According to The Register, several US companies have been sued by states and cities in the USA over hotel taxes. Sites such as Expedia have been paying the taxes on the wholesale price of the hotel rooms rather than the retail price. This is amounting to millions of dollars. And neither side wants to loose this battle.

I was looking at how I would get to Lisbon in Portugal today if I ever needed to go, and checked some companies. I found a price in Australia that looked good, but I frankly did not care what the price was. I wanted to know how to get there. So I then went to the Expedia web site. And I found that to get to Lisbon you go via Frankfurt, London, or Paris. Anyway the price of the best price in Expedia was more than double the normal prices locally. I was shocked. DOUBLE!

A friend of mine needed to send me some large files, so I got him to upload them securely to my unix box. I did not want to open FTP on this box since it is somewhat insecure. So I created an account on the box for him, and gave him SSH access… and got him to install WinSCP which will transfer files through a filewall provided SSH is open. Works really really well.

I also found a site for showing the current airline traffic over sydney… link. I will soon write a program to superimpose this over OziExplorer maps!