.60 shipped.

I was woken up the alarm, so my reaction was to just punch it, and it shutup.

A few minutes later, it went off again. As before, I hit it to shutup. This went on 3 times I think, and then I put the tv on, and tried to wake up.

I got up, and I started getting ready, to go down and have some breakfast, which is only served until 9.30am or so.

I was getting ready, and then the clock was saying that it was after 10am, WTF? did I set the alarm wrong? I checked the time, and it was only about 9am, so I figured that when I punched the clock to shut it up, I must have accidently changed the time forward by an hour.

I finished getting dressed, and my drummer mate and I went down to get breakfast, because our other mate was in the bathroom, and we didn't want to wait for him, and risk missin out on breakfast.

We went down, went to the restaurant area, and the 2 of us went in. We started getting some food, and then our other mate came in. We sat and had breakfast, we'd cut it fine, because before we'd finished, they started packing stuff up.

We finished breakfast, and then went back up to the room, finished getting ready, and packed our stuff up.

We left the room, and I realised that I couldn't find my sunglasses. I was hoping that I hadn't left them in the room.

I checked my backpack, and in the process of jamming my hand in my backpack, I caught my fingernail on something, and it got bent right up, and pulled off from my finger about halfway down the nail.

This hurt like hell, and my finger started bleeding, from under the nail.

I found my glasses in my bag after that, so we went down to reception, and I lined up to checkout.

I had to wait for ages, the people in front of me were squabbling about paying through travel agent, and they didn't want to stay any more nights, and the hotel hadn't been paid, and apparently they'd broken something.

I was getting pretty fed up, eventually I got served, so I could check out.

The woman brought up the bill from the room, which now had the 3 breakfasts on it as well. My mate had said that the breakfast was $4.50, but it was actually $13.50 each.

I paid for the room, $160 something it worked out to be, and then I went outside, where my mates were waiting.

We walkked down to the parking station where we'd parked the car, we had to pay for the parking before we could leave.

We went to the window to pay, but there were no attendants. There was a machine, but we found that it wouldn't take notes, only coins, and it's going to be a bit difficult to pay $30 something parking with coins.

I thought there was another pay area, on the floor below, so we went down there, to find no payment things of any description, just ending up in the shopping centre.

We went back up to the other level, and had a closer look, there was an attendant sitting in the office/window, she'd been sitting on the floor or something.

We paid for the parking, it was $24, that wasn't too bad. We went down, chucked our stuff in the car, and left the parking station.

We drove home, and on the way back, I made a couple of suggestions, "back seat driving" if you will, only because I used to drive this route home every day, so I knew which lane to be in, and where you could gain a bit of ground.

When we got to the entry to the freeway, there was a guy stopped at the lights, and he got out of his car, so I suggested that my mate get in the other lane, so we could go around this dope if the lights went green.

My mate got pissed off, and told me that he knew how to drive, and didn't need me to tell him.

I just kept my mouth shut for the rest of the trip back, until we got back to his place, and then our drummer mate and I got out, and we got in his car, and left.

We went to the service station, my mate needed some fuel, and then I got dropped at home.

I sat and did some blogging, and then Dad came in, and asked if I had all my stuff organised to take to Maitland.

I went int, and spoke to Mum, she was asking what I wanted to take up, there's an old tv cabinet thing, they asked if I wanted that, I figured it would be ok to put a tv on.

I went to the shed to get my pushbike out, and found that it wasn't there, Dad had already got it out.

I sat around inside for a bit, and I finished setting up tivo, and then I put the cover back on.

I packed up the access point, which I still hadn't done anything with, I figured I'd set it up in Maitland.

I went down to the car, Dad told me the car had just rolled down the driveway, with the weight of the trailer on it.

He was loading the bed up, someone had painted it blue, and it looked hideous, I couldn't stand it, so I said that I didn't want it.

I said I would have the mattress though, and get my own bed.

We loaded the mattress on to the trailer. I went and got my pushbike, and brought it down outside the garage. The tyres were totally flat, I found the pump, and I pumped them up.

I then found that the tyres were all perished, I'll have to replace them.

I sat on it, and it was just awful. The handlebars weren't even straight on it, the bolt holding the handlebars on is stripped, and they can move independently of the wheel, great.

I went over and sat on my motorbike. I then got really upset.

I didn't want to have to move all my stuff to Maitland. I didn't want to have to live there during the week. I wanted to ride my bike. This whole thing is fucked. I hate the government, and the so called "justice" system, it's just fucked.

Mum asked me if I wanted a bedside table. I was really upset, so I just said no, but then I realised that I did want it, but I couldn't say anything, because I was worried about just losing it.

I walked away, I went and sat inside, and felt really angry, and sad, and upset.

I just sat there for a while, and then I finished getting things organised in there, packing up the tivo etc.

I went back down to the garage, and there wasn't much going on, so I went back inside again, and just sat there.

My parents came in at about 3pm, and asked if I was ready to go? I told them I wasn't, that I would be in a bit.

I finished getting organised, I packed up my laptop, and my backpack.

I went down to put my tivo in the car, but Dad had locked it. I went and got the keys off him, and then I put my tivo, my bag and laptop and some other stuff, a bag of sheets etc, in the car.

I locked the car, and gave Dad his keys back. A few minutes later, we went down, and got in the car. Dad noticed that his mobile phone battery was flat, and asked my brother if he'd been playing with it, he said he had been.

I told dad that I had a car charger, it was in my bike. I got out of the car, and started going towards my bike, and then I remembered that the adapter was in the side of the bike, and I'd need the key to get it, which was inside.

I then went to go inside, and remembered that I'd locked my door, and the keys were in my bag, in the car. I went back to the car, got my keys, and then I went inside.

I grabbed my bike key, went down, opened the side of the bike, took the charger out. I locked the bike again, and then I went and got in the car. I realised that I had my bike key ion my hand.

I got out of the car, leaving the charger, I went back, unlocked the door, dumped the key inside, then I locked the door again, and went and got in the car again.

Dad had plugged in the charger, and plugged his phone in, but it didn't charge. I looked at the LED on the charger, it wasn't lit. Hmm, looks like the charger is stuffed after all that.

That would explain why it didn't work when I tried to use it to charge my mate's wife's phone, when we were at the car yard, before going to Dreamworld.

We left home, and headed towards the freeway. Dad had to get fuel, going to the service station before the freeway. It's a "no right turn", and he'd like "when did they do that?", and makes the right turn anyway.

The driveway to the service station had a "no entry" sign on it, but Dad just went through it anyway. He got fuel, I sat in the car and waited.

My brother, sitting in the bag, started singing along with some reallying annoying song that came on the radio, and I asked him to stop.

Dad finished filling the car, went and paid, came back and got in the car. We left the service station, and got on the freeway, and started heading north.

A few minutes up the freeway, it started raining. We pulled over, and Dad and I got out, to put a tarp over the mattress, to stop it getting wet. It was a bit late. We also put a cover on the tv cabinet thing.

We covered it anyway, spending a few minutes covering it, and then we got back in the car, and started driving again.

We went for a couple of minutes, and then the tarp started flapping excessively, so we pulled over again, and fixed it, retying it, and moving things in the trailer around a bit.

We started going again, went for about 10 or 15 minutes, and then had to pull over again, because the cover on the tv cabinet was flapping around. I left Dad to get out and fix it this time. I was getting fed up. It wasn't even raining now either.

We started going again, and then we took an incredibly long time to get to Maitland, because Dad was driving so slowly. We eventually got there, at 5.10pm, taking over an hour and a half to get here.

I used to do this trip in an hour. I went to the front door, and found it open, the senior DBA had just got back. Apparently he'd been in Morisset all day, and it had only taken him 15 minutes to get back from there, doing 200km/h at one part.

He came out, and helped Dad and I to unload the stuff from the trailer. We moved it all inside, the mattress was soaked. We put the mattress upstairs, and lent it up against the wall to dry.

I put my bike out in the laundry. Dad wandered around, and looked through the house. As soon as we were finished, Dad left, to go home, and the senior DBA and I decided to go over to the club, for a beer.

We walked over there, to find that it was closed. Bloody public holidays. We walked all the way back again, and went in to the pub next to the house, there were a few people in here.

We sat and had 3 beers, I was starving, so when I left, I went across to the supermarket to get some food, and the senior DBA went back to the house.

I went in, found some food, went and queued up, and paid. The usual banter with the checkout chick went on "how are you?" "I'm fine, and how are you?" crap. For once, I actually got an honest answer. The chick said she was sick of being at work today.

I commented that the public holiday pay must have been worth putting up with being at work for. We had a chat for a few minutes, and then a couple of people came to the register, so she had to serve them, and I left.

I walked back to the house, and cooked some dinner, I setup the tivo while I waited for it, and then I ate. The senior DBA asked if I wanted some wine, he had a couple of good bottles of wine he'd found when unpacking some stuff, so we sat and drank the bottle.

We watched tv after that, and the senior DBA went to bed at 8.30pm, I sat and watched tv for another couple of hours, and then I setup the sofabed, because all I'd brought was the mattress, which was soaked, I didn't have a bed.

I realised that I'd left the sheets in the car, I sent a message to Mum about it, and she replied and said that Dad had realised when he was on the freeway on his way home.

I went to sleep after that.

I was woken up by my alarm, I had to get up a bit earlier today, since we were going down to Sydney tonight, to see "Southern Culture on the Skids".

Anyway, I was woken up, and then a few minutes later, the phone rang, I got up, answered it, it was my drummer mate, telling me that he was leaving soon, to come and pick me up.

I had a shower, got ready, had something to eat (since I had some food today).

I had another quick look at the access point, trying to find a network patch cable for it, so I could configure it.

My mate turned up. I hadn't planned on taking anything with me, just wearing casual clothes, but my mate convinced me to take my green leisure suit with me, and wear that.

Oh well, any excuse. I grabbed my backpack, dumped everything out of it, and loaded it up again, with my suit, and some clean clothes.

We left, got in the car, and went around to our mates place.

Our mate got ready, and while we waite, my drummer mate and I sat and read the newspapers that were hanging around.

Our mate finished getting ready, and we all jumped in his car, and left at about 11.45am.

We drove to the service station a little bit round the corner from my mate's place. While he was getting fuel, I went in and got some junk food.

We finished there, and kept heading for the freeway. On the way up Kariong hill, there was some chick who had no idea how to drive in front of us, she was all over the road, and then she just decided to change lanes, without bothering to look, and ran the car in the lane next to us off the road, in to the brakedown lane.

The guy driving the car that got run off the road blasted his horn, and was visibly swearing at the stupid chick.

We kept going, left that behind (there was no contact/accident, the guy had been able to avoid that), and then we got on the freeway.

We drove down, got off at the end, and drove down the highway and into the city.

The road had changed around, they'd finished some roadworks, and we ended up on some new route, and didn't know where we were. We eventually found our way around, and went to the parking station that we normally use, near the Travelodge, to find that it was full.

We drove around the city a little bit, looking for another parking station, hopefully not too far away, and we did find one.

We parked the car, it was now 2pm, we grabbed our bags, and walked up to the Travelodge.

We were being dodgy, I'd only booked 1 room, and 3 of us were going to sleep in it, someone on the floor, so my mates waited at the side, and I went to the counter.

I checked in, and got two keys. When I checked in, I had to show my ID, I used my expired license, the chick didn't notice that it was expired (it shouldn't matter anyway). She then started going on about how her brother lives on the Central Coast or something.

I wasn't really interested in he conversation, I got the keys, and left the counter.

We went up to the room, on level 10. I opened the door, to find the only thing in there was a double bed.

Hmm, Deja Vu, this is what happened in the Formule1 in Coffs Harbour, on the way to Brisbane/Bundaberg.

We came out again, and we all went back to the foyer. I went to the desk, and I complained that I'd booked a twin room, and now I had a double, which I didn't want.

They checked, and found another room available, so the woman on the counter (a different one than had just checked me in) redid the cards, with access to a different room.

We all went up to the new room, this time on level 16. We got to the room, and went in, it was a twin room, that stank, of stale smoke. This must be a smoking room or something.

I couldn't be bothered going down and complaining again, thought I wonder what floor I would have ended up on that time :-)

My mate lit up a smoke, to try to cover the stale smoke smell, and then I noticed a no smoking sign, so he put it out again.

I tried running the air conditioner, but it did bugger all.

We dropped off our stuff in the room, and then we left the room. We went out of the hotel, and across the road, into the pub.

We got drinks, and sat down, and had a chat. I was starving, so I went back to the bar, and got a packet of chips. The chick behind the bar served them in a basket to me, saying "here you go darling". heh.

We ate the chips, finished our drinks, and then went for a walk, to find another pub.

The next pub, that my mate had wanted to go to, was shut, which was a bugger. We wandered down towards Chinatown, and we went in to Paddy McGuires, we got drinks, and went and sat outside.

There was some free music magazine thing on the table, so we looked at that, just full of ads and rubbish.

While we were sitting there, some dero looking woman came wandering along the street, and asked us for money. I didn't have any change, and I told her that, and then she arcced up, saying that we could afford beers though.

Gee, having a go at me is going to motivate me to give you my money isn't it?

She went off after that, and we decided to go inside. We heard a band on, so we went to find that, it was in the other part of the bar.

We sat in there, and listened to the band for a while, they were pretty good. I got another drink.

There was some really weird guy, sitting with some foreign guy, who was really hairy, on another table near us.

