Business
I haven't checked the books, but I suspect that we've invoiced more in the last five months than we did for the entire 2002-2003 financial year. Business is booming, although it means I have no time for the more plesant things such as recreational time.

Two out of three small business owners I've spoken to recently have found it difficult to find or keep good staff. I'm finding the same. The remaining one in three pays a highly-paid consultant to avoid their staffing difficulties.

Business has me travelling interstate regularly. Last week was Canberra, this week and the next is Sydney. Next year there's a trip to Brisbane, and that's one of the few business trips I'm actually looking forward to.

ToEE
The ToEE wiki has been improving significantly recently, primarily thanks to James, one of our players. New features include a public guestbook, indexed blogs, new character portraits, humour, and much much more.

If you're the sort of person who enjoys reading about someone else's role-playing game, then you might even consider visiting. The new chronological character diaries are well worth reading.

If you're interested instead in how Google can decide that all sorts of irrelevant cruft is considered to have a high page-rank because it's written in W3C compliant XHTML and is updated regularly, then our humour page has numerous and disturbing examples.

Humour
On the topic of humour, Jacinta suggested that this image may be a good addition to our office.

I would like to point out that consultants from Perl Training Australia do an excellent job of solving client problems, and the previous link should be considered for its humour value only, and should not be taken to relate in any way to our business activities or professional ethics.

We make our money because our clients seem to have an inexhaustible list of desires, and they need someone to manage their other consultants. ;)

Vegetable Thief
Caught the thief who's been stealing our vegetables, since she tried to come back and take our artichokes (which weren't even ready to pick yet), and our loquats (which needed another week of ripening).

We informed the thief in no uncertain terms that we were not impressed at her taking our produce without even the common courtesy of asking, and that no, we were not going to let take away what she had picked thus far.

I'm very annoyed, as we now have a number of fruit and vegetgables that really should have been left in for another week or two to fully mature.

Hopefully we can keep a vegetable garden that doesn't get plundered before the vegetables are mature from now on.

Health
Recovering from a mild bout of the common cold. Stuffy nose, but not much else. Real bummer getting it just before my big teaching run for the quarter, but I'm glad it's nothing more serious.

Speeding
We have a large number of speeding cars in the street outside our house. It's pegged as a 50km/hr zone, but plenty of people ignore that. The local area has a large hoon population, with souped-up cars, doughnuts, and drag-races a common site. While I chuckle at this most of the time, and admit that it's probably a symptom of deeper community issues, I have to admit that speeding cars isn't making the street a safer place to live.

A recent report in the local newspaper talks about how when the police do a blitz on traffic offenses, they end up booking an incredible number of drivers. At the moment they're particularly targetting the speeding problem. Now, this sounds like a great money-making enterprise for the police, except they're a community service and have other things to do than sit by the side of a road with a speed camera.

And so it dawned on me. The police should sub-contract. If I can easily spot a dozen cars going 20-30km/hr over the speed limit per day, then so can most people on the street. Arrange for a training and qualification program for civilians to operate speed-cameras, and arrange for them to get a decent slice of any fines issued from cars they've caught. Before you know it, you'll have a bunch of enterprising people doing their qualifications and operating speed-cameras from their front-yards. Speeding is going to become very expensive. Those streets which are considered particularly probelmatic will probably have citizens jostling for the right to operate a camera.

Of course, you'll probably see a higher incidence of road-rage as irate drivers take out their frustration on the newly empowered citizens. That's a bit of a bummer.

Returning Friends
David, who's gone and joined the army, will be visiting this weekend. I won't get to spend as much time with him as I'd like, since I'm leaving interstate on Sunday on a teaching assignment.

We've organised for the next ToEE game to run to co-incide with David's visit. Apparently joining the army and being posted interstate isn't an excuse to miss roleplaying sessions. ;)

Work
Stacks of invoices to print and send, although all the money will be passed onto the lovely people who have been minding the business while Jacinta and myself have been away.

Business turn-over is likely to increase strongly over the next year. We'll have plenty of staff (at last!) and hope to take advantage of as many opportunities as possible.

Accounts Receivable is currently huge, with about 12% of our net value being in A/R.

Honeymoon
Tuesday 21st October
Arrived in Airlie Beach. Checked into the YHA where we were staying. Dropped into the dive centre, picked up reading materials. It's hot up here.

Honeymoon
Back from Honeymoon. Had a fantastic time, lots of diving (11 dives in total), snorkling, swimming, lazing around on beaches, and all those other good honeymoon things. Reading material on flights was an excellent book discussing the Australian stock-market, and Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Haven't finished either, but Kiyosaki's book is far too light on information for my tastes. If I wanted storytelling, I'd be reading a novel.

Discovered that Ian and Lizy have been doing an excellent job of looking after the business while I was away.

When it's not quite so late at night I'll write a much longer log of my exciting travels.