Have you ever been to an airport, where your luggage already awaits you eagerly on the conveyor belt and not vice versa?
Welcome to Zurich Airport.

The American Geological Institute just published an interesting statistics, detailed in this pdf.
The price of a barrel of oil has stayed steady to the ounce of gold since 2001. Whereas the price of oil to the dollar has risen even faster than compared to the euro.
What baffles me, is that oil is usually perceived as a scarce and finite resource. Demand for oil has risen fast in the last 7 years, and supply not risen significantly.
Whereas demand for gold has risen a modest 3% per year since 2001 while the production has dropped a little.
The gap between dollar and euro as a result of the weakening dollar is widening - further speeding this process.

When you want to watch really passionate sportsmen, just go watch kids. Whenever my son has a football match, he's absolutely passionate about that. His passion into the game is unconditional. In every game he's absolutely focused. That doesn't necessarily make him the best player, but it sure helps him, not to get distracted by pain, thirst, or the strength of the competitor.

Facebook is the one big name in social networking. And it has an impressive amount of users.
Richard MacManus at readwriteweb has an interesting interview with Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director at Asia Internet consultancy +8* and Co-Founder of MobileMonday Beijing.
Did you know, that the leading social networking platform, QQ, makes more in yearly profits than Facebook in revenues (while losing money)? QQ has five times more users as well.

It's a fascinating thing, that the internet really does work as its meant to be. It's even more fascinating when it's not working.
Interconnecting different ISPs or service providers is called peering. This boils down to: You can walk through my garden, if I can walk through yours. More specific: your customers can walk through my garden if mine can walk through yours.
In the internet, it's of course the customers customers customers customers.
And sometimes, major league ISPs don't play along well.
Renesys Blog has some details about an internet outage that affected customers of Telia and Cogent in a way, that the doors between Telia and Cogent had been locked up thoroughly.
As Renesys details: Of course, the list of impacted networks is too long to be included here, but they include a wide range of commercial, educational and government clients. On the Telia side, the victims include the Swedish Defense Data Agency, the Finnish State Computer Center, and broadband customers in St. Petersburg. With regard to Cogent, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Delaware, Kansas State University and Reuters America were all collateral damage.