So we're using Xero for one of my businesses, MedRecruit.

I'm in a non executive role and we're all scattered around the country so it provides a great way to peek at the balance sheet or cashflow forecast where-ever I am.

I really like the way that you can dril down through all the accounts to look at transactions in detail too.

I've used a few other desktop accounting packages in my time (I currently use Quickbooks for my personal company and family trust) and they really are all a complete pain in the arse to use for an infrequent user like myself. I'm sure if you learn how to use them they are fine but honestly I expect stuff to be so intuitive that a geek like me can just pick it up and run with it.

I've got good basic accounting knowledge and I've picked up all I need to know about Xero just by using it. No documentation required.

As a small business co-owner Xero really is the ducks nuts for keeping myself aware of the goings on.

Two thumbs up from me.

What I'd really love is a chopped down version with a limited number of transactions per month that will allow me to use it for my smaller stuff at a cost point that I can justify more easily to myself.

[Update]

I am reliably advised that Xero has discounted rates for your second and subsequent businesses and even more discounted rates for non GST registered entities like your famil trust. So I've registered two of my other companies with Xero and my trust. Will blog how my move from casual observer to somewhat more active user goes.

Tim has a post up titled 'Trademe Invest in Ruby on Rails'.... which is a bit misleading really.

It's more like 'Trademe invest in Zoomin, who happen to use Ruby on Rails'.

Good on Zoomin for gettig their claws ito Trademe on this one. I thik it's fantastic... but it's pushig it a bit far to note that 'Trade me have 'lauched their first Rails page'. If it were written in PHP they would have launched 'thier first PHP Page' and the same for JSP. Don't think it's too likely that Trademe will be making the move off ASP.NET anytime soon.

When you buy someone elses technology you generally get it as is where is

A funny little example I saw this morning was Sysinternals Process Explorer. Microsoft now own this but there's still a right click menu option to 'Google' a process name.

Will be interesting to see how easy it is for them to Mashup the Zoomin stuff into Trademe though... in particular whether most of the 'mashing' occurs on the Ruby side or the ASP.NET side.

Kiwis have a long history of paying too much for Aussie companies- Ansett and AAPT are the best examples.

I think with the TradeMe/Fairfax deal we might just get one back.

While TradeMe is no lemon (the others arguably were) I really struggle to see how they can justify the price they paid.

If you stack it against even the exorbitant per connection fees pad during the electricity market de-regulation it just seems out of whack. Does anyone know how Fairfax proposes to grow their investment? Into Australia, maybe, but certainly I see ver little opportunity for growth beyond that- even Aus will be hard work.

Looks like the dollar is continuing to get NAILED. It was always going to happen- was just a matter of when.

At Kognition we've been holding quite a lot of our working capital in US$ lately in anticipation- it's nice that it's finally started doing something

I think we've had the big fall now and we'll setlle in around 63-64 cents for a good few months. That said we could see a number of the mom and pop uridashi holders bail which could further catalyze things- good time to be holding forex anyway

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.

I've just listened to Adam Cogan on Dot Net Rocks.

Adam talks about his cool rule enforcement applications for VS.Net and SQL.

You also get to find out that he takes his whole team (30 odd people) to a beach house once a year and they all get up and go for runs @ 6:30am..... Now there is an idea! It's a great DNR episode and it gives some great insight into why Adam is able to run such a tight development ship.

Listening on some new headphones that I just got. I find my Sennheiser HD25 muffs a bit uncomfortable for use at the office so I got some cheapish ($120 vs $600 for HD25) Sennheiser phones- HD465. They are open ear designs- i.e. they just sit as flat pads on your ears so REALLY comfortable.

