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!

Here are my weekly notes:

• Everyone seems to be down on Yahoo lately, but Fortune has five reasons to buy Yahoo stock. I’d be wary.
• Justine Ezarik, better known as iJustine, received a write-up in the latest issue of MIT’s Technology Review. I can’t decide if that says something about her, or something about the publication.
• Google launched a US Voter Information site this week. We need something like this in Canada! I wonder what kind of impact it will have on voter turnout.
• Check out these incredible pictures and drawings of Dubai. Not sure if it’s all true or not, but I suspect it is.
• Lots of speculation in the last few days that Windows 7 will be released in the latter half of 2009. We should learn a lot more from Microsoft’s PDC, which starts tomorrow.
• Amazon’s Web Services division had a big week – EC2 is no longer in beta, there’s an SLA, and Windows/SQL Server support is now in beta. Keep it up AWS!
• I installed the latest “Windows Live” beta this weekend, and I like the look. Not so impressed with the performance thus far.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Apple launched new MacBook’s this week, featuring a large, all-glass trackpad. They are also made from a single block of metal, which is their new “brick” manufacturing process.
• Facebook recently hit a new milestone – more than 10 billion photos have been uploaded to the site. Another 2 TB of photos are uploaded every day. Incredible numbers!
• If you had any doubt that airport security is a farce, executed just for show, this article will erase it.
• Here’s the scariest thing for Halloween 2008.
• Daniel Lyons asks the question many people are wondering about: Why is Jerry Yang still in charge at Yahoo?
• I’m sure you’ve seen the photo of McCain from the third and final debate, sticking his tongue out as he turns away from Obama. Here are some thoughts on the photo from the man who captured it. And here’s a funny photoshop of the photo.
• It’s official – the Canadian government has declared that bisphenol-A is harmful to humans, and will ban plastic baby bottles containing the chemical.
• Who would the rest of the world vote for? Without a doubt, Obama.

Happy Thanksgiving! Here are my weekly notes:

• I had three Thanksgiving Dinners this weekend, two with turkey and one Asian-style. So much food! My photos here.
• Sharon and I went to Body Worlds yesterday. The first part was really hot and narrow, everyone was packed in like sardines. I thought it would take hours to get through, but once we got to the second room it wasn’t so bad. I thought Body Worlds was interesting, but I wasn’t seriously impacted or anything. The next major exhibit at the Telus World of Science is called The Art of Brick, featuring The Brick Artist, Nathan Sawaya. It opens December 20th. Yay Lego!
• My favorite task management app, Remember The Milk, just turned three years old! Happy Birthday RTM! Looking forward to many more great things (like an iPhone app maybe?).
• Uncov is back! Yes, Ted has decided to resume writing one of the most entertaining blogs on the Intertubes. Check out his newest post, A Bloggers Guide to Armchair Economics.
• Apple is launching something big tomorrow. Ryan Block wonders if, given the current economic situation, this is the best time for Apple to be launching new laptops. Mary Jo Foley wonders if a sub-$1000 Apple laptop would hurt Microsoft?
• Amazon S3 is now storing 29 billion objects. Very impressive.
• Sharon’s first article was published in Vue Weekly this week. I’m so proud of her! You can read her interview with Sebastian Lysz here.
• The last presidential debate takes place on Wednesday! Here’s a fun mage thread on Fark…what would you equate the candidates with?