You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Kittens, Guessing, Networking, Tax

Sluggy Freelance pointed to Puppybreak as their complaints department. Aww. :)

And lest we forget the cat-loving among us, there is also Kittenbreak.

For the record, I wouldn't say I was a dog person or a cat person... or a duck, pig or budgie-person, come to that. I don't have any desire to own living things that can crawl under the couch, make secret deposits under my bed, or gnaw on my books, and I'd be worried about the welfare of anything that I was responsible for - I feel its something of a personal triumph that I haven't managed to kill the houseplant given to me during my housewarming. Even if I can't remember what it's called. :)

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If you're wanting an interesting game that takes advantage of the power of modern search engines, then Guess the Google may be just what you're looking for. It displays the top 20 images for a search term, and you have to guess what the term was - it's kinda fun.

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Sabrina's father seems to have found the time-zone thing pretty tricky, since she got a call from him at 11:45pm the first night, and 4am the second. (I answered the phone both times, because I've got a receiver right next to my bed.) I found it quite funny, though it was a little hard to get to sleep after the 4am call - if it had happened again this morning, it might have moved from "amusing" to "annoying", but he called at about 8:30am instead, so I have great hopes for the future. ;)

We had a nice flatmate-bonding session last night, because we were trying to get their wireless networking going. Networking is firmly in the hardware support arena for me - and this is the arena where I'm in the "helpless Christian" category, rather than being the guy with the net and trident... Okay, that may be a metaphor too far. Anyway, the challenge of trying to get this stuff to work was compounded by the fact that neither of my flatmate's WinXP installations are in English. The French version wasn't so bad - I could generally guess what various buttons and menu items might be - but the Japanese was pretty inscrutable. And not being able to "drive" is pretty frustrating, especially when they appear to be clicking randomly while you're stopping to try and think.

Anyway, T's network card is set up, and S's card should be set up soon - if nothing else, I should be able to con one of the people coming to the party on Saturday from work to take a look.

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We got into a big discussion in the office about the correct tax strategy. I'm already paying provisional tax, so consensus seems to be that I should lower my withholding tax to 20%, and use the "extra" income in to lower the amount of interest I'm paying, and hand over the extra dosh during the provisional tax times. On one hand, that seems attractive; but on the other, the fact that my revolving credit account isn't really a real bank account makes everything that much more complicated to manage. :( Other people are planning to raise their withholding tax, so they can keep below the level that triggers provisional tax. Thank goodness I live somewhere with a relatively simple tax structure, rather than, say, the States.

Those of you who are employees don't know how lucky you are. ;)

In other employment news... I just got an email from HR pointing out that my contract only runs until July 1st. So I've now got to decide whether I want to renew until November 1st. This is complicated by the whole "should I ask for more money" thing, which you have to think about as a contractor (since you never get a raise otherwise). Given that they would be well and truly poked if I left in July, you might think that I have a fairly strong bargaining position - but it's always hard to tell whether the people you're negotiating with have any idea what you do. :)

Posted by svend at April 28, 2005 10:08 AM