Well. For the last few months I've pretty much fallen off the face of the Earth blogging wise. A few reasons:

1. We've been working really hard.
   We've been polishing off some product development which means that we've had to work hard on both the product and ensuring that we remain profitable and able to pay the bills.
2. I've shifted to Wellington
   So we've now opened a Wellington Office. Will post some piccies soon. This has meant some reasonable time spent geting stuff organised. Yesterday we got the ISA boxes at each end talking to each other. It's really cool so I now have a Dunedin IP subnet and a Wellington IP subnet and we can route between them over a L2TP over IPSec tunnel. Means I am getting 15ms pings from WLG to DUD- it really is just like being there.
3. I've been putting in some good gym time
   Been doing a lot of Spinning at the Gym which is really kicking the BF% down. Have paired back the weights for the last wee while but I'm going to kick it back up again soon.
4. MTBing.
   I'm back riding a mountain bike quite a bit again. Riding to work most days too. Got a nice 2nd hand Specialized Epic Pro on eBay that I picked up in Vancouver last month.

I'll blog a bit more detail on some of these things over the next wee while. But anyway- going to make a real effort to blog more 'cos I've been slack.

OH! And if you haven't already noticed I tend to majorly over use hyphens- not sure why- I just do. I've found someone elase who does too! I'm reading Robert Fisk's book on the Middle East at the moment- he apostrophises too... will post a detailed review on the book once I've finished. It is heavy going but very interesting.

Rod Drury wants a new Knob.

One of my mates @ e-Media had a knob like that.
It was certainly big... and it flashed when you turned it.

I have a different Knob. Mine's got buttons and all sorts. Quite nice really.

O)K... so Phil came back and commented on my post from yesterday....

One suggestion was to support mapping between tags. I still have issues with ontological mapping like this as I think that it remains both error prone and a time consuming PITA. But, I did some thinking while abluting this morning (the little boys room is a great cognative stimulant) and I reckon that we must be getting close to being able to draw inference mappings from real world data.

What do I mean from this. Well. Google has a whole schwag of information on various sites around the world that would, IMHO, cover pretty much every conceivable topic. One would think that they should be able to use their Googlebase to build some sort of inference engine that would give a ranked inference between potential tag terms. So, from my example yesterday, Canoeing and Kayaking would sit very close together on the inference list. Thus tag ontologies and the mappings between them could become a fuzzy concept and we could use fuzzy algebra to help us build systems around them.

I played around with this sort of autmatic inferencing in music files in my final year AI paper @ varsity. Used Self Organising Maps to cluster similar music. Google could use some sort of Neural Net to cluster key words out of their database. Then this cluster map could be used to help map between concepts in a fuzzy fashion.

The advantage of this approach is that these maps could then be represented to the user in 2D or 3D space and coupled with some funky zooming could be used to help solve the UI problem that Phil talks about.

Phil Cockfield has been writing quite a bit on tagging recently.

He's currently talking about tagging emails at source rather than destination.

This is all well and good except that to work really well we need to either

a) Share the same set of tags

b) Alow the sender to 'pollute' the receivers tag list

And of course the whole semantics issue comes up....

For example if someone from the UK tags an email with 'Canoeing' I might miss it because I'm only interested in Kayaking.

OK... so I'm pretty travel crazy over the next few weeks... blogiing may be light again for a bit

25 Aug DUD-AKL
31 Aug AKL-BNE
2 Sep BNE-WLG
5 Sep WLG-DUD
11 Sep DUD-LAX
16 Sep LAX-DUD
27 Sep DUD-SEA
31 Sep SEA-DUD

Done

Rod has some stuff on NZ's First Class experience.

I'm inclined to agree that it's not super but I reckon the seats are actually that bad... Much better than NZ business.

The NZ inflight entertainment experience is LAME LAME LAME. When I fly to Seattle this week it will be the Fourth time I have seen the same bloody movies in NZ in the past few months.

Roll on the new business class... it looks IMHO to be about the best business offering around (bar maybe Lufthansa but only cos I want in flight internet.... which they have even in coach).

FWIW. Like Rod we have a back of the plane company policy..... but the odd upgrade is nice

Rod also comments on the lounge experiences...

IMHO the Air NZ lounges (Intl ones excepted) are pretty bloody good. Every other Star Alliance lounge I've been in recently has been pretty ass.... I mean in Singapore they even give you tyhe second class treatment by bouncing Gold Star Alliance to the 'Premiere Lounge'... Premiere my ass. I reckon Air NZs lounges and Koru Club in general spank the pants of most others...

