I came really really close to nasty call to the Embassy Suites in the USA whilst I was doing my BAS and my business accounts. For my USA trip I used my work Visa card to pay for the conference hotel. I was getting a better price through the conference than I could get through my travel agency – which is normal for conferences. [With conferences the hotel does some maths; and charge more for hire of conference rooms and the like if the per-attendee room charge is lower, and they do other stuff too.]

Anyway I had intended to pay my bill through a credit card, and did… And this was about $600 for four nights – not bad value really. Anyway, when i was going through the accounts I could a US$202.50 expense, and it listsed the hotel. The format was slightly different, but it was definitely a hotel charge. Hmm… Then I realized what it was. I had used an ATM at the hotel, and they charged me US$2.50 for the withdrawal. Looking back now, I am sure that the hotel would have not been able to explain the expense, since they could not since it was not their expense. OOps.

All day I have been downloading the latest copy of Visual Studio from Microsoft. I still have 250 mBytes to download, and it is going to be about another two hours. Maybe. I just suspended the download for a moment, and restarted it and it is now going about 1.5 mBit rather than 256 kBit. The reason I thin is that there have been a few minor hick-ups in the network, and this has caused the speed to slow. So creating a new TCP connection fixed the speed issue. Of course I could be completely wrong. I often am.