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.