Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in Canada! Here are my weekly notes:

• Probably my favorite article of the week: There’s no such thing as “cyberbullying”. “There’s only the cruelty in all of us, and the cowardice of making words to hide from it.”
• In case you missed it, Gap redesigned its logo. And it struck a nerve.
• Google is getting rid of its free 411 service. Why call when a Google search is so much easier?
• I’m pretty excited about NuPack, a new package management system for .NET.
• Twitter recently introduced new search architecture. Apparently they’ve never heard of regression testing though, because it broke lots of apps that relied on geocoded searches. And it still isn’t fixed.

Here are my weekly notes:

• This is awesome: Google Street View is now available on all seven continents. That’s right, you can see the penguins!
• Why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly. Let’s hope that article is wrong.
• Here’s an incredibly thorough post from MailChimp on the first year as a freemium service.
• From ReadWriteWeb: Could location-based services increase civic engagement in millenials? Maybe we’ll see a little of this at play on October 18.
• I love the intro to this post on PayPal’s new iPhone app: File this one under, "Ok, fine, we do live in the future."

Fall is definitely here, though we had some warm weather this weekend. This photo was taken yesterday by Oscar D.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Why Blockbuster’s success in Canada is a bad news story: “Blockbuster in Canada is profitable not because it has been innovative. Not because it has reinvented itself in a digital era. Not because it has been visionary. Blockbuster is okay because the innovations and services that have devastated its southern partner basically aren’t available in Canada.”
• Thoughtful piece by Malcolm Gladwell on why the revolution will not be tweeted.
• Of course there are faults, but this is pretty amazing: YouTube can (with the assistance of the copyright holders) really validate every minute of uploaded video against every minute of every major copyrighted work.
• Related: YouTube Time Machine.
• When will the first Earth-like planet bet discovered? May 2011, apparently.
• Why Startups Outside Tech Cities Aren’t Totally Farked.

There was a pretty awesome sunrise in Edmonton on Sunday morning!

Sharon and I spent all day Sunday on the Slow Food Edmonton Dairy Farm Tour! We visited Sylvan Star Cheese and Bles Wold Yogurt. You can see all of our photos here.

Here are my weekly notes:

• I like new logos. Can’t explain why. Here’s the new IE 9 logo.
• Sounds like my kind of book: How to Measure Anything.
• Never thought I’d see this – an API from the Yellow Pages!
• Civic Commons is an exciting and important project. Can’t wait to see it evolve.
• Tomorrow is nomination day here in Edmonton! Less than a month to go until the election. You can follow all the candidates on Twitter here.
• Sadly I still haven’t gotten access to #newtwitter. I’m excited to play with the right-side pane though. Speaking of Twitter:

Couldn’t resist a photo at the Twitter offices when I was in San Francisco

Here are my weekly notes, from San Francisco!

• Sharon and I are on vacation, until the middle of next week, here in San Francisco. So far the weather and everything else has been great, so let’s hope it stays that way! Not sure I’ll be writing about our trip every day, but I will upload pictures and stuff when I can.
• Never thought of it that way. The Student Loan Scheme: gateway drug to debt slavery.
• Apparently third party apps aren’t as important as everyone thought in the Twitter ecosystem.
• Windows Phone 7 – Released to Manufacturing.
• Another great piece by Arthur S. Brisbane, on the Age of Voices.

I know I’m a big geek but this cracks me up.

Chinatown in San Francisco.

Me in front of the cable car on Powell Street.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Really interesting introductory piece by Arthur Brisbane, the new Public Editor of the New York Times.
• In case you haven’t seen it yet, take some time, and read this New Yorker article on the Koch brothers, “the billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.”
• I would say the Netscape offices are a pretty important piece of Silicon Valley’s history, which is why I was surprised to read that AOL is moving out.
• Headline says it all: It’s 2010 and Canadians pay the highest cell phone bills in the world.
• For the geeks reading this: Vampires (programmers) versus Werewolves (sysadmins).
• Do you ever talk on the phone anymore? I rarely do. I much prefer text, email, or some other form of communication. That’s why I think it’s so interesting that cell phones, which make it possible to talk anywhere, are the devices that are killing voice.
• One of my favorite links of the week: Information Overload in the 17th Century.

I guess there is such a thing as a money tree! And it can be yours at Superstore for just $12.99!

Here are my weekly notes:

• I’ve been really busy with work lately. Among other things, I’ve been exploring/using: sitemaps.org, html5boilerplate.com, TFS 2010.
• If you believe the stats, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet sometime this month. IPv6 anyone?
• Facebook apparently isn’t happy about the new movie The Social Network. Which only makes me more interested to actually see it.
• Speaking of Facebook, they finally launched Places.
• Three firms own 89% of your sugar water.
• That visualization comes from David McCandless, who writes the amazing Information is Beautiful site. You can watch his TED Talk here.

Had a great time tonight at the birthday party for the edmontonian and The Unknown Studio! If you’re not already a regular reader/listener, you should be!

@bingofuel and @journalistjeff blowing out the candles on a lovely cake made by @frostedbetty!

Here are my weekly notes:

• I use jQuery every day, and I’m a big fan. So I’m really happy to see the jQuery Mobile Project.
• Every time you type on Windows Phone 7, it plays a subtly different sound. Now that’s attention to detail.
• Here are some great thoughts from Miguel de Icaza on the big tech story of the week: Oracle suing Google over Java.
• I’ll admit that I’m a fan of The Economist. It’s one of the magazines I typically pick up before hopping on a plane. The New York Times has an interesting piece on the brand and its marketing.
• Can you believe we’re already halfway through August? The summer has just flown by.
• I’m loving the Fringe so far! Kory has a great review aggregator here.

Buskers are all over the grounds. Would be better if they weren’t right in the middle of thoroughfares though.

Clean and organized! And green!

The main busker stage.

I was pretty exhausted last night, so here are my weekly notes a little later than normal:

• A couple weeks ago I got defensive on behalf of next generation leaders here in Edmonton. The following week, Marty Forbes and I went for lunch to chat. In today’s Edmonton Sun, Marty wrote: “I am indeed confident there is future greatness living in our city…”
• You’ll never guess how Coca-Cola is defending itself in a lawsuit about the health benefits of Vitaminwater: In a staggering feat of twisted logic, lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the lawsuit by asserting that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.”
• David Eaves has been blogging lots of great entries on the census debacle here in Canada, such as this one: Your Government *did* just get dumber…
• Gizmodo thinks that Xbox 360 Kinect could be the future of Microsoft, at least as far as interfaces go. Speaking of nifty interfaces, here are a few early concept renderings of the 3D holograms in Iron Man 2.

Yesterday was Slow Food Edmonton’s annual Wild Boar and Beer BBQ, organized this year by Maria and Sharon. The weather was great, and the event went off without a hitch! Yum! You can see all my photos here.

Hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend! Here are my weekly notes:

• I think it’s amazing that, thanks to advances in technology, we can even take a stab at answering questions like this: What if the Earth stopped spinning?
• Is radical transparency compatible with total anonymity? That’s the WikiLeaks paradox.
• Remember the movie Helvetica? Jason describes it as part of a design triology. The next installment, Urbanized, sounds like my kind of film.
• It sounds like the plot of a movie: seven “keys to the Internet” have been spread across the globe.
• The Acceleration of Addiction. Thought-provoking piece, as usual, from Paul Graham.

Sharon and I were “celebrity” judges at the Heritage Festival this weekend, along with former City Councillor Michael Phair and CTV’s News Director Glenn Kubish. It was lots of fun, especially getting to drive around in a golf cart! You can see all of our photos here.