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Sadly, we had to be up today before 10 to do a room swap. Our late decision to stay an extra two nights whilst the Barmy Army was in town wasn't a sharp one. Our destination room wasn't ready when we were so we went to the local cafe for breakfast. We shifted room then went straight back to the Internet cafe for a session. They were doing an unadvertised deal of 6hours for AU$20 which was quite handy as was their flexibility in allowing me to upload the latest batch of pictures. They have a slightly odd system pre pre-payers where you get a card with a logon ID which lasts as long as your time left does -- or they're in business.

We did a few hours then went on the hunt for a diving guide to the Great Barrier Reef and a copy of LOTR. Books are shockingly expensive, AU$20 for the average paperback. That has [the whiff of] a Net Book Agreement style cartel [to it]. We had some cheap nachos for lunch in one of the several Food Courts.

We headed off into the University in search of a Henry Moore statue [sculpture?] for Helen. To no avail. We ended up in the Botanical Gardens which are quite pleasant especially as it seems to aim a lot of its efforts towards creating shade.

Back into the Internet shop to get up to date and I was just trying to FTP my final page when everything ground to a halt. The desk boy was on the phone to the not responding ISP. I noticed the gateway wasn't responding but not wanting to step on people's toes, I didn't press the issue. However, I got bored pretty quick and started helping out. Eventually plugging a monitor into the gateway to find it was stuck in the BIOS. [note the absence of hair :-( ] I booted it (noting it ran Linux) and relayed the information to the manager over the phone who hadn't heard of a BIOS (or perhaps my pronunciation of it) but [he] was extremely nervous about me fiddling with the gateway as it was the property of the ISP and he didn't want a bill. That hadn't stopped him getting the desk boy to power cycle it a couple of times. Oddly [not really], it spent another five minutes fsck'ing its disk. [I must admit, I didn't think I'd have genuine cause to get "fsck" into my journal...]

So impressed they gave Helen and I another AU$20 worth of time each which was kind but I don't think we're around for long enough to use it [unless we want to come back in a year and test their database]. However, I did naughtily run a copy of PuTTY, an SSH client -- woo, hoo! Editing files with emacs again!

Finally, another very late night cakey and coffee. This time a different waitress, the owneress, I thought, who frankly didn't do a much better job.

Adelaide YHA, Adelaide S34.92636 E138.59451 Elev. 26m