He started talking to us, I wasn't having much to do with him, but my mates were talking to him, so then the both of them came over, and sat on our table. The foreign guy was deaf, or didn't speak English or something.

I really wasn't comfortable with them sitting there, some of the stuff the guy was saying was just wrong.

Our drummer mate went of somewhere, leaving the 2 of us to deal with them. I sat there for a while, and then I checked my change, and found a couple of dollar coins, so I ran off to play the pokies.

I went in, put my money through, won it back, tried a different machine, lost it. I put the other dollar through, and lost it too.

My drummer mate came in, said he'd been to the loo, I figured that was a good idea, so I went down there, and when I went in, my other mate was just coming out, so he'd escaped the weirdos.

We left the pub after that, and we walked back to the room. We took it in turns to have showers, someone got stuck using the bathmat for a towel, because there were only 2 towels.

I had to iron my shirt, so I grabbed the crappy iron you get (it doesn't even take water), and I plugged it in.

When I was plugging the iron in, I noticed that there was a breaker switch thing on the powerpoint. I wasn't sure if it was on, because there was nothing else plugged in to the powerpoint, and I didn't want to wait for the iron to heat up, to find that it wasn't powered.

I pressed the reset button on the powerpoint, and the tv which my mates were watching made a static noise, and the channel changed.

Heh. I found this quite funny, so I waited a few seconds, and I did it again.

My mate was like "the channel keeps changing on the tv!". I waited, and I did it again, only to have him whinge about it again.

This was getting funnier and funnier.

I stood there, pressing it, waiting for my mate to complain, change the channel back to the one he was watching, and then I'd do it again.

This went on for about a minute, I must have done it about 30 times, and then finally my mate asked "are you doing that??", and I lost it, and pissed myself laughing (not really, but it was pretty funny).

I stopped doing it, waited for the iron to finish warming, ironed my shirt, and finished getting dressed into my leisure suit.

Once we'd all showered and changed, we left the hotel, and we walked down to go to the pub we'd tried to go to before, apparently the food is really good.

We got there, to find that it was still closed. Hmm. We then decided to go back to the pub across the road from the hotel, since they served dinner in there.

We went back there, got more drinks, and I asked about the menu. We were given one, and we went and sat down, and looked at the menus, and worked out what we wanted.

Some chick came to the table, and asked us what we wanted, we ordered, and then sat and waited.

I finished my drink while we waited, and then went and got another one, when I came back, my dinner was served. We ate, and drank, and then we left the pub.

We waited outside for a few minutes, flagged down a taxi, and asked the driver to take us to the Gaelic Club, because we didn't know where it was, and hoped he would.

The driver said that he wasn't sure where it was either. Hmm, great. He said he thought he had an idea of where it was, but that he wasn't entirely sure.

He took us around to where he thought it was, it was there, and the fare was only $5.

We went in to the club, upstairs, to the bar area. There was an old Irish guy working behind the bar. We got some drinks, and then went and sat down.

There was a jukebox, we put a few dollars in it, and picked out some songs. The volume was turned down really low.

I felt around on the back of the jukebox, and found the volume knob. I tried adjusting it, but it didn't make any difference.

I went over to the bar, and I asked the guy if we could get the jukebox turned up a bit.

He told me that if we'd put a song on, and didn't hear it, that he'd give me the money for it, but I told him not to worry about it.

I finished my drink, and went and got another one. I'd had a rum or something when I came in, and the Irish guy had ribbed me about not getting an Irish drink, so this time I got a shot of Irish whiskey.

I went back, and sat to listed to the jukebox. Some other people in the pub came over, and told us that they were about to have a sing along, and we could join in if we wanted. We told them we weren't there for that long.

The Irish bartender came around a few minutes later, witha big plate of sandwiches, and offered them to us, this is a pretty cool pub. The drinks are cheap, the people are nice, and there's free food.

We finished our drinks, and we went down, and back to the street, to wait to get in, since the concert area is separate to the bar we were in.

It was about 8pm, we waited to get in. More and more people came and waited. Eventually they opened the door, at about 8.20pm, and we started to go in.

We had to get our tickets, and they were linked to the credit card they'd been bought with. A second person came to run another machine, so that people could go in 2 at a time.

I went to move in to the second machine, and the bouncer grabbed me, and held me back, and then the person at the counter said it was fine. What a dickhead.

I went in, scanned my card, and the three of us went in. We went to the bar, and got drinks, and then found a good place to stand, a bit back from the stage.

The "act" that was on, just 60s music playing, and a couple of Go Go dancers on the stage, was called "Sounds of Seduction". My mate had seen them before.

That went on for a while, and then they went off, and the opening act came on, some religious band that I didn't think were too terrific.

I spent the time that they were on drinking more.

Eventually they went off, after 1/2 hour or so, and the Go Go dancers came back out again, this time a third chick came out, she wasn't bad.

After another 20 minutes or so of that, or maybe half and hour, the proper band, "Southern Culture on the Skids" came on.

People started dancing, and we moved in a bit closer to the stage. The band was pretty good, most of the people in the place were dancing.

I spent about half the time sort of dancing with a chick near me, and then she ran away. We kept dancing.

After about an hour and half of music, a couple of chicks climbed up on the stage, and started dancing around. The security guy came in to grab them off, but the chick playing the bass guitar told him to leave them.

A couple more chicks got up, and I was thinking that I should try to get up there. The next thing I see, my drummer mate is up there.

I knew I had to get up there at that point, so I went over to the side, where the stairs to the stage were, rather than trying to climb up on the stage, like the other people had done.

I asked the security guy standing there if I could get up there, and stood to bring attention to my green suit, and the security guy was like "yeah! get up there!", and so I went up on to the stage.

There ended up being about 10 people from the crowd up on the stage, 8 chicks, and my drummer mate and I, this was terrific.

We all danced around up there for about 5 minutes, while they finished off the last song, and then we all came off the stage, down the stairs at the side.

As I came down, the security guy came over, shook my hand, and gave me a pat on the back.

I waited around just off the stage, they'd put some background music on, and we all danced around a bit.

The guys from the band came back out, and down on to the floor. I saw the lead guitarist come down, so I went over, told him it was a great show, and shook his hand.

I spotted the chick I'd been dancing with, she was upstairs now, so I went up there, and I stood next to her, and I said hello, and she said hello back. We stood there for a couple of seconds, I couldn't think of what to say, I was put out a bit by the fact that she'd said hello, and then walked off.

I stood there for a little while, and then I came back down, and went back to dancing out on the floor.

I saw the chick bass player come down off the stage, and I was going to go and talk to her, but she started talking to someone else, so I just hung back, and continued dancing.

I'd seen a guy and girl done up to look like they were in the 50s earlier in the night, they looked really good, so I went over and paid them a compliment.

I went over to find my drummer mate, and I asked if he was getting a poster or whatever, and then we went over, to find they'd packed all the stuff up.

He said he'd been waiting until the band members came out, and I asked what he was talking about, because they'd all be out for like 20 minutes now.

We saw the lead guitarist, he was standing reasonabley close, so we went over to speak to him. He had quite a few posters, and my mate said he'd wanted to buy one, but there were none left.

The guy unrolled one off, and gave it to him, and I noticed that it was signed.

He rolled another couple off, and gave one to my mate and me.

I had a look at it, thinking it was just signed by him, and realised that it was fully signed, by all 3 members of the band.

Wow, they were selling the posters for like $5, and now we've each got on, for free, fully signed.

We stayed chatting to the lead guitarist for a while, my mate, who plays guitar, asking him about the guitars, and stuff like that.

We could have stayed chatting for a while, but apparently the club had been double booked, they were waiting to show some sports event in there, so the bouncers started clearing people out, and we got cleared out last.

We walked back around to the hotel, and we left our posters there, and I got changed out of my green suit, I'm not wandering around the city like that anymore.

We left the hotel, and went back to the street, some guy came up to us, and asked how to get to Central station, we gave him directions, and he took off.

We waited a couple of minutes, and then flagged down a taxi, and we asked the driver to take us to the Rocks, figuring we'd go to the Lowenbrau or something.

We got down there, a $10 cab fare, and found that the Lowenbrau was closed.

The Orient was open (but someone the other day claimed that they never close, jokingly).

We each got drinks, and then we sat down. We took ages, I finished my drink, and so did my mate, but my drummer mate didn't want to finish his beer, so he left half of it, and we left.

We went out, flagged down a taxi, and asked the guy to take us to McDonalds on George St.

He drobve us around there, I'm not sure what the fare of that ride was, not much.

We got out, and went in to McDonalds, we ordered food, and then sat down, and ate.

While we were sitting there, some deaf guy came around, handing out little cards, with sign language on them, and asking for a little bit of money for them. I gave him $2, and my mate gave him some money, and then he left.

We continued eating, and 2 cops came in, and walked straight around behind the counter, and went to the coolroom.

What is this? self serve? A few minutes later, 2 more cops came in, and they too went behind the counter, to the cool room.

The first 2 cops came back out, dragging some guy in a white hooded jumper out with them.

The other 2 cops stayed in the cool room. We finished eating, and then 4 more cops came in to McDonalds. Hmm, something interesting must be going on here.

My mate and I left, before something happened. When we got outside, we saw that there was more cops out there, and there were 4 cop cars, 2 parked on this side of the road, and 2 on the other side, all with their flashing lights on.

There was 8 or 10 cops in McDonalds now. 2 of them were talking to the guy they'd dragged out of the cool room.

My mate and I were waiting, for our other mate to come out, he'd gone missing. I told my mate to wait there, and I'd go and try to find him.

I went back in, and I went to the service area, and found him waiting in a line, to get more food. I went over, and he told me that he wanted to get some chips. I told him that we were waiting outside for him.

I went back outside, and waited. There were all these freaky people waiting outside the theatre a bit down the road, done up in leather, bondage gear etc.

My mate said something about "no leather in McDonalds" to me, to which I replied "except for the hamburgers".

While we waited there, another cop car came down the side alley, and it was followed by a forensics vehicle.

WTF is going on here? Our mate came out, eating his chips, and we wandered off, getting the hell out of there.

We walked back to the hotel, and went back to the room. My mate put the tv on, and our drummer mate setup his bed on the floor, with the spare pillows and blankets.

There was a Mr Bean marathon on ABC, so we watched 2 or 3 episodes, and then I set the alarm (I had to fix the time, because the clock got reset when I was mucking around with the power thing before) so we'd get up in time for breakfast.

We went to sleep at about 3am.

I slept in, I got woken up at midday by the landline ringing.

I couldn't drag myself out of bed, so I ignored it. My mobile rang a couple of minutes later, and I wasn't awake enough to deal with talking to someone, so I ignored that too.

I waited for it to ring again, the message service, with a message from someone, but it didn't.

I got up, and went and sat on the computer, A little while later, the landline rang again. I answered it this time, it was my drummer mate.

He told me that he was on his way to pick me up, so I told him I'd get ready, and I got off the phone.

I had a shower, and I got ready, there was nothing to eat, and I was starving. I sat around for a little while, and then my mate turned up.

I grabbed my guitar, and then I went and got in the car, on the way to our mate's place, I asked if my mate wouldn't mind going to McDonalds on the way.

We went there, and I tried calling our mate, to see if he wanted anything, both on his mobile, and the landline, but he didn't answer.

We couldn't go through the drive through, because my mate's car window was still broken, and he couldn't open it, so we parked the car, went in, and I got some food.

We got back in the car and just as we were leaving, my mate called me back.

I told him that I'd called, to find out if he wanted any McDonalds, but that it was too late now, and that we were on our way. He said he didn't want any, anyway, and would see us soon.

We went to our mate's place, I grabbed my guitar and food out of the car, and we went in. I sat and ate, while the others set up their instruments.

I finished eating, setup my amp, and then we played for a while.

No one was in it today, the playing was crap, no real effort at all. We played for a couple of hours, and then packed up the stuff again.

My mate and I left, on the way home, we went to the supermarket.

We went around, I got some food. When I came out, Dad was there. We wandered out, and I went over to my mate's car, and then I figured I might as well go home with Dad.

I told him I'd just get my guitar, grabbed it out of the car, saw my mate off, and then I went and jumped in Dad's car, and we came home.

I went in, dropped off my food and guitar, and then I went inside, because Dad had been going on about the new kitchen while I was in the car on the way home.

I went in to have a look, there was some mail for me to apparently, but all it was, was a stupid charity house raffle letter.

I am so sick of them sending me these. I bought 1 ticket, about 6 years ago, and now every few months, I get another one.

I don't even open them anymore. It annoys me, I bought the ticket for 2 reasons, the main one was to win the house, but also to donate the money, and the $15 I donated will have been gone by now, with the amount of mail they've sent me in the years.

(rough estimate, stamps were 45c for a while, and now are 50c, that works out to between 30 and 33 letters, and I would have received at least that many in the last 6 years).

Anyway, I didn't bother to open this one either, I just screwed it up and chucked it in the bin.

I had a look at the kitchen, apparently there's still something wrong with it, and has to be fixed.

I came out, and Mum said that there was a parcel for me too, and a notification of some registered mail.

I wasn't sure what it was for, maybe the parcel, but that had been delivered, and it wasn't registered mail.

Dad had to find the parcel, a big box. I opened it, to find my wireless access point I'd bought, and asked the seller to send to me at work, but he obviously hadn't, and it had turned up at home a few days ago.

