Reports of my death at the hands of the Telus meerkats are greatly exaggerated.

Bloomberg mistakenly published the template for Apple CEO Steve Job's obituary on Thursday. Sure, it only went out on a corporate newswire and had blanks to fill in for Job's age and cause of death, but in this age of the interwebs it was bound to leak out. Jobs previously had cancer but at this point will probably be dancing on the graves of his company's competition. Those of you in Canada have probably seen Telus' brilliant reaction to the increasingly ubiquitous iPhone: Meerkats who apparently have learned to use the company's smartphone offerings from RIM and Palm.

Microsoft is once again in the news for all the wrong reasons. The latest release of Internet Explorer, IE8 Beta 2, is still having troubles despite some of the most glaring bugs being squashed. Ars Technica walks us through the good, bad and ugly of the browser and concludes that it's still a year or more behind rivals Firefox, Safari, and Opera in terms of features. What irks me most is that IE8 Beta 2 apes Firefox 3's "awesome bar" which integrates bookmark functions and searches you browsing history right from the address bar. It baffles me that Microsoft would choose to copy a feature that many Firefox users don't even like (I find it quite useful, but it depends on your browsing habits). Hard to believe that this is all that's left of the browser that won the browser wars of the late 1990's.

Now on to another of my favorite subjects, gamma radiation. The science team for the Fermi spacecraft has released their first gamma-ray map of the sky, using the first 90 minutes of observations. Such a map takes weeks to compile from the ground due to most of the incoming radiation being deflected (thankfully) by the atmosphere. The speed of the space-based observations makes it possible to study black holes and gamma ray bursts in detail not previously possible.

A Japanese research team has announced that a type of stem cells can be extracted from the pulp inside wisdom teeth. The cells can only form certain types of tissue and are therefore less useful than embroynic stem cells, but it does get one around a host of ethical problems.

And finally, Apple has renewed our hope in the long anticipated (but largely mythical) tablet Mac, thanks to a patent filing that deals with future developments of the companies multi-touch technology. The filing includes a drawing of what is either an iPhone for giants or, in fact, the long-awaited iTablet.

Eat Kangaroos: Because Cows Fart Too Much

Programming Note: Due to other commitments, I'm planning to make this blog a weekly one since that gives me more motivation then "whenever I can find time," which I can't.

Strange story out of Australia this week. A study by a private consulting group, Australian Wildlife Services, suggests that the country could cut agricultural emissions by replacing herds of sheep and cattle with kangaroos. The reason: kargaroos emit less methane by far than either sheep or cows, and since methane is a potent greenhouse gas (yes, I said potent, insert fart joke here) the country's overall contribution to global warming could be reduced by about 10%.

While on the subject of the vaugely absurd, a newly formed company called OnLatte has reportedly developed a printer that will print various designs into the foam on your next latte. The machine started life as the print head from a plotter (a poster-format printer geekboy engineers use to print technical drawings) and a tank of edible brown ink. Another story were you can write your own punchline.

One thing I've never understood about life south of the border is this: what is he source of the belief that you can sue your way out of everything? A suit filed last week in Alabama accuses Apple of deliberately misleading consumers over iPhone 3G speeds. And this will fix what is clearly a technical glitch how, exactly? You might try the latest 3G-enabled media tablet from French gadget maker Archos and settle that pesky “is it the phone or the carrier” arguement once and for all.

Fans of Stargate SG-1 can rejoice (!) that they can now have an X301 all of thier own. Well, sort of. In this case it is a laptop following on from Lenovo's X300 ultraslim, not a modified Gou'ald glider.

I often wonder why so many engineers end up being tied down with administrative task or (gasp!) get promoted to management. It might be because, if left to run wild, every engineer out there would be dreaming up things like the Lotus Ice Concept Vehicle, a three-ski sled that uses a pusher propeller to zoom across the polar ice.

In scary tech news, a company called TrueMedia wants to set up face-capturing cameras near big screens at your local store and then use the screen to show you targeted advertising. Hello, has anybody seen Minority Report? Did it perhaps occur to you that maybe that isn't the future we want?

Another peice of technology scared me in another way this week, in the form of a PlayStation 3 controller equiped with a full qwerty keyboard above the normal PS3 buttons. The idea is to use it for online chat via the PS3's existing web services. But can you imagine the key combinations this could introduce to game play? Quick! Hit up-square-circle-alt-control-j!

And finally, we can all live in fear of the Mamavirus. Yes, that is the proper scientific name for this (relatively) huge virus found infecting amoebas in the Paris water supply (eeeew) last year. While not dangerous to humans, it has been found to itself harbour a smaller virus (dubbed Sputnik) which is the first know incidence of a virus that infects another virus, causing the mamavirus to deform and damaging its ability to replicate.

New feature: the off switch!

CNET cell phone reviewer Kent German recently posted about his experience after discovering that a favorite resort in northern California now had cell service after long being a dead zone due to its rural location. True, over the air services reach further every year, but this would be less of a concern if we simply re-introduced what used to be a universal feature: the off switch.

While it is very easy to put many of the gadget I own to 'sleep', it is darn near impossible to turn some of them off entirely. Is anyone clear on how to turn and iPhone 3G off, short of letting the battery die? I've also noticed that my satellite TV box does not turn off, instead favouring a sleep mode as well. The only time it turns off is 3am, when it resets to check for updates. I assume this has to do with the fact that it takes a long time to re-aquire the feed when it restarts, but it does illustrate my point. And yes, I have hard-booted a laptop. My home network is based around an Airport Express which has a reset buried in the management software, but again no off.

I recall one commentator saying that machines would not give us any trouble so long as we retained the ability to turn them off. Oops. It seems I already have a household full of gadgets that I can turn off only if I forcibly remove all the power sources. Can everyone' favorite sci-fi scenario be far behind?