Category: Life: Personal

Aargh – a day after I receive my login details for the Inland Revenue (tax office) Self Assessment system, they send me a reminder saying I need to submit my tax return by the end of this month or pay a £100 fine. I thought I had to the end of the financial year (April). Gulp.

So I’ve had to spend the last 3 hours gathering all my receipts, P60s, bank statements etc to complete my tax return. The fun part is I put things like that in “a safe place” so they don’t get lost (legally I’ve got to retain them for 10 years!) – but I can’t always remember where the safe place is 🙁 . Anyway, found them, filled in the 10+ page tax return online and for the last 40 minutes I’ve been waiting for the tax office’s system to accept the return.

I filled it in on their website, clicked “continue/submit” a number of times and now I’ve got to wait ages for it to submit something to itself?

I could wait, but as I’ve got £45.78 of outstanding tax to pay (last year the tax office owed me money), I want to get it all cleared. But I can’t have the “tax reference code” from the tax office until the system has submitted the data to itself – grrr…

And there I was planning an enjoyable night “out on the town” tonight. Bah humbug!

Well, that’s good. Thanks to Neil’s suggestion about setting my templates to Static to make MTMacro work, I’ve now got my cute little smilies back 🙂 Yeah! The bad news is, I think I’ve got a hard drive failure on my home server. Last night I heard it making very strange chugging noises, SSH’d in and /var/log/messages was getting a lot of messages about potential failures of /dev/hda (the main HD). I shut it down and asked it to perform a FSCK (file system check) upon reboot, but as yet it hasn’t reappeared on my LAN. Looks like I’ll have to hook a monitor to the box and see what’s going on.

I just hope it hasn’t caused any damage to the software RAID0 system I’ve got configured: If so, I’ve lost nearly 400Gb of data (and if it’s taken the 4th HD with it – that’ll be 630Gb in total!). Next month I’m planning on buying a machine with 2Tb of storage in a RAID5 config so I’ll be really really annoyed if all that data’s gone [to give you an idea of the current storage requirements: That machine had around 600Gb of data on it, my “main” desktop machine has 270Gb of data on it, my laptop another 10Gb and then 150 CDs (practically 95Gb) that all needs transferring to a single server machine…

Yep, I’m a “data collector” 😉

Apart from that, I haven’t done much since yesterday. Went bed early yesterday (8.30pm), woke up by the Work servers at 2am, went back to sleep by around 5am then woke up again at 9.08am (without my alarm clock going off and 8minutes after I was meant to be at work!). I’m actually putting together a little submission to Behind The Front Line which I’m hosting for a mate, and believe me, the sort of strange and annoying queries I’ve dealt with today at work could probably double their current contributions!

Still to do:
* Finish the redesign of this blog: What do you think of it so far? Too bluish?
* Start the design of my own personal site (and upload holiday photos)
* Start the basic design of my father’s site and install a good CMS system for him
* Redesign my “old main money spinner” site
* Redesign/overhaul Beebware.com
* Launch at least 3 more sites
I’m planning on having most of them done by the end of this month. You can start laughing now 😉

Yeah, I know – I’m getting old (a quarter of a century!). Just wish I could remember why I bothered setting my phone to remind me it’s my birthday today – perhaps I thought that at this point my whatchamecallit thingybob would be so bad that I’d whizbangedthingy it’s my birthday today (the 15^th of June).

Happy Birthday Richy!
Happy Birthday? How old am I?
25 sir!
Ooh, that’s terrible. Only yesterday I was 24, today I’m 25, by the end of the week I’ll be in my thirties. At least I’ve got all my marbles…Ah, don’t you just love the green ones

(with apologies to Spitting Image and the late great Ronald “Do the Ron” Regan)