I had a quick look at it, looks groovy.

I stood and chatted for a while, and then I went back out. I dropped off the access point, grabbed my laptop, and I went back inside.

I sat on the lounge inside, and browded the internet for a while. I was impressed with the signal quality, since the signal had to go through a few walls.

I went to the Australia Post website, and I sent an email asking to have the registered mail diverted to Maitland, like I did with the registered mail that turned up in Brisbane.

I browsed eBay for a while, looking at 2.4GHz video/ir transmitters, since I might get a tv to put in the house at Maitland, and I want a way to watch the tivo downstairs, while I'm upstairs.

They were pretty expensive, one guy was selling a stack of them, and people kept running the price up really high, instead of waiting for the next one.

I played gltron for a while, and then Dad served me some dinner.

I sat and ate, it makes a change from frozen crap, that I live on.

I browsed a bit more, and then I took my laptop back out. I briefly mucked around with the access point, trying to run it as it's own network, but it didn't even seem to show up.

I figured I'd have to connect to it wired, and configure it or something first.

I mucked around with the configuration of the disks in one of my machines again, and then I grabbed the 60gb and the 120gb disks, that used to be in it, before windows crapped on the partition tables.

I used those disks for the second tivo I've got, I tested the script installing on to them, it worked, but I realised that my logic was a bit dumb..

It does an mfsrestore, and automatically adds the second disk, as a result of selecting both drives, and then it adds the second drive to the first, when it already is, which is a function you only need when adding a second disk to an existing unit.

I put the disks in the tivo, putting the proper brackets on them, then I put my ir file on there, for the digital STB I've got, and I installed the logos, and set them up.

I ended up sitting watching tv until 3am, and then I went to bed.

I got up, had a shower, got ready, had breakfast, packed my bag, and then I walked to work. I had to be up a bit earlier this morning, to be at work for 8.30am.

When I got to work, a bit before 8.30am, the royalty manager's kids were sitting in reception. I spoke to them briefly.

Apparently their parents were doing something today, but the royalty manager had left something he needed at work.

I went in, and dropped of my stuff at my desk. I decided to go back and wait in reception, since I hadn't seen anyone working in reception.

I really didn't want the guy turning up, seeing no one at reception, and buggering off again.

I went back and sat in reception, and chatted with the royalty manager's kids, and then the manager came out, and I spoke to him for a minute, before they all left.

I wandered around out in reception a bit, waiting. I had to fart, so I looked around, didn't see anyone, and let rip with a fairly loud fart.

I sat down again for a minute, and then I paced around again, and I realised that there was a chick working in reception, hidden in the corner. Oh d'oh.

I decided to go and wait back at my desk. At about 8.50am, my desk phone rang, it was the chick from reception, telling me that there was someone there to see me.

I went out to reception, and collected the guy, he was carrying a huge box with him, big enough to fit 4 laptops in.

I lead him to my desk, and pointed out my laptop, just sitting on the desk.

He opened up the huge box, it had a tiny keyboard in it.

I let him sit at my desk, and go about taking the laptop apart. He didn't look like he knew what he was doing, and was just basically attacking my laptop with jewellers screwdrivers, trying to pry bits of it off.

He eventually managed to get the plastic panel above the keyboard off, complaining that he didn't like working on new laptops, preferred ones that had been knocked around a bit.

He mentioned that there were less tabs on this model, than the other ones, making it harder to get it apart.

He took the keyboard out, I wasn't paying attention at this point, I was chatting with one of the indexers, over near his desk.

The guy put the new keyboard in, and put the panel back on, and turned my laptop on. Linux booted up, to the login screen, I logged in, ran up a terminal, and then tested every quick on the new keyboard, it all seemed fine.

I signed off on the fix slip, and the guy packed up his stuff. He told me that I could have just had the whole unit replaced (a bit extreme, just for a broken key), but said that I probably wouldn't have wanted that, because I'd got "all my stuff installed on it".

He left, and I sat down, and looked at the laptop. He'd burred up a fair bit of the plastic, digging at it with the screwdrivers, the panel above the keyboard wasn't fitted properly.

I sat there, tried to fix the panel, it wouldn't go back on properly. I ended up grabbing my leatherman out of my backpack, and taking the panel off again.

I then found that the keyboard wasn't installed properly, and was crooked. I fixed that, positioning it properly, and then I put the panel back on, and it went back on properly.

If I'd known this would be the case, I would have had them send me the keyboard, instead of sending some disorganised guy who didn't know what he was doing.

I did a bit of work. The indexer asked me about using the ps/2 barcode readers with the usb keyboards. I told him that I hadn't managed to get the adapters, and I suggested just trying to use it anyway.

We plugged in the ps/2 barcode reader, it didn't work. I rebooted the machine, it still didn't work.

I rebooted the machine, with no keyboard attached, I would have liked to test the barcode reader at that point, but it's a bit hard to send ctl+atl+del with a barcode reader.

I plugged the usb keyboard in, logged in, and found that the barcode reader wouldn't work.

Hmm, crap. Oh well, we're back to adapters, or ps/2 keyboards. In the short term, the indexer got the one usb barcode reader off his machine, and put it on the scanner machine.

I went up to see the email support guy, to find out about getting a lift home today, but he wasn'y there.

I went across the road, and I bought a chocolate bar, and came back to work. I noticed there was a competition on the wrapper, I entered it. (I ended up winning another crappy ringtone, which I didn't even bother to claim, and deleted the sms with the code to get it).

I went to see the email support guy again he was at his desk now, so I arranged to get a lift, that was fine.

I went back to my desk, went to run kismet, and found it complained that I had no wireless device.. Oops, I put a new kernel in, and I haven't built/installed the wireless drivers for it again.

I did that, no dramas, and got the wireless card running again.

I did some work, until the senior DBA, and the guy from royalty came down, and said they were going out to lunch.

I went with them, on the way, the guy from royalty asked if I knew anything about tv aerials.

I asked what he was after, splitting an aerial run, to go to 3 tvs instead of 1, and I suggested he just get a splitter, and use some F connectors on the runs.

We walked to Dick Smith, and went in, to look what they had for doing it.

He only wanted 3 runs, so it was better to get a 3 way splitter, instead of a 4, because there's signal drop that way. We managed to find a 3 way splitter, and some f connectors, that you just screw on to the end of the coax.

The senior DBA noticed some tiny digital cameras in a bargain bin near the counter. I said you had to worry about the resolution, those crappy little cameras are usually less than 1 megapixel, and the guy working behind the counter chimed in they were .3 megapixel (as opposed to 300 kilopixels?).

The royalty guy bought his aerial bits, and we left, and kept walking.

There's a temporary shop setup, selling factory outlet shoes, we went and had a look in there (maybe should have another look in there, since I need some shoes).

We left there, kept going through the mall, went in to the shopping centre, we went to the bakery, and all got pies.

We went and sat outside, and ate our pies, and then we walked back to work.

I hung around upstairs for a little while. The email support guy went off to get some lunch, and a couple of beers.

The senior DBA was working on the little guy from royalty's machine (who wasn't there), just cleaning it up a bit, putting some patches on it, defragging it etc.

While we were doing that, the other guy from royalty, who's rarely there, that sits next to the little guy, over the partition from the senior DBA, complained about his laptop not being configured correctly.

He asked if we could look at it, and we jokingly told him that he'd have to log a helpdesk ticket about it, and he complained that he already had, and showed us a post-it note with the job number written on it.

We had a look at his laptop, he was complaining, that whenever he shut the lid (because he's using a port replicator, and an external screen etc), that the laptop suspends, so he has to leave it half open, in order to use it.

This will be something to do with how the lid switch is configured. I suspect that's a setting in the bios. We rebooted his laptop, went into the bios, and then found that the Acer laptops are crap (well, we already knew that), but that there's bugger all options in there.

I then thought, maybe it's in the power tab in windows, where you set the screensaver etc.

We booted up windows again. For some reason, it took an absolute age for the login box to come up, after the blue background or whatever appeared. It took like 7 minutes.

The guy was complaining, accusing us of busting his laptop, when all we'd done was reboot it. (yeah, we'd gone into the bios, found nothing to change, changed nothing, and exited without saving).

It was a relief when the login box came up. Oh, and the external usb keyboard wouldn't work either, so the senior DBA logged in with the laptop's keyboard.

I then suggested replugging the keyboard, pulled it out of the port replicator, and plugged it in again, and it started working.

We opened up the display settings, screen saver tab, power settings button, and found a screen, with options like "when I close my lid", and a drop down box, with options like "shutdown", "suspend", "do nothing".

We set that to "do nothing". I found it humourous that we had to tell windows to "do nothing", I thought windows had been designed from the ground up, to "do nothing".

I went back to my desk after that, and continued coding. At about 4.30pm, I got a call on my desk phone, from the email support guy, he was leaving.

I packed up my laptop, grabbed my backpack, and went down to the carpark.

The email support guy wasn't out here, I just wandered over near his car, and a couple of minutes later, he came out of the fire stairs.

We got in the car, and started driving, towards the freeway. We didn't get very far, and we got stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, crawling very slowly.

It took us 50 minutes to go about 10 kilometres, to get to the service station, before even getting on the freeway. During this, the email support guy said he should have gone the other way, the back way.

The email support guy got fuel, and I just waited in the car.

I looked across, and on the main road, the cops had busted someone for something, light's going, cop over at the car, writing them a ticket.

The email support guy came back, and we left the service station, went and got back in the crappy traffic.

It took us another 15 minutes or so, to get on the freeway.

This was all caused by a dumb roundabout, all the people coming up the freeway, are then just streaming around the roundabout, to the right, to go up the pacific hwy, and blocking the people going south, who want to go straight through the roundabout, and get on the freeway.

We eventually got through there, got on the freeway, and I got dropped at home. It ended up taking just over 2 hours, to go about 100km. Pathetic.

I got the email support guy's phone number, in case I had to arrange getting a lift from him on Monday morning, and then I came inside.

I sat and watched tv.

I spent a bit of time mucking around with the disks in one of my machines. I bought a 200gb sata disk to put in it, about 4 months ago (when I went to the fair in Newcastle, and my mate bought most of his machine).

I finally got around to putting the disk in, because I wanted to get the 200gb pata disk out again, which I had bought for the tivo, and I want to get that ready to take to Maitland.

Anyway, I put the disk in, and then I tried to use the disk manager in windows to partition it. I wanted a couple of 100gb fat32 partitions.

It wouldn't let me do it, complaining that it's too big. Crap. I have another disk in this machine, with a 120gb fat32 partition on it.

I kept trying to do it, but it refused to let me have any partition bigger than 32gb as a fat32. I googled around to find out why, and apparently Microsoft are trying to force you to use NTFS.

Well, I don't want to use NTFS, because I intend to one day put linux on this machines, and be able to access all my files.

I couldn't find anyway in windows to create the correct partition sizes, that I wanted. I'd downloaded Mepis a couple of days ago, and it was on my laptop, so I used k3b to burn the iso. I booted that up, and used kparted or something (maybe only cfdisk, I don't remember), to partition the disk as I wanted.

While I had Mepis running, I decided to use that copy all the files. I moved everything from the pata disk to the sata disk, back in the partitions where it belonged (I needed 3 partitions, because I'd had 2 disks partition tables go, and 3 partitions).

Once that was done, I rebooted into windows, went in, and assigned the correct drive letters to the partitions on the sata disk, to put them where the 2 pata disks (120gb/60gb) were, before windows crapped on the partition tables, about 6 months ago, and I had to rescue it with "stellar phoenix", on to the pata disk from the tivo, because stellar phoenix would bsod when the sata controller was in the machine.

While I was doing this, I realised that the 200gb pata disk, from the tivo, was only showing up as a 120gb disk.

I decided that I would get the 200gb disk working properly, and leave it in this machine, and I'd put the 120gb and 60gb disks that windows screwed the partition tables on, into the tivo. It's only 20gb difference (not even 10 hours of recording in the tivo), and I won't end up using them otherwise.

I went and confirmed that everything had copied from the pata disk to the sata disk (I was only a couple of files out, but figured they were some crap, like swap files, or temp files or something), and then I deleted everything off it.

I tried to fix the disk/partition size, but nothing I did would make windows recognise it was a 200gb disk.

I booted up mepis again, used kparted, it came up, said there was a 200gb disk in there, with a 120gb partition on it, and 80gb unpartitioned. I just deleted the 120gb partition, created a 200gb partition.

I rebooted, into windows again, and it came up, now seeing a 200gb disk. How retarded you are windows.

I sorted more files out, got everything back where it belonged, and the machine working better, back like it was 6 months ago, before windows crapped on the partition tables, (though not working as well as when I had linux running on it).

After all that, I decided to not leave the 200gb pata disk in the machine. I don't need that much space in the machine now, and I'd be better off getting one of those usb external disk caddies, and putting the 200gb pata disk in it, and using it with my laptop.

I went to bed at 5am.

I woke up, at 7.30am. It was bloody cold.

I got up at 7.45am, and went and had a shower, got dressed, and then had some toast, and walked to work.

I got to work, went to my desk, and sat and started doing some coding. I got a call from the guy upstairs, about disk space, assigned to the people in the group I work in. I said I'd have a look.

After a while, I found some home directories in there, and someone had 80gb worth of data on the server. I was chatting to one of the indexers, and he went around to speak to the guy about it.

