I celebrate this holiday, it's a secular thing, called Xmas. Basically you've got your family gatherings and your spirit of giving. It happens at the same time as the lesser Christian holiday (the important one being Easter of course) and also some old pagan holiday, apparently, called Saturnalia . But everything grinds to a nice halt as far as business is concerned.

Well, yeah, partly because I've been under a lot of stress recently, let's say over the last six months. And I need a break! They always say that people starting businesses don't take enough breaks, I'm a pretty good case in point. But everyone hits their limit at some point and I'm desperately in need of a vacation. So sorry if I owe you a phone call or something.

This last week even has been something else. I rented an apartment, which is not a small thing for me. I also did all of the Xmas shopping - it's really, really unusual for me to leave it so much to the last minute. But I got almost everything that I wanted to get. I found out that the accountants at Deloitte think it's likely that we'll be able to get some money from SRED , which is really, really cool.

What's SRED? It's this nice program run by CRA that gives you money for your research and development work. It's not so complicated like NRC grants either, where you have to file ahead of time, and where the work has to be done by an academic (a researcher, student, or intern). With SRED you can apply work by your own employees, even yourself. You can also file after you did the work, which is really important if like me you don't know anything about government programs. Or didn't know anything about government programs.

Anyway, the point is that if, like me, you haven't actually been paying your RnD workers (like me), you can go back and back pay them (me) and get the government credit back for it. You have 180 days to do that under the Income Tax Act. Caveat, is that you have to pay them as an employee, which means tax withholdings. So it's not like it's free money ;-) But it looks like the SRED benefit it going to be more than the tax will work out to, so even if you're paying yourself, it's better than doing free work, and that's pretty damn good stuff!

So what else? The Search For Investment continues, the Development of Better Software continues, the Improvement of Sales continues, etc., etc. Dan at the Accelerator Centre has been very helpful in setting up meetings and so has Gary Will, Communitech s resident mentor.

Well, that's all for now. Ciao.