Month: March 2007

Notes for 3/11/2007

Here are my weekly notes:

  • I was at Blockbuster today and noticed that they are already taking pre-orders for Halo 3, which doesn’t come out til November. Price was $79.99 with a $10 deposit required.
  • Eric Rice did something interesting recently – he posted an introduction message on his blog, despite being a blogger for years. He posted it as a kind of “new reader orientation.” Neat idea, I might copy that!
  • I went for brunch with Sharon today to Barb & Ernie’s Old Country Inn here in Edmonton. It was quite tasty, if a little cramped. Ernie is quite a character! We also wandered around the Art Gallery’s Free For All event – pictures here.
  • Interesting post on caffeine…it’s something I should learn more about.
  • Has Twitter tipped the tuna? Ross Mayfield thinks so.
  • Went to see 300 on Friday with a bunch of people…I left impressed! It’s not for everyone, but I rather enjoyed it. Speaking of movies, here’s the 100 worst of the worst according to Rotten Tomatoes.
  • The U-Pass referendum passed at the University of Alberta with 84% voting yes.

2007 ETS Community Conference

Post ImageI went to the Edmonton Transit System Community Conference this morning, and I have to admit it was rather interesting. I’m not a transit geek or anything like that, but I happened to come across the conference online last week, and a couple of sessions caught my eye. One was on new technology, and the other was on web technology. Other sessions included a tour of the LRT garage, an input session regarding the 100th anniversary of ETS (happens in 2008), and an information session about Edmonton’s Transportation Master Plan.

I recorded the welcome and keynote, which you can listen to here. Here are some notes from the two breakout sessions I attended. From new technology:

  • ETS has ordered six hybrid buses, two of which are already in service. Each one costs around $700,000.
  • They also recently finalized their largest single order of buses ever (over 200). The new fleet will replace all the old GM buses, and will allow some room for growth. The 2007 Clean Diesel buses cost about $400,000 each.
  • ETS is experimenting with GPS and other wireless technologies. Lots of buses now have a GPS transmitter on top. The only thing preventing them from doing cool things like an “arrivals & departures” board at transit centres is money.
  • Most buses will be outfitted with a camera system consisting of 5 cameras. The cameras record to a DVR on the bus that has around 1 TB of storage, and uses MPEG-4 compression.
  • They have new automatic people counters! Haha, kinda funny they mentioned this one, but it actually does make a big difference I guess. In the future it could be linked to some of the wireless technologies too so that ETS would know if a bus is full or not in real-time.

And from web technology:

  • The webmaster for ETS is the same lady who records the BusLink information, and the old station announcements on the LRT.
  • I came ready to complain about all the new windows that are spawned on the website. Apparently I’m not the only one with that concern! No word on when it will get fixed.
  • The ETS website is the busiest of all City of Edmonton websites, with over 900,000 visits in 2006.
  • They launched an online store four months ago, where you can buy tickets and passes. It has already done over $100,000 in sales.
  • An average of 89,000 plans per month were created in 2006 with the Trip Planner tool.
  • There is a lot of things they’d like to add to the website, but it sounds like they have to jump through hoops to be able to make any changes.
  • It was mentioned in passing, but it sounds like the City of Edmonton is gearing up to overhaul their entire web presence.

The new technology session was particularly interesting for me…I have long wondered if they were testing GPS and similar technologies. Turns out they are!

It was announced in the keynote that the recent U-Pass referendum at the University of Alberta passed with 84 percent voting yes. You can read more about the vote at The Gateway. The ETS staff seemed pretty excited about it.

I’m not sure I’d go to this conference every year, but it was definitely worth checking out. And hey, you can’t beat the price – free!

Ottawa to help Alberta energy go green

Post ImageHere’s something you don’t hear every day – the federal government wants to help Alberta with it’s oil and gas industry! I think it’s great, as long as the funding is actually used appropriately. From the CBC article:

Ottawa will spend $155.9 million to make Alberta’s oil and energy industry more environmentally friendly, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Thursday.

The money will also support a project in Edmonton designed to convert municipal waste into electricity. Efforts to design a coal-fired electricity plant that releases almost no emissions will also be funded.

Already the announcement has been criticized by The Sierra Club, and I’m sure many more critics will follow. Harper has good timing though, as the Alberta government today “introduced legislation requiring about 100 high-polluting companies to reduce their emissions output starting July 1.”

Maybe this is the Canadian government’s way of saying, “yes, we value the oilsands as a strategic Canadian asset.”

Read: CBC.ca

Smyth – Heavyweight Champion of Puck Tipping

Post ImageI’m still sad that Ryan Smyth is no longer an Oiler. I was happy to read about him in an article on NHL.com though. Author Evan Grossman calls Smyth the “heavyweight champion of puck tipping,” and has some excellent quotes from Smyth and Brodeur:

“That guy is unbelievable,” Brodeur said. “You can count all his goals over the season and I don’t think you could add them up to the blue line.”

Smyth says it’s all about practice:

“It’s the old cliché, practice makes perfect,” said Smyth, who was traded to the Isles from Edmonton at the trade deadline. “I do it every game day, at every morning skate, just tip pucks.”

After losing their fifth straight game last night, I think it’s safe to say the Oilers are definitely missing Ryan right now.

Read: NHL.com

Mini Y2K? Nope – Y2K7

Post ImageI have been reading about the upcoming daylight saving time change taking place this weekend, and it sounds like a big headache. The problem is described in this CNET News.com article:

Thanks to a federal law aimed at reducing energy costs, daylight saving time starts three weeks earlier and runs one week later in the fall. However, without an update, many computers and digital gadgets can’t automatically adjust to the new time, potentially wreaking havoc on corporate scheduling for the next three weeks.