I went back to work, and a little while later, the indexer came back. He told me that the guy knew he was using a lot of disk space, and apparently it was because his machine was stuffed, and it was going to be rebuilt or something, so he'd backed his whole hard drive, including the windows directory (duh) to his home directory.

I went back to work, I delegated the task on to the new guy, who's supposed to be looking after our data, and I told him the huge directories, and suggested that he find out if any of the stuff could go off to tape, especially the files belonging to people who have left.

The woman who used to work on the front counter, and took over for the guy that left (who used to stay in the pub, and got sick of our noise), was trying to install a dymo printer on her machine.

A couple of people fiddled around with it, and then they asked me about it, so I went over, and installed the software/printer etc, and configured it for her.

It's Thursday, so we had a morning tea. I went out, did the usual thing, eating, chatting, and then going back to my desk, because I don't like the whole socialising thing, there's no alcohol, and I've got nothing to say.

I continued working on code, until the guy from upstairs came down to my desk, at about 12.50pm.

We went out for lunch, wandered down the street. We went into a fast food place.

We got our food, and went and sat outside, I'd just ordered a salad sandwich, and it was huge, almost too big to fit in my mouth.

After that, we all walked back to work. I went back to my desk, and I continued working, rewriting some code.

I noticed that there was no reception on my mobile phone, I moved it around a bit, and eventually found a spot, balanced up on top of computer, where it got one bar of reception.

It rang a couple of minutes later, the message service. There were a couple of messages on there, from the guy working on behalf of Dell, he wanted to know about coming to fix my laptop, but he didn't leave a number, and only his first name, so I had no way to ring him back.

I went back to work, and I got a call at 5pm from the guy upstairs, he was going to leave.

That sounded good, so I packed up my stuff and then I left, and we walked down to the pub.

We got drinks, and went and sat in the pokies room, where the other people from work were sitting.

We all chatted for a while, and then I played the pokies. I don't recall winning anything.

My phone rang, I went outside, where I could hear, and it was the tech calling on behalf of dell.

We arranged for him to come out and fix my laptop tomorrow at 8.30am.

I went back inside, and drank, and chatted a bit more. I got a bit fed up with the old librarian, being more beligerant than usual, and also the fact that now I have somewhere to live (other than in the pub), and I don't have to spend all night in the pub anymore.

I grabbed my laptop, and I walked back towards the house. On the way, I went into the supermarket, I bought a bunch of stuff, including a timer, so I don't have to eat cold or burnt dinner.

I went back to the house, and I ate some cheese and crackers, watched some tv, and then I went and put the dinner on, and went back and watched more tv, while I waited.

I ate dinner, and then the other guy came back, and asked if I wanted to go to the club, I decided to go over there, just for a while.

We went there, and I had a couple of drinks. My phone rang, it was my Dad, he told me that he'd changed his mind about driving up on the weekend, to bring up some stuff for me, like a matress, because it might rain.

We hung around in the club a little bit longer, and then we left, and walked back to the house, we got back at 9pm.

I sat in the loungeroom, and watched junkyard wars, through the xbox, streaming it off my laptop.

I shut the lid of my laptop, while I watched it, to save the battery. I opened it again, a little while later, and found that the screen was stuck off.

I finished watching the episode, and then I had another go at the laptop, it was still running, I just couldn't see anything.

I switched it over to a text console, logged in (all working blind), and issued a reboot command.

The laptop rebooted, came up fine, so I shut it down again, made up the bed, turned off the tv, and went to sleep.

I got up, it was really cold, I went and had a shower, got dressed, packed up stuff, including the bed, without crushing my fingers today.

I had a coffee, some toast, and then I walked to work.

I sat and worked, had a chat with the project manager about a data flow diagram he'd drawn up, to illustrate the new system I'm working on.

I setup my laptop, and kicked off the download I'd tried to do last night, the Xorg source code. For some reason cvsgrab wouldn't work for me. I fiddled around, wrote a new shell script to run it, and got it going, and left it to finish downloading.

I did some work for a while, I checked my email, and saw the result of the eBay auction, where I'd bought the access point ("Buy it now"), I wrote down the bank details the guy had sent me, to go and pay when I went out to lunch.

A little while later, the project manager came back, and he asked me about using the barcode readers, and they were talking about having to buy new ones, because the ones they've got, are ps/2, and all the machines now have USB keyboards.

I suggested that they get adapters, and plug the usb keyboards into the barcode reader, and into the ps/2 port.

The project manager said he didn't think the machines had ps/2 ports, I thought they did, and would have been terribly surprised if they didn't. We looked, and found they did.

I googled around, and found details of usb -> ps/2 adapters, apparently there's a difference between ones designed for mice, and keyboards. I couldn't find any locally, ie in .au, but a few in the US.

I said I'd have a look in the computer shops, when I went out for lunch.

I went back to work for a while, until I decided to find out about going to lunch.

I went upstairs, and I realised that I'd left the bank details I'd written down, downstairs.

I went back, and got them, and went back up. I went out with the senior DBA, we went for a walk down the road.

We went to the cheap shop near work, to look for a bike pump, they didn't have one, that we could find, so we gave up looking, and left.

We went to the next cheap shop, and looked around again, still couldn't find a bike pump. This place was selling batteries cheap, something like 24 AA batteries for $2. Can't go wrong. I bought these, and the senior DBA bought some clothes pegs.

We left there, kept heading to the shopping centre. I went to the ATM on the way, and got some cash.

We went into Kmart, and wandered around. They had a cheap outdoor table set on display, we had a look, the senior DBA wanted it, I didn't see the point, I wouldn't be sitting outside, it's too cold.

We went into the bik aisle, and I found a cheap bike pump, the senior DBA got a helmet.

We went over to the hardware section, and looked for some washers, so we could install the washing machine properly. The senior DBA didn't know what size he needed, and I hadn't looked at the tap/fitting, so I had no idea.

We headed to the front of Kmart, and the senior DBA went to walk out, and I suggested that he go through the checkout, and pay for the helmet and the pump first.

We went to a checkout, and the senior DBA realised that he was carrying 2 pumps, so dumped one.

While we waited to get served, some woman in front was buying an Xbox. The checkout woman was telling her to make sure that she kept the receipt, in case she had to get it serviced or fixed, because "Sony or whoever makes it" is a pain about it.

Uhh, a "Sony Xbox"?

We got served, the senior DBA paid for his stuff, and we left.

We went over to the bakery, and we got some pies, and then we went and sat outside to eat them.

The manager of royalty, and his wife came past, we chatted to them for a minute, they were on their way into Kmart. The senior DBA asked them to look at the table that was on display, and tell him what they thought of it.

We continued eating, and a little while later, the manager of royalty and his wife came out of kmart, and back to where we were sitting.

They told the senior DBA that they thought the table set looked cheap.

We started walking back, and I skewed off, to go to a computer shop to look for the usb/ps2 adapters.

I walked down, went into the computer shop, and asked the guy about adapters. He said he knew what I was talking about, but that he couldn't get them.

He showed me that they had some dumb Microsfot mouse that came with one, which I pointed out wouldn't work, because the keyboard ones are different internally, because a keyboard draws more power or something, and I really doubt Microsoft would give you an adapter that would do something more useful than they were marketing it for.

The mouse was like $70 too, and I'm not paying that. The guy suggested that I just buy ps/2 keyboards, yeah, that's one way out of it, and what I'd do, but I don't think that'll wash at work, with those stupid black acer machines, to have a beige keyboard.

I asked the guy about getting some in, and again he said that it's easier just to buy a keyboard, yeah, easier for you buddy.

I left there, and started wandering back towards work.

I noticed an electrical goods shop across the road, with a "closing down sale", I figured I'd have a look, so see if I could get some speakers, or a heater or something.

I went and had a look in there, wandered all around, nothing grabbed my attention, and there was nothing useful in there.

I left there, and headed back towards work again, I decided to look in the useless Dick Smith shop, to see if they had any adapters. I went in, looked around for them.

Someone asked me if I needed help, I told the guy what I was looking for. He told me they didn't have any.. they'd recently had to have all their cables tested/certified, and when they pulled the till machines out, the keyboard cords got stuffed, and so they'd used all the adapters, replacing the stuffed keyboards.

He also told me that Dick Smith were manufacturing their own, and so had discontinued ordering them, but their own brand wouldn't be stocked for a couple of months. Great.

I left there, and went across the road to the bank, and I deposited the money for the WRT54G into the seller's account.

I walked back to work, and when I got backed, I checked the email about paying for the access point.

The guy had asked that I send a copy of the receipt, and they'd ship it faster.

I went in, used the photocopier to scan the receipt, cropped the scan, since it scanned a full A4 page, with a tiny receipt slip on it, and then emailed the cropped scan to the guy.

I checked my email, and I'd received an email from a company doing a survey on behalf of Dell, about their support. They said they knew I'd contacted the help desk recently, and wanted me to let them know what I thought of the support I'd received.

I had a good time filling that in, as I think I already blogged about..

I did some work for a while, and then I checked the Xorg download I'd restarted this morning.

It had finished, I'd ended up downloading 890M of stuff, jebus. It was supposed to be about 300MB.

I bzippd it up, and it compressed down to 42M. Why did I have to spend a whole day downloading the crap? why couldn't they have bzipped it, and put that up, like every other project does, where you can download a daily cvs snapshot, over http even.

A little while later, the senior DBA called me, and told me he was going to leave. I suggested going across the road, to Harvey Norman, where the chick from the bar works, to look at speakers, and a heater or something.

He said he was going for a smoke first. I went out, and across to where the smokers smoke, and socialised for a little while.

After that, I walked across the road to Harvey Norman, the senior DBA was going to drive over there, it's across the road for Christ's sake!

I walked over there, and he drove, and I got there before him, a couple of minutes before him.

I went into the electrical section, into the speaker/home theatre section. I started looking at the speakers. Crappy selection, and very expensive.

The senior DBA came in, we had a quick look, and then we went to look at the heaters. I found an ok looking little fan heater, it'll do for the next few days, until we get the gas connected.

I tried to find a timer, so I could set it up to turn on an hour before I have to get up in the morning, so it's not so horrid to get out of bed, but they didn't have any.

We went to the checkout, I went to the counter with the woman from the bar working on it. She rang up the heater, a few dollars cheaper than the display had said. The senior DBA pipes up "that's not the price".

D'oh, be quiet, she put a discount on it, I told him, and then he realised. I paid for it, and then we left.

We went over to the car, and I chucked the heater in the car. I told the senior DBA that I would have been happy to carry it, but was just taking advantage of the fact that he'd driven over here.

We decided to look in the furniture shops. We looked in "Fantastic Furniture", and while looking through the furniture, for a chair, or a small lounge, or a coffee table, we came across a lounge, exactly the same style as the senior DBA's lounge.

We couldn't remember the fabric of it though, so we couldn't match that.

We left there, and went across to another furniture shop, wandered through there, it was a boring shop, most of the furniture was the same as in the last place.

I realised I needed to buy a pillow, because the 2 x $5 pillows I bought yesterday were useless, it was like sleeping on nothing.

We went into the bed place, and I went to have a look at the pillows. I ended up buying a $30 pillow, I thought it was a good tradeoff, it's supposed to be entirely synthetic, and treated with something to stop bugs etc getting it it.

I mainly bought it because it was thick, and didn't compress to nothing.

We left there, I chucked the pillow in the car, and then the senior DBA offered me a lift back to work, across the road.

I jumped in the back of the car, because the front passenger seat had the heater, and my pillow, and other stuff on it.

We drove across, back near work, and I jumped out, and went back into the building. I went back to my desk, and I tried to build Xorg that had finished downloading.

It had some problem, building the "hardcopy" module, of the documentation. I tried to stop it from doing that, by trashing the hardcopy directory, but that didn't work.

Crap. I realised that when I had downloaded the stuff out of CVS, I hadn't put the full path to download in there, which might explain why I had 890M of stuff, instead of 300M like it was supposed to be.

I started downloading it again, with the correct path specified.

While I did so, I read some documentation, and found a new page, with a daily cvs snapshot tarball linked to it. Argh, this is what I was looking for, before I wasted all that time getting cvsgrab going.

I killed off the cvsgrab, and downloaded the tarball. It ended up being about 42M, instead of 890M.

While that was downloading, I went to check kernel.org, and found that 2.6.11.11 was out, I'm on 2.6.11.10, old :-)

I pulled down the new source, since the changelog had references to changes for the 915 chipset (I think), I untarred that, and compiled it.

I didn't reboot yet, I used cvsgrab to pull out the latest Mesa and DRI code, since I couldn't find tarball snapshots for those. That took ages.

Before mesa was finished downloading, I got a call from the senior DBA, he wanted me to go to the supermarket on the way back to the house (fine, I'm already going there anyway), and get some washing powder, he's connected up the washing machine, without replacing the washers.

Mesa finished coming out of CVS, I packed up my laptop, grabbed it, and left work, walking back to the house. I went into the supermarket on the way, got the washing powder, some juice, and something for dinner.

I got back to the house, went in. The senior DBA paid me for the washing powder.

I sat and watched tv. I went and put my dinner in the oven.

The senior DBA told me that the woman from the mail room, and the guy from Orange who was looking after IT were coming around.

A little while later, they turned up, and then we went through the house, showing them around.

They asked if we wanted to go and get pizzas, I already had my dinner in the oven, so I was right. The senior DBA went with them, to go and get a pizza.

