Here are my weekly notes:

• Finally finished reading Richard Florida’s book Who’s Your City? today. I enjoyed it, but the endless lists of cities became monotonous by the end. One of the most interesting parts is right at the beginning, when the concept of using light to measure economic activity is introduced. Very cool.
• Techmeme published a list of the top 50 headlines for 2008, arranged chronologically.
• The comments at FriendFeed on this headline are hardly surprising: Scout Earns All Merit Badges Possible.
• From Jeff Jarvis: statistics that show the state of the news business.
• Here is Sharon’s write-up of “The Art of the Brick”, the LEGO exhibit we went to see on my birthday.
• Canada plays Sweden tomorrow in the gold medal game. Go Canada Go!
• Back to work tomorrow. Normal schedule resumes. I’ve enjoyed my time off!

Today was my 25th birthday – thanks everyone for your birthday wishes on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere! Special thanks to Sharon for making it a birthday to remember!

She made eggnog pancakes for me this morning, and stuck a couple candles in them for me to blow out. We went to the TELUS World of Science in the afternoon to see The Art of the Brick. Definitely made me feel young playing with LEGO! For dinner we went to my favorite Edmonton diner, Route 99. From there it was on to Starbucks, and then to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I really enjoyed it, but at nearly three hours, it’s a bit of a marathon. All in all, a great day!

Here are a few notes for this week:

• Interesting article on text messaging – basically the carriers are making far more money than they should be. And the busiest texting day of the year is coming right up!
• A somewhat funny post at TechCrunch for the holidays: A Silicon Valley Christmas Tale.
• Here are The Buzzwords of 2008 from the New York Times.
• Speaking of 2008 lists, don’t miss the fantastic Lists: 2008 page, compiled annually by Rex Sorgatz.

Here are my weekly notes:

• On Friday, ProTraining held a holiday open house. I took some photos. Thanks guys! Also on Friday, I went to liveblog Walter’s session on social media at CPRS Edmonton – photos are here.
• Twitter doesn’t really have a policy on usernames at the moment. It’s a free-for-all, unless someone makes a trademark complaint. That happened to Steve Poland recently, which prompted him to argue that Twitter needs a better policy on usernames. I would tend to agree, keeping in mind that a similar situation has worked out mostly okay with domain names.
• In his new book Outliers (which I think Santa sent me for Xmas!) Malcolm Gladwell explains the 10,000 hour rule – basically that it takes that length of time to become truly expert at something. I’ve seen a few people agree with this, such as Chris Anderson. Can’t wait to read the book.
• I’m sure you heard about the Iraqi journalist throwing a pair of shoes at President Bush. Not surprisingly, a few folks have cashed in on the event, such as Alex Tew who built a flash game and put it up at sockandawe.com. He then sold the domain on eBay for £5,215. Not bad!
• Apparently a few more undersea cables were cut this week, again within a short period of time. Curious.
• Interesting report from The Bivings Group that I’m definitely going to have to examine in more detail: The Use of the Internet by America’s Largest Newspapers (2008 Edition).
• Sharon and I had a great time at Jennifer, Martin, and Andy’s place for dinner tonight. Thanks for having us!
• Just four more sleeps until Christmas! I need to get my shopping done…

Here are my weekly notes:

• Sharon invited me to tag along with her to the Vue Weekly Xmas party last night. Was cool to see the offices and meet some great people, such as Hanne and Carlo from Supper In Stereo.
• On Tuesday I did an interview with Archie McLean from the Lej Out Loud podcast about Twitter and the political crisis. You can get the file from the Edmonton Journal site or iTunes and if that doesn’t work, I’ve got it mirrored here. I did make a mistake in the interview – I said Barack Obama has kept his Twitter up-to-date since the election, which of course, he hasn’t. Wishful thinking I guess!
• TechCrunch has been keeping track of layoffs in the tech industry, and on Friday they announced that over 100,000 people have lost their jobs since August 27th, 2008.
• While at Tech Days in Calgary, I was introduced to Oxite. It’s an open source, standards compliant CMS from Microsoft. Haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet, but I will be!
• A new report commissioned by Intel found that 46% of women would rather go without sex for two weeks than give up the Internet for that long. Incredibly, 30% of men would swap sex for the Internet for two weeks!
• As you probably heard, Jay Leno will be going to primetime next year when he gives up The Tonight Show to Conan O’Brien. Great move by NBC.
• Here’s a look inside Google’s Canadian HQ in Toronto from Mathew Ingram.
• Finally went to see Quantum of Solace yesterday. I quit enjoyed it, but that’s probably because I re-watched Casino Royale not long ago. The new movie doesn’t really stand on its own.

Tonight I went to volunteer at Santas Anonymous with Sharon, Diane, and Andrea (I think Alain was there too, but we didn’t run into him). A few of us on Twitter were thinking about some sort of pre-Christmas tweetup, and Brittney suggested a Wrapping Tweetup! She couldn’t make it unfortunately, but my thanks go to her for getting the idea and wiki page out there.

Santas Anonymous is quite the operation! Our wrapping tweetup turned into more of a bagging tweetup actually, as our job was to take the wrapped presents and get them into tagged garbage bags ready for delivery. We spent a couple hours there, but could easily have spent more because the piles of gifts seem unending! Lots of children will be happy on Christmas morning thanks to Santas Anonymous.

