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!

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!