Brendon from Provoke was in our student rag this week- in the Bunch of 5s Question and Answer section

Obviously down here trying to pilfer some student talent....

Pity I was in Perth otherwise I might have had to drag him out for a Tech Ed Geek Festesque Boozup @ a student pub.

My friend Sandy (in Singapore) has blogged about the ANZAC day service we attended there.

It was quite an amazing experience. I purchased a Poppy - my 3rd for the year having also purchased one in Shanghai @ the get together there, one at the Shell Station in Huntly (on the actual Friday before ANZAC in NZ).

As dawn broke I left my Poppy atop the headstone of 'An Unknown New Zealand Soldier'.

We've now got Rodney Hide asking for suggestions for Parliamentary Question time on his blog.... really a rather funny situation.

Over on rivers.org.nz there is a discussion about power stations- we kayaker care very much about power stations.

here is my response...

I always get my ass kicked for this answer. But IMHO Nuclear is not a bad option. Only problem with it is it is BLOODY expensive.
But, for a clean green country like ours it is ideal.

Minimal emissions (Coal/Gas to some degree), just Nuke waste which is pretty manageable or at the very least exportable. Minimal visual polution (wind farms), no damming rivers (hydro), small in size (solar), reliable (all of the above save for Coal/Gas).

The other good thing we could do is stop selling Comalco electricity at below market rates. Comalco is basically just an electricity exporting mechanism. Ship the bauxite in, use the cheap power, ship the aluminium out. Export electricity.

Paul Andrew, MS's Wellington based Dev Evangelist is moving on to Redmond. We'll be sad to see you go mate.... been great working with you. Next time I'm in Redmond we're sure hjas hell gonna get a group of the Kiwi expats together and go to Wades Gunshop for a blast up.

It's Orientation Week this week @ Otago University... The talent would leave even Tim Huffman speechless!

I used to really love it on web forums where every once in a while someone would dredge up a cool post from times gone by....

S here is a post dredged out of the back blocks of my blog on Airline Excess Baggage Charges.....

Anyone have any similar insights?

How about a link next to the expiry of an auction to allow me to add it to my Outlook calendar?

Yes Sir... that is correct.... your Subaru Lagacy really is only a 'Remuera' 4WD....

flood.wmv (391.74 KB)

* Remuera is a wealthy, old money suburb in Auckland, New Zealand notable for it’s palatial estates, four-wheel drives and middle-aged housewives who refer to each other as “daaahling.”

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 former work mates is a Dad... Congrats guys... what a cutie...

Makes me feel old... fact I'm getting married next Sat doesn't help

There is much ado about a sheep on a recent postage stamp... Why on earth politicians like Katherine Rich (an otherwise generally intelligent polly) need to get involved I don't know.

But in that vein I've come to the concusion that the sheep stamp is the all but inevitable politically correct by-product of a United Future/Labour Coalition Govt.... it is a chemically castrated solo dad.

So I fell off the blogging wagon for a few months due to too much work. I'm back in action now... watch this space.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/15.html#a9204

Scoble has been fanning the flames around the copyright nature of blog material. Wearing my techno-legal guy hat for two secs... how about incorporating some sort of license metadata into the RSS standard... that's what XML is for isn't it? It's eXtensible for a reason.

This would allow publishers to indicate to aggregators how their content may be used- it's almost like DRM but without the big stick. Like an advanced form of robots.txt. It could allow things such as a copyright/attribution notice to be appended and so forth.

Someone asked about contracting in the UK on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to- a mate in Auckland who has been there done that posted a fantastic reply. Reproduced here for your information and pleasure.

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

IMAGE_00093.jpg (32.53 KB)

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Scoble has the details here....

Dunno why the hell they changed it in the first place....

Ok... so Rob has re-ignited the flame @ http://robertlevy.net/ and the first post back he talks about his car... and his insurance... the man is insane... let me quote a little.

