Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder and project lead, released Mollom in public beta today.

Among cities in the North East of the USA, and Ontario and Quebec provinces in Canada, Waterloo Region came out to be the 5th least costly place to do business in.

Waterloo Region is cheaper to do business in than Buffalo, NY, Baltimore, MD, and Detroit, M, but more costly than Sherbrooke, Que, Lexington, KY, and Charleston, W. Va. Out of the major centers closeby that are cheaper, London, Ontario and Chatham-Kent are cheaper.

The study includes labor cost, income taxes and transportation. 

Who says that money can't buy happiness?

Apparently, if you spend it on others, it will make you happy. 

Spending time volunteering, or writing open source software, has the same effect too (makes others happy, as well as yourself). 

After coming back from DrupalCon Boston, I had this conversation with Salma, my 4 year old:

Salma: You went to America?

Khalid: Yes?

Salma: What for? You were visiting cousins?

Khalid: No, I went to visit Drupal ...

Salma: Is he our cousin?

Khalid: No, but he sure is family ...

With a mom and dad who both code for Drupal, Salma is a Drupal baby ...

Bill Nuti, NCR's CEO, made $16.8M in total compensation in 2007, an increase of 141% over 2006 (which was $6.8M).

In 2007, NCR closed facilities in Scotland and Canada, outsourcing some manufacturing (Solectron/Flextronics in the USA) or moving it to low cost countries (Hungary, India). Moreover, the Customer Engineers had their pay and benefits slashed severely. In 2008, there is a hiring freeze in effect, as well as coop student hiring freeze. Many employees also got a zero % increase for 2008.

As expected, the record from 1932 snowfall (245.3 cm) was broken this winter (246 cm), and winter is not even over yet.

Even the amount of snow for one day was 32 cm on Saturday, topping the previous record in Jan 22, 1966 of 30.5 cm.

The total amount of snow from Friday/Saturday was 38 cm, but with wind and drift, it was waist deep or even chest deep in many places.

I arrived in Boston in the afternoon after a fairly easy trip.

On the way from Waterloo to Pearson International Airport, Highway 401 was being repaired for potholes and the van driver took alternative backroads. This was a very scenic route with parts of the Niagara Escarpment, farms with cattle outside, and roads less traveled.

An American exchange student from Maine stayed with Coptic Christian family in Alexandria, Egypt.

He weighed 155 pounds upon arrival, and returned only at 97 pounds.

He claims that he was not given enough portions to eat, and that the Christian Coptic mandate to fast 200 days a year (with no animal protein) made it happen.

His Egyptian host family denies the allegations. Shaker Hanna says that it is "a lie", with the boy's parents planning to recover some of the costs of his stay.

Canonical has launched another Drupal site: Ubuntu Brainstorm.

The site is meant as a digg-like tool for the community to suggest features for Ubuntu's Linux distribution, and vote on ideas others have submitted.

The site runs some custom modules (qapoll, qawebsite), on top of Drupal 5.