I love Apple, as it seems most people do, but Wow! You know you're paying too much for your hardware when the vendor can afford to have a store like this on 5th Avenue. Makes our store here in little 'ol Wellington, NZ look a little dull really.

Well I it was really only a matter of time before THIS happened (Google Earth required). I remember reading, when Google Earth was first launched, about how it would be an interesting advertising vehicle…I guess this just proves the point. Global coverage from a single 75 by 110 foot billboard located just outside Las Vagas (where else?!?!)… Not bad. I wonder how many Martians will actually buy Maxim though?

Uh Oh… here comes another Flame War!!!

Last week Vitamin posted an feature with Molly Holzschlag entitled "Will the Standards Battle Ever be Won?" in which she answers some of the burning questions surronding Internet Explorer's standards support. In the comments for this article, some are pretty scathing of Microsoft and this has been met with a, slightly less than refrained, response from Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft… and to be fair, I can't really blame him.

It nice to actually hear the "Other" side of this argument, although I hate to admit that's probably exactly what the response to Chris's post will be (and some of the comments thus far would indicate just that)… There is, it seems, a community within the community (our community), and I've been guilty myself in the past, that simply put will never accept Microsoft as anything but the anti-christ of anything they do, particulary on the web front.

But I for one applaude Microsoft for addressing the issues and making a valient attempt to move forward (or should that be "catch up"?… sorry, couldn't help it, that one just slipped out and I look forward to IE7, although I'm sure in the short term it will make life harder. While I agree, we do spend a lot of our time addressing issues within IE, we should not forget that IE has, in the past, facilitated a considerable amount of forward momentum in the web arena without which we may very well not be where we are today… and for that perhaps we should forgive their error in judgement, taking the extended holiday that was/is IE 6.

Enough with the bitter rhetoric… they have acknowledged they made a mistake and action is being taken… it's time to move on!

This morning at 5am I awoke to the sound of a txt message from family in the UK… it read "Just heard on our TV that a possible tsunami is heading your way…". A little worrying one might say.

I know it was the middle of the night here and that this was no doubt "breaking news" on the evening news programs in the northern hemisphere but I was stunned by the complete lack of coverage provided by the NZ media. The only news I was able to view to find out what was happening was BBC World and Australia's Sky News (and they're at least 2 hours behind us so that kinda kills the "middle of the night" argument!).

While I don't subscribe to the CNN theory of taking next to no information and recycling it for hours, it would be nice if the media here actually took enough interest to keep people informed… all we got was a brief "there was an earthquake near Tonga and we may have got a tsunami" on the 6am news!

As it turns out thankfully there was no tsunami, well not a big damage causing one at least, and the warning was cancelled, but this highlights just how vulnerable we are on this little rock in the South Pacific. Makes you stop and think…