Here are my weekly notes:

• Thank you to Sharon for giving me the kick-in-the-behind that was necessary to get me started on my spring cleaning. My room looks so much better, and I finally found things that had been lost for months!
• I’m perfectly happy drinking tap water, but I have to admit that Boxed Water Is Better is fairly interesting. Apparently they donate 20% of their profits to world water relief and tree reforestation foundations.
• According to TeleGeography, Skype is now the largest provider of cross-border voice communications in the world. Pretty impressive! I use it everyday for precisely that purpose.
• Some details on the CBC cutbacks from Tod.
• Alberta has a new brand and slogan: “Freedom To Create. Spirit To Achieve.” Like my friend Chris, I actually quite like it. Dave has a slightly different take on it.
• Here are eight lessons learned as a brand on Twitter from the Blogger team.
• The 2009 F1 season started this weekend, with the brand new Brawn GP team finishing first and second! The TSN broadcast was terrible – no pre-race show, abrupt commercial breaks, and worst of all, a five to eight lap delay. That’s just unacceptable given F1’s official live-timing, Twitter, and other ways to get information immediately. TSN better get its act together for the next race.

Here are my weekly notes:

• My parents have been in town for the last few days, so it’s been good to spend some time with them. Last night Sharon and I took them to Hardware Grill for dinner, and to Illuminations afterward. They really enjoyed both, and so did we!
• Microsoft’s MIX 09 event happened this week, which means there was lots of news for developers. Colin has a nice roundup here.
• I agree with Scott Hanselman, we totally need FizzBin – the technical support secret handshake. Probably a better idea in theory than in practice, however.
• Is Twitter the savior of journalism? Or something like it? Lots of great discussion by Dave Winer lately.
• If you’re a regular Facebook user, you’ve no doubt seen the latest redesign by now. Seems most people dislike it. I don’t really care one way or another. I like this post by Robert Scoble on the issue though: Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now.
• Speaking of Facebook, I’d love to have a vanity URL (facebook.com/mastermaq). Yes, even despite all of the great reasons that Chris Messina has laid out for why we shouldn’t have vanity URLs.
• As you may have seen this week, Cisco purchased Pure Digital, maker of the Flip video camera, for $590 million in stock. Lots of theories about what they are going to do with it, but no one really knows. I bet even Cisco doesn’t know!
• Nielsen says that unique visitors to Twitter increased 1382 percent year-over-year, to 7 million in February 2009. Not bad!

As I mentioned in my last post, I didn’t touch a computer all weekend. I can’t remember the last time I went that long without using a computer! I wasn’t completely disconnected however, I read email and posted updates using my BlackBerry.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Sharon and I had a good time in Calgary this weekend. We ate at four places on our short “eat-away” – Pfanntastic Pannenkoek Haus, Rush, Dairy Lane Cafe, and Peter’s. The main event, for Calgary Dine Out Week, was Rush. Sharon will be posting about each one this week. My food pictures are here, and my pictures from the Calgary Zoo are here.
• Last night, just after we got back to the city, we went to see Bill Maher at the River Cree Casino & Resort. He performed in “The Venue”, a giant tent behind the main casino building. I thought he spent too much time on the Republicans, but overall I enjoyed the show. He’s very funny!
• Cool post from Pingdom – the size of social networks vs. the size of countries.
• Interesting entry from Boing Boing guest-blogger Dan Gillmor on the New York Times and “Serious” journalism.
• Another interesting read – Behind the Scenes at Mininova. I use that site all the time to find torrents!

Here are my weekly notes:

• I really dislike DST. This whole time change thing has got me screwed up again.
• IDEAfest yesterday was great. I’ll be posting my slides soon (just wanted to add some stuff to the end). Chris LaBossiere wrote a great post on social networking, inspired by the event.
• Skittles ran an interesting marketing experience this past week. They made the homepage of their site a search for “skittles” on Twitter. People quickly took advantage of that, posting all sorts of things, which forced the company to change from Twitter Search to Facebook.
• Darren wrote about a service called ZinePal – it lets you print your blog. Actually looks kind of neat.
• Really looking forward to the end of the week – Sharon and I are off to Calgary for the weekend for Dine Out Calgary. We’ll be back Sunday evening to see Bill Maher at the River Cree Casino!

Here are my weekly notes:

• I sort of already do this when I post my “Sleeping” update at night – Yawnlog is a social sleep tracker. There really is an app for everything!
• FriendFeed posted a really interesting entry about how they use MySQL to store schema-less data. They currently have over 250 million entries in their database, not counting metadata!
• Computerworld’s Mike Elgan called podcasting “the most underappreciated, underutilized media ever” in a new opinion piece this last week.
• What did the Internet look like in 1996? Slate took a peek this week. AOL is mentioned six times in the article, Netscape four times.
• I’m going to write about my new Netbook soon, but in the meantime, check out this article from Wired: The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time.
• Another great essay from Paul Graham: Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. Don Dodge has some good discussion of the idea here.
• Looks like I need to have a blogging evening/day – my backlog of posts is getting awfully long!

