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Matt Cooke’s Dangerous Elbow

Matt Cooke, who like most NHL players is actually a nice guy off the ice, seems to suffer from a disorder that makes his on-ice personality the target of the ire of not only his opponents, but even his team-mates.  And now, like ripples through a still pond, a...

On Stock Options

Over the past way-too-many years I’ve had occasion to interview north of 250 individuals for dozens of positions at both startups and large companies on both sides of the border.  Having spent my teething years (professionally) in the maelstrom of Silicon...
The Epic Struggle of Big Telco

The Epic Struggle of Big Telco

Dear Fred — I think your statement: “In the early days of the Internet, when dial-up was king, the telco companies were in the driver’s seat. They had the customer relationships. They had the on-ramp to the Internet. But they did not create Google,...

You Fucking Morons

I’m not usually one to get excited about this sort of stuff, but living as I do at pretty-much the epicentre of the coming Olympics in Vancouver 2010 issues of security, terrorism, and other such hysteria have got my spider-senses tingling.  I’m fairly...

The 10 Most Disappointing Technologies of the 2000s

I have just realized that FOIB and ianbell.com passed their 10-year anniversary some time in 2009 without me really marking the event.  During that time I’ve authored thousands of articles, missives, and comments that have been shared from my online pulpit and...

2009: The Year of the Hypocrite

It was a year that began with such promise.  Having elected an African-American democrat, America seemed to be shrugging off eight full years of its most oppressive, incompetent, and deceitful government of the modern era and was moving boldly into a new political...

I’ve been busy

But I have actually been blogging.  Cheating on you, in fact, by writing over at the AppSocial web site.. which is our startup. Here are two articles from Today, even: The iPhone has leapfrogged Windows Mobile Bang for the buck How did the City of Vancouver spend a...

Ian Bell on the CBC reading William Markle Pecover

If you read this year’s Remembrance Day posts [1,2] you will be familiar with the passage that I read on air for CBC’s On the Coast on November 11th.  My Great Grandfather survived Vimy Ridge largely unscathed, until he went back there in the 1980s and...

William Markle Pecover – On Being Bombed in Britain

In the second of this series honouring Remembrance Day, my Great Grandfather William Markle Pecover submitted a very angry piece to Winnipeg’s daily Free Press Evening Bulletin, forerunner of the Winnipeg Free Press, which published the story on Sept. 22, 1917. ...

William Markle Pecover – Memory of Vimy Ridge

In Honour of Canadian Remembrance Day, which honours the Armistice of November 11, 1918 and the service of soldiers before and since that bloody war, I am republishing two excerpts from the collected memoirs of my Great Grandfather, a veteran of two world wars, and in...