Work today was really hellish. We had to go up to Birmingham and M managed to take a wrong turn, leaving us stuck in the car for another half hour.

We had gone up there to try to work out what was wrong with the BDC. It refused to boot all the way and blue screened when you tried to log on. Unfortunately I left my Bootable Business Card (Linux distro that runs from a 40Mb CD) in Swindon so we couldn't get on it and access the network from it that way either.

Repairing or reinstalling NT failed as it couldn't copy lots and lots of files across from the CD so we concluded that it had a duff hard disk, we ended up disconnecting it so we could return to Swindon and replace the disk there. So having the Bootable Business Card wouldn't have done much good anyway. Still, as of tomorrow it will live in the Technet folder!

Took a lunch break during which I located Forbidden Planet and picked up some Doctor Who CDs and books. Then it was back to the office for testing of the Evil Database. It is evil because it needs a unique frontend for each user so we have a lot of messing around with scripts to select the correct one. Add to this the confusion of accessing it from multiple NT domains and you end up with a 10 minute wait from double click to Access appearing on screen.

My own database (still under construction) sits on MySQL on a Linux box and a PHP3/HTML front end, time from double click? 1 second.

Of course, removing the BDC also removed the plot server, so we had to set up the PDC as a temporary replacement plot server. HA! We ended up messing about with different versions of the server software and drivers, and had to have some CDs mounted on network shares in Swindon so we could access them up North.

We finally got that sorted and headed home, the plans to spend the afternoon in Swindon were scrapped and I made it back to my place at 18:00.

I then sorted out my bank statements (my floor now actually has space on it!) and listened to the first episode of one the Doctor Who CDs, it is the best yet.

Then it was time to connect to the net and discover that somebody had cooled inter-culteral misunderstandings, being my first cool I was forced into smug mode (see Red Dwarf - maybe). I also found that the rating on May 16, 2000 is now my highest so I will keep writing up my life for anybody (or should that be everybody) to read. I then requested a kill for another witeup of mine that had ended up as low as May etc was high, looking back it wasn't as good as I thought.

A few days ago I complained to ZZN about a spammer and got a nice response that assumed I was a ZZN member and had access to their red list. I wrote back and got this automatic response.

I'm now off to listen to some more Doctor Who and room cleaning (shiver), but I think this will push me up a level so that is two great everythings to happen to me today :) .