It’s not much but it was funny to watch Bryn encounter it for the very first time

Luckily he had his stylish Ming the Merciless coat (and matching booties – thankfully not visible here)

As a small business owner / freelancer one of the most annoying things for me is chasing the money. I love having the money in my account, and I love doing the work to earn it... but the bit in-between is time-consuming and sometimes very frustrating. Over the years I've tried a number of solutions and never found the right one.

FreshBooks seems to be a pretty good solution though. And it's a very low risk trial (free if you only have 3 clients or less).

Account management, payment integration and setup is very simple - took less time to catch up on outstanding invoices for about 6 jobs tonight that I usually take with basic account management each month!

For clients where it's a simple case of billing against a PO or fixed price quote the process is really simple. For clients where you need to be able to produce a timesheet to track billable hours that's also possible (though only via web based time-entry at the moment... can only hope a desktop/PDA add-on eventuates at some point - for Windows, OSX, Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian...a  tough call I guess, but no harm in hoping)

The system automates a lot of stuff that you either have to set reminders for (or pay your accountant extra to do) in other solutions and has seamless integration with a number of payment gateways (from a very simple PayPal solution, up to high end credit card processing solutions).

What makes FreshBooks so interesting is that it's not a big accounting firm, but a small 6 man team who really seem to love what they're doing (and more importantly remember what folks actually need the system to do)

I like WLM, and the recently released 8.1 beta looks really good - it's certainly progressing in the right direction. But it's still missing one or two things that keep me going back to Gaim...

Tabbed Chats
On my laptop screen real-estate is a premium. Having 5 chats open takes a lot of desktop, and makes finding the specific chat a pain. Having them tabbed would reduce clutter and make the world a better place.

Other transports - Yahoo is okay, but jabber would be excellent
Currently 95% of my contacts are in messenger users. But there are a couple of people who use GTalk and a couple of bots I use that communicate via Jabber. And we won't talk about those Skype people ;)
Having WLM open up at least a Jabber transport would be awesome. They've shown that they can do it with Yahoo! (no use for me though) so hopefully another nod to the open source world wouldn't be too implausible...

Improved Outlook integration
While I'm not a huge fan of integration bloat having WML integrate fully with Outlook so it's smart enough to compare/integrate address books and gather data so If I've got an offline contact that I know more about than they've put in their Live profile I can (for instance) send them an SMS, or quickly bring up all the emails they've sent me

Got to the airport yesterday, checking in and discovered the stylus had falled from my K-Jam somewhere between leaving home and getting to the gate.

Of course in Far North QLD there are not that many K-Jam stockists so I'm going to have to wait until I get home to pick up a replacement. Until then, a sharpened fingernail or a covered biro will have to do!

Best case scenario is that it dropped out in the car, or when I picked the K-Jam up off the desk... but we shall see....

It's the second stylus I've lost for the K-Jam... unlike my previous Palms and Clies where I never lost one either the case or the stylus itself seems a litle flawed and doesn't hold securely. No doubt it's better on the latest models ;)

Update 9 Nov: Okay, don't ask how this happened but... we got home and were packing down the bedroom and discovered, under the bed, a stylus for my K-Jam! Don't know if it's the first one I lost or the second... but I'm happy again (more on the packing later!)

Okay, I know it sounds a little silly, but I just had to try. I'm using Moka5 to host Ubuntu on my iPod (because I can, not because I'm uber or anything like that) and I was testing a site build and needed to see how it looked in IE6.

Now I could have just gone to my other machine (the laptop has been upgraded to IE7 but we've got a desktop still at IE6 - it's my Media Centre machine so I don't dare touch in in case we miss something!) but I had the Ubuntu desktop up (testing the site in Firefox) and thought.... let's try out this IEs4Linux thing...

Well, I was very pleasantly surprised. I does exactly what it says on the tin with very little fuss. I only noticed after installing IE6 that it can apparently install the IE7 engine as well (wonder if they'll ever get the tabbed container working as well!)

