Vanity domains
I'm now the proud registrant of pjf.id.au. Currently it just takes you to the PTA homepage, but it means that I now have a place to throw things that aren't really related to Perl Training Australia at all, like scuba-diving, edible flora, or beer-making.

It also allows me to golf myself an address that's shorter than my current CPAN address.

A few exciting things today on the Perl Training Australia front:

• We opened bookings for our new Perl Security course.
• We opened bookings for Damian's Advanced Object Oriented Perl and Text Processing with Perl courses.

Our list of courses open for booking is now pleasingly long.

Working with (superhuman) people
As I run a business, I get a lot of people telling me that if I have any work left over, that they're more than willing to take on the load in return for an additional source of income. These offers come in all three main areas of our business -- programming, sysadmin, and training. I'm very happy with this situation, it provides me with a greater range of opportunities. I like opportunities.

However, I very rarely take these individuals up on their offers, despite us often having a huge amount of work that we need to deal with. However it was only the other day when I realised why.

I tend to be very fussy and particular, and quite disinclined to hand work to anyone if I feel that I can do a better job myself. I'm even disinclined to let our accountant fill out the tax returns, instead I just mine them for knowledge.

This means that for me to offer work to another person, they need to have repeatedly demonstrated almost superhuman powers in their area of expertise. I want them to be able to do their job much better than I could possibly do it.

This isn't necessarily the best way to do business. Most of our clients don't know and probably don't care about the difference between well-written code and poorly-written code. Most of them don't even know what a sysadmin does, let alone if they're doing a good job of it.

It does, however, mean that I can sleep easily at night -- and that's worth quite a bit to me. It also means that when there's a close call, like a border-gateway machine with a completely corrupted filesystem, that I can trust the matter to be resolved effectively and efficiently. That allows me to spend the day doing more enjoyable things, like income tax. That's what happened yesterday.

Yesterday was SysAdmin Appreciation Day, and I really appreciate all the hard work that our two super-human sysadmins, Ian and Daniel have put in during the time that I've had the pleasure to be working with them. I hope to be able to get them down to a pub and buy a few rounds of drinks in the near future.

PTA is now a merchant
After many years of "meaning to do that soon", I've finally got around to making Perl Training Australia a merchant, and hence able to accept credit card transactions. At least that will be so once I fax in some ten pages of documents and provide the bank with a small sum of cash.

I've called an incredible number of banks in the process, and found a very wide difference in the knowledge of their representatives, particularly when it comes to on-line based systems, as opposed to ones with terminals.

What I also discovered is that there are products that exist that the banks do not advertise, and do not recommend when you explain your needs and requirements. You can't find these products unless you know about them already, or suspect they might based upon discussions with other banks. They're sort of like banking easter eggs.

Once I discovered the existance of these easter eggs, the process became much much simplier. Go to each bank, mention the magic words, and lo! An offer for an extremely low-fee and flexible facility appears. Either that, or the customer consultant gets very confused and you get transferred through five different departments.

The other thing I found surprising is the variation in fees and conditions for what is essentially the same service but at different banks. Sometimes a difference in ongoing charges and establishment fees of 300% was seen.

One particularly frustrating occurance was that different consultants from the same bank would disagree with each other. One bank gave me two pieces of conflicting advice regarding making payments into a third-party bank account. Another gave me three different pieces of advice as to our eligibility to use a particular service.

In the end, I found a very knowledgable consultant, who also happened to have done some Perl programming in the past, lived in the local area, was interested in learning more about GnuCash, and dismissed a number of the fees and charges that I had expected for the facility that I was after. I think I've made a friend in merchant services, and that should hopefully assist matters as they progress.

For those wondering what these merchant easter eggs happen to be, they're services provided by a group called Cardlink, who provide on-line processing capabilities. Cardlink operate on behalf of the banks to provide on-line terminal replacements, batch processing facilities, and real-time "e-commerce" facilities. They have a lot more technical clue than the banks, and their staff have been very helpful in answering my questions regarding standards and interoperability.

The downside is that Cardlink's programmer API is a windows-only system, and they can't provide me with the network protocol that gets used. That's okay, because I wasn't really planning to use their programming APIs in anger, and with the service I've negotiated I'm getting Cardlink's services for free. However cardlink have shown themselves to be quite clueful, and have informed me that they're very willing to look into providing alternate solutions based upon customer demand. That's a good sign.

Perl Training in Perth, Australia
Yes, this is an advertisement. ;)

Perl Training Austalia is running its Introduction to Perl and Intermediate Perl courses in Perth, Australia, from the 31st of August to the 3rd September. Book and pay before the 6th of August and you can get a free Perl book.

Visit our bookings page now to secure your place.