GigPark opens to the public

After a fantastic invite only period, GigPark is now open to the public. No more invites – everyone is free to join.

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while know that I’ve been working on GigPark since early 2007. Today the whole team and I were incredibly proud to let our baby leave the nest ;).

Were were also lucky enough to have our friends Jevon and Mathew blog about the launch, and for Mashable to review the site today.

We’ve got a long way to go, but today was a great milestone for GigPark.

Breaking: Massive fire on Queen St West (at Portland)

Rosalynn and I woke up to find a huge fire burning just down the road from our condo. We can see flames and billowing smoke from our window. I hope everyone is OK.

For any TTC riders, it looks like streetcars are being diverted onto King Street at Shaw.

Obamamania just took a turn for the … bizarre

If you haven’t already, check out http://barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com/

Silicon Valley tradition coming to Toronto

This is a great idea! If you are interested in meeting some smart entrepreneurs and technology people head over here and see if there are any tickets left.

Thanks to Leila and the team at Idee for bringing this great Silicon Valley tradition to Toronto!

This traffic report is brought to you by Twitter

Last night I spotted a road closure on my way back from football and fired off a quick twitter message in case any of my friends were driving in the west end. What a nice citizen I am ;). This morning I find out some clever people have created a traffic report newsfeed that twitter-ers can post to. So, instead of just helping friends we can help our whole city. Pretty cool.

The site is called Commuter Feed. You can post traffic problems you spot by texting twitter (21212 in Canada) with “@commuter YYZ” at the beginning of your message. For example, “@commuter YYZ A truck full of chicken have escaped all over the DVP!”.

YYZ is the code for Toronto – switch out your airport code for a different city.

There is one fatal flaw to Commuter Feed… As Mark says: “wait, but http://www.commuterfeed.com… doesn’t PUBLISH it’s feed on Twitter….um, I’m supposed to find wifi when on the road?”

Protest in pictures

I’m really enjoying following the Flickr members protesting the possible Microsoft-Yahoo! deal. It shows how creative and loyal Flickr members are and that in the minds of some people, Microsoft is still extremely evil.

Personally, I’m not sure Microsoft is powerful enough anymore to be that evil. I haven’t used a Microsoft product for years (there are a lot of alternatives).

Laptops that cost less than your phone

What do we really need in a laptop?

Well, if you’re like me most of your *stuff* lives on the web now (Flickr, Gmail, Google Cal, PBwiki, Basecamp…), not on your hard drive. So, maybe we don’t need as much as we once did from our laptops. Or maybe we just need different things: a speedy web connection, ultra-portability and good battery life?

The funny thing about ultra-portable laptops is that we drop them and leave them places – well I do anyway! So, I think ultra-potable should also mean ultra-cheap.

Because of this I’m WAY more interested in the $299 ASUS Eee PC and $399 CloudBook than the $1,800 MacBook Air.

The Eee only has a 7inch screen and 4GB of memory but it will check Gmail, make Skype calls and update Basecamp projects just as well as any other laptop. It also look pretty easy to mod in some interesting ways and is on sale in Toronto for $299.

The CloudBook has a much bigger 30GB hard drive but isn’t available just yet. Apparently we’ll be able to pick one up from Walmart in a few weeks.

A good friend just bought an Eee so I’ll keep you posted on what he thinks of it. I might not be far behind him.

UPDATE: I had a play on my friend’s Eee this morning. Brilliant! The interface is nice and simple, the keyboard and trackpad work great and the size is mind blowing. It’s called a laptop but this thing only sits on one knee (it’s not big enough to actually sit on your lap!). When the version with the 9 inch screen is released later this year, I’m in.