I went back to watching tv, and a while later, when I thought my dinner was cooked (because the timer on the oven can't be used, because the "up" button is stuck, and the microwave doesn't have a timer), I got it out of the oven.

I went and sat in front of the tv, and started eating my meal, to find it cold in the middle. I couldn't be bothered to put it back in the oven, because I would have had to put the plate in there or something.

I suppose I could have put it in the microwave, but I couldn't be bothered, I just ate it.

After that, I was still hungry, so I went and got the box of Tiny Teddies I'd bought at the supermarket yesterday, and started eating those.

The senior DBA got back about the, he'd got 2 pizzas. It was more than he wanted to eat, so he asked me to wat some, and I ended up eating almost a whole pizza.

After that, I sat on my laptop, and booted up the new kernel, which worked nicely. I compiled the cvs DRI code, installed it, that worked.

I built the Mesa stuff, this was tricky, it kept complaining about missing files. I found the files that were missing, they were in the Xorg source, so I just copied them from there, and it compiled.

I installed that, and then I kicked off the Xorg compilation. This took an absolute age, I don't know why, probably just because there's stacks of code to compile.

I installed this, and then started it. I was getting somewhere, now the i810 driver module was being used, this was the first time I could get this to go, rather than the vesa driver.

I wasn't too happy though, I still couldn't get the DRI code, and Direct Rendering, to work. glxinfo was telling me "Direct Rendering: no". Argh.

I sat and played the doom clone I'd installed for a while. The senior DBA went to bed, I played doom a bit longer, and then packed up my laptop, setup the sofa bed, and went to bed, and sleep.

I woke up at 4am as usual, but this time, because I'd taken my medication before going to sleep, I wasn't having an asthma attack, I was just waking up because of the habit.

I found that I could breathe, and so was able to just go back to sleep.

I woke up again at 7am, the alarm on my phone waking me up. I turned the alarm off, it was too cold to get out of bed.

I went back to sleep, and woke up again at 8am, it was still too cold to get up, so I just lay there, until about 9am, at which point I forced myself to get out bed.

I grabbed my bathroom stuff, toiletries, and clothes etc, and went and had a shower.

I came back, finished getting dressed, and then packed up the sofa bed. In the process of folding the sofa bed back in, I managed to squash my fingers in the mechanism. That hurt like hell, even more so, because it was cold.

I heard the senior DBA get up, come down the stairs. He put the kettle on, and I went in and made coffees.

I drank my coffee, and then I walked to work.

I got to work, and found a couple of messages on my work phone, they were from Dell. The first was the tech, he couldn't find the building, and the second was from the call centre, telling me that the tech had come out, but I wasn't there.

Well, they didn't actually arrange to come on Monday, they were supposed to come last Friday, and I never told them I would be available yesterday.

I called them back, and explained the situation. They said they would try to get someone out here this afternoon to fix my laptop, or tomorrow.
Fine.

The geosurvey group had recently bought a "large format scanner", basically a scanner for A0 pages, for doing maps etc, to enter them into the system I'm developing.

A guy from the vendor was here, installing it, and giving a bit of a demo on how to use it.

He had no idea how to use it. We asked him some fairly basic questions, like about TWAIN support, and he fished around in the CDs that came with it, found a TWAIN driver, but it's only a demo, and costs a couple of hundred bucks.

I would seriously think, that when you've paid $27 000 for a scanner, you would get the driver with it. Pathetic.

I also asked if the scanner, or the software it came with, supported reading the barcodes on the papers we were scanning, apparently some scanner software can do this, but he'd never heard of such a thing.

At 12.45pm, I got a call from the Dell callcentre, they arranged for a tech to come out to fix my laptop, between 3pm and 5pm this afternoon, and confirmed the address. I told them that I would be at work during this time.

The new guy, who looks after the geosurvey data, came over with a music cd. He was trying to play it in his machine, but the CDDB lookup in itunes (he's got an ipod shuffle) wouldn't work, he wanted to know if it worked on my machine (because he knows I've got an ipod mini).

I put the CD in, and it popped up and said that "some files must be updated on my machine", uhh, somehow I don't think I need to update files to listen to a music cd. Undoubtedly it's some crap DRM shit I don't want on my machine, so I cancelled that, and the CD still worked.

I ran up itunes, and found that it had no issue with the CDDB lookup. It must be something to do with the department's proxy server. I found a workaround for that a while ago, which is why it worked on my machine.

I edited the squid config on my machine, that's on there so my linux laptop can access the net at work, and gave the new guy's machine access through mine. He went back, tried again, and the CDDB lookup worked fine.

I tried to download the X source, the latest out of CVS, in case that would give me some working code. I had to work out how to access CVS through http first though, since that's the only access to the net I have at work.

After googling for a while, I eventually found a program called "cvsgrab", which works with the http cvs interface that some sites run. Luckily the site with Xorg, and the Mesa, and DRI stuff on it has one of these.

I had a go at using cvsgrab, a java based thing, I didn't have any luck with it. Something to do with the configuration, or the paramters.

At about 2pm, I went out to lunch, the senior DBA hadn't come in to work today, and apparently the relocations chick was coming to visit, at his new house, where I'm staying too.

I went and got some lunch, ate it, and then went to the cheap shop near work. I bought a couple of powerboards, because I had issues plugging all the entertainment gear in yesterday. (tv, receiver, xbox, digital stb, vcr, switch, there wasn't enough power).

I walked down to the house, the senior DBA and the relocations chick were there, outside, they were about to go for a walk, I said I'd just drop the stuff off.

I went in the house, dropped off the bag, with the powerboards in it, and came back out. The senior DBA and the relocations chick had disappeared, I couldn't see where they'd gone.

I went back in the house, and went about putting one of the powerboards under the tv, and plugging everything in.

They came back, and the senior DBA told me that he couldn't work out how to watch tv. I hadn't shown him yet, and because of having the receiver, and the digital stb, it's not as simple as just turning on the tv.

I put the tv on, the reception wasn't great, because the aerial lead from the roof, that runs in through a hole in the wall, has no end on it. I rigged up a connection yesterday, just shoving the bare wires into the connector, and running that to the stb, but it wasn't great, and we couldn't get channel 10 like that.

I put the tv on, The Bill was on, and then I left it, and went upstairs, where the others had gone. I chatted for a while, it was getting close to 3pm, when Dell are supposed to be coming (well, in the next couple of hours, I doubt they'll be there at 3pm), so I left, and headed back to work.

On the way, I went into the shopping centre near the house, went to the bakery, got a scone, and ate it on the way back to work.

I got back to my desk at 3.03pm. There was a couple of messages on my desk phone. Uh oh.

I listened to them, they were both from the Dell tech, the first one telling me that he had arrived, and the second telling me that I wasn't there, and so he was leaving.

he left his mobile number, so I immediately called him back, but he didn't answer, so I left a message, and explained that I'd been told he would be there between 3 and 5, and it was only 3 now.

I didn't get a call back. I'm getting sick of this.

A little while later, the sysadmin came down, and we chatted for a while.

He went away, and then I got a call from a guy at Orange, he'd called the wrong number, and was actually after talking to the guy from Orange, who's over here at the moment, who was looking after IT.

I got off the phone, and had another look at the cvsgrab program. I found a newer version, managed to work out how to use it, with the correct environment set up etc, and kicked it off downloading the Xorg source. Apprently it's a couple of hundred meg worth.

I went back to work, working on the "record types" field in the database. There should be about 10 different record types, but there's actuall over 40 in there, because of case differences, and typographical errors.

I got that a bit sorted out.

One of the indexers came over, who's a fan of Mythbusters. I quite enjoy it too, and then I remembered that I had an episode on my laptop, so I put that on, while we chatted.

That attracted a bit of attention, and the project manager came over, and joined in the conversation, while we watched some of the episode. It was the one where they talk about mobile phones causing explosions at service stations, and that it's much more likely to happen from static electricity, caused by people getting back in the car while filling the car up with petrol.

After that, I sat and waited for Xorg to finish downloading. It just went on, and on, more and more files coming down.

I got sick of waiting after a while, at about 7pm, when I wanted to leave work, so I killed it, and packed my laptop up, and left work, and walked back to the house.

Yet again, I haven't finished putting in notes of this day, and I don't really recall what I did, but I probably went to the supermarket on the way, got some food for dinner, went back, ate the dinner, and watched tv, before going to bed.

Argh. Trying to get my laptop fixed is more of a saga that trying to get X running.

When I first got the laptop, the enter key kept sticking down. I carefully pulled it off, to check if there was anything stuck under it, but in the process this tiny little bit of plastic that hinges the key broke.

I found that the left shift key was the same size, so I pulled it off, and took the spring from under it, and fixed the enter key.

I managed to use some superglue to sort of fix the plastic spring, so I could put the shift key back on. It worked somewhat, ie the shift key stays on, and works, but the key is all skewiff.

I logged a ticket with dell, both with customer care, and tech support, since the problem was there when the laptop arrived.

Nothing happened for days, until I was eventually called up, at about 8pm, by a Chinese lady who had difficulty speaking english.

I explained the situation again (I had put all the detail in the ticket, to avoid this), and was then told that it would be transferred to tech support.

Nothin happened for another week, until I was called up again, at 8pm, by another Chinese lady who had difficulty speaking english, a different one from before, and I got to explain the situtation again.

Nothing happened for another few days, until I was called up by Unisys support, for confirmation of the address of the laptop, for the repair to be done. I explained that I work in Maitland during the week, and am at home on the weekends, because assumedly the work will be done during the week.

The parts had been sent to Gosford, which is where the laptop was sent to, but then because it's not there for the repair to be done, the ticket had to be sent back, to be started all over again.

I was called up again the next day, to organise a time for the repair to be done, probably in the "early afternoon", well, it'll need to be, because it's a Friday, and I leave at 3pm.

The next day, I heard nothing, no one turned up, so I went home at 3pm.

I wasn't in at work yesterday, because of the move, when I got in this morning, there were 2 messages on my phone. One from the tech, wanting to confirm the address, because he couldn't find it, the other from Dell, saying they'd have to reschedule the fix, between 10am and 12pm today.

I called Dell back, got through the stuff, and they said the guy would be out this afternoon, between 3pm and 5pm, or tomorrow.

I went out to lunch a bit after 2pm, and got back at 3pm, there were 2 messages on my phone. The tech was here, wanted to know where I was, and another from him, saying he must have missed me.

Immediately called the tech back on his phone, but he didn't answer, so I left a message, and he hasn't called me back.

This is pathetic. I'm glad I didn't pay for 3 year support, I would be fuming, if this is the kind of support I get. It's taken me almost a month to get this fixed. Thankfully I can use it in the meantime.

I'll have to reconsider buying Dell equipment again.

Update: Woo, I just got an email, a survey about Dell's support. I had a good time filling it out, expressing that I was dissatisfied with the support I had received.

It had a free text field at the end, asking about things I think they did well, and things they could do better. I used this to mention that I would appreciate calls inside business hours, from people who can fluently speak english, and technicians who turn up at the arranged times.

I've not actually heard anything from Dell support today.

Another Update: Dell tried to call me on my mobile in the afternoon yesterday, but I had no reception. When I got the messages the guy had left, he hadn't left his name, or a number, so I couldn't call him back. He called me again while I was in the pub last night, I was able to arrange for him to come this morning.

He was supposed to be here at 8.30, so I rushed to work, and he didn't turn up until 9am. He fixed the laptop, scratching some of the plastic in the process, saying "I hate working on new ones, I rather working on ones that have been bashed around a bit". Obviously he thought he'd make up for the fact that I haven't bashed it around.

It's finally fixed, hooray.

I woke up at 4am, having an asthma attack as usual. The only problem this time, was that my ventolin had run out.

I got up, and looked around for any old ones, but of the 3 or 4 that I found, they were all totally empty, not even any propellant left in them.

There was nothing I could do, so I went back to bed, and attempted to get back to sleep, while not really able to breathe.

I managed to get back to sleep, and then was woken by the alarm.

I got up, went and had a shower, and got dressed. This bit of activity was bit much for me, based on the fact that I couldn't breathe.

I went inside, since I hadn't heard Mum go anywhere, I thought she could go to the chemist, and get a ventolin for me, before I died or something.

I took my asthma card with me, that you need when you buy ventolin, and some money, to pay for it.

I found mum, sitting on the computer, talking on the phone. She asked me what I needed, and I said ventolin, and then I went and sat in the loungeroom to wait, while she finished her phone call.

She must have been on the phone to Dad, and asked him about some ventolin, because she came out a couple of minutes later with an old inhaler, that Dad had in his suit pocket.

I took a couple of puffs out of it, gees, it's old, it's the ones with CFC propellant, it tastes different.

She also brought out a seretide inhaler thing. I said that it was a preventer, but she said that Dad had said that it helps.

I took a couple of puffs out of that too.

We went to the doctor after that, I was still out of breath, so Mum spoke to the receptionist for me, I gave her my Medicare card, and I sat down.

While I was waiting to go in, I sent a message to the senior DBA, to find out how he was going, because the removalists are at his place this morning, loading up all his stuff.

He called me back a minute later, and told me that they were nearly finished, and he'd be leaving in about 15 minutes. I told him I was at the doctor at the moment, and that I'd see him in a bit more than an hour.

A few minutes later, I was called in. I explained that I'd had an asthma attack, and not had any ventolin this morning.

