Pretty Good Printing?
I've set up one of my clients with PGP, using the plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. This is working well. I have progarams which generate and encrypt message, drop them into a mail, and send them off. The human who receives them double-clicks on the mail, enters their passphrase, and there's the text.

All was working well, until today the human in question attempted to print the message. "Printing of a PGP decrypted or verified message is not supported". Oh dear.

I agree that sending the message off to the printer may not be good to start with, network printing protocols are almost invariably sent in-the-clear. However there is a real and genuine business need to have these documents printed.

Of course, it doesn't help that I use mutt and GPG for my mail. For me, it all "just works".

New Business
Business is booming, and it's still going upwards. While grabbing a bite to eat on Southbank last Wednesday, I bumped into an old associate who was active in Melbourne cycling scene back when I was a University student 4-5 years ago. Like me, he's running his own business, and prefers Debian/Linux has his operating system of choice.

In what seems to be a surprisingly common occurance, my old associate is heading overseas and needs someone to look after a number of customers while he's away. He's flying out the day after one of my other clients is flying back from Europe. As such, I have four new clients (quite large ones, too), who'll be relying upon me to keep their networks and Linux servers running smoothly.

Perl Training Australia - now (almost) hiring
Because of all the new work that's coming on board, I'm looking at hiring a technical assistant to help out with things. I need to put together a job description and fill out a ton of paperwork (tax, workcover, council permits, etc) before I can actually employ them.

PerlTidy
Perltidy rocks. I've been reviewing large amount of Perl code for another business, and PerlTidy does a fantastic job of making difficult-to-read code much easier to read. It's amazingly good.

Complimentary faux pas
From time to time we occasionally get lazy and decide to order our groceries on-line, rather than trying to make sure we arrive during delivery times at the local supermarket. (There's only so much one can carry home on a bicycle.) This morning one of the on-line deliveries arrived.

In general, the on-line deliveries are well packed, and the items in good condition. The on-line grocery merchants know that customers will leave if they're dissatisfied, so the fruit and veg are usually top notch, and we've never had a problem gaining refunds for goods damaged in transit (taco shells are easily broken).

It would also appear that sometimes complimentary items are also delivered. These items are clearly marked "with compliments" so you know they're not something that's fallen in by mistake. That's good, because normally I would consider a serve of chicken liver pate delivered to a vegetarian household to be a mistake.

I'm sure we'll be able to find someone to take it off our hands.

Banking
The bank has the card. Hurrah. I don't need to report it lost.

Chickens
From time to time it's desirable to inspect chickens to make sure they're free of parasites and disease. One of the most useful parts of the chicken to inspect is politely called the vent, as most parasites and many diseases will manifest themselves around this area.

To perform the inspection, one usually needs to lay the chicken on its back, and hold its legs up with one hand. It's kind of like changing the nappy on a baby. Most chickens will protest strongly at such undignified treatment, although a little grain or bread afterwards usually goes a long way to patching things up. Most of our other chooks ignore the chicken being inspected, they just line up hoping for food. This makes it easy to inspect one chicken after another.

Today Jacinta was inspecting our broody to make sure she's in good health. Parasite infections on broody chickens are very bad, because some parasites (or their eggs) usually remain in the nesting straw, so persistant problems are common.

Now, as I said, most chickens ignore the protests of another chook who's being inspected, and all our chickens show noticable ire with our broody because she's either hogging the nest, or pomping herself up. She's not really the flock's favourite right now. However, during the inspection, Sofie (who is one of the lower chickens on the pecking order) actually payed attention and attacked Jacinta.

I now hold Sofie in much higher regards. Keeping backyard chickens means I'm often concerned about cats who might try their luck, and knowing that we have at least one chook with the pluck to agressively defend the flock will help me sleep easier at night.

Besides, watching a little fluffy hen try to attack a full-grown adult human is very, very cute.

Banking
Went to a different branch, and it only took 30 minutes of the teller explaining to me that it what I was asking was completely and utterly impossible (beyond all possible doubt), before the manager was called and immediately approved the deposit. I spend another five minutes pretending to be incredibly interested in their home loan options, so the bank staff could have warm fuzzies when I left.

Unfortunately, the bank still managed to win, as I left my credit card in the branch. It seems that the home loan discussion was so engrossing that the teller forgot to hand back my card, and I was so exhausted from having to listen to all the excuses and blame-shifting, that I forgot to check that I had it.

