Mojotoad Visits
Jacinta and I met with with mojotoad the other day, who's doing his world-victory-lap after being published in The Perl Journal along with yours truly. We had a few pints and went out for Indian. Talked about everything from computers and geek stuff to biblical fruit and erosion of privacy. A very enjoyable evening.

New T-shirt
I now have a new SourceForge T-shirt that arrived the other day. Giving feedback can be worthwhile sometimes. :)

Consluting
The work that I have been doing has started to dry up a little, and my next project is due to start "any day now". It's been starting any day now for a few months, so I'm not holding my breath on the timelines. I'm very certain it will happen because they've sunk so much work into it, I just need the green light. (Actually, I'm thinking of starting work now and getting to the milestones a little early.)

Been also calculating how much full-time work I'd need to do at modest consulting rates in order to support myself for a year. If I wanted to take a bog-standard contract I could live most comfortably working five months each year. Whilst working for five months at once is unattractive, the thought of a seven month holiday without the thought of work is most attractive indeed.

House
Been looking at getting some repairs done to the house. The gutters need replacing before autumn/winter begins to rain in earnest. Having spoken to one particular builder about how he can bring in approximately $AU450,000 tax-free in a good year, I'm considering changing industries. :)

Computer Security
One of my old old servers which I should have finished decommissioning ages ago got cracked. Still investigating, but it looks like the other machines on my network are unaffected. I'm currently in the process of doing clean-up and locking-down. The machine in question that was compromised is now removed from the network and will almost certainly go into the spare parts cupboard. The moral of the story is (a) Don't get lazy because the O/S makes it a pain in the arse to upgrade packages, and (b) Don't use an O/S that makes it a pain in the arse to upgrade packages, because you will get lazy.

Hooray for apt-get. :)

Bandwidth
Flakey network links are so annoying. Bad network links. Bad.

Games
After watching kevinl and Susan playing a certain multi-player game, I went and purchased a copy for myself. It's heaps of fun, so I'm not surprised that people get addicted to it.

Schnet
Visited Schnet last Friday for Kat's birthday. Kat looked extremely happy, which is great. Never got my coffee off Nate, but I know he's a busy elf. Played lots of hacky-sack and drank plenty of brewskis at the pub.

Had Kevin cycle in on Friday for a meeting in the city. He looked as if he loved it, so I'm certain he'll be cycling even longer distances soon. ;)

Girlfriend
Jacinta mentioned that I never write about her in my diary. Hi Jacinta!

Buffy
Buffy (and her moping wuss ex-boyfriend of a vampire Angel) are back on TV. Yay.

Finance::Quote
Finance::Quote 1.05 has been released, mainly bugfixes but a few enhancements to make the life of people writing modules easier. Available on SourceForge and your local CPAN store.

Consluting
Getting pretty busy, actually. Have a few contracts that I'm working on, as well as trying to get back into open source properly. Obsidian is moving along, and people are pushing work through it, which is great.

Shall post a link to my resume soon, but people should feel free to e-mail me (pjf at cpan.org) if they're impatient or want to throw work at me without seeing the resume. :)

Fruit
Have ooodles of blood plums thanks to the tree outside. I think about 30% of my food by weight comes from eating blood-plums.

Obsidian
Going into business with a number of extremely clueful people. Idea is to have something similar to CyberSource but with a smaller group, more flexibility, and with some serious tenders for larger projects. Some things are quite scary, I'll probably want to have a good talk to a clueful accountant.

Open Source
One of the big reasons for me dropping full-time work is so that I can spend more time on fun things like open-source. For the last couple of months I've been doing next to zip, I'm hoping to change that soon. I'm still figuring out exactly what my week will look like, but I'm trying for 2 days of (paid) work, 2 days of open-source/other projects, and 3 days of fun.