The doctor offered to put me on the nebuliser, but I said I was ok now, I figured I just needed a new ventolin, and to get some preventer, so I stop having asthma attacks in the middle of the night, every night.

She listened to my chest with the stethoscope, and then I got a prescription for a couple of ventolin inhalers, a seretide preventer, and some ventolin nebules for the nebuliser (since I've got one).

I was only in there for a few minutes, I couldn't think of anything else I needed to be at the doctor for, and then I took the prescription, and went out.

My brother was still sitting in the waiting room, looking after Mum's handbag, she was outside on the phone, so I collected him, and the bag, and we went outside.

We got in the car, and went to the chemist. I got the prescription filled, had to wait for ages, got it, and they asked me all these dumb questions, have I used seretide before etc.

I know all about the stuff, I just answered the questions, took the medication, and went to the counter.

The other woman at the counter rang it all up, commented on it being expensive, and said that it would probably cost my whole pay.

It was $80. Somehow I don't think that's my whole pay, it's only a bit over an hour's pay.

It was still pretty pricey though, and I don't really need 50 ventolin nebules, about 10 would have been more than enough.

I paid, took the stuff, we went and got back in the car, and went home. I got the nebuliser out of the cupboard, cleaned the mask bits, and sat and used it for 10 minutes.

I didn't really need it, it just made me feel a bit wired now.

I finished getting the stuff together, to take to Maitland, I didn't really have all that much stuff, and no bedding stuff, but an old quilt I was going to take.

Mum brought in a new quilt she'd bought, a double bed one, I think they have a bigger bed these days, so it wouldn't fit on their bed.

There was a quilt cover too, and some towels that she brought in. I grabbed anything else I could think of that I might need, cables etc, and my digital STB.

I waited around for a bit after that, and then the senior DBA turned up, and we frantically chucked all the stuff in the car, because we had to get to Maitland when the removalists got there.

I loaded the receiver, bedding stuff, my backpack, laptop, the nebuliser.

I almost forgot to take my sunglasses, so I ran back inside, grabbed them, and went and jumped in the car.

We left, and drove to the house in Maitland, the removalists were already there.

The owner of the pub came around, opened up the house, and gave both the senior DBA and I a set of keys.

The removalists started unpacking the truck, and the senior DBA and I unloaded the car. He had electrical/computer stuff in the boot, and once I'd grabbed all that out, I waited for the removalists to get the tv stand out.

Once they'd done that, I kept myself busy, setting up the tv stand, with the tv, my receiver, the xbox, digital STB, and retuning it etc.

Once that was done, I helped the removalists move some boxes out of the truck, and then when they were done, the senior DBA paid them, and they left.

We started unpacking the kitchen stuff, which had been boxed up for 2 years, and was a bit dirty and dusty, there was even grass clippings in the boxes, all dry and brown now.

I decided to go and get some cleaning stuff, so we could clean out the fridge (not used for 2 years), and the cupboards, before washing up all the stuff, and packing the cupboards.

I walked up to the supermarket, bought a bunch of cleaning stuff, and some coffee/milk/sugar etc, along with some juice, and other bits and pieces.

I also got some synthetic vanilla essence, the removalist had told us a couple of times to wipe the fridge out with it, before putting food in it, to make it smell fresh.

Before walking back, because I was starving, hadn't eaten anything all day, I went to the bakery, got a scone, and started eating it, while walking back to the house.

On the way back to the house, I saw the owner of the pub, driving in to the carpark of the shopping centre I'd just been in.

I got back to the house, and we cleaned out the fridge, wiped the vanilla essence through it (it did make it smell better), and then we continued unpacking the boxes of kitchen stuff.

The owner of the pub had come around, and was putting up blinds in a few rooms.

The removalists had put most of the boxes in the master bedroom, including ones full of computer stuff, and kitchen stuff, so the senior DBA went up to go through these.

We found some kitchen stuff, and moved the boxes down, and then I helped the senior DBA put his bed together.

About 4 pm, we got sick of moving boxes around, and unpacking things, so we decided to go and have a beer. We told the owner we'd be in next door, and left him in there, putting up the blinds.

We went to the bar, it was such a long walk, must have been almost 25 metres :-) We went in, and got beers, and sat and drank.

We chatted to the woman working in the bar for ages, as well as a few of the people sitting in the bar. One of the people in there was an undertaker, he was complaining that business was too quiet lately, heh.

I got hungry, so I got a packet of chips, and sat and ate those, while we continued chatting. The woman working behind the bar mentioned that she works at Harvey Norman a few days a week, in the electrical section.

Handy, I might have to go there to get some stuff I need to buy, like speakers.

After we came out of there, I went to the shops again, and the senior DBA went back to the house, to lie down. I bought some food for dinner, a couple of washing baskets, and a couple of pillows.

TIP: don't buy $5 pillows. You might as well not bother.

I walked back to the house after that, being environmentally friendly, with my shopping in the washing baskets, instead of plastic bags.

I got back, sat and watched some tivo files on my laptop, while eating cheese and crackers.

The senior DBA came down, and said something about getting his bike sorted out.

We looked for the bike pump, and eventually found it, in the tent, that we'd shoved under the stairs.

We got his bike out of the laundry, where he'd put it, and we tried to pump up the tyres. There was something wrong with the pump though, like the bit that pushes the valve in was missing, so we couldn't pump up the tyres, gave up, and put the bike back in the laundry.

The senior DBA asked about watching stuff on the tv, I said we could, (watch the tivo stuff), but I needed a way to connect my laptop to the xbox, I needed a crossover cable.

I was going to crimp one up yesterday, but I couldn't find my crimping tool, Dad's still got it, he took it when I was on holidays in Bundaberg, I remember getting an SMS about it, when I was in the room in the F1 motel in Coffs Harbour on the way.

I was going to get a crossover cable from work (I brought a long straight through, and an rj45 joiner, to patch it on the end), but I didn't go to work today, so I couldn't get one.

The senior DBA thought he had a switch, in amongst all the computer stuff and cables he had. We went through the box, and found the switch, then we had to find the transformer for it.

The senior DBA's housemate at his old house had helped him pack, had packed a lot of the computer stuff, including wrapping a lot of it in newspaper, to stop it getting damaged.

It was a bit of a joke though, all these little newspaper wrapped items, it was like a lucky dip. Half the stuff that was wrapped really didn't need to be, like a little patch lead for a phone with rj11 plugs on each end, or a phone double adapter, or a power double adapter.

The more little packages we unwrapped, the funnier it got, all these ridiculous things, carefully, individually wrapped up.

We eventually found the transformer, wrapped up in newspaper.

I fished out a few short lengths of cat5, and went and installed the switch near the tv, patching the xbox in (eventually, a couple of the cat5 leads I took were duds).

I then patched in my laptop, with the big long bit of cat5 I'd taken, and setup the xbox, streaming the tivo recordings off my laptop.

We watched Mr Bean, the episode where he goes to the laundromat, and ends up wearing the woman's skirt etc.

In it, he puts a pound coin down on the washing machine, and it looked like it said "WTF" on the side of it.

I commented on the fact it looked like there was something on the side of the coin, and the senior DBA said that there is something written on there, he was over in the UK for a while, and he's got a pound coin somwhere.

He then remembered that it was in with all his change, he went and got the bag of loose change, and poured it out on the floor.

There was a stack of change there, a couple of hundred dollars worth.

We looked for the pound coin, couldn't find it. One thing we did find though, was a 5c piece, that had been run over by a train. I couldn't believe how flat and big it was.

We kept looking, couldn't find the pound. I suggested we pick all the gold coins out, and count them, so we fished out all the $1 and $2 coins.

I started counting it up, and then I found the pound coin, I'd fished it out as a gold coin, because it was similar to a $2 coin, it's sort of in between the 2 in size.

I had a look at it, but it was worn, so I couldn't see what was written on the side, probably something in latin.

We finished counting the gold coins, there ended up being $113 worth. We picked up all the silver, not bothering to count that, probably another hundred dollars worth.

After Mr Bean, I mucked around on the xbox, looking for something else to watch.

The web interface on xbmc was a bit broken, I couldn't use it in firefox, because it kept coming up asking what I wanted to do with .asp files. I was able to use konqueror though.

It's a fairly old version, from November last year, it's probably been improved since then.

I's brought all my divx movies up, so I put in the CD with "He Died with a Felafel in his Hand" on it, and sat and watched that. It's a pretty good movie.

After that I listen to some music, and the senior DBA made coffees (he'd been in the kitchen while I watched the movie).

I had my coffee, the senior DBA showed me how to unfold the sofa bed, and then he went to bed.

I went up and grabbed my stuff (my few things had been chucked in my room, while we unpacked, to keep them out of the way), and I went back down and makde the sofa bed up, and then I went to bed.

I couldn't be bothered to fix the time on the alarm clock, so I just left it flashing, when I went to bed.

I woke up, at some unknown time to start with, and later found it to be 4.30am.

I was having an asthma attack as usual, and I couldn't find my ventolin. I must not have put it in the bed last night.

I got up, and felt around near the chair, but couldn't find it, so I turned on the light, looked around, still couldn't find it.

I then looked, and found that after all that, I did put the ventolin inhaler in the bed, so I didn't need to get up, and I could have just done my usual, of taking a couple of puffs without waking up.

I turned off the light again, and then on my way back to bed, I had to step over the xbox, I wasn't sure where it was, so I stepped a long way over it, and stepped on the controller, and to avoid breaking it (or hurting my foot), I didn't put any weight on my leg, and nearly fell over.

I went back to bed, and back to sleep.

I got up at 11am, and started watching tv. I had something to eat, and then read through a lot of documentation for mplayer, trying to work out how to get the ty files to display in the correct aspect ratio.

I found that the -zoom switch worked for that.

I then tried to play a DVD on my laptop, but didn't have much luck.

I tried using both mplayer, and "totem", neither of which would play a DVD. I figured it was something to do with the encrypted vob files on the DVD.

I looked at the output that mplayer was dropping, when I tried to play the DVD, a pointer to a text file.

I read it, something about the libdvdcss library not being able to be distributed with Debian, fair enough, after all the crap about deCSS a few years ago. It had a script to run to install it though, so I just ran that, and about 36kb was downloaded, and the library installed.

I realised that I'd have to recompile mplayer, which I did, but it still didn't work. Argh.

A little while later, I tried again, and both mplayer and totem would suddenly play encrypted dvds, maybe I didn't have to recompile mplayer again, after all that.

I mucked around with the xbox a bit after that, with some of the extracted recordings, watching them, everything seemed to be working.

I decided to try watching a dvd in the xbox, and discovered that it wasn't interested in playing encrypted dvds either. D'oh.

I googled around, found a way to decrypt dvds, using "vobcopy", which even had a debian package, so I just "apt-get install vobcopy", and then went about decrypting my copy of Beverly Hills Cop to the hard drive in my laptop.

I went back to the xbox, and mounted the laptop's drive, and was able to play the unencrypted vob files on the xbox with no problems.

I watched the first few minutes of the movie, and then I put some dinner on.

I remembered about the old analogue reciever I've got up in the roof cavity, that I want to take to Maitland with me, so I used the ladder from the bed, and I climbed up and got the box out of the roof.

I sat and watched tv, I went to go and get the washing in off the line (the second load I did yesterday), but someone had already got it in, so I just brought it back.

I sat and watched more tv, ate dinner, mucked around on the laptop, and copied more recordings from the tivo to the laptop.

Dad came in for a chat for a while, and he said that he'd help me move some furniture up next weekend.

He went out, and then I packed my bag for work, and packed up the xbox, and a few other bits and pieces.

I went to bed, and watched some tv, before going to sleep.

I got up at about 11.30am, and I was just sitting around, mucking around on my laptop.

I got a message from my drummer mate, wanting to know what I was doing. I replied, and told him nothing.

I downloaded the latest mplayer source code out of cvs, hopefully with the ty audio support fixed.

While I waited for that, only a few meg, but will take a while on my crap internet connection, I went and put the washing on.

I came back, and continued waiting for the download, then went through and checked the file to do with the audio support had been updated.

I spent quite a bit of time reading through the source, and then I went and checked the washing, it was finished, so I hung the washing out.

After that, I came back, got more clothes, and went and put another load of washing on.

I came back inside, and I started compiling mplayer again. I've done this a stack of times, thinking that the audio problem was something I was causing with incorrect configuration.

While I waited, I got a call from the guy that owns the aircon business, that I used to work for. He was having problems sending email.

I worked out that he was trying to send mail through the incoming mail server (because he has a hosting account), instead of through his isp.

I told him how to fix it, he put the correct settings in, and then the email went out.

After I got off the phone, I noticed that I'd been sent a message. I read it, it was from my drummer mate, telling me that he was on his way. He'd actually sent it quite a while before, must have been when I was out hanging the washing out or something.

A couple of minutes later, my drummer mate turned up.

The mplayer compile was still going, should be finished in a minute, so I asked him to wait. The compile finished, I ran it up, and found that it did work, I was able to watch the ty files that I'd dragged out of the tivo. Groovy.

I packed up my laptop, and grabbed my bass guitar, and went and got in my mate's car.

We started heading to our mate's place. I was starving, so I asked my mate to go to McDonalds on the way.

We went there, we were going to go through the drive through, but my mate's window is broken, and he can't open it more than a crack, so we parked, and went in.

We ordered some food, and went and sat and ate, and then we kept going, and went to our mate's place.