It does need to install Wine, and requires a few keystrokes in Terminal... but the instructions are straightforward - if you've got Linux up and running it's not going to be beyond you. If you need to do compatibility testing this is really handy... and you can have multiple versions of IE co-existing side-by-side.

Hmmm... wonder if this can be made to work on OSX....

Currently listening to: Rihanna Pon De Replay (Hey Mr. DJ Turn The Music Up)

Totally random thing... just found out that Billy The Kid was gunned down on my birthday (well, 86 years before I was born to be precise). It was also the day that the US$10,000 bill was officially withdrawn from circulation (2 years after I was born)

While these things probably have no direct bearing on my life it's interesting to see - in the same way as knowing what the #1 record was when you were born (it was Procol Harums "A Whiter Shade of Pale" which was at #1 in the UK for 6 weeks starting on June 8th)

... and the ramifications of some of the things that happened certainly have had an effect on the generations since.

So... why did I go looking for this? It was actually as an extension of demonstrating the interesting things you can find when ego surfing and we wondered what happened on particular important days for people.

Like ego surfing the results can be cool, but shouldn't be treated as more than an amusing waste of time (unless you discover something really startling about yourself!)

Currently listening to: Me'Shell Ndegéocello Make Me Wanna Holler

Telligent have just released a service pack for Community Server 2.1. The service pack fixes a number of annoying little things (and updates the version number to 2.1.61025.1) - if you're running CS2.1 it's certainly a worthwhile upgrade.

However, it does highlight a couple of small niggles with CS. The upgrade process is very manual - you have to run a SQL Script against the remote database and upload various files to replace the old one... but there's no quick and easy way to find where you've customised the scripts and ensure that the customisations make it through the upgrade.

For me it was simple as I've very little tweaking here but for people who've really customised the look and feel of their site it's going to be a more significant update - and would scare me for the future unless the Telligent are planning to put a bit more thought into the process - both for the current 'hardcoded' approach to customisation and skinning and also for the upcoming 3.x generation that hopefully brings a new skinning model...

It would be really neat to see a PC based tool that includes FTP capabilities (to update the files) and a SQL connection (to run the scripts) - both highlighting changes (by knowing what the original vanilla code looked like and running a delta against it that can then be applied to the new version. Of course it's never going to be that simple or easy... but it would be cool

Currently listening to: Depeche Mode People Are People

I used to be a very happy Optus Mobile customer. We had a couple of mobile phones on a business account, and the landline was also with them. They had some good broadband plans as well and it almost made sense to bundle them.

But then the cold calling started. Drones who, though they were trying hard, really didn't understand much English outside their script; Enthusiastic Aussies who really thought they had the right product for me; and stone-walling supervisors who couldn't understand why I was upset about having maybe 8 calls in a week both during the work day and sometimes quite late into the evening.

I explained to the supervisors that repeated calls would do nothing but alienate me. They promised to update my records to have calls blocked.

I went into my local store and explained how annoyed I was with this continued harassment - while they had some sympathy there was nothing they could do, although they did connect me to their marketing administration people.

I patiently explained the problem, gave lots of details of my account and the numbers they were calling and they promised to opt us out.

I returned every bit of junk mail they sent with various "Please don't send junk mail" and "Not known at this address" messages.

Eventually the mail stopped, and the phone calls (after going through the above steps with the marketing admin people three times in total) also seemed to stop.

Then yesterday they could contain themselves no longer. Two calls from enthusiastic reps wanting to offer to tie me into a 24 month contract as a reward for being such a good client.

Turns out spammers aren't the only idiots. Optus telemarketing have finally driven me to action. If I wasn't going away for a couple of days I'd already have canceled our entire account. As it is their days are numbered. All because their CRM was too stupid (or too arrogant) to realise that when I said "don't call" I actually meant it!

Currently listening to: Red Snapper Image of You