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.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Finally got a new phone today! I gave in and got a BlackBerry. I was looking at the Pearl, but in the end went with the Curve (8330 on Telus). One of the first things I did when I got home was download TwitterBerry!
• I’ve been playing with a new C# library for Twitter this week called tweet# or tweetsharp. It was written by Daniel Crenna and features a fluent interface. Very cool.
• Also on the topic of libraries for developers, jQuery released version 1.3 this week!
• I’ve seen dozens of Windows 7 reviews this week, but none as interesting or useful as Tim Sneath’s Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets. Don’t miss it.
• A number of blogs discussed the state of Enterprise RSS this week. Greg Reinacker from NewsGator wrote a fantastic reply on Thursday. He says Enterprise RSS is there as an enabler, and is “in more places than you probably think.”
• Interesting article at The Daily Beast on The Gig Economy. Tina Brown posits that no one has a job anymore, instead they have gigs.
• Ready for Tuesday? I’m looking forward to Barack Obama’s inauguration!

The first full week of January went pretty much as expected – very quickly! It was a busy week. Nice to be back to a normal schedule though.

Here are my weekly notes:

• It’s possible that the New York Times company could default on $400 million worth of debt in May, and that has many people speculating about the company’s future. What would happen if the New York Times stopped printing? How would the world react if America’s newspaper of record was no longer available in physical form? Michael Hirschorn argues in The Atlantic that the blow would be largely sentimental. I think he’s right.
• Some related stories from the week: On Monday, the New York Times started selling display advertising on its front page. Jack Shafer wrote in Slate about how newspapers tried to invent the web, but failed. And TechCrunch wrote that to see where media is going, simply follow the money.
• Microsoft announced on Monday that the Xbox 360 recorded its best year in history – life-to-date sales of the console reached 28 million worldwide.
• Mininova saw the number of torrent downloads double from 3.5 billion in 2007 to 7 billion in 2008, and the rate continues to increase.
• This looks like a simple but useful tool included in Windows 7 – the Problem Steps Recorder. Run into an issue? Use the tool to record a short video that you can then send to tech support. Nice.
• From Chris Anderson: the best selling MP3 album of the year at Amazon was also released for free under a Creative Commons license. So much for “piracy” destroying the music industry!
• Using Google Insights for Search, the Royal Pingdom blog has identified the current trends for web terminology and buzzwords. Kind of interesting!
• Have you heard about Microsoft Songsmith? It’s a new product out of Microsoft Research that can automatically provide musical melodies to accompany any vocal singing you provide. Very cool!

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.