The news that there’s backlash against a proposed “Flood Tax” saddens and disappoints me. Here’s the deal: Julia Gillard, our illustrious Prime Minister, yesterday announced a $5.6 billion flood recovery package, made up of a one-off $1.8 billion levy and $3.8 billion worth of funding cuts and deferrals.

It exempts anyone earning less than $50 grand

It is calculated at half a percent for anything you earn over $50 grand, and one percent of anything you earn over $100 grand.

And obviously it exempts flood victims.

In real terms this means that those getting by on a $150K wage will pay up about $750 over the year but on average wage earners are going to pay around $80 next financial year to help get the state of Queensland back on its feet. This is the cost of a couple cartons of beer or a night out at the movies for the family.

Me, I’m willing to pay this levy and I can understand there might be some opposition from those who’ve already willingly donated  money to the cause, but it’s not like it’s going to break anyone’s bank. I’m not exactly living large on six figures but I don’t think I’ll miss that money.

Related articles

• Flood levy ‘just plain dumb’: Hockey (theage.com.au)
• ‘All should pay as all are affected’ (theage.com.au)
• Australian government to introduce ‘flood tax’ (marketwatch.com)
• Australia unveils new flood tax (bbc.co.uk)
• Australia: Flood Tax To Pay For Clean-Up (news.sky.com)

Our company did well this year.

Of course I’m kidding. We actually got something quite generous and greatly needed.

According to Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President at Google, Wave will no longer be developed and will be put in maintenance at the end of this year:

We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

This is pretty sad, really. Wave was a product ahead of it’s time and, despite a legion of loyal fans (including me!), didn’t have the uptake that Google had hoped for. I had plans on moving my blog, and pretty much my entire online life, over to Google Wave and other Google Apps.

Perhaps Google will be incorporating what they’ve learned from Wave and Buzz into their social networking foray. Google recently dropped $100M into the laps of games developers Zynga.

Related articles

• Google Kills Wave, Its Collaboration Tool (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Google Wave Crashes (searchengineland.com)
• RIP Google Wave (money.cnn.com)
• Google throws in the towel, Google Wave to shut down (geek.com)
• Google Drops Google Wave (pcworld.com)
• Google Wave’s goodbye (tech.fortune.cnn.com)

An interesting web comic/graphic I found on the tubes. I can see that that there’s a lot of truth in this. In today’s society, we do indeed have in infinite appetite for distractions which lead us away from what is really important in our lives and I’m somewhat guilty myself. Can these distractions ruin a person? You betcha.

I have a couple side projects going which I’m putting a little time into in the hopes of making some residual income. My strategy so far has been to develop mostly static reference web pages. I’m into Sci-Fi, so I figure why not go with a booklists (novels, novellas, etc) of favourite Sci-Fi shows. Obvious ones are Star Wars, which has a heap of EU material, and Star Trek, which I’m mostly unfamiliar with but I’ll learn, and a couple others which I’ll eventually work on. Once I have things set up, there won’t be that much work to do; I just have to keep a look out for new releases and include them on my site which will be easy.

Turns out the current book lists for these two shows is more than 100 books each which is going to take plenty of time to colate, so I made the decision to go with a popular series of books called Twilight. There’s only four books, but there’s scope for DVDs, posters, toy action figures and the like.

So I’ve deployed a WordPress blog and developed the site, added content, registered a couple domains, signed up as an affiliate with the likes of Amazon, Poster Planet and even Google Adsense. I’m proud to say that it is paying off! I logged into Google Adsense this evening and found that I have made an impressive grand total of 1c!  Woo Hoo! Once I make it to $20, I think, Google sends me a cheque which I bank, thankyou very much.

It’s small fish, right now, of course. I’m not planning on retiring any time soon.  I have an idea for a more interactive web site which I want to model on another favourite haunt of mine which is very successful. That will come after the other booklist websites I am working on (see the links in “My Sites” on the right hand nav bar when they come on line). Tweaking the headers and meta tags is probably the hardest thing to do in this whole exercise, and that wasn’t all that diffucult. Search google for “Twilight Book List” and you’ll see me in the top 10 sites. A bit more refinement might see me in the top three. Google Analytics tells me I’m popular in New Zealand and Latvia, of all places.

What are you waiting for!? Check my site out, click the Google Adsense links adverts, and buy some stuff at Amazon.com using my convenient links! Tell your friends and family. You won’t find these books any cheaper!

I’m assisting mum and dad with their internet presence which will in turn help them with their new Internet business. This involves setting mum up with her own domains, Gmail, Facebook, a Blog, Youtube, and perhaps a couple other sites like Twitter. It’s going to take a while to learn the concepts of some of these sites but it shouldn’t be too difficult.

The Internet business they’re getting into takes a bit of getting my head around but they’re fairly confident that, through hard work, they can make it work and turn a profit. I wish them good luck and god speed. Hopefully with hard work and dedication and some support from me and Suzanne on the technical aspects they can make it work.