I have a confession to make. I spent some of my Sunday working on something that wasn’t related to my Monday morning work deadline, or to my spare-time responsibilities to GNOME. I moved the ‘golder.org’ and ‘chilternflyers.org’ e-mail and related services off of the widow co-host (which is due to be shut down) and back to the backup server. I decided that it needed to be done on a Sunday (early UK morning), to give the DNS a decent chance to propogate. It took a little more than the two hours I had estimated. It took six hours, but they were well spent, and I’m much happier with the situation now. It may not have a two bytes of spare memory to rub together, but it still serves up my e-mail as fast (if not faster) than before. My dad is currently looking for a 512Mb memory module, which when fitted should make things zip along quite nicely (no long pauses when changing mail folders!). Plus, now I don’t have to look after a load of e-mail services for other people’s customers for free!

As soon as that was working, I went straight back to my bug list on my client’s bug tracker, as there are were three issues with a ‘must be working by Monday morning’ deadline. Unfortunately, the main bug report, once properly explained, turned from something that might take an hour or two, to something likely to take a day or two. I went from being confident at having them completed on time, to being sure they wouldn’t be ready for several days. I hate it when that happens, but in some ways it’s the client’s own fault for announcing a release date without consulting the developers first to be sure it’s feasible. IMHO, the feature request is actually a very good idea, and when properly implemented should help bring a lot of business to the site, so it’s worth geting it right first time. If it is bodged together hastily, and it doesn’t work smoothly, or people have to jump through too many hoops to use it, they won’t come back to check it out the second time when we do get it right!

So, Monday comes round, and at least I’ve got a headstart in the timezone difference. I get a clear six hours to get things as far as I can before UK wakes up and I have to explain what’s left outstanding, and how long it’s likely to take. At about 4pm (10am UK time), a big thunderstorm comes through. Normally, I’d normally disconnect the modem and wait for it to pass, but this time, I’m in the middle of committing the patches required for this Monday morning (UK) deadline, so I decide to take a chance and stay connected. Just after Mee tells me (for the third time) to close the windows and disconnect the electrical stuff, I saw (out of the open window) a lightning bolt strike the telegraph pole about two hundred metres up the road. The ping stops responding. The carrier detect light on the modem has gone out. Oh shit.

I have a ‘surge protector/line tester’ unit in-line before the modem and the handset. I press the line tester button a few times and nothing. I pick up the reciever and nothing. I see no physical line damage anywhere up to the telegraph poles on the road, so I report the line as down to TOT, assuming it a fallen coconut palm had cut the line further up the road like last time, and do my best to work offline for the rest of the day (it’s late in the day, and I’m getting tired at this point anyway).

TOT didn’t come all day Tuesday, so mid afternoon (mid-morning UK time), I go to the Internet shop and hook up, try to catch up with e-mails and sync up what I’ve been working on so far. After struggling with dodgy patch cables, severe packet loss and disconnections for the first hour or so, I finally finish catching up with e-mail (no replies yet) and bug reports with half an hour left before I run out of money to pay the shop owner. One of the bug reports says ‘stop’ and re-explains the requirement (yet again). I have no choice but to download the bug report off-line and spend some time reading it properly back at home. I also notice that one e-mail says that my urgent invoice will be paid ‘if someone comes in to do the banking’. Fair enough. It’s not their problem that it’s urgent. Luckily I catch my dad on-line, and he puts some money in my bank to cover my accountants fees for last year’s company balance sheet (that would otherwise have resulted in a crippling fine if not submitted within the next few days).

I get home from the Internet shop, and try plugging the handset directly into the phone line (bypassing the surge protector) - it works. So, I spend a while trying to figure out why my SMC Barricade (modem router/gateway box) isn’t dialing the serial modem attached to it. The SMC firmware is dumbfoundingly lame, and I can’t draw a conclusion except that either the router’s serial port is broken and isn’t capable of sending the AT commands, or the modem’s broken and not capable of recieving them. If this crappy cheapo Compaq laptop had a serial port, I could rule out the modem. OK, so I hunt out my ‘spare’ modem (an old Eicon Diva PCMCIA card) and try to connect with that, but for some reason it now just hangs the PCMCIA bus (on Windows too), so it must’ve broken somehow since I last used it. I need to buy a new modem, and I’m not 100% sure that the router’s OK, so I can’t just use an ordinary serial modem (even if I could afford the measly 2000baht to buy one!). My kit is shit. Am I ever going to get a decent ‘puter (PowerBook 15" w/512Mb etc) to work with? I’m missing my old Dell already (RIP!).

This morning, Mee and I went to the bank to settle up accountants fees and have breakfast. That’s a great weight off my mind. I’ve spend the rest of the day poring over my e-mails off-line, digesting as much as possible from the customer’s bug reports and e-mails, and responding to as many outstanding e-mails as possible. Much of what I’ve been digesting and responding to is work-related, but I don’t think I’ll get away with invoicing 3 or 4 hours for just ‘digesting and responding to e-mails’! I’ve not had a chance to do any coding work, but at least tommorow when I do, I can do so with a slightly bigger overall picture in mind.

So, tomorrow and Friday are likely to be spent hacking hard on work-related bug reports/feature requests. On Saturday, I’ve got to head down to Samui again, to help P’Chai and P’Fai bring the tools back. We’ll probably stay a night or two, as we’ve all been working very hard recently on our own jobs, and it’d be nice for P’Chai and I to show P’Fai a bit of Samui and have a few beers at a few bars on the island :) Travel down on Saturday daytime, stay Saturday/Sunday evening, then travel back up on Monday (another long weekend!).

Dammit, I’ve probably missed the Internet shop now as well. People are going to think I’ve dropped off the face of the planet :(