The Vancouver Apple store in the Pacific Centre Mall opened for business this past weekend. I was in Toronto, attending the MESH conference (thanks to commandN) and couldn't make the opening day, but I was there Sunday morning.

Take a look at Anxiety, a nifty little to-do tracker for OS X. It uses the new Calendar Store in Leopard so that it keeps your to-dos in sync with iCal and Mail (and therefore also any devices you may sync with iSync). Best of all, it's free!
 

This is great - Jim Benson goes to a restaurant in Beijing and finds a rather unusual item on the menu. Apparently web 2.0 culture has permeated everything and everywhere ... including the menus at chinese restaurants. That's some good branding!
 
 

I was browsing Craigslist today and came across this post. It indicates that Apple is hiring staff for their new Apple Store in the Pacific Centre mall, downtown Vancouver. Woohoo! It's about time (assuming it's not a fake post) I live only 3 blocks away, which is both a good and a bad thing (mostly bad for my wallet).

Google Maps just got a big update and now offers traffic and terrain views. Hybrid view is gone - the Satellite view now shows roads & names by default.
 
Traffic view displays green, yellow or red segmented overlays on top of roads, indicating traffic volume. Not surprisingly, it looks like traffic updates are only available for US cities - according to Google, traffic outside my downtown Vancouver, BC apartment is non-existant.
 

One of the things that struck Natasha and I after moving to Vancouver is how little we actually drive these days. Living downtown, we can walk or take public transportation to most of our destinations. We only drive on weekends, and even then, only occasionally. Our car insurance payments have actually decreased from what we used to pay in Kamloops, and we only fill up the car once a month or so. Even better, walking is healthy and good for the environment.

We picked up an Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard on the weekend and I wanted to share my first impressions with you.

We got tired of paying Telus (our local phone company) a lot of money for what seemed to be little service. I started looking at alternatives and decided to give a voice over IP solution a whirl. By now most people are familiar with VoIP: phone service over the internet. Basically, a VoIP provider acts a gateway between the regular phone system and the internet. You're probably familiar with services like Vonage - you sign up for a monthly plan and they send you a little box which connects to the internet and your regular house phones.

A friend of mine asked me if I could take a look at his Drupal installation - apparently whenever he enabled a particular module his entire site would crash. "Sure, no problem. I'll take a look this weekend and we'll get it sorted out for you" was my response. But something came up that weekend and I put it off. I figured that it wouldn't take me long to figure out, so I could do it Monday. Of course, when Monday came around, something else took precedence and I put my friend's problem on the backburner.
 

I use a MacBook Pro as my primary workstation, and it's usually connected to the internet via an ethernet cable, although we do have wireless in our house for those "work from the couch" days.