Welcome to ianbell.com

This web site is presently under construction. In the meantime, you should probably follow me on twitter: @ianb

At the Canucks Fan Zone, blogger Derek Jory asks the question (of no one in particular — they don’t allow comments) whether the following photo, ostensibly from 1984, is real:

MJ_MEGA

[click to continue…]

1958 – 2009

by Ian on June 25, 20091 comment


Born To Amuse, To Inspire, To Delight
Here One Day
Gone One Night

Like A Sunset
Dying With The Rising Of The Moon
Gone Too Soon

Gone Too Soon

- Michael Jackson, 1991

Rogers Wireless iPhone 3G = FAIL

June 22, 2009

Have you had problems returning a damaged iPhone to Rogers Wireless?  If so, I’d like to hear about it in the comments.
It has been a year since Apple and Rogers Wireless launched the iPhone 3G in Canada.  It was that summer, in 2008, I unloaded my first-generation unlocked iPhone for a legit iPhone 3G from [...]

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Why WOULDN’T you buy an iPhone?

June 15, 2009

The big news from last week’s Apple WWDC was of course the new iPhone 3GS.  The features are obviously a significant evolution of the already successful iPhone 3G… so this is good news for Apple fanboys and shareholders.  Last week, the Nielsen blog suggested that the price of the current iPhone 3G sliding to an [...]

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Tuffmail: Still the best IMAP service provider I can find..

May 23, 2009

Here’s a question:  Where do you host your email?
Gersham and I are rather well-known for a business we started in 2002 called Geekmail.  By 2003, we were on the cutting-edge of IMAP-based email hosting and ran thousands of mail accounts on a cluster of 9 servers hosted at Peer1 Network in Vancouver.  We pushed the [...]

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iPhone Skype not in Canada due to … Trademark issues?!

May 20, 2009

Skype for the iPhone is a much-hyped and very cool app that’s not available (legally) for us Canadians despite the fact that it is free and offered by a global company.  There are of course workarounds but this is a kludge and not for the feint-of-heart.
In 2007, a story surfaced to quel rumours of an [...]

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The Fox and the Hedgehog: Which one are you?

May 19, 2009

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  – Archilochus
Which one are you?  The ancient parable of the fox and the hedgehog has come into increasing view in popular culture lately.  And while its origins are somewhat ambiguous, the allegory has been applied to entrepreneurs, scientists, philosophers, playwrights, business leaders, economists, [...]

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Follow-up to C-17 Crash

May 16, 2009

One of the most popular articles on my blog recently was a post about C-17s encountering difficulties landing at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.  The US Air Force announced recently that they had completed their investigation into the incident, essentially concluding that the crew failed to follow landing checklist procedures while on approach to the [...]

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NHL goalie salaries and playoff impact

May 16, 2009

It’s such common wisdom to say that your team gets you into the playoffs but your goalie gets you to the final that the phrase has become a hackneyed cliche. But there’s a new cliche in town:  One lesson is starting to become clear in the new NHL is that you’ve got to build it, [...]

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The Armchair GM’s Rx for the #Canucks in 2009/2010

May 13, 2009

Once man’s recipe to salvage the Vancouver Canucks’ chances at a playoff run in 2009/2010

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