Had a not too bad weekend, which I spent with my brother and a couple of my cousins (whom some of you might remember from my 21st birthday bash) in Redcliffe. Hanging out with my cousins means that I’m exposed to hours on end of hard core hip hop, which isn’t such a bad thing every once in a while. Some of it is very clever, and some of it even sounds OK. But it’s always nice to come back to the music of the sixties and classical pieces. Vivaldi, Bach, Tchaikovsky and company have been getting a lot of play time on my computer recently. Not that they were played with low frequency before. The thing is, I do most of my work at home now, and the classical pieces help to create a nice work environment. If I play lyrical pieces, I tend to sing along, which means I can’t concentrate on the task at hand. I seem to be able to hum along to Bach etc and not lose concentration. I think it actually improves it.
I’ve added some MPEG movies to my web site. They are here and here. They are quite small, so it won’t take long to download them.
This year I’m going to have to seek help from a tax professional in order to complete my tax return. Completing the supplementary section is extremely difficult. In previous years, Perpetual Investments sent me a very comprehensive guide telling me how to calculate different values that I needed to fill in at various places thoughout the supplementary tax return form. This year they’ve only done half the job, and recommended getting help from a tax accountant. I don’t even know what half the stuff means (nor do I really care): franked and unfranked dividends, discounted capital gains, CGT concession, modified passive income, foreign tax credits and so on and so forth. So Perpetual sent me a tax statement with all these different values on it, but I’ve not a clue what to do with them (it’s not a simple matter of finding the right box on the tax form and copying the values). I remember from last year there was a lot of adding and subtracting stuff together, which isn’t difficult if you know which stuff to add or subtract from which other stuff. Hence, my need for a tax accountant this year.
I’d hoped to do some Ph.D work this weekend. I’ve done nothing besides a tiny little bit of coding. I also have a paper to finish writing a presentation to prepare. The coming week is going to be very busy because, as I said in my last entry, I’ve still got some marking to do as well.
