Are you busy tomorrow night? No? Great! Join us for the Edmonton Weblogger Meetup! All the details can be found at the Meetup site. Please RSVP and we’ll see you there!

There is always a ton of different theories regarding HIV and how to cure/prevent it, but I thought this one was particularly interesting. A group of researchers at the University of Liverpool have speculated that black death may have enabled some Europeans to be immune to HIV:

Devastating epidemics that swept Europe during the Middle Ages seem to have had an unexpected benefit – leaving 10% of today’s Europeans resistant to HIV infection. But epidemics of which disease? Researchers claimed this week that plague helped boost our immunity to HIV, but rival teams are arguing that the credit should go to smallpox.

Either way, some European’s carry a mutation which affects a protein known as CCR5 on the surface of white blood cells. The mutation prevents HIV from entering the cells and thus doing their damage.

Intense stuff man. I wonder if they can use this knowledge to come up with a vaccine?

Read: BoingBoing

Just bought a few tracks from Puretracks.com, and it occurred to me that I don’t do that very often. And the main reason is that normally, I can find an album or a song from a download site well in advance of being released on a legitimate site or in the stores.

So there you go. If any music industry executives are reading this, give us high quality tracks for download well in advance of having them appear on illegal services! I am pretty sure I’d purchase more music online if I could get it really early.

One of the biggest films of last year will be back in theatres again in time for Easter. The Passion of the Christ has been shortened by six minutes to make it “more palatable for a wider audience” according to Mel Gibson:

“Some of you actually said that you wish you could have taken your Aunt Martha, Uncle Harry or your grandmother or some of your older kids, and you thought that perhaps the intensity of the film was prohibitive to those people. So I listened to that and it inspired me to recut the film to cater to those people that perhaps might not have seen it because of its intensity or brutality.”

Are you kidding me? Six minutes?! You need to cut a good 120 of those 127 minutes to make it more “palatable”. And clearly, I am not the only one who thinks so:

Newmarket had hoped the recut version would receive a PG-13 rating (parental guidance suggested for kids under 13), but the MPAA ratings board ruled it was still graphic enough to merit an R.

So the movie will be released “unrated” instead. Not that it really matters. The people who believe the movie causes miracles to happen would pay full price to see it again regardless of the rating or length. As I advised in my review of the original, don’t eat anything before or while you watch it.

Read: Canoe

Looks like there is something good to come out of the Molson-Coors merger after all:

Molson Kick is a lager that will contain guarana, a South American plant that’s a natural source of caffeine. The beer will be available throughout Ontario, Quebec and Western Canada beginning March 21, and in the Atlantic provinces on April 1. It will be marketed in what the brewer calls “a sleek, fast-chilling aluminum bottle,” as well as in cans.

Read: Globe and Mail

A while ago I posted about one of Google’s newest test services, Google Maps. Well I decided to play with it again, just to see if anything had changed. The first thing I decided to search for was “edmonton strippers“, expecting to see Diamonds or something. Alas, the service only returned furniture and upholstry services. Next, I decided to search for “edmonton university” and guess what? No University of Alberta found.

Clearly, the service needs some work.

If you use AOL Instant Messenger, stop now. Uninstall it, and never use that crap again. AOL recently made changes to the Terms of Service for AIM, including this quote among others:

You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.

Read: Steve Rubel

Off and on for a while now, there have been rumblings that there are not enough women bloggers out there. For the most part, I think that the “problem” of not enough women blogging is just a figment of the imagination of women’s activists. If we really want equality, we need to stop singling out the women in every situation, and blogging is no different.

So basically, I have become tired of the argument, and have generally ignored posts about the topic lately. But this post from Rory Blyth is one I just couldn’t ignore:

It isn’t so much that there aren’t a lot of women blogging (there are), but that there aren’t many female tech bloggers…Before anybody goes and tries to come up with a solution to the “problem” of too few female tech bloggers, determine first if it is a problem. I’m not saying that it isn’t, but it’s foolish to assume without weighing differences between the sexes that it is.

Well said.

The weather here in Edmonton has been quite nice lately, except for the wind. In some places though, there is still lots of snow! Such as Inuvik, where I used to live. If you haven’t already, check out Martin’s new post on Inuvik in March, and be sure to look at the gallery. Some really neat pictures!

On Wednesday, I posted about the new Google News customization capabilities. I was obviously very excited in my post, and I didn’t really take the time to think about the new features. Perhaps it was because the product-that-will-always-be-beta finally changed in some way. In any case, I have been doing some reading (as I often do) about it, and came across two really great posts that sum up the drawbacks and/or flaws of the service.

The first is from Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo:

But I use a few browsers and several computers. Without any sort of login or registration system, though, I have to make the same customizations on each of those machines and on each browser. What the heck? Isn’t that like having a version of My Yahoo! that just forgets your settings every time you use a new computer? That would really suck.

Very good point, I didn’t even realize this at first! Thinking about it though, Jeremy is right. I would love to be able to have the same Google News page on my desktop and on my tablet. The second post is from Steve Rubel:

Google News introduced a new feature today that enables the user to put customized searches right on the home page. That’s all well and good, but where are the RSS or Atom news search feeds?

Also good point. This is, in my opinion, the biggest area Google is behind. MSN Search, IceRocket, and many others all offer RSS feeds of their searches, so why not Google?!