Melbourne Cup day..

The auction for the Apple monitor III finished, and I got nearly $18 for the monitor, not bad, for something I was about to throw away.

At about 9am, I tested that I could watch the streaming coverage of the race on my machine, and decided to just leave it running.

I had to get a file off the usb drive that I carry on my keyring, however when I plugged it into my laptop, it crashed the USB kernel modules.

I tried to force remove the USB kernel modules, but they just got stuck, and I ended up having to reboot my laptop. I tried again to mount the drive after rebooting, but didn't have any luck.

I suspect that carrying the drive on my keyring has caused it to develop some issues.

A few hours later, someone asked about watching the race. They booked the conference room, with a projector in it, and so I borrowed a laptop (since the stream was all DRM rubbish, that requires Winblows Media Player, and doesn't run in mplayer).

I tried to get the laptop to run the stream, but I couldn't even get on the website. Typical Telstra, what a surprise, their equipment is overloaded and doesn't work.

The stream kept running on my desktop machine, and I found the URL it was streaming from, and I tried to open that directly on the laptop, but then when the license acquisition crap started, it had to contact the webserver that was constantly falling over, so I couldn't get a license.

I ended up finding a 21" monitor on a spare machine, and so I moved that around on top of the cupboard near my desk, and attached it to my desktop machine, carefully, so I didn't lose the stream.

It seems that most of the people who were left at work during the race came and stodd around and watched it on my machine :-)

The quality wasn't too bad, it was better than the terristrial reception someone was trying to pickup on a tv somewhere else in the building.

After that, I downloaded VMWare, and I installed it on my laptop, but it's not working very well.

When I was installing it, it complained about a mismatch in the version of GCC between what was on the system, and what had been used to compile the currently running kernel (since GCC got updated when I dist-upgraded a couple of days ago).

I let it compile anyway, but when I tried to run it, it would just hang, and then I couldn't do anything with the machine, even reboot it.

I tried running it a couple of times, but it did the same thing each time. I think I need to recompile the kernel (or go to a newer version while I'm there), and then try again, so there's no GCC version mismatch, in case that's what the problem is.

After work, I went and saw Doom. That was marginally better than I expected.