Getting screwed on car insurance.  Now that I actually have my own car I gotta start paying insurance and boy does that suck.  Right now I'm paying over 250/month...

This is just mad...US$250 a month == NZ$384 a month... To put that in perspective, that is NZ$4 more than I pay to insure my Subaru GT Legacy Twin Turbo 206kw Extremely Nickable For Ram Raiding 'Space Rocket With Wheels'....

And more importantly that's NZ$380 per year, not per month.

Eee youch!.... Should I ever take the red pill I'll sure as hell be joining Ericgu @ the LBS  and buying myself a shiny new bike... can't believe Eric doesn't like the color scheme on the Litespeed..... Titanium is like... so sexy!

Sorry to all of those RSS subscribers out there.... the recent run on self congratulatory blog posts is becuase I've decided to make the news page on our new look company web site simply a tap off a category on my blog. That way it is harder for me to neglect the all important comapny news... like I have done in the past.

So. Going forward you will get the odd PRish post coming out of this blog too..... should make a nice change from some of the other ranting I do.

OK so I'm on the brawn push over the next few months... especially given how sore my legs were after skiing the other day. I can leg press pretty big weights but it seems that my legs still got realy sore skiing so I think the problem is in my stabilisers not being strong enough. What's everybody doing for lower body stabiliser work?

I can just manage 1/2 a dozen Swiss Ball squats but that's a fairly perilous exercise to do Tried doing one legged medicine ball squats today but too unco-ordinated. Anyone have any ideas? Suggestions?

Rory blogged about a night in Tacoma without internet....

Kinda got me thinking... I managed 5 days without earlier this year when I was in Fiordland... but as a general rule I'm never more than 0 meters/feet from my Smartphone so really I'm hardly ever without the internet.

Just to show how wonderful the Google ranking system... Technology Head Me who gets most of his Google karma from links with technology sites is ranked @ #2 site for the search term Alison Annan

http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%22alison+annan%22&btnG=Search&meta

What a crazy world we live in.... I've posted on this before here, but I wonder if, in this age of all over the subject range blogs, Google are doing anything to correlate their ranking system with subject clustering.

OK, so I'm a day late... But monday was a snow day here in Dunedin. Nick thought I'd be cold... but not me! Office Dog and I were out by 8am in shorts and T Shirt (well he was in his birthday suit) going for a run. Herewith some photos... off my Smartphone I'm afraid...

Iliciting suggestions for content/functionality for your theoretical internal developer portal

Oh yes please......

But seriously... developers work in all sorts of different ways- IMHO the last thing they want is some company wide uber portal to constrain their lives. Give me blogs and Google- that's a pretty good toolset to be completely honest. Google is my most important productivity tool- I'd just love some metrics on how many searches I do a day.

I'm pleased Mr Dee didn't come to my session on smart clients, Val and Gabe gt a bit of a roasting...  *

I'll have to write up my review sometime over the next few days... just REALLY busy..... and got to do GST today!

I agree on poor old Nic's session... the drilling was crazy... I left and stormed down to the speakers room and told some people to start rolling shit down hill!

[OK.... Quick Brainfart Below]

To be completely honest I'm not as keen on Sky City as a venue. I really liked the Aotea center because it was spread out, had lots of room and has some character. The rooms are not as good as Sky City maybe, but, they've just done a major refit.

I didn't actually get to many sessions at Tech Ed this year- was busy reworking my slide deck to remove all the content I presented @ Security Summit. In the end I only had two people who had been to the security summit presentations in my session so I could have represented some of that exciting content.

My session went pretty well. Got through a couple of Demos. My Smart Client deployment demo went well apart from the fact that I couldn't get my initial MSI deployment to work so I had to XCopy deploy. Deployment really is the best feature of smart clients. We have one of our applications deployed from invercargil to Kaitaia and updated automagically over the internet.... Really is useful.

I think that I spoke fairly well but that I could probably do with refining my slide deck a little- had a bit too much detail on some of the slides. I really wanted to make it an interactive session... but everyone was pretty tired Daryl Burling and Brent Clarke helped kick things off though.