Here are my weekly notes:

• Just got back this evening from Vancouver. Had a great time at Northern Voice! I’ll write up my post-mortem later this week.
• I finally got my Dell Mini 9 netbook! It was delivered on Friday, so I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.
• Though it didn’t win for Best Picture tonight at the Oscars, The Dark Knight still had some good news this week – it surpassed $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales.
• This is pretty coo: the hardware behind the newest WordPress.com data center.
• For some reason, I find myself interested whenever I come across another Dubai-related link. Jason Kottke wrote recently about a post by David Galbraith, and summarized: “What’s the biggest problem with Dubai? It doesn’t have the cultural bedrock needed to support a destination city.”
• Cool visualization, though I don’t agree with all of them: The Trilogy Meter.
• My photos from Northern Voice are here, and my photos from Illuminate Yaletown (which I’ll write more about later) are here.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Sharon and I went to Normand’s for dinner last night. The service was great, and the food was pretty good too. They were non-stop busy, all night. I have a few photos to upload still.
• This is such a great list – 15 things all airports should have.
• Lots of software companies do continuous integration, but how many do continuous deployment? The folks IMVU have an incredibly inspiring deployment process.
• I couldn’t agree more with Darren about phone books – it seems bizarre that we still have them in 2009. Such a waste.
• The Moonlight team shipped version 1.0 this week – congratulations! Silverlight is doing better than you might think.
• Twitter doesn’t have a business model to announce just yet, despite all the discussion early in the week that they would start charging companies.
• I’m getting excited for Northern Voice! Megan and I leave Thursday evening.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Just got back from celebrating Andrea’s birthday at King Noodle Hot Pot, and I feel like I gained a hundred pounds! Very good though, and she was definitely surprised. Happy Birthday Andrea! Pictures are here.
• On Friday, Sharon and I went to Eden Lilly for “a very sexy party” which Sharon wrote about here. Yesterday we went to check out the Royal Bison Craft & Art Fair, which you can read about here.
• Despite repeated statements to the contrary, Microsoft will indeed change the behavior of the UAC control panel in Windows 7. All you need to know is that this’ll make Windows 7 more secure.
• Very cool from the New York Times: the Article Search API. With it you can search through more than 2.8 million articles from 1981 until present, via 35 searchable fields.
• Opera is working on a new Javascript engine called Carakan. I’m glad to see the JS-engine wars heating up!
• Facebook has joined the OpenID foundation. That’s pretty cool, and something I didn’t think would happen.
• Another interesting (and long overdue) announcement from Facebook – they’ve opened up the status API to other applications.
• Should be a couple of Twestival-related articles published this week! If you’re planning on joining us on Thursday, please register online.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Didn’t watch all of the Super Bowl today, but caught most of the second half. Quite entertaining! Now I’ll have to go watch all the commercials online. One thing I already watched was the Transformers 2 teaser! It’s gonna rock!
• Also: It should be called Handegg.
• On Friday, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) announced a 20-year deal with Wi-Fi Rail Inc., to outfit 104 miles of track and 43 stations with wireless Internet access by 2011. It won’t be free to use, but it’s not too expensive – yearly access will cost $300 when fully complete.
• I think this is cool: TripIt has an API! Now I want a WordPress widget.
• CoverItLive is a service that helps you live-blog an event. On Wednesday, it was announced that they raised $1.2 million. One to keep an eye on, I think.
• Long Zheng posted about a potential security issue with the way Microsoft has implemented UAC in Windows 7. I agree with Long, I think it’s something they should change, even if it is by design as they claim.
• On Tuesday, Liz at Three Bright Stars gave me a “Lemonade Award” for my post about Free WiFi. Thanks Liz, much appreciated!
• I’ve run into rate-limiting issues with Twitter’s API this weekend. I requested whitelisting on Tuesday, but still haven’t heard back. Kind of annoying.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Happy Chinese New Year! I had a great dinner tonight with Sharon’s family.
• Nicholas Carr wrote an interesting post this week about what he calls “the information triumvirate” – the web as the medium, Google as the navigation of that medium, and Wikipedia as the destination.
• According to new traffic data from Hitwise, Twitter surpassed Digg for the first time this week. Maybe that’s why they have been able to raise more money at a $250 million valuation.
• One of my favorite commercials is The Discovery Channel’s “I love the whole world”. I guess Microsoft Learning thought it would be fun to spoof! The Halo one is pretty good, actually.
• Wizzard Media announced on Thursday that it recorded 1.2 billion podcast download requests in 2008. Fairly impressive numbers!
• Here’s some more statistics: the Internet 2008 in numbers from Pingdom.
• And even more: comScore estimates that the worldwide Internet population is 1.5 billion. Amazingly, they estimate that 21.8 million Canadians are online.