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. ;)

Weddings
Congratulations and thank-you to Daniel and Tomoko, who just got married, and very kindly asked me to be best man and witness at their wedding. I'm very very happy, and very very honoured.

The wedding was a very small and private affair, with family and a few very close friends present. However I believe that Tomoko and Dan are planning a much bigger occasion in January, which I'm very much looking forward to.

Dan's final request as we were all leaving Dan and Tomoko to their privacy was that I run the 1st Edition AD&D game I've been talking about. :) Some things just never change.

Printers
One kind reader asked me how things turned out with the printers, and I'm glad to say that everything turned out well. They were having an incredibly busy week, and so they can be excused for showing poor customer service on one occasion. ;)

Accountants
I'm finally making the plunge and getting an accountant, so I've got someone's brain to pick from time-to-time. I've already ingratiated myself to them by noting a few problems with a transitional period of their website, but organising a meeting is proving to be very difficult, due to a very full calendar for almost the next three weeks.

Dogs
Found a small dog on our doorstep Saturday. Looked after it for a couple of days, and it got picked up by the Lost Dog's Home today, who will hopefully find its owner. The dog meant that I missed by large delivery of hard-drives since I had to have multiple doors closed between dog and rabbit, and couldn't hear the (already defective) door-bell.

Finance::Quote
After much waiting, Finance::Quote 1.08 is finally out, and available at your local CPAN store. New quotelets, and a great many bugfixes feature in this new release. Thanks to everyone who submitted code, patches, ideas and suggestions!

GnuCash
Still rocks. The 1.8.x business features really do make a difference.

GnuCash
Okay, I can't do nice accounts payable/receivable with a cash accounting system, because as it was kindly pointed out to me, they only really make sense under accruals. In a cash-based system, you just ignore things which haven't happened yet. This leaves me with a dilemma, since moving to accruals costs me about $50/year in lost interest (no big deal compared to time saved), but also bumps me out of the Simplified Tax System for five years (STS), and I may not want to do that.

Accountants
Shopping around for accountants to talk about business structures, investing, tax, and other exciting things, like getting bumped out of the STS for five years because I want to change my books in such a way that the ATO will get more money.

Interchange
Beem playing with InterChange a bit. I'm quite, quite impressed. I'm looking at it for both use with PTA, and for the use of a number of customers.

Travel
Canberra mid-June, Sydney late June, Sydney again next week, Sydney again two weeks after that, Canberra in all likelyhood after that... Somehow I don't seem to be spending much time in my home city.

Hardware
Got a new scanner off Ian, since my old one is about to die. Haven't picked it up yet, hope to do so soon. Got a new UPS, courtesy of a friend who's since moved to the UK, need to schedule some downtime to install it.

Work
Stupidly busy. It's crazy. There was like a two week period where I hardly even saw my own office, since I had to be with a client saving the day, or in Sydney, or both.

Stuff
Tons of stuff to write about, not enough time to do so. Work is very busy. Everything else is very busy. I have no time. Aiie!

GnuCash
Compiled and installed GnuCash 1.8.4 to celebrate the new financial year. Gosh, does it look sweet. It'll take me a while to setup the 2003-04 books in it, but it contains many, many features that I've been wanting for a long time. My initial tests reveal that it should handle GST quite well, it happily keeps track of invoices (both ones that I've issued, and ones coming up), and if I set things up properly should take most of the work out of filling out tax returns.

My only fear is that it will move me from a cash-based system (money is counted when it actually enters/leaves the business) to an accurals based system (money is counted when an invoice enters/leaves the business). A cash based system is slightly beneficial to the business when it comes to interest, so I'd like to stick with that. Of course, I'm very interested in knowing what invoices have been served and what bills are coming up, but I want to ensure GnuCash can handle the entries being made in the GST tables when these move from accounts payable/receivable and into the appropriate categories. I believe it can, but it's far too late at night for me to properly test.

Airport Security
Travelled to Canberra last week to do some teaching at the ANU. In my hand luggage was a small Debian/Linux machine, an SV24 cube. These things look great on the x-ray scanners, full of different bits of metal, wires everywhere, different densities, and so on. The bag also contained power cords, ethernet cable, wireless keyboard and mouse, and other bits and pieces.

Of course, airport security doesn't like metallic boxes filled with wires that aren't easily identifiable... or do they? As it happened, once I had removed the machine from the bag I was hit with a barrage of questions, but not the type I had expected. "That's so cool! Where can I buy one of those?", "How fast was the CPU did you say? And what are you running on it?", "You mean I could play games from my hotel room TV? Sweet!"

Work
Keeping in the trend of calling me out the blue at the end of the financial year, another old client of mine wants me to do a reasonably large amount of work as soon as possible. I've actually been giving quotes on how much I'll charge to work on weekends.

Some of my clients are a real delight to work with. I've mostly finished a shared address-book setup for one, running on an LDAP backend, Outlook MUAs, and LABE for management. They're even a feel-good organisation who are working to try and reduce the community's energy usage. I wish more of my clients were like that, rather than seeking to enhance their market share.