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.

Mouse drives (fixed)
Of course! Why didn't I think of it? The trick was to power cycle the machine another couple of times after the "successful installation".

I'm so glad I usually work with an OS that doesn't require five reboots to install a new mouse (that uses the same mouse protocol as the old mouse).

Mouse drivers (rant)
My old scummy $10 mouse developed a problem with one of the buttons, and so a very nice friend donated me his old Microsoft Intellimouse (he's got some swish optical wireless thing now). I plugged the mouse in and started using it under Linux without thinking much more about it. However, on the rare occasions that I do use Windows, I noticed that the mouse wheel didn't work. Today I thought I'd fix that.

It appears that while my $10 trash mouse could fit its driver on a floppy disk, to get a Microsoft Intellimouse to run you either need the CD that comes with it, or a 10Mb download from Microsoft. 10Mb seemed to be a lot for a mouse-driver, but it rapidly became apparant that it included all their mouse drivers, plus pictures of all the mice, plus advertising materials, a swag of different EULAs, and a few system files.

Installing the software required two reboots of the machine. At the end, there's a walk-through showcase explaning how great your nice mouse is, filled with more pictures. It even shows you a picture of the mouse it's installed thd drivers for so you can compare it to the one sitting under your hand. Yup, that looks like my mouse.

Unfortunately, after all that, the wheel still doesn't work. The Microsoft Mouse Troubleshooting Page concludes that my PS/2 port is incompatible with the mouse's scroll function. Impressive that Linux is able to use the wheel without issue, given my hardware is supposedly broken.

The new drivers seem to be putting the mouse into a state where the wheel functions are disabled. How do I know? Because if I reboot into Linux from Windows without power-cycling the machine, the mouse shows all the symptoms of an incorrect driver (pointer jumps erratically and clicks erratically).

I suspect I'm going to see if there's a "generic ImPS/2 windows driver" out there, and use that rather than the 10Mb bundle of Microsoft stuff.

Petting zoo
We've been discovered by some of the local school-children, and during the school holidays became something of a petting zoo. Chickens apparently have extra cool value with primary school kids.

"I'm not going to tell anyone about this place, it's just too cool!" was remarked by one younger of the two children who discovered our property. Within a week she "hadn't told" another half dozen children or so.

The girls want to play with power-tools, and paint the house, of course.

Tax
Tax returns suck. Most people just need to put in their income, how much tax was taken out, write $300 in the box marked "other business expenses", and wait for their cheque. When you're actually running a business (especially if you start it part-way through the financial year), things become much more difficult.

What makes it even more fun is that in my haste last year I claimed a bunch of small purchases as regular purchases, not asset purchaes. I believe due to their low cost and nature this is fine. However I can depreciate an asset over multiple years, and I'm expecting to have a significantly higher income over this year (and the years to come) compared to last year, so depreciating assets are good, so I don't want these as expenses anymore. That stick of RAM is an asset now (or an improvement to an asset).

What this means in the end is a bunch of paperwork. Hoorah. I love paperwork for the tax department.

Support
Acting in a support role for a business who has their technical manager travelling around Europe for a month. I get to answer both questions from the business and their clients. So far this support has involved pointing out the space at the end of a filename, and listening to "but the note here says that if this happens I should do blah, but if I *do* blah, then.... Oh, it works. Thanks Paul!"

X-COM
Never played the original before, only X-COM 3. Original X-COM rocks.

Big filesystems
Yup, it does takes ages to fsck 240Gb of drives. Never again. Ext3 is now in the server's kernel.

LinuxChix
Rocked up to a Melbourne get-together of LinuxChix. I'm not on any of the mailing lists, but everyone seemed happy enough to have me there as the token male. Lots of fun was had by all, and I was surprised that one person remembered me from rec.food.veg many many many years ago. I'm looking forward to the next meeting.