We played the instruments for a while, and then I mucked around on my laptop for a bit, looking at tabs, and playing bits of songs, to play along with them.

The laptop battery ran out, after only 3 1/2 hours, hmm, maybe I need to get some power management stuff on my laptop, at least work out how I can shut the lid (so the screen goes off), and be able to open it again, without needing to reboot.

I shut the laptop down, and we sat and listened to the recordings we'd done (my drummer mate brings an old cassette recorder, with a crappy built in microphone. It's marginally better than nothing).

We packed up the stuff, and then left, we went to the supermarket on the way home. I bought some food, and then got dropped at home.

I went and got the washing in, and hung out the second load of washing I'd put on this morning.

I sat and mucked around on my laptop, and then made some cheese sandwiches, and ate, I was starving.

I decided to have another go at building the DRI graphics drivers, the stuff I'd checked out of cvs.

I didn't have much luck, it seemed like there were files missing, and then I found that I couldn't even load the kernel modules for some reason.

I wondered how long all my machines had been running, so I logged into everything, and checked the uptimes, they were all pretty good, around 3 months on everything.

About 1/2 hour later, while I was siting on the computer, watching tv, the power went off.

Hmm. It was pitch black. I was just trying to think of what to do, whether I try to feel around for the torch, or what, and about 10 seconds after going off, the power came back on, and everything started booting up again.

I then had to get the internet connection going again, this was a real pain, and it ended up taking me 20 minutes to get the connectivity sorted.

I had all sorts of issues, problems with routing tables, firewall configuration, ip addresses (stuff coming up before the dhcp server, like the tivo).

I got all that sorted, and then I extracted some recordings from the tivo (after rebooting it, so it would get it's IP address), on to my laptop.

I setup the xbox, I want to take it up to Maitland, to use for watching movies, and playing music etc. I put some ty files on to it, and found that the stuff recorded in "high" quality from the tivo, when watched off the xbox's hard drive, played perfectly.

When I tried streaming the recordings across samba though, it was a bit glitchy, but still watchable.

I continued pulling stuff off on to the laptop, queued up a whole bunch of stuff, and then I went to bed, watching some tv, and I fell asleep about 2.30am.

I got up, and went and got ready. The shower was going scalding hot and freezing cold again. I am so sick of living in the pub.

I went and packed up my stuff, had some breakfast, and left the pub, for the last time. No more pub, thank Christ for that.

I went to work, sat at my desk, doing a little bit of work. I waited for 9am, went and checked the ticket site I'd been on yesterday, and managed to get 3 tickets to see the Finns.

One of the indexers came to see me, and asked me to have another look at the script I'd written for them the other day, for converting the archive images from useless format, to tiff.

I'd had to write a custom script the other day, with a wierd offset value, and now it didn't work against the image he was trying to convert.

I went and changed the offset, to the correct value, 512 bytes, and it worked.

I'd just gone back to my desk, when the guy from Orange who was looking after IT came around, he asked me how we were going with moving into the house, and I told him that we weren't moving until Monday.

The then asked about some optical cartridges that they'd found at one of the sites, Lidcombe or somewhere, which they'd moved here, and he wanted me to identify if they were from the jukeboxes, or belonged to the set containing the data for the system I'm writing.

I said I'd have a look at them later, and then I went back to work.

A little while later, I remembered about the problems I'd had trying to get mplayer going over the weekend, and that the support for tivo files had been broken.

I did a bit of research, on the mplayer mailing list, and found that the ty support was fixed in cvs. Apparently the audio stream detection was busted, it was being forced to the wrong format, and then mplayer was crashing when trying to decode the wrong stream format.

I emailed the guy in Melbourne who looks after the tivo images, because he'd been trying to get it going too.

I went back to work for a while, and then I got an email, someone posting a comment on my blog, wanting to know about linux support on the laptop I've got (not wanting support, just wanting to know about drivers etc).

I sent a couple of emails back and forth to him, and went back to work.

I finished up the date conversion code in one of the data entry pages I've written, that was a real pain, doing ISO data -> Oracle and vice versa.

I downloaded a couple of tabs, and decided to try to compile kguitar, since the java renderer I've got isn't great, but I didn't have any luck, I need to download a stack of stuff, and I don't have time.

I went and saw the sysadmin, he'd been given a box full of old backup tapes, tapes that only hold a couple of gig, and we don't have a drive for and haven't had for years. Useless junk.

The sysadmin came with me, and we went to look at the optical cartridges, figuring that they probably weren't, and that someone was confused, but when I opened the box, I found that it was actually filled with optical cartridges, they were from the jukebox, and they were part of my dataset.

The other few boxes were full of them too. What on earth were they doing out at Lidcombe?

Once I'd confirmed that they were needed, I went to see the guy from Orange, to let him know that they were needed, and to store them with the others.

He was on the phone, so I just waited. While I waited, I had a look in our old print room, before Forestry came and turfed us out of our part of the building.

They've installed a rack in here, I went and had a closer look, and found it to be full of CBs and radio equipment, hmm.

I went back out, and was just waiting, the little guy from royalty was hanging around, saw me, and came over for a chat.

The guy from Orange was off the phone, so I spoke to him, letting him know about the cartridges.

The little guy asked the guy from Orange about a complaint that the annoying support guy might have made about CDs recently.

The guy from Orange told us that the annoying support guy had complained about the blank CDs recently. What an old woman the annoying support guy is.

He was being a Nazi with the blank CDs, and keeping them locked away (but he was using them for personal stuff), and when someone found the key to his personal cupboard, with the department's CDs in there, they unlocked it, and pinched the whole spindle of CDs, with about 80 left.

As soon as he got wound up, all the CDs were put back, but he still went and complained about it. Pathetic.

I explained to the guy from Orange about why he'd complained, and the fact that the CDs were only taken because he was hoarding them, and wasting them, and that he got them all back, trying to make him look like a bit of a fool (not that he's not perfectly capable of doing that himself).

I went back with the little guy after that, over to where royalty and IT are, and I hung around there for a little while, and then I went back to my desk.

I noticed it was 11.49am.

My mobile phone had locked up, at 11.11am. Bloody thing.

I sat and did some work, and a little while later, I got call to go out to lunch, so I went upstairs, and we all went out to the car, and got in.

The little guy got in the front, with the senior DBA (driving), and I jumped in the back.

The manager of royalty, and his wife came out, my bags were in the back, so I jumped out, and shoved my stuff in the boot, and then got back in.

The sysadmin came out, then realise that there was no room in the car (because he's always the last one out), and said he'd just go to lunch on his own.

The five of us went for a drive, and went to the pub near the station.

I went into the bar with the senior DBA, hopefully to find out about the house. The others went into the restaurant. The owner's daughter was working behind the bar, we spoke to her for a minute.

The guy from royalty, and the manager of royalty came in, they ordered drinks, and then we did, and paid, and went into the restaurant.

We ordered lunch, sat and chatted while we waited for it, and then we ate, and chatted for a while after that.

I went around to the house, with the senior DBA. We saw the owner, he was in the house painting, and it seemed there were a few other people in there, cleaning up, trying to get it ready for us, for Monday.

We spoke to him, about paying the rent, and he told us to go back to the bar, and pay it in there, since he had his hands full.

We went back to bar, and paid the rent, 3 months worth, to the woman working behind the bar, and got a receipt. Then we went back into the restaurant, and sat and chatted.

We left, and drove back to work, and got back a a bit after 2pm.

I sat around, waiting for a call from Dell, since they're supposed to be coming in the "early afternoon" today, to fix my laptop.

They haven't tried calling either my mobile or the desk phone.

At about 3pm, I gave up, and packed up my laptop, and other stuff. I went up, to see when we were leaving (taking all my stuff).

I chatted for a while, the sysadmin asked about my laptop, he said it weighed a bit (I gave him the bag), but I told him that was the bag, and all the crud I've already collected that I need to carry around, so I took the laptop out, and he had a look at it.

The senior DBA said he wanted to leave, so we left the building, and got in car. I grabbed my stuff out of boot first, so it was easier to unload the car when I got home.

We drove back, went home.

The senior DBA came in, because he was after borrowing some allen keys, to take apart his tv stand, because he's moving on Monday.

I went through the tool box, fished out a few different allen keys, and gave them to him.

He looked at all the PCs, and commented that the so called "analyst programmer" would be impressed with the setup, in reference to a picture he'd showed us the other day, of a flight simulator, that consisted of 5 or 6 pcs, and I'd said that I had a bigger setup than that.

The senior DBA left, I said I'd see him on Monday morning.

I sat around, and did nothing for a while, and then I played the bass guitar a bit.

My mate (whose wife left him) called me a bit after 5pm, and said he wanted to see me, I said I wasn't doiny anything, and was home.

He came around a little while later, and we sat, and chatted.

I asked if he wanted a drink, and while I was over pouring them, he commented "10 years". It's been 10 years, since we first met, while at school, in year 8, in 1995.

We chatted for a good while, he asked if I'd had dinner (I hadn't since there wasn't any food).

We decided to go and get some McDonalds, we drove there, and went through the drive through.

We drove from there, and went to go up to the lookout over Gosford, but the gate was shut, usually it's not.

We went from there, and went across to Adcock park.

My mate said "grab hold of everything", and pulled on the handbrake, doing a nice 90 degree slide/turn/park.

Heh, the first handbrake turn I experienced was exactly the same situation, after going to McDonalds, at Adcock park, only it was in the shitbox Laser my mate used to have, and it was about 6 years ago.

We sat and ate, and chatted, and then we drove back.

My mate went near my place, then asked if I needed to go home for anything, I told him there was no reason, unless he wanted me to get my bass guitar.

We decided not to get the guitar, because it's too much of a hassle. I can play it accoustically, but it's pretty quiet, and to get the practice amp/speaker/transformer etc is too much of a hassle.

We went back to his place, and sat and watched tv for a while.

My mate's sister came back, and went and did something in the room she's staying in.

My mate and I sat and watched "Shallow Hal", and then after it finished, the three of us went to the leagues club.

We went in, and I got a drink, and then when I turned around, my mate was gone, and I thought I saw the bag that worked in the Internet Cafe, so I basically did a runner away from that area of the club.

I looked around, couldn't find my mate, so I played the pokies. My mate came and found me, and I explained about how I thought I saw the bag, and couldn't find him.

We went back in, to the noiseroom. I sat down, there were quite a few people I know in there.

My mate, who works for his dad, who owns the aircon business was there, and went and bought me another drink.

His ex gf, who keeps getting my mail was there, and I really couldn't handle her, just being there, not even having to speak to her, because of the shit she put me in, by not giving me my mail.

Her just sitting at the table made me more and more annoyed, until I couldn't handle it anymore, and I walked off.

I went and played more pokies, activated the feature on a machine, and ended up with my money back. While the feature was going through, there were 3 guys sitting around a pokie behind me, and to my right, and they were hitting the buttons on it increasingly hard, and excessivly hard.

Once the feature finished, I took my money out, went and found the nearest bouncer, and dobbed on the guys belting on the pokie.

I went back in after that, thinking I was refreshed, not having to look at that infuriating woman.

My mate that works for Orange wanted to speak to me, so I went and sat on the other side of the table, and spoke to him for a little while, explaining about the shit with my license, getting charged, going to court, getting convicted, and I had no issue in telling him it was all caused by our mate's ex gf.

(Mainly becuase she wasn't at the table at the time, but I was in the mood for a confrontation, so I probably still would have blamed her, even if she'd been sitting right there, I was so pissed off with her).

My mate asked me to record a Foo Fighters concert that's going to be on satellite next weekend, since his sister wants to see it, and won't be home.

I'd had enough of the club at this point, and just wanted to go home, so I went and sat next to my mate, that I'd come with, and I told him I'd had enough.

I was going to continue, and tell him I was getting a taxi home, but he said that he had had enough too, and was just waiting for his sister to come back with his phone, and then we'd leave.

She csme back a few minutes later, gave him his phone, and then we left, went and got in the car, and my mate dropped me at home, at about 1am.

I went to bed, and tried to watch some tv, but I was too tired, couldn't keep my eyes open, and went to sleep.

Here's a quick one. I'm trying to get kguitar compiled.

It's taken me ages to get past it failing on "-libt-mt not found" when ./configuring.

Turns out I had no /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so file, so I just made it a symlink to libqt-mt.so.3.3.4, and then I got past.

Now I apparently need the KDE headers.

I woke up late, at some point the volume had been adjusted on the clock radio, and I hadn't heard it.

I wasn't in the mood for getting up anyway, after having probably close to 30 drinks last night, so I lay in for ages, and eventually got up, and went and had a shower and got dressed.

I didn't eat anything this morning, usually I have a couple of bits of toast.

I went to work, and bumped into the woman who works in the mail room, that's going out with the contract DBA. She told me that she's been crook the last couple of days, and she went to the doctor about it, and he told her that she had food poisoning, and probably got it from the pies we ate on Monday.

I went to my desk, started doing some work, and the project manager arranged a meeting.

I got an email about a presale on tickets to go and see Tim and Neil Finn in concert, at the Opera House.

I tried calling around my mates, but as usual, no one would answer their phone.

I was pretty hungry, and went out and had morning tea, that was convenient, I was just thinking about going across the road to get some junk food.

While we were out there, they told us that another set of shirts had come in, (the shirts they've had made up, with "Geological Survey of NSW" embroidered on them), I went and had a look.

