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.

Without really intending to, it seems I took a week-long break from blogging! Should be back to normal now. Here are my weekly notes:

• Congratulations to my sister, who got engaged this week!
• As of Wednesday morning, Facebook hit the 500 million active users mark. Pretty amazing.
• Have you seen the terrible BP photoshops? I couldn’t believe it.
• Engadget has an in-depth preview of Windows Phone 7. Looks great!
• I really like the movie Groundhog Day, so I was quite interested in this post on A/B testing that uses the film to illustrate problems with that approach.
• Great visualization: U.S. mood throughout the day inferred from Twitter.

Sharon and I spent the weekend in Calgary, basically just to eat and shop (Charcut and Crate & Barrel, among others). As always, it was a nice change of scenery. The festival we checked out today, Kensington’s Sun & Salsa Festival, was great. There were so many people there! And there was plenty of sunshine too. You can see the rest of the pictures from our trip here.

After a small accident yesterday I spent four hours in the emergency room, finally getting home just after midnight with fourteen stitches in my hand. Not surprisingly, that meant I didn’t post my weekly notes. Here they are:

• A recent article in the New York Times said that the government should step in to regulate Google. Search Engine Land has some great satire about that.
• Great write-up on the Old Spice “Smell like a man, man” campaign, with those wonderful commercials featuring Isaiah Mustafa “on a horse.”
• Congrats to Calgary-based SMART Technologies for the successful IPO!
• The visualization I was waiting for! World Cup 2010 on Twitter.
• Quite a discussion has taken place about YMCA’s new logo! I kinda like it, but apparently it’s not coming to Canada just yet.
• This is just ridiculous: The State of Oklahoma is concerned about kids listening to audio files “designed to induce drug-like effects” because that might be a gateway to actual drug use.
• I generally don’t understand articles like this one, but I enjoy reading them and stretching my brain muscles anyway: Was the Universe Born in a Black Hole?
• Here is cognitive surplus visualized. Time spent watching TV versus time spent creating Wikipedia.

My parents are in town this week. Looking forward to seeing them!

Here are my weekly notes:

• Spain won the World Cup today, defeating the Netherlands by a final score of 1-0. We call it soccer here, but I was surprised to learn that the word “soccer” is actually a British creation!
• I love this: Confirming The Exact Location Where the Web Was Invented. Why? Who cares? Simple: “The place where the web was invented is arguably the most important place in 2 millennia of Swiss history and of global historical importance.”
• A new restaurant called 4Food is opening up in New York soon, and it’s my kind of thing, featuring iPads for taking orders, and a 220 square foot monitor displaying tweets and check-ins.
• Very interesting: The 3 Papers That Define Biotechnology.
• Newsweek reports that American creativity is declining. I had no idea there was a CQ score, similar to an IQ.
• One of my favorite headlines from the past week: The New Bill Gates, Philosopher-King of the Nerds.
• About a month or so ago, Sharon and I picked up the BOLLÖ folding table and chairs for our balcony from Ikea. Lately we’ve noticed the set everywhere – balconies, yards, restaurant patios, etc. I really wonder how many they’ve sold here in Edmonton!
• The Mayfair Hotel was finally demolished today, and it came crashing down right into Jasper Avenue!

Happy Independence Day to everyone south of the border! Here are my weekly notes:

• The last week feels like it was three. Sharon and I were busy moving out of my old apartment and into the new condo. I’ll be writing more about that later this week.
• Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3 was released recently, and it is another great step forward for Microsoft’s browser. It’s faster than almost any other browser across a variety of tests, except for Opera of course, which just got even faster with the release of 10.6.
• It’s official, there is now a .xxx TLD. The only problem? It sounds like some of the biggest names in online pornography don’t want to use it.
• If you’ve ever been annoyed at how using Wi-Fi on your phone drains the battery, this might be the reason why.
• Sometimes you just want toothpaste, and choosing from the dozens of varieties available is just too much of a burden. Soon you might say the same thing about the Canadian wireless industry.
• Speaking of too many choices, I remember when there was just Becel. Now there are nine different varieties (in Canada at least), including the brand new Becel pro.activ. Why?!

Happy Father’s Day! Here are my weekly notes:

• The end of best friends? Only if adults continue to intervene. Why can’t we just let kids be kids?
• Apparently some Chinese companies hire white men to pose as fake businessmen. It’s all about appearances.
• Twitter reports it currently sees 750 tweets per second on an average day, which is 65 million tweets every day. The current record holding event is Game 7 of the NBA Championships – the Lakers win resulted in 3,085 tweets per second.
• IBM has a new high profile supercomputer – Watson plays Jeopardy. It’s not as smart as you’d think though.
• The shortest possible game of Monopoly: 21 seconds. Be sure to read through the comments for even more solutions and discussion!
• I’m not sure why they decided to rebrand, but so far Telus customers don’t seem very happy with the new Optik name (applies to TV and Internet).

It was a busy weekend for Sharon and I! Last night we were at Slow Food Edmonton’s Summer Solstice Dinner, where everything was cooked inside a backyard-wood-burning-oven (which got as hot as 900 degrees Fahrenheit):

This afternoon we went to Councillor Don Iveson’s campaign launch party:

We spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening at Rundle Park:

Such a nice weekend here in Edmonton! Here are my weekly notes:

• Who knew LOLcats would become such a big business? Here’s a NYTimes profile on I Can Has Cheezburger.
• Really interesting photo gallery showing how the Library of Congress is digitizing the past and present.
• I’ve noticed this lately: The Tech Press Turns on Microsoft’s Ballmer.
• Google has a new search index, called Caffeine.
• Big security breach this week for Apple iPad owners. Though I haven’t heard much about it since the story broke, so many it wasn’t a big deal after all?
• Also Apple-related this week: they announced iPhone 4. NewTeeVee asks if Apple is killing the Flip as a result. All I can say is that I plan to get an iPhone 4, and likely won’t be getting a new Flip.
• The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan. Wow.