WIND Mobile: A Guide To The New Kid

I doubt it’s news to anyone that Canada is about to get a new entrant to its lackluster cell phone market. WIND Mobile, partially owned by foreign interests, was temporarily blocked from using the spectrum they bought on auction last year, but managed to overcome that hurdle and are now gunning towards having phones on [...]

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The Fringe, Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread, and Chasing the Unique Experience #yeg #yegfringe #theatre

A few things converged to make this blog post happen, and it is a strange and mysterious convergence. First of all, the Fringe is coming up in a few weeks, and I’m super excited about it (more on that in a few paragraphs). Second, Mack Male posted a blog post to titled Discovering Live [...]

Canadian ISPs: “Consumers will make good choices if we don’t inform them”

Traffic Shaping
On Monday, Canadian ISPs Rogers and Shaw went up in front of the CRTC to discuss traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is the practice of altering the way packets move through the network in order to (in theory) provide a higher quality of service. If you want to consider the tired analogy of the internet [...]

Twitter is RSS 3.0 and We’re All Coffee Beans, or Why I Won’t Use FriendFeed

Every now and then I find someone interesting to follow on twitter because of the links they post. Finding interesting links is a big part of why I use Twitter. It makes it so the links come to me with very little action on my part (thus fitting in nicely with the my lazy side). [...]

Meetings Considered Harmful? A Case For Smaller and Fewer Meetings

There was a brief discussion on Twitter yesterday about whether meetings are a good thing or a bad thing. The question was raised, by a young and up-and-comer self-taught programmer and university student in what I understand to be one of his first office jobs (in the form of an internship), as to why others [...]

Edmonton: Growing Up A Bit? Fireworks, Railyards, and Airports, Oh My!

Last week we took in the Canada Day fireworks here in Edmonton. I’ll get right to the point and say that they were incredibly awesome. I’m pretty sure that they were, in fact, the best fireworks I have ever been personal witness to. Well choreographed, lots of variety, some really massive explosions (the kind that [...]

Twitter Spam Through the Looking Glass: Bit.ly Gives Us A Glimpse

Spammers on Twitter appear to have discovered how to use @replies to their advantage. For the twitter uninitiated, an @reply is essentially a public message. Prefixing a message with @username makes it so the target user sees the tweet in a special reply feed even if they aren’t following them, but it also allows everyone [...]

Twitter Promotion Done WRONG: #moonfruit

Just read the blog post on Mashable calling the #moonfruit twitter tag “twitter promotion done right” and I couldn’t disagree more.
Purely from a financial perspective, I doubt it’s worth it. They are giving away 10 MacBook Pros. Each is worth, most likely, somewhere around $2500. So they are spending $25,000 on this promotion. This [...]

How Facebook is Doing It Wrong, and Why It Doesn’t Matter

The Change
According to the New York Times, Facebook will soon be defaulting to having status’ (and by extension the replies that have largely replaced wall posts), photos, and videos show up as public content.
This follows on from the previous change that stripped Facebook of all of its filtering features and made it a twitter-like spamfest [...]

How Not to Crowdsource (or really, how not to build an open-submission website)

@ink_slinger linked to a City of Edmonton website today called “Idea Zone”. I was intrigued, so tried to find out what it was.
Go ahead, visit the site. See if you can find out what it’s all about. I can wait…
Did you visit it? What did you learn? Probably nothing, because in order to find out [...]