Will be interesting to see my feedback. Anyway... gotta go do some work. More on Tech Ed from me (including jumping off the Sky Tower) later!

*[UPDATE] Mr Dee did come to my first session (the DNUG Meeting) and said it was a 'must not miss'

We've now got an 'office' dog around Kognition.

Toby is a wee terror who has just today learnt to climb the stairs to the office. Provided he is good and stays relaxed on the bean bags I'll let him stay... otherwise he's going out the back!

Michael Kleef is talking about how he tried to make his session more interactive for Tech Ed this year...

I really want to start getting my sessions more interactive too- tried to get this years Tech Ed one more interactive. The fact that it was 2nd to last session made it a bit tough...

Looks like Michael was using bribes... must remember to take some bribes next time

Will have to wait and see how my evals turn out....

Now you all know that I'm by no means a religious nutcase. But this is really funny...

Our Father, who 0wnz h34V3n, j00 r0ck!
May all 0ur base someday be belong to you!
May j00 0wn earth just like j00 0wn h34V3n.
Give us this day our warez, mp3z, and pr0n through a phat pipe.
And cut us some slack when we act like n00b lamerz, just as we teach n00bz
when they act lame on us.
Please don't give us root access on some poor d00d'z box when we're too
pissed off to think about what's right and wrong, and if you could keep the
fbi off our backs, we'd appreciate it.
For j00 0wn r00t on all our b0x3s 4ever and ever.

4m3n

Got to a few sessions on Day one... in between sorting my deck and in particular my demos.

The 100 level Map Point session was prettty good- getting our hands on the map data for NZ (about 6mo out) will mean that we can start to do some really neat stuff with our utilities job dispatch application. Pity there is no support for writing your own plugins to the MLS- kinda precludes doing funky stuff like location over packet trunk radio.

Next session I hit was the stuff on Team System. I'm not completely convinced that the demarcaton of roles in Team system is going to work in an NZ context- we tend to be jack of all trades down here... but we'll see. The workflow looks good but I'm going to delegate all that hard stuff down to Nick

Went to the Metropolis architecture talk, if only becuase it was The Metropolis talk. Harry did a good job, knew his stuff well.

Also went to the Data in SOA discussion that Harry gave. Again, a useful session if maybe a little assumptuous of the idea that we are all from big IT shops.

Finished the day with an early Dinner @ The Mexican Cafe with Nick. Saw the guys from Provoke and there were plenty of other Wellywood types- seemed they were all out for dinner with PAndrew.

Blogging from the keynote this morning.... The room is filling quickly and as per usual people are STUPID and don't shift to the middle of the rows..... is it some innate fear of a sudden need to ablute that causes this phenomena?

The MS team have been a bit more adventurous with the keynote this year and chose a 'Professional Speaker' rather than an MS exec for the keynote. I think this should be cool- we never get one of the really BIG execs down here anyway.

Seems that yet again Tech Ed New Zealand will fill one of NZ's largest conference venues to capacity.

I'll be there! Will you? Let me know in the comments and we can catch up.... talk some politics and have a beer maybe.

The Keynote looks fantastic... a great surprise to pull out of the box... checkout what you're missing.

Deviating from the usual TechEd keynote, we are very pleased to bring you Dr. Joseph MacInnis, one of the world's foremost explorers and innovative thinkers. Dr MacInnis was the first man to dive under the North Pole, was a consultant to the Titanic discovery team and the discoverer of the world's most northern shipwreck.

A very cool 'Your Potential Our Passion' Flash app from MS.

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/innovation/yourpotential/main.html

I have mixed feelings about the 'Your Potential Our Passion' thing.... I really love it as a feel good marketing series and cncept but it's been overused in silly places here in NZ... Like playing the advert at a rugby match...... what a waste. But this flash app is VERY cool..... love to know who did it and what they spent on it? No hints in the code unfortunatly.... :-(
It even has subtitles for disability accesibility!

