January for me was an interesting and varied month. Here is a quick look back at what I got up to in the month.
Read more

In Australia, it’s tax time again. This means that the tax office sends me nice letters saying how much I owe them for my HECS/HELP debt, how if I paid it all up front it’d reduce by X amount (if only I had that much money!) and how they don’t charge “interest” on the loan, they merely “index” it against the cost of living. What ever makes it easier to sleep at night. But recently I realised something simple: the Australian Tax Office charges interest not including amounts you’ve already paid.
Read more

There are times when 140 characters just isn’t enough, microblogging works but in this case I have a quote which would be put 86 characters over twitters limits (I tried):

And generally speaking, “large, deep-pockets organization(s)” are no more stable than a startup, from the grunt’s perspective. At any moment, you’re one spreadsheet away from being laid off to improve the quarterly statements.

It’s taken from a comment on the Slashdot article about the JRuby guys splitting from the Oracle/Sun behemoth. It is an interesting statement and something I feel is a rather accurate representation of the way life really is and a quite straight forward and direct statement of fact.

Yay for Macroblogging!