At my brothers party last night one of the people there asked me a really strange question… I was talking to this person, and at one stage he asked in all seriousness ‘so, how do you know Duncan? Where do you know him from?’. Needless to say he was slightly embarassed when he found out who I was. I must admit that I have made similarly innocent comments in meetings and parties, but that does not make it any less interesting from the other side.

I saw an article about the time and frequency standards in the USA, and how they have managed to make a stable optical atomic clock. This new clock will not gain or loose a second within 400 million years. This is amazingly accurate. When I was in the UK a couple of years back I managed to get the to Science Museum where they had the worlds first atomic clock. This is several times more accurate than the most accurate modern versions of those radio based clocks.

And according to APC Magazine, QANTAS is getting in-air broadband when its new planes get delivered… If in fact Airbus ever actually delivers the A380’s. This would be so great for the long distance plane journeys…

Finally the Internet in Australia is slightly problematic this evening. PIPE Networks has a power outage, and Telstra is fixing some issues with their ADSL network due to hardware failure… I think things are returning, but really slowly.