Check out this piccie of a fully frozen PC still running Windows!.... I used to do a lot of work with these industrial style PCs... VERY cool shot.
http://blogs.msdn.com/mcreasy/archive/2004/07/13/181857.aspx

No time to rip all your CD's? LoadPod will do it for you!  (Assuming you have an iPod and at least 50 CDs and are willing to pay $1.50 a CD and live in an area they service - which now includes Seattle).
http://blogs.msdn.com/mcreasy/archive/2004/07/13/181868.aspx
Now what I want to know is will they rip Vinyl!... that's what I want done!.... Thinking about hiring a student to do it!

That is all... back to work for me!

Lukas notes the Len Lye movie being shown in Auckland at the moment... if you really want to see some cool Len Lye stuff the New Plymouth Govett Brewster Art Gallery is the place. They have some truely phenomenal kinetic sculptures from the man who must surely be the grand master of that art. A photo simply does not do Trilogy (below) justice...

[UPDATE] In case you haven't seen it the above sculpture is about 10 meters high and hangs from the ceiling of the art gallery.... when running the sound alone is truely awe inspiring... and quite frightening!

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....

When I get time I like to do the odd bit of DJing... Lukas has pointed to his sets from his radio show hosted @ Twisted. I also have some sets hosted at twisted... Listen to them here...

Ok so Army Steve (Smith) is now in Kuwait. If you have been following his blog it looks as though he has jumped through most of the usual military hoops to get there....

I received a very thoughtful piece through the email this morning... it filtered through our New Zealand Territorial Force (Reservist) command and through my dad to me... it makes quite touching reading. Google tells me it's been sydicated widely.. but it is well worth reading if you have not already.

http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Galloway_062304,00.html

WASHINGTON - The Internet, which fills our inboxes with spam and scams every day and keeps our delete keys shiny, occasionally delivers a real keeper, such as the words below, which were written by a graduate of West Point, Class of 2003, who's now at war in Iraq.

We tracked down the author, who gave us permission to quote from his letter so long as we didn't reveal his name.

Old soldiers in the Civil War coined a phrase for green troops who survived their first taste of battle: "He has seen the elephant." This Army lieutenant sums up the combat experience better than many a grizzled veteran:....

Air New Zealand has just announced that they will be implementing a Super Economy class on their 747 fleet and the new 777 ERs and one assumes the 7E7s when they arrive. Details here.

The most significant thing is that there will be in seat power and an extra 5-6 inches of leg room. I'm sold already!

I just hope that 'Premium Service' doesn't mean that I'll have to pay for expensive NZ wines and fancy food.... Give me airline stodge and a can of coke any day as long as I can have a power socket for my PC!

Now if they would just install Boeing Connexion it'll be just about perfect.
http://www.connexionbyboeing.com/

OK... I'm sitting in Changi (Singapore) Airport bumming some free wireless so I thought I ought to blog about the past day.

I was delayed by 30 minutes out of DUnedin on the way up so connecting to my SQ flight @ CHC was a bit of a rush. Didn't get much of a look @ CHC international.

Flight over on SQ was a bit strange really. The scenery was great. Have some photos of Ayers Rock (Uluru) from 30,000 feet which is really cool. I was a little disappointed with the much vaunted Singapore Girl cabin service to be completely frank. THe crew were not particularly friendly and they duffed up the meal service something cronic- I missed out on half of my second meal :-( Food was OK though... as good as one can expect in coach. The entertainment system was pretty cool variety was great but the UI was pretty cludgy and slow- anyone want to tag team on a CE based plane/hotel video on demand system?

Singapore has been a blur. Arrived and took a Taxi into town with the guys I was sitting next to on the plane. Stayed @ the Furama Hotel booked via Rates To Go. Hotel was well priced (internet access a little expensive) and about 4 Star standard in NZ terms. Location was OK. I used the Subway (MRT) to get around- be sure to print out a copy of the subway map from the MRT site- it was very useful.

My body clock woke me up at some ungodly hour this morning but I had been