Poaching
I'm currently in the quite surprising position of being actively poached by a high-profile, international company; quite out of the blue. At first I thought they had simply contacted a number of Perl-related people, since there was mention that the job would involve relocating to Seattle, and surely nobody would expect me to do that. I wrote a polite letter to say that I was really quite happy managing Perl Training Australia, and that I'd need a very compelling reason to consider moving.

I realised that the company was actually serious when I received an international phone-call shortly afterwards, asking what salary I considered compelling. I didn't have a good answer to that: the idea of leaving my business and lifestyle to move far away from friends and family is almost unimaginable. Mix into this the apparent eagerness my potential poacher has for software patents, and it's pretty clear I'll need a lot of convincing.

There'll no doubt be more discussions on this matter, and I'm curious to see how it progresses.

Where's that talk?
Often at user-group meetings and conferences I get asked if particular slides or papers will be published on-line. Now you can find a lot (not all) of talks by Jacinta and myself online at Perl Training Australia's presentations page.

Other presentations and papers will go up when I collect a sufficient collection of tuits.

Cross-browser compatibility
We've got a redesign of the Perl Training Australia website that's in its final stages of testing. Everything seems to be working great until I started compatibility testing.

The site works wonderfully in Mozilla browsers, and reportedly in Safari. It works well in Internet Explorer (MSIE) 6 and 5.5, but without some of the CSS features that MSIE doesn't support. It looks awesome in lynx and w3m (text-based browsers), and degrades nicely in Netscape 4.7x.

The site is horribly, horribly wrong in MSIE 5.0 and 4.01, both of which completely muck up the menus. How long are we going to keep supporting these old, standards-challenged browsers?

Currently investigating fixes, and checking to see how many of our visitors actually use MSIE 4.0/5.0.

Anyone who wishes to check out the new site and provide feedback is most welcome to do so. Either comment on my use.perl journal, or drop me an e-mail.

Business/Life Design
It's finally official. After almost four years of providing system administration services, I'm finally out of the game, and this is a joyous occasion. It seems ironic that Perl Training Australia was doing so much system administration, but I had lots of contacts in the industry, and lots of work available to me.

All the SysAdmin work that I was performing is now being handled by Daniel's new business, Digital Infrastructure Solutions. Daniel's been doing practically all the work anyway, but this provides him with many more opportunities to grow his business. Most importantly, it means that I can now work on training and course development full-time.

One of my most startling discovers is that I can now plan my entire life using a Gantt Chart. That's something I've never been able to do before, and I wholeheartedly look forward to it.

We're still in the game of providing specialist development and consulting services, and of course we're doing more training than ever before. If you're used to booking us in advance for development or consulting (rather than calling up whenever your machine has problems), then you'll find little has changed. If you have an espresso machine in your office, then you're especially welcome to keep throwing work our way.

Website Design
Jacinta and myself are in the process of modernizing our website. The old site uses HTML 4.01 and CSS, is built using a batch process, is completely static, and uses colours I can't see. The new site uses XHTML strict and CSS, runs on top of Mason and Class::DBI, and still uses colours I can't see. The new site is almost at the point we can make it live, but I've got a number of usability improvements I still wish to make.

The moral of the story is that if you're going into business, pick colours that you can see for your logo, especially if you're the one who has to maintain the website.

Conference Talks
Received a phone-call the other day regarding the upcoming SAGE-AU conference. Would I like to give a second presentation in the technical program?

Calls like this always amuse me. Asking if I'd like to stand in front of an audience and talk is like asking most people if they'd like a hundred dollars.

As such, I'm now presenting an additional talk. The topic? "Conference Presentation 101". It will show heavily influences from MJD's presentation a few years back, a few tricks that I picked up along the way, and a good dose of bizzare science.

Paperwork Day
I've been travelling around having a wonderful time teaching. I'm now back in the office and working through everything that has landed on my desk while I've been out. Yes, it's paperwork day.

None of the paperwork is very hard, it's just time consuming. I've had to complete workcover forms, business activity statements, group certificates and payment declarations, dividend and franking accounts, insurance, tax, refunds, and goodness knows how many bills and invoices. Still to come are income tax (two individual, one company) and a few end-of-year adjustments. Bah.

It would be reasonably accurate to say that I've spent this week (and will be spending some of next week) working for the tax department. This does have some advantages, most of our personal income and cash-flow have already been mapped out for the next 12 months.