4:47am. Argh, it’s stupidly early to be awake. I’m still waking up.

5:15am. Shower woke me up all right. On the bright side, all being well I can go home early. And I bet I get a seat on the 5:27 train… on the 8:21 there’s never any.

5:30am. The suburb is shrouded in darkness. There were a handful cars on the road, and a few people walking to the station, too. I exchanged Good Mornings with the guy at the newsagent, and there was an utterly delicious smell wafting out of the door of the bakery.

These new shoes of mine I got on Saturday are appallingly comfortable. Probably more comfortable than my slippers. They just don’t feel like work shoes. Okay, so they’re actually somewhere in that grey area between work and casual shoes, but they seem to look okay with work clothing. It doesn’t seem right.

To my utter surprise, there must have been around forty people on the train. I suspect some of the poor sods do this every morning. Half of them seemed to be asleep.

5:50am. Parliament Station was almost deserted, as was Lonsdale Street. Some lady wanted to know where Bourke Street was. I told her it was where it always was. No, actually I didn’t, I just told her where it was. Other than that, the few people coming out of the station walked briskly off into the darkness.

When I got in to work, thankfully I wasn’t the only one. One of the testers was in too. He looked surprisingly cheerful and energetic.

6:45am. A few people are in now. Yet there’s nothing actually happening. Coulda slept in this morning.

7:10am. Okay so now they tell us we’ll probably see nothing at our end of things until about 7:30… grrr…

However, the fresh coffee scrolls and muffins the project manager brought in almost make it all worth it.

9:30am. That’s the last time I come in early for something like this! Due to various screwups elsewhere, nothing has happened yet.

12:50pm. Well, it all started happening just after 10. And naturally there’s been a few hiccups along the way that have kept me busy. Strangely enough I don’t feel tired yet, though I bet I will later this afternoon.

2pm. I just realised I have a five o’clock shadow but it’s only two o’clock.

9pm. I think I’d better head for bed soon.

11pm. zzzzzz

Well, the good news is that at work, the system I’ve been working on goes live tomorrow. The bad news is that I need to be in the office when it all starts off, at the ridiculous hour of 6am. It’s making me yawn just thinking about it.

If everything falls apart, I’m not at all confident I’ll be awake enough to do much about it. Oh well, at least I suppose I’ll get to go home early.

Yesterday was Towel Day, in memory of Douglas Adams. Not exactly a very well known occasion, but I dutifully trudged off to the station with a towel around my neck. It proved quite useful as a scarf in the cold morning air.

My old uni mate Peter G was there at the station. "Great beach weather" he remarked, then sounded all disappointed when I informed him of the significance; he would have joined in too. No matter. Nobody else on the train batted an eyelid. The guys at work wondered if I was going swimming. I ended up lending my copy of Hitch Hikers’ (which I just finished re-reading) to Tony, so he could be converted!

After work some of us went to the Amber Bar to meet up with some people we’ve been working with. I spent the evening getting drunk and dancing (not necessarily in that order). I think I’m getting too old for this kind of thing - it was fun, but exhausting. I called it a night before too long, since I had to head into work in the morning for a few hours.

On the train on the way home, I felt distinctly woozy. The train seemed to be full of people having their conversations. But whereas I can normally block most of that out, it seemed I was listening to all of it at once. After a few minutes all I could hear was the guys in the seats just behind me, who were earnestly talking about arch-mages and hit points and all that other role-playing stuff that role-players talk about.

Once I got home, sleep came rapidly…

I was just doing the dishes, and the biggest damn moth I have ever seen in my life was outside, banging itself against the kitchen window trying to get closer to the light. It must have been close to 15cm across. Bigger than a small bird. I’m very glad the window was securely shut… And I thought spiders were bad!

It’s been a pretty quiet weekend for me. Catching up on paperwork, housework, just about every other kind of work except for work work, which thankfully has pretty much confined itself to business hours this week.

