Travel
I'm writing this entry from my hotel room in Sydney, using a wireless keyboard so I can type in a relaxed position, and using a TV set as my monitor. Yes, I'm interstate again, for what I believe is the third time (and fifth course!) in five weeks.

For some reason we're very popular up here in Sydney, much more so than in Melbourne. I don't know if that's because Sydney doesn't have enough Perl people, so everyone's eager to learn the language, or if it's because there are plenty and the local Sydney.PM are doing a good job and spreading the word.

This visit I'm teaching members of one of Australia's larger banks, and they've been a real pleasure to teach. Almost all of them have a good amount of development experience already, so they've been asking questions and absorbing material well. It's very pleasing. The feedback forms are also very pleasing.

On the matter of feedback forms, I find it both ironic and amusing that the most commonly suggested way to improve the first module we teach is to make a two-day course, as that's exactly what we've done. This particular client, however, requested that the more intense single-day version be run, as everyone was quite experienced and would be able to cope. Indeed, they have coped, or at least they have so far. Hopefully they won't blow any synpases after tomorrow's training as well.

Travel Surprise
Getting up to Sydney had its own little surprise. The flight I was catching left from the international terminal in Melbourne, despite being domestic for it's first leg up to Sydney. Flights leaving from the International terminal require a great deal more time to catch than a regular domestic flight -- even though you're only going to be on the plane for an hour, you still need to run the gamut through customs and about 6km worth of duty free shopping that you can't take advantage of.

As fate would have it, I arrived "on time" for my domestic flight, at the domestic terminal, which is after the gates close for "international" flights. So, I was in Melbourne, without a flight, with a course starting the next day that I needed to teach. Troublesome, surely.

Luckily for me, the airlines cover for these situations. It's called gouging. Depending upon how desparate you are, you can either have your ticket moved to the next available flight in the same class (usually about 3-4 days time) for only a modest fee (about 30% of the ticket cost), or they can drop you on the next flight to Sydney in business class for about 250% on top of what you paid for your original ticket.

Of course, everyone else turned up "on time" for their domestic flight in the domestic terminal as well, so there were about 20-30 people all wanting to get to Sydney, I just happened to be near the front of the queue, so I was lucky enough to pay the shockingly high charge to secure one of the six remaining seats to Sydney that evening. I really hope the other passengers weren't in a hurry.

Thoughts on scalping
For a moment I was surprised that we don't have airline ticket scalpers. Almost anyone at the tickets queue at the airport with a grumpy look on their face and two large suitcases is almost definitely in a bad spot. A scalper could easily sell a ticket for three times its original value and still undercut the incredible prices charged by the airlines.

The reason this doesn't happen is the ticket pricing structure. The tickets most suitable for scalping are non-transferrable, or transferrable only with 24 hours notice. The tickets which can be transferred immediately cost even more than it does to catch one of those remaining business class seats, and so they're also a poor investment for the scalper.

Of course, identification is only checked on baggage checkin, so potentially a scalper could check-in someone else's baggage, collect their boarding pass, and then transfer. This is definitely a civil offense, and may even be a criminal one since airlines are involved, both of which are good deterrants to scalpers trying to make a little cash. Plus there's the risk that nobody will want your ticket, and the fact that you can only reasonable scalp one ticket per day per airline.

The upside is that a good scalper could accumulate a great many frequent flyer points.

AD&D
As Daniel's wedding night wish was for me to run an old 1st edition AD&D adventure, I've been moving somewhat towards that goal. I've filled in a few of my missing books with electronic copies (a great money-maker for WOTC), and have been refreshing my knowledge of the rules and adventure.

The old 1st Ed books by Gary Gygax are great to read, especially the whole rant on pole-arms at the end of Unearthed Arcana, or the part of the Dungeon Master's Guide which talks about how swiftly combat can be played out. The then goes through an amazing gamut of rules and exceptions, most of which have been dropped in every game I've played to ensure that combat does move swiftly.

Looking through the old books is rather nostalgic and odd. I started playing AD&D when I was about seven years old, some 19 years ago now. Back in those days (and maybe still today) there was a lot of talk about how AD&D in particular made you evil, or caused you to go into fits of dangerous depression. I still remember being amazed when our primary school principal sanctioned the use of one of the smaller schoolrooms for AD&D play during lunchtimes.

Wedding
Still getting married, and it's still getting closer. Jacinta's wedding dress should hopefully reach us next week, but we've still got a bunch of things to arrange. I'm going to have to check around to see what I can do as far as hand-holding for my clients are concerned while I'm getting married and on honeymoon. Somehow I don't think I want to be SSHing from my palm pilot to fix a misbehaving server while sipping cocktails on a tropical island.

House
With the money currently in accounts receivable (due within 30 days), we will have paid off our home loan. Not bad considering we only got the house three years ago, and one of those years was spent relaxing and earning virtually no money (and definitely no savings).

Goodnight
It's reached my bedtime, so I'm going to grab a few hours sleep before waking early tomorrow, packing my bags, checking out, opening the lab, teaching for eight hours, and then flying back to Melbourne in time to sleep and visit a client the next day. I sure have a busy life, but it's varied and interesting, and satisfying if not exhausting at times.

