I just got off the phone with a potential new client in the pacific. They are at the moment doing a scoping exercise whilst working out priorities for this year. Rather than doing the eMail tag thing I just gave a VoIP phone call across there. I was impressed with how well it worked generally – it connected faster than using Telstra. There was the occasional dropout and also it did hang up once, but it was good. The potential client also let me know that he would arrange a site visit if he could, but I do not think that I will be able to justify it on this job. Things may change of course, but that is the impression.

Telstra decided to send me a bill today for one of my services. It is not on my single bill since the billing systems are not yet properly integrated between the service types – anyway this bill I know cost more to process than it did for the amount in question. It is a bill for one cent. They do say “PAYMENT IS NOT REQUIRED UNTIL NEXT BILL”. It would be tempting to pay it anyway… I am sure I can find a 1c piece somewhere, and they are still legal tender.

Earlier I was looking for some suppliers of ‘Data Radios’ for a project. I came across an article titled ‘GPS Water Vapor Estimation Using Interpolated Surface
Meteorological Data from Australian Automatic Weather Stations’ which sounds really really boring. The translation is ‘Determing Humdity through GPS satellites’, and is something I have thought about doing every now and then. Apart from the time aspect, one of the reasons I have not done it is that it requires having a good view of the sky from the GPS antenna, something which the trees here stop. I can assure my readers that this was not an article I went looking for. Even I am not that much of a geek…