If you’d like to volunteer, you can drop in on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 9am to 9pm until December 19th. Check the website for more details.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Went to the Butterdome Craft Sale today with Sharon. The place was packed! She wrote more about it here.
• CNN is looking to launch its own wire service to compete with the Associated Press and others. Not sure why they’d want to do that, but I guess if they can offer it much cheaper than the AP they might get some business.
• Keep in mind that I’m a total geek when I say that I love this idea: Crispin Porter & Bogusky has come up with “Softwear by Microsoft”, a clothing line of graphic tees that feature retro designs (such as the DOS logo). Want!
• Apparently due to concern over the current financial crisis, Honda announced this week its withdrawal from Formula 1. That’s terrible news for F1, though probably a responsible thing for Honda to do.
• Google Reader launched an updated look and feel on Thursday. After some initial shock, it has really grown on me. I like it.
• Apparently there’s an office building in Osaka, Japan that has an expressway running right through it! Simply amazing.
• Gizmodo posted about a researcher who thinks that hurricanes could be broken up using F-4 fighter jets. I’m not sure how realistic that is, but any viable option to stop hurricanes from reaching the shore would be welcome.
• Had a nice holiday dinner with my Questionmark co-workers on Saturday evening at Unheardof. Watch for Sharon’s review!

Here are my weekly notes:

• This week Twitter announced they will no longer be able to send messages to Canadians via SMS due to rising costs. Stupid Canadian mobile industry. Apparently Twitter also turned down a $500 million takeover offer from Facebook. And finally, Shaq is on Twitter!
• Okay one more sort of about Twitter – CNN covered the impact of social media in relation to the Mumbai terrorist attacks.
• Sometime this week The Pirate Bay turned five years old! Looking forward to another five.
• As you may have noticed, YouTube changed all videos to a widescreen format this week. Great for new videos, but it kinda sucks for the old ones.
• Rumor has it that Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo’s search business for $20 billion. I’ll believe it when I see it.
• Pay attention to the news tomorrow – it seems likely that Barack Obama will nominate Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. He’s expected to keep Robert Gates as Defense Secretary.

December 1st tomorrow, can you believe it? Just 25 days until Christmas. BTW, this is such a waste of a great domain name.

Here are my weekly notes:

• As I write this, Sharon is busy watching 24: Redemption. The DVD will be released on Tuesday. I have written about simultaneous movie releases in the past, and this is pretty darn close. Start of a trend, perhaps?
• Here’s another interesting post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog, this time about the taskbar.
• Interesting map of alcohol consumption around the world.
• The Dark Knight, the most successful movie of 2008, is also the most pirated. I think the lesson there is to make great movies, and the money will follow.
• Fascinating article about The Netflix Prize in the NYTimes recently. Apparently “Napolean Dynamite” and a handful of other films are preventing the leaders in the competition from making further progress.
• All good technologies will be used for negative purposes, there’s no avoiding that. Still, it’s sad to hear that a 19-year-old committed suicide on Justin.tv.
• I love looking at pictures of Dubai. Here’s another great set from Boston.com. I really like their “The Big Picture” feature.
• Something I’ll need to look into further: Twilio, an API for phone services.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Had fun celebrating a few friends’ birthdays yesterday – Happy Birthday to Janice, Andrew, and Jane! We started out at Laser Quest (I won the first round) and then nearly filled the Boston Pizza Lounge downtown. Good times!
• Al Gore thinks that Web 2.0 needs a purpose, and of course, that green should be the purpose. In a somewhat related story, Al Gore has joined Twitter!
• Sounds like the New York Times (NYT) is in financial trouble. It’ll be interesting to see how they cope with this situation.
• Told you netbooks were trendy – Walt Mossberg wrote about them this week. On Tuesday, the laptop turned 40 years old.
• One of my favorite apps now has a native app for the iPhone/iPod touch – Remember the Milk! So far I love it. You can find out more here.
• Flickr now has over 3 billion photos. Facebook is still the champ of course, with over 10 billion photos.
• Did you like the “hologram” that CNN debuted during their election night coverage? It apparently cost over $300,000. Don’t be fooled – it’s essentially a fancy green screen.

Here are my weekly notes:

• I did another guest review on Sharon’s blog, this time of Devlin’s.
• The controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) turned ten years old this week. Hard to believe it has been so long already.
• Earlier this week, many websites published news that Apple had rejected Opera Mini from the iPhone AppStore, apparently for competitive reasons. Turns out the truth is quite a bit different and more interesting than that.
• As a huge fan of the show, Sharon has been telling me about this for a quite a while: the parallels between the final two seasons of The West Wing and the current election are uncanny. Or maybe deliberate, depending on how you look at it. Let’s hope the result is the same also.
• Two major OpenID announcements were made this week. Windows Live is now an OpenID provider, as is Google.
• FriendFeed launched a new feature that I really don’t like – the ability to share your FriendFeed activity on Twitter.
• Lewis Hamilton became the youngest ever Formula 1 world champion this morning in an incredibly dramatic race. It literally came down to the last ten seconds of the season. Massa won the race and was so close to making the upset happen, but Glock inexplicably lost 18 seconds on the last lap which enabled Hamilton to pass him to secure the necessary points. Ferrari won the constructor’s championship.
• I can’t believe how close we are to the end of the US election (well, assuming we don’t have a repeat of 2000). If you’re an American reading this, please vote for Obama!