Ghostbusters
One of the television stations is running a 20 year anniversary special of Ghostbusters (and Ghostbusters II). Boy, I sure feel old now. When I was a child I built my own ghostbusting paraphernalia -- we'd catch ghosts using equipment cobbled together from an old vacuum cleaner, turntable, and pram. An evaporative cooling unit was used for containment.

We must have done a pretty good job, as I haven't heard of any ghosts hanging around my old suburb since that time.

Monday

Tax
Spent the day working on tax matters. This wasn't anywhere as exciting as it may seem, and I'm sure most people don't consider tax to be even remotely enchanting. Most of the work was spent ensuring that all the accounts were reconciled for last quarter, and the primary source of frustration was caused by some misplaced invoices. It would appear that I had started two indepdent folders for the invoices in question, and had filed the older invoices into a section which I had since forgotten.

The most amusing part of dealing with tax matters was to discover that the Australian Tax Office had given me the option of making GST installments. This means no mandatory pain of ensuring accounts are reconciled at the end of each quarter, and a generous period of time at the end of the financial year to make sure that everything is accounted for. The installments are also well less than the tax we would otherwise have to remit, so the business gains a slight gain from interest earned on this money.

Tomorrow will be spent double-checking what is likely to be the most complex personal tax return I'll ever complete. Thankfully it's all filled out, and I only need to recheck the figures.

Travel and Training
I'm flying up to Sydney next week to teach four days worth of Perl Training. Sydney courses are always a bit of a gamble, but we've got a good attendence for our public courses, and a new facilities vendor who is offering lower prices, better food, and more importantly more drinkable coffee than our old suppliers.

While I love teaching, I don't enjoy the travel, and living away from home for another whole week isn't particularly appealing. Jacinta's clearly looking forward to my return as well, since with me away she'll be responsible for letting the chickens out at 5am each morning.

Syndicated Blogs
I've got pjf.id.au now producing an RSS feed of my journal. This is nothing short of pure narcissism, and rather pointless narcissism at that, since I'll have no chance to write in my journal while I'm away interstate. Nevertheless, it's done. There's even a link on the journal navigation to add it as a Mozilla sidebar tab.

Training Calendar
Perl Training Australia has just finished determining its public training calendar for 2005. We're still finalising a few details near the end of the year, but it looks like I'll be keeping out of trouble for some time. Included is a new course on web development, which will be focusing on using HTML::Mason, along with plenty of practical exercises.

Our (obviously private) calendar of corporate bookings is also filling up, with banks and government being the most active seekers of training at this time.

Better than google ads
Having found myself with a little spare time at 1am this morning I improved the advertisements that display on pjf.id.au. You may need to look carefully (or at a few different pages) to see the changes. While the new ads aren't likely to earn me $0.005 cents/day like the old ones, they are a little more amusing.

Lunchtime Code
This lunchtime over a salad roll I put together code to generate Perl Training Australia Brand Fairy Dust(TM). These are the little squares that appear on our letterhead, course covers, logo, and other corporate branding.

The code allows for variable density and colour saturation, the creation of different sized areas, and various scaling factors. This means that it's very easy to generate some very cool looking special effects. It's good to have a well-behaved logo.