Credit Report
Invoked the Privacy Act a couple of weeks ago and got a copy of my credit file. The way some spammers push these services, you'd think your file would be filled with sordid details. Instead, it was exceeding dull. This is your name. You've lived there, there, and here. You last know about you working for a company that you left 2-3 years ago. These businesses asked for your credit report on these dates, and that unsurprisingly corresponded with when I was evaluating loans to purchase a house. No other details recorded. Yawn

Work
Busy busy busy. Always busy. Did an upgrade for a client today and one of the drives that arrived was DOA. I hate hard-drives.

Hard-drives
Big box of three hard-drives arrived from Seagate, as part of my previous warranty return. The box contained an almost unbelievable amount of foam-rubber packing.

Travel
Melbourne, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Melbourne, Sydney again, and again, and again... My work has me travelling, which is very good financially, but makes dealing with clients difficult. Sure, I can ssh from my palm pilot and mobile phone, but I can't graffiti very quickly, and anything other than simple unix commands are challenging. The occasional internet cafe is good for catching up with things when out of the office, although I have privacy and security concerns with using third-party machines.

I'm hoping to switch to some sort of one-time password or challenge-response system for remote logins, but that will take me some time to see what can be done with ssh and my existing mobile hardware.

Assistant
I've been talking about getting an assistant for ages, and now I have one. Actually, one of the first tasks of my new assistant is to do the legwork required to create her own position -- tax, workcover, employment declarations, insurance, office setup, etc. The idea is that in 2-4 weeks I'll be able to advertise a real position and accept applications. My current assistant (Seona) knows that the job is temporary at the moment, and that she's effectively on trial if she does want to apply for the permanent position.

Seona's a web-designer with Cold Fusion qualifications, so the regular admin job isn't catering to her skill-set. Of course, I'm not going to neglect having a decent web-designer in-house, as I've plenty of things which need to happen on the HTML front (adding some spice to the Perl Training Australia webpage for starters). Seona appears to be happy that the job is pegged as temporary at the moment as well, since it means that she can easily shift to a job more suited to her skills if she wants.

One great thing about having an assistant is stress-reduction. Knowing that I can shift a large number of office-admin tasks to Seona instead of having to do them myself is doing wonders for my stress-level.

Finance::Quote
Finance::Quote 1.08 has been reviewed and accepted into the Debian pool. Thanks to Ross for his hard work in this department.

Engagements
Ian and Sofie had their engagement on Saturday. What a night! Lots of food, lots of drink, lots of wonderful people. I was able to catch up with a great many people from my schnet days, their families, and a number of new people who I'd never met before. A member of Sofie's family (Sofie's older cousin, I've been told) came around with a bottle of 40% plum spirit, and would have encourage as many people as he could to drink to Sofie's health, and Sofie's much younger cousin (about 5-6 years old) would come around and tickle anyone should could get near. I felt quite honoured that Sofie's family was so accepting of myself and my friends. ;)

Weddings
Congratulations and thank-you to Daniel and Tomoko, who just got married, and very kindly asked me to be best man and witness at their wedding. I'm very very happy, and very very honoured.

The wedding was a very small and private affair, with family and a few very close friends present. However I believe that Tomoko and Dan are planning a much bigger occasion in January, which I'm very much looking forward to.

Dan's final request as we were all leaving Dan and Tomoko to their privacy was that I run the 1st Edition AD&D game I've been talking about. :) Some things just never change.

Printers
One kind reader asked me how things turned out with the printers, and I'm glad to say that everything turned out well. They were having an incredibly busy week, and so they can be excused for showing poor customer service on one occasion. ;)

Accountants
I'm finally making the plunge and getting an accountant, so I've got someone's brain to pick from time-to-time. I've already ingratiated myself to them by noting a few problems with a transitional period of their website, but organising a meeting is proving to be very difficult, due to a very full calendar for almost the next three weeks.

Dogs
Found a small dog on our doorstep Saturday. Looked after it for a couple of days, and it got picked up by the Lost Dog's Home today, who will hopefully find its owner. The dog meant that I missed by large delivery of hard-drives since I had to have multiple doors closed between dog and rabbit, and couldn't hear the (already defective) door-bell.

Finance::Quote
After much waiting, Finance::Quote 1.08 is finally out, and available at your local CPAN store. New quotelets, and a great many bugfixes feature in this new release. Thanks to everyone who submitted code, patches, ideas and suggestions!

GnuCash
Still rocks. The 1.8.x business features really do make a difference.

GnuCash
Okay, I can't do nice accounts payable/receivable with a cash accounting system, because as it was kindly pointed out to me, they only really make sense under accruals. In a cash-based system, you just ignore things which haven't happened yet. This leaves me with a dilemma, since moving to accruals costs me about $50/year in lost interest (no big deal compared to time saved), but also bumps me out of the Simplified Tax System for five years (STS), and I may not want to do that.

Accountants
Shopping around for accountants to talk about business structures, investing, tax, and other exciting things, like getting bumped out of the STS for five years because I want to change my books in such a way that the ATO will get more money.

Interchange
Beem playing with InterChange a bit. I'm quite, quite impressed. I'm looking at it for both use with PTA, and for the use of a number of customers.

Travel
Canberra mid-June, Sydney late June, Sydney again next week, Sydney again two weeks after that, Canberra in all likelyhood after that... Somehow I don't seem to be spending much time in my home city.

Hardware
Got a new scanner off Ian, since my old one is about to die. Haven't picked it up yet, hope to do so soon. Got a new UPS, courtesy of a friend who's since moved to the UK, need to schedule some downtime to install it.

Work
Stupidly busy. It's crazy. There was like a two week period where I hardly even saw my own office, since I had to be with a client saving the day, or in Sydney, or both.