The change affects Canada too. The article goes on to mention Y2K and how it is somewhat similar, and I thought – it’s like a mini Y2K! And then I came across this Wikipedia entry:

Y2K7 refers to the Year 2007 problem, caused by a US-mandated change to Daylight Saving Time, which could have widespread repercussions in the computer industry.

I should have known that there would already be a clever name for this problem. I also learned from the entry that there is a Year 2038 problem too.

The change means that daylight saving time starts this Sunday and ends on the first Sunday in November. The Wikipedia entry contains some helpful resources, and Microsoft’s support page for the change is here.

Read: CNET News.com

Scoble and his sheep

Post ImageI think Robert Scoble is a really smart and passionate guy, but man does he ever herd a lot of sheep! In the last few months, Twitter has grown incredibly fast. So fast that Obvious Corp. is trying to offload Odeo so that they can focus on Twitter. And it seems to me that the growth is largely due to Robert pimping the service.

I don’t really have a good way to back this up, other than noticing the trend in my aggregator. Before Robert started talking about Twitter in almost every post on his blog, it was rare for me to read about Twitter in any of the other blogs I subscribe to. Lately though, it’s like clockwork. There’s probably one blogger a day who announces they have “given in”, “succumbed”, or otherwise been “forced” to join Twitter. It always goes something like this:

I heard about Twitter a long time ago and thought it was useless. Now though, I have decided to try it out, and Scoble’s right, it’s great!

They don’t always mention Scoble, but often you can trace it back to him. Maybe he should be asking the Obvious boys for referral money!

The one notable exception to the trend (remember, this is just based on the feeds I read) is Darren Barefoot, and even he mentioned Robert!

Free Starbucks on March 15

Post ImageCoffee addicts rejoice! I just came across this excellent news at the Starbucks Gossip blog:

Next Thursday, all company-operated and licensed Starbucks stores in the U.S., Canada, and other countries will give away free Tall (12-ounce) cups of coffee to anyone who drops by for the second annual Starbucks Coffee Break.

What a great idea! I’m so there.

Read: Starbucks Gossip

161 exabytes of data created in 2006

Post ImageThere’s a new report out from research firm IDC that attempts to count up all the zeroes and ones that fly around our digital world. I remember reading about the last such report, from the University of California, Berkeley. That report found that 5 exabytes of data were created in 2003. The new IDC report says the number for 2006 is 161 exabytes! Why the difference?

[The Berkeley researchers] also counted non-electronic information, such as analog radio broadcasts or printed office memos, and tallied how much space that would consume if digitized. And they examined original data only, not all the times things got copied.

In comparison, the IDC numbers ballooned with the inclusion of content as it was created and as it was reproduced – for example, as a digital TV file was made and every time it landed on a screen. If IDC tracked original data only, its result would have been 40 exabytes.

Even still, that’s an incredible increase in just three years. Apparently we don’t even have enough space to store all that data:

IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) in 2010.

Pretty hardcore, huh? You can read about zettabytes at Wikipedia. I’m not too worried about not having enough space though, even if we were attempting to store all that data (which we aren’t). Hard drives are already approaching the terabyte mark, so who knows how big they’ll be in 2010. Then of course there’s also the ever falling costs of DVD-like media.

More importantly, I bet a lot of the storage we “have available” right now is totally underutilized. You’d be hard pressed to find a computer that comes with less than 80 GB of storage these days, and I can assure you there are plenty of users who never even come close to filling it up. Heck, even I am only using about 75% of the storage I have available on my computer (420 GB out of 570 GB) and I bet a lot of it could be deleted (I’m a digital pack rat).

Read: Yahoo! News

Edmonton Festival City

Post ImageI was looking around for event listings for Edmonton recently, and yesterday I stumbled upon the Edmonton Festival City website. My first reaction was – wow, this is great! – and my second reaction was – how did I not know about this site?! From the about page:

The people of Greater Edmonton are physically connected to each other by streets, sidewalks and bridges. We are also united culturally through our sports teams, the arts, local media and — uniquely to Edmonton — by the range, depth and variety of our festival scene.

The site has photos and some general information, but the real gem is the calendar. All of Edmonton’s many festivals are listed, with dates, contact information, and brief descriptions. There are events listed right up to November 2008.

It’s a pretty good resource. They really should have a blog/RSS feed with festival-related news though, then it would be really useful.

Read: Festival City

Spider-Man 3 HD Preview Clip

Post ImageIf there’s one movie I am looking forward to this year, it’s Spider-Man 3. Even though I have high expectations for the movie, I am confident it will exceed them. Needless to say, I was pretty excited to learn that NBC.com would have a special preview available tonight after Heroes aired. I just downloaded and watched the largest option, a whopping 285 MB for seven and a half minutes of 720p HD content.

The preview contains a scene with Peter and MJ, a scene with Peter and Aunt May, and the rest is an action sequence featuring Peter and Harry. And yes, the preview does end with a bit of a cliffhanger. It’s a fairly good preview, despite not giving us the goods (no Venom, no Sandman, etc)! If you want to download the clip, you’ve only got until tomorrow at 9 PM pacific time. Though I’m sure it will be up on BitTorrent by then.

The video took me about 8 minutes to download, which is pretty good considering I wasn’t even using our fastest connection. Looks like Sony is using Limelight Networks to serve the video.

Read: NBC.com