Happy Father’s Day! Here are my weekly notes:

• The end of best friends? Only if adults continue to intervene. Why can’t we just let kids be kids?
• Apparently some Chinese companies hire white men to pose as fake businessmen. It’s all about appearances.
• Twitter reports it currently sees 750 tweets per second on an average day, which is 65 million tweets every day. The current record holding event is Game 7 of the NBA Championships – the Lakers win resulted in 3,085 tweets per second.
• IBM has a new high profile supercomputer – Watson plays Jeopardy. It’s not as smart as you’d think though.
• The shortest possible game of Monopoly: 21 seconds. Be sure to read through the comments for even more solutions and discussion!
• I’m not sure why they decided to rebrand, but so far Telus customers don’t seem very happy with the new Optik name (applies to TV and Internet).

It was a busy weekend for Sharon and I! Last night we were at Slow Food Edmonton’s Summer Solstice Dinner, where everything was cooked inside a backyard-wood-burning-oven (which got as hot as 900 degrees Fahrenheit):

This afternoon we went to Councillor Don Iveson’s campaign launch party:

We spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening at Rundle Park:

Such a nice weekend here in Edmonton! Here are my weekly notes:

• Who knew LOLcats would become such a big business? Here’s a NYTimes profile on I Can Has Cheezburger.
• Really interesting photo gallery showing how the Library of Congress is digitizing the past and present.
• I’ve noticed this lately: The Tech Press Turns on Microsoft’s Ballmer.
• Google has a new search index, called Caffeine.
• Big security breach this week for Apple iPad owners. Though I haven’t heard much about it since the story broke, so many it wasn’t a big deal after all?
• Also Apple-related this week: they announced iPhone 4. NewTeeVee asks if Apple is killing the Flip as a result. All I can say is that I plan to get an iPhone 4, and likely won’t be getting a new Flip.
• The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan. Wow.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Pretty nasty weather in Edmonton recently. Ah well, everything is about to get very green!
• On Friday evening Sharon and I joined a few other local bloggers for the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra’s A Night in Paris. We chose to sit in the choir loft with Jeff and Brittney (photo of them here), which was a neat experience. Brittney wrote all about the evening here.
• Neat infographic on the rise of consumer location-based services.
• This is such a great idea: The V Lock. Never miss the keyhole again.
• As an Opera fan, I really love that they made fun of a recent Chrome ad.
• Pretty interesting to read about the new NYC subway map. They keep making Manhattan wider!
• Can’t remember if I mentioned this yet or not: EdmontonPolitics.com. Politics in Edmonton just got more interesting!

We took my Grandma out for brunch today to Cafe Haven to celebrate her birthday. Happy Birthday Grandma!

Here are my weekly notes:

• Happy 5th Birthday to YouTube! The site now streams two billion views per day.
• I did a talk on social media at the Alberta Liberal Convention this weekend. I thought it went quite well, with good participation from the audience. Only one person asked if I am a liberal (I’m not…I don’t and won’t belong to any political party).
• Here’s a great post from Anil Dash on why he won’t sign an NDA. I’ll definitely be pointing to this in the future.
• In case you missed it: Announcing TED’s Open TV Project.
• Apparently Twitter has updated its trending topics algorithm, so that Justin Bieber appears less frequently. Not sure how effective it is, as two of the top ten topics as I write this are “Twieber” and “Jieber”.
• This is a good “special report” on Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
• OpenID + OAuth 2.0 = OpenID Connect?

Did you miss the City Market Downtown on Saturday? Don’t make that mistake again! Here is Sharon’s recap.

Happy Mother’s Day! Here are my weekly notes:

• You know the baby on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album? He worked on the iconic Obama HOPE posters.
• The iPad will be available in Canada on May 28. Prices start at $549.
• Located in Northern Alberta, just inside Wood Buffalo National Park, the largest beaver dam in the world is visible from space!
• Here are the results of Randall Munroe’s color survey. Over five million colors were named across 225,000 user sessions, creating a great data set to explore.
• Some neat research on projecting visualizations throughout the home.
• Saw Iron Man 2 today and enjoyed it. Robert Downey Jr. was great once again, but the final battle scene was a little underwhelming. And the “you complete me” scene from the trailer was nowhere to be found in the actual film.

Sharon and I volunteered at Homeless Connect today. It’s such a rewarding experience! The next one is scheduled for October.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Sharon and I went to see the final performance of The Drowning Girls today (they called it their “Wayne Gretzky” performance as it is the 99th time they’ve done it). I’m amazed they did the whole thing soaking wet. It was a great show!
• Really interesting perspective from investor Ben Horowitz on why he and Marc Andreessen prefer founding CEOs.
• Great post from Chris: 50 Incredible, Historical Speeches.
• I’m not so concerned with all the privacy issues going on with Facebook right now, but I know a lot of people are. Here’s a timeline of Facebook’s eroding privacy policy, from EFF.
• This is a pretty awesome short movie (great music too): Nature by Numbers.
• If you spent any time online this week you probably came across the NYTimes article on PowerPoint and the American military. It annoys me that just because an image was displayed using PowerPoint, that the assumption is that PowerPoint is bad. The image has nothing to do with PowerPoint, and is crazy all on its own!

Today was a nice day for lunch on the balcony (with Sharon’s favorite street canopy in the background):

Here are my weekly notes:

• This weekend marked the 20th anniversary of the launching of the Hubble Telescope. It’s pretty amazing when you think about all we’ve learned from it.
• Love Lady Gaga? Here are 50 covers, choreographies, and parodies on YouTube.
• David Carr wrote a great overview of how Gizmodo monetized the iPhone spectacle.
• An update on the planes vs. volcano visualization I linked to last week.
• Nice: Announcing the first free software Blu-ray encoder.
• From comScore: State of the digital media universe in Canada.
• Roger Ebert says video games can never be art.

Here are my weekly notes:

• Among other things, Twitter announced this week that the entire archive of public tweets will be available at the Library of Congress.
• The launch of datadotgc.ca is very exciting! You can read more about it here.
• Does music have soul? Even music generated by artificial intelligence?
• What’s emitting the most CO2 per day – planes or volcano?
• Conan O’Brien, who was in Edmonton last night, will make his comeback on TBS.
• I admit I’m a sucker for infographics, but this is too true.
• Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight fame, has created a quantitative index of the 50 most livable neighbourhoods in New York. Great stuff!
• Sharon and I took part in the Gallery Walk yesterday, which was a great way to enjoy the fantastic weather we had this weekend. Today, we spent the day at the Greens, Eggs, and Ham farm. More on that later!

Here are my weekly notes:

• Here’s a pretty cool video of a Microsoft Research project called “Manual Deskterity” that combines pen and touch computing.
• Another interesting video: What we can learn from a 2.5 year old using an iPad. And if you’re not stick of iPad articles yet, this one on the Steve Wozniak connection is rather intriguing.
• It must be video day…here’s another great one, via Adam: New Urbanism – Built To Last.
• Definitely looking forward to JavaScript Intellisense Improvements in Visual Studio 2010.
• Another new web service from Amazon: the Simple Notification Service.
• I haven’t read through all of this yet, but I absolutely love the concept: Coding for Journalists 101 – Go from knowing nothing to scraping web pages. In an hour. Hopefully.