New Chickens

Linguistic note for international readers: "chook" is Australian slang for "chicken".

Spent the Easter weekend away in the country on Jacinta's parents' farm. While we were up there the opportunity presented itself to purchase some new chickens, so we did. We're now the proud owners of four new chooks, two Isa Browns (boring but practical), and two Isas with a Barnevelder grandparent (larger, but much prettier).

Everyone seems to get excited about what we name our chickens, but to be honest we're not good with chickens actually keeping their names. Our old chooks now being referred to as Black Chook, White Chook and Golden Chook, for obvious reasons of apperance. Our plan for the new chickens (at Ian's suggestion) was to name them after old coin-op computer games (Galaga, Gyrus, Super Mario, etc).

We've started referring to the Barnevelder-crosses as Dig-dug and Pac-man, but the Isas seem to be commonly referred to as simply Isa and Lace (due to her feather decorations).

Names for chickens are pretty irrevelant anyway. The only phrase they seem capable of learning is 'chook chook chook' for when they're about to be fed.

The new chickens are settling in well, and taking the lead from our old chooks about where to sleep at night, so there's no worry about having to haul them out of trees late at night. Some small confusion arose when the newer chickens didn't realise that they weren't allowed to go to bed until the older chooks had retired, and that one of the older chickens liked to stay up late. A few healthy scuffles resulted as the late-retiring chicken would knock the newer chickens out of the coop until it was sufficiently late until she could go to roost without losing honour.

I'm looking forward to getting five eggs a day again, instead of the one egg per day that we have been receiving. However it will probably be a couple of weeks before the newer chickens are old enough to begin laying.

Why doesn't everyone do personal accounting?
I think I've discovered why some people don't do personal accounting, and just look at their bank statements/balances each month to judge their financial position. It's because spending half a day working through a huge pile of receipts, invoices, and statements is dull.

Dull dull dull dull dull.

Even so, I still find the benefits of personal accounting far outweighs the effort involved. I'm not going to let a meager 2 inch stack of unprocessed papers stop me.

A day off
One of the nice things about running your own business is that after a long week in Sydney, and a busy weekend, you can choose to take the Monday off and have a long weekend. That's the theory, anyway.

The trouble is that even if you take a day off, the rest of the world keeps working. In the period of 9am - 11am I've accquired a new potential client, confirmed two off-site appointments, and had a phone-call letting me know of a machine compromise at a client. Thankfully the compromise was rapidly contained and cleaned.

Given that works seems to have found me, I'm going to spend a few hours catching up on paperwork (relatively relaxing), and try to see if I can finish work early.

A week away in Sydney (working)
Spent the last week in Sydney, presenting introductory Perl courses to a mixed class of students. We had nine students, and I believe they were representing eight different organisations. An interesting tidbit from the class is that the boarding passes used by my airline are printed and processed using Perl — I even got a peek at the source code.

Any class over eight students usually warrants a second trainer, and so I was fortunate enough to have Jacinta assisting me.

Normally when I travel for training I find myself with a little free time in the evening; however this particular trip had a busy social calendar. One night was spent visiting some old friends who have recently had a child, and the other was spent with Sydney Perl Mongers.

Syd.PM certainly know how to have a good time, especially judging from my grin in the photo. We had Robert Spier (from perl.org) visiting, and to cap off the evening the New South Wales chapter of SAGE-AU were also at the same pub. When it got too late Jacinta had to almost drag me away, reminding me that I really did have to be up and teaching at 9am the next day.

As always, I'm very happy to be back at home, and I'm looking forward to a weekend where I'm not standing on my feet for 10+ hours a day.

Soooooo busy!
I'm presenting at the SAGE-VIC conference tomorrow, so today has the usual rush of revising all my slides, applying eye-candy (Ascidian photos this time), and rehersing. Then I've got a long weekend, followed by four days of teaching.

That's why, after an otherwise peaceful week, every single client seems to be crawling out of the woodwork to try and push work onto me. Today. My last business day in the office.

The thing is that I don't want to do a lot of the work that's being proposed. It's not that I don't enjoy development, it's all the things that go with it (wrangling specs out of clients, contracts, moving goal-posts, feature creep, lack of closure, maintenance, etc) that I dislike.

Training, on the other hand, is cleanly defined, a lot more social, lot more rewarding, and a lot less stressful. Nobody calls you up at 4am in the morning to tell you that your course notes are broken, and that you've desparately got to fix a poorly worded sentence on page 83. We're doing a good job of increasing our training turnover, and I'm trying to reduce how much I'm involved in commercial development.

It's not an easy task to tell a long-term client that you don't want to do any more development work for them, and certainly not a task I want to try and do in the last stages of conference preparation.