Dark Thoughts

It's been one of those slow days today. Had an arguement with the bank this morning about why they charged me an overlimit fee before my account was over the limit. Apparently it's illegal for them to actually report the charged interest to my account until the end of the statement date, but it's not illegal for them the deduct a fee against the interest charge in the meantime.

It's simply not right. I'm going to fight this one.

I spent last night teaching my housemate the basics of MYOB, so that he can manage the accounts for our house. To the casual reader, that might seem like a bit of an over the top exercise, but seriously, we are going to rent this out, so need to start recording equity positions for distributions, Capital purchases for depreiciation purposes etc. Plus, my housemate really wants to learn the software.

It was a bit frustrating. Apparently he either doesn't like my keyboard or he is Capilal Letter phobic, because he just wanted to type everything in in lowercase. I guess it does get the information across, but it is seriously hard to read. Sentence case is the way to go. Anyway, he's responsible for it, and he needs to explain to our accountant why it's all in lower case, so I'll let him sort it out.

Anyway, the technical side went all right. We covered the banking part of MYOB (Deposits, Withdrawals and Reconcilitations) as well as a bit of an introduction to the Journal Entries. The highlight, as always is getting to stamp all the bits of paper with the "Entered" stamp. Seriously, this must be the reason why accountants do their job, for the big collection of self-inking stamps that they get to acquire.

Anyway, it prooved to be a nice little distraction from me needing to do my own data entry, so I just did lots of filing instead.

In other news - Mongolia in 4 weeks. Looks like it will be fun, but am picking up some travel tips from my cow-orkers in the meantime.

Also, a friend of mine got in contact with me today and wants to work on some collaboration work doing some music. It should be great, because he's got an awsome talent. I think we'll be able to do some seriously good music together. I'll torture the Kurzweil and I'll let him mangle with the DP4+.

I'm also planning on how I'm going to restructure my studio for my trip to China. Probably sell off lots of the boxes and get a Kurzweil KSP8 as a audio interface via firewire. That would rock.

Another strange thing happened to me today. I was going through my in tray and found a letter addressed to me detailing a substantial pay-rise. Wicked. A very pleasant surprise. It's left me in a very good mood, despite my earlier banking conflicts.

Blah, anyway, I've got stuff what needs to be finished before I can go home, and then to Toastmasters. I've got to do a speech tonight. It's going to be called Something about Zen, and it will be a parallel between my experiences on the back of a motorbike between Izmir and Assos in Turkey, and the plot of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Hope it goes OK. I've only had half a day to prepare.

Should be fun though.