I’m now on holidays until the New Year. Should be a good opportunity to get some work done

Here are my weekly notes:

• The year in photos, 2010. From one of my favorite blogs, The Big Picture.
• This time of year has to be one of my favorites, just for all the cool data and visualizations we get to play with! Like the Google Zeitgeist for 2010.
• I watched parts of Larry King’s last show the other day. 25 Years. He sure is old. Love the suspenders though!
• This is a pretty important accomplishment I think: In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture. You can play with the Books Ngram Viewer here. As impressive as the feat is, Google’s Ngram Viewer is not perfect (thanks to Karen for the link).
• The Dirty Truth About Web Passwords.
• TIME’s Person of the Year for 2010: Mark Zuckerberg.

It has been over a month since my last notes post. The mini-break wasn’t on purpose! I like the weekly notes entry, because I can go back and see what I found interesting at any given point in time. Of course, you can always see what I’m reading in my Google Reader Shared Items (they also appear on the right column).

Here are my weekly notes:

• Don Martin’s final column in the Calgary Herald. He’s been writing there for 32 years.
• I was surprised to read that Brightkite is getting rid of check-ins, deciding to focus instead on group texting. The location-space is hot right now, so it seems odd that they’d drop out. I’ve written about Brightkite a few times in the past.
• The original rules for Basketball sold for $4.3 million at auction, while the Emancipation Proclamation went for just $3.8 million.
• Here’s a great profile of Boing Boing.
• If you’re in need of some reading material for the holidays – Give Me Something To Read Best of 2010.
• Here it is: the list of lists related to 2010.
• What a fascinating idea: a time lapse of Natalie, from a baby to ten years old!

PS. I’m really into Tumblr at the moment, despite their reliability issues. I’m blogging at Edmonton Etcetera.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Everyone hates Ticketmaster – but no one can take it down.
• Looks like the Olympics paid off! Canada is now the top brand among about 100 countries.
• This sounds oddly intriguing: The Anthology of Rap.
• I have been using Longreads lately, and I think it’s useful. The NYTimes wrote about it here.
• One advantage to writing this a day late is I can link to Jeff’s headlines from today, where he wrote about about the iNews880 copy-and-paste incident that I noticed over the weekend.
• Conan is back! I’m blogging this in-between commercials, actually. It’s good to have him back.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Apparently Netflix now accounts for one-fifth of all American network traffic during the busiest time of day. Everything has a cost, however, and some estimate that Netflix is spending up to $2 billion for the content rights.
• What a quarter for Microsoft!
• Great post by Michael Arrington on entrepreneurs. Are you a pirate?
• I’m sure you’ve seen the GQ cover featuring three of the actors from Glee. It achieved the desired effect of lots of media coverage, thanks in large part to angry parents. I thought this New York Times article on the incident was fairly balanced, pointing out that a) this has happened before, it shouldn’t be a surprise, and b) the girls in the shoot are 24 years old. And all that talk of  “looking to Glee for family-friendly entertainment” is a little silly to me – there’s lots of meant-for-adults content in the episodes.
• Africa is Coke’s Last Frontier. Also, Coke is the continent’s largest employer, with 65,000 employees and 160 plants.
• Allstream says it’ll cost about $7 billion to roll out high speed Internet to Canada’s most remote areas. Let’s get it done!
• Just a reminder: you can see my shared items on Google Reader here.
• I’m not much of a zombie-fan, but I did enjoy the first episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead tonight! And last night, we went to see Any Night at the TransAlta Arts Barns, which I also enjoyed.
• A couple of weeks ago, my good friends Jane and Yi-Li finally got married! Sharon has a post about the wedding here, and the rest of my photos are here.

Sharon likes the new Canada Post mailboxes!

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!