this is not a drill

it's my first 4th in KC! I have been fully apprised of the central nature of blowing shit up to celebrate the birth of a nation, courtesy of the fireworks that have been going off in the neighbourhood since the 1st. The vacation in the middle of the week sucks. I am just going to be off for the whole week now, and with the number of people at work who wisely took the rest of the week off, it's difficult to get anything done. In other news, my cubemate is heading to chicago for a week to do Veritas training, so I will be gloriously un-cramped for 5 days, then he's back for a week, then he's on vacation for 2 weeks. I can get so much done instead of us tripping over each other. Rule. I'm also madly trying to get my CCNA 2.0 testing set up so I can get at least one cert under my belt before the end of July, and then get cracking on the Oracle, Sun and CCDA certs. It's tough trying to find time to study, but it's working out. It's also the end of the finanical year in .au, so I'm expecting a major tax refund due to the vagaries of the .au tax system. Basically, it works like this: I got taxed as if I was earning the full amount of $$ for the year. But I only worked 6 months of it. Therefore, I will be assessed as only having earned as a salary for the whole year a whopping 50% of what I was taxed at. This means that I paid 50% tax on 50% of my salary, which ends up being $BIG_NUM of pesos. Year, it's in PacRim pesos, but I'm not going to sneeze at it. I should be able to pay back my parents and pay off my visa card bill and have a sizeable chunk of change left over to finally buy a *nix based system or 3. I'm slowly going mad without access to a Unix system, or at least that's how I'm justifying the purchases that are coming down the track. i also need to put wireless in cuz I'm sick of trailing a phone cord wherever I go to get online. If TWC and Earthlink would get their shit together, I'll hand over shekels to them for cable modem access. Which reminds me.. time to send my weekly email to them. Toodles - don't blow yourselves up, and consume much food!