Time for another ICubed! What have I found interesting lately? See for yourself:

• Saturn Moon Death Star?
  Is there a Death Star (think Star Wars) orbiting Saturn? Looks like it to me! [via Dave Donaldson]
• Google IPO Site Live!
  Get it while it’s hot! What do you enter on sites that require a state/zip code? I always put 90210 because its the only one I can remember easily! Thank you Aaron Spelling!
• Francis Crick Dies
  The man who helped discover the double helix of DNA has died. Follow the link and find his groundbreaking paper from 1953.
• Top 10 Funniest IT Stories
  Think you have troubles with the computer? Think again! [via GeekPress]
• Mary Kate versus Ashley
  It’s the battle we’ve all been waiting for! Enjoy!

Tonight (being Friday) I went to Improvaganza at the Varscona Theatre with Sharon (who, notice, remains blogless). It was really entertaining, very funny! And as luck would have it, for their last skit, they took a suggestion for the setting, and someone yelled out Inuvik. What are the odds?

After the theatre we went to my new favorite Starbucks! In the new building on the corner of Whyte Avenue and 104th Street, there is a Starbucks. Right across the street from the Second Cup and the Timothy’s. Anyway, not only is it brand new, it has the coolest bar inside! And it is open until 1 AM, which means you can sit around drinking coffee and enjoying the, ahem, scenery passing by.

Thanks to everyone who came on Thursday to the Blogosphere dinner! We had a good turnout, and it was lots of fun (except for the slightly odd waitress showing us pictures of when she was 300 pounds – seriously I was trying to eat). Hopefully everyone will come to the next one and bring more people too! Here are a few photos from the dinner, especially look at the last one.

That’s right, my publicly traded blog is worth over $13,000 in BlogShares currency! Found a very neat site today, BlogShares.com, which is a fantasy blog shares market. Basically, its like a real stock market, but instead of companies you have blogs. You can check out my blog profile here, or click the listed button to the left.

Want to see some other blog listings? Here you go, some of the most popular Blogosphere.ca members:

• Dickson’s House of Love – B$4,646.46
• EclecticBlogs – B$1,844.65
• Megan’s After all, I did pay for this – B$3,024.34
• Andrew’s Welcome to Ocean Avenue – B$1,845.51
• bean’s Blog – B$2,466.67
• Brock’s Blog – B$4,049.56
• Michelle’s Kissed by Kiwi – B$6,458.78
• Genie’s Bottle – B$2,107.67

As far as I can tell, it works like a normal market, the blog becomes more valued as more shares are purchased. Also, looks like inbound/outbound links have some sort of effect on the price as well. I am still learning, but its a very good idea, and kinda fun! Give it a try!

What are you doing tomorrow night? Hopefully nothing so far, because you should be attending the Blogosphere.ca dinner! Here are all the details you need:

So far we have me, Dickson, Andrew, Michelle, Chu, and possibly Megan.

http://tinyurl.com/54buu

Posted using PostInk

UPDATE: Sharon, Megan, Annie and Don are all confirmed!

Does anyone else think we are in the middle of “The Blog Revolution”? I certainly think its happening right before our very eyes. Not convinced? Consider these facts:

• The Democratic National Convention, which ends tomorrow, has sparked a huge blogging community.
• CNN recently teamed up with Technorati to launch the Technorati Politics site to monitor the convention in real-time.
• MSNBC has a blogger, the Associated Press has three, CNN hosts a multi-headed blog. Is that enough mainstream media adoption for you?
• Bloggers actually got credentials for this year’s convention.
• Glenn Reynolds (one of the most read bloggers around) was on CNN to talk weblogs and politics.

Okay so I think that’s proof enough that weblogs are moving into the mainstream. But how about one more tidbit? Ignoring Blogger.com and some other sites, as well as personally hosted sites, the latest estimates peg the number of blogs at over 4 million, 1.4 million of which are said to be active (updated on average every two weeks). Predictions expect the number of hosted blogs to exceed 10 million by the end of 2004.

So thats good, lots of blogs are being created by “average” people. At the same time, we are seeing the mainstream media adopt blogs, as well as companies like Microsoft. So I suppose the queston is – is that good for the blogosphere? Will the mainstream media attempt to “monopolize” the blogosphere like they have traditional media? (If I published a newspaper, you’d believe the Journal over me – in fact you’d likely ignore my newspaper altogether).

I just hope this revolution and spotlight on the adoption of weblogs doesn’t spell the end for simple, fast, and powerful personal publishing. In many ways, I think weblogs are our last hope for keeping the media honest!

Yes Megan I used your word, but if you don’t like it, you can get bourne! haha! Tonight went to see The Bourne Supremacy with Andrew – awesome movie! Definitely one of the summer’s best movies, I highly recommend it! Matt Damon plays that role so well, its scary. I completely agree with what one of the critics said recently – “Jason Bourne is the James Bond of our time”. So true.

One of the best parts about the movie is the car chases – absolutely intense. I don’t want to give anything away, so instead I will tell you about my own car chase! After the movie, Andrew and I picked up Dickson (he had no choice, Inge told him we were coming and hung up on him, it was awesome) and then we went to meet Felicia at BP’s. After three orders of chicken fingers and fries, and one chocolate brownie with ice cream smothered in whipped cream, we decided to leave. But we didn’t go right home.

No somehow we decided it would be a good idea to race Felicia back to her place. I came up with the route, and we were off – me and Dickson in my car, Andrew and Felicia in hers. I must say, I am very impressed, I didn’t think Felicia had it in her, but that girl can drive! Granted she was shaking afterward 🙂 Anyways, right off the start I knew it would be interesting as Felicia (by mistake) ran a red light. She also went a lot faster on the Whitemud than I expected her to! When all was said and done, Felicia was right in front of us (I didnt know which house was hers, and she had a V6 as opposed to my 4C). Good times. I recommended Rum to Fel to calm her nerves 😉

If you are like me and you missed Social Code at WEM a couple weeks ago, never fear! They are coming back to Edmonton on August 18th and 19th to Kingsway Mall. Then they will be back again for NAIT’s Oookfest on September 11th. If anyone wants to go to one of these times, let me know! Social Code Rocks!

Thought you were the only ones who liked the display pictures I make? Check this out!

Looks like the Internet is suffering some major outages this morning, and as of yet, no one seems to know why. Google is reporting an error for many users (though it seems to be working for me) and apparently Yahoo, AltaVista, and Channel9 among other sites are having troubles. The thinking is that these sites are under a DNS attack. More information here, here, here and here.

Very rarely do the top 40 sites dip under 99% reliability, so this is interesting indeed!