THE REVOLUTION WILL, ACTUALLY, BE ON FACEBOOK

Hope everyone had a good weekend. It was going well until Sunday. No plans to go into detail about it on here. Needless to say, here’s to a better week!

So what’s new in GJH Land (aside from being thinner now than I’ve been in a long time)?

* Remember that much-lauded Do-Not-Call Registry the Canadian federal government set up for folks to sign onto with the premise it would, you know, reduce calls from annoying telemarketers? Well, turns out it doesn’t work. Huzzah for our government!
* The Mac has turned 25 years old. The finest computing experience out there, bar none. Funny how it all went from this…

…to this in less than a generation.

Cocky? Sure, but it’s justified.

* The White House’s IT infrastructure is considered primeval against the Obama Team’s total love of technology. Odd how a government that prides itself on innovating in military technologies like this can barely keep its civilian domain up to pre-millennial standards.
* Mad Men won yet again last night at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. That’s a reason to be happy on a Monday. In other news, I’m not watching the Oscars this year and let’s hope the ratings are lower than ever. That will teach ‘em to exclude The Dark Knight.
* The Encyclopedia Britannica seems to have realized that this whole Wikipedia business isn’t a trend anymore.

VIVA LA FACEBOOK: The New York Times has a great article from this past weekend’s Sunday Magazine about the influence of Facebook in organizing protests through online collaboration that spill over into the offline world. Definitely worth checking out.

THE ROUND-UP

Alright, here’s the deal: this blog’s been getting pretty friggin’ stale. There’s been almost no posts the last little while. I’m pretty mercurial as is, but this blog, whew, it’s been dry. I swear, if I were a novelist and not an IT worker-thingy, I’d never get a novel done. I’m so up and down.

So starting today, I’m committing to a few things on here — a few more posts per week. Almost all tech-focused (this is my schtick, so it goes).

Behold – the ultimate Frink!

*HOLY CRAP. Apple has just announced all tracks from the iTunes Store are now being sold DRM-free. Huzzah Apple!

* Who would want to hack Britney Spears’ Twitter account? What, does Circus have some subliminal messages we don’t know about? Well, at least we find out that she has a four-feet-wide, razor sharp… um, well, hackers unite.
* Noted transhumanist/futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote an article in 1999 about what the world would look like in 2009 tech-wise. He was remarkably accurate in some cases. Maybe a little too optimistic in others. But still, he was closer to reality than most.
* Wired’s posted the Sexiest Geeks of 2008 (it’s a few weeks late, sure). I *totally* didn’t see that Marina Orlova – a buxom blonde – would win this category. Nah, would never happen.
* Rogers has added 200,000 new subscribers in one fiscal quarter. This, of course, is entirely due to Research In Motion and Apple. Although Rogers wouldn’t tell you that.
* The new Shazam movie is not happening now, since studios have wised up to audiences that heart the dark and/or ugly side of comics (see The Dark Knight and The Watchman). If anyone saw Speed Racer, I feel for you – it was like eating 10,000 tonnes of candy and tripping out at the same time.

MACWORLD 2009: Engadget has a live blog posting from earlier today at the final MacWorld’s keynote address. There’s a few newish innovations coming down the intertubes – a greener computing platform, moving software to “the cloud” and a bigger screen – but really, this marks an end of an era for Apple.

As we’ve been told a few times now, Steve Jobs is in poor health due to “hormone imbalance.” If you actually believe that diagnosis, then you’d be hard-pressed to wonder where Apple’s going with its product lines into the future, sans Jobs. If he leaves the company, of course.