Busy weekend so I didn’t get around to posting this. Here are my weekly notes:

• Did you get your Facebook username on Friday? I am now mastermaq. Here are three smart things to read related to usernames on Facebook.
• In case you missed it: Jason Jones of the Daily Show at the New York Times.
• Yet another article explaining that location seems to matter more than ever in the digital world.
• According to an Ofcom study in the UK, 43% of adults who currently don’t have Internet access would choose to remain disconnected even if they were given a computer and broadband connection for free. A large portion of that group is old or retired, which might explain the stat. Still, it’s a little disturbing.

The rest of my London trip was good. I did make it to Noel’s place on Saturday, and had a great time playing Rock Band. On Sunday, I visited the British Museum, which was quite impressive. Like the museums we visited in Washington recently, the British Museum is free. Unlike those museums in DC, there is no security to go through, you simply walk in! I had dinner at Gourmet Burger Kitchen that night, and at Hamburger+ the following evening. The rest of my evenings were spent in the pub 🙂

My flight home was direct, thankfully, and was uneventful. I watched two movies: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (absolutely terrible) and Watchmen (not bad).

I enjoyed my time in London, but it’s good to be back. You can see the rest of my photos here.

Here are my weekly notes:

• While sitting in the airport last weekend, I read this article about Shanghai’s preparations for World Expo 2010. The city is spending $45 billion, more than Beijing spent on the Olympics.
• Opera is now the most popular mobile web browser in the world! I use it on my BlackBerry all the time.
• I think hating Bing was the expected default action, but it’s really quite good. And certainly people aren’t ignoring it.
• Great post: What the CBC can learn from NPR.
• I’ve been reading about the Bill 44 debacle in Alberta, though I haven’t said much about it. I think Chris sums it up nicely.
• It’s the little things like this – high-resolution, device-specific icons – that will make Windows 7 more than just “better than Vista”.
• Alberta Views Magazine was named Magazine of the Year at the National Magazine Awards. Also: Metro Edmonton is the largest free daily in the city.

I’m loving the tube here in London, though I’m a little concerned about the possible strike. Service would be affected starting Tuesday at 7pm for 48 hours – basically, the last part of my trip.

Today was my first full day in London, UK. Weather was great, and I thought it was a productive day in terms of work. I’m here until the 11th. Here are my weekly notes:

• One of the coolest things about Heathrow is seeing all the different types of airlines. Every plane seems to have a different logo and paint job. It was particularly interesting to see so many planes with the F1 logo, though the British Grand Prix isn’t until June 21st.
• I completely agree with these comments on Flickr’s current UI/implementation for Creative Commons. It could be much better.
• This was announced earlier in May, but I only recently had a chance to look at it – AWS Import/Export. Basically you can now send hard drives full of data to Amazon and they’ll upload them to S3. Very cool.
• The product I’ve been working on at Questionmark was recently released: Introducing Questionmark Live.
• Apparently the number of homeless people with laptops is on the rise. I guess I’m not entirely surprised at that, considering my experience at Homeless Connect (almost everyone was familiar with Facebook).
• Bing is now live. TechCrunch notes that Bing 411 also launched.
• As you’ve no doubt heard by now, General Motors filed for bankruptcy protection.

Fish & Chips, and Beer in London tonight. Oh yes.

Here are my weekly notes:

• We had an open house at the Questionmark office here in Edmonton on Friday, which went fairly well. Thanks to everyone who stopped by! I posted some photos here.
• Sharon wrote about our trip to the City Market this weekend. We ran into a few people while we were there, and evidently missed a whole bunch more who got there earlier than we did. Maybe we’ll have to do a City Market Tweetup one Saturday!
• Something I read and bookmarked last week in the Times: The American Press on Suicide Watch.
• A new “fact engine” called Wolfram Alpha is launching tomorrow (soft launching tonight). Here’s a search for “Edmonton”. Looks pretty interesting. Sadly, when I type in “mastermaq” it says “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” You can read more about the service at Search Engine Land.

Sharon and I leave for Washington D.C. bright and early tomorrow morning. We’re there for a quick vacation, returning late Saturday evening. I’ll be blogging this week, but it might all be trip-related, just to warn you! And of course, I’ll be tweeting our adventure (unless Sharon manages to steal and hide my BlackBerry, that is).

I’ve found that one of the best opportunities for me to read is while I’m on a plane. I’ve got two books with me on this trip: Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and Judith Estrin’s Closing the Innovation Gap.

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

• Went to see Wolverine tonight with Megan and Tom, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The summer movie season is here! Next up for me: Star Trek, Terminator Salvation, and Transformers 2.
• Apparently Pixar is opening a new 20,000 square foot studio in downtown Vancouver in the fall. Very cool!
• Sharon and I tried the new Starbucks Breakfast Sandwiches the other day (well new for Edmonton) and though they weren’t bad, I’d rather have an Egg McMuffin every time.
• This is pretty awesome: when you initialize a Microsoft Surface computer for the first time, it says “I’m just a table right now, check back later”!
• Duke Nukem Forever is finally dead. Lots of additional great stuff here.
• Free does not mean no business model. Well said, at Techdirt as usual.
• In roughly a week, Sharon and I will be off to Washington, D.C. I’m excited!

