Wow, 20 metres was alive as anything last night.. Now I'm sitting here with it pouring rain outside, and not hearing a thing on 20 metres! Well except one New Caledonia station who I'm not managing to reply to!

So it's the last day of term today (for the missus anyway..), so she got me to go pickup pizza, and bring it down for her students.. I'm sitting outside her classroom reading an ARRL SSTV article on my iphone, after she'd gone back into her room at lunchtime, and it was like a switch on the kids mouths.. As soon as she'd headed inside, and there were no other teachers around, it was as though someone had flipped a swear-switch on the kids! It was all mother-f'ing this, and 'you g**-d*mn*d' that.

Wow, there's something VERY wrong with our education system these days, if kids even THINK of swearing at school, let alone doing it! Lordy, if we'd sworn at school when I was a kid, we'd have got a bloody good switching! And it's not like that was *that* long ago!

WOOOO, she's all back together, and what do you know.. It runs perfectly!

The speedo is a bit dicky, and it seems there's an issue with switching to the driving light relay, but it's running! Oh, and rego is renewed, so I can ride her tomorrow :)

Figured out the towbar mount - seems the towbar on an '84 K100 is very different to that on a later model K100! Email me if you want pics for your own bike :)

I don't understand why clients don't pay on time? I mean, they get an invoice on their invoice date.. Then one with 'OVERDUE" in big red letters at the start of the next month. Then again a fortnight later.. Then again at the start of the next month.. Then again a fortnight later.. Then one at the start of the third month, with 'SUSPENDED' on it.. At which point I've also redirected their website (or domains) to our http://contactaccounts.rendrag.net.au/ site, and taken down any other services (SSL Certs, re-billing services, etc) on the overdue invoice..

So the rear end of the bike all came off today, and the gear position sensor is out.. And one of the three springs inside it (it looks just like a key tumbler, except it's running on electrical conducting grooves instead of a key!) is totally mangled! Will try hitting up locksmiths, and see what gives!

So I decided to see if I could figure out the dash problems that are stopping the K100 from starting.. - Waiting on the paint to set nicely before I hit it with cutting compound, so thought it was time to work on other things.. LOTS of mucking around later, I'd finally tracked it back to the first of the three sensor wires coming off the gear position sensor being faulty.. Thankfully I'm told that I don't have to pull the gearbox down to pull the sensor off.. Seems that the neutral sense comes from that wire, hence not being able to start it.. *totally* disconnect the sensor, and at least I can start it with the clutch it - seems having just one wire wrong totally confuses the dash!

Nope that's right.. I *only* have to remove the rear wheel, final drive, footpeg mounts, muffler mount, pannier mounts.. oh, the swingarm and rear shock.. But I guess that's easier than dropping the gearbox ;)

What a whirlwind couple of weeks it's been! Relocating the office interstate, setting up colo'd servers in Sydney and Canberra, but it's all settling down now! We've got a couple of big beefy compaq boxes in Sydney, running vmware with a bunch of virtual machines on them, as well as our primary DNS, and our secondary is sitting in canberra. Next step is to start migrating services currently hosted in the US down into Sydney, and decomission our US boxes.

Of course there's some US services which will always stay there, such as email, as that just has WAY too much bandwidth overhead to be economical in aus, but the plan is to get all our webhosting servers migrated back here by the end of the year :) Our colo provider likes the sound of that too ;)

And of course, I'd always rather be putting my hosting money into .au business rather than overseas!

So I've just posted the last of the first batch of stuff I put up on ebay.. Not too bad, though i must have spent a good 15 hours photo'ing, and googling specs to build up the ads.. Still have an absolute bucketload of stuff, though most of it now is scsi cards, usb/firewire cards, scsi hdd's, and old 8x4.5 and 8.9gb raid cabinets.. Oh, and ram, and motherboards, and old 4RU ATX rackmount cases.. Will put that that stuff up when I get back from the christmas break.. Would be *really* good to have everything gone, and the garage/server room basically just containing the stuff I'm keeping, by the time I head up for Sharree's birthday at the end of jan..

Fingers crossed - there's a lot of work there :)

So just finished upgrading the Law Foundation's FirstClass server from 8.2 through 8.3 to 9.0. Seven and a half hours to back the bastich up (pointed out it needed a damned good defrag.. have fired that off..), then FIVE MINUTES to do the upgrade! Gotta say I was bloody impressed!!

Couple of hitches - most notable being it removed 'WWW Client' access from the 'All Users' group.. That would have caused a few hiccups, but sorted now.. Also, will be interesting, it remodelled all users desktops to force them to their group's model desktop layout... Will see if we get any complaints about that!

Gotta say I love the automatic client upgrade feature.. Finished the upgrade, and then logged in with my 8.2 client, and bingo, it goes 'you need to upgrade your client, click OK to continue', and voila, 5 mins later it's downloaded and upgraded me to V9.0!

You know, this month, it's 13 years since I first started using Firstclass - originally on version 2.6 on a 300 baud manuall-dial modem using the IEAust's EOL BBS!

Well she's all done (except the headlights/high beam takeoff, but that can wait for a week or so :) ), and road tested!!