Travel
Melbourne, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Melbourne, Sydney again, and again, and again... My work has me travelling, which is very good financially, but makes dealing with clients difficult. Sure, I can ssh from my palm pilot and mobile phone, but I can't graffiti very quickly, and anything other than simple unix commands are challenging. The occasional internet cafe is good for catching up with things when out of the office, although I have privacy and security concerns with using third-party machines.

I'm hoping to switch to some sort of one-time password or challenge-response system for remote logins, but that will take me some time to see what can be done with ssh and my existing mobile hardware.

Assistant
I've been talking about getting an assistant for ages, and now I have one. Actually, one of the first tasks of my new assistant is to do the legwork required to create her own position -- tax, workcover, employment declarations, insurance, office setup, etc. The idea is that in 2-4 weeks I'll be able to advertise a real position and accept applications. My current assistant (Seona) knows that the job is temporary at the moment, and that she's effectively on trial if she does want to apply for the permanent position.

Seona's a web-designer with Cold Fusion qualifications, so the regular admin job isn't catering to her skill-set. Of course, I'm not going to neglect having a decent web-designer in-house, as I've plenty of things which need to happen on the HTML front (adding some spice to the Perl Training Australia webpage for starters). Seona appears to be happy that the job is pegged as temporary at the moment as well, since it means that she can easily shift to a job more suited to her skills if she wants.

One great thing about having an assistant is stress-reduction. Knowing that I can shift a large number of office-admin tasks to Seona instead of having to do them myself is doing wonders for my stress-level.

Finance::Quote
Finance::Quote 1.08 has been reviewed and accepted into the Debian pool. Thanks to Ross for his hard work in this department.

Engagements
Ian and Sofie had their engagement on Saturday. What a night! Lots of food, lots of drink, lots of wonderful people. I was able to catch up with a great many people from my schnet days, their families, and a number of new people who I'd never met before. A member of Sofie's family (Sofie's older cousin, I've been told) came around with a bottle of 40% plum spirit, and would have encourage as many people as he could to drink to Sofie's health, and Sofie's much younger cousin (about 5-6 years old) would come around and tickle anyone should could get near. I felt quite honoured that Sofie's family was so accepting of myself and my friends. ;)