Here are my weekly notes:

• Kim & Shane moved out this weekend. My apartment now looks pretty empty! I also realized how much kitchen stuff Kim had. Needless to say I did quite a bit of shopping and cleaning over the last two days.
• The cookie-cutter tech article (this one is about bit.ly): find a service that bloggers have written about recently, explain what it does in layman’s terms, throw out some statistics about growth, describe the business model or lack of one, cite either Google or Microsoft as companies that could destroy the service. Oh, and capitalize its name, even if the service itself never does.
• General Electric has apparently come up with a digital storage technology breakthrough that will allow standard-sized discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.
• This is kinda cool: The TV magic behind Hockey Night in Canada.
• Derek is right – taking photos doesn’t, and shouldn’t, make you a terrorist. He wrote about some very odd security ads in SkyTrain stations.
• Here’s something I could get behind: Reboot the university.
• Sharon and I went to see Ghosts of Girlfriends Past yesterday. It wasn’t bad, pretty much as expected. We were both surprised at how little Jennifer Garner was in the movie, however.
• I’ll be in Calgary on Tuesday covering the Web Strategy Summit.

Here are my weekly notes:

• My Dad was in town over the weekend, so we got to hang out a bit. He took us for dinner to Montana’s last night, a restaurant I’ve never been to. I always thought the commercials were over the top, but I understand now they’re just a reflection of the level of kitsch inside the place! Watch Sharon’s blog for a review.
• Jenson Button won the Bahrain Grand Prix today – thankfully there wasn’t any rain! Brawn is certainly looking strong this season.
• Sounds like the release candidate of Windows 7 is now out, as are details about the new Windows XP Mode feature. Very, very smart move by Microsoft. That single feature will go a long way toward ensuring the success of Windows 7.
• As you may have heard, Yahoo is shutting down Geocities. Fred Wilson has some great history here.
• Techvibes has the details on the first round of innovation vouchers issued by the Government of Alberta.
• Zappos sounds like a pretty cool company – don’t miss this post by Scoble.
• Swine flu has made its way to Canada. More than 80 people have died from the disease in Mexico so far.

UPDATE: On Friday I did another interview about Twitter, this time for CityTV. You can watch the segment here.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Looks like Outlook 2010 will finally get upgraded with the Ribbon UI to match the rest of Office.
• Definitely going to have to look into this further: Sign in with Twitter.
• Better Place is one of those companies I’ve been reading about for a while now, just waiting for some big news. In the meantime, there are some cool smaller bits of news, such as this prototype in-car dashboard that uses Windows XP and WPF. Looks pretty slick.
• Finally! TripIt now has an iPhone app.
• Can we say that Twitter is officially mainstream now? I mean, Oprah is a user! Check out herebeforeoprah.com to see if you joined before she did.
• Obama finally made his pick for CTO: Aneesh Chopra.
• Bad news from The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden – the defendants were all found guilty and will now appeal. This could set a terrible precedent for the net.
• Sharon and I finally got our trip to Washington, D.C. all booked. We’ll be there the second last week in May. If you have suggestions on where to go and what to see, let us know!

Happy Easter! Here are my weekly notes:

• I haven’t been online much this weekend, mainly because I’ve been working on ShareEdmonton. I’m making really good progress on it – more to share later in the week!
• The Journal wrote about how Twitter was used in a recent baby kidnapping, and they interviewed me for it.
• Wednesday was the 10th anniversary of The Matrix. I still love that movie.
• There’s a new, more Twitter-like interface for FriendFeed now in beta testing. I haven’t been using FriendFeed very much lately, but my initial impression of the new design is positive.
• From Wirelessnorth.ca: Real Marketshare of Canadian Carriers. They note that Bell has kept its share largely by purchasing Aliant, Telus is growing aggressively, and Rogers didn’t see as large a bump from the iPhone as you’d expect.
• The Alberta budget for 2009 was released on Wednesday – Dave has the details.
• As mentioned in the comments on my Edmonton notes, the Oilers were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs this week. Not sure who to cheer for now!
• Here’s a really great idea from Boris Mann: Web apps should let me “bring my own storage”. That would indeed be pretty cool.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Sharon and I watched Slumdog Millionaire this weekend. I thought it was really good, and I definitely enjoyed it. Not sure about all the hype though.
• From the NY Times – Facebook at 5: Is It Growing Up Too Fast?
• As you may have heard, Google recently launched Google Ventures, a new venture capital fund. Recession is a good time to do it, I think.
• Happy third birthday to Amazon S3! Still one of my favorite web services. Also from Amazon, a new web service called Elastic MapReduce. Hadoop in the cloud!
• The Malaysian Grand Prix was quite interesting until the rain started about half-way through, forcing a red flag and much confusion. When it became clear the race wouldn’t be restarted, we learned that half points would be awarded as the race didn’t get to the required 75% completion mark. The last time that happened was in 1991. Jenson Button got his second win for Brawn GP.
• I’m really looking forward to the long weekend coming up. Hopefully I can get some work done, and sneak in a little rest too! It’s going to be a busy week. At least Spring is on the way!