I had a great dicussion with my bank manager the other day- wen't something like:

CA: I need to be able to see the statment of account for my on call forex electronically via internet banking.

BM: We can't do that- you should use desk bank, our $30+ a month 'business' product.

CA: Hmmm... that feels like daylight robery... but do tell me more. Does it work over the internet.

BM: Well, sort of, you use a modem to dial into it.

CA: WTF!?! I thought modems went out long ago. I don't even have a phone line.

And so it is. We do not have analog telephone lines at all in Wellington. At the office we have a VOIP PABX (an Asterisk Linux Box) and attached to this we have some SIP phones. At home I am getting TelstraClear cable turned on (they now let you have the internet without a phoneline which is a darn lot better than Telecom) and we'll setup a VPN tunnel to the office and attach a SIP phone off the PABX at home too. We already have a great VPN tunnel; running between our ISA servers in Dunedin and Wellington and we are going to put an Asterisk box at the Dunedin end so that we can VOIP out onto the University or Otago phone network- we have a number of on campus customers. We are alos doing A LOT of Skype calling- several of our customers now use it as their primary communication mechanism with us- we can have multi party phone conferences, for 90 minutes, for FREE!

We're also really taking advantage of MSN Messenger a heap more now. We use the Remote Assistance feature for pairs based programming at a distance.

Other cool things that we are doing include using MS Virtual Server to run a number of our key servers- the real benefit for us is the ability to scale up more easily without doing a full rebuild each time. Just pick up the required server images and drop them on a new box.

So a lot of this stuff really excites me at the moment. I'm talking with a number of customers and friends about how this can help their business too. Finally we're looking at some new business opportunities that take advantage of all this stuff.

Exciting times ahead.

Our work with the National Poisons Center www.toxinz.com has been published as a MS Case Study

We were in Computerworld this week with a wee case study on our project for the New Zealand National Poisons Center. This was a pretty full on project and it has some really smart technology in it- some of which we can't really talk about that much.

Big thanks to the team @ Kognition who worked on it- it was pretty hard yakka at times. Led by Nick Head, our illustrious CTO, the team was Jason McBratney, Simon 'Skip' Gardiner and myself.

From Left to Right..

Nick, Chris (Me), Jason, Skip... location. Out the front of our office door.

It don't just rain... it pours....

Bob McNeill, who did some contracting for us at the end of last year has (once again) won the New Zealand Music award in the folk music section.... well done Bob!

RIANZ web site is STUFFED at the moment- some one please fix it for them!... So can't post a link to the award details....

One of my company student interns, Mengqiu Wang, received a prestigious University of Otago International Scholarship.

Quite chuffed... he and some of the other members of the team have been working on a REALLY kick ass project over the past few months with .NET on an interesting new platform. Can't say much more than that as we're still under NDA.

Well done Mengqiu!

I'm doing a speaking tour for a series of Microsoft MSDN events in early November.

I'll be in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch talking about Web Service Architectures and the Microsoft Application Blocks.

When the registration site is posted I'll let y'all know the link.

That's right. Kognition has shifted offices... again.

We shifted into the Centre for Innovation at Otago University.

We've pimp'd up the office pretty nicely (see photos below).

One is of the area we call the Glasshouse- it's got two all glass walls looking out onto the University and we've got nice leather couches, cacti and an air hockey table in there.

The other half of the room is where we work- though it also has our DJ Setup. It'll also be where our big ass server rack is gonna go when it arrives- servers have arrived, just no rack yet.

Anyway- check the photos.... Bill, come visit, Casey, export yaself here

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...wow! I was Googling my own name (to find a recent photo of myself) and found that I had been quoted in the Chapman Tripp Tech Law newsletter. This is actually kinda cool as Chapman Tripp were the only law firm I applied to after finishing law school. I think they were keen to have me but it was still going to be a HUGE drop in earning from being an IT guy...

The Mobile Devices Division at Microsoft recently published a case study on an applicaton built by Kognition Consulting for Delta Utrilities Limited.

View the case study here.

http://idg.net.nz/news.nsf/UNID/221F2341D3B330A9CC256EFD001E6E5E?OpenDocument

The success of an initial online evening course on ASP.Net, coordinated by Dunedin consultancy Kognition, has laid good ground for the formation of regional .Net user-groups around New Zealand broadcasting their meetings in real-time to developers in the other regions.

http://idg.net.nz/news.nsf/UNID/CA2B98B8ABC54F3CCC256EFC00289B21?OpenDocument

Chris Auld, managing director of mobility software specialist Kognition, spoke to Computerworld earlier this month about Backdoor.Bardor.A, the first Windows CE Trojan. He says it wasn't a serious threat, but was a harbinger of more serious mobile worms and viruses that would come once virus writers started looking "outside the box".

http://idg.net.nz/news.nsf/UNID/B4D0FF30288C4E74CC256EF200263010?OpenDocument

Backdoor.Bardor.A, the first alleged Windows CE backdoor Trojan horse, isn't much of a threat, says Chris Auld, managing director of mobility software specialists Kognition.

I'm about to start aggregating some blog entries from my blog into the website of my company. All apolitical posts of course. This is just a test post.

You heard it there first I'll be speaking at Tech Ed in the second to last session of the whole conference... eeek....

More details as I prepare my content... be sure to look out for me... I'll be the one wearing the red shoes! I am allowed to wear my red shoes under the speaker dress code aren't I!?!

But who are the Keynote speakers this year???
Steve Riley?

Good to see Tony Goodhew back in this neck of the woods!

And Michael Howard... Nice one....