Sponsor's Message

On Friday I was all set to roll out the "New Aardvark" this morning but events seem to have conspired against me.

My oldest PC, containing all the newest code, went belly-up on Sunday when a thunderstorm produced some momentary blips on the mains.

Fortunately (because I always follow my own advice) everything was backed up onto CDR -- but there's a good few hours still involved in restoring the key parts of those backups to a new machine kindly loaned to me by the CAD Design Scbool.

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination. 7

And, since it never rains (and thunders) but it pours, I see that the DNS for the Aardvark Forums seems to have turned to custard.

So, the future has been postponed for a day and I'll be working hard to get things back in order around here (re-installing about a gazillion apps and setting up a new staging server on this box).

It's at times like this I realise just how hard it is to scrape by on around $10K per year of income -- yeah, honest, that's about the annual total of this household's income each for each of the past three years.

As a result, most of the hardware I'm running right now is years old and some of it (my printer, a video card, a power-supply and other miscellaneous bits) has been kindly donated by Aardvark readers -- just to keep things going.

Of course I could be flipping burgers down at McD's but I fear that (at 52) I'm a little old for that.

Thank goodness I'm living in Tokoroa where rents are about $120-$160 per week, houses still have wood-fired heaters and you can walk almost anywhere. This keeps the cost of living far lower than it would be in larger centres such as Auckland or Wellington.

The good news is that, according to the IRD calculator this household will be entitled to a tax rebate of almost $300 -- woo hoo!

The bad news is that this entitlement will only last until mid-May (6 weeks) because my daughter (who is still at school) then turns 19. It seems that the "Working for Families" scheme then drops us like a hot spud.

Somehow, the government seems to think that 19-year-olds stop eating food, stop wearing out their clothes, don't take showers, and generally don't cost anything to support.

So, once again we're back to the crazy situation where, despite living well below the official poverty line, we're paying a fist-full of tax while others earning as much as ten times more, are getting hand-outs.

I'm glad I'm not given to bouts of depression or I'd be feeling rather down right now -- but hey, life's too short for that kind of thing so I'll stop typing and start shuffling CDRs.

Fingers crossed -- *tomorrow* the sun will shine, birds will sing, and the "New Aardvark" will grace your screens with its content.

Free Advertising!
Yes, while I sort out the issue of sponsorship, I'm offering loyal Aardvark readers the chance to have their venture advertised for free on these pages.

If you send me your 150x150 banner (no more than 20KB) and a URL to point at, I'll put it in a rotation to appear in the area currently allocated to sponsorship.

Because of my government-imposed state of impoverishment, I won't be charging for this exposure and there's no obligation to anyone -- but neither are their any promises ;-)

Drop me a line if you'd like to take advantage of this.

Did you notice
As eagle-eyed readers will have noticed, sponsorship of this fine blog/column is up for grabs.

Those who have already made enquiries about sponsoring Aardvark should hear back from me this week - and anyone else who might like to do so should drop me a line ASAP.

Tell us all and see what others have to say in The Aardvark Forums

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