The Economist rated a bunch of cities around the world for their appeal to business travellers. Number one, narrowly beating fellow Canadian cities Calgary and Toronto (as well as the rest of the entire world), is – you guessed it – Vancouver.

Melbn shows up on the list as well, tied with Montréal for 9th place. Melbn is bested by three other Australian cities; Perth, Adelaide, and (say it ain’t so!) Brisbane. Sydney, for the record, is 12th.

How dumbass is this? Due to political pressure, Australia’s primary research organisation is dropping most of its renewable energy research. Yeah, the future of Australia is coal. Until we don’t have any more. Excellent. Good move.

Come one come all! We’re having the next Asterisk evening at the Fujitsu Centre for Excellence
! This is Fuji’s state of the art show-off centre – they’re promising lots of interesting toys to play with. As usual, we’ll be discussing developments in Asterisk land over the past couple of months. If you’ve got some interesting toys yourself, please bring them along!

Date: Thursday February 2nd (the day after tomorrow!)
Time: 7pm – late
Place: Fujitsu Centre for Excellence, 1 Southbank Boulevard, Southbank (Inside the Pacific Internet building)

After Fujitsu makes us leave, we’ll be heading to a local cafe or pub to continue our collective phone geekiness.

Many thanks to Joseph Sirucka for securing the venue for this evening, and to Fujitsu for letting us use it.

Is it because his prose is as close to singing as it gets? No, that’s Salman Rushdie. Is it because he writes lovingly about my hometown, mentioning local icons Save-on-Foods and White Spot? No, that’s Google Earth + my imagination. Is it his clever blending of the real and surreal, spiritual and civil? Nooo… That’s Paul Auster. His effortless hopefulness? No. Wry, sometimes even dark humour? No. His correct spelling of words like “colour” that American writers still haven’t mastered? Not that either, but it helps.

It’s all of them, all together, all in one book.

Or maybe I’m just a sucker for cheap sentimentalism. And helicopter shots in the desert. They’re cool too.

I’m starting on one that’s been sitting on my “to be read” pile for a long time now, Hey Nostradamus! I’m only a little way into it so far. Action centres on a school shooting, but the book seems to be about more than that: how the people involved relate to God, and to each other. Coupland’s always a good read.

I’ve wondered that myself for some time. Now, thanks to Al Jazeera, I know that he “is a Canadian freelance columnist based in the UK. His writing focuses on the implications of political violence in contemporary society.” Now you know too, gentle reader.

(Congratulations Josh on the publication of your column! It won’t be the last.)

CNN wins!

(Oh, yeah, and Disney buys Pixar).

I admit it, I’m a bit of an IP spotter. When I see a nice IP address, I feel the need to compliment the person who’s using it, “Gosh you’ve got a nice number”. It’s like lucking out and getting a good phone number.

A good geek will know the IP address of a good DNS server, and perhaps their own IP address, and a few others. When I had an ISP, we had two class-C blocks of IP addresses: 64.69.72.x and 64.69.73.x. Ah, the memories. My favourite DNS server, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person one day, is jade.bc.net at 128.189.4.1. Some numbers you just can’t forget.

There’s another troupe of geeks out there who share my appreciation for fine IP addresses, and they’ve made a website to honour the good ones. I’m a bit upset that jurgen dot ca’s IP address (64.69.91.105) didn’t do so well, but there are about 7000 which are worse.

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There are many advantages to hosting students from overseas. My favourite (at least this evening) is the opportunity to laugh at each others’ languages. I have to say, Danish is bloody hilarious. Better than Swedish. I’m wondering why the Muppet Show didn’t have a Danish Chef instead. It would have been great.

Now, without any further adieu, may I present for your enjoyment: Mette saying bihulebetœndelse.

Everyone’s favourite fruit company announced their best financial quarter ever. They raked in US$5.75 billion, around $US565 million of that was profit. They sold about 14 million iPods, which is about a million iPods per week, or about 100 every minute – over 200% more than last year.

In the same quarter, they sold about 1.2 million Macs, about 20% more than the year-ago quarter.

I’m trying to parse these numbers. It seems that “200% growth” means a threefold increase in numbers. If 0% growth means it’s flat, no change; then 100% growth would mean a doubling in numbers. Take what they did last year, and double it. So 200% growth would be taking what they did last year, and adding the doubled number to it.

They say iPods grew 200% and Macs grew 20%.

So on one hand, it’s a good thing that more people are buying Macs. Hooray for that. However, I need to question whether the “halo effect” is as prominent as they say it is.