Bureaucracy
I'm used to doing work for large organisations. Submitting a proposal and having it run past many different comittees, panels, and departments isn't that unusual. I think the longest "lead time" I've encountered for a project thus far has been about two years. The last few days, however, have really taken the cake insofar as the most red-tape.

The client is booking five days of training. Two now, three next year. The training for this year is on a tight schedule, but that's okay. However the client does have a few interesting quirks. Firstly, they pay invoices at the end of the calendar month after they've been receieved. That means that today (last Friday of the month) is the deadline for the invoice to be provided if payment is to be made before 2003. That's okay, printing and sending invoices is easy.

However, for me to deliver the invoice, I first need to sign the customer's "standard agreement" for contractors. The agreement is about a dozen pages, most of it is either non-applicable, or standard CYA (Cover Your Arse) for things like privacy laws and disclosure of confidential information. Alongside all this are the requirements that I give full intellectual property rights to the client for any material I present or develop. No thanks, I'd rather keep IP.

So, after taking the contract past the client's solicitor and risk management office, the appropriate changes had been made. Of course, by this stage (after many many days of to'ing and fro'ing) it's 1:30pm Friday, so there's only 3.5 hours for the contract to be signed, and invoice entered into the accounting system. I actually had a representative from the client drive a considerable distance to my office to have the contract signed and witnessed, and now she's driving back again with two hours to spare to get it processed. :)

I can now understand why the client wanted to be billed "all at once", instead of on three separate occasions. It's very likely that three invoices would have meant three contracts. :)

Saturation
I keep being told that we're in a terrible, terrible slump, and IT workers are starving out on the streets. Apparently it's really hard to get work these days. Despite that, I've encountered a monotonically increasing workload since the start of this financial year. Software development, code review, system administration, training, consulting, business management, broadband resale, the works.

I'm currently negotiating with a client who really wants two days of Object Oriented Perl training at exactly the same time as a milestone date for a rather large software project that I'm heading. That date happens to be in about two weeks time. In the same timeframe I had also scheduled needs assessments and SLA negotiations for four new clients.

And here I was thinking that I'd shaken that caffine addiction. :)

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.