Spoke to my sister, who is gallivanting around England on a very short trip over there - for a job interview for heaven’s sake! Bloody jetsetters. It sounds like she’s almost certainly got the job if she wants it, something I have mixed feelings about. Career wise, it’s good for her, and she and hubby Adrian will have a great time living in London. On the other hand, I’ll see her a lot less, because let’s face it - London is a lot further to go than Sydney. More expensive to call, too.

Tonight I had Daniel’s Not Famous At All Pseudo-Mexican dinner. Which consists of leftover bolognaise sauce, with extra fresh tomato, some taco sauce stuff, grated cheese, wrapped in some of that Mexican bread stuff. Any visiting Mexicans would probably laugh openly at it, but I like it. I have no idea if it really resembles Mexican food, or what it would be called if it did, but it’s delicious!

And with this I watched The Mummy on DVD. Which wasn’t excessively intellectual, but was entertaining, in a rollicking adventure Indiana Jones kind of a way.

I learnt two important lessons today.

This’ll get a bit geeky, but when I got into work this morning, my PC was off. Odd, I left it on. With the screen turned off (that’s the manual power saving feature in Windows NT 4) but definitely on.

So I booted ‘er up. But I couldn’t logon - all it would do is display a very cryptic error message. Eventually I noticed somebody had been fiddling with my logon settings. Whoever it was obviously didn’t notice the computer had already been on, so they rebooted it, fiddled with the settings, then shut it down. How kind. It feels like I’m in The Three Bears - whose been sitting at my PC?

Changed the settings back (lucky I had them written down) and logged on. It worked, but the marvellously helpful Corporate LAN Standard setup that is the bane of my existence, decided that obviously logging on is good grounds for re-installing Microsoft Office, followed by another reboot! T-smeggin’-riffic.

It made my morning somewhat less productive than it should have been. To be quite honest, it pissed me off quite considerably. The lesson? Next time I leave work early with the PC left on but the screen turned off, it might be a good idea to leave a friendly post-it note saying "Bugger off!" on it.

And the other lesson? I’ve discovered that turning off your mobile phone is definitely a good idea when you go to the toilet. Sitting on the can and suddenly hearing your phone echoing  The Liberty Bell around the cubicles isn’t good.

It was sad to hear the news of the death of Douglas Adams. I have a sudden urge to read the Hitch Hikers books again.

But you know what’s a little bit spooky about it… on Saturday night, mere minutes after hearing this news, my sister was looking on the Web for rental property in London, where she might be living soon. First thing she clicked on was an apartment listing. The agent’s name was shown as: Hotblack Desiato.

Perry Como also died over the weekend. The key difference here is that I have absolutely no idea what he did. The media kept talking about him being known as "Mr Casual". What does that mean? Was he a singer, a writer, an ambassador - or did he just wear a lot of cardigans? I have a vague feeling I’ve heard of him once - I seem to remember Lenny Henry saying that somebody would "make Perry Como look like a Hell’s Angel". I don’t remember why it seemed funny. I’m obviously from completely the wrong generation to appreciate the significance.

This morning I got into work and found my computer had 97 network error messages for me to read. The first dozen or two related to a network drive being full, and I’m guessing the rest did too. Thank goodness for the Clear All button. I mean for heaven’s sake, computers have screensavers - they know when you’re not around. So why do they still bother you with this crap? Pretty bloody pointless telling you all about it every 5 minutes if you’re not there, isn’t it!

You know what I spotted today? A quick explanation for people from outside Melbourne. We have a toll road here that goes through a tunnel under the river. The eastbound tunnel has been notorious for construction delays, and now has problems with leakage of water. Which is not great for inspiring confidence to use it, to be honest.

Well it turns out that on the approach to the westbound tunnel, the one that doesn’t have the leak, there’s a very well placed sign for Holeproof underwear - it simply says "Don’t worry - it’s Holeproof"!