Someone asked if I had mine, and I said I didn't think I was entitled, as I'm a contractor. They asked how long I'd been there, and I said over a year, and then the project manager said that I'd probably be there for another year too, so they let me have a couple of them.

I took them back to my desk, and tried on one of them, seems like a good fit, I decided to leave it on.

The little guy from royalty was being smart, and ringing my phone and hanging up. I just ignored it, I wasn't going to be near my desk anyway.

We went into the meeting, ended up being in there for 1 1/2 hours, and then when we came out, I went up to see what was going on for lunch.

They were looking at a bunch of photos they'd taken around the office, and then the senior DBA said he was going for a drive.

The little guy from royalty, and the senior DBA and I went and got in the car, and he drove back to the pub, uhh, that's not really a drive, I could have walked here in about a minute.

The senior DBA said he was going back to the room, so the little guy and I went to get some lunch.

The little guy wanted to go somewhere that was a TAB agent, so he could bet on a horse race running in a little while, because the cranky old guy has something to do with one of the horses running in it.

He wouldn't tell them which horse it was, but the little guy knows someone who works at the track or something, so was able to call up, and find out, and he wanted to bet on it.

We went to the club, where we'd been last night.

There was about a million people in here. WTF's going on?

I waited for a while, and couldn't really be bothered, I only want a sandwich or something anyway. The little guy put his bet on, and I used the ATM, got some cash out, and then we left, and kept going, to look somewhere else to find lunch.

We walked around the corner, and went past a little cafe, we saw the director and the deputy director general in there, eating lunch.

We kept going, went into the mall area, and went to a little fast food place. The little guy got a chiko roll, and I got a toasted sandwich and a drink, which cost $6.85, a bit steep I thought.

We walked up the road, and I went to newsagent. I wanted to buy a ticket in the $25 million draw in a couple of days.

I waited for ages and ages, there were a couple of people in front of me, buying about 20 different lotto tickets, with all different registered cards, and then just chatting.

I got a bit fed up, eventually another chick working in there asked what I want, and I told her I wanted an autopick in the $25 million draw. She asked how many games I wanted, and I said whatever I could get for about $3, while holding $3 something in my hand.

She said something about 20 games, and a few more, which I thought was a bit weird, but didn't query it, and then she ran the tickets up, and said that it was $19.80 worth.

WTF? She must have thought I said $20 instead of $3, I couldn't be bothered arguing, perhaps I'll actually win with one of the games I wouldn't have got, so I paid the $20, took the tickets.

We continued wandering, and went into the pub on the way back to work, since the race the little guy bet on had been run by now.

We saw the support guy from work, the little guy asked him if the race had run, it had, and then he asked how the horse had gone, it had run last.

The little guy wasn't too happy, he just screwed his ticket up, and threw it away, without even bothering to get it checked.

We walked back to work after that, and I went to my desk, and worked, I was feeling a bit crook for some reason.

I got a call back from Dell, they'll come and fix my keyboard tomorrow apparently.

I then got a call from the manager of royalty, he'd invited us to dinner the other day, and he wanted to confirm that we were still going.

I told him that I didn't know what was going on, because the senior DBA had gone back to the room at lunch time. He told me that if he wasn't going, and I wanted to, then he's come and pick me up.

I told him I'd give him a call later, when I had a chance to speak to the senior DBA.

I got off the phone, and then I got a call from an external client, something about the email system being broken.

I told him that I didn't know anything about it, I don't work in IT, and that he'd have to ask the email support guy about it. I told him that it probably was broken though, because I know they've been screwing around, they replaced the mail gateway with some exchange/notes gateway.

We then chatted for a bit, and got off the phone.

A little while later, I finally got a call back from my drummer mate, who I'd tried to call this morning about the Finn tickets, he said he was interested in going, and we chatted for a bit.

I then tried to call my other mate, who plays lead guitar, to see if he wanted to go, but he didn't answer his phone.

I logged into the site, to try to get the tickets anyway, and found that they were all sold out already.

I sat around for a little while, and then left work, and went back to the room.

The senior DBA was sitting in the room, reading a No Idea magazine, or Women's Weekly or something.

I asked him what was going on with going to dinner, he told me he'd go, so I sat around for a minute, and then called the royalty manager, and told him we were coming, and found out what time to get there,

I went and sat in the bar after that, while I waited for the senior DBA to get ready. I was starving, so I had a packet of chips, and drank a gin and tonic.

The senior DBA had come down, and went across to the other pub, while I finished my drink. My mate who I'd tried to call earlier messaged me.

I called him, (not pissing about trying to have a conversation over SMS), explained about trying to get tickets to see the Finns, but they were sold out anyway.

He told me that it was probably just the presale that was sold out, not the whole thing, so I should try again to get the tickets.

I chatted to him a bit, and then I got off the phone, finished my drink, and left the pub.

I went across to the other pub, found the senior DBA, speaking to the guy from CCB. He offered him a lift home, and he took it, so we left, and went and got in the car, and headed to the royalty manager's place.

We stopped off on the way, at the bottle shop, and spent a fair while looking around for a bottle of wine that didn't have preservative 220 in it.

We found one, bought it, and then kept going, we dropped the guy from CCB off at the place he's staying, the house where the woman who works in the mail room lives.

We continued to the royalty manager's place after that, parked, and went in.

We were there for a few minutes, the manager's kids were served their dinner, and the rest of us sat there chatting, and drinking the wine, and snacking on crackers and dip/cheese etc.

We had dinner, meatballs, which were interesting, rolled up ham, and bacon or something, and then baked for a while, they were pretty good.

After dinner, we were chatting about the kid's billy cart, and then we went out to look at it, and the kids dragged it up the hill.

We watched them have a few rides on it, they didn't even need the brakes they'd rigged up, at the end, they just do a 180 degree turn to negate all the momentum.

They had 4 or 5 runs down the hill, and then we went back inside, to have some desert.

The senior DBA felt sick all of a sudden, and we decided to leave.

We drove back to the pub, and the senior DBA went up to the room.

I stayed down in the pub, had a couple of gin and tonics. I went and played the pokies, and went around all the pokies, winning a couple of bucks here and there.

One machine kept paying, so I sat and played that one for a while, I kept getting the feature on it, and ended up winning $30.

I got my money out, and went back to the bar, to get another drink. The senior DBA came down, and I shouted him a squash, and we sat and listened to the woman playing the guitar and singing.

We realised at this point, that it's our last night staying in the pub. We're supposed to be able to move into the house behind the pub near the station on Monday.

A little while later, the bar guy came around, collecting the glasses, and telling people that it was last drinks, and it wasn't even 10pm.

We went back to room, and I went to bed, hopefully for the last time, in the pub.

I woke up, I had a shocking headache. I got up, took some panadol, and lay in for a while, trying to rest, since my head was killing me.

I got up a bit later, still felt rough, but not as bad, went and got ready, and went to work.

I sat around, feeling really seedy. I got some emails from Dad, it was all the mail that came through yesterday, he'd scanned and mailed it through.

I couldn't be bothered arguing with this stuff anymore, I'm not going to get anywhere, I'm just going to get frustrated, and I'm already stressed. I can't handle any more stress.

I rang up Bundaberg court, asked if I could pay the fine, gave the guy my credit card details, and got off the phone.

Next, I rang up SPUR, or SPER, or whatever they're called, the QLD counterpart of NSW's SDRO. I went through the hideous phone system, and then got parked on hold.

I listened to their crappy hold music for 20 minutes, fuming, before getting totally pissed off, and giving up.

Useless, I should not pay it, and then say I tried, I sat on hold for hours, and they obviously didn't want my money.

I'll just go and pay it at the post office at lunch time.

I went and took more panadol, and then did some work. One of the indexers came and saw me, apparently they'd set up a machine for the "Open Day", (it was "Open Day" today, where anyone could walk in off the street, and see what the Department actually does), but the video drivers were missing off the machine.

I went and had a look, worked out that it needed the nvidia drivers, which I'd downloaded the other day, and were on my machine, so I installed them, and then went back to my desk, and continued working.

A couple of hours later, I got called up by the senior DBA, he wanted to know if I was going for lunch.

I went up and we hung around. The senior DBA told the little guy from royalty that he had to go and drop his car off at the service station, and asked for a lift back to work.

We went out to the carpark, and the senior DBA and I got in his car, and we waited, and waited, and the little guy didn't come out.

The senior DBA called him, asked where he was, and he said that he thought we were joking about needing a left back to work. He got off the phone, came out, got in his car, and followed us to the service station.

The senior DBA had to get some more work done, he'd replaced the tyres the other day, to stop them from catching the front wheel guards, but it was still doing it, and I noticed that the guard had chewed up the front left tyre.

It turns out, that after getting the new tyres on, the guards were still all bent from the old tyres, and the guy at the tyre place wouldn't fix them, so it was only still catching because the guard was still bent from the old tyres.

We left the car, and we jumped in the little guy's car, and we drove to Hungry Jacks, we went in, got food, went and sat outside. After lunch, I was still starving, so I went back in, and got an ice cream cone.

While I was in getting that, the senior DBA was rustling around in the little guy's car, looking for a lighter so he could have a cigarette.

He must have found one, because he came out of the car, and sat and smoked, while I ate my ice cream.

We got back in the car after that, I got in the front passenger seat, and there was a pornographic magazine on the floor. I asked why that was there, and the senior DBA said he'd found it in the glove box, while looking for a lighter.

I don't want to know why someone would have pornography in the glove box of their car.

We drove around a bit, taking a long way back to work, almost going to Walka Water Works, but the little guy was going about 180km/h, so he missed the turn off.

We went back to work after that, and we decided to have a look at the display for Open Day, and find out what the Department actually does.

We spent a little while down there, looking at the maps we produce, some of them done in a special stereographic way, where using 3d glasses makes the maps look 3d.

There were also some cores on display (the bits of rock they drill out of the ground, to see what minerals occur at what depths in the ground), and the mine safety group had a stand, showing photos of accidents, like tip trucks tipped over.

We all went upstairs after that, I hung around for a little while, and then I went back to my desk.

There was a message on message on my phone, I listened to it, it was from Dell, they needed the address to fix my laptop.

I called back the call centre, and gave them the address to fix laptop, but this caused an issue, because the spare part, the new keyboard, had been sent to Gosford, so they'd have to recreate the whole ticket or something.

I got off the phone, and went back to work.

I realised I hadn't paid that fine, and while I've still got a couple of days, if I forget, and don't pay it, then I could have to go to jail for a week.

I walked down the street, went to the ATM, and got $500 out, then I walked to the post office, and paid the fines, which brings the total fines paid today to $800, and I paid my American Express bill while I was there.

I went back to work, and paid the senior DBA half the cost of the room in the pub for this week.

I went back to my desk, worked, and then got called up by the senior DBA, he was going to pick up his car, and wanted to know if I wanted to go.

I'd had enough today, so I said I would, and he asked me to go out to the little guy's car.

I headed out there, on the way I bumped into the chick from work (makes sense, since I'm at work), and she wanted a chat, but I wasn't really interested, and I had to get to the car.

I left the building, went around to the car park, and went and got in the car with the little guy.

The senior DBA came out a few minutes later, got in the car, and we drove to the service station. The senior DBA and I jumped out, the little guy went home, and we went across the road (a bit like playing that chicken game on the Atari 2600), the senior DBA spoke to the mechanic.

He'd fixed the guards, and they worked out paying for it, the senior DBA got a refund for the amount he'd paid for the wheel stud, that the mechanic couldn't get, and ended up paying about $20 for the work.

The mechanic gave us a stack of brochures, to stick around at work, and then we left, and we drove back to town, and parked behind the pub.

We went into the pub we drink at, had a few drinks, and chatted. There were quite a few people from work in here.

A little while later, a few more people turned up, they'd come up for Open Day today, but mainly because in the morning, before Open Day started, the building at Thornton was being opened by the minister.

I chatted to them for a while, ended up having about 12 drinks while we were in here.

I played the pokies, broke even. While I was playing them, I got a call from the relocations guy, he was trying to send an email to the senior DBA, but it kept bouncing.

I confirmed the email address he was trying to sent it to, and then I got off the phone.

We left the pub a little bit later, and went back to the room, and then we left, and walked down to the club.

We got some drinks, and ordered food. We played pool while we waited for dinner, before we finished the game, the food came out, and we stopped to eat.

A couple of guys came in, wanted to play pool. We told them we were playing, just stopped to eat, and they'd only have to wait a little while, but they just left again.

A few minutes later, the social club guy, and a few guys who work in Woollongong (sp? I should know that one) turned up.

We didn't want to chat to them while trying to eat, so I said not to look at them, and they won't know we're there. It worked for about 15 minutes, before we were spotted.

They came over chatting, and at this point we tried to finish our game of pool.

We sat and chatted to them, and drank, quite a few drinks.

Ages later, I went and played the pokies, I broke even again, gave up, and went and sat down again.

I drank more, and chatted to the guys. After quite a few more drinks, I looked at my watch, and noticed it was 12.45am. Holy Crap, how did that happen? I couldn't believe it, and the bartender saw me looking at my watch in disbelief, and confirmed that it was a quarter to 1 in the morning.

We finished our drinks, and left the pub, not long after that, and walked back to the pub, where the room is.

The senior DBA was totally pissed, great, he's going to snore all night, and make me feel like throwing something across the room at him.

I went to bed at 1am.