I get to call the bank tomorrow and see if they have it. They should, since it was left on the staff side of the counter, but I'm expecting I'll probably have to go through all the joy of reporting the card lost. Wheee!

Accounting
Snipped the last ties with the accounting package I used for the 2001-2002 financial year -- an amusing little program called Erecord. Erecord is a free (as in beer) software package provided by the Australian Taxation Office. As an account packing, it stinks. No double-entry, support for only one account if you want to reconile statements, no sorting of transactions, and no linking of invoices to payments, and nothing even approaching useful reports. It's also incredibly, mind-numbingly slow. It's only up-side is that it will try to fill out the quarterly Business Activity Statements (BAS), and that also has its share of problems. It only runs under Windows.

For the 2002-2003 financial year, I'm using GnuCash. It doesn't do BAS statements automatically, which means a few more splits, and a little reporting configuration. However, it's a real accounting package, and handles my multiple accounts, variety of assets, multi-currency income streams, and statement reconciling with ease. It even generates the numbers to put on my BAS statement (with a little work). There's no way I'm going back.

GnuCash is even happy for me to deposit foreign cheques to my credit card without having to make up lame excuses why it's not possible.

Invoicing
The final tie I had with Erecord was the invoice printing. Erecord would print reasonable looking tax invoices, although there was no good way to record if an invoice has been paid or is overdue. During periods of heavy invoicing, it can be difficult to keep track of what's going on.

My new system involves a bit of custom programming onto the side of RT, which I use as my job-tracking system. My invoicing program locates resolved jobs with the appropriate keyword, takes the time spent on each, scales that by my hourly rate for that customer, and itemises the results onto an invoice. A few more improvements will have it generate a ticket for the invoice, linking each job to the invoice ticket, and marking each job as successfully invoiced. It will also include an attachment of the invoice on the new ticket.

This is great for me, since RT will gladly show me which invoices are open (unpaid), and which are overdue. It's also good for my customers, as they can just drop the invoice number into the system, and it will come up with all the details of the jobs on their invoice. Very nice.

It also has financial benefit because I'm running an RT system for a particular client, and they may wish to make use of the new invoicing features. It's almost certain they'll want customisations so their invoices look extra specially pretty. I love customers who want their software customised.

Banking
Banks can really be a pain sometimes. Personally, my banking matters are pretty simple. There's a home loan offset account, which acts in many ways like a personal account, and there's a credit card (paid off in full each month), which makes every day purchases considerably easier.

Everything works pretty well, until you try to bank a foreign cheque. The home loan just plain doesn't do foreign currency, at least they're honest about it. The credit card (with a different financial institution) is happy about doing foreign currency, but their banking system doesn't allow them to put a 28 day hold on the funds from the foreign cheque -- something about bad software on their behalf.

As such, trying to deposit a foreign cheque to the credit card makes the bank uneasy -- I might spend those funds before the cheque has cleared, and that would be terrible. I should note at this point that said foreign cheque is a bank cheque, not a personal cheque, and is covered in holograms and watermarks. I usually point this out to the bank, along with the facts that I pay off the card every month, I never go near the credit limit, and I've never been refused for the dozen or so foreign cheques that I've banked previously.

Usually, after much talk up and down the chain of command, the cheque is finally deposited. However sometimes it's refused.

Luckily for me, the following proceedure has always worked without fail:

foreach bank
    foreach teller
        say "Hi, I'd like to deposit a foreign cheque to
             my credit card";

Eventually, I'll hit someone who doesn't know there's supposed to be 15 minutes of ceremonial grieving by the bank before refusing, or just flat out doesn't care. Usually I succeed after 1.2 branches.

The whole thing does get rather tiresome, and as the whole matter appears to be entirely discretional, is highly dependant upon branch/staff/managers.

I'm investigating alternative arrangements, the most useful of which would be an account in US dollars.

Broody chook
Broody chook is still broody. It's been something like four weeks now. If we weren't able to steal eggs from her each evening, she'd be sitting on a mound of about eighty eggs by now, trying to make them hatch. Given that we don't have a rooster (and so the eggs aren't fertile), the whole thing is starting to get a little silly. I'm even considering going and buying her some day-old chicks to break her out of her broodyness.

She stayed off the nest long enough today (to eat and dust bathe) that I could change the straw in the nesting area. She had a huge sook about me doing that.