Company Tax
Our company tax return is only four pages long, so at a glance it looks like it should be fairly straightforward. The booklet on how to fill it in is only 116 pages, most of which doesn't apply to us; that's even better. It's only once you realise that the booklet is simply a reference to a great many rulings, fact sheets, case files, laws, and other publications that it becomes apparent that everything is not quite as straightforward as it first seems.

Development - Undesirable work
I'm trying to change the make-up of work that I'm regularly doing. My goal is to do more training, more course development, a few more apperances at conferences, and less development.

Despite the fact that I really do enjoy development (and testing and even documentation), the process around it is not very enjoyable. For a start not many clients actually have a good idea of what they want. Often they want a system that replaces an existing way of doing things, but actually getting them to explain that current process can be nigh impossible. Either they don't have a good process, don't understand it, consider it obvious, or just don't see why it's relevant.

All of these are hurdles that can be overcome, but they all take time, and for some clients it takes longer than others. Depending upon the client there may also be other struggles -- in some cases large amounts of paperwork and contracts, or dealing with whoever looks after their system to get things installed.

None of these are surprises, anyone who's been in the software engineering business for any length of time should know about and expect the gauntlet of processes that are required to get a system produced for your average non-technical customer. However just because they're expected doesn't mean I enjoy them, and I value enjoyment of my work quite highly.

Technical customers are a little different, since they usually don't want to outsource their development, or when they do they already have a very good idea about what needs to be done. My experience with technical customers is that I'm usually brought in (on-site) for a few days to solve a specalist problem, hunt and kill well-defined bugs, or implement a well-scoped project. Furthermore they can usually make their own improvements and bugfixes once the hard part is over.

So training and 'consulting' for technical clients usually has excellent closure, but development for non-technical clients certainly does not. Good closure is very satisfying -- you can finish a job, know that you've done a good job, and go home with a clear mind.

However poor closure usually means lots of ongoing work and revenue streams, as the client keeps coming back for more improvements and additions. I'm not bothered by this, we have an excellent turnover on courses, regular work from other sources, and the reward for effort on development work is much lower than our other categories.

The hardest thing will be saying 'no' to work. I've never been very good at that.

RPGs and Wikis
Looks like using a wiki is becoming more and more popular for roleplaying games. I've just had a friend ask me for help in setting up GalanWiki for his game.

Fish
I've been sorting through my diving photos, and should hopefully get a number of decent ones up from our trip earlier this year. In the meantime, here's a friendly fish that we found (click photograph to enlarge).

Training in New Zealand
Finished a week presenting Perl training courses in New Zealand. At the end of the last day I handed back my access card, wished goodbye to the students, and promptly locked myself into a back room of the training facility. After a few phone-calls and only 40 minutes of solitude I was released.

Aside from that, training went quite well.

Daniel and Tomoko are having a child.
Daniel and Tomoko have just announced that they'll be having their first child, due in the middle of 2005. Dan visited briefly yesterday to tell us the good news.

We had a short discussion on the difficulties of naming children, particularly finding names that sound good across multiple languages. It was felt that while my suggestion of Spike certainly had character, it was not considered a suitable name, not least because it doesn't sound any good in Japanese.

I'm certain that Tomoko and Dan will make excellent parents. In order to allow their existing computer room to become new the baby's room, Dan is even purchasing a high-performance gaming laptop with a 1900x1240 display. Now that's dedication.