New Hardware
My 15/30Gb SCSI DLT tape-drive arrived at last. Surprisingly easy to set-up. Worked straight out of the box, no hassles at all. Fantastic.

Thanks to Ian's very wise advice, I've turned off hardware compression and I'm using software compression (gzip) instead. After Ian mentioned that he discovered the hard-way that different tape drives can use different compression algorithms, I'm very happy not to make the same mistake.

Visitors
Gwen (Jacinta's sister) and her fiancee are down from sunny Mackay (Queensland) and are staying the evening. Even though our rabbit made good friends with Gwen, he's now sorely miffed because they're staying in his room, and have the door shut against the Melbourne winter.

Accounting
The ATO's free E-tax software has annoyed me sufficiently that I'm doing my 2002-2003 accounting in GnuCash. E-Tax is slow, makes it difficult to keep track of transactions and entries, makes it impossible to reconile any complex transaction structure, and requires me to boot into Windows to use it. It's only advantages to me is that it handles GST and BAS statements automatically. Not even having the choice of being able to use double-entry has just become too frustrating for me. I want to keep track of everything, darn it, not just the minimum required for GST reporting.

Using GnuCash means that while GST is a little more bothersome (any business expense involves splits), personal accounting and tax is a breeze. I will give credit that E-tax was useful when I first started business, and it's good to see the tax office supplying free (as in beer) software to small businesses.

I'll probably continue to use E-tax to print invoices, since it does a good job of that, and my invoices tend to be large and infequent rather than small and often.

Hopefully this financial year I'll avoid having a mound of papers for "things which need to be remembered, but which E-tax can't handle".

Linux Advocacy
I suspect I have found the world's best Linux Advocacy page. Get your Linux now and help stomp out NEPOTISM, HEGEMONY, CORRUPTION and COMPUTER INSOMNIA.

Meetings
My goodness. A week filled with meetings. Well, one and a half days is filled enough for me. Good news is that all the meetings are about giving me regular income for extended periods of time, and the meetings thus far have included dotted lines and signatures. All very good.

Flying South for the Winter
Yes, I'm in Australia. The further south you go, the colder you get. Despite this, I've got lots of friends who are doing that, except they're all doing it now. Friends from Brisbane and Sydney, sister-in-law-to-be from Mackay, old workmates from the UK. I don't know what it is about Melbourne winters (wet, cold, dark) but everyone wants to get a slice of the action before the whole winter thing goes out of season.

More Meetings
Another meeting tomorrow morning. Lots of homework to do before then.

Toys
DLT tape-drive arriving soon. Near-miss with toasty hard-drive has convinced me of the requirement of some heavy-duty backups, and CD-R just doesn't cut it as a backup medium anymore. Hoping that 300Gb of tapes should last me a while.

End of Financial Year
I didn't think it was true, but it is, the end of financial year generates a big chunk of work just by rolling around. One the one hand there are organisations with budgets they need to spend in the 2001-2002 year to justify future budgets. On the other hand we have organisations who, having spent their 2001-2002 budget, suddenly have money again and wish to spend it somewhere.