Top world cities survey for 2008

Zurich, Vienna and Geneva are the best cities in the world as far as quality of live is concerned, says Mercer Consulting in a survey published in June 2008. Sydney is placed 10th.

See report . 

Movies and reality

In a bizzare coincidence to the korean movie "3-Iron", a  woman was suspected to be living from closet to closet, house to house:

 Japanese man finds woman living in his closet

  Source  :AFP - Friday, May 30 06:29 am

TOKYO (AFP) - A Japanese man puzzled by food mysteriously disappearing from his refrigerator got a shock when he found out a woman had been living in his home for months without permission, police said Friday.

The 57-year-old man living alone -- or so he thought -- in the western city of Fukuoka installed a security camera and called the police when he saw images of someone walking around his home while he was out.

"We searched the house in the man's presence. We found the woman in the closet," said a local police spokesman.

The woman, named as 58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa, was found in a flat storage space only just big enough for a person to squeeze into lying down.

She had sneaked a mattress and several plastic bottles into the cubby hole, police said, adding that the women had been arrested.

"She told police that she had nowhere to live," the spokesman said. "She seems to have lived there for about a year, but not all the time."

It is unclear how she managed to enter the home undetected. Police suspect she might have been closet-hopping, moving from house to house.

 With the incredible increasing booming cost of property and housing prices, perhaps this might be more common in the future ? House-sharing as in car-sharing ?

Ludicrous patents !

A  company in Singapore laying claim on a patent to the technology that enables "Internet searching via visual images" is suing several companies which it claims has profiteered by using its "technology"  illegally. Read more here.

This  is vaguely similar to the suit brought on by British Telecom a while ago on the "hyperlinking" patent and the recent "web-navigation" patent.

So what is next ?

Another acquisition!
Westnet is one of the better isps I've been with in the past, at least in Sydney.  No hassles in application and cancellation process. Now it is being acquired by Iinet another growing isp for a whopping $81 mil. Just hope the customer service is just as good after this. To read more , click here

OOPS ! Bomb off !
Mood:  on fire

"There is no obesity timebomb. The bomb has already gone off," Associate Professor Katherine Samaras told a federal parliamentary health committee inquiry today.

An obesity expert from St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Prof Samaras said 60 per cent of Australians were overweight or obese.

Obesity was the "underlying cause" of many individual health complaints treated by public hospitals, including "a majority of non-genetic breast cancers", heart conditions, diabetes and birth complications.

Read more here.