Wow, got back to jase's at 6pm yesterday, lay down on the futon, and basically slept straight through.. Not sure how well I'm going to cope with the late nights tonight, and tomorrow night :(

Yesterday was a bit of a write off.. Not having a staff lanyard meant every time I tried to go in somewhere to get photos, I'd spend 5 mins arguing with security before I could get in.. Ended up giving up.. Ditch was a bit grumpy about there being hardly any photos from the day, but there's not a whole lot I can do about that...

Security needs to be reigned in hard. Ditch and Liz got sent through alcohol control coming in yesterday morning, because someone had decided to put *all* cars, no matter whether they're staff cars or not through there instead of letting them in as usual at the shell servo entrance.. Was supposed to be fixed after a meeting yesterday morning, but considering I just about had to run someone over because they did the same f'ing thing this morning when I arrived, I guess the problem hasn't been sorted..

*grin* there's apparently an 'all points' out looking for the luxie, as I heard as I walked through the security office coming into my desk this morning.. The security dude on duty looked a little uncomfortable when I chuckled and told him to jump back on the radio and tell them I'm staff, and to go jump.. He suggested I go talk to the event controller about it, but seriously, I'm here to do a job. My payment for said job is unrestricted access to anywhere I wish to go within summernats.. If anyone from security gets in my way, that's their problem to deal with, not mine. God help them tomorrow morning if they try the same shit.. It's 9am, I'm exhausted, I already have a headache, and I'm very close to losing control of my temper. God help whoever bears the brunt of that!

Oh, and I don't think I'll be coming back next year.. Between simply not having the stamina for the long hours and long walks, and the amount of tension going between management and event control, I'm just not really that interested anymore...

Spent today fairly busy, getting a few setup shots, went over to scrutineering with Liz and got some shots of nice cars.. Though there seems to be a MAJOR lack of 'decent' cars here.. - too many VK and VR commodores, and chev's with big superchargers.. C'mon guys, have some imagination! One of the security guys I spoke to said he'd heard that a lot of the older entrants (who have the more 'different' cars) didn't like the huge amount of security last year, so decided not to come this year...

Seems there ARE staff lanyards, the guy running security just decided that I didn't need one. Thanks mate, now I can't get into half the areas I need to...

Hmmm

Arrived at the 'nats office just after 5, so didn't make too bad time, considering I left Melbourne just after 9.. Collected passes, seems there's no lanyards for staff this year, bit of a bummer, but I guess the black armbands are all we need to get in wherever we want... Had trouble getting a car pass for Jase, ended up only being able to get 'off-site' (aka the carpark up whoop-whoop) parking permit for him... grrr

Ahh well, caught up with Frank O'Hare and his family for dinner - was good to catch up.. Then headed over to the castle to watch the First ep of Dr.Who Series 3, then back to jase's to get online for a bit, then head to bed..

I can't believe it's a year gone by since Boky died already. We all miss you mate.

Went to see the Emerald Model Train exhibition thingy today with mum and dad - got a heap of photos (see http://www.rendrag.net/mediagallery/album.php?aid=15 ), was a pretty cool layout... Was also nice to get out of the house :)

Back to work tomorrow... Have to do a heap of stuff for steve for RingSing, plus I need to do some stuff for deek's bakery, AND i have to do that rebuild of fresh fruit and veg... Also have to make sure I have all the gear I need for summernats - not far away from that now!

Yep that's right!

As part of a rationalisation of the servers colo'd in the garage (Yes, trying to cut a) heat load, and b) power bill by dropping servers and heat load..), I decided to move my personal site over onto one of my US colo'd boxes.. While doing that I figured I'd do a revamp, and well, here we are.. GeekLog - quite a cool system... Photo galleries coming sometime this week as well :)

Well the VMWare conversion project is working pretty well... - drussi.rendrag.net.au, my main web development server is now running quite happily inside a VM on vmware2 :)

Yep, just picked up two second-hand servers I bought on ebay.. They are:

Dell Poweredge 1650 - 1RU, Dual PIII-1.4GHz, 2GB ram, 2x 100Mbps Eth, 3x SCA drive slots. Also bought 72 and 146GB HDD's in caddies for it. Though I'll actually put an 18 and maybe a 36 in there... The 72 will nicely upgrade the 36GB Exchange drive in the main work fileserver, and the 146 will either make a nice scratch disk for video editing work, or go back on ebay and pay for itself (i really just wanted the caddy but the guy wouldn't sell the caddies without the drives...). This will be VMware1.rendrag.net - main eth on workstation (private) network, secondary without IP used for vmware for virtual machines..

Compaq DL380 G3 - 2RU, Dual PIII-1.4GHz, 2GB Ram, 4x Gig Eth, 6x SCA drive slots. Came with two 18GB HDD's - one 10krpm, the other 15krpm. This will be VMware2.rendrag.net - main eth on workstation (private) network, other eths used one per virtual machine so I can keep using MRTG on my switch ports.. - though we'll see how many VM's it ends up with :)

Spent quite a bit more than I wa splanning, since those drives weren't planned (the dell was just going to sit for a month or so till I could find a caddy to put one of my spare 18GB SCA drives into...

So the other day I was putting a disclaimer on the AFPA's online store.. Wasn't quite sure why they wanted such a full-on disclaimer, but hey, ok.. While I was there I noticed they had a leatherman that had everything I needed (aka had hex-driven screwdriver bits..), so I went ahead and ordered one.. Then it arrived: 



Now I can see why they have the disclaimers about proper usage of merchandise :)

My God, I'm so bored! First week I haven't had to work since I left school! Though I ended up pulling *everything* out of the cupboards in the kitchen, disinfecting all the cupboads, washing all the cutlery/crockery/pans/appliances/etc.. And then, since josh had made the comment the other week about not knowing what stuff was actually theirs and what was mine, I sorted everything out so that my stuff is in one set of cupboards, theirs is in another.. Ended up cleaning up the linen closet, and did the same thing.. Well that's two days out of the way, now what to do with the rest of the week??