Mouse drives (fixed)
Of course! Why didn't I think of it? The trick was to power cycle the machine another couple of times after the "successful installation".

I'm so glad I usually work with an OS that doesn't require five reboots to install a new mouse (that uses the same mouse protocol as the old mouse).

Mouse drivers (rant)
My old scummy $10 mouse developed a problem with one of the buttons, and so a very nice friend donated me his old Microsoft Intellimouse (he's got some swish optical wireless thing now). I plugged the mouse in and started using it under Linux without thinking much more about it. However, on the rare occasions that I do use Windows, I noticed that the mouse wheel didn't work. Today I thought I'd fix that.

It appears that while my $10 trash mouse could fit its driver on a floppy disk, to get a Microsoft Intellimouse to run you either need the CD that comes with it, or a 10Mb download from Microsoft. 10Mb seemed to be a lot for a mouse-driver, but it rapidly became apparant that it included all their mouse drivers, plus pictures of all the mice, plus advertising materials, a swag of different EULAs, and a few system files.

Installing the software required two reboots of the machine. At the end, there's a walk-through showcase explaning how great your nice mouse is, filled with more pictures. It even shows you a picture of the mouse it's installed thd drivers for so you can compare it to the one sitting under your hand. Yup, that looks like my mouse.

Unfortunately, after all that, the wheel still doesn't work. The Microsoft Mouse Troubleshooting Page concludes that my PS/2 port is incompatible with the mouse's scroll function. Impressive that Linux is able to use the wheel without issue, given my hardware is supposedly broken.

The new drivers seem to be putting the mouse into a state where the wheel functions are disabled. How do I know? Because if I reboot into Linux from Windows without power-cycling the machine, the mouse shows all the symptoms of an incorrect driver (pointer jumps erratically and clicks erratically).

I suspect I'm going to see if there's a "generic ImPS/2 windows driver" out there, and use that rather than the 10Mb bundle of Microsoft stuff.

Petting zoo
We've been discovered by some of the local school-children, and during the school holidays became something of a petting zoo. Chickens apparently have extra cool value with primary school kids.

"I'm not going to tell anyone about this place, it's just too cool!" was remarked by one younger of the two children who discovered our property. Within a week she "hadn't told" another half dozen children or so.

The girls want to play with power-tools, and paint the house, of course.

Tax
Tax returns suck. Most people just need to put in their income, how much tax was taken out, write $300 in the box marked "other business expenses", and wait for their cheque. When you're actually running a business (especially if you start it part-way through the financial year), things become much more difficult.

What makes it even more fun is that in my haste last year I claimed a bunch of small purchases as regular purchases, not asset purchaes. I believe due to their low cost and nature this is fine. However I can depreciate an asset over multiple years, and I'm expecting to have a significantly higher income over this year (and the years to come) compared to last year, so depreciating assets are good, so I don't want these as expenses anymore. That stick of RAM is an asset now (or an improvement to an asset).

What this means in the end is a bunch of paperwork. Hoorah. I love paperwork for the tax department.

Support
Acting in a support role for a business who has their technical manager travelling around Europe for a month. I get to answer both questions from the business and their clients. So far this support has involved pointing out the space at the end of a filename, and listening to "but the note here says that if this happens I should do blah, but if I *do* blah, then.... Oh, it works. Thanks Paul!"

X-COM
Never played the original before, only X-COM 3. Original X-COM rocks.

Big filesystems
Yup, it does takes ages to fsck 240Gb of drives. Never again. Ext3 is now in the server's kernel.

LinuxChix
Rocked up to a Melbourne get-together of LinuxChix. I'm not on any of the mailing lists, but everyone seemed happy enough to have me there as the token male. Lots of fun was had by all, and I was surprised that one person remembered me from rec.food.veg many many many years ago. I'm looking forward to the next meeting.

Power failures
I'm glad I got the UPS talking to the server again, just had our second power-outage in twelve hours. Looks like the big gusts of wind are wrecking havoc with the power-grid. Last night's lightning probably didn't help either.

Everything is working just as it should. The server continues running for five minutes in case things get better, and my workstation falls flat on its face but recovers quickly due to ext3. It also recovers quickly because all the important stuff (such as /home) is mounted on the server. Hurrah hurrah.

Camels
The Age newspaper had scottp and myself out at the Vic Market with camels on Sunday, taking photos. They're running a small article on melb.pm. It seems that camels really like Scott. I'm hoping they'll publish a photo of the camel giving Scotty a big sloppy kiss.

Work
AIIIIEEEEE!!!! Just when you thought it couldn't get any busier, it does! There's a good chance that myself and a client's ISP representative will be placed into the ring to fight it out regarding certain networking problems that they've been experiencing.

I'm looking forward to December so much. Everyone goes on holiday in December, right?

Trees
Some good friends dropped around a Hazelnut tree the other day, claimed it was an engagement present. I love trees, and I love hazelnuts, so I'm very happy.

Wireless
Have the antenna, have the card on-way. Getting cables sorted out. The card and antenna nicely works out to be just under the legal limits on power-output, handy that.

Chickens are also cool...
Because they catch and eat mice. Who needs a cat to keep your property free of rodents, when you can have a chicken?

Big file-systems
So, you've got almost a quarter of a terabyte of space sitting around on that RAID-5. You know, if the machine ever crashes, that fsck is going to take forever. Wouldn't it be great to drop in a journaling filesystem? Ext3 sits over the top of ext2, it's easy to setup and configure. Why not use that?

Probably because I didn't compile it into the kernel.

UPS
The UPS wasn't talking nicely to the computer for a while there. I tried to look-up information on my UPS and the cable it uses, and what settings I should use under genpower. What was google's top and most useful source for this information? My diary entry from last year. Great!

As it happens it looks like the cable just wasn't seated properly, or some other stupidity. It all works fine now.