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Frank put out the hints yesterday about the latest group of guest editors for Tech Talk Blogs.  Today he announced that 3 ladies will be the latest guest editors and I'm one of them.

Our topic is Tech.Ed

Should be heaps of content..but if our blog is starting to look bare..i'm probably blogging on tech talk instead.

Let me know anything you want me to talk about...always up for suggestions.

I've just finished the ordeal of dealing with a non-paying client.  So what can you do about it?  Really there's not a lot. 

Call, email, send letters asking for payment or explaination.  This only seems to do any good if they've forgotten about paying or they care about paying. Office of Fair Trading  - don't care unless you are a PAYG employee who has effectively had "wages witheld".  So if you're a company contractor, you're on your own. ASIC - don't care unless the client has been doing something illegal, like insolvent trading...and even then, only send a "reminder of your legal obligations letter" Engage a debt collector - The generally take about an 11% cut of whatever they get out of them.  Pretty much, they just send letters, and ring the client a lot.  The extra advantage, is they can list the client as a defaulter...but this is only for debts over 90 days old.  This can be effective if the client cares about being listed as a defaulter.  It also means that the client can make threats and yell at the debt collector rather than you :) Go to court.  If the debt is under $7,500 you can go to small claims court, which doesn't involve lawyers etc.  If the debt is over that amount, which in my case it was, you can take it to magistrates court..which costs lots more money.  If you win..which you hopefully would, the other party has to pay your court costs..but not for your time for preparation or being there :( In my case, I did step one over and over until my letters and emails were being ignored. Step 2 and 3 are no use to me.  Step 4 - this at least got a reaction.  After many unanswered emails, using a debt collector at least got me an email telling me to back off or my invoices would never be paid.  When i was just about to start step 5, and  organise a summons, the money magically appeared.

So 4 months later, I've finally been paid...yay.  Lucky i always stash a bit of money so didn't starve to death when i had close to 12 weeks of invoices not paid.

So what did I learn from the...

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Here's some pics from Neil's Mashup Windows Live Services session at Remix.  John crashed the session to present the 10 minute map with some Melbourne content.

Found a picture of our tshirts on Delicate Genius Flickr pics:

Well we made it home.  We're back from the first Remix Australia.  It was good to catch up with some people and to meet people we talk to or subscribe to their blogs for real.

We flew in on Sat morning and went out to Port Campbell to take some pics of the 12 Apostles.  Bad weather for sunset :( So up we got for sunrise the next morning.  Hadn't really put much thought into the trip before we went...didn't think about the fact that the sun doesn't rise very high very fast in winter that far south..doh!

Then we had some fun with Tom Tom getting our car back to Franklin Street (in the city) .. we ended up out in some suburbia Franklin Street ..doh!

Then next day it was off to Remix....Found it a bit of an overdressed crowd...lots of people in business /  dressy shirts...must be a melbourne thing.

Congrats to Niall for his placing at Web Jam for his Media Centre Big Screen Photos 2.  If you haven't seen it..it's a great app to view all your flickr pics on media centre.  Hopefully he'll do one that integrates with SmugMug.  I'll have to send them an email to help the cause as I am a big smug mug user and fan.

We'll be offline a few days as we fly down to Melbourne to goto remix.

We had some t-shirts made so keep an eye out for us. John will be participating in WebJam on Monday night.

See you all there... 

Was trying out the live contact api and was getting a "can't share information" error on the last confirmation page of the authentication process:

Not the friendliest error.  My problem was i was running from local host.  I added an entry in my host file of 127.0.0.1 www.bronwen.com and ran the code using that sitename and tada...it's happy again.

Thanks to Chuck, John's webcast on building a vista gadget is now on 9 MSDN site.

Like the rest of Brisbane (maybe even Queensland) we were issued with our 4 minute shower timer in an effort to get all households to use a maximum of 140L of water per person a day.

This is all well and good...except it's not the best "egg timer" in the world.  Not sure what they've done with the design, but I've seen it "clog up" on 3 separate occasions now..and you have to give it a little tap to restart.  This of course means your 4 min shower can easily become 15 as it's hard to see the grains of sand falling in a steamy shower room..let alone notice that it's blocked up.

So did I get a faulty one or are they all llike this?

We published today the third installment in the clustering articles for Virtual Earth. This time we focus on the client side, updating our javascript to support the latest Version 5 of Virtual Earth.

Clustering Virtual Earth on Version 5

We also have moved to object oriented Javascript and show how to use shape differiential to further optomise your swillions of points added to Virtual Earth.

Let me know what you think and if you find it usefull